The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,273

asshole Magister Jens Galden?”

Kip looked at the cards he’d drawn. Nothing. A big, heaping, steaming-on-a-cold-winter’s-day pile-of-stinky nothing. He’d drawn most of the equipment in his deck, but no direct attacks and no one good enough to put the equipment on. If he’d kept Katalina Galden, he would have had a chance.

“Same family, though not likely by blood. I was actually speaking of Janus Borig,” Andross said, drawing his own cards, imperturbable. “The woman who drew the new cards.”

It was whiplash for Kip. He’d been walking down another mental path completely. And then he remembered. This was how Andross Guile operated: overload your opponent with too many things to think about, and then drop a bomb with a burning fuse in his lap and see what he did.

“How many people in history do you think were smarter than you are?” Kip asked.

But the counter didn’t work.

“She was a dear friend of your grandmother’s,” Andross said. “For a long time. She, more than anyone, I think, is responsible for our family’s troubles. She lied to me. She lied to us.” She? Oh, she Janus Borig.

Kip got to go first, so he laid out nearly all of his cards. “How so?” Kip asked, suspicious.

“I was going to say, ‘So beware of trusting anything she told you.’ But instead you’re surprised,” Andross said. “So you think she’s a truth teller? Because she’s a Mirror? Because ‘Mirror’ implies a passivity?”

After his talk about mirrors with his wife not two hours ago, Kip felt like either history was bringing something together for him to understand or this was just one of those times where you learn a new word or concept and suddenly you’re seeing it everywhere.

“I know this much,” Kip said, trying not to show how troubled he was. “She didn’t try to kill me before even meeting me.”

“No, she was more interested in using you to kill someone else,” Andross said. He played three coccas; they were smaller ships, but each capable of decent damage. If Kip got the direct attacks his deck depended on, he would have to waste valuable turns taking them out.

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?