Free The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks Page A

thinking about it.
    “Are you Kip?” a voice intruded, breaking Kip out of his fantasy. The speaker was a tiny, clean-shaven, very dark Parian man in a starched headscarf and a slave’s robe of fine cotton.
    “Uh, yes.” Kip stood and the ball of dread that dropped into his stomach told him who’d sent the slave.
    The man eyed him for long moments, clearly judging him, but not letting the verdict show in his face. Andross Guile’s head slave and right hand was named Grinwoody, Gavin had told Kip. Grinwoody said, “Luxlord Guile requires your presence.”
    Luxlord Guile, as in Andross Guile, one of the richest men in the world, with estates throughout Ruthgar, Blood Forest, and Paria. On the ruling council known as the Spectrum, he was the Red. Father of two Prisms, Gavin and the rebel who’d almost destroyed the world, Dazen. Andross Guile was, Kip thought, the only man in the world Gavin Guile feared.
    Grandfather.
    And Kip was a bastard, a blot on the family honor. Felia Guile, Kip’s grandmother and the only person who could massage Andross Guile’s tyranny, was now dead.
    But before Kip ran face first into that wall, he had another problem. He couldn’t leave the hall without giving Magister Kadah fresh reasons to hate him, and he couldn’t show Andross Guile disrespect by making him wait.
    “Uh, will you tell my magister that I’ve been summoned?” Kip asked.
    Grinwoody looked at him, expressionless.
    Kip felt foolish. Like he couldn’t take one step, poke his head in the door himself, and say, “I’ve been summoned.” He opened his mouth to explain himself, remembered Gavin’s orders: Remember who you are.
    He was going to apologize, or say please, but he stopped himself.
    After another moment of weighing Kip, Grinwoody acquiesced. He rapped on the door and stepped into the classroom. “Luxlord Guile requires Kip’s presence.”
    He didn’t give Magister Kadah a chance to respond, though Kip would have given his left eye to see the expression on her face. Grinwoody was a slave, but a slave authorized to do his duty by one of the most powerful men in the world. Nothing the magister said mattered. Grinwoody was a man who remembered who he was.
    The real question was, who was Kip? Grinwoody had referred to him only by his first name. It hadn’t been, ‘Luxlord Guile requires his grandson.’
    What had Gavin said? ‘We’ll count it a victory if you avoid wetting yourself’?
    Kip cleared his throat. “Uh, you mind if we stop by the privies on the way?”

Chapter 13
     
    Gavin smiled as he stepped off the skimmer onto Seers Island. Karris had her
ataghan
drawn, and was pointing her pistol at the nearest man.
    The people stood in an unruly mob, but they were armed withswords and muskets, makeshift spears. There were few commonalities between them: they had come from all seven satrapies, light-skinned and dark, dirty and clean, dressed in silk and wool. Several had an extra eye drawn on their forehead with coal. Though even among those, some had exquisitely drawn, others rough, lopsided.
    What these men and women had in common was only this: each one had the religious devotion to cross reefs in a small outrigger canoe to get here, and every one of them was a drafter.
    A woman stepped through the crowd. She was little, barely taller than Gavin’s waist, arms and legs short, her trunk the size a woman of average height would have. She had a flaring eye tattooed exquisitely on her forehead.
    “You will not draft here,” she said.
    “I’ll decide that,” Gavin said.
    Instead of looking irritated, she smiled. “It is as foretold.”
    Seers. Excellent. “Someone foretold that I’d say that?” Gavin asked.
    “No, that you’d be an asshole.”
    Gavin laughed. “I think I’m going to like this place.”
    “You’ll come with us,” she said.
    “Sure,” Gavin said.
    “It wasn’t a request.”
    “Yes it was,” Gavin said. “When you don’t have power to compel obedience, by definition