“I swear,” Kip said.
“Again.”
“I swear.”
“And thus are you bound. Come with me,” she said.
Kip picked his way around piles that reached up to his knees. The woman wasn’t right.
He followed her upstairs. It was, apparently, her workroom. The division between the rooms was stark. The mess didn’t set one grubby paw beyond the stairs. There was no disorder here, none. Every surface was immaculate, all done in white marble with red veins. Jewelers’ lenses and hammers and chisels hung beside tiny brushes, special lanterns, palettes, and little jars of paint. One desk was slate, with little bits of chalk and an assortment of abacuses, large and small. An easel sat opposite, with a blank canvas on it, a magnifying lens in front of it.
One wall was dedicated to finished cards. They were hung so densely that you couldn’t touch the wall. And the wall was so big, so packed—from floor to ceiling—that if Kip hadn’t spent the last weeks in the library, memorizing everything he could learn about these cards, he’d have no idea that every single one of them was worth a fortune. These were originals.
And there were too many of them. Kip sucked in a sudden breath.
“The Black Cards. The heresy decks,” Janus said. She sat on a little stool in front of her easel. “You know of them.”
“I’ve barely heard a whisper,” Kip said. “I—not really.”
“What colors have you drafted, Kip Guile?”
Kip felt a chill, displacement, sickness. “That’s not my name,” he said stiffly.
“There is no one else you can be, Kip. I’ve seen your eyes. You think you’re smart, but the truth is—”
“Right, I know, everyone tells me—”
“—you’re a lot smarter than you think you are.”
Which left him dumbstruck. Ironically enough.
“You’re a Guile to your bones, young man. Even if you’re not a son, a bastard can go far in this world. The Guiles are cursed, don’t you know? The family has few children, and has had few for generations. Intense lights all snuffed too soon. So goes the story, anyway. Now, what colors have you drafted?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m starting your card.”
She was speaking another language, or nonsense. Kip knuckled his forehead.
“I have a gift,” Janus Borig said. “Curious, curious gift. Unusual. I have a host of gifts that are common enough, of course, though not common all together, and one gift as rare as a Prism’s.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me,” Kip said. Someone is telling you something interesting, and you have to let your big yap interfere?
But she laughed. “Green, of course. But blue, too. What else? You’re not merely a bichrome, I’m certain of that.”
Want to play it like that?
“You can paint,” Kip said. “Very skilled, and you’re a jeweler, too. You can split a stone finely enough to fit it on your cards.”
She chuckled. Smoked. “Here’s the thing, this game is much easier for me. I only have nine colors left to guess from, and you may well be able to draft more than one of those. You, on the other hand, have all the uncommon abilities in the world from which to guess.”
Nine colors left? Eleven colors? What the hell was she talking about? “You’re teasing me,” Kip said.
“Maybe we’ll know each other well enough someday that you’ll be able to figure that out,” she said. “Smoke?”
Huh? “Sub-red,” Kip said, thinking she was guessing what he could draft.
She lowered her pipe. Oh, she’d been offering to share her pipe. But she said quickly, “You’ve drafted sub-red, or fire?”
“Same thing,” Kip said.
“Answer the question.”
“Fire.”
“Do you know, a scheme can be useful without being true. You can see sub-red?”
“Yes,” Kip said. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure why he’d come. Curiosity? Maybe it hadn’t been a good enough reason.
“Can you see superviolet?” she asked.
He nodded, grudgingly. He wasn’t even sure why he was loath to give her more information.
“Do you want to be a Prism, Kip?”
It was like she had a trick of asking questions that he didn’t want to ask himself. “Everyone probably thinks about that,” Kip said.
“You don’t know if you want it or not. Part of you does, but you don’t think you could ever be the man your father is.”
“That’s crazy talk,” Kip said. He swallowed.
“No, it’s not. I know crazy talk. I know it well. I am a Maker. We are not mere artists; we are the caretakers of history. The cards are history. Each one tells a truth, a story. The Black Cards tell history that has been suppressed, because it threatens…” She looked up at the ceiling, thinking, looking for the right word. She gave up. “Well, it threatens. Take that as you will.”