The Black Prism

CHAPTER 68





Gavin stopped drafting as the sun sank below the horizon. He could use the ambient reflected light if he wished, but he was already exhausted. He looked over the scrub brush plain to the south. Karris was out there, somewhere. In all likelihood, he would never see her again, never get the chance to tell her the truth. It saddened him more than he would have imagined possible.

He turned back and studied the day’s handiwork with disappointment. He’d hoped to erect half a league of wall today, at the least. Instead, he’d laid nothing more than foundation, albeit a full league of it. Surprisingly enough, it had been Aliviana Danavis who’d solved the hardest problem so far. Or maybe not surprisingly, given how smart her father was. Gavin had been walking along the trench the workers were digging, spraying yellow into it. Where there was existing wall, he’d let the yellow flow over it like water, sinking into every crack, reinforcing stone and mortar with magic. Where even the old wall’s foundation was gone, he drafted the yellow into solid luxin directly, giving the wall a foundation seven paces wide. Everywhere, he anchored the yellow to bedrock with a half-evaporated, tarry thick red luxin.

But not only was walking slow, but as soon as the luxin reached the level of the ground, Gavin had to throw it. Like every other color, yellow had mass. It weighed about as much as water, and with the amounts that Gavin was moving, he was getting crushed. His muscles would give out far before his drafting ability. Of course, it would only get worse as the wall got taller.

He’d begun using scaffolding, but within half an hour it was clear that that wouldn’t get the wall finished in a month, much less the five days he had.

That was when Liv had sketched out her idea, and like most great ideas, it seemed simple, obvious—after she said it.

Gavin laid two tracks on either side of the wall, and drafted arms to connect them. With the addition of wheels and a harness to hold him, he was able to hang suspended in the air over the wall. The wheels glided along the tracks, so instead of having to move a scaffolding every twenty paces, his scaffolding moved with him. Instead of throwing luxin, he could drop it. It took almost all the physical effort out of the project.

By the time he’d properly drafted the harness so that he wasn’t swinging crazily every time he threw more luxin, it was late afternoon. Gavin had rolled slowly along his tracks, sealing the yellow luxin at twenty-pace intervals and laying more yellow over the sealed points. With the amount of time left before sunset, he’d focused on the brute drafting, so rather than tackle the intellectual challenges of drafting the interior of the wall, he’d decided to draft as much foundation as he could.

He made huge progress, but it was still hard to say whether he was going to finish the whole project in time. If he finished an entire tall, impregnable wall by the time Rask Garadul’s army arrived, except for two hundred paces in the middle, the entire endeavor would be vanity.

Gavin lowered himself to the ground. He wobbled a little as he approached Corvan Danavis, who was holding their horses. Corvan looked concerned. “Just a long time off my feet,” Gavin said.

Corvan accepted that silently. A few blocks later as the sun was fading out of the sky, he said, “So… Karris was captured.”

“Mm-hm,” Gavin said, not making eye contact.

“So you’ve put all that behind you?”

Gavin said nothing.

“Good. I always thought she was the biggest threat to your plan. Enough reasons to hate both of you, and rash enough to tear it all down without thinking. So you’ll antagonize Rask and hope he kills her to show he’s serious?”

“Damn you,” Gavin said.

“Oh, not past it, then?” Corvan asked.

He wasn’t serious about getting Karris killed. Gavin knew that. Corvan might always understand the cutthroat thing to do, but that didn’t mean he always did it.

“So she still doesn’t know?”

“No. That’s why I broke our betrothal.”

“Because she was the mostly likely to see through you, or some other reason?” Corvan asked.

“We destroyed her. Dazen burned down her home and the war took the rest. I didn’t realize she had nothing—and I should have. By the time I offered to restore her family’s fortune, it seemed like an insult. She spat on me and disappeared for a year. When she came back, she was different.”

“I noticed. A Blackguard. An astounding achievement. But you didn’t answer my question.”

Though it was getting darker, the streets were comfortably warm, and if anything, the crowds were getting thicker, people lighting lamps outside their own homes or shops. Others were relaxing, drinking on the flat roofs of their houses. It was almost as if doom weren’t impending.

Gavin looked around and made sure his voice was low enough not to carry. “I’ve lied to everyone. I’ve lied so much sometimes I forget who I was. With everything my brother and I did to Karris… I couldn’t—well, shit, she’s seen us both naked, hasn’t she? If anyone would know, she would. It would be the quickest way to destroy everything.”

“True enough, but you were going to say something else,” Corvan said, looking down at his saddle, giving Gavin that shred of privacy.

“I thought about it, you know? How to marry her and still deceive her. Or, failing that, how to show her that she had no choice but to keep my secret. In the end, she was the one thing I wasn’t willing to defile. After I ran away, she fell in love with my brother. If she figured out the truth and decided to destroy me…” Gavin shrugged.

Now Corvan did look him in the eye. “I don’t know whether to admire you all the more, or to be horrified that you’d be so stupid.”

“I usually opt to admire me all the more,” Gavin said, grinning.

Corvan gave a grudging smile, but didn’t laugh.

They rode through the streets as quickly as they could without crushing anyone, and arrived at the Travertine Palace as darkness set in. Ironfist was standing at the gate. Uncharacteristically, he had a huge grin on his face.

“High Lord Prism,” he said. “Dinner awaits.”

Gavin scowled. If Ironfist was grinning, it meant something awkward, unpleasant, or vexing was coming. But he wasn’t going to ask. With that grin, Ironfist would just grin bigger and enjoy being mysterious. Fine. Gavin started walking toward the private dining hall.

“High Lord,” Ironfist interjected. “The great hall.”

It was only a few steps away. Gavin barely had time to think why they might possibly need the great hall for dinner before he was inside the antechamber to the great domed hall.

The great hall of the Travertine Palace, though perhaps only a third the size of the Chromeria’s great hall, was one of the wonders of the old world. The doorways were enormous bulbous horseshoe arches, striped green and white, speaking of the days when half of Tyrea had been a Parian province. Travertine and white marble alternated everywhere: in the chessboard pattern of the floor, in intricate geometric shapes on the walls, and in old Parian runes that decorated the bases of the eight great wooden pillars that supported the ceiling, their layout an eight-pointed star. Each pillar was a full five paces thick—atasifusta, the widest trees in the world—and none narrowed perceptibly before reaching the ceiling. The wood was said to have been the gift of an Atashian king, five hundred years before. Even then it had been precious. Now they were extinct, the last grove cut down during the Prisms’ War. Gavin had never found out who had done that. When he arrived in Ru, the grove was simply gone. His commanders—Dazen’s commanders—had sworn the last trees were standing when they left the city. Gavin’s commanders after the war had sworn the trees were gone when they arrived.

What made the atasifusta unique was that its sap had properties like concentrated red luxin. The trees took a hundred years to reach full size—these giants had been several hundreds of years old when they’d been cut. But after they reached maturity, holes could be drilled in the trunk, and if the tree was large enough, the sap would drain slowly enough to feed flames. These eight giants each bore a hundred twenty-seven holes, the number apparently significant once, but that significance lost. On first look, it appeared that the trees were aflame, but the flame was constant and never consumed the wood, which was ghostly ivory white aside from the blackened soot smudges above each flame hole. Gavin knew that the flames couldn’t be truly eternal, but after allegedly burning day and night for five hundred years, these atasifustas’ flames gave little indication of going out anytime soon. Perhaps the flames nearer the top were a little duller than those lower as the sap settled in the wood, but Gavin wouldn’t have bet on it.

When the wood wasn’t mature, it made incredible firewood. A bundle that a man could carry in his arms would warm a small hut all winter. No wonder it was extinct.

No torches were necessary in the great hall, of course, but outside the stained glass windows, each also a horseshoe arch, torches burned so that the colored glass would glow day or night, white or green or red.

Again, the colors, the shape itself, all were meaningful to the people who’d built this wonder, and Gavin had no idea what any of it meant. It gave him a sense of insignificance. He didn’t think anything he made would survive five hundred years after he was gone. Indeed, it was mostly luck that his brother Gavin hadn’t razed this very wonder when he’d destroyed this city.

As Gavin walked in, his eyes were pulled from the majesty of those atasifusta pillars to the men and women seated at the great table, every face turned toward him. He was distracted briefly as he stepped past twin shadows flanking the halls. His head snapped to the side, expecting an assassin. No, it was a Blackguard. One on either side of the doorway, and dozens more around the hall, all of them familiar to him. Blackguards? Here?

Oh, the ships of those to be Freed have come. Ironfist must have commanded all these Blackguards to come along.

His eyes returned to the table. There were at least two hundred drafters waiting for him. A small class, as the White had told him. What she hadn’t told him was who was in this class. Gavin knew all of them by face, and most of them by name. He recognized Izem Red and Izem Blue, Samila Sayeh, Maros Orlos, the discontiguous bichrome Usef Tep whom they called the Purple Bear, Deedee Falling Leaf, the Parian sisters Tala and Tayri, Javid Arash, Talon Gim, Eleleph Corzin, Bas the Simple, Dalos Temnos the Younger, Usem the Wild, Evi Grass, Flamehands, and Odess Carvingen. Everywhere he looked, heroes from the Prisms’ War, from both sides. These were some of the most talented drafters in the Seven Satrapies, and they represented every single one of the Seven Satrapies too, even the Ilytians were represented, albeit only by Flamehands, and Eleleph Corzin was Abornean.

Gavin stopped in his tracks, disbelieving. Every year, some drafters from the war were Freed, but Gavin hadn’t had this many of the greats since immediately after it, when so many had been pushed to the brink by the amount of power they’d handled in fighting.

These drafters had all been young during the war, and Gavin had known and dreaded that they’d start passing, but so many, all in one year?

“We had us a pact,” Usem the Wild said, answering Gavin’s obvious confusion. “Some of us who fought together. Said once the first of us had to go, we’d all go together. Wanted another year or two, myself, but better to go out on top, isn’t it?”

“Better to go out sane,” the Purple Bear growled.

“Better to go together,” Samila Sayeh said. “And stop making Deedee feel bad.”

Indeed, Deedee Falling Leaf did look worse than most of them. Her skin was tinged a permanent green, and the halo of her eyes was straining under the green that had overwhelmed her formerly blue irises. She smiled weakly. “Lord Prism, it’s an honor. I’ve been looking forward to this Freeing for a long time.” She curtsied, choosing to ignore, as most of the old warriors did, that she had been on the other side of the war than Gavin.

The rest of them followed her example, bowing or curtseying in the formal style of their homelands. Gavin bowed formally, meeting their eyes, careful that he too gave equal respect to drafters from each side.

Inside, as it always did, his heart broke. He wanted to tell those who’d fought beside him that it was him, that he wasn’t Gavin, that it had all been for the best. Instead, he sat with them, finding himself next to the irascible Usem the Wild as the slaves brought out steaming platters of food and cool flagons of citrus juices and wine.

“When I told some of the others”—Usem nodded grudgingly over at the Izems and Samila, who’d fought for Gavin—“they thought it would be a good year for them too.”

“We wished, Lord Prism, to perhaps help the Seven Satrapies put the… war behind us,” Samila Sayeh said, diplomatically stopping herself from calling it the False Prism’s War. “We’ve actually become good friends.”

“Personally,” Maros Orlos, the shortest Ruthgari Gavin had ever seen, said, “I’m glad to have a Freeing without all the trappings. The fireworks and speeches and posturing by satraps and satrapahs and upstart lordlings who won’t ever have to fulfill the Pact themselves. A Freeing’s holy. It ought to be between a man, the Prism, and Orholam. The rest is distractions.”

“Distractions? Like dinner with the Prism and your Freeing class?” Izem Red asked. He was Parian, lean as a whip and with a wit to match. He still wore his ghotra folded so it resembled a cobra’s hood, a style he’d picked up as a seventeen-year-old drafter, and endured incessant teasing for it. He’d been called a poser until the first battle when his lightning-like strikes, fireballs as fast as an arrow, and decimation of the enemy’s ranks had silenced all teasing once and for all.

Maros opened his mouth to protest, realized he was about to spar with Izem Red, and turned his attention back to his food.

Tala, an older Parian woman with short white hair and red halos compressing brown irises, said, “You know, High Lord Prism, Commander Ironfist told us you have a little project you’re working on. Something about that reminds me of that old poem about the Wanderer. How does it go, some work…?”

It was a famous poem; they all knew it. She didn’t even need to say the whole thing. She was offering their help on Gavin’s wall. “That would be wonderful—” Gavin began.

Bas the Simple, the odd Tyrean polychrome, interrupted, his head cocked to the side. “ ‘Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with gods.’ Gevison, The Wanderer’s Last Journey, lines sixty-three and sixty-four.” He looked up, saw everyone looking at him, and looked down shyly.

“That would be marvelous,” Gavin said. “I understand if anyone has objections and doesn’t wish to join me, but if you would like to… I’d really appreciate it.” It was a total gift, and one that wouldn’t cost most of them anything. Not all of these drafters were at the edge of death, most of them were ridiculously powerful, and many were wonderfully subtle in their chromaturgy. Their help would make all the difference.

Of course, these were also all the people who had known Gavin and Dazen best. If anyone were likely to discover that Gavin was a fraud, he or she was in this room. And with their Freeing looming, the discoverer would have little or nothing to lose in exposing him.

Gavin’s chest tightened and he smiled over his fear, as if he were smiling at how brilliant and strangely simple Bas was. Smiles returned to him from every side of the table. Some of those smiles, Gavin knew, must surely be serpents’ smiles, but he had no way of knowing which ones. Who would be more likely to destroy him? Those who thought he was the man who had been their friend and learned he had usurped Gavin’s place, or those who’d fought for him and had believed him dead and now learned that he’d betrayed them?

Bas the Simple was staring at Gavin, not smiling, his head cocked to the side, oddly perceptive eyes studying everything.