Chapter 67
Dazen Guile was trembling, shivering. His eyes were dry, scratchy from not blinking enough.
He was in a race against his own mortality and a timer with some uncertain amount of sand in it. He’d recovered from his fever, but was still deathly weakened from it. His body, struggling to heal itself from the fever and from the dozens of cuts he’d sustained in crawling through the hellstone tunnel, was desperate and weak. Gavin’s fool lackey kept dropping the blue bread down the tube. The more of it Dazen didn’t eat, the better his source of blue and the faster he could draft. But the more he starved himself, the weaker he became.
And the bread only lasted so long. Once a week—assuming, always assuming that Gavin had arranged for him to be fed once per day, rather than some odd fraction thereof—once a week, the cell was flooded with water.
At first, so many years ago, Dazen had thought this was a mercy. The water was soapy, warm. He could regain a modicum of cleanliness once a week. If he tried, he could comb the tangles out of his hair and beard. And then he’d tried saving his bread once—and saw the water bleached it, or stained it a dull gray. A blue-gray, it had been in the blue cell, of course, reflecting the blue light of the walls.
It had been a mercy. It had been Gavin’s way of keeping his brother from getting some disease that fed on the muck and filth his own body produced. It had also been Gavin’s way of making sure that whatever Dazen might have hidden away in a week, from his own body’s effluents or from his food, would be washed away, leached of power.
Dazen had needed to swim before he’d broken out of the blue cell, holding the oily cloth he’d woven from his own hair out of the water several times when the torrent had come, and now, in this cell, the bleaching water threatened again. He was too weak to do more than float and save perhaps one blue loaf, so every week he would starve himself for the first couple of days and start drafting again, and his drafting would speed up as the week progressed. Then he would devour all the stale bread his belly could hold before the flood came to wash all away again.
My will is indomitable. Unshakable. Titanic. I cannot be opposed. I cannot be stopped. I will win. There is only winning. And I will crush my brother. This is the fire, this is the fuel, this is the hope that sustains my broken body.
Blue was harder than green. Blue was all Dazen needed to break out of this level of hell.
In another hour, Dazen’s right arm was full. He scooted over to his seat against one wall. He nestled his back firmly against the green luxin and braced himself. For weeks now—months?—he had been shooting out blue projectiles at the highest speed his body could handle, and bracing himself against the wall kept him from being flung about and destroyed.
The green luxin wall opposite him was pitted and chipped to a depth of a hand. It had infuriated him at first. His brother had made the blue chamber thinner, and the blue drafter in Dazen had expected every chamber to have exactly the same dimensions. But his brother knew that green was weaker than blue, so of course he’d made the green walls thicker. It was logical. The blue in him had calmed.
He picked his targets with arithmetic precision to exploit the structural properties of green luxin. He didn’t know, of course, if he’d picked the correct wall. The ball shape of his chamber prohibited that. If his brother had irrationally made one wall thicker than the others, Dazen might simply get unlucky and pick the thickest wall.
That infuriated him. The uncertainty of it. The imprecision. It was wrong. He’d wasted at least a day in a weak stupor trying to figure out if there was some way to tell which wall was the right one. Hours wasted in calculation when action was required.
It was a warning sign of how deep the blue had sunk into him.
But he’d overcome that, as he’d overcome every struggle. As he would overcome even his brother.
He breathed deeply, ten breaths, gathering his will. Every projectile he fired hurt him, crushed his weakened body against the wall. But Dazen couldn’t yield, couldn’t shoot weakly. Shooting weakly meant that he’d wasted the days it took to draft the blue he needed. The wall could give anytime. It could give to this very shot.
Or, of course, it could take another twenty, and at any time, Gavin could come back and—
No! Don’t think it. Do this. Pain is nothing. Pain is an obstacle on the road to freedom. I cannot be stopped. I will not be stopped. I will have my vengeance and my freedom, and those who have done this will tremble.
He took the tenth breath, braced his right arm with his left, and gathered his power. Old scars ripped open on his palm as the blue luxin tore through his skin.
Dazen screamed rage and despair and hatred and pure, glorious will. A missile burst from him with incredible power.
During the False Prism’s War, he’d been hit in the chest with a war hammer once. It had cracked his shield and a rib. With his weakened body, this was worse. He passed out.
But when he opened his eyes, he saw his victory. The green luxin was broken. A few fibrous tendrils held on, but it was broken. He could see darkness beyond. His prison was broken.
With a calm willpower that would have stunned a younger version of himself, he drank some water, ate a little of the bread. Not so much that his long-empty stomach would revolt.
Then, only then, did he draft a tiny thread of green. It was light, it was life, it was power and connectedness and well-being and strength.
Only then did he allow himself a moment of triumph. He had done it. He had done it. He really was unstoppable. He was a god.
He stood, grinning, legs trembling, but strong enough to allow him to stand, and tottered over to the hole. He tore away the green luxin with his bare hands, opened the hole enough to peer through. To crawl through, once he gained a little more strength.
Poking his head through the hole, he drafted some green imperfectly into his hand, bathing the darkness in weak green light. The green egg in which he’d been imprisoned was, it appeared, contained within a greater chamber, only a little larger than the egg itself. It wouldn’t have mattered which wall Dazen broke through. All of them were equal.
For one stupid moment, he was furious at the time he’d wasted, wondering which side to attack. But then that passed. That day of vacillation was gone, it couldn’t be called back, and it was illogical to fret over it, to waste more of the present on the past. He pushed it away, and his smile came back.
To one side of the chamber, he saw a tunnel, floor glittering with sharp shards of hellstone.
Dazen laughed, low, quiet. It was a laugh at finally, finally being underestimated.
No, brother, that won’t work. Not this time.