“Uh-hmm.” Commander Ironfist’s face was as placid as a lake at dawn. He gave no indication of what he was thinking. She was afraid some monster might burst from placidity though, so she sped up.
“They bet I’d get into the Blackguard, and they knew that once I was free, they wouldn’t have any hold on me, so everything I’ve been stealing has been stuff that is recognizable. They’ve probably got it all stowed somewhere in a place that they can tie to me.”
“So that’s how you knew how to disguise yourself at Ruic Head,” Ironfist said. “How good are you?”
“At lifting things?” Teia asked. She hadn’t thought this would be his first question. “Better than I am at fighting.” Not that she liked the fact.
“What would you say if I told you I work for Aglaia Crassos, too?” he asked.
Her heart dropped. She looked at the door for an escape. The commander calmly stepped between her and it.
“No,” she whispered. Begged. “No, please.”
There was no way she could make it. No way she could fight off Commander Ironfist if he wanted to stop her anyway. It was madness to even think to oppose him.
But what was her other option? To just give up?
Her only hope was paryl, and even that was a thin hope. During the battle at Ruic Head, she’d done something with paryl that made everyone within sight think they were being burned to a crisp, but it had actually done nothing. If she could remember exactly how she’d done that, maybe it would be enough.
“Relax,” Ironfist said. “I don’t. I’m just surprised that it didn’t occur to you. Usually those being blackmailed become paranoid.”
A breath whooshed out of her. “Sir, I’m so deep in my own problems that I can’t even imagine how bad my life would be if she’d gotten to you.”
“Can you describe the items to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In writing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do so. I’ll take care of it. If.”
“Sir?”
“If this is all of it. You understand?”
All of it? Confessing to stealing trinkets was one thing, but what about Teia’s own brush with murder? Would they believe her? What was more plausible: that Teia had botched a theft and panicked and stabbed a man, or that she had crossed some cabal of invisible assassins?
Even if they believed her, somehow Master Sharp would find out. She would wake to find him in her room again. And he would know. The thought turned her knees to jelly.
“Is this all of it?” Commander Ironfist asked.
“Yes, sir,” Teia said.
“Then let’s go talk to the White.”
Talk to the White?! Oh, no. No no no. Even the best liars could have a bad day. Teia couldn’t afford for that to be today.
Chapter 22
Time was measured out with such perfect regularity that time lost meaning. Gavin’s every day had a similar rhythm. Pull. Twist. Push. Twist. Pull. Up, down, life circumscribed in ovals of work and rest and transition from one to the other. Scrape off the inefficient edges of every moment. Breathe in, breathe out, try to make the motion of the one to the other as painless as possible. Wake, sleep, and spend no time in between. Up before dawn, eating gruel, more gruel at lunch, sometimes with a slice of fruit to fend off scurvy, beans most nights, meat when they’d been particularly good. The ship stopped at a port only once a week, though they stopped at other times, too, for freshwater and for the sailors to have a chance to hunt. But most days were a blur, the round of pumping blood, or of the whip striking, falling, being raised, hesitating in the air for one instant, striking again.
Up before dawn, eating gruel. A chance at the waste bucket. Then rowing. Gruel, then a chance at the wash bucket.
The tempo ate leagues, a perfect balance between speed and exertion. If some emergency came upon them—or if they were to be an emergency that came upon someone else—the slaves needed to have the push to escape doom or to bring it. But that didn’t mean they rowed slowly, not with this crew, not with this captain, not with this accursed overseer Leonus.
It was measured, and it was the same when they hit bad weather, the light Angari ship bobbing like a cork on top of the waves, vomit and water washing past the slaves’ hardened feet. As the weather grew so bad that other ships stayed in port, wintering, they never slowed. These men had shot the Everdark Gates. A storm was a frivolity to them; they had only contempt for it.
Gavin could hear the drums in his sleep. His breath as he lay under his bench came in the same intervals it did when rowing. His hands healed, formed new calluses, ripped open, bled again, fresh agony every morning.
Leonus was a fool, but the slaves knew their business, and not even his mismanagement could impede them much.
Up before dawn, eating gruel, the other slaves rubbing liniment into aching knees and backs and hands, staving off the day when they were no more use on an oar. Leonus strangled one man whose oarmates finally called him out after a spat. He hadn’t been pulling his weight in weeks, maybe months. One word, and he was murdered in front of their eyes. A warning to the rest of them, Gavin supposed. Gavin gathered that the usual way was to whip the offender to make sure he wasn’t faking, and drop him off at the next stop, and sell him for a pittance to some other crew desperate enough to take on an old, broken slave. Other slaves became beggars, some few lucky ones taken in to the luxiats’ houses of mercy.
Gavin didn’t know how long it had been since he’d been taken. He didn’t know where they were. They’d seized five ships, and doubled back, hunting or letting Mongalt Shales catch up, any number of times. They could be off the coast of Paria or Ilyta or Atash for all Gavin knew. His beard had grown out. His hair, like all the other slaves’, had been shaved short with a razor so it wouldn’t catch on things. A pirate haircut was no thing of beauty, but these Angari were at least miraculously free of lice. Clean people. Considered themselves advanced.
One night, after a particularly good week when they’d seized two rich galleys, Gunner was rewarding the slaves. Double measures of strongwine and letting slaves come up on deck at night, albeit chained, and in small groups.
Gavin was chained to Orholam. They sat on deck, the strongwine keeping them warm. They had it so rarely that on an empty stomach, it had quite a kick.
Idly, Gavin stared at the stars, trying to figure where they were from the constellations. Off the Ruthgari coast, perhaps?
“Do you know why they call me Orholam?” the old man asked.
“Because you’re kind and kind of useless,” Gavin said, grinning.
But Orholam wasn’t grinning.
“Please, no blasphemy, young Guile. Not with me. Not tonight.” He paused. “I was a prophet of Elelyōn in a little village on the Parian coast between the Everdark Gates. We were isolated there, of course. No ships in or out, all our trade having to wend through the mountain passes, even our names for Orholam odd to other Parians’ ears.
“In my youth, my village was raided by an Angari ship that had somehow made it through the east Gate. The village was burned, my mother killed in front of my eyes, my father killed in disgrace that doesn’t bear repeating, my young brothers and sisters either taken for slaves or killed, I knew not which. I escaped. I lived through the winter night inside the corpse of one of our oxen they had slaughtered for fun. They didn’t even carry the meat back with them. Young men, laughing. I had been serving as a prophet under Demistocles. You’re not familiar? Then I will be brief. Orholam began to speak to me even as a child. Under Demistocles’s tutelage, I learned to discern when it was the Most High’s voice, and when it was my own desires. I grew arrogant. I called down miracles, and they happened. You think your chromaturgy is a wonder? It is mere science. Men moving bricks. But my power? Orholam’s power, unleashed from the heavens themselves? Like lightning compared to candle. But—and this I will grant you—the latitude you drafters are given is much wider. You do so much yourselves. But to us all, drafter and prophet al
ike, Orholam giveth and Orholam taketh away. We call him the Lord of Light, but we forget that he is lord.”
A sermon. From a man they called Orholam. Just what Gavin needed. At least it was different, and a good wine kick in the head can make even religion bearable.
“One day, a year to the day after I’d lost all those I loved, the Most High told me to heal an Angari widow. Leprous. In the hardness of my heart and the stiffness of my neck, I turned away instead.
“The next morning, Elelyōn told me to go prophesy to the Angari. I fled instead. Not because I was afraid I would die shooting the Everdark Gates, but because I knew I wouldn’t. I knew he is merciful. I was afraid that if I told them to repent, they would, and I wanted nothing of mercy for them. I wanted them to burn. Men, women, children, eunuchs and servants and slaves, foreigners visiting their shores, rabble and king, soldier and merchant. I wished fire for them all.” His aspect took on a fierceness Gavin had seen before, though not on this man’s kind face. It was a visage etched by the acid thirst for vengeance.
Then it was followed by sorrow deeper than words. “I wished the very name of the Angari to burn and be known no more. I ran as far as I could get the other way, and ended up seized by river pirates at the head of the Great River. I was sold and sold again until I was marched overland and eventually sold to the Angari. As if it could be anyone else. I have served for fifteen years, and for ten of it, I lived in hatred. I have been ever a slow learner, but Orholam is patient.
“Elelyōn hasn’t spoken to me in many years, but the day we fished you out of the waters, he did. And again last night telling me that now you are ready. Not to hear. Not yet. But to speak.”
“To speak?” Gavin asked. “What an odd prophet you are, to go around listening.” He looked at the canopy of stars overhead. Beauty in black and white.
They had to be somewhere outside Melos, if Gavin remembered the star charts correctly, and of course, he did. To remember was his curse.
“I have nothing to say.”
Very quietly, very gently, Orholam said, “He said you would speak blasphemy. That you would need to lance the boil, and let the poison seep out before all else.”
“If he already knows what I’m going to say, why don’t we just consider it said?” Gavin said. He thought to say it wryly, but it came out worse.
“It’s not that he needs to hear it. It’s that you need to say it.”
Gavin turned away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Liar.”
Gavin snarled, “How dare you? Don’t you know—”
Orholam looked at the sailors, who’d glanced over at Gavin’s raised voice, but the men looked in no mood to break off from their own conversations unless the pair got into an actual fight. He said, “Don’t I know who you are? Heh. You know, that was part of what I loved about being a prophet. A prophet is a slave of the Most High. A slave, but having such an exalted master gives us the authority to speak in one voice to satrap, soldier, servant, or slave. I thought that made me as important as a satrap. Really, it’s just that we are equally small before him, ants and flies arguing for precedence under the gaze of a giant.”
“Now that’s more the kind of talk I’d expect from a prophet.”
A wounded silence, but then Orholam said, “It is odd to me, o man in ruins, that you who have been the answer to so many prayers should have none of your own, not even now, trapped and awaiting death. I have had fifteen years to grow past my rage at being. You haven’t that luxury.”
“Rage at being? Folly. Folly as much as calling fifteen years as a slave a luxury. I was the Prism. How could a Prism, of all men, complain?”
“Better an honest ingrate than a liar who is still an ingrate, after all.”
“Call me a liar one more time, and you’ll be swallowing teeth.”
“Let me tell you something, o slave Prism. When Orholam asks your submission, you can submit now and find the way easy; or later, and find the way hard; or never, and find yourself crushed.”
“Because he is punitive and cruel.”
“Because he is King. And the longer you walk in the wrong direction, the farther you have to run to get back to where you should have been.”
“He is no king. He doesn’t exist. He’s a comforting tale, a candle held against the darkness of our fears. There is only nothingness. It is as little use to curse him as it is to pray to him. We are a man who, having tripped, blames the stone for grabbing his foot.”
“Why then the fear to talk to him again?”
“First you call me a liar, and now a coward?”
“You need more honest men in your life. Or better ears. Orholam knows that in spite of all the mirrors he gave you, you still couldn’t see yourself, so he took your sight. Perhaps it will sharpen your other senses?”
“Go to hell,” Gavin said. But a part of that breathless, chest-seizing fear rose up in him again. Exposure. How did the old man know he couldn’t see?
Oh, but of course. If Gavin could draft, he wouldn’t be here. That the man knew about Gavin’s loss of the colors, his blindness, was no supernatural insight, it was mere deduction.
Orholam laughed. “No, better than hell waits for me. For I have finally bowed the knee. These, our excellent hosts, have power over my body only. Freedom, for me, is only a matter of time. These shackles cannot hold me. I could ask Orholam to take them off, and they would drop from my wrists.”
“Prove it,” Gavin sneered.
A fleeting irritation passed over the prophet’s face. “It’s only fair, I suppose, that you should tempt me to do what got me here in the first place. No. I shall not abuse the power entrusted me. I’ve been put here for me, but I’ve also been put here for you, Prism.”
“Uh-huh,” Gavin said.
“Orholam doesn’t make mistakes, o man of guile. You became Prism by his will. That wasn’t an accident. There are things only you can do.”
“Not anymore,” Gavin said. A cloud on the horizon lit from within as lightning sparked in it.
Better that he hadn’t been born. Better that he hadn’t been born a Prism. If only he hadn’t started light splitting, if only he hadn’t been a full-spectrum polychrome, if only he hadn’t told Gavin about his polychromacy, hoping to mend the rift that seemed to have sprung from nowhere when Gavin had been taken away and named the Prism-elect, everything would be well. His older brother had taken Dazen’s gift as a betrayal, as Dazen taking away the one thing that made him special.
So the real Gavin had retaliated by betraying his younger brother’s elopement with Karris.
Sitting on the rocking deck of the galley, the false Gavin drained his strongwine to the lees. He hadn’t realized that until this moment. He’d thought for years that Karris had lost her nerve. He’d blamed her maid. He’d blamed his own poor planning, thinking he must have let something slip.
In truth, his older brother had found out, and in vengeance, had shared the secret. The White Oaks had then intimidated Karris’s maid into speaking. That explained the guilt on the woman’s face that night—it had been real guilt he’d seen there, but it wasn’t the guilt of betrayal; it was the guilt of being too weak to stand up to pressure. A pressure too great for anyone in her position to withstand.
That look, that partial, unjust guilt, had been why Dazen left her on the wrong side of a locked door to burn, to die, unknowingly condemning all the rest of them as well. A moment of guilt that wasn’t even hers had led to the deaths of all those people. It had been Dazen’s sin in falling in love with Karris, his petty betrayal: eloping with the woman his brother wanted but didn’t love. That had led to Gavin’s huge betrayal. Gavin’s sin, and Dazen’s wild vengefulness, the acid that had etched his soul. Each had visited vengeance upon the other in a circling spire until the satrapies burned.
“Your father chose Gavin to be Prism, but Orholam chose you. Does that tell you nothing?” Orholam asked.
For a moment, the use of the correct name took Gavin??
?s breath, then he remembered that in his shock at being captured, in a moment of blind foolishness, he’d told Gunner that he was Dazen. No prophecy. Orholam was the next rower on the bench. He’d simply overheard.
But if he had, who else had, too?
Gavin chuckled. Kind of low on the list of things I should be worrying about, isn’t it? Dammit. It took me fifteen years to get up the nerve to tell you who I am really am, Karris, and I told a ship full of pirates within minutes.
“My father chose him because he was older,” he said.
“Your father, the descendant of Iron Ataea Guile? Swayed by a tradition of primogeniture that your family has rarely observed? Your father, who was himself the younger brother?”
“He chose him because he saw will in him.”
“And clearly his second son didn’t have that,” Orholam mocked, but gently. “What your father saw in you was what made him reject you, and that very thing is why Orholam chose you.”
“And what thing is that?”
Orholam smiled. “You’ll figure it out, eventually.”
“You got some balls, you know that? You sit up here and drink with me, and you tell me what a terrible person I am, and then you insult my brother and my father, and you smile. You fuck.”
Orholam shrugged sadly. “This is why there are few prophets. We end up dead a lot. The truth is offensive to men who love darkness.” He looked at the sailors, still talking drunkenly and loudly on deck, some of them already passed out. “I think they’ve forgotten about us.” He extended a hand and took the tin cup from Gavin. He waited a moment, looking at the pirates, then nonchalantly got to his knees and reached deep into the barrel to draw forth additional measures of strongwine. He handed them to Gavin, and flopped back to sitting.
That was some recompense, at least. More wine. “Here’s to the profit in listening to a prophet,” Gavin said. He clinked cups with the madman and drank.