Teia remembered that shit: Stop crying! Slap. Stop crying! Slap. You dare defy me? Report for whipping, you stupid bitch!
One learned to cry quietly. To save tears up for later.
Teia slipped in before the slave standing outside the door could close it. This was the Nuqaba’s bed chamber, but though she had entire rooms devoted to baths just steps down the hall, they’d brought in a copper tub full of steaming water.
The Nuqaba herself was pacing the room in a bathing robe—Teia had forgotten that Parian women rarely bathed nude, which had always struck her as a weirdly backward custom for an otherwise reasonable people. How do you get really clean when you wear clothing into the bath? The noblewoman’s hair was bound up on top of her head with aromatic oils to moisturize it through the night, her skin scrubbed of all cosmetics. But her eyes were puffy from tears and bloodshot from either whatever was burning in the hookah on the table, or the bundle of haze beside it, or the mushrooms she had diced very finely in a dish.
If only Teia hadn’t been such a straight arrow growing up, she might know how much of which intoxicant would kill you. It would have been a nicely believable accidental suicide.
I’m a soldier, not an assassin.
But as the door closed quietly behind her, Teia was arrested by something else, and she instantly forgot all about the Nuqaba and assassinations and stealth and consequences.
Chained against the Nuqaba’s wall, head imprisoned within a helm with blackened glass over the eye slits to keep him from drafting, but unmistakable from his towering form and chiseled body, was Commander Ironfist.
Chapter 61
He woke in the deepest darkness he had ever known. When his panic subsided, he examined his surroundings. He’d been moved while he was unconscious.
It was a black cell, but otherwise identical to the ones Gavin had made. Just more cruel.
More secure, too, naturally. It was very Andross Guile. This cell didn’t even have to be made of luxin. Dark stone of any kind, plus no light, and there could be no escape.
“Feel it,” a voice said.
Oh no. “Who are you?” Gavin asked. That wasn’t his father’s voice.
“Feel the stone,” the dead man said.
“You can’t be here. You…”
“Feel the stone!”
Gavin felt it. Not granite, smoother. Marble? But without the slick coolness of marble. This was more metallic, as if rather than simply being cold, it was sucking the warmth right out of his skin.
“No,” he said.
“No one has drafted so much black luxin since Lucidonius,” the voice said. “Here lies your masterpiece, and no one but your father will ever know.”
I made this? An entire cell of black luxin, a dark mirror of the others. Why?
I should feel distrust. I should have my guard up here, against this dead man, surely the worst part of me. Instead I feel only a cavernous desolation that sits below my rib cage, burrowing at my heart.
I am a skin suit. A hollow man. I am a disguise buttoned up over nothing.
I am as empty as the eye they burnt out. Lensless, I gawp and stare. Bathed in light, I remain a black Prism, reflecting nothing, spitting only facets of myself into these cells. I am the unseeing I.
“Of all the dead men, surely you would be the greatest liar. Why should I believe anything you say?” Gavin asked. But he believed.
“Because you know what makes the best lies, and you think you’re smart enough to winnow out the facts even if I did lie to you.”
“That does sound like me,” Gavin admitted to the voice of the darkness. The younger me. Am I really talking to a part of myself in each of these cells? Shouldn’t I be a good man, then, if I drained so much bile into these abominations?
“I created us one at a time,” the voice said. “Blue first, then green sometime later, yellow, orange quite a while later—the technical problems made it difficult to craft a chamber entirely of orange. It was important to me, to you, not to cheat and use multiple colors. We fixated on that. Red we did with many layers of seared red luxin and liquid red. Anyone else would have worried about placing what amounts to a bomb in the Chromeria’s heart. Superviolet and sub-red not even I could figure out.”
“But I did,” Gavin said, thinking he’d caught his dark mirror in a lie. He had some inkling of this, scratching around the back of his skull.
“By cheating,” the dead man said. So he knew that, too. He’d merely been baiting himself, to torture himself more.
“There is no cheating in life, only success and a thousand flavors of failure.” Gavin sounded like his father, saying that. He couldn’t remember, though, if he’d heard it from him first.
“See, you do remember, a little. We made superviolet and sub-red as death traps rather than as true prisons. We crafted the superviolet so that in breaking any part of the luxin, it would all break. So when any man fell in, in falling in or fighting it, he would shatter it all and release so much luxin dust into the air that he must suffocate. And the sub-red, do you remember?”
The obvious problem was that sub-red was highly flammable. You could draft a crystal of it, but if exposed to air, it caught fire instantly.
“I did… something… with orange.”
“You carved out the space for the chamber, sealed it airtight on every side, then made a permeable wall of orange luxin that you stuck your hands through repeatedly. You burnt sub-red in that chamber until there was no air in it at all, and then you created the chamber itself with a monomaniac’s total fixation. That cell is perfect, a perfect sphere shining and crystalline, a marvel with the beauty of ten thousand flame crystals larger than anyone else has ever drafted. A perfect cell that no man will ever see.”
“Because as soon as he fell through the trapdoor, he’d bring in air with him. He wouldn’t have time to even see the fire that would consume him.”
“Or if he miraculously lived through the inferno, he would then asphyxiate, as you built the trapdoor to seal airtight behind an intruder.”
That was right. He’d done that to keep it from being an actual bomb.
“You’re being awfully helpful,” Gavin said. The darkness was getting to him, even with this comforting voice.
“You made me different from the others. Don’t you remember?”
Gavin didn’t. Not enough. But the dead man knew that, didn’t he?
“You assumed that if father caught you, he would throw you in here. Because why would Andross Guile try any half measure?”
“So I made an escape route?” Gavin said.
“Naturally, I thought about it. For a long time.”
“I built escapes for the others.” Most of them. “Why not this one?”
“Perhaps I planned to. Perhaps it was too hard. Perhaps I wanted one prison that I might use for someone else—father, perhaps—from whence I knew no one could escape. Or perhaps it was that madness in me. That fixation. Perhaps I couldn’t bear to build an almost-perfect prison.”
“‘Perhaps,’ ‘perhaps’? Stop that!” Gavin said.
“Then you tell me,” the dead man said.
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“This doesn’t take memory. I’d bet you haven’t changed as much as all that.”
The dead man didn’t goad him after that.
It took a few minutes, standing in the darkness, feeling it soak into his bones, feeling the terror rise like water flooding the cell, covering his toes, then his ankles.
Gavin cursed aloud. “How young and stupid was I?”
The dead man didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
Why do men walk to the edge of a chasm? Is the view so different, right at the edge, than it is two steps back?
They walk to the edge because it scares them.
I wanted this here because it frightened me. I, a veritable lord of light, was ashamed of being afraid of the dark. So I made my own cell, my own greates
t terror, and I put it under my own house. But its existence wasn’t enough. It had to be inescapable. A cell without locks isn’t scary enough for a brash fool. It’s only as scary as the threat is real.
There were many kinds of suicidal madness. There was only one name for the kind of madness that puts a gun to its own head when it has no intention of pulling the trigger: youth.
All these years of the terrors in the night and the sudden paralyzing panics that I dismissed as foolishness and cowardice and nonsense. All these years, I was sitting on this egg of darkness, all the time, waiting for it to hatch.
Shit.
“So what’s the tally?” Gavin asked, impatient with his old self as all proud men are impatient with the proof of their past imperfections. “Tell me about you.”
The dead man chuckled low. “Direct, still direct. As if we don’t have all the time in the world. Very well. You made me last of all the dead men. You made me with the black luxin that destroyed you, that obliterated so much of the Dazen Guile who had been. You didn’t craft my personality to punish you, though. No additional torture is necessary in a black cell. You made me to hold all the memories you hoped to lose. Finally, Dazen, you made me to comfort you.”
So the young me wasn’t heartless. Brash and irritating and irritatingly competent, but not always thoughtless. But this was a palliative comfort. A hierarchical comforting, wasn’t it? Old me saying sorry, but I’ve clearly bested you, future me. Because I can’t imagine you ever reaching the heights of perfection again that I have reached now.
Fuck you, young, arrogant me. “What if I don’t want your comfort?”
“Then we reach an impasse far more quickly than the old you expected we would. Hmm. Funny. The old you was the young you. Regardless, the young Dazen desperately wanted to share, to justify himself, to be understood. He thought you would be the only person who could understand him.”
“‘The young Dazen’?” Gavin asked. “Like you aren’t him?”
“A will-casting like me is… quite special. I’ve been in here for almost two decades. I’ve aged. Learned. So no, I’m not exactly young any longer.”
“A will-casting doesn’t age. It only decays.”
“Depends on how well they’re made. All magic fails eventually, yes. Will-castings deteriorate regardless of how well drafted. Me? I’ve aged. I’ve been aware of the passing time, and I don’t know that I would thank you for it. I’ve wanted someone to talk with for a long time, and I’ll only appreciate it more if there are big differences between us now. I’ve talked to myself enough. You will wish to talk. Now, or soon. I know, because I am you.”
“And if I don’t want your truth?” Gavin asked.
“My truth? Is this the madness speaking? There is no my truth or your truth. You have forgotten the truth; your forgetting it doesn’t make it cease to exist. I am here to remind you of it, so that perhaps in the last days of your life, you might reconcile yourself to who you have been, and die with a measure of peace.”
“You’re gentler than I would have been, back then,” Gavin said.
“Clearly not. But I do tire of your obstinacy, old man.”
Gavin waited in the darkness for a long time. It was impossible to tell how long, though. He felt his way around the chamber. Had he already done that? It felt as if he had. Maybe he only had all those years ago.
It was shaped exactly like the others, from the trickle of water down the wall to the hole in the bottom of the floor for his waste. Of course, in the darkness, the cell could be roofless for all he knew. It might extend only as high as his upstretched hand could reach, and he would never know.
That would be the kind of bitter joke young Dazen might have played.
So he moved around the cell, as methodically as he could in the total darkness, and jumped, slapping his hand against the curvature of the wall as high as he could.
“I could mock you for this,” the dead man said. “But I don’t find it foolish, despite how it looks. I rather admire your tenacity instead. I’m glad I didn’t lose that as I got old.”
“‘Despite how it looks’?” Gavin said. “Can you see in here?”
“A figure of speech only. I can hear you slapping the wall, and it’s what I would do. Would have done? Will do? I’m not really sure how to address us.”
“I would have thought I would only put the vile parts of me into this cell, into the black,” Gavin said, though he hadn’t really intended to talk to the thing.
“My control of black wasn’t that precise. It’s more of a battle axe than a scalpel. And as you might not recall, I had very little practice. Handling black is analogous to the other colors but far more difficult. And I wanted me to be a comfort to you. Can’t be all vileness and hate and do that.”
Only I would try to do surgery with a battle axe.
Only I would nearly succeed.
“The others,” Gavin said, still jumping and measuring the wall. He planned to go around at least twice, just in case he missed a spot on the first round. “The others said I was the Black Prism. Is that true?”
The dead man sighed. “So it worked, to hide that from you for all these years?”
“So the answer is yes.”
“Yes,” the dead man admitted.
“They said that I needed to kill drafters to refresh my powers.”
“That makes it sound like an evil power. It’s not evil. Black luxin itself isn’t evil… though I guess I, being will-cast into black luxin, probably would try to convince you of that. Hmm. Well, you needn’t believe me outright on matters pertaining to black luxin itself—I wouldn’t in your place, I suppose. Won’t in your place, whatever. Suffice it to say, I only killed those who attacked me first, or those who wished to suicide anyway.”
“The Freeing.”
“That’s right.”
“Is that what the Freeing was always about?” Gavin asked. “Giving provender to feed a black luxin drafter?”
“I don’t know,” the dead man said. “I think maybe it once was, but I don’t think that all the Prisms have been black drafters. Maybe only very few. The Spectrum was baffled when I made it past the first seven years. They expected me to die, or they thought I needed them. I feared that father figured it out then, but from how old you are, I’m going to guess he remained ignorant for longer than I imagined.”
Gavin said, “What happened at Sundered Rock?”
“I think you know by now,” the dead man said.
“Fragments only. I want to hear it all.”
Gavin could see no expression, of course, and eventually the dead man spoke: “Our plan worked, mostly. I—we—decided that some of the friends I’d made and allies I’d promised myself to were worse than who we were fighting. You remember this much, right?”
That was where the plan to replace the real Gavin had come in. Gavin said, “If I won, I wouldn’t really win. As it was, the war was traumatic, but brief. If I won as Dazen, I’d have gained the upper hand against the Chromeria, but I would still have had to subdue five of the Seven Satrapies. I might have beaten them eventually, but it was the wrong victory. My general Gad Delmarta had killed eighty thousand people in Garriston, and my army was full of Gad Delmartas. I remember what I planned with Corvan before the battle. What I don’t remember is what happened during and immediately after it.”
The dead man made a sound low in his throat. “Mmm. General Danavis managed to array the men I most wanted to die against the strongest parts of Gavin’s army. Unfortunately, it is remarkably hard to lose a battle in exactly the way you wish. A lot more people died in bringing me face-to-face with my brother than I’d intended, and then, of course, he kicked our ass.”
“How did he do it?”
“I don’t remember that, either. I remember thinking he’d cheated. But maybe there is no cheating, there’s only success and a thousand flavors of failure.”
“Thanks.” Old me is a dick. Guess that proves it is old me.
But the dead man went
on. “At the end, rather than die, I drafted black—and wow, did I draft black. It struck like a thousand cannons. Afterward, over the years, I asked a score of different soldiers who’d been there what happened that day. None wanted to talk about it. When pressed, there was no stable, single story. I drafted so much black luxin that day that it obliterated other people’s memories as well as my own. And, like me, they filled in the details as well as they could without even knowing it. The mind abhors a void, so it fills it with avoidance and fantasies, and calls them truth.
“There was an explosion, they said. The gods walked the earth again, they said. No, the Guile brothers became gods and warred, they said. Magic had undone the world, they said. The brothers brought hell to earth, they said. Others insisted nothing happened. Just a huge battle like any huge battle, they said. Others said that was what split Sundered Rock, that the rock had another name before that they couldn’t remember now. Storm giants came to Sundered Rock, they said, and threw mountains and lightning at each other.
“Others, who were much farther away—outside the influence of the black, I believe—reported the explosion. Like the earth screamed. Like creation itself groaned. Like Hellmount blowing up in fire from the stories, a scholar said. They saw something on the horizon, an obsidian sunrise. Maybe it was ash, a scholar guessed, from a new volcano—but there was no ash found later.”
“Stop. Enough.” It was too painful to dwell on. The lies and their cost, the men and drafters dead, undeserving. All those closest to Gavin and Dazen, the guards rushing to preserve them… obliterated by the brothers’ hatred and power.
Now here he was, trapped in his own cell. The cell he had forgotten was the cell in which he would be forgotten.
It would take a miracle to save him. Something never seen.
Perhaps something… mythic?
“Tell me,” Gavin commanded the dead man. “So there’s black luxin. A legend come to life. Is there white, too?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t make sense. There must be a balance.”
“There is a balance. There is pure, white, full-spectrum light—which we split into all the colors of the rainbow, and which we draft in innumerable ways into matter—and there is darkness and black luxin. That is the balance: black against all the colors put together. As there is no forgiveness, only forgetting, white luxin’s a myth, a lie for the desperate and foolish. There is no hope for you, Guile. No escape. There is only the perfection of darkness. There is no white luxin.”