The slave didn’t touch him.

Andross Guile got up, impassive. The spider in him had won out. Somehow Kip knew it would be a mistake to think he was less dangerous simply because he wasn’t shouting. He was unashamed of his nudity.

Which makes one of us.

“Enough,” Andross said.

“Enough?!” Tisis shouted. “Enough?”

He slapped her, without passion.

It caught Tisis unaware. His big meaty hand caught her across the neck and cheek. Her head snapped to the side and she dropped to the thick carpet, not even trying to arrest her fall. She was unconscious. For a moment, Kip was afraid she was dead.

Apparently, it was a concern Andross shared. He knelt over her, poking fingers into her neck. Satisfied by what he found, he stood.

“That worked rather better than I expected,” Andross said. “Grinwoody, put down the knife. My robe. Then attend to Lady Malargos. She’s easily embarrassed, so cover her before you use the smelling salts.”

As Grinwoody draped the robe across Andross’s bare shoulders, the promachos turned to Kip. “So, you got my note. I wasn’t expecting you yet. Thought you’d sulk for a while. Come, let’s sit in my parlor.”

Kip followed him into the main room of the apartments where they’d played Nine Kings so many times. Like this was normal.

“You’re not even going to try to deny it?” Kip asked. “You trashed my room and pissed on my bed. Destroyed everything. Stole my money.”

“Well, not personally. Brandy?”

“No, I don’t want your damn brandy!”

“That’s too bad.” Andross poured two glasses anyway, and put one in front of Kip. He sat in his chair and gestured for Kip to sit across from him. “Knowledge of fine alcohols is mostly an affectation, but an important one. Men respect those who have greater knowledge of the trivial than they do, when that trivia is costly. Nothing more so than spirits.”

“Here’s the thing,” Kip said. He was saying ‘Here’s the thing’ a lot recently. It irritated him. Why didn’t he just launch into what he had to say? “Here’s the thing.” Dammit, twice! “It isn’t that you would tear up my room that I find surprising. You’ve tried to have me killed before, so I don’t really think anything is beneath you. It isn’t even that you would claim the action after you did it. I know you like watching people jump. I think you were trapped in this room so long becoming a wight that you needed people to come to you so you didn’t only hear second- or thirdhand accounts. You learned to become obvious so you’d get the thrill of having some power in this world. I understand all that,” Kip said. “You’re a pathetic shut-in who is suddenly not shut in anymore, and you aren’t adjusting to it well.”

Andross’s eyes, so amused mere seconds ago, turned into wells of darkness. He sipped his brandy as if watching Kip dig his own grave.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Kip said. “How could you be so stupid?”

An arched eyebrow.

“I am of you,” Kip said. “I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I’m as cold as you, I’m as smart as you, and when you push me, I’m as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don’t know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is.”

“Hmm. Words, like the stench of a fart,” Andross said. He waved a hand as if to dispel them. “You’re marshaling them better than you did, but don’t bring your games to me. We’re past that now. There is nothing about you that inspires fear, Kip. Your very name is insubstantial. Kip.” He smirked condescension. “Words without actions are weightless. Throw them against this wall, and see? Nothing.”

Kip wondered how fast he could draft. He wondered if it was faster than Grinwoody and Andross together. He wanted to kill them both. He wanted to stand up and piss on Andross Guile himself to show what he thought of him. But he didn’t think he could get away with it, and having emptied both barrels of his rhetoric in Andross Guile’s face and having hit nothing, he felt suddenly vulnerable, empty. There was no more powder at hand. He was the barely acknowledged bastard, alone, insulting the Guile, throwing epithets and disrespect at the promachos himself.

And all he had at hand was the fact that he didn’t care if he wrecked himself.

Paltry ammunition indeed. He did his best to keep his sudden fear off his face, but if there was one emotion Andross Guile was attuned to, it was others’ fear. He fed on it.

“Want that brandy now?” Andross asked archly, the very personification of a lupine grin.

“I’ll take it,” Kip said, keeping his voice level.

“No you won’t,” Andross said.

The glass was sitting within easy reach. Kip thought of snatching for it—and then thought, how fast Fortune’s wheel turns. One moment, I threaten death in high dudgeon. The next, I grub for a glass of brandy.

And this was part of Andross Guile’s curious power. Another lord might have thought denying his guest a drink was simple rudeness, and been above it. Andross Guile didn’t mind if he lowered himself, as long as he lowered his opponent more. Indeed, shame was a tool to be used against others, because Andross himself was shameless.

Perhaps literally so. He had gotten out of bed naked, without even acknowledging the fact. He seemed unperturbed about being naked, despite having all the spots and wrinkles and sagging skin of a man his age. Though Kip could swear that the paunch Andross had carried was shrinking, he stood at the antipodes from his beautiful son Gavin. Nor did he seem more than peeved at being interrupted pre-coitus.

Perhaps Kip was a poor judge. His own glass of self-horror was constantly full, so the slightest additional drip made the whole thing spill over. But even a normal person would be embarrassed at such a thing, wouldn’t they?

Kip had assumed that his grandfather was ashamed, and had simply controlled it. That his sudden rage had been a cover over the embarrassment. What if, instead, there was a simple void where shame would be for others, and the rage had been merely for Kip interrupting whatever plan Andross had in place to snare Tisis?

A dozen times, Kip had wondered how his grandmother, by all accounts a good woman, had loved this man.

And now another thought occurred to him. What if, instead of loving Andross, she’d loved the world? What if she’d seen herself as the only one who could keep this wolf from the flocks? Felia Guile had been smart, everyone agreed on that. She’d been an orange. She’d been the only person who could get Andross Guile to change his mind. She’d been the bulwark against the storm.

And now she was gone.

Kip was staring at an old man with saggy skin sitting in a faded robe, the bare skin of his legs almost translucent, almost obscene in itself—and he was the one who suddenly felt naked.

“What do you want?” he asked. “You’re old. What does winning even look like for you?”

“Old?” Andross chuckled. “I’ve got a good twenty years left. Kip, if you and Zymun don’t pan out for me, I can start a new family and still have time to groom the next generation. I have the options of a young man again, but with all the advantages I didn’t have when I was young. Do you not know your family’s history?”