“Our skimmers can sink any ship they throw against us,” Cruxer protested.
“True, absolutely,” Kip said. “But skimmers can’t haul in food, or gunpowder, or salt, or lumber, or iron, or all the tens of thousands of things Big Jasper needs every single day. And the fact is, the secret of the skimmers won’t be a secret forever. How long will that be our advantage? A year? It’ll take the Blood Robes a year or more to build the navy they need. What will the Chromeria do if they show up with a vast navy and skimmers?”
“They’ll die,” Winsen said.
“Make this simple for us, Breaker,” Ben-hadad said. “What do we need to do?”
“I’m certain—and Lady Eirene Malargos needs to know this,” he said, looking over at Verity, “that if we lose Blood Forest, we lose the war. There was one battle already at Ox Ford, and our side lost. Grievously. Ruthgar lost thirty-five thousand men there. That, followed by Raven Rock and the worthless victory at Two Mills Junction? Ruthgar’s sick of taking the brunt of every battle. Sick of sending men to die. I think everyone on our side has written off the Foresters. They’re too far away, and too expensive and too hard to defend. A better line, they think, is the Great River. I think the satrapahs and the Colors will never say this out loud, but they’ll send token forces to make a guerrilla war in the Forest to buy themselves time to build their own defenses, but no one’s going to send tens of thousands of soldiers to die again. In short, the Seven Satrapies have already fallen. They simply don’t have the will to do what needs to be done to win.”
A silence fell over them.
“Worst fight speech, ever,” Winsen said.
“But…” Kip said, grinning suddenly. “We have a few advantages. Inside Tyrea and Atash, there were people who wanted the Color Prince to win. He threw off odious bonds and tore up bad treaties. He freed slaves. He promised wealth and a return to ancestral gods. A certain slice of the people loved him. That’s not true in Blood Forest. The people here care deeply about nature, and they see wights as profoundly unnatural, defying the order of the seasons themselves by which life yields to death. Moreover, the Color Prince lost his temper here. He wiped out whole towns, and let his men ravage and rape others. This is the satrapy just across from the border town where two hundred young women jumped to their deaths off the walls of Raven Rock with their children in their arms. The people here are scattered, but they’re tough and they know the land intimately. They’re hunters and trappers and guides and lumbermen and river captains. In some areas, they’ve never much recognized the Chromeria, but they will recognize someone who comes in and fights a hated invader with them. We gather everyone who’s willing and has something to offer, and we show the Color Prince why it’s called the Blood Forest. Tisis grew up there. She knows the people and their customs. With her help, we’re going to go to the Deep Forest, we’re gonna raise a small army, and we’re going to save the satrapy.”
“In other words,” Big Leo said, “we’re going go fuck up the Color Prince. Like I said.”
Kip punched the big man in his good shoulder. It was like hitting a side of beef. “Exactly. I just had to use more words to explain it for the slow ones.”
“Don’t you guys look at me!” Ferkudi said.
And so, nearly in sight of the capital of Ruthgar, they boarded the odd new skimmer that Ben-hadad had dubbed the Mighty Thruster.
Kip had shaken his head. Tisis had muttered, “Boys.” Ferkudi had guffawed. Winsen had grinned. Cruxer had blushed and said, “You can’t call it that.”
“We’re the Mighty,” Ben-hadad said. “The propulsion units are thrusters, that’s all.” The damn liar.
“I guess you’ll be the first man to ride the Mighty Thruster?” Tisis asked.
His brow wrinkled. “That makes it sound…”
“Make sure you take a good wide stance, legs far apart, or he’ll throw you.”
“He? I didn’t…”
“Do you need more instruction? Because I’m getting quite adept at riding a mighty thruster myself,” she said.
Ben-hadad blanched.
“You’ll want to make sure you have a good grip, and loosen up your hips a—”
“All right! All right!”
Hours later, they sped into the mouth of the Great River—on the good skimmer Blue Falcon.
Chapter 19
“It’s your fault. This war. This madness. All this death and insanity.”
Gavin lifted his head at the sound of the voice, but there was no speaker with him in his cell, no slot open to the outside from which a taunter could hurl word-bolas at him. He closed his eyes again. The silence was a pillow over his face.
Which was odd, considering the hard surfaces reflected back every sound he made. But motionless, barely breathing, seated with his legs crossed, his fingers splayed in the sign of the three in an attitude of prayer, he was habituated to his own little noises. It was only natural that, too long deprived of sensations, he would start hallucinating.
How did you make it so long, brother?
His brother had gone mad down here, but slowly. So slowly. Sixteen years in this monochromatic hell, and for how long had he been sane? Ten years?
Gavin didn’t think he could make it two months.
Odd.
He’d barely moved since Marissia had been taken away. He had control of nothing but his own body.
Seven days. Seven days he’d eaten nothing. In the natural progression of fasting, he hadn’t even been hungry since the wretched third day.
On the seventh day, water had cascaded down the umbilicus above him. First, the rush of soapy water. When Gavin had created this prison, he’d thought it was a measure of his kindness to give such a luxury. Plus, he didn’t know how long a man could live in filth without getting some sort of infection, sickening, and dying. The Prisms’ War had seen plenty of filth, but it had been a war measured in months. Even then, nearly as many men had died of disease as from battle.
But when he’d designed the prison, he’d forgotten about heating the water. A rush of cold, soapy water to a naked man with no means to heat himself was no kindness.
Even my attempt at kindness was cruelty.
But Gavin endured the torrent. He rubbed some water over his wounds, but made no move to clean his beard or skin. He merely sat near the cloaca on the floor and watched as his bread was soaked sodden and sucked away.
The lime, to defend against scurvy, came next. (There were no oranges now, with the loss of Tyrea.) Gavin couldn’t tell, of course, if his father had dyed it blue as he himself always had dyed the oranges he’d sent his brother.
But Gavin didn’t scramble to grab the lime.
The clean water flowed next, rinsing away the soapy water and the lime.
Gavin sat, impassive, his face in his hands.
In the new cleanness of the cell, he could somehow smell afresh his own stench—deliberate, this time—and the slight chalk aroma of blue luxin. He glanced up at his reflection, pinched to inhumanly narrow proportions by the curving of the reflective wall, shimmering slightly with the crystalline facets of so much blue luxin. It looked disgusted with him.
The gaunt figure said, “Starving yourself? You think that’s an acceptable way for a Guile to go? Grow a spine.”
“I control what I can,” Gavin said.
“I didn’t peg you for a coward.”
“What do you mean?” Gavin challenged his reflection. I’m unhinged, he thought.
“Make up your mind. You still have teeth, don’t you? You want to live, bite the bread. You want to die, bite your wrist. Bleed out.”
Maybe it wasn’t his imagination.
Gavin could imagine taunting himself, but this wasn’t how he would have done it.
With his hands in front of his face, Gavin couldn’t see if the reflection’s mouth moved in time with his own or not. Was his sanity so tenuous?
“What am I doing?” Gavin asked aloud. Talking to oneself was one thing, talking as if one were real
ly two different people was something else.
Then he felt a chill down his spine. He could have sworn this time the reflection didn’t move quite correctly.
He tilted his head. Squinted. Sniffed. The reflection wasn’t quite moving in time with him.
“You don’t remember?” the reflection asked. This time, Gavin was sure its mouth moved, whereas his hadn’t. But the voice was all in his head. “Where’s your perfect memory, Gavin Guile?” it asked.
“Dazen.”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? After what you did. Filicide.”
No. It didn’t matter. “What are you?” Gavin asked. “I don’t feel mad. Nor fevered. I’ve not been fasting so long that I should see apparitions.”
“You really don’t remember. I’m appalled. Gavin Guile, the man so near to being a god, has forgotten his own creation? But some part of you does remember, doesn’t it? Else why are you talking in your sleep?”
“What are you talking about? What are you?” And then it hit him. “Orholam have mercy, you’re the dead man.” The name itself was a distant echo. Something his brother had ranted about once, years before, perhaps?
“You still don’t understand how cruel you really are, do you?”
“I wasn’t cruel,” Gavin said. “I did what I had to. I couldn’t kill him, and I couldn’t let him go. This was the only way. It was only supposed to be until I established my rule. Things escaped me. There was never a time I could release him safely. I thought there would be, someday. I never did anything to be cruel, though. It was never that.”
The apparition grinned, unconvinced. Like Gavin was pathetic.
“The black didn’t take that much from you,” the dead man said. “I know you wanted it to. You fed the black every obscenity you’d committed, every crime and horror. Black luxin is forgetting and madness and oblivion so it mostly worked. But one thing it is not. It isn’t clean. It never works exactly as you hope, does it? You forget the wrong things, and it sticks like tar on the fingers of your mind.”
For years, Gavin hadn’t even remembered that drafting black was possible. He must have fed even his knowledge of how to draft black into the black. For years, he hadn’t been able to remember what he’d done. Certainly not how. Hellishly, now—too late—it was coming back to him in bits and pieces, black stones turned over in the light, cutting memories best left on the banks of the river Regret. “What are you?” he asked.
“You created these prisons, the first one in a single month, the rest over the course of the first year. It was a mammoth undertaking. A brilliant demonstration of your gifts, and of your monomania and your fear. But you knew. You knew he’d be down here for a long time, and you knew he would have nothing to do but figure out how to undo what you had done. And destruction is ever so much easier than creation, isn’t it?
“But then you realized that wasn’t true only of things, but also of men. Destruction is easier than creation. So you made me. A reflection of yourself. A distraction. A dissuasion. You knew that eventually Gavin would figure out an escape, unless you could keep him from turning his mind to the puzzle fully. So you made me, to destroy him first, so he could never destroy your prison.”
“No,” Gavin said. It was too plausible, too smart.
“You had been exploring the forbidden arts of will-casting, and so you will-cast a portion of yourself into this prison. I am indeed a reflection of you, Dazen. I am all the hatred you had for your older, stronger, more assured big brother, with his natural air of superiority, with his total ownership of father’s affection and father’s pride, with his easy mastery of all that came to hand. With his casual contempt for you. You only needed me to be a distraction, but you decided to go far beyond that. You made me to be an instrument of torture. Your brother lived alone, with only your hatred to keep him company for sixteen years.”
“I would never…”
“You are a crueler man than you know. Of course, then you used the black to obliterate the memory of what you had done, even from yourself. As if sin forgotten is sin forgiven.”
Gavin swallowed.
“But all magic fades, scoured slowly by the sands of passing years, and you’re starting to remember, aren’t you?”
It couldn’t be true. But it fit. He had recently dreamed about his first Freeing as the Prism, and that dream had ended with his using black luxin. On purpose, to blot out memory.
It had worked. He had lost his memory of that night—and how many others?—for more than seventeen years.
With how much evil he could remember that he’d done, how much worse must the memories be that the old him had decided needed to be fed to the black?
“You can get out of here, you know,” the dead man said through heavy-lidded eyes.
“How?” Gavin asked.
“You know how.”
Draft black. One last time.
“Any idea that starts with the words ‘one last time’ is a bad idea,” Gavin muttered.
“What?” the dead man asked.
“Something father used to say.”
“You’re older now. More in control of yourself and your magic. You could do it safely.”
“I have no magic.”
“You can have the black again.”
“No. It is madness and poison and murder and death. It’s what got me here.”
“Yes, here, alive,” the dead man said. “How much do you remember about Sundered Rock?”
“Everything,” Gavin said.
“Liar.”
“I remember enough.”
“Really? I doubt that. How much truth are you ready for, ‘Gavin’ Guile?”
“I have no illusions left.”
The dead man barked a laugh. “Odd indeed that I am the fragment of you, when you are the one who is so thin and hollow. Gavin, Gavin. Do you remember meeting the Mirror Janus Borig when you were a child?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what she said?”
Vaguely. “Yes. What does it matter? Mirrors don’t see everything.”
“You don’t remember.”
“No,” Gavin admitted. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh, that is fortunate. Because I was not created to torment your brother, no. Sadly, you created me to torment a prisoner. Which now is you!” Gleeful, irritating little ass. Had Gavin ever been like that? Oh yes, he had. He’d honed his skills against his big brother when they were children. “And,” the dead man said, “I’ve got nothing but time, and you have nowhere to go.”
“Make your point and be done with it,” Gavin said. But his stomach turned. How long could he last with a twin self mocking himself in his hell? This apparition would know all of his weaknesses, all his secret self-loathings. The dead man would be a better tormentor for Dazen himself than he could possibly have been for the real Gavin.
“Janus Borig told you, Dazen. She told you that you could draft black.”
“Yes, so what?” Gavin had recovered the memories of that much.
“She told you that you could only draft black. You were a black monochrome, Dazen. You told your brother. You, who had been powerless, the one son in a powerful family who couldn’t draft. You could feel father’s embarrassment, his keenness that no one else know, his hope that he could fix you eventually. So when you heard that you had black, you bragged about it, and Gavin feared you. Rightly. When you began to evince your powers, your brother knew how you were doing it, because you told him. And gradually, Gavin came to understand that he had to stop you.”
“No, this isn’t true.”
“Do you remember why you went to the White Oak estate, to face Karris’s brothers?”
“I went there to see her. We were going to elope.”
“No, you knew she was already gone. You cared for her, somewhat, at least enough you didn’t want her to die. But you never planned to marry her. You yourself leaked that you were coming to take her away.”
“No.”
But the
dead man went on, heedless. “So if you knew she was gone, why did you go to the White Oak estate? Why would you knowingly face seven brothers, seven drafters?”
“I wouldn’t. That’s not how it happened.” But it was so long ago now. So foggy.
“You went for the same reason that you’ve hunted down wights yourself. Why would a Prism himself hunt wights? When Orea Pullawr tried to stop you, it should have been a small fight—Gavin, you’ll get yourself killed, she said. But you fought for the right to hunt wights as if your very life depended on it. Why would a Prism do such a thing?”
“I could hunt them safely. There was no reason for other men to die. So many had died already. It wasn’t dangerous for me.”
“No, those are the lies you’ve told others to make yourself look good. The truth, Gavin, was that it was dangerous for you not to.”
“What does this have to do with the White Oaks?” Gavin demanded.
“Because between them, her brothers included drafters of every color. Because black is emptiness, but emptiness can be filled. Darkness may be filled with light. Black can hold every color. You went to the White Oak estate to murder those young men, to steal their powers. Because that’s what black drafters do.”
“No.” But it came out a whisper.
“And that’s why you had to hunt wights. You’ve been running out of power from the very first day, and it had to be replenished with the blood of drafters. In her weakness and her love, your mother denied it. Your father and brother knew the truth. They held off as long as they could, but when you murdered all those people at the White Oak estate, they knew you were a monster. They knew you had to be stopped. You, Dazen, are the Black Prism.”
Dazen had crafted his Gavin persona like a goblet of blown glass. Molten glass given shape with hot air, hardening to a fine, beautiful, brittle finish. Seeing the gold leaf twining down the delicate stem and the rich imperial purples of the wine, and hearing the melodious chime of fine crystal, the world had been blinded to the palsied hands cupping the bowl.