“They said that I needed to kill drafters to refresh my powers.”
“That makes it sound like an evil power. It’s not evil. Black luxin itself isn’t evil… though I guess I, being will-cast into black luxin, probably would try to convince you of that. Hmm. Well, you needn’t believe me outright on matters pertaining to black luxin itself—I wouldn’t in your place, I suppose. Won’t in your place, whatever. Suffice it to say, I only killed those who attacked me first, or those who wished to suicide anyway.”
“The Freeing.”
“That’s right.”
“Is that what the Freeing was always about?” Gavin asked. “Giving provender to feed a black luxin drafter?”
“I don’t know,” the dead man said. “I think maybe it once was, but I don’t think that all the Prisms have been black drafters. Maybe only very few. The Spectrum was baffled when I made it past the first seven years. They expected me to die, or they thought I needed them. I feared that father figured it out then, but from how old you are, I’m going to guess he remained ignorant for longer than I imagined.”
Gavin said, “What happened at Sundered Rock?”
“I think you know by now,” the dead man said.
“Fragments only. I want to hear it all.”
Gavin could see no expression, of course, and eventually the dead man spoke: “Our plan worked, mostly. I—we—decided that some of the friends I’d made and allies I’d promised myself to were worse than who we were fighting. You remember this much, right?”
That was where the plan to replace the real Gavin had come in. Gavin said, “If I won, I wouldn’t really win. As it was, the war was traumatic, but brief. If I won as Dazen, I’d have gained the upper hand against the Chromeria, but I would still have had to subdue five of the Seven Satrapies. I might have beaten them eventually, but it was the wrong victory. My general Gad Delmarta had killed eighty thousand people in Garriston, and my army was full of Gad Delmartas. I remember what I planned with Corvan before the battle. What I don’t remember is what happened during and immediately after it.”
The dead man made a sound low in his throat. “Mmm. General Danavis managed to array the men I most wanted to die against the strongest parts of Gavin’s army. Unfortunately, it is remarkably hard to lose a battle in exactly the way you wish. A lot more people died in bringing me face-to-face with my brother than I’d intended, and then, of course, he kicked our ass.”
“How did he do it?”
“I don’t remember that, either. I remember thinking he’d cheated. But maybe there is no cheating, there’s only success and a thousand flavors of failure.”
“Thanks.” Old me is a dick. Guess that proves it is old me.
But the dead man went on. “At the end, rather than die, I drafted black—and wow, did I draft black. It struck like a thousand cannons. Afterward, over the years, I asked a score of different soldiers who’d been there what happened that day. None wanted to talk about it. When pressed, there was no stable, single story. I drafted so much black luxin that day that it obliterated other people’s memories as well as my own. And, like me, they filled in the details as well as they could without even knowing it. The mind abhors a void, so it fills it with avoidance and fantasies, and calls them truth.
“There was an explosion, they said. The gods walked the earth again, they said. No, the Guile brothers became gods and warred, they said. Magic had undone the world, they said. The brothers brought hell to earth, they said. Others insisted nothing happened. Just a huge battle like any huge battle, they said. Others said that was what split Sundered Rock, that the rock had another name before that they couldn’t remember now. Storm giants came to Sundered Rock, they said, and threw mountains and lightning at each other.
“Others, who were much farther away—outside the influence of the black, I believe—reported the explosion. Like the earth screamed. Like creation itself groaned. Like Hellmount blowing up in fire from the stories, a scholar said. They saw something on the horizon, an obsidian sunrise. Maybe it was ash, a scholar guessed, from a new volcano—but there was no ash found later.”
“Stop. Enough.” It was too painful to dwell on. The lies and their cost, the men and drafters dead, undeserving. All those closest to Gavin and Dazen, the guards rushing to preserve them… obliterated by the brothers’ hatred and power.
Now here he was, trapped in his own cell. The cell he had forgotten was the cell in which he would be forgotten.
It would take a miracle to save him. Something never seen.
Perhaps something… mythic?
“Tell me,” Gavin commanded the dead man. “So there’s black luxin. A legend come to life. Is there white, too?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t make sense. There must be a balance.”
“There is a balance. There is pure, white, full-spectrum light—which we split into all the colors of the rainbow, and which we draft in innumerable ways into matter—and there is darkness and black luxin. That is the balance: black against all the colors put together. As there is no forgiveness, only forgetting, white luxin’s a myth, a lie for the desperate and foolish. There is no hope for you, Guile. No escape. There is only the perfection of darkness. There is no white luxin.”
Chapter 62
Ironfist wore a peculiar white gem on his chest. Teia didn’t recognize the stone, which had always been tucked into his tunic, but she did recognize the leather thong from which it hung.
Apart from his size and musculature, it was the only thing about him she recognized. His bare limbs were manacled to the wall at his wrists and elbows, thighs and ankles. An iron strap held his waist flush against the wall. A helmet was bolted directly into the stone and encased his head completely, locking under the chin, the glass over his the eye slits so dark he could probably barely make out shapes as he twisted his head back and forth painfully.
Little wads of cloth had been stuffed into several of the manacles to cushion them. They were bloody. He’d lost weight, too.
How long had he been here?
Teia was so stunned that she almost didn’t move in time when the door opened behind her. The crying slave girl brought in a bucket of water and stood next to the tub awkwardly. Must have been new.
The Nuqaba touched the water. “You took so long it’s fine now. Begone, and see to it I’m not disturbed.”
The girl bobbed down to her knees and backed out to the door, then stopped. “Blessed? Would you like your bathers?”
“What part of ‘not disturbed’ was unclear? Out! Remind me tomorrow to have the captains put stripes on you.”
After the girl left, the Nuqaba rubbed her thigh in evident anguish. Teia saw what she guessed was a musket-ball scar, months old but still red and angry.
“I want you to know, I wasn’t always like this,” the Nuqaba said, though she didn’t look at Ironfist. “Your Prism friend shot me. I almost died. The musket ball is still in my leg, and the pain is… quite something.” She picked up a little cup of a brownish liquid that Teia assumed was tincture of poppy and drained it.
The Nuqaba gritted her teeth against the taste.
“I made it through four broken bones, a broken tooth, innumerable black eyes, and such humiliations as you would scarce believe at the hands of that husband you left me to, and I never once asked for poppy. But maybe I was scared that it would make me lose control, that I would tell him how I wanted to kill him, how I’d been planning it for years. How he reduced me to seducing his men because I knew I’d need help.”
She walked over to him and removed a pin at Ironfist’s throat.
“Turn your head away. I’m going to bathe.”