He knocked and swore he saw dark-clad figures up several stories on either side of the alley bob out of nowhere quickly and disappear. He felt the weight of hidden eyes.

Jumpy, Kip. Jumpy.

An old woman opened the door. She was almost bald, and she was smoking a long pipe. Long nose, few teeth, a scattering of liver spots amid faded freckles. Her dress was besmirched with paint. She would have looked like a vagabond, but she wore a thick gold necklace that must have weighed a sev. She was wrinkly and ugly as afterbirth, but plainly vigorous, and there was such warmth in her features, Kip found himself grinning almost immediately.

“So. You’re the bastard,” she said. “Rea told me you’d come. Come in.”

Chapter 44

The first thing Kip noticed about Janus Borig’s home was that it was home to the largest mess Kip had seen in his life. The mess had paws in every nook, had shed fur in every cranny. Piles of clothes like coughed-up hairballs hid the floor, and stacks of books stood like trees for the mess to mark its territory. The mess seemed to have little sense of human valuation, because old gnawed-on chicken bones shared floor space with strands of pearls and either jewels or colored glass close enough to jewels to fool Kip’s eyes.

The second thing he noticed was the guns. Janus Borig liked guns. There was one attached to the door, swiveling toward the peephole, in case Janus decided to kill a visitor rather than welcome him. But others were scattered everywhere, as if the mess had gotten into them and tossed them about. Pistols, the latest flintlock muskets, matchlocks, blunderbusses—there were handy ways to kill people everywhere.

“Don’t touch anything,” Janus said.

Which was impossible, thanks.

“Half the things in here will kill you if you nudge them wrong.”

Oh. Lovely.

She spun around and put something down on a shelf. It was a tiny pistol. She took a drag on her long pipe, contorted her lips into a quasi-smile, and blew smoke out of both sides of her mouth simultaneously. “Promise me something, bastard of the greatest Prism to ever live.”

She turned over her pipe and tapped out the ashes into a small pile of the same. She picked up another pistol, cocked it, and then used the spur of the hammer to scrape out the remaining ashes from her pipe. With every scrape, the cocked—and for all Kip knew, loaded—pistol rotated from being pointed at Kip’s forehead to being pointed at his groin.

To his left and right, there were piles; he couldn’t move anywhere without touching something.

“Uh, yes?” Kip said.

“Promise me you won’t kill me or report me to those who might.”

“I promise,” Kip said.

She sucked at her lips, making a squeaking sound, then spat. She put down the pistol and grabbed at a pile of tobacco, stuffed some in her pipe, eyeing Kip closely. He swore there was a pile of black powder right next to the pile of tobacco. She snatched a fuse cord from one of the matchlocks and stuck it onto the flame of a lantern, then used the fuse to light her pipe. “Swear it,” she said from behind a curtain of smoke.

“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.