If he gave his word, he would. Andross Guile was scrupulous about keeping his promises.
“Then I’m not the one who’s insane,” Gavin said. “All this? You mean the entire fate of the Seven Satrapies rests on one stupid knife?”
“If the White King wins, it’ll be a moot point, but long term, if the satrapies are to survive, yes. We must find it.”
“There’s only one? Can’t you make another? I mean, who made it in the first place?”
“The luxiats have stood in the way of previous attempts to make another. It’s a holy relic. Maybe Lucidonius made it. Maybe Karris Atiriel. Maybe the one we know was a much later replica. But the luxiats’ grandstanding doesn’t matter. There’s a key ingredient in the Blinder’s Knife that is extinct.”
Of course.
“White luxin,” Gavin said. He cursed. The dead man was a liar—or at least wrong.
“Indeed. The stories say that before Vician’s Sin, things were different. Drafters of white luxin were born every generation. A piece like the Blinder’s Knife was a stunning achievement, but not unique. In the intervening centuries, all of the others have been lost.”
“So if you could find even one white drafter or find one piece of white luxin from an earlier era, you could make a new knife? So surely you have such a knife somewhere, just waiting for a bit of white luxin?”
“No,” Andross admitted. “It was tried. There’s a level of unity of will that couldn’t be achieved by any team, not even one trying to save the world. A blinding knife has to be created by one person. He or she has to be a full-spectrum polychrome and a superchromat to handle the intricacies of balancing that kind of magic.”
“You mean a person like me.”
“Now you understand,” Andross said.
“So that’s the real reason you didn’t expose me, didn’t kill me. You kept me alive just so I could make you a new knife!” Of course there had been another reason, and one tied to Andross Guile’s own well-being. “But you never so much as hinted about this.”
“I criticized your brute-force drafting,” Andross said. “I hoped it would inspire you to learn more delicate work.”
“You asshole!”
“I thought we had at least another five years to get things in place.”
“Why not just tell me?” Gavin asked, though he should have known better.
“If I told you we absolutely needed you to craft an instrument which would allow you to be replaced, you would know that until you crafted it, you could do anything you pleased, anything at all, and we would not only not be able to oppose you, we would have to help and protect you. Even Orea agreed we had to keep that knowledge from you. And of course, this was all speculative anyway, contingent on us rediscovering white luxin—and you being able to draft it if we did. But even the hope of such a thing would have put tremendous power in your hands, if you’d known about it.”
It was like being punched in the stomach after already having had the wind knocked out of you. Gavin had been so consumed with keeping his own secrets that he had never pried into theirs. He hadn’t noticed that they’d also avoided talking about the Prism ceremony, because he’d been so terrified of their discovering his ignorance.
He’d been like a wayward youth, sneaking out late and getting drunk, thinking his parents must never know, thinking them fools who had never been young themselves, while they watched it all and hoped he grew up sooner rather than later.
But there was some puerile protest left in him. “If the knife was so important, why did you bring it to war against me? It makes no sense. Why would the High Luxiats allow you to endanger it like that?”
“Gavin was made promachos. They couldn’t refuse him.”
“You mean they couldn’t refuse you, armed with a promachos,” Gavin shot back.
Andross tipped his head and shrugged, acknowledging the compliment and the truth of it.
“That doesn’t answer why. Why would you take it out there? You were going to kill me with it?”
Andross Guile sighed. His piercing gaze rested heavy on Gavin. “We were going to try to save you.”
“Save me?”
“I was becoming an authority on black luxin. Your mother and I started secretly studying it as soon as Janus Borig told us that you would become a black drafter. Fascinating stuff, about which the world is clogged with superstition and misinformation. But this isn’t the time for a lecture.
“In sum, your mother and I hoped that if we stabbed you—of all people—if we stabbed a black drafter with the Blinder’s Knife, that you would survive it. Probably you would survive bereft of your powers, true, but if you can save a mad dog, you don’t mourn that you have to break its fangs to do so.”
Gavin felt sick. It was exactly what had happened when he’d been stabbed with the knife. It had taken his colors. It had also taken his color vision—Blinder’s Knife indeed. But it had left him alive. Somehow, the knife had separated his powers from his life. His parents’ hopes and their research had borne fruit—only too late for him, too late for them, and too late for the satrapies.
“The knife doesn’t take away the black, though,” the dead man said, breaking his silence. “Nothing can take away black luxin from you. The abyss lives in you.”
If Gavin believed his father, and his own will-cast reflections, his own past self and the evidence in front of his own eyes, he had been on the wrong side all along.
The Prisms’ War really had been the False Prism’s War.
It had been his fault, utterly. All of it. From the massacre of the White Oak family to the Battle of Blood Ridge to the burning of Garriston to the coming fall of the Seven Satrapies.
He hadn’t been caught up in his brother’s and father’s schemes to purge the Seven Satrapies of their enemies. He wasn’t the victim. He’d cast himself as the aggrieved party, but of what had he been the victim? Being a younger brother?
The real Gavin had been no saint, either, sure. In fact, maybe he’d been a villain, too. But he’d tried to save Dazen.
For all his flaws—and there had been many—his big brother had tried to save Dazen.
And in return, Dazen had killed him and broken the empire.
“You see what the old man’s doing,” the dead man said. “Don’t you? He’s steeling himself to kill you. Or at least to abandon you here and never come back until you die. He’s saying farewell.”
Andross said, “All this devastation, caused by one bitter librarian who seduced your brother in a vain attempt at revenge on me, and then stole the knife while he slept. That was why I wasn’t at Sundered Rock. I was going after her and the knife. I’d heard she had people in Blood Forest. Never guessed she’d double back to Tyrea. Smart, going back to the very center of the devastation. I never figured she’d be that canny, or that a woman with a treasure literally worth all the gold in the Seven Satrapies would keep it in a closet in a shack. Never figured you’d stab yourself with the knife and then jump in the sea, either.”
“Lot of inconvenient surprises for all of us in this,” Gavin said sarcastically.
Andross waved it away. He wasn’t interested in revisiting that. “Tell me, at Sundered Rock, if Gavin had held the Blinder’s Knife, would he have had a chance to use it on you?”
“Yes,” Gavin said.
“Don’t you see?” the dead man whispered. “He’s getting all his last questions answered. This is the end, Gavin.”
“That bitch.” Andross sighed. He was preparing to go.
“Damn you!” the dead man said. “Draft black! Kill him! Let your hatred make you strong for once!”
“Poison, I think,” Andross said. “Starvation is easier for me, but only in the short term. I should regret it later, I think, if I weren’t as humane as possible.”
“I don’t believe you,” Gavin said. “What about our game?”
Andross just shook his head.
“You don’t have any equals,” Gavin insisted. “You don’t have anyone to talk t
o. You’re not going to kill me. You’re too lonely.”
Andross said, “Goodbye, son.” He picked up his lantern.
“You cretin!” the dead man said. “You worm. You spineless ! Raka! We can get out!”
“Father, tell me you’ll come visit.” Gavin was barely hanging on. He couldn’t bear the darkness again.
Andross hesitated. “No, Dazen. It hurts too much. No games. The poison will be in your next meal. And in every meal until you eat and die.”
“Draft black! Kill him!” And suddenly, the dead man’s voice took on cavernous depths and thunderous tones that reverberated into realms beyond human ken. “I won’t be imprisoned forever!”
“I REFUSE! NON SERVIAM!” Gavin roared at the wall, and the darkness, but his shout was as much fear as it was defiance.
His father looked at him, shouting at a wall like a madman. There was a tremendous sadness and resignation on his face. He folded his arms. “You know… for a moment this conversation… It was almost enough to make me forget…”
No. Orholam, no.
Andross said, “There’s one last thing I wanted to tell you, though. Did you ever wonder why I picked your older brother to be the Prism and not you?”
Still recovering from his terror and confusion—had the dead man said he wouldn’t be imprisoned? as if they were separate?—Gavin said, “He was the eldest. You needed to make someone Prism immediately.”
“Triply wrong. First, I’m a younger brother myself; you think I care about primogeniture? Second, I had all the time I needed—and third, that isn’t why you believed I picked him, anyway, was it?”
Gavin swallowed, and said quietly, “Because he was your favorite. Because he was like you.”
“Half-wrong.”
The dead man whispered now, his voice low, gravelly, menacing, “Do you want to be in here with me forever? I won’t make it pleasant.”
“Which half?” Gavin asked. “No one is like you?” Arrogant old cancer. He was right about that, but that only made him worse.
Andross said, “I fell in love with Felia, not some woman who was a mirror of me. Of course I searched her out for her pedigree, for her family’s lineage of drafters, for their intelligence and hers. Those were all prerequisites. I wanted to pass on the best breeding to my sons and daughters that I could. I felt I owed it to you to give you a mother as excellent as your father is, not just some beauty or heiress or noblewoman. But there were other possibilities.
“However, it was your mother I fell in love with, because I realized she had strengths where I had weaknesses. She had not just a mind, but also a heart. She had wisdom, and discernment, but she also had compassion. I did not. Do not.
“Your brother Gavin was more like me than even I am. He was hard and cold and egocentric. Charismatic, too. Better looking than you, a little. But with no sense of others. Like a baby who forgets you exist when you play hide-and-peek and is surprised each time when you reappear, Gavin forgot to care about people unless they were directly in front of him. Everyone around him thought they were the center of his world whilst they were around him, but as soon as they walked away—usually having given him what he wanted—he forgot about their concerns. About his promises to them. I chose Gavin to become the Prism, Dazen, because he was very good at getting what we needed. But I also chose him for another and far more important reason.”
“And what’s that?” Gavin asked bitterly.
“Because usually, after seven years, the Prism dies.”
“What?” Gavin breathed.
“By choosing your brother, I was consigning him to death, so I swore I would spend as much of his last seven years with him as possible. Dazen, I chose him to die because you were my favorite. You always were.”
“You’re lying.” Gavin’s knees weakened, and he crumpled to the floor.
“You had all the strengths of your mother, and most of mine. You were the me I would have chosen to be.”
“You ignored me. You despised me.”
“Your brother was dangerous. He needed me if he was to have any chance of becoming a moral leader or even a decent human being. You, on the other hand, were destined to be upright. You erred, but you were always the son who ended up doing the right thing… had not the madness taken you. Had I understood what black luxin would do to you, I would have done everything differently. Perhaps I would have chosen you to be Prism first, and let you die young and pure, before this madness took you. I did the best I could with what I knew.”
“I hate you,” Gavin said.
“And I loved you, Dazen. And you betrayed me. Hiding your identity from me? For all those years? Every day was a twist of the knife, another ingratitude heaped on the rest. Another day of spitting on my sacrifices. But I was right about you. You’re useless, broken, worthless, and used up now, but for a long time, you were magnificent. You were the greatest Prism this world has known.”
“Strike him down. It’s our last chance,” the dead man begged.
Gavin’s breaths came like little fires into his lungs. The black luxin was right there, burning molten under his fingertips. He could use it now. Surely it was safe to use a little. Even if he lost a little piece of himself, what was losing a few memories against losing his very life?
Andross lifted the lantern and stared at Gavin as he readied himself to go.
“You can still draft black luxin, can’t you?” Andross asked.
“Yes,” Gavin hissed. It was so close.
“Kill him! Kill him!” the dead man screamed.
“And yet you haven’t,” Andross said.
Surely next there would be some gibe about Gavin’s weakness, his lack of will. All of Gavin’s hatred and fear and the long years of resentment against his father raced to his fingertips, but they were outrun by pity. A man who has strength but no love is worse than dead.
Andross Guile shook his head, astounded. Each word clear and slow, he said, “Imprisoned. Dying. Furious. And yet you won’t use the black. Not even against me.”
“This is death. His or yours,” the dead man said.
“You see?” Andross Guile said with a sad little quirk toward a grin. “I was right about you.”
The lantern snicked shut, and Gavin was plunged into the final darkness.
Chapter 66
By the time Tallach and Kip made it to the Blood Robe camp, the battle was virtually over. But battles don’t end at all the way Kip had once imagined. He’d thought battles ended all at once: there’s a winner, the losers run away, and the winners pick the corpses clean of loot.
It wasn’t like that. This battle was over. The day had been won. But there was still a lot of killing and dying to do. There were even heroics.
Kip could see that a Blood Robe soldier with a spinning spear was facing off against a dozen of the Nightbringers, and had them down to a stalemate. The bodies of four of their comrades lay on the ground, two still, and two still writhing.
Kip gestured, and Ben-hadad rode over to take care of it. Ben-hadad lofted the double crossbow he’d designed. It was a fearsome weapon. The bows were made of scrimshawed sharana ru: sea demon bone.
Aside from its scarcity, sea demon bone was hard to work with because will was necessary to its use, and will itself was so variable, so bows made entirely of the stuff were impossibly inaccurate. The bows that did use it, like Winsen’s, used it as one compound of several, and used will only to make it easier to string the bow, not during drawing or firing. At the same time, using a crossbow from horseback was usually stupid because drawing the string required either a crank, or a lot of strength and a stirrup: a crank was slow, and bracing a stirrup against the ground to draw was incompatible with riding.
Ben-hadad had surmounted both difficulties by bringing them together. His will softened the sea demon bone bow while he drew the bolts back. For the next step, he’d designed a pressure gauge. Using his will, he tightened the bow until the gauges turned blue. With this, he could shoot ten to fifteen bolts in a mi
nute, and he thought he would get better with practice.
Winsen had scoffed at such speed, until Ben-hadad pointed the loaded crossbow at him. In a blink, Winsen nocked and drew an arrow, pointing it at Ben-hadad’s forehead.
One didn’t want to get in an insanity fight with Winsen.
But Ben-hadad merely stared at him, unblinking. The moment stretched.
Winsen’s arm started trembling from holding the incredible tension. Then his whole back and shoulders shook from the pressure of holding the arrow drawn. Winsen wasn’t tall, but his bow, of which he was a master, required incredible draw strength.
Then Winsen lowered the bow to let out the tension with a grunt. “Point made,” he said. “I suppose there are times a crossbow could be handy.” Then he grinned at Ben-hadad.
“You can call her Grace,” Ben-hadad said.
“Grace?” Kip had asked. “Why not the Mighty Thruster?”
“You all are never going to let that go, are you?” Ben-hadad said.
“Never,” they said in a chorus.
But this day, Ben-hadad offered Grace to the heroic Blood Robe surrounded by the dead and wounded and impossible odds—offered it by pointing it at his face and speaking first. “Put down the spear, and live a slave,” Ben-hadad said. “Or hold it and die. You have a count of five. Four. Three. Two.”
The man screamed and charged. “Light cannot be—”
Ben-hadad’s heavy bolt punched through his armor and he pitched facedown.
One of the Nightbringers behind him in the circle went white as a sheet and grabbed his groin.
Ben-hadad cursed. “You thought it would be a good idea to stand directly behind a man attacking me? Nine hells, man!”
But the man didn’t crumple as a wounded man would. Instead he pulled at his tunic and trousers, and found a hole. He let out a little uncertain laugh. “Shaved my balls!”
His friends laughed. Ben-hadad just shook his head. “Be happy I didn’t use the fire bolt.”
He left them to their japes. War is absurd. Those men had lost friends in the last five minutes, and yet had forgotten it for a moment: woodsmen and farm boys once again, joking now about whether their friend’s balls had dropped.