No one was looking at Gavin and Gill Greyling, but Teia saw tears streaking down both their faces to see their father honored so.
“What we do today, with this execution, is that cut,” Karris said quietly. “We may cut too deep. We may kill men who could have been saved. The one is all rot, but the other two, in gentler times… Perhaps they could be treated with gentler medicine. Today we cut deep so we may save the whole body. But I want you to know, I hate it, too.”
Quentin, Teia thought. We’re going to kill you. Dear Orholam, Quentin.
Chapter 22
I’m no better than my brother. But I live.
Gavin waited, starving, fasting, wondering if his father saw him or if he had been forgotten. His entire gambit rested on his father’s seeing him choose death, and the water flushing the cell every week erased all evidence of that.
Nor would Gavin necessarily even know if his father came down to observe him and left.
But you can never blink when you stare down a Guile.
There was only the bland trickle of water, so slight that it usually clung to the ceiling and coursed down the wall with only the occasional drip. It had, over the years, worn a slight gutter in the blue luxin. He plugged that gutter with the two remaining fingers of his left hand, watched the water back up and spill out of the gutter and finally course around his fingers and into oblivion.
Death always finds a way.
Stop what gaps you may;
Scream defiance that you live,
Life leaks through the mortal sieve.
When he’d constructed these cells, he’d thought that there were two main problems with any prison: what comes in, and what goes out. He’d spent restless nights figuring out exactly how to deliver the food, and how exactly to take away the waste and the water.
He’d gotten it exactly backward. The problem with a prison isn’t what comes and goes; it’s what stays.
When he shat—rarely now, it had been so long since he’d eaten, but it had been a problem from the beginning—he had to wipe with his left hand like the barbarians of old in the Broken Lands. There was no way to wash his hand adequately after. Thus, when he ate, he had to tear apart his bread with right hand and his teeth, feral.
Once in the first days, he forgot, and ate three bites with both hands.
The Mighty Gavin Guile, the High Lord Prism, the Emperor of the Seven Satrapies, the Promachos of Orholam, the Defender of the Faith—shit eater.
He’d pondered then, for days straight, whether that was to be the end of him. Would he get some infection and shit out his life, while his father watched—or, worse perhaps, didn’t? He had no idea how often his father checked on him, but it couldn’t be often. Regardless of how the old arachnid did it, getting down here wouldn’t be easy. Harder still to keep his passage secret and to come and have no one notice the absence.
Gavin had never gotten sick, though, which proved something profound about him or Orholam or the state of natural philosophy. What that profound something was, he wasn’t sure, which definitely proved something about himself.
At the very least, the shit eating and his sick fear afterward had made the fasting more palatable.
After the first days, the hunger had passed. He almost missed it, insane as that was, for it had been a constant distraction. A blessed distraction from what that demon in the glass, his own tormenting reflection, had said. ‘You, Dazen, are the Black Prism.’
He had convinced himself, somehow, that he hated Sun Day. That he hated ritually murdering all those drafters. He’d convinced himself that he was being noble when he hunted down wights personally. He was saving people’s lives! He’d convinced himself that he had gone to the White Oak estate that fateful day for love.
As if a Guile knew anything of love.
He knew what love was, surely. He knew what it would look like, smell like, act like. Though never wise, he was smart enough to know the real thing. He just could never feel it. He was Guile, and that meant corruption.
Orholam forgive him. Every small thing he’d done right had been feeble atonement for the murder of thousands. He could barely remember his knife strokes on all those Sun Days now, the insincere words offered to comfort those condemned to die. He’d corrupted the holiest day of the year into just another long day of labor.
I have to work so hard, he’d thought, as he slew the best and brightest and most dedicated men and women of the satrapies.
And added to his power with every death.
He had convinced himself, recently, for a time, perhaps… that his brother had been the villain after all. His brother must have been a murderer, a cheat, a rapist, a monster. And his father! Worse, worse still.
But Gavin—nay, Dazen. Dazen False-Face. Dazen the Impostor—Dazen himself was the monster here.
He himself had been the tyrant, the lone beast who would be a god. He just hadn’t been very successful. He had let his father remain in power. He had let the White oppose him. He had been less competent than he could believe.
And that stung worse than the idea that he was evil.
He was evil and he wasn’t even good at it.
But.
But. He survived. He was here. Maimed and bent. Eye burnt out. Fingers cut off. They’d broken everything but his will.
As long as he had that, he could overcome. And he would.
He was the bad guy? So be it.
He was a monster? He would be the best. He would emerge. He would comfort Karris, and he would avenge himself on his enemies.
She would be better off without him. He saw that now. But she didn’t see it. And she had how many years left, anyway? Five, maybe? He’d kept up a pretense of goodness for seventeen years. He could do five more for her sake.
I will be sweetness and light to her eyes, and bitter gall and hellfire to my enemies.
Goddammit, father! Come down here already!
“Want to talk?” the dead man asked.
Gavin said nothing. You don’t respond to a torturer who has only words as his rack.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, his father came.
Gavin was awakened by the slight tremor that he knew signaled the cell’s being lifted. He’d thought when he built the cell that it would be imperceptible. After his time here, though, the small change felt like an earthquake. He woke instantly and sat over his hole, placid, meditative.
When the slot in the wall opened from the apparently seamless blue, it wasn’t where Gavin had guessed it would be. Top-quality workmanship there, hiding its location. His own workmanship.
But almost as soon as the slot opened, something slid into the gap. When Dazen had come to visit the real Gavin down here, he’d left only open air between them. Andross Guile was not so confident, or so cocky, perhaps.
Andross Guile set a window between them, sparkling, crystalline, translucent but not fully transparent—thus, likely blue luxin. He was illuminated with an icy light.
Gavin stood on wobbly legs and faced his father. The elder Guile was visible only through Gavin’s own reflection. And Andross was a perverse mirror of him. He looked hale. He looked better than he had in twenty years.
In contrast, Gavin himself looked like hell. It was as if his father had stolen away all his youth. His skin was bronzed where Gavin’s was pallid. The fat of all his sedentary years had now melted into his sharp Guile jaw and broad Guile shoulders. Gloves gone, spectacles gone, he didn’t look anything like the invalid he had so recently been—or perhaps had merely pretended to be.
A dozen quiet expressions ran over Andross Guile’s face at the speed of his thoughts. Finally, all he said was, “Son.”
It was a kidney punch.
It shouldn’t have done any such thing, but it sent Gavin spinning. For no reason at all, he thought of his own son. Though not by birth, by adoption Kip was his, and Gavin loved him fiercely. He’d warmed to the boy only slowly, true. Only seen and loved the Guile in him by degrees. Gavin hadn’t been much of a fathe
r to him, but he’d done some things right. He’d gotten him into the Blackguard. He’d given Kip time amid those good people to help him grow straight and tall rather than crooked, as the other nobles’ pampered sons and daughters would have turned him.
And he’d saved Kip’s life, the once.
It wasn’t much, but it had been solely for Kip’s benefit, not his own. He had tried. In what little time he’d had with the boy, before this war had torn him away, he had tried. Once.
What had Andross Guile done for his sons, with all the time in the world? With all the wealth he’d accrued, and all the power he’d accumulated, with all the leisure he could want and limitless years, when had Andross Guile ever taken his eyes off himself and simply been a father?
“When I was a boy, why did I never go to you when I needed a father so desperately?” Gavin asked. “You were there. But where were you? What kind of man abandons his son to this? Never mind. Putting your kin in this hell is the least of your sins.” He waved at his father-reflection dismissively. “You call me son? No. This man-shaped grotesque is nothing to me. You are no father of mine.”
Gavin started crying, and he couldn’t help but shut his eyes. Tears getting into his eye hurt so much it blinded him. He saw only a single expression on his father’s face before he heard the scrape and snap of the slot’s slamming shut.
He staggered over to the wall, and leaned against it, whispering, “Damn you. Damn you for all you were and all you could have been. Damn you for all you should have been and were born to be, but never were.” And because the wall was fully reflective now, he whispered to that blue mirror where his sire might not be, and where his own reflection was, “Damn you to the hell you’ve built for yourself, Guile.”
Chapter 23
“Something ain’t right,” Big Leo said. “What is it that isn’t right about this? Anyone?”
“No oars,” Cruxer said. “How the hell did all of us forget oars?”
The Blue Falcon II had no oars; it was almost dark, and this was a problem for a luxin-propelled ship in a river with a current pulling them toward what might be enemies.
Standing at the prow of the skimmer, Big Leo said, “Not that this. That this. That. Something ain’t right about that.” He pointed toward the strangers waiting for them with his chin.
“It’s my fault,” Ben-hadad said, still looking at the Blue Falcon. “My design. My work.” He brightened. “But… hey, I think I already know how to fix it. Orholam’s shining smile, boys, it’ll be beautiful.”
“Can you fix it now?” Cruxer asked, looking nervously toward the armed men waiting for them on shore.
“No, no, no, but on Blue Falcon III,” Ben-hadad said. “If we give the oars a convex shape and modify the hull a bit, we can have them fold seamlessly and interlock into the gunwales here. See? They’ll nest into each other. And if we make them of brightwater, they’d double as armor! Breaker, you think you can do that much solid yellow?”
“Ben,” Big Leo said, his voice rumbling deep in warning.
Ben-hadad clicked his lenses up. “Hmm?”
“Shut up. Someone tell me what’s wrong with this. With them. My gut’s going crazy.”
“Could be fear,” Ferkudi offered.
Big Leo leveled a gaze on him like a hammer falling on an errant thumb.
“Not fear,” Ferkudi amended. “Definitely not fear.”
No one else answered Big Leo. The skimmer drifted slowly downstream in the late-evening water. No sunlight meant no luxin, no luxin meant no motion. No oars meant no options. So they stared at the figures on the riverbank, and the figures stared back at them.
They could crack their lux torches for a source, but those were precious and they had precious few of them. No one wanted to waste their lux torches because they were scared of a few villagers.
“The current is pushing us right to them,” Tisis said. “And the wind isn’t helping.”
An improbably large bare-chested man and a child stood at the shore, but another dozen men and women sat around a cheery fire higher up the bank, cooking dinner and talking quietly.
“We’re too interesting for only two of them to be at the shore,” Kip said.
“If you do say so yourself,” Winsen said.
Kip let it go, though he was this close to punching Winsen in the nose. “We’re too dangerous looking,” Kip said. “That’s what’s wrong, Leo.”
“They’re trying not to spook us,” Tisis said, getting it.
“Who tries not to scare six armed men in uniform?” Kip asked.
“People who are scary themselves, that’s who,” Ferkudi said.
“Quiet, all of you,” Cruxer said. He was holding the waxed leather bag that carried the Mighty’s remaining mag torches. “Winsen, I count fourteen on the beach. Are there any others in the trees?”
“They’re Deep Foresters,” Tisis said. “If there’s more hiding in the trees, you’ll never see them.”
“None in the trees,” Winsen said, ignoring Tisis.
Cruxer handed out the precious mag torches. “No one crack one unless I give the order. Or unless I die, I suppose. That is one big, hairy, freckly guy.”
There was something feral about the man standing at the water’s edge. He wore a brown linen shirt, but it hung fully open, unlaced to show off a pelt of red chest hair and muscles, the tails of the shirt tucked into his belt, sleeves rolled up short to show bands of polished copper around his enormous biceps. Everywhere he was covered with thick, curly red hair over freckles: chest and arms and stomach. A beard like a burning bush hung halfway down his chest, contrasting with the bald dome of his head. And though Big Leo had a full head’s height on him, this warrior was chiseled from stone. Despite the fading light and the distance and hair, Kip could see veins on every muscle. And scars, as if from wild animals?
Tisis gasped, and at first Kip was needled that she was appreciating the incredible virility of that wild man, but when he turned to her, she said, “Look at her!”
The child wasn’t a child, but a pygmy.
Her appearance rattled something loose. A memory or—
I’m lying facedown, motionless, in the jungle underbrush in the lee of a downed tree. Loathsome things move under my belly and scuttle over my bare hands. Most of them harmless, I hope. A bird spider perches on a bough within arm’s reach above. Spiders terrify me beyond all measure, but I don’t move. Don’t dare to. Rustling through the underbrush and trees not twenty paces away is the war party.
The war-blue pygmies carry lances and flails, but the greater danger is the great tygre wolves they ride. Standing tall enough that they look eye to eye with a tall man, they’re almost too big for the pygmies to ride. They have long jaws more akin to an alligator’s than a dog’s, and their riders don’t control them so much as direct their viciousness. Tygre wolves aren’t trained mounts like a horse, they’re more like an arrowhead you strap into. Barely controlled, and that only by will magic; if a rider falls off, he can expect to be eaten first. Sight hunters, so their sense of smell isn’t as acute as a dog’s, but it is far better than a man’s.
The chi I drafted should have killed the scent of my body—give it that, the vile stuff—but there’s nothing to do about my breath. I don’t have it in me to draft chi again, not now. I can practically feel the tumors growing every time I do.
One of the tygre wolves comes toward me now, big wide paws silent on the greenery beneath. It growls.
My bowels turn to water, and I couldn’t move if I wanted to. The tygre wolf lunges—and snaps its fangs shut on the huge bird spider above me, drool from its slavering jaws splattering across my forehead.
Its rider curses and pulls at one of its ears, and it obeys her, chomping happily. Before they turn, I see the rider well, her gaze keen, teeth bared.
She is—
Not the same woman. Very alike. Maybe an ancestor. But that woman was not this one. Or perhaps Kip’s very unfamiliarity with the pygmies made them all look alike to h
im: sharp elfin features, imperial-purple hair, and the permanently upturned mouth and cheek depressions like smiles and dimples that had so often confounded men, who repeatedly mistook their expressions and motives, coming to call them smiling devils.
For a moment, Kip was suspended between the card’s knowledge and his own.
And then, in the blinking of an eye, he was out of that time-that-is-not-time.
And then the skimmer skritched onto the pebbles of the riverbank.
“Greetings,” Kip said. “We’ve come to fight.”
That came out wrong.
“Not to fight you, obviously,” he added. “I mean, we hope not? You wouldn’t happen to be fighting for the White King, are you? That would be awkward.”
“Good old Kip Silvertongue,” Winsen whispered.
“We know why you’ve come,” the pygmy woman said, her voice high pitched. “We’ve been sent to welcome you. Kip Guile? And you, Tisis Guile, born Malargos? And the Mighty, we presume?”
“That’s… right,” Kip said. She knew about Tisis and his marriage? How could she know that?
“I am Sibéal Siofra. This is Conn Ruadhán Arthur. We are of Shady Grove.”
“Shady Grove?” Tisis said. “You are far from home indeed.”
A cloud passed over Sibéal’s face. “There is no home now. Not for us. The White King has driven out everyone before him. First we in Shady Grove welcomed refugees, then to our shame and against our traditions we turned aside refugees, then we became refugees in turn. We have lost homes and tribe and spouses and children and land and faith. We have only a thirst for vengeance. Lead us, Luíseach, and we will go anywhere, so long as you lead us against that abomination.”
“Lee shock?” Kip asked, butchering the accent, though terminology probably shouldn’t have been foremost on his mind.
“Bringer of Light,” Tisis said.
“Oh, great. That again.” He turned to Sibéal and Conn Arthur. “Gather your people.”