But it didn’t matter. Gavin was committed.
The cell filled the entire space Gavin had carved out of the Chromeria’s rocky heart here. He had burnt through lux torch after lux torch for the light necessary. Here there was only a small area to stand in, and then a single tunnel so low it was necessary to crawl through. A fortune’s worth of hellstone was mortared into the floor and the walls.
His father, of course, had simply been able to take the vertical shaft down to the blue cell. Unfortunately, the cell itself lifted into a new place, and the only way to trigger the controls to lift it was from above. There was no way for Gavin to reach the ceiling of his blue cell—much less break through it—to try to escape that way.
He had to go through his own tunnels and cells.
It seemed Andross hadn’t altered the tunnel from Gavin’s original design. It curved one way into darkness, and then would swoop back so that no blue light could leak through. If Gavin could still draft, the hellstone would have been a huge problem: it would drain any blue luxin from him before he got to the next cell.
A moot point now, but the razor-sharp hellstone would still shred skin and bone if he fell against it.
But he remembered the path: crawl like a bear here on hands and feet, rest a knee here, hand there, crawl again over to here. A singular way that had to be recalled from memory once he made it past the first bend and he was fully in darkness. He rested on a knee after the second bend and reached up. It took him several minutes to find the depression overhead, and there, recessed, was another piece of hellstone, loose in its mortar’s grip. Gavin pulled it free and tucked it in his mouth. It was no larger than a dogtooth, small enough to be missed. Small enough to be swallowed if necessary, and maybe still not kill him coming out the other side. Gavin continued on.
The trapdoor was still where he remembered it.
His heart sank. Apparently Andross had found this tunnel, because the trapdoor had been repaired. The latch was designed to break under the pressure of a person’s weight. He’d wanted to be sure that his brother fell in, instead of triggering it and staying in the tunnel—which was a dead end anyway. But since the real Gavin fell in, it had been reset.
Gavin felt nauseated. He’d expected it, of course. His father wasn’t stupid, and he would have searched thoroughly, but Gavin had hoped against reason that his father wouldn’t find the other cells. If Andross had found the other cells, then he’d found his eldest son’s rotting body.
Dear Orholam, forgive me.
Gavin put his full weight on the trapdoor and tumbled down into the green cell.
He stood to find that it, too, had been repaired. His brother had blown a hole in one wall, but there was no sign of that now, just perfect, slightly undulating, woody green luxin. Gray to Gavin’s eye.
He stood, slightly wobbly despite that he’d expected the fall. He was not well.
“Long time no see, Guile,” the dead man said. He looked somehow different in the green wall. A worse reflection, of course, but some trick of Gavin’s memory made even his voice different, as if, in a green wall, the dead man must have green characteristics. His voice husky, something wild in his leer.
“Oh, I’ve missed you, too, darling,” Gavin said. He walked to the wall, and pulled out the hellstone shard he’d taken from the tunnel.
“But time is different for us here.”
“Uh-huh,” Gavin said.
“Why don’t we talk about this?” the green dead man said. Was there an edge of fear in that voice?
“I think we’ve talked quite enough,” Gavin said, and he set the hellstone against the dead man’s third eye and began scratching the wall.
“You need your strength. Why don’t you draft some green?” the dead man said.
“Funny,” Gavin said. He was certain now about the dead man’s moving independently: the green reflection didn’t even bother to try to match his movements precisely. He spoke, and his mouth moved when Gavin knew his own wasn’t moving.
Part of the traps he’d laid for his brother had been dependent on his drafting. He’d thought the lure of drafting green would be too powerful for his brother to resist, and thus he would act wildly. Trapped like an animal, he would bite the bars of his cage, but never be able to gather the wits to do it mechanically. He had, unfortunately, underestimated how long the original Gavin would spend in blue, and how the blue would change him, make him more rational and cool despite his baseline hot temper and rebelliousness.
This green cell had held his brother only for a few days.
“So you’ve been lonely, huh?” Gavin asked, still scratching, scratching, scratching.
“You’ll never get out,” the dead man said.
“You really think I’d spend a year building a prison and never once stop to think how I’d get out if I were ever trapped in it myself?”
Of course that was only half-true. He’d planned how to escape—that was why he’d placed the hellstone chip for himself. But he’d not planned how to get out without drafting.
The hellstone would get him out of green. Yellow… yellow was another question.
“How much did Mot tell you?” the dead man asked.
“Mot?” Gavin’s only interaction with the god had been when he’d sunk the blue bane and run his skimmer over all the god’s foul wights, turning the water red. “Not much. I never bothered to chat with him.”
The dead man looked at him for a long while quizzically, then burst out laughing.
“We don’t remember much at all, do we?” the dead man said. “How many times did you—I mean I—use black luxin anyway? Do I remember? Because once shouldn’t have done this much to… me.”
Of course, Gavin was in green. Of course the dead man would try madness here. Try to make Gavin think he was already mad, that he remembered things that weren’t true and didn’t remember things that were. Of course green would try to make Gavin wild and fearful and uncontrollable.
When Dazen had made this prison, he must have figured that his brother would be particularly susceptible to the wildness of green. That questioning his very sanity would be a good way to keep him from formulating logical plans, would infuriate him.
But one thing this creation of his did do was remind him how much the black had taken.
And then the will-casting. It was always dangerous, he knew that. Utterly forbidden for a lot of good reasons that Gavin had naturally decided didn’t apply to him.
He’d been talking to the dead man here as if he were the same dead man in the blue cell. As if he were still Gavin, mocking himself.
The dead man was still a reflection of himself, of course, but Gavin suddenly understood something about his own design. He hadn’t cast his will into the prison as a whole—there was magic-killing hellstone everywhere down here. If he’d made the prison a seamless whole, a failure of part of it would be a failure of all of it.
So instead he’d imbued a bit of his will into each cell. This dead man was utterly separate from the first.
That was why he’d made this dead man ask what the last one had asked Gavin. He would have wanted to know how to torment his brother more successfully. There were two facts he could glean from this: this dead man didn’t remember anything he’d told the last one, and, more importantly, this one might know things the last one hadn’t.
Dazen had made the blue cell in a month. He’d poured everything into that, and he’d known that his brother was there and not making any progress in getting out for a long while. But Dazen had taken much longer creating the other cells, which meant he’d also crafted them later, when he knew more and different things.
So what did this bit of his will-cast self, this shadowy mirror of himself, know that Gavin himself had forgotten?
It was almost worth exploring.
Talk to a version of his old self that his old self had crafted purely to drive a prisoner insane?