The Black Prism

CHAPTER 94





Dazen was crawling through darkness. This was death, but life lay beyond, somewhere. The floor was sharp, cutting his hands and knees cruelly. He’d sucked up as much red luxin as he could before he’d left the blue cell, and if he hadn’t been fevered, he would have kept a flame alive, but his thoughts were still sluggish, stupid. All he could do was hold on to his anger, and the red had helped him do that at first.

I will have my vengeance, he thought, but it was passionless. There was only the pain in his hands and knees and the crawling. He refused to stop. This tunnel had curved and curved again, but it couldn’t go on forever. Soon, he would sleep, and either die or wake stronger. Strong enough to gather his strength and bring down Gavin. He laughed weakly and kept crawling.

Damn this sharp rock. What had his brother done? Carved his prison out of pure hellstone?

Son of a bitch, that was exactly what Gavin had done. Spent a fortune simply to cut Dazen up. The hateful bastard. But Dazen wasn’t so easy to stop. He kept crawling. Freedom would not be denied him so easily.

Still, obsidian was so rare that lining an entire tunnel with the stuff would have cost more than the Guile family made in a year. Why would Gavin have done such a thing? The magic properties of the stuff meant that with pure darkness and a direct connection—such as through blood or an open cut—it could drain the luxin out of a drafter. No wonder the red luxin wasn’t helping Dazen feel hatred anymore. It had all been drained away.

Something niggled at Dazen’s mind. The bends in the tunnel, maybe that was it. The tunnels had bent so that no blue light would spill from the blue cell into the tunnel. Thus the tunnel would be totally dark. So the obsidian would work.

Damn Gavin to the evernight. He’s not stopping me. I don’t care if I’m a bloody wreck. I’m getting out of here.

Part of Dazen was telling him to stop, to think. That blue, rational part of him. But he couldn’t stop. If he didn’t keep moving, he’d never get anywhere. He was so sick, so fevered that if he stopped he might never move again. Gavin wanted to paralyze him.

No. No no no. Dazen pushed on. The floor here felt different. Not obsidian. He’d gotten past it. He crawled farther. He could swear there was a glow ahead of him. Dear Orholam, there was—

The floor dropped out from under him, swinging open on hidden hinges. Dazen tumbled down, rolling over and over, unable to stop himself, down a chute that snapped shut behind him. He rolled over, bathed in green light.

Green?

An entire, round chamber, with green walls like trees. A hole up top for water and food and air, and a hole in the bottom for waste. Dazen looked desperately at his skin for the red luxin. It was gone. All gone, all sucked up by the obsidian tunnel.

Dazen started laughing stupidly, desperately, madly. A green prison, after the blue prison. He laughed until he was sobbing. There wasn’t one prison. There weren’t two. He knew it now. He had no doubt. There were seven prisons. One for every color, and in sixteen years, he had only escaped the first.

He laughed and sobbed. In one luminous green wall, the dead man laughed with him. At him.