“Why not just tell me?” Gavin asked, though he should have known better.
“If I told you we absolutely needed you to craft an instrument which would allow you to be replaced, you would know that until you crafted it, you could do anything you pleased, anything at all, and we would not only not be able to oppose you, we would have to help and protect you. Even Orea agreed we had to keep that knowledge from you. And of course, this was all speculative anyway, contingent on us rediscovering white luxin—and you being able to draft it if we did. But even the hope of such a thing would have put tremendous power in your hands, if you’d known about it.”
It was like being punched in the stomach after already having had the wind knocked out of you. Gavin had been so consumed with keeping his own secrets that he had never pried into theirs. He hadn’t noticed that they’d also avoided talking about the Prism ceremony, because he’d been so terrified of their discovering his ignorance.
He’d been like a wayward youth, sneaking out late and getting drunk, thinking his parents must never know, thinking them fools who had never been young themselves, while they watched it all and hoped he grew up sooner rather than later.
But there was some puerile protest left in him. “If the knife was so important, why did you bring it to war against me? It makes no sense. Why would the High Luxiats allow you to endanger it like that?”
“Gavin was made promachos. They couldn’t refuse him.”
“You mean they couldn’t refuse you, armed with a promachos,” Gavin shot back.
Andross tipped his head and shrugged, acknowledging the compliment and the truth of it.
“That doesn’t answer why. Why would you take it out there? You were going to kill me with it?”
Andross Guile sighed. His piercing gaze rested heavy on Gavin. “We were going to try to save you.”
“Save me?”
“I was becoming an authority on black luxin. Your mother and I started secretly studying it as soon as Janus Borig told us that you would become a black drafter. Fascinating stuff, about which the world is clogged with superstition and misinformation. But this isn’t the time for a lecture.
“In sum, your mother and I hoped that if we stabbed you—of all people—if we stabbed a black drafter with the Blinder’s Knife, that you would survive it. Probably you would survive bereft of your powers, true, but if you can save a mad dog, you don’t mourn that you have to break its fangs to do so.”
Gavin felt sick. It was exactly what had happened when he’d been stabbed with the knife. It had taken his colors. It had also taken his color vision—Blinder’s Knife indeed. But it had left him alive. Somehow, the knife had separated his powers from his life. His parents’ hopes and their research had borne fruit—only too late for him, too late for them, and too late for the satrapies.
“The knife doesn’t take away the black, though,” the dead man said, breaking his silence. “Nothing can take away black luxin from you. The abyss lives in you.”
If Gavin believed his father, and his own will-cast reflections, his own past self and the evidence in front of his own eyes, he had been on the wrong side all along.
The Prisms’ War really had been the False Prism’s War.
It had been his fault, utterly. All of it. From the massacre of the White Oak family to the Battle of Blood Ridge to the burning of Garriston to the coming fall of the Seven Satrapies.
He hadn’t been caught up in his brother’s and father’s schemes to purge the Seven Satrapies of their enemies. He wasn’t the victim. He’d cast himself as the aggrieved party, but of what had he been the victim? Being a younger brother?
The real Gavin had been no saint, either, sure. In fact, maybe he’d been a villain, too. But he’d tried to save Dazen.
For all his flaws—and there had been many—his big brother had tried to save Dazen.
And in return, Dazen had killed him and broken the empire.
“You see what the old man’s doing,” the dead man said. “Don’t you? He’s steeling himself to kill you. Or at least to abandon you here and never come back until you die. He’s saying farewell.”
Andross said, “All this devastation, caused by one bitter librarian who seduced your brother in a vain attempt at revenge on me, and then stole the knife while he slept. That was why I wasn’t at Sundered Rock. I was going after her and the knife. I’d heard she had people in Blood Forest. Never guessed she’d double back to Tyrea. Smart, going back to the very center of the devastation. I never figured she’d be that canny, or that a woman with a treasure literally worth all the gold in the Seven Satrapies would keep it in a closet in a shack. Never figured you’d stab yourself with the knife and then jump in the sea, either.”
“Lot of inconvenient surprises for all of us in this,” Gavin said sarcastically.
Andross waved it away. He wasn’t interested in revisiting that. “Tell me, at Sundered Rock, if Gavin had held the Blinder’s Knife, would he have had a chance to use it on you?”
“Yes,” Gavin said.
“Don’t you see?” the dead man whispered. “He’s getting all his last questions answered. This is the end, Gavin.”
“That bitch.” Andross sighed. He was preparing to go.
“Damn you!” the dead man said. “Draft black! Kill him! Let your hatred make you strong for once!”
“Poison, I think,” Andross said. “Starvation is easier for me, but only in the short term. I should regret it later, I think, if I weren’t as humane as possible.”
“I don’t believe you,” Gavin said. “What about our game?”
Andross just shook his head.
“You don’t have any equals,” Gavin insisted. “You don’t have anyone to talk to. You’re not going to kill me. You’re too lonely.”
Andross said, “Goodbye, son.” He picked up his lantern.
“You cretin!” the dead man said. “You worm. You spineless ! Raka! We can get out!”
“Father, tell me you’ll come visit.” Gavin was barely hanging on. He couldn’t bear the darkness again.
Andross hesitated. “No, Dazen. It hurts too much. No games. The poison will be in your next meal. And in every meal until you eat and die.”
“Draft black! Kill him!” And suddenly, the dead man’s voice took on cavernous depths and thunderous tones that reverberated into realms beyond human ken. “I won’t be imprisoned forever!”
“I REFUSE! NON SERVIAM!” Gavin roared at the wall, and the darkness, but his shout was as much fear as it was defiance.
His father looked at him, shouting at a wall like a madman. There was a tremendous sadness and resignation on his face. He folded his arms. “You know… for a moment this conversation… It was almost enough to make me forget…”
No. Orholam, no.
Andross said, “There’s one last thing I wanted to tell you, though. Did you ever wonder why I picked your older brother to be the Prism and not you?”
Still recovering from his terror and confusion—had the dead man said he wouldn’t be imprisoned? as if they were separate?—Gavin said, “He was the eldest. You needed to make someone Prism immediately.”
“Triply wrong. First, I’m a younger brother myself; you think I care about primogeniture? Second, I had all the time I needed—and third, that isn’t why you believed I picked him, anyway, was it?”
Gavin swallowed, and said quietly, “Because he was your favorite. Because he was like you.”
“Half-wrong.”
The dead man whispered now, his voice low, gravelly, menacing, “Do you want to be in here with me forever? I won’t make it pleasant.”
“Which half?” Gavin asked. “No one is like you?” Arrogant old cancer. He was right about that, but that only made him worse.