Kip was screwed. The game had barely started, and they both already knew he was going to lose. He looked at the card he’d drawn: Yellow Spectacles. Garbage.
Yeah, Luck, go bugger yourself.
“I’m sure anyone who has a message you can’t control must be untrustworthy,” Kip said, more furious at his cards than at his opponent. “From today forward I will get all my intelligence from you alone, grandfather.”
A muscle in Andross’s jaw twitched, but he took a slow breath. “Do you know, it’s so frustrating. I’m making all the same mistakes with you I made with Dazen. I’m a better player than this. Fine.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care, and Kip had to hide his astonishment that he’d thrown his grandfather off his own planned path for once.
“She told me,” Andross said, “when I first ascended to the Red seat on the Spectrum, that she wanted to paint my portrait for her cards. It was meant to be hugely flattering, of course, a known Mirror telling me that I was worthy of a card. If one excludes the procedure and discovery and weapon and monster cards, that fact alone would acknowledge me as one of the four hundred fifty-seven most important people throughout history to that point. Slightly more, actually, but I didn’t have an accurate count of the Black Cards then, and of course, there were many important people who never sat for their portrait, but they’re the less famous for it. What the originals of these cards did, though, was known to very few.”
Andross played Amir Bazak on one of the coccas, and Red Spectacles, and equipped them on him. Amir had turned himself into a human bomb, penetrating the enemy lines during a battle through subterfuge and then drafting so much red it killed him in an explosion that took out thousands and opened a gap in the line. It was a weak card, easily killed—if you had something to kill it with.
“But you knew,” Kip said. It was hard to imagine Andross Guile not knowing any secret. “You knew what the cards did.”
“I married well, into a family that knew . . . most of it,” Andross said. “But Borig was clever. I think she’d already seen more than I guessed. She led me to believe that a card could only cover the time period up until its creation. Seems logical, right? And I believed that each person could only have one card. She lied. So tell me, my cleverer grandson, why would that be a problem?”
It wasn’t the flattery of being told he was historically important, Kip realized. Though he imagined that flattery had meant quite a lot to Andross Guile, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
But Andross would have pushed past the flattery.
Commemorating a mere Red? Andross had set his sights so much higher, and would soon achieve so much more. If Andross had believed that he was destined for much greater heights than merely being the youngest Red in history, then . . .
“Ah,” Kip said. “You had plans. You knew that you were going to be promachos someday. Or maybe Prism? The White?”
“Something like that,” Andross said. “Regardless, I should have known better. I was a young man, with a young man’s weaknesses. I thought potential meant something. I thought I was so very devious in having her paint my card before I had done most of the things I’d planned. See, I was worried about what my enemies might do with such a card after it was completed. I knew I deserved a card. So if I could get her to do my card early, then even if my enemies got it, the information they learned about me, being solely retrospective, would be of limited use to them.
“But the truth was I hadn’t done anything up to that point to deserve a card. Seizing control of my family, winning my bride from the pool of suitors and against a father who initially opposed me, becoming the Red? These are but the foundation stones of a legend, not a legend itself. But she was clever to come to me then, when I was overwhelmed with other concerns and susceptible to flattery. I couldn’t take the time then to properly investigate the cards.”
“They weren’t only retrospective?” Kip asked. He played his garbage, and drew a Great Mirror. Too late.
Andross sipped his whiskey. He motioned that both ships and Amir Bazak would attack.
Kip couldn’t stop the attack. The ships hurt him a little, and then Amir Bazak exploded and took out one of them, and badly damaged the other, but also took out almost all of Kip’s life.
Andross said, “There are scholars’ papers that say things like ‘operating outside of time,’ which sounds profound, until you think about it and realize it’s nonsense. No, her lie was different. She told me—or I assumed—that it was only possible to have one card. After all, no one else has ever had more than one, and though I’m a proud man, I hadn’t considered myself quite that special. Reflecting on it later, I realized that I didn’t know that others hadn’t had multiple cards made of them, with only one kept for later use. I only knew the cards that had entered the registers. It’s possible the Mirrors have pulled this trick before. Lucidonius has no card, so far as we know, but there is an account of there being a Mirror during his era who met an early end. It was attributed to the Order, but they are a convenient scapegoat, aren’t they?”
“You think Janus Borig made another card of you?”
“That’s the question I think you will answer. Right. About. Now.” Andross played Sea Demon.
Kip couldn’t kill it in one turn, and the cocca alone could kill him next round, so it was now impossible for him to win.
He’d been focused during the game, focused on winning, on Andross’s words, and that tight focus had allowed his mother to blur into insignificance in the background. But now she came back into his vision, only for him to see her retreating into the distance. Andross wouldn’t give Kip her story; he never gave anyone anything, especially not something of great value to them.
Kip hadn’t thought it would affect him, but suddenly it felt like losing his mother all over again—and even worse now. Andross wasn’t going to let Kip find his grandfather, either, for his grandfather Asafa would likely tell Kip the story himself, and Andross wasn’t about to give up a prize for nothing.
It was a moot point. Kip was going to die in this battle. It shouldn’t hurt.
He didn’t have time to prattle on with some old stranger anyway.
“Looks like a small man on a little ship wins it for you,” Kip said. “An unlikely hero, what with sea demons and Great Mirrors about.”
“But a hero nonetheless . . . because I was willing to lose him.”
Kip folded his cards, conceding. “So Zymun and I are your little ships?” he asked.
Andross sipped his whiskey. “It’s a game, not a metaphor, and you’re the one who chose these decks. Not that I’m opposed to learning lessons from mere games or other unlikely places. Speaking of which, there’s the matter of our first wager. I believe you have a story to tell me about what happened to Janus Borig’s cards.”
Chapter 79
Even as Gavin ran up the steps to the Tower of Heaven’s roof, he noticed a change from the hewn conformity of all the stairs he’d climbed in the entire hike up until now.
The steps became irregular, a more natural shape, with uncut stone, albeit worn by the passage of many thousands of feet over untold years. Coming out on the top of White Mist Tower felt not like reaching the top of one of the Chromeria’s seven towers but instead like summiting the stone crown of a mountain. The top wasn’t carved flat, but gently curved.