“Haven’t Viewed my card yet, have you?” Andross asked.
“There’s a war on,” Kip said. “Did you not notice?”
“We have so many things in common, you and I,” Andross said.
“Some,” Kip admitted. Not many.
“Both outsiders, both drawn inexorably to the center of all things, both overlooked, both with a tenacity to outlast stones and shatter cities. We approach life with hearts broken but heads unbowed. We both are surrounded by the mighty. We were both great from our youth: I recognized as a young man with a destiny, you . . . well, that other meaning of ‘great.’ Depending on how you parse such things, one might say one or the other of us has brought down gods. Only you have killed a king, but if today goes well, I’ll add kings to my list, too.”
“Both wasting our time on a beach?” Kip offered.
“Odd. Flippancy is a trait of the fearful, not of those who inspire fear.”
“Do I look fearful to you?”
After a moment, Andross said, “No.”
“Then can we move this along? I saw the sign you told me to look for. I have places to be.”
“No, you have one place to be. This place.”
“Sir?” a young Blackguard interrupted. “Pardon me, High Lord Promachos. It’s the Prism, sir. Er, Prism-elect?”
“Yes?” Andross said, irritated.
“Commander Fisk wanted me to tell you . . . He’s, um, the Prismelect that is—He’s sort of gone crazy, sir? Not like battle exhausted or catatonic, sir. He’s using the mirrors to burn people, apparently on purpose. He’s laughing. Our people, sir. The bane are almost to the shore, but he’s mostly ignoring them. Said it’s like ants under a glass.”
Andross sighed heavily. “Well, that’s inconvenient, if not a total surprise. Kip, remind me the next time you louse something up that you aren’t half as bad as your brother.”
“He’s only my half brother, so there you have it,” Kip said. “What were you hoping he’d do?”
“Oh, exactly what he’s doing, but half competently. He was supposed to get angry you’d been favored and get on the mirror array to defend the islands until he burned himself out, broke the halo, and needed to be put down by the Blackguard.”
“What?” Kip asked.
“He was supposed to ‘ascend to the heights and fail’—thus clearing the path for you to . . . be what we said. Young man,” Andross said to the Blackguard, “tell Commander Fisk this falls under the Fourth Oath. You’ll find him stationed with our young Prism.”
“The Fourth Oath, sir, yes, my lord.” But the young man had a panicked look on his face, like he was failing a sudden quiz.
Andross sighed again. “In the last extremity, your duty to protect the Prism is replaced by your duty to protect the Seven Satrapies from the Prism. This, you damned fool, is the last extremity.”
“Oh! Yessir!” the Blackguard said.
Then he ran.
Kip turned to follow him.
“Hold,” Andross said. “The bane will come ashore in mere minutes. I’ve lookouts posted to let me know the moment it happens.” He pointed up to the orange tower where a man with a hand mirror stood waiting on a side balcony of a tower above them, ready to relay the signal.
“I don’t understand,” Kip said. “What does it matter?”
“For one reason—that you can look at two different ways. There was a lost prophecy hidden in a forbidden scroll at the Great Library in Azûlay. I recovered it at . . . great cost to our family, not least yourself. It said the Seven Satrapies would be plunged into a thousand years of night if the Lightbringer didn’t stand on the shores of the Jaspers when the bane made landfall—as in literally where the water touches land. So one way of looking at that is this: if you’re not standing on the shore when the bane land, you can’t be the Lightbringer. The other way is that if you are the Lightbringer, you’d damned well better be standing on the shore, or it’ll mean a thousand years of night for all of us.
“Either way, Kip . . . when history calls your name, you raise your damn hand.”
“Are you telling me that’s why you’ve been standing down here holding your dick while you could have been stopping Zymun?” Kip demanded. “Because of some idiotic prophecy?”
“He’ll be stopped soon, regardless,” Andross said. “A bet thirty-eight years in the making is about to be decided. The last card flipped. I’m not about to walk away from the table now. Zymun’s nothing. He’s got no money, no connections, certainly no friends. And very little time left. ”
Kip said, “No money? It doesn’t matter who has the money; it only matters who has the guns!”
“You’re missing the forest for the trees.”
“One of those trees is on fire!”
“Kip. This is your last chance. Two minutes. Maybe five. If you’re the Lightbringer, you’ve got to be here. If you leave, I will take the mantle of that office from you. Someone must save this empire, and if you won’t, I will.”
“By standing here?” Kip said, “All this time. Everything you’ve seen and heard of me, and you still don’t know me at all, do you? I don’t care about being the Lightbringer. I—”
“Yes, you do. There’s a time to lie about the scope of one’s ambitions. I should know. I’ve done it for all my life. But that time is past.”
Zymun was killing people. The bane were landing, and Kip wasn’t helping the defense. But Kip felt that old surge of longing, to matter, to matter so much that no one could ever deny it, no one could underestimate or minimize or ignore him ever again. To have the respect he’d won from a few people be in everyone’s eyes.
At the cost of a few extra dead defenders, people who would never know that Kip could have saved them but didn’t. Here’s all you could ever want, and the price for it will be paid by someone else.
“I do want it. But I want to save my friends more. To hell with your prophecies. The Lightbringer can’t be the one who stands around waiting for the light. He’s the one who brings it.”
“Kip! Grandson,” Andross said to his back, and his voiced seemed almost kind. “If you want to survive up there on the array, don’t draft. You’re no Prism. The power will break your halos in moments. It’ll burn you out. You break our enemies with your will. Earn your name, Breaker.”
Kip glanced back at him over his shoulder, eyebrows drawn down. “As much as you don’t know me, grandfather . . . maybe I don’t know you, either. Farewell, sir.”
* * *
Andross watched as Kip ran back inside.
Very little of the fat boy he’d once been clung to the man Kip had become, except his compassion, his loyalty. Andross liked that about him.
Too bad. His leaving early surely meant that he, too, would ascend the heights and fail.
Light flashed across Andross’s face and he looked up to the signalman with the hand mirror high on the side of the orange towers: The bane have made landfall. That signalman was merely passing along a message from another spotter. It would have taken several moments at each station to confirm the message and then pass it along. Kip might have still been standing on the shoreline at the moment the bane landed.