The Black Prism

CHAPTER 72





As the sun dragged its feet toward the horizon, Gavin gave the signal, and the teamsters’ whips cracked. The draft horses surged forward. Their leads drew taut, and the ropes connected to the great yellow luxin supports strained for a moment. Then the supports fell, the great straining mass of the horses snatching them away from the dropping wall.

The final layer of yellow luxin hit the ground with a boom, shaking the earth. Gavin quickly moved to inspect that everything had gone according to plan.

“One league out!” Corvan called. He was standing on top of the wall, looking out toward King Garadul’s vast army.

“Shit!”

“Here, Lord Prism!” one of the engineers called.

Gavin hurried over. The last of many big problems he’d run into in crafting a wall almost entirely of yellow luxin was that all the luxin had to be sealed. The seal was always the weakest point. If you could melt through that one area—no mean feat, but still—the whole structure would unravel. That his wall was made in sections just meant that each section had multiple seals. If any section failed, it would be catastrophic—an entire section of wall, fifty paces across, would splash into liquid light in moments.

It was probably the reason no one before Gavin had been idiot enough to make an entire wall of yellow luxin.

The solution had been simplicity itself: two layers of luxin, each protecting the other, the seals to the inside. That part was common enough among drafters, but the seal was always the last thing you touched. So you couldn’t really tuck it inside, not on something as big as a wall. You could protect one seal by covering it with more luxin and sealing that, but one seal would always be external. Most drafters would have covered the seal and covered that seal and covered that one and left it at that.

It wasn’t good enough for Gavin. He’d built the entire second layer of the wall up on supports. Then he’d built each side, sealing them on the inside. When the draft horses pulled out the supports and the second layer of wall fell into place, it left a structure where the seals—for the first time that Gavin had ever heard of—were truly protected, not just by yellow luxin, but by the vast weight of the wall itself. And as each section locked to the next, it became more and more difficult for anyone to ever lift the wall to access the seals.

Gavin was building something monumental, something pure, and it felt great. This edifice would stand long after he was dead. There weren’t many men who could claim the same. The locals were already calling it Brightwater Wall.

Hurrying over to the engineer who’d called out, Gavin found that one of the supports hadn’t been pulled all the way free. The wall had dropped on it, pounding the two-pace-wide support almost halfway into the earth, and keeping the wall from fitting the next section perfectly.

“Three minutes until our artillery will be in place!” Corvan called down.

Sonuvabitch! Gavin dropped on his knees next to the broad yellow support and brushed dirt away hurriedly. The support, unlike the wall sections, was sealed right at the surface for just this eventuality. Right… there! Gavin sent some sub-red into the seal and the entire support dissolved, the yellow luxin abruptly liquid. The wall settled with a deep rumble.

Gavin had made the tolerances too tight. He should have made those joints able to hook together even if they weren’t so well aligned. The tight joints gave the wall more strength and would keep soldiers inside dry even during rainstorms, but still.

Taking his attention off the wall for the first time in hours—it felt like days, though it was only early evening—he looked to the people assembled, looking for who he needed.

There were thousands assembled. Most of the people of Garriston wanted to see the wall being built. Vendors had set up their wagons and stalls. Minstrels wandered through, playing and prodding people for coins. Soldiers kept avenues clear and began ferrying gear and powder and ropes and shot for cannons and firewood for furnaces and additional armor and arrows and muskets. Others operated the cranes as soon as the second layer settled in place. Drafters were pouring through the inside of the wall, sealing any cracks, looking for flaws that they could fix, or larger ones that needed Gavin’s hand. The Blackguards—nearly a hundred of them—also stood nearby.

They’d told everyone to leave already, but they didn’t have the men to spare to enforce the order. The people were too curious; they knew they’d never see anything like this again in their lives. Gavin couldn’t worry about them right now. He was already feeling the tightness of impossibility squeezing his chest.

“Captain!” Gavin called. “You’ve seen the process. Get the teamsters moving as fast as they can. We’ve got sixteen more sections. Send half the teams all the way to the east side, and have half work from here out. Take six drafters. You four, you, and you. You’ve seen what I’ve done. Go do it.

“General Danavis, talk to me!” Gavin shouted. Less than a league now. It should be enough.

Gavin moved to the inside of the great arch that would hold the gate. There were open holes, tubes running down the great curving length of the wall. Gavin filled himself with light and blasted green luxin down each tube. It would give the wall some flex, but also strength to recoil from any battering ram blow. He sealed each green luxin tube at the end.

“Lord Prism,” Corvan called, holding a fresh-drafted telescope up to one eye. “It looks like they have teams pushing their artillery out in front of the army. They know we don’t have the skirmishers to go out and smash them. Damn spies! I can’t see the culverins, but we know they have half a dozen. If they fire from greatest random—” He paused, doing mental calculations. Greatest random was literally the greatest distance gunners could reach, but at almost two thousand paces for the biggest culverins, there was no such thing as aiming. “They could begin their bombardment anytime now if their crews are practiced. Within minutes, even if they’re not.”

It wasn’t the culverins Gavin was worried about. Because of the trajectory of those big guns, their shots would hit the front of the wall. Brightwater Wall could take as many direct hits as they wanted to give it. They would have to come substantially closer for the higher-trajectory howitzers and closer still for the mortars that would absolutely wreak havoc on the stubborn crowds behind the wall. Garriston’s cannons would have to knock out those guns before they could be placed, bagged, and loaded.

“Damn it, find someone who’s not doing something more important and get these damn people back,” Gavin ordered. “This isn’t a Sun Day outing! Shells are going to be landing where they sit in ten minutes!” Gavin turned back to General Danavis. “Start firing as soon as you can. Buy me time, General!”

Gavin felt more than heard the next section of wall fall into place. People were rushing everywhere, but he pushed it out of his mind and confronted the new biggest problem of all, now that the wall was actually taking shape.

He hadn’t built the gate.

He ran over to one of the cranes hoisting supplies to the top of the wall. It was already lifting off the ground as he approached, rising fast. Gavin jumped, throwing out two hooks of blue and green luxin, snagging the sides of the load. He rose fast and pulled himself up. He jumped off as soon as the load settled on top of the wall, startling the soldiers operating the crane. They froze.

“To work!” he roared. They jumped, and then jumped to it.

Gavin ran across the top of the wall, dodging men to get back to the arch above the gap where he needed to draft the gate.

Tremblefist was barking orders, sending up a small number of Blackguards to stand with Gavin—as if they could do anything to protect him from incoming shells—but not so many that they would get in the way of the defenders trying to set up the wall for any of a hundred tasks. The rest of the Blackguards took up positions in front of the empty gate.

As in all battles, there was simply too much to see, too much happening all at the same time to put everything together. Gavin looked toward the sun, poised above the horizon.

Two hours. All I need is two hours. Protecting these people is one great purpose I have that you must approve of. So if you’re up there, would you please get off your holy ass and help me?

General Danavis had been organizing, training, promoting, firing, and training Garriston’s defenders for the past week. Twenty hours a day, sometimes twenty-two. It was inhuman, and yet it wasn’t enough. Gavin was accustomed to the discipline and ease of working with veterans. By the end of the Prisms’ War, his men had worked together fluidly. Stocking this wall with supplies would have taken his veterans literally one-third of the time it was taking these men. His veteran cannoneers would already be sighted in, with distances marked off. These men barely knew each other, much less trusted each other. It made everything painfully slow, and Gavin was slow to adjust to how slow they were.

We’re doomed.

But then he drafted a quick platform to walk out on in front of the open arch—necessary to gather some of his open threads of luxin—and he caught his first sight of the wall as his enemies would see it.

That damned boy artist had made his masterpiece.

Gavin had been the one who filled the forms, but he’d always been hovering above them, and while he was getting the sections to fit together he’d always been on the other side of the wall. Now he saw the whole.

The entire wall—the entire great curving league of it—glowed the color of the sun when it first shows its face. That glow came from the liquid yellow—a hair’s breadth from being perfect, hard yellow—that floated behind the first layer of perfect yellow. The liquid yellow would mend any damage that did scar the outer wall. But then, within that thin layer, Gavin saw that his old drafters, doubtless under the direction of Aheyyad, had added their own touches. As an enemy approached, he would see that the entire wall was swarming with loathsome things. Spiders the size of a man’s head appeared to be crawling across the wall, stopping, little jaws clacking. Small dragons appeared to swoop and spin. Disapproving faces swirled up out of the gloom. A woman ran from some many-fanged thing and was torn to pieces and devoured alive, her face painted with despair. A man who appeared to be walking along the base of the wall was seized by hands that swirled out of the mist and yanked him in. Beautiful women turned into monsters with forked tongues and huge claws. Blood seeped and pooled on the ground. And those were just the things Gavin could see in a cursory glance. It was as if the drafters had gotten together and taken every nightmare any of them had ever had and put it into the wall. They were illusions, all of them mere images within the wall, but an enemy wouldn’t know that at first, and even if they did know it, it was scary as the evernight itself. Better, it would certainly distract enemy archers and musketeers from making accurate shots at the murder holes hidden by those images.

And that was just the wide blank sections of the wall. At every corbel, the scowling, forbidding figure of a Prism looked down on the attackers. As Gavin looked, he saw that every Prism for the past four hundred years had been crafted into the wall, with Lucidonius at the right hand of the figure who dominated all and Gavin himself at the left hand. Above them, over the huge gate gap, loomed the scowling figure of Orholam himself, radiant and furious, his planted arms making the arches of the gate. Anyone attacking this gate would be attacking Orholam himself, and all his Prisms. A brilliant little trick to make the attackers feel uneasy. Each figure, including Orholam, had cunningly hidden machicolations to drop stones or fire or magic on attackers.

Gavin bit off another curse. He’d paused for a good five seconds, admiring his own damned wall. He didn’t have time.

For a moment, he thought of simply closing the gate gap, just making pure wall. But at this point, that wouldn’t be any faster. The forms were already shaped to make a gate. All he had to do was fill them and tie them—just on one side, the cleverness he’d use for the rest of the wall would have to wait. Tomorrow, if they lived that long.

Gavin gathered the spools of superviolet that connected the whole superstructure of the wall and began pouring in yellow luxin.

Orholam, he was exhausted. He’d been drafting to his absolute limit every day for the last five days, and all through this day in particular since the first rays of dawn. If he’d been a normal drafter, he’d have gone mad long ago. Even most Prisms would have killed themselves with the amount of drafting Gavin had done. The others knew it too. If anything, Gavin had gotten more powerful since the war, and far more efficient. He’d seen women like Tala—whom he’d never seen impressed by anything in her life—shoot glances his way during unguarded moments like he was downright frightening. But there was only so much even he could draft.

Nonetheless, he poured perfect yellow luxin into the forms. The real Gavin couldn’t have done this: he wasn’t a superchromat, he couldn’t draft a perfect yellow. But Gavin couldn’t go halfway. There was no “good enough” with yellow luxin; if it weren’t drafted perfectly, it would dissolve. Simple as that.

Something rocked the wall, and Gavin almost fell from his perch. Someone steadied him, and he saw that Tremblefist was standing beside him, holding him up. A moment later, he heard the delayed rumble of distant artillery.

“I’ve got you,” Tremblefist said. He wasn’t quite as big as his older brother, but he too had worked with Gavin a long time. He must have seen the glazed, stupefied look in Gavin’s eyes, because he said, “Our own cannons will start in a moment. Don’t be… distracted.” Don’t be alarmed, he meant. Don’t be frightened. Don’t botch the gate and get us all killed.

More of King Garadul’s artillery began landing in the field, most of it far short of Brightwater Wall. The sound of the enemy culverins became a thunderstorm in the distance. Gavin gathered his will and kept drafting. He didn’t realize that he was weaving on his feet until he felt Tremblefist’s big hands close on his shoulders. Several other Blackguards pressed close.

“Raise the cowl!” General Danavis yelled.

As yellow luxin splashed from Gavin’s hands into the forms below him, he felt the wall shudder as each section of the cowl swung into place on counterweights. The cowl was his architect’s invention. Basically, it was a removable roof for use during artillery bombardment. There were plenty of times when an open roof was preferable—to gather rainwater, when it was unbearably hot, or when men had to carry great loads or carts had to pass down the length of the wall. But during a bombardment, it would shield defenders from howitzers and mortar fire. The wall’s own artillery was left free to fire on the same basic defensive design as an arrow slit—easy to fire out at a wide angle, but requiring a direct hit from the other side to put it out of commission.

“What the hell is that?” Tremblefist breathed. Gavin wouldn’t have even heard him except that the man was basically holding him up. And Tremblefist didn’t talk to himself much.

Gavin looked up, giving himself a small break, and looked over the plain.

The army was rumbling ever closer, catching up with their culverins. In front of them were teams setting up the howitzers—the defenders still hadn’t fired a single shot, a fact that had General Danavis screaming at the nearest crews.

But that wasn’t what had Tremblefist cursing. In front of the main army, drawing even with the advance cannon emplacements, were more than a hundred men and women, some riding, and some simply running. All were dressed in brightly colored clothing. Gavin could tell that by the way the greens moved, sprinting with huge bouncing, league-devouring strides that they weren’t just drafters. They were color wights, and they were headed straight for the gate.

They would be at the wall within four minutes at the most.

Four minutes. Gavin looked at his half-formed gate. If he didn’t worry about hinges, if he just sealed the damn thing to the wall itself, it was possible. Maybe. He looked up at the sun, gathering power. It was less than an hour until sunset. The festivities for Sun Day’s Eve would start as soon as the last ray of sun disappeared from the horizon. Whether the attackers were heretics or pagans or faithful, they wouldn’t fight during Sun Day. Sun Day was holy even to the gods Lucidonius had driven out.

If they could hold off the attackers for that one hour, they had a chance. And Sun Day would give them the time they needed to reinforce the gates and get supplies and guns in place.

One day. One hour. Four minutes that would determine the course of this war. It came down to this. Gavin was not going to quit. He had four minutes left in him.

The culverins on the wall finally answered those out in the field, but the shots were wild, not even close to the field artillery emplacements or the charging color wights. And more of King Garadul’s shots were hitting the wall itself, each rebounding off the yellow luxin with a crunch and a whine and a splay of yellow light as the wall absorbed the blow and healed itself.

The forms Gavin was filling with luxin were three-quarters full, washing him in the invigorating scents so close to mint and eucalyptus, but he was tiring anyway. He looked out to the color wights. Not even two minutes left.

Orholam, I’m trying to do something good here. Great purpose, Orholam. Selfless and all that. You want people to be selfless, right?

Tremblefist handed Gavin off and was shouting orders down to the Blackguards on the ground. General Danavis was ordering troops to the gate and to form in ranks behind the wall. The crowd was beginning to scatter. Everyone was shouting, but Gavin couldn’t even make out the words anymore.

Flashes of magic bloomed in front of him. The color wights had spotted him. They were throwing missiles and fire and everything they could think of, but his Blackguards were deflecting it all.

Gavin kept drafting. The color wights were only two hundred paces out now, running at a full sprint. He had only seconds left. A cannon roared to Gavin’s right and tore through a dozen of the color wights, shredding them. But the color wights behind them leapt through the blood and smoke and flying limbs, faces snarling, inhuman, glowing.

Drafting the last of the yellow luxin to fill the last form, Gavin pulled the threads together in his hand. He was going to make it! He was sealing the luxin when a cannonball smashed into the forms. All the force of the impossibly lucky shot went straight into Gavin’s hands. It was like holding a rope and having someone drop an anvil tied to the other side.

The luxin was yanked out of Gavin’s hands instantaneously. Gate and cannonball slammed into the ground beneath the arch, the cannonball blasting through Blackguards and a dozen still-gawking civilians behind them. The gate—abruptly unheld, unsealed yellow luxin—hissed and seethed into light before Gavin could stop it.

In two seconds, the gate flashboiled into nothingness and disappeared—and so did Garriston’s hope.