Chapter 78
Days passed. Weeks.
Gavin was fed and given watered wine, but the guards who tended him never said a word. Never answered a query. Avoided eye contact. When one did accidentally meet his eyes, Gavin saw the worst thing possible: pity.
They thought Gavin was mad. Without his prismatic eyes, no one believed he was the Prism. Without his drafting, without his regalia, without his Blackguard escort, his impish imperial imperiousness seemed the struttings of insanity.
Was what Gavin had woven in all those years of power so thin a veil? Is a man no more than his magic?
Then one day, the door opened and the Nuqaba came in, bracketed by her Tafok Amagez. She limped a little as she came to stand in front of him. She waved the guards away. They hesitated, obviously mindful of what had happened last time. Her jaw set, and they left.
“You may be pleased to know we’ve come to an agreement,” she said.
“We?”
“Eirene and I. Your father and the two of us. We are going to sell you to him. After you’ve faced justice.”
“Justice?” Gavin asked. “So you’ve come to wash my feet and begin begging to know how you might pay restitution.” Lies and illusions and bluster. But it was all he had.
“You’ve assaulted the Nuqaba. A drafter who assaults the Nuqaba is punished by having his eyes burnt out. Everyone wins.”
She meant it. Every word. Even after all he’d said.
You can’t barter with crazy.
“Even you win,” she said. “With your eyes burned out, your father doesn’t need to know you lost your power. Eirene wasn’t going to go along with it, until I pointed out that your father might deny that you were you. After all, without your prismatic eyes, what are you? Useless, that’s what. Useless.”
She leaned close, but not close enough for him to snatch her haik and pull her against the bars and brain her.
“You’ll be gagged, of course, and in the very stadium where you killed so many, you will be publicly blinded. While people cheer. You always did so love a spectacle, didn’t you? On the ship home, you’ll be scrubbed and shaved and given a haircut and put back in clothes befitting your former rank. Your father has to accept receipt of you, of course. Has to accept that it’s you. But I want you to know something. On that ship with you, there will be an assassin. A man loyal to me unto death. After you’ve been accepted, he will shout some nonsense about the Color Prince, and kill you. Do you know how hard it is to stop an assassin who doesn’t care if he dies?” She sighed. “Your death is necessary, I’m afraid. It’s my fault. I was careless. I spoke too freely, earlier. I searched all our laws to see if I could cut out your tongue and remove all your fingers instead so that you wouldn’t be able to tell him what I said, but there’s no such punishment. Blinding will have to do.”
Her tone was so light and joyous that Gavin thought she must be joking.
She wasn’t joking.
“Do you know,” she said, “it used to be quite common? Blinding drafters, that is. I think they had more drafters then. They said that if a man misused the light Orholam gave him, he should be denied light altogether, that perhaps he would repent and not lose his soul. Tell me, Gavin, don’t you agree that you’ve misused the light that Orholam gave you?”
Yes. Yes, I have.
He said nothing.
“There are instructions for how to do it—hear this—humanely. Because if you’re going to put out a man’s eyes, you should do it without unnecessary suffering, right? Ha. Apparently, it requires all sorts of strapping down. They used to build this machine. Quite ingenious. Two pokers that could be adjusted to the wideness of each man’s face. The tines heated glowing hot. A stopblock so that eyes would be fully burnt out, without piercing the brain and killing the blasphemer, no matter how he might thrash. There are even instructions on what luxin to use to prop the eyelids open. If you burn the eyelids, the blasphemers would often get an infection and die. You want them to live, not die of a fever. How can they repent if they aren’t in their right mind, right? They said they did both eyes at once because after losing one eye, a man’s anticipation of the pain of losing the second was so great they’d often go mad.” She smirked. “We, of course, have no machine. We’ll do one eye at a time. I want you to think of one thing, Gavin Guile. Tssssss.”
He looked at her, confused.
“That’ll be the sound of your eyeball steaming as red-hot iron enters it.” A chill went through his very core. This was the woman who it was rumored had tortured her husband for years. Suddenly, he believed it.
“And know this, if you shout anything other than screams of pain, if you claim to be Gavin Guile, we’ll shout you down and beat you for blaspheming and tear out your tongue. There aren’t instructions in my scrolls how to do that, but I don’t need them. I already know.”
She was a worse butcher than her brother ever was. “What happened to you?” Gavin asked. She wasn’t like this, before, was she? Or had it been there all along?
“I refused to merely survive.”
“You’re the Nuqaba; you’re sworn to Orholam.” Though as the words came out, the irony wasn’t lost on Gavin that he should be the one speaking them.
She glanced around for eavesdroppers, then the expression instantly morphed from appalled to grimly amused. “A dead faith that keeps rolling only from its own momentum. Men want to worship, and worshipping abstractions is hard. I give them something easier: me. As you used to.”
“I never asked for men’s worship,” Gavin said. He’d lost faith, but he’d taken it as his responsibility to safeguard the religion for those who did believe. Why destroy it for others, if it made them happy? Why destroy it, if there was a slim chance that it was true?
“Did you not?” She shook her head. “I don’t even need the seed crystal to tell me that you’re deceiving yourself. I have preparations to make. Just remember: tssssss.”
She laughed, and left.
Gavin sank to the ground of his cell. His eyes. Dear Orholam, his eyes. His fucking eyes had been betraying him all his life.
During the war, men and women, satrapahs and conns had believed in him because of his prismatic eyes, he knew. His impossible eyes. His brother had seen the onset of their prismatic glory. That had torn his brother’s soul; Karris had only been the pebble that upended the cart. With one glance, his eyes had proved to the world that what the Chromeria said could never happen, had happened. Two Prisms in one generation. And if one had to pick between brothers, it was hard not to choose whichever brother who stood before you, threatening you, wasn’t it?
You are nothing more than your magic, Gavin Guile.
Gavin remembered his first conversations with his older brother about magic. Gavin, the elder, had known everything. Or speculated with such confidence that Dazen had never failed to be impressed. He’d worshipped Gavin.
He still did.
He wondered how much of his persona as Prism was a projection of that winsome, pretend perfection his big brother had embodied to Dazen as a child. Gavin was the oak around which Dazen had grown, like ivy. The parasite vine climbed high and decorative, slowly choking the life out of that which it embraced. No wonder Gavin had hated his little brother with the boyish hatred of encumbrances.
Even after the war, Dazen had grown round the great expanse that had been Gavin, draping his own foliage over the widespread branches and calling himself an oak. Calling it life, when it was death. Blocking out the sun, light, and life intended for another.
And now that Gavin was dead, and the oak rotted, what happened to the ivy? On its own, it had no strength to stand.
I haven’t mourned him. I put two bullets in his face, and I haven’t mourned him.
I wonder what it smells like down there. I left his body to rot. I didn’t even have the decency to wrap him in funeral cloths. Didn’t want to get bloody.
I didn’t want to get bloody?
There’s always something desperate requiring my attention, isn’t there? As if I can blind myself with activity, with travel, or with war.
He thought of all the wights he’d killed over the years. The White had been right. There had never been any need for him to risk his own life hunting them down. Foolishness to risk a Prism to hunt a few wights. Wights are merely once-men, running in fear, nearly always alone, usually in the wilderness because no one in the world would give a murdering madman shelter. Take a tracker after them, figure out when they sleep, and have half a dozen men fire muskets at the sleeper.
Instead, Gavin had insisted on going after them himself. On facing them. Killing them when they were conscious. Giving them those phony last rites. Trying to purge himself, more than them. Steeped in blood, he sought blood to cleanse himself.
He sometimes still couldn’t believe the White had let him go hunting. But she’d thought he’d kill himself if he didn’t have those trips. Perhaps she’d been wiser than he knew.
The tiny window inset in the cellar’s door opened.
“Tssssss.”
And a woman’s laugh.
It chilled him. Staring there at the now shut window, and his grubby cell and his half a hand, and his dirty beard and his long dirty hair, Gavin felt his chest tightening up. Hard to breathe. Shooting pains.
A thought that he’d batted away successfully a hundred times came back to him, and stood over him, and spat upon him: You’re not going to get out of this. There is no escape.
It was almost puzzling to him. Putting on Gavin Guile hadn’t meant putting on a set of clothes, it had been putting on a new skin. He’d seen flayed men: his spies left for him by his brother. He could still hear their shrieking, and now he felt he was one of them, the Gavin-skin torn from him.
He was going to lose his eyes.
Well fuck his eyes.
‘Orholam will give it to you plain,’ the prophet had told him. ‘You keep up your lies, and you’ll be stricken blind.’
He was already blind. What could they do to him but make all the world see what he already knew? For months now, he’d been a husk. A man when he had been nearly a god. That knife, that damned knife had stolen his power. But there was no getting it back.
He looked around the cellar, and could almost convince himself that he saw brown dirt, brown wood, the silver of metal. But it was all gray. Shades shading into black. Into blindness.
Who had he been deceiving, anyway, thinking he could make a comeback? From this. He had built himself to be the perfect Prism since he was seventeen years old. A seventeen-year-old’s projection of a perfect Prism, anyway. Robbed of the light of his youthful delusions, he was an empty mirror in a darkened room.
Ah, Karris, I’m only glad that you don’t have to see me like this. And if you do see me before my end, I won’t see the disappointment, the horror, in your face.
If I could do it again, would I do it all differently? Would I have stolen your life, Gavin? Would I have come forward, at any point in all my years as Prism, having consolidated my power, and said of my own will, at my own time, ‘I am not he’? I was too great a coward to live in the light. Fitting then that light be taken from me.
He sat, hollowed of feeling, for days. Morning and night, the window would open. He would hear a light step. “Tsssss,” the Nuqaba would say. And she would laugh.
Haruru was as much a legitimate Nuqaba as Gavin was a legitimate Prism. Hundreds of years ago, under Prism Karris Shadowblinder, immediately in the aftermath of Lucidonius’s death, the Parians had been given extra leeway in how they kept the religion. Having been the birthplace or fostering place of Lucidonius, they had demanded special consideration. Prism Karris had allowed it in order to keep the empire together. Though attempts had been made since to keep the two parties more in line theologically, there had been no success in bringing the Nuqaba further under the Prism’s political control.
Most Prisms tried, but war with Paria was something no one had the stomach for. And a succession of Nuqabas had played their hands beautifully, strengthening key positions while giving up the inessential. But the truth was, too many Parians, both within the satrapy and outside of it, considered themselves uniquely bound to the Chromeria. The empire was, as they saw it, theirs. Their man had founded it. Their people had expanded it. To go to war with their own was unthinkable, so long as certain prerogatives were respected.
The Nuqaba was supposed to be a living saint. She was supposed to be mother to all the clans. She was supposed to be a model of patience and wisdom and firm love. She was supposed to look upon her people with the eye of grace. Some had gone so far as to wear a patch over their left eye, the oculus sinister, the evil eye. Not Haruru.
Ironfist and Tremblefist are going to be furious when I kill you.
No, that problem, that thought, that was the old Gavin. That was the Gavin who had power. Who was power.
She came back, to speak to him, or to taunt him.
“You’re going to make a deal with a pagan army?” Gavin asked suddenly. “Your people will kill you for that.” Perhaps worship of Orholam had slipped among the rich and powerful in Paria, perhaps they would be happy to make a deal with a monster. But would the army? Would the villages, and the fleets? Or would those faithful people rather die before they would join with monsters, regardless of what their betters told them to do?
“Not me.”
And then Gavin understood.
She’s a useful idiot, is what she is. One of her nearest advisers probably works for the Color Prince.
It amazed Gavin how stupid ambition made smart people. Haruru controlled the Satrapah Tilleli Azmith totally, but hated having to publicly give the appearance of obeying her—or perhaps of merely being her equal. The Nuqaba wanted to be unfettered. So she’d join with the Color Prince, believing he would then turn toward the Chromeria and leave her alone until he’d dealt with them. Leave her alone. In what world would the man be stupid enough to do that?
The Color Prince wasn’t an Angari pirate, coming to raid. He wanted to be an emperor. He was building up Tyrea rather than plundering it. Doubtless he was doing the same with Idoss and Ru now. It was certainly why he’d stopped or at least slowed his advance. When you spent money to build, you ultimately got more out of the land you held, but it took more time. If he was patient, it might be too late to stop him already. The caves above Ru held millions of bats. The guano contained a key ingredient for making gunpowder—and the Atashians had held a stranglehold on that, making the Chromeria and everyone else pay dearly for what the Color Prince now had for free. And what else could you do with the cedars of Blood Forest but build a fleet?
Both of which took time. With the Chromeria’s navy shattered …
The Color Prince needed time, so he was using this time to divide his enemies. And the Nuqaba was deluded enough to think that if only she had total power over Paria, she could use that time better than the Color Prince could use his time to gather resources from five satrapies.
Truth was, it would probably take her years and a civil war for her to rule Paria outright. And when she won—if she won—Paria would be at its weakest precisely at the time when the Color Prince began to reap the riches of the satrapies.
Parians were great warriors, but they weren’t so great that they could fight five satrapies. And in the meantime, as he subdued the other satrapies, the Color Prince wouldn’t have to face those Parian warriors and Parian ships.
We so easily convince ourselves that what is good for me is also good for others.
If Gavin had been promachos, he could have stopped the Color Prince before Sun Day.
Of course, it’s different when you’re right.
Truth was, he could have stopped him even without being promachos. Sending the Blackguard searching some of the rivers in Atash that might hold harbors fit for shipbuilding. The skimmers changed everything, and Gavin was more adept at figuring out the implications of rapid changes than most. The Blackguards could have found those harbors—if they existed—in a few weeks. With the amount of lumber collected all in one place, it would have taken only a single good red drafter and a spark. They’d have destroyed the Color Prince’s fleet before it could sully the waves.
If I were in charge, things would be better.
Said every tyrant ever.
“Why are you grinning?” the Nuqaba asked, peeved.
“I’ve got my health, my family, one and a half hands, two good eyes, what’s not to love?” Gavin asked.
“We’ll change that soon enough,” she snarled.
“That’s why it was a joke…”
Her face contorted, and he was suddenly glad she didn’t have a pistol now. Didn’t like condescension, this one.
My brain seems stuck in the obvious right now. Perhaps to deny what’s coming.
“Though I will sit close enough to hear the hissing and popping of your eyes, to savor your screams, I wish I could be there on your ship home, as you jerk and twitch at every touch, every voice, wondering which one is my assassin, wondering how you can fight off a death you can see coming, but only metaphorically. When they shave your cheeks clean, will you wonder if that razor will later taste your throat? What savage nightmares will you have before you die?”
“So,” he said, “you act the evil gloating traitorous bitch queen laudably enough, but I’m bored. Are we going to do this? Hard to escape when I’m stuck in a cell.”
“Such things have to happen at noon. And I’m not giving you any chance to escape. We’ll go straight to the hippodrome. I wanted to do it tomorrow, as part of the Sun Day festivities, but the Ruthgari have a different view of things.”
“Spilling blood as defilement, yes, pity, that.”
“Yes, pity,” she said flatly. “So we’ll do it today.”
She stared at him for long minutes, seeming to savor the darkness he tried to hide growing in his breast like the white egg of black widow spiders undulating slowly until it suddenly split, bursting forth a black, creeping explosion. He tried to keep the horror off his face, the fear that he’d convinced himself he simply didn’t have the capacity to feel. He was wrong, and the hopelessness crept in a black wave up over his defenses, over his bravado, and finally over his face.
She saw, and smiled.
Finally, a knock on the door. “Your Eminence,” a voice said, “it’s time.”