The game seemed trivial before Gavin understood it. His daily bread came down the chute. He caught the loaves if he could before they hit the ground, which would damage the crust.
Then he would examine every bit of each loaf’s surface, looking for an injection site. He often couldn’t find it. The loaves dropped down the chute and collided with several locks on its way to him, so finding a small hole was often impossible.
He would tear open a loaf and smell it, sometimes catching a faint whiff of something off. Then, with a carefully cleaned, dry finger, he would touch the soft flesh of the broken bread, feeling for wetness or any temperature variation.
If he didn’t find it, he would close the loaves up as well as possible and wait. The poison, being liquid, would make the affected bread go gummy after a time.
Then sometimes Andross would baste the poison onto the outside of a loaf, as if buttering a pastry as it baked. That tended to affect either the flakiness or the color of the crust, so Gavin took to examining each loaf for those variations.
It was harder to examine the weekly fruit, not least because that sweet treat called to him in a way the boring bread never could. Some weeks, only a single segment of the lime would be contaminated. Other times, it would have seeped through numerous segments, and he would debate with himself about how much of the poison he might be able to ingest without losing consciousness.
Nor was he always perfect. He’d gotten woozy a number of times when he’d eaten some of the narcotic by accident.
He’d fought through his sleepiness and never lost consciousness.
But that wasn’t the game. That was only the beginning of the game.
As the long days passed, until the summer must surely be over, and deep into autumn, Gavin saw that the game was one of endurance, to see if he could keep the same level of boring vigilance day in and day out, as his emotions cycled down and further down and the sands scoured the gilded grandeur of the idol he’d erected to himself, and it was revealed to stand on bare scaffolding and feet of clay.
This game was not a game; it was his whole life. He had become a bread inspector.
Andross Guile wasn’t checking on him. Had never once come to talk.
There was no one to whom to prove himself. There was, finally, no escape.
Not for him.
There was an escape hatch in this cell. He’d put it there. It required drafting a key whose design he had carefully committed to memory, and affixing it to a pole he would draft in a particular shape to fish down around the corners of the cell’s waste hole and into one dead end. If he could draft, it would have taken him no more than a day to escape.
If he could draft.
“Eat,” the dead man said. “Let Karris be a widow. Let her move on. She probably already has. No one can mourn forever. Especially not a beautiful woman like that.”
Gavin said nothing.
“What if she’s already moved on? The mourning period is over. She probably needs allies badly. A political marriage to the White isn’t something anyone would scoff at. You staying alive only gives her a reason to feel guilty.”
“She doesn’t know I’m alive, so it doesn’t matter,” Gavin croaked. This will-casting was better than some of the others at getting him to talk. Or maybe Gavin was just that much weaker now.
“No, I meant when they find your body. If she finds out you lived past when she remarried, she’ll be devastated. Of course I wasn’t implying you’d actually get out and be reunited with her. I think we’ve all given up on that by now, haven’t we?”
Gavin cursed him, but without passion.
“Do you think your suffering is ennobling?” the dead man asked.
Gavin didn’t answer.
“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!” the dead man said.
It wasn’t, of course.
When Gavin woke the next morning, the dead man greeted him with the same gleeful words. “Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”
And then the next.
“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”
…
“Surely today is the day your father will relent.”
…
“Do you think today is the day your father will relent?”
…
“Perhaps Andross will show his merciful side today,” the dead man said, as if hopeful.
…
Sometimes he wouldn’t say it first thing, and Gavin would hope that perhaps he’d forgotten, or thought it wasn’t having an effect. But he always said it. “Dazen… psst, Dazen… do you think today might be the day?”
Other times he would ask twice or three times, making Gavin wonder if a day had passed without his noticing, increasing his disorientation.
He laughed through Gavin’s panics, the times he lay gasping, chest convulsing, certain he would die.
But death would be a relief, wouldn’t it?
And there was no mercy in Andross Guile. One can’t appeal to a side a man doesn’t have.
Gavin had a pleasant hallucination once. One, out of all the nightmares and disquieting dreams and constant anxiety. Be strong and of good courage. You are not alone.
It wasn’t a voice, it was a memory, and an unhelpful one at that. It had encouraged him for three days… what, sixty days ago now?
Gavin didn’t want encouragement. He wanted a side of beef and rivers of wine and his wife’s breath mingling with his and a bath and a bed and sun upon his face and his father dead at his feet and friends who weren’t figments of his imagination and the susurrus of the sea beneath the skimmer’s deck and the flexing of his arms and shoulders as he sailed. He wanted his powers back and the adoration of the crowd. And he wanted to have no secrets, to never feel a fraud again. He wanted to save everyone and be seen doing it. He wanted to be proud and beautiful again. He wanted all he’d had before and more.
He wanted that seventh goal he’d never told anyone.
But it was all gone.
But it was all folly. He would never have more than he’d had. He would never have as much as he’d had. He would never be as much as he’d been. He could only ever be less.
He couldn’t even be Prism without his powers.
The best he could hope for was to live broken and powerless and ugly. What had he said when they’d saved him from the hippodrome and he’d shot that man? ‘I’m not quite useless. Not yet’?
But now he was.
“Maybe today will be the day your father relents!” the dead man said as the bread came down the next morning.
But Gavin didn’t even care.
He ate the bread. All of it. Both loaves. They tasted wonderful.
He could hardly hear the dead man laughing, and not for long.
Chapter 54
The skimmer ride from Big Jasper to Az?lay showed Teia how fast this war was changing the world.
Like many great discoveries, Gavin Guile’s insight was simple in retrospect: instead of taking the oar as his paradigm, or the sail, he took the wind itself. The skimmers were powered by drafters who shot unfocused luxin to propel them.
But Andross Guile had seized on his son’s original insight and innovated upon it, realizing that the new technology had a cultural implication: the typical threshold by which a satrapy justified the cost of educating a drafter at the Chromeria was her ability to make a solid, stable luxin in one or more colors.
What Andross was the first to realize was that the reedsmen didn’t need to draft stable luxin. So he had called up all the discipulae who’d failed out of the Chromeria in the last four decades. Hundreds of suitable candidates had been found already. Thus, he gained an entire corps for transportation and saved the halos (and lives) of his trained drafters for war. Four of those now powered the ultralight skimmer that propelled Teia, the messenger, and barely more than the clothes on their backs across the sea to Paria.