“Because…” the dead man said, as if leading a very stupid pupil to an obvious truth, “because black is the color of…”
“Of madness,” Gavin said hollowly.
“Dazen, Gavin has been dead seventeen years. He was never imprisoned. You killed him at Sundered Rock.”
“That’s not… that’s not…” Gavin felt suddenly lightheaded. The tightness in his chest returned. He fell to the floor.
“All your contortions and striving have been to hide a man who wasn’t there. Did you think it was a coincidence that as you lost blue, you dreamed of him breaking out of your blue prison? That as you lost green, he broke out of green in your dreams? The black luxin hell you brought to earth at Sundered Rock killed one man, but it destroyed two. Do you remember the bowl in the blue prison? And the cloth woven of human hair?”
Gavin remembered.
“How would you remember that? He never told you about it. He hid it from you.”
“I must have discovered them when I went through that cell.”
“Where was it when you were in the blue cell just weeks ago?”
“It must have been repaired.”
“Your father bothered to repair a slight depression in luxin more than a foot thick? And reset the trapdoor? And he repaired the green chamber? And somehow he didn’t repair your trap in your work chamber where the rope didn’t burn properly? And he cast new musket balls, all to make you think now… after all this, that you’re mad? Does that sound like your father’s work? Gavin was never here. It was always you, it was always only you.”
“And if I couldn’t know any of that stuff about him, how could you? I know these cells aren’t connected. I know it’s will-castings that I did. How could you know any of this?” Gavin asked.
“We know, Dazen, because you came down and raved to us. Told us why it had to be this way. I, for one, always figured that the truth was, you made this prison for yourself. Surrounded by problems too big for you, you made a problem small enough for you to handle.”
Dazen felt the tightness increasing in his chest. He remembered, as in a dream, coming down here that fateful night. He opened the yellow chamber and thought of closing himself inside. He argued with himself, aloud. There was no one here but his reflection, his own image crafted so carefully to look like a dead man, his brother.
The dead man laughed. “Come now, think of it! Did you really think that after Sundered Rock you were able to stuff your brother in a box, and keep him alive but drugged for the whole journey home, and bring him into the Chromeria—and no one ever noticed?! You had a box that you wouldn’t let the servants touch. Do you think they wouldn’t tell your father and mother about such a thing? Do you think your father and mother didn’t break into it immediately?”
There had been a chest. He opened it in his memory, and this time, overlaid on the phantasmal image of his brother unconscious, he could finally see the truth. Inside the chest had been a spear of living black luxin. Black luxin he’d drafted himself.
It was the implement he’d drafted in those last desperate moments at Sundered Rock, the weapon with which he’d killed his brother. Beautiful and terrible as the night sky devouring itself unto eternity.
He’d carved the cells out of the Chromeria’s heart with that spear, cutting through rock and the old bones of buried drafters and the luxin encased in their bodies with equal ease, until it too had failed, and broken apart into ten thousand pieces of hellstone.
The ten thousand pieces that he had then used in crafting the tunnels themselves.
How else could he have stolen such a kingdom’s fortune’s worth of hellstone without his father’s noticing?
But what would his mother have done if she’d found that spear straight from hell in his belongings, still smeared with his brother’s blood?
She would have wept, and prayed, and waited, and hoped that her last son would come back from his madness. She would have been gentle, and patient, and protective. As she had.
And his father would have been scared, and distant, and angry, and watchful, and intrigued, and enraged, and uncertain. As he had.
Dazen had thought he’d been so clever. He thought he’d fooled the people closest to him. In reality, they’d played along, pretending to be deceived because they had no other options, no other sons, because in their own ways they both still needed him: his mother needed him to keep her own hopes alive, and his father needed him in order to rule through him.
“It didn’t take everything, though, did it?” the dead man asked. “Despite the black luxin, you knew certain truths. Or perhaps only certain hungers. You had to kill to keep drafting. You knew it would all fail eventually. That’s why you had the nightmares, the attacks of panic. You knew that you were shameful, that you were a murderer, and everything you did to atone for your sins was a pile of glass baubles next to the mountain of shit that you built higher every year to keep yourself in power, to stay alive. You thought you were so clever. You thought yourself nigh unto a god, when in reality you were propped up by those who feared and hated you as much as by those who loved you. And even that wan love was tainted with fear and despair.”
“You’re wrong,” Gavin said.
“You know I’m not.”
“No, you’re wrong about one thing,” Gavin said. “And perhaps one thing only.”
“Pray tell.”
“My father didn’t know. There’s no way my father has known all this time. He could never let anyone think they were fooling him. It isn’t in him to play along. I—”
“Oh,” a voice said, “I think you’d be surprised at what is in me, son.”
Gavin hadn’t noticed the chamber moving, hadn’t heard the slot open. He fell, nerveless, sliding against the unforgiving luxin wall to the ground.
Not him. Not now. Please. No, God!
“I came to see if you’d grasped the truth yet,” Andross Guile said. “And I find you ranting to a wall.”
The dead man laughed, but Andross Guile didn’t hear it.
“I want you to know, boy, I came down here just now seriously considering putting you back in power. Your brother’s son Zymun is a worm who will become a terror if I let him survive. Kip is fled and too sensible to return soon, if ever. The Color Prince—he now calls himself the White King—is grown more powerful than we could have imagined. You are needed at this hour, Dazen. Not all of your power was magical, though you refused to see that. Not all of your leadership was based on light, though you were blind to that. But you’ve gone only ever deeper into madness. Perhaps this is my fault. Perhaps I left you down here too long. But you’re mad now, and that I cannot change.”
“It can’t be true,” Gavin said. “I wouldn’t do all this for no reason.”
“Couldn’t. Wouldn’t,” Andross scoffed. “You did.” It was a death sentence. “This is your work. All of it. Once I knew to look for it, it was obvious. Brute-force drafting, even where it was elegant. Always using lots of luxin, even where a little would serve as well. No aesthetic except that bigger was always better, and strongest was best.”
“This is all lies.”
“I won’t leave you here, though. Lest all of this madness is an act, meant to lull me into a false confidence that you’re broken. Your cunning is without peer. You’ve doubtless put in an escape hatch of some sort. So. One last game, where the stakes are light. Every day, I will send down two loaves. One will be poisoned. You can try to figure out which, if it pleases you. Eventually you’ll fail, and when you’re unconscious, you’ll be moved somewhere more secure. Somewhere terminal. Or you can attempt to figure out where the drug is in each loaf, and hoard a stash of it, and take it all at once to kill yourself. That would solve a lot of problems for both of us, but you’ve never been interested in solving problems for me, have you?”
“I hate you,” Gavin said.
Andross stared at him with inscrutable eyes for a long time.
“I know. And it’s too bad, because I have only ever loved you, Dazen.”
Chapter 46