“I know. Yes, I am the product of this breeding myself. But now I am Prism, and what I do today isn’t for my family; it is for the Seven Satrapies. Today, your war is finished. Now I ask again, will any join me at the table of peace?” He swept his hand, as if in invitation toward them.
None did. Gavin, who moved the world on the fulcrum of his desires, Gavin, loser and leader, drafter deceiver, exile executioner, Gavin was being ignored.
He stared at the sun, as if praying. It was one of those white-hot days, the delta air was thicker than blood, the sounds of the city coming in even to the center of the hippodrome. He prayed, but he wasn’t praying. He was filling himself with power.
“So be it,” Gavin said. He swept his hand again, and this time, blue luxin spikes shot out along the superviolet guide-wires he’d place at the throats of each man and woman in the first rank of the circle. Through the center of each throat, and into the center of each spine.
The front person in each family’s column dropped dead.
It was so sudden, so stark and brutal and so quiet that no one said a word. Many didn’t even know why the people had fallen.
“War seems so random,” Gavin shouted. “Does it not? Who lives, who dies? It’s like a lottery. But in my lottery, only you who are responsible for this war will die. I think the common folk will prefer this greatly. Now! Who will join me at the table of peace?”
For a moment, shock prevailed as every family looked at their dead. In each case, “Orholam” had picked the most pugnacious, the bitterest, the most hateful or guiltiest person in the whole family to be first in line. Some families had to be happy to be rid of their most troublesome member, and far more so to see the worst of the other families die.
But these were families bred to war, in many cases literally so.
“Are you insane?!” a Willow asked.
“You killed my father!” a sixteen-year-old, fiery-haired Green Apple shouted. Damned Blood Foresters and their tempers. The young man pulled out his belt dagger, a wild look in his eyes.
“Your father was a fool, and you’ll be a dead fool if you attack me,” Gavin told him.
“Ahhh!” The young man charged the platform.
Some people simply don’t react well to surprise.
Gavin astounded everyone by turning his back. “There’s no need for anyone else to die,” he shouted. Behind his back, the rising young Blackguard Watch Captain Ironfist materialized from nowhere and cut the young man down before he reached Gavin.
It was so nonsensical that Gavin was swept into sudden fury. “Sit at the goddamn table, and no one else needs to die!” he roared.
Another pulse and another row of men and women died. He’d almost forgotten the sound of projectiles thunking into human flesh.
They broke and fled across the sands. He’d known they would. The damned cowards. Like he’d never set up an ambush in the course of the Prisms’ War. He still thought of it as the Prisms’ War as the losers did, though he didn’t think he’d failed once to call it the False Prism’s War when he spoke of it.
He was so furious he thought of waiting until they were in its teeth to trigger the trap. No. No. Enough killing. The point was to shock them into submission, not to turn the few survivors against him forever.
He reached into the superviolet he’d laid under the sand out in a great ring and pushed luxin into it, hard. A great spike-toothed ring of death leapt out of the sand in a fence around all the nobles. Green and blue and yellow luxin twined, shivered, begged the nobles to impale themselves on the barbs.
The nobles tripped over each other, literally falling and smashing into each other as they stopped.
Beyond the glowing wall of death, blocking each exit from the hippodrome, they saw stony-eyed Blackguards, weapons unsheathed, in the loose, easy posture of killers, luxin readied.
“No one else need die!” Gavin shouted. “Get back to your lines.”
His Blackguards and the drafters he’d brought echoed his command, circling outside the wall, bellowing at the people inside, “Back to your line. Now! Move!”
Others were gentler, but the result was the same. In minutes, the lines had reformed. Now, more quietly, Gavin said, “Would you rather die than have peace? No one else in your family or on your lands has to die.”
“If I take your offer,” one grandmother said, “I’ll be setting myself against all of them. How is my little family to stand against the might of the Willows on one side and the Malargoses on the other?”
“Whoever takes my peace gains my protection,” Gavin said. “Whoever breaks my peace gains swift and brutal death.” He swept a hand slowly across the columns, and this time set glowing yellow targets where the next missiles would fly. In the front of many of the columns were children, or favorite aunts, favorite sons. Orholam forgive the families if they were too stubborn even now. Orholam forgive him.
He held the tense silence until someone was about to speak, and then he swung a hand so fast at the table that the entire crowd flinched, thinking it another attack. He sent out waves of sub-red so that the air around him shimmered, a trick he’d honed in the war to make it look like he was radiating power, and roared, pointing at the table, “This is the end of your war. Who. Will. Sit?”
Over the bodies of the dead obstinate and the dead murderers and the dead proud, they made peace. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been quick. Not all justice could be done: how far back does one go with judgment, after what horror in the chain does one say, ‘All before this is forgiven’? But peace had been forged. Hostages were exchanged, and hostages were sent to the Chromeria where Gavin would have personal oversight of them. In the years that followed, a test of the Prism’s Peace had come, of course. It had come from a Guile cousin, Marcos-Sevastian Guile, who’d exacted vengeance for a wartime rape in like fashion, doubtless thinking his blood connection to Gavin gave him extra leeway. If he’d had a shred of the Guile intellect, he’d have known it meant exactly the opposite.
Marcos-Sevastian had been found mutilated in the town square, limbs piled neatly nearby, a sign propped under his bloody chin: “So too to all who break the Prism’s Peace.”
And later, Gavin had needed to send an emissary to a Ruthgari lord using his economic might to ruin one of his vassals who’d turned on him early that day.
That had required only a stern talk. Blood and words. Peace by sword and will.
Eirene Malargos had been the first of the heads of the most powerful families to sign.
Now Gavin said to her, “Do you think that lottery was random? Your uncle Perakles was a warrior coward. Happy to take insult, happy to send men to die, but would never dare the line himself. And his wife Thera? You think that vicious heifer had it in her to lead a great family to a picnic, much less to a peace? Think of those who died that day: they were—except that regrettable young Green Apple idiot with the knife—exactly the people who couldn’t countenance peace, or who had done such horrific things the other families couldn’t countenance peace while they lived. If that was Orholam’s hand, it was his hand working through me. And my mother. It was she who helped me sift the nobles and the conns and the banconns. Only she knew them all well enough to know. She selected you, Eirene. Do you remember the moment at the table, when they wanted you to be the hostage at the Chromeria, because Tisis was too young? My mother picked you to lead your family. Your lottery number was her choice. So you can decide if you owe me everything or nothing, but your life and your position, those you owe to my mother.”
Eirene’s eyes were damp, and Gavin didn’t know if she was thinking of those who’d died that day, or her father who’d died before, or all that she had lost in leading her family, or whether she was thinking about Felia Guile and the friendship of that great woman that she’d been deprived of. “Did she… did she speak of me? At the end?”
The most tempting lies are often best shunned. It proves your honesty. Gavin shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. Our time was… very limited. T
he Color Prince was almost literally at the door, and we had a city to defend. It was an abbreviated Freeing, at best.”
And he had her. By Orholam’s beard, he had her. He was going to claw his way up out of this cell, and out of this country, and he was going to climb the heavens. He would fell the sun. There was nothing Gavin Guile couldn’t do. He was not only his magic. He was a man unlike any other man who’d ever gone before. He was a man to rival Lucidonius himself. He was a god.
“Lady Malargos, set me free. I will win this war, and I will repay every debt you are owed, and I will make the Color Prince pay in blood.”
But then the door opened, and of all people, of all the real Gavin’s old friends and lovers and enemies and those who were all three in a singular body, the Nuqaba walked in. She was dressed in the casual style that a Parian lady would usually only wear in her own home, among her ladies and eunuchs, and that she was dressed so here told Gavin that she was an honored guest and a close friend of Eirene Malargos. She wore jeweled slippers, women’s loose mid-calf-length trousers secured with a multifolded brocade belt with long fringe, a light blouse open in the front, and a vest snug about the bust decorated with precious stones matching those on a number of necklaces and a loose scarf about her hair.
She wore the small tattoos of her position as Nuqaba, almost invisible against her rich black skin: one just below her lower lip, and one under each eye in decorative Old Parian script. Under the left eye, it read, “Cursed Accuser,” and under the right “Blessed Redeemer.”
“Greetings, Gavin,” the leader of Paria said, “do you know what this is?” She held up a metallic chain with a large jewel on it like living fire captured in amber. “This is the seed crystal of the orange bane. Among other things, it detects lies, and you, you glorious fuck, you are a liar.”
Chapter 57
“I’ve figured out something really exciting,” Quentin said. He was standing on the table in the restricted library. His hair was askew, and he had a few days’ growth of scrubby uneven beard. “Unfortunately, it’s trivial and not at all helpful!” He laughed, and it was the ragged sound of someone right on the edge.
Kip said, “Quentin, why are your teeth red? Tell me that isn’t blood.”
“Heh-heh-heh.” His voice pitched up crazily. “Nah, it’s not blood. Khat. You know khat? It’s a stimulant. Never used it until today—uh, three days ago. With kopi and khat and…” He looked down at several bowls below the table.
“Please tell me you haven’t been using the High Luxiats’ flower jars as chamber pots,” Kip said.
“Kip, under a thin veneer of excitement, I think I might be about to collapse.”
“That seems likely,” Kip said. “What did—did you drink the flowers’ water first?”
“I couldn’t drink it second. That would be gross. Plus, there wouldn’t be any room.”
Kip shook his head. He reached up and grabbed Quentin and put the young man down on the floor. He didn’t trust Quentin to jump down without hurting himself. The reedy scholar barely weighed more than Teia.
“Um, thanks?” Quentin said. “And please don’t touch me again. I don’t… I just don’t like being touched. Thanks.”
Kip shrugged. So Quentin was weird. Not any weirder than the rest of them. “So…?”
“The Black Cards and the Lightbringer are connected!”
“That is… exciting. I guess. How?”
“That we don’t know anything about either of them! Ha!”
Kip said, “Not so exciting.”
“I, I, I told you that I figured out the organization scheme, right?”
“That was like three weeks ago.”
“Right, right. I, I found all the references to the Lightbringer—I’ll show you those in, in, presently—and there was a problem with all of them—”
“Problem?” Kip interrupted. “What kind of problem?”
“One moment, one moment! So I had this thought and I went and I found all the books on the Black Cards. I couldn’t find them at first, but then I didn’t look for books on Black Cards—those have all been burned or stolen or what, what have you—so instead I looked for books about all the cards, but written before the Black Cards were declared black, that is, heretical, see?”
“Smart.” Kip wasn’t following, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“And I found the very same thing!”
“Same as what?” Kip asked.
“Same as the Lightbringer mentions!”
“But you didn’t tell—”
“Oh, right, right. Look.” Quentin pointed to a tiny book on the table.
The leaves were so old they were fragile and stained. “What is this?” Kip asked.
“It’s a luxiat’s prayer book. It was stitched into book form rather than a scroll so it could be thumbed through more easily, and fit in a pocket. They made them durable, and with plenty of empty pages at the back for the luxiat to record notes or prayers or dreams from Orholam or prophecies. This one belonged to Darjan himself.”
“The warrior-priest?”
“A leader of the aħdar qassis gwardjan. A green guardian priest.”
“The writing looks funny,” Kip said.
“The text? It looks funny to me, too. I don’t speak all these languages. I paired all the oldest books not in Parian or Old Parian with their translations. Sort of handy that the translations have been moved to this library, too.”
Kip hadn’t meant the text per se, though of course he couldn’t read it. He meant that there were blanks in the text. Spaces floated as if someone had written in invisible ink in them, but there were no words there. “What’s with the gaps?”
“Look at the translation book, right, right below it.”
The book of translation had gaps, too. They weren’t precisely aligned with gaps in the original, at least not by spacing. But Kip could guess that they must be aligned by meaning.
“It’s, it’s the same in all of these,” Quentin said. “Someone’s erased a lot.”
“Erased ink?”
“Or, or, or… or they wrote in some invisible ink. You’re the polychrome. You tell me.”
Kip shielded his eyes from the lantern and widened his pupils out to look in sub-red. Nothing. He soaked up some sub-red luxin from the lantern and brought it to his fingers—
“Kip, you’re forbidden to draft sub-red in a library!” Quentin said. “You can get expelled!” He obviously meant to whisper the last word, but he did it so loudly he might as well have been shouting.
But Kip was already done. There were no heat-reactive inks. He narrowed his gaze to superviolet—so often used for secret writing. Nothing there. He gently streamed superviolet luxin over the page, but nothing fluoresced. Then he donned each pair of colored spectacles in turn and gazed at the page. Nothing, nothing in any color.
But when he drew forth his superviolet spectacles, he found that one lens was broken.
“Oh, hells,” he said.
“Oh, Ben-hadad didn’t tell you about—Oops!” Quentin said.
“Tell me about what?”
“So! Nothing in any color?” Quentin asked.
“Tell me about what?”
“They all thought you were dead. He had some experiments he needed to do. Something happened. And then I think he’s been trying to find the right time to tell you. He, he feels terrible.”
“Then why are you telling me this?”
He looked nonplussed. “It slipped.”
“I didn’t mean why you, I meant why not him. Forget that. Show me this.”
“It’s all the same. I’ve copied them all out. In each book, in each translation, there are fragments only of Lightbringer prophecies. I thought at first they might have used bad ink. You can see that in some old manuscripts: ink that fades with age and gets illegible. But you wouldn’t have the translations with blanks in exactly the same places.”
“Why not? I mean, if the gap was already there when they wrote the translation, why wouldn’t the
y leave a gap, too?”
“Because I looked at the various times in which each of these translations were made, and there have been different copyists’ notations used to show that a text was illegible or absent. None wrote those notations in these gaps, and none of their methods involved leaving long blanks, it’s an inefficient use of the space on the pages, which are often expensive. So, so someone erased the relevant sections in the copies and the translations. We didn’t lose all of the Lightbringer prophecies in existence, of course. But in these books, we get only fragments. And not all the texts have translations, so some of these translations are my own.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kip said. “How did they erase ink?”
“With hide you can scrape it off. Often followed by putting down another layer of whitewashing solution. With papyrus, you—”
“But I don’t see any change between the scrolls where there’s writing and where there isn’t. It doesn’t look like it’s been treated.”
“The treatment may be so old that it’s impossible to tell the difference.”
“Meaning that the erasures happened a long time ago?”