She didn’t get to be that girl. The candor and winsome integrity of a Commander Ironfist would never be hers. She could play at it, but it sat on the other side of a glass, the reflection of a girl she would never get to be.
Teia reported in to Anjali Gates, who gave her food and told her there was a bath waiting in her room. Teia pretended to be more tired than she was, and said she’d probably retire for the night unless Anjali needed her. The diplomat said she’d not go out to keep from antagonizing anyone—the party had already started, and the Nuqaba insisted everyone drink heavily at her parties. “I know you might be curious to go to the great hall, have some fun, drink too much, maybe kiss a boy, I understand. But anything you do may have repercussions beyond yourself. And after the White’s message, there will be those eager to pick a fight with you. Winning such fights would be as bad as losing them.”
“I understand,” Teia said.
Naturally, she headed out to the great hall immediately.
Chapter 57
There was nothing but time here. Time and the lure of insanity.
The dead man spoke to him whenever he opened his eyes, so he often sat in a torpor to gain a measure of peace. But when torpor yielded to sleep, there was a different kind of torture.
“Go on, sleep,” the dead man said. “I’ll be here when you wake.” And he laughed.
Gavin tore his heart open, and it tore him in turn. His fingers ripped on the thorns, bled. Blood flew in frantic gray splatters to fall to the luminous white marble of the tower’s roof. But he didn’t stop. Couldn’t.
The storm bore down upon him, thunder rolling within the gathering clouds, all streaming toward the judging hands of the colossus who stood over him, towering over the tower, examining him with the intensity of a man stooping over a tantruming child, and at the same time so vast that the whole earth was his footstool.
Gavin threw aside dark thorns and chunks of his own skin and flesh, heedless, but he wasn’t fast enough, couldn’t be fast enough.
The gathered clouds massed around the great figure’s fist, and rose, all together, rose, rose over his head, with a great sucking sound of all the winds twisting together. His fist rose in preparation to strike, to shatter, to smash, to judge, to obliterate the stain that was Gavin Guile.
His heart was full of murder, murder, murder. He broke the thorns off one by one. Wrath. Denial. Manipulation. Pride. And lies. Everywhere lies. Shame and bitterness and cowardice and lies. His oarmate-prophet Orholam had warned him to quit his lying. But he couldn’t quit his lying. His whole heart was dark with it.
Everywhere he tore off thick black veins, glimpsing febrile gray muscle palpitating beneath them—gray because it was starving, dying.
He was a liar, Gavin Guile. He was so inveterate a liar that he didn’t know his own face in the mirror anymore.
He was weeping, weeping from the pain, weeping from memories half-seen, fully shunned.
He saw his brother, standing over him on the egg-shaped hill—the Great Rock before it had become Sundered Rock—and his brother said, ‘Dazen, Dazen, Dazen. You could never beat me. Not in magic, not in muscle. Never. Not in cunning, not in counsel, not in stratagems or seductions. Not once in all our years. How did you think you would beat me now?’
The real Gavin had picked up a spear and limped toward where Dazen lay concussed, delirious, immobile.
‘Brother,’ the eldest said, his voice softening as he approached, steps slow, ‘did you think I would give up this life? Do you even know what I paid to be here?’
And the elder brother, even as he lofted that spear and prepared to kill him, wept. How had Dazen forgotten that? The real Gavin’s tears had fallen on barren, smoking ground.
Crying? Dazen had barely thought his big brother could.
But his tears didn’t stop him from advancing. He didn’t want to kill Dazen, but he was going to.
No, no, no.
It didn’t matter. He broke the heart into its last pieces. From a distance, it looked gray. It wasn’t gray. There were no shades of gray. Life was white and black streaked together so intimately that the two couldn’t be untangled. If he tore out what was corrupted, it tore out everything.
There was nothing wholly untouched, nothing pure, nothing innocent. His heart fell to pieces, putrescent, rotten stinking meat in his hands.
He rolled from his knees onto his back, limp. His arms stretched out as they had so long ago under the rising sun, and he stared at that crackling colossal fist of judgment as it came sweeping down. And he accepted it.
Chapter 58
“This is a terrible idea!” Former Satrapah Tilleli Azmith whispered. “The Chromeria’s messenger is in a room not fifty paces from here! If she steps outside her room at the wrong moment…”
Apparently Teia had come in at a good time.
She dodged another servant in full regalia and white gloves, carrying wine.
“They have no claim on him,” the Nuqaba said. “It doesn’t matter. And how dare you speak to me that way? You’re not even a satrapah anymore.”
She might have been teasing. Teia couldn’t see the Nuqaba’s facial expressions in the few brief upward glimpses she afforded herself.
Teia was, of course, invisible, but coming into the feast in the great hall had not been one of her better ideas. It was called a great hall, and indeed, it was huge, but it was also filled with nearly a thousand people. They weren’t quietly sitting at their tables and talking and eating, either. They were milling about, grabbing wine jugs and food from beleaguered kitchen slaves, gambling, singing along to musicians, grabbing the asses of the slave dancers, kissing, gambling, and Teia didn’t even know what else. A yellow show drafter appeared to have eaten a large quantity of hallucinogenic mushrooms and was sketching wonders in the air and blathering incoherently.
It was still a good five hours until midnight.
“This what happens when the first four courses consist of beer, wine, brandy, and arak,” a nobleman said to Teia. He started when he looked toward her and saw nothing. “Oh, Nwella, I thought you were standing right here,” he said to a woman a few paces away.
He must have sensed Teia’s presence. Her breathing? Had she made a sound? How could he have heard that in this cacophony?
She hadn’t come directly to the high table on purpose. Instead she’d been driven here as she’d dodged into what gaps she could see. She’d thought it would be safe to come in here, that anyone who ran into her would likely be drunk and not even notice it. Instead, because whenever she wanted to see she had to uncover her own eyes, it meant she was giving hundreds of people a chance to discover her, over and over again.
Satrapah Azmith looked baffled. “You’re not really considering…”
The Nuqaba picked up a narrow sausage and looked at her. She took a bite and chewed, apparently in no hurry to answer her.
“So tell me again why you think I shouldn’t unveil him here. Would it not be a demonstration of my power? To have plucked such a prize from the Chromeria itself?”
“Fuck that. I’m not even talking about that idiotic idea now,” Satrapah Azmith said. “Are you really considering letting them demote me?”
“Oh, I’m considering doing it even if we reject their proposal. You seem to be forgetting your place in our partnership.”
It hit the satrapah like a punch in the face. “Are you…” She looked as if she were struggling to contain herself, and failing. “Are you fucking insane?”
The Nuqaba sucked the juices off long, gold-lacquered fingernails. “Careful, old woman. Addressing me with such language flies perilously close to blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy? Who do you think…” But the satrapah regained control of herself, and stopped speaking, though she did set her cup down with a bang.