The Blinding Knife(86)

The foul hag took it and drank deeply. “Gaeros, help this one dress, and”—she rubbed the beads of perspiration from her upper lip—“summon my room slave, the tall one, Incaros. I find I’ve worked up an appetite.”

“He awaits you eagerly in the next room, Mistress.”

“Ah, see! Anticipating my needs!” She turned and put the crop against Gaeros’s groin. “If you were even a little bit handsome I might reward you for that.” She slapped the crop against his crotch, as if it were playfully, but it connected hard.

A small grunt escaped as the man turned to the side and held himself still for a long moment. His eyes were watery when he opened them. But Aglaia had already forgotten about him. She turned to Teia and stood over her. Aglaia said gently, “You’ll remember this, won’t you, Teia?”

“Y-yes, Mistress.”

“Gaeros, find out her favorite food and drink. We’ll serve them to her next time. She’s done well. Very well. Teia, I’ll beat you again next time. Slaves are naturally slow to understand and need firm reinforcement of basic lessons. But after that, this won’t have to happen again.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“And you swear to serve me with your whole heart, don’t you, girl?”

“Yes, Mistress,” Teia said fervently. There was no trace of guile in her.

Was she a good liar? Aglaia had asked. Teia was a slave. Of course she was a good liar.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Your second reward.” Aglaia Crassos rummaged through a little jewelry box. “You are to wear this at all times, understood?”

“Yes, Mistress.” Teia had no idea what she was talking about.

Lady Crassos handed her a slender, pretty gold necklace with a little vial dangling from it. Seeing the puzzled look in Teia’s eyes, Lady Crassos merely smiled broadly and left.

As Gaeros helped her dress, eliciting gasps and grunts and grinding teeth as cloth slid over inflamed skin, Teia heard the harpy noisily rutting next door, cries of passion not unlike pain. When Teia was all dressed and her tears dried, Gaeros gently took her tightly balled fist in his hand to take the necklace and put it on her.

With difficulty, Teia unclenched her fist and surrendered the vial. A vial of olive oil.





Chapter 43




Kip held a book open across one arm and rubbed his forehead, rubbed his eyes. He’d discovered a little trick to help his concentration. He was standing at the window, and now he closed the book, keeping a finger tucked in to hold his place. He looked left and right. No one was in sight. He turned the book over; its cover was bright blue, drafter’s blue.

Blue sluiced through him, starting at his eyes, and cleared away every obstruction to logic: weariness, emotion, even pain from sitting scrunched. Kip breathed out and let the blue go. He grabbed another book, on the fauna of old Ruthgar when it was called Green Forest. It was actually a pretty interesting book, but he’d grabbed it for its cover as well: drafter’s red. The primary colors—not in the sense artists used the term, but in the drafter’s sense, the colors that were closest to their luxin counterparts—were endlessly popular. Kip looked at the cover and drafted a bit of red. It blew air on the dying sparks of his passion for learning about the cards. He set the book down. Grabbed orange. A thin tendril of that helped him be more aware of how objects related. He wasn’t doing any of these colors perfectly, he knew. To be counted a drafter of a particular color, you had to be able to craft a stable block of its luxin. Kip couldn’t do that. He could draft only green and blue. The sub-red had been a fluke, just that once. He’d taken the test. He was a bichrome.

But what he could do was pretty darn useful. He opened his book again and kept reading.

Over the last two weeks, he felt like he’d made a lot of progress learning Nine Kings. Now he had a good sense of the basic strategies—it was, after all, only a game. There were whole reams of information he could simply ignore as well—strategies when playing more than one opponent, game variants played using fewer cards or more, ways to wager money, drafts from common piles. All unnecessary for him.

Then, at some point, he had a realization that he’d learned basic strategy, but in studying accounts of great games, he still didn’t understand why players wouldn’t play their best cards immediately—and with a whoosh like drafting fire, the metagame opened up. Counters that he’d figured were unimportant, perhaps vestigial from the ancient versions of the game, suddenly came into play. Strategies to thin the opponent’s deck. Theories as to how to balance play styles when addressing decks of certain colors. It became a game of mathematics, managing piles of numbers and playing odds. Playing against a certain deck in a certain situation, your opponent would have a one in twenty-seven chance of having the perfect card to stop you. If he played Counter-Sink now (and he was playing logically), you could infer that he didn’t have it.