The Broken Eye(308)

Cruxer threw the lever, and they dropped—one level.

The lift jerked to a stop so hard it nearly knocked them all off their feet.

“What are you doing, Captain?” Ferkudi asked Cruxer.

Cruxer said, “It wasn’t me.” He flipped the lever back and forth to show them.

They were at the Spectrum’s level. Kip turned to see a smug Grinwoody. Apparently the lever in his hand was some kind of override. “Ah, hello, sirs,” he said. “Promachos Guile demands you come with me. Now.”

His triumphant grin told Kip just how much trouble they were in.





Chapter 90




For one mad moment, Kip thought about beating the hell out of Grinwoody and making a run for it. It was, of course, a terrible plan, but that grossly grinning face made it so tempting.

Instead, Kip and the squad followed Grinwoody to the Lightguard checkpoint, heart like a stone. There was no general Blackguard checkpoint here: their numbers were too depleted now. They were only stationed directly outside the council chamber, down the hall.

But as they got closer to the four Lightguards, a young Lightguard officer stood up with difficulty from the chair where he’d been resting. He lifted himself with the help of a boar spear. The crossbar was designed to stop the penetration of the spear into a boar’s flesh so it couldn’t gore you, but he was using it as a crutch.

Kip could feel the ripple of recognition pass through the squad, like wolves with their hackles rising.

Aram. He had a splint around the knee that Cruxer had destroyed. In the year since he’d been crippled, the young man had obviously been sucking at the teat of bitterness, for his face was twisted more than his leg. But whatever else it had done to him, his injury hadn’t stunted his physical growth. Aram had filled out. His arms and shoulders were huge even as his crippled leg had withered, and Kip had no doubt that the young man was far more proficient with that boar spear than anyone would guess.

There was a flash of something in Aram’s lidded eyes as the squad approached, hastily hidden. But Kip recognized it. All the hatred and resentment in the world—and Aram’s eyes held his share and more—couldn’t hide that emotion. Not from Kip. It was grief.

It was being excluded from a club that you wanted to be part of more than anything. It was not-belonging.

It was only in seeing that feeling so perfectly mirrored in Aram’s eyes that Kip realized the void of it in his own heart. When had that ache disappeared? Kip had been an outsider for all his life. The fat boy. The drunkard’s boy. The whore’s son. The Tyrean. The bastard. The unfairly favored. The boy who didn’t deserve to be in the Blackguard. For all his life, Kip had felt excluded.

Aram was feeling that. He’d lost the Blackguard. Kip was going to lose it himself. How could he look at Aram and not feel compassion?

Technical ability wasn’t what made a Blackguard, though it was part of it. The essence of a Blackguard was sacrifice. They lived and died for each other, and that, the unquestioned devotion of the whole corps, made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. A Blackguard could be told to go to his death, and he would, because he loved his fellows and he trusted that his commander wouldn’t waste him. Orders might come down that made no sense that you could see, but they did make sense. Mistakes happened, men and commanders failed, but not—in this one tiny, precious corner of the world—from malice or selfishness.

That was a treasure beyond words, and it was what made the Blackguards the best in all the world. That was what Aram lacked. His selfishness was poison to the heart of the one most valuable thing the Blackguard had.

But he couldn’t see it, and that wasn’t reason to hate him. It was reason to pity him.

“Aram,” Kip said. He saw the insignia on the young man’s lapel. “Lieutenant.” Respectful, but not deferring.

And the grief was gone. There was only hatred there, but Kip was unmoved by it, even as the squad bristled at Aram’s open sneer.

Aram said, “Search them. No one may go armed with the Spectrum meeting on this level.”

A Lightguard came forward to search and disarm Kip, and Kip was suddenly tired. They were really going to play this? Again?

“Uh-uh,” he said. He pushed the Lightguard’s hand aside.

With a voice equally tired, bored, and exasperated, Kip said, “I’m a full-spectrum polychrome. This is the best squad among the Blackguard initiates. We are weapons. There’s no such thing as disarming us. And we, for our part, are compelled as Blackguards not to let ourselves be disarmed within the Chromeria itself. It goes to the very heart of who we are. We are those who are trusted with weapons here. We make ourselves slaves to earn that trust. So what you’re asking is both pointless for you and impossible for us.” Kip said the words to the man who was approaching him, but they were for Aram, and more than that, for Grinwoody.