The Black Prism

CHAPTER 92





The prisoner was full in the fever’s grip. The gash he’d cut across his chest and the foul hair he’d packed into the cut had done their work. Death or freedom. It was time.

He tried to stand, but couldn’t. He was shaking too hard. Maybe he’d waited too long. He’d wanted—needed—to wait until the fever was at its hottest in order to have any chance at all. If he’d miscalculated, he would simply die, and end all of Dazen’s problems for him.

That would just be tragic.

He propped himself up, found his dirty little hair bowl close at hand, tried to inspect it for flaws for the thousandth time. He couldn’t tell. He felt like weeping, the fever throwing his very emotions into disarray.

“I’m sorry, Dazen. I failed you,” he said aloud. Meaningless words. From nowhere. The part of him that had marinated in blue for so many years found that curious. Not unexpected, but still strange. Why should he feel emotions simply because his blood was literally hotter than normal? Strange, but inconsequential.

He pulled the cut on his chest open, pulled out the chunky, dirty, blood-clotted wad of filth, and threw it aside. It didn’t all come out together. Some was stuck in the wound. With a grimy fingernail, he scratched out the remaining filth. It made him gag with pain.

Stupidity. He’d used his fingernail? When trying to clean a wound? He should have drafted tweezers. He wasn’t thinking straight. He blinked, his body tottering. No, there was no failure. Lesser men might fail. Not him. Not without trying his plan.

Gavin scooted over to the shallow bowl he’d scraped with his own hands over the course of sixteen years.

Well, some men might have nothing to show for sixteen years of labor.

He laughed aloud.

The dead man in the wall looked concerned. Keep it together, Dazen. Gavin. Whatever. Whoever you are, today you’re a prisoner, today you can be a free man. Or a dead man, which is a freedom of its own, isn’t it?

Dazen took his finely woven hair bowl and laid it inside the stone bowl he’d dug over the years. It fit perfectly, as well it might. He’d made it to fit, and checked it a thousand times as he crafted it. Sitting right in front of the bowl and its depression, Dazen untied his loincloth and shifted awkwardly until he could set it aside.

“If only Karris could see us now, huh?” the dead man said. “How could she choose him over this?”

Dazen barely glanced at the dead man, sitting in his shiny blue wall, mocking him, seated with legs spread grotesquely in front of a hair bowl and a shallow hole. “You can’t debase me,” Dazen told the dead man. “I do what I must. If that’s depravity, so be it.” He licked dry lips. He hadn’t been drinking water. He needed to be nearly dehydrated for this. His tongue felt thick.

The dead man said something in response, but Dazen ignored him. For a moment, he forgot what was next. He needed to make water. He wanted to lie down. Orholam, he was tired. If only he could rest, he’d have the strength…

Slapping! That was what was next. A little more pain, and then freedom, Dazen. A little more. You’re a Guile. You can’t be chained like this. You’re the Prism. You’ve been wronged. The world needs to know your vengeance.

Seated still—there was no reason to move from here, he wouldn’t be able to make it back if he moved—he studied every surface of his body that was visible.

Then he started slapping himself. Everywhere that he would be able to see. Hard.

“This strikes you as rational?” the dead man asked. “Maybe sixteen years in blue hasn’t been enough for you.”

Gavin—Dazen, damn it—ignored him. He slapped his forearms, his stomach, his chest everywhere except where the cut was—he didn’t want to pass out this close to victory—and his legs. Every surface of his body that he could see he slapped until it was insensitive, numb to the pain and, more important—red.

Gavin was only human. Though he was a superchromat, even he made tiny errors. That was Dazen’s bet. That was why Gavin hadn’t let anything with color down here. If he’d made the blue light perfectly, all in only one incredibly tight spectrum, there would have been only blue light to reflect from any item. Gavin wouldn’t have had to worry even if his prisoner had red or green or yellow spectacles. But the tiny flash of green Dazen saw every time he pissed into his bowl before it was leached of color told him that there was some spectrum bleed.

Now everything depended on how much and how fast he could draft.

Shivering, trembling hard from fever and from beating his skin nearly bloody, he pissed. Not straight into the depression. Not straight into the hair bowl. If he pissed too hard, he was worried he’d break right through the oil that he’d so painstakingly smeared around the inside of the hair bowl. So he pissed into his hand, and let the warm liquid flow gently into the hair bowl.

You’ve made me an animal, brother.

But if animal he was, Dazen was a fox. The dehydration had made his urine as shockingly yellow as his body could produce, and the woven, oiled hair bowl held. Dazen’s heart leapt—he wanted to weep—as he saw yellow for the first time in sixteen years. Yellow! There was spectrum bleed! By Orholam, it was beautiful.

He drafted off of it. Just a tiny amount, it was like trying to suck water through a bag, even as the bowl slowly drained. He drafted a yellow ball, not even as big as his thumb, into the palm of his left hand.

It immediately started shimmering into light—but yellow light. For the first time, Dazen saw his cell in something other than blue light. He saw his body in something other than blue light. And yellow, being in the middle of the spectrum rather than at the opposite end, made red a hell of a lot easier to see. And it had spectrum bleed both up and down.

And Dazen’s whole body was red from him slapping it.

Dazen drafted red hard, as hard as he could, even as the little yellow marble sputtered out and disappeared. It was enough. It had to be enough. The skin down to his right arm looked dull in the blue light that once again dominated the cell, but he knew it was red.

And now the whole reason he’d given himself a fever.

Dazen drafted heat from his own body. It was incredibly inefficient. It had never worked before. He was shaking, the fever was so bad he couldn’t think. Surely… surely…

He drew on his body’s heat, tried to imagine it rising in waves as from a desert. A tiny flame, a spark was all he needed. He had as much as he could get. Like an old man, Dazen propped himself up. Magic had weight, and with as much as he was planning to throw, he needed to not fall over as soon as he started. He got up to his knees and grinned at the dead man.

The dead man grinned back, like he’d been expecting this. Like he’d been waiting for it for years.

Dazen brought his hands together. He threw a tiny starter stream of red out of his right hand, directly at the dead man’s face. His left hand let all the heat he’d gathered go at once—

And made a tiny spark.

The spark caught. The red blazed, and suddenly the blue cell was flooded with red light and heat. Dazen drafted more and more and released it in a hammer blow, straight at the dead man, straight at the weak spot in the cell wall.

The concussion bowled him over despite his attempt to brace himself. He’d thrown his fireball with so much will there’d been no way he could take the force in his weakened body.

He didn’t think he lost consciousness, but when he opened his eyes, the world was still blue. Failure. Dear Orholam, no.

Dazen rolled over, expecting to see the dead man leering at him. But the dead man was gone. A hole stood in his place. Jagged, broken in the wall, the edges smoldering, glowing with sludgy low-burning red luxin. A hole, and a tunnel beyond.

He couldn’t stop himself. Dazen started weeping. Freedom. He couldn’t stand, he was too weak, but he knew he had to get out. He had to go as far as he could from here before Gavin discovered he was gone. So he started crawling.

As he crossed out of the blue luxin cell, he held his breath, sure there would be some trap, or some alarm. Nothing. He breathed deep, fresh, clean air filling his lungs with strength, and began crawling to freedom.