The Black Prism

CHAPTER 47





Seven years, seven great purposes, Gavin.

Gavin held his right hand out and counted up from his thumb, drafting each color in turn: thumb to pinky, to ring finger, to middle finger, to index finger, back to middle, to ring, to pinky. A seven count, each color in turn, from sub-red to superviolet, feeling the little thread of emotion from each.

For Orholam’s sake, I’m the Prism. I am the whole man. Master of all colors. In my prime. Stronger than any Prism in living memory. Maybe the strongest for hundreds of years. Most Prisms only lived seven years after their ascension. Only four had made it to twenty-one years. Always in multiples of seven—of course, they could be killed or die of natural causes too, but none burned out except on the multiple years. Gavin had made it to sixteen, so he had at least five years left. In fact, if any Prism could make it past twenty-one years, he would be the one to do it. He felt strong. He felt stronger and more in control of his colors than he had in his whole life.

Of course, it could all be an illusion. He’d been exceptional in other ways; perhaps he’d pitch over and die tomorrow.

He felt that familiar tightness in his chest again at the thought. He wasn’t afraid of death, but he was afraid of dying before he accomplished his purposes.

He stood outside his father’s apartments in the Prism’s Tower. His father’s slave—Gavin knew the man’s name was Grinwoody, though it was rude to use a slave’s name if they didn’t reveal it to you themselves—was waiting, holding the door open. It was a door into darkness of more than one kind. There was sharp pain in Gavin’s chest. It was hard to breathe.

Andross Guile didn’t know Gavin wasn’t Gavin. He didn’t know his elder son was rotting under the Chromeria. He thought Dazen was dead, and he’d never seemed concerned about it, much less sorry. Traitors were to be dismissed and never spoken of.

“Lord Prism?” the slave asked.

Gavin shook the last tendrils of luxin from his fingers, the waft of resinous smells a small comfort.

Andross Guile’s room was kept completely dark. Thick velvet drapes had been hung over the windows, then the whole wall hung with more of the same in layers. An entry chamber had been erected around the entrance so that light from the hallway wouldn’t come in with his few visitors. Gavin drew in superviolet light and then stepped into the entry.

Grinwoody pulled the door shut behind them. Gavin drew a little ball of superviolet into his hand, drafted imperfectly so it would be unstable. The instability caused it to slowly disintegrate back into light of its own spectrum. For a superviolet drafter, it was like carrying a torch whose light was invisible to everyone else. Neither Grinwoody nor Andross was a superviolet, so Gavin could have as much of the eerie violet light as he wanted.

As Gavin watched, Grinwoody pushed a heavy pillow in front of the slight crack at the bottom of the door behind them. The man paused, letting his eyes become used to the darkness. He wasn’t a drafter, so he couldn’t directly control his eyes. In darkness, it took a dull—a non-drafter—half an hour or more to reach full sensitivity to light. Most drafters naturally could do it in ten minutes, just from spending so much time attuned to light. A few could reach full light sensitivity in seconds. But Grinwoody wasn’t trying to see. He had obviously memorized the layout of the room years ago; he was simply making sure he wasn’t allowing any light into High Master Guile’s chamber. Finally, satisfied, he opened the door.

Gavin was glad to be holding superviolet. Like all drafters, he’d been taught not to rely on colors to change his moods. Like most, he failed often. It was a particular temptation for polychromes. There was a color for every feeling, or to counteract every feeling. Like right now. Using the superviolet spectrum was attended by a sense of remove or alienation or otherness. Sometimes it seemed ironic or cynical. Always it was like looking down at himself from above.

You’re the Prism, and you’re afraid of an old man.

In the superviolet light of his torch, Gavin saw his father sitting in a high-backed padded chair turned toward a covered, boarded-up window. Andross Guile had been a tall, powerfully built man. Now his weight had dropped from his broad shoulders to form a little ball in his paunch. He wasn’t corpulent; it was just that what weight he had was in his gut. His arms and legs had grown thin from years spent hardly moving from that chair, his skin loose and spotted already at sixty-five.

“Son, so good of you to come visit. An old man grows lonely.”

“I’m sorry, father. The White keeps me very busy.”

“You shouldn’t be so supine with that wheeled wench. You should arrange for the hag to join the Freeing this year.”

Gavin let that pass without comment. It was an old argument. The White said the same things about Andross, minus the derogation. Gavin sat beside his father and studied him in the eerie superviolet light of his torch.

Despite the absolute darkness of the room, Andross Guile wore blackened spectacles molded tight around his eye sockets. Gavin couldn’t imagine living in utter darkness. He hadn’t even done that to his brother. Andross Guile had been a yellow to sub-red polychrome. Like so many other drafters during the False Prism’s War, he’d pushed himself to his absolute limit. And beyond. He’d fought, of course, for his eldest son. Using too much magic, he’d finally destroyed his body’s defenses against it. But after the war, when so many drafters had taken the Freeing, Andross had instead withdrawn to these rooms. When Gavin had first come to visit Andross here, there had been blue filters set on the windows. With his own power at the opposite end of the spectrum, Andross had felt safe with blue light. Since then, the chirurgeons had told him he needed complete darkness if he was to keep fighting the colors. If he was taking such extreme precautions, he must be very close to the brink indeed.

“I hear you’re trying to start a war,” Andross said.

“I rarely try without succeeding, I’m afraid,” Gavin said. He didn’t bother marveling that his father already knew. Of course Andross Guile knew. The man owned the loyalty or the fear of half of the most powerful women and men in the tower.

“How?”

“I received a letter that I had a natural son in Tyrea. When I arrived, the town was burning. I stumbled across some Mirrormen about to murder a child and I stopped them.”

“Killed them.”

“Yes. The child turned out to be my natural son, and the men turned out to be Rask Garadul’s. He was making an example of the town for refusing to send levies. He claimed a special interest in the boy, but I’m not sure if that was just because he thought it would hurt me.”

“A special interest? I thought he was there to punish the village.”

“He said Kip had stolen something from him.”

“And had he?”

“The boy claimed his mother had given him a jewelry case just before dying from injuries she took during the attack. He didn’t steal it, though.”

“But you have the dagger? Is it the white luxin?”

A chill shot down Gavin’s spine. He’d thought the worst part of this interview would be his father picking through the details of affairs that Gavin hadn’t actually had and thus couldn’t remember. A white luxin dagger? White luxin wasn’t possible, and for Andross Guile to speak about it like this meant he thought that it was. Or knew that it was. That he’d seen such a thing, and that he thought Gavin should know what he was talking about.

His brother had mentioned a dagger too. Gavin’s chest tightened.

If he wasn’t very careful, he was going to ruin his disguise. This was why he avoided his father as much as possible. Andross Guile was one of the few people who would know exactly which memories Gavin would have and which Dazen would have. Others who knew had been alienated or killed during the war. The feeble excuse that the severity of the brothers’ fight to the death had made Gavin forget things would only go so far. Andross, in particular, might forgive him for misremembering things that happened in the run-up to the final battle, but surely Gavin would remember things that had happened years earlier, wouldn’t he?

“I didn’t see the dagger,” Gavin said. “It was in a box. It didn’t even occur to me it might be the white luxin.” White luxin was impossible. Gavin would know. He’d tried to make the mythic material himself—and as a Prism, he would be the one who was able to do it if it could be done at all.

“Idiot boy, I don’t know why I always favored you. Dazen was smarter by half, but I always took your side, didn’t I?”

Gavin looked at the ground and nodded. The first kind word he’d heard from his father about himself in years, and it was delivered as a rebuke.

“Are you nodding your head or shaking it? In case you’d forgotten, I’m blind,” Andross said bitterly. “Never mind. I understand your own secrecy in hunting the dagger—even my spies haven’t heard of you bumbling about, so bravo for that—but when you stumbled across a suspicious dagger that some halfpenny king wanted badly, that didn’t send shivers up the back of your neck?”

“I was surrounded by thirty hostile drafters, Mirrormen, and an extremely put-out king. I had plenty of shivers.”

Andross Guile waved his hand, like none of that was worth considering. “With no Blackguards guarding you, I suppose. Stubborn, fool boy. What was the box made of?”

“Rosewood, maybe?” Gavin said honestly.

“Rosewood.” Andross Guile sighed deeply. “Alone it proves nothing, of course. But it tells you what you have to do.”

“I was planning to rally the Seven Satrapies, speak to each directly, see if I could sway them,” Gavin said. “The Spectrum, of course, will do nothing.” He knew how this went. His father would announce what Gavin would do and run right over everything Gavin threw in his path. For Orholam’s sake, I’m the Prism.

“And by the time you’ve done that, King Garadul will have taken Garriston. You were right in everything you told the Spectrum, though you drew the wrong lesson and the wrong course of action. Which is why you have me. If you’d spoken with me as soon as you returned, I’d have told you this. By withdrawing unilaterally and giving a jewel into Tyrean hands—”

“Hardly a jewel, father—”

“You dare interrupt! Come here.”

Woodenly, Gavin sat across from his father. Andross Guile extended a hand and found Gavin’s face. He traced Gavin’s cheek almost gently. Then he drew his open hand back and cracked it across Gavin’s cheek.

“I am your father, and you will give me the respect you owe me, understood?”

Gavin trembled, swallowed, mastered himself. “Understood, father.”

Andross Guile’s chin lifted as if he was sifting Gavin’s tone for anything displeasing. Then, as if nothing had happened, he continued. “Garadul covets Garriston, so even if it’s a tower of feces built on a plain of ordure, giving it to him is weakness. The right course would be to raze the city, enslave the inhabitants, and sow the fields with salt—and leave before he arrived. But you’ve destroyed that option with your incompetence. And once King Garadul holds Garriston with twenty thousand men, you’ll find it a lot harder to take back than he’s going to find it to take when only a thousand are holding it.”

“The Ruthgari only have a thousand men holding Garriston?” Gavin asked. It was less than a skeleton crew. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry when he sculled through Garriston, he surely would have noticed.

“Troubles with the Aborneans hiking the tariff to travel through the Narrows again. The Ruthgari are making a statement with a show of force. They pulled the ships and most of the soldiers from Garriston.”

“That’s moronic. They have to know Garadul is massing troops.”

“I agree. I think the Ruthgari foreign minister has been suborned. She’s smart, she must know what she’s doing. Regardless, you must go to Garriston. Save the city, kill Rask Garadul, but even if you fail those, get that dagger. Everything rests on that.”

What “everything”? Here was the problem with pretending to know secrets you didn’t know. Secrets, especially big, dangerous secrets, tended to be referred to obliquely. Especially when the conspirators knew spies were frequently eavesdropping on them.

Maybe I should have taken my chances with claiming to have forgotten what the dagger was.

There had been a time when Dazen had known all of Gavin’s secrets, even those that were supposed to be just between Gavin and their father. Dazen and Gavin hadn’t just been brothers. They’d been best friends. Though Dazen was two years younger, Gavin treated him like an equal. Sevastian was younger; they made him stay home. Gavin and Dazen had the same friends. Together, they won and lost fistfights against the White Oak brothers. Gavin missed the simplicity of those fights. Two sides, lots of fists, and once one side started bleeding or crying, the fight was over.

But Gavin had changed on the day he turned thirteen. Dazen was not yet eleven at the time. Andross Guile had come in his dress robes, looming, impressive in red-gold brocade and red-gold chains around his neck. Even then, after having been a member of the Spectrum for a decade, Andross Guile had always been referred to as Andross Guile, never Andross Red. Everyone had always known which was the more important. Andross had taken Gavin away.

When Gavin came back the next morning, his eyes were swollen like he had been crying, though he angrily denied it when Dazen asked. Whatever had happened, Gavin was never the same. He was a man now, he told Dazen, and he refused to play with him. When the White Oak brothers tried to pick a fight, Gavin filled himself with such deep sub-red that the heat emanated from him in waves, and he quietly told the brothers that if they attacked him, the result would be on their own heads.

In that moment, Dazen knew Gavin really would have killed them, too.

From then on, Gavin had spoken to their father as a confidant. Dazen had been left to fall by the wayside. For a time, he’d played with Sevastian. Then Sevastian was taken too, and he’d been alone. Dazen had hoped when he turned thirteen he’d be welcomed back into their graces, but his father had barely acknowledged the date. When it came time for it to be divined whom Orholam had chosen to be his next Prism, all of Big Jasper and Little Jasper was a whirl of speculation, but Dazen knew his older brother was the one. How it happened didn’t matter. Andross had been grooming Gavin to be Prism for his whole life.

And I was groomed to be nothing. A castoff to marry Karris White Oak or some other girl to deflect some other father’s ambitions. Until Gavin tried to take even that from me.

The hardest part of maintaining his disguise was here—not in pretending to be Gavin, but in being reminded of all Gavin had had and that Dazen never would.

“So, go to Garriston, save it or burn it, kill Garadul, and get the dagger. Sounds simple enough.” If Gavin did things right, that would fulfill one of his purposes, and set the stage for another.

Andross said, “I’ll give you letters to the Ruthgari to make sure they’ll obey you.”

“You’re going to make me the governor of Garriston?” Every time Gavin forgot how powerful his father was—even from this little room—Andross did something to remind him.

“Not officially. If you fail it would besmirch our name. But I’m making sure that the governor does whatever you tell him.”

“But the Spectrum—”

“Can, on occasion, be ignored. It’s so not easy to depose a Prism, you know. When you return, we’ll talk about getting you married. It’s time you start making heirs. You showing up with a bastard presses the issue.”

“Father, I’m not—”

“If you crush one of the satraps, even a rebel one, you’re going to need to buy off one of the others. It’s time. You will obey me in this. We’ll talk about the bastard problem later.”