Chapter 83
Gavin had expected some casual cruelty on his way to the hippodrome, like being forced to wear a hood, or locked in a carriage or palanquin with something disgusting so that his last sight before the cheering crowds would be of filth. Instead, he was allowed to ride inside a normal carriage, albeit with doors that locked from the outside, and windows too small to wiggle through.
He was also chained and tied up nearly as much as he would have tied up himself in this situation. But still, he could see, and by luck, he got the better window.
He wanted to think that knowing these were among the last things he would see lent everything a certain poignancy, but the truth was that the Great River Delta was always beautiful, and now, with Sun Day on the morrow, it looked as vibrant as he’d ever seen a day in whites and grays look.
As the carriage rumbled through the cobbled switchbacks down Jaks Hill where the great families had their estates, Gavin could see the myriad farms stretched out on the plain below. With the warmer weather and the passing of time, the floodwaters had deposited their yearly tribute of fertile silt. Some fields were now dry. Others were muddy. Some few were still under a bare thumb of water. Thousands of shorebirds filled land and sky. Egrets and herons and cranes and ducks and geese and red-winged blackbirds had arrived from their migrations or emerged from hiding. Rushes and cattails and a thousand kinds of grass had sprung up in the lines between perfect fields. The land must be a debauched party of greens and browns and points of color like jeweled fingers flashing in torchlight.
Gavin’s monochromatic vision was a curse once again. This world had faded to textures.
He sank back into his carriage seat.
Some part of him still expected a crash at any moment, a violent stop, fighting—rescue.
But none came. The image of the baby black widow spiders rolling over him in a wave changed. Now the eggs were grains of black powder, wadded down the blossoming barrel of a blunderbuss. Gavin, the elder, watched: a hole in his forehead, a hole in his jaw, head bobbing like an old man with the twitching sickness because the tendons supporting his head had been clipped by the passage of bullets and brains out the back of his skull. Dead Gavin smiled around broken teeth, blood washing from the front of his head and his mouth and the back of his head, too, too much blood for a man to bleed when his brain had been stopped. Too much blood for a man to bleed, period. He cocked that blunderbuss, aimed it at his little brother’s stomach.
He fired.
The blunderbuss vomited black death through Dazen’s guts. He jerked, looked down with trepidation. All his soft tissues were gone. He stood on his spine alone. A writhing mass of black spiders fed on his guts, grew into adults in moments, and swarmed, devouring. They climbed his spine, wrapped under his hanging skin, and went inside his rib cage. They devoured his lungs. He couldn’t breathe, feeling them from the inside, taking life from his very core. And then they ate his heart. It seized, labored, thumped one last time, and stopped.
He fell. Opened his mouth to seek some forgiveness, but only spiders burst forth, burning his esophagus like bile, spewing over his tongue, crawling out of his nose. He was covered with black spiders, a living stinging biting blanket, sticky as tar. His brother stood over him and laughed. His eyes crinkled and he leaned forward—Dazen had forgotten how Gavin did that, how he doubled forward, eyes shut when he laughed hard.
Now Dead Gavin stood over him, laughing, and the sun shone through the hole in his head like a third eye. The beam of light fell on Dazen just as the spiders began crawling up his cheeks. They were going for his eyes! He jerked, but his arms were useless, his mouth pried opened. And then the spiders began attacking his eyes, biting, poison squirting deep into those orbs, filling his precious orisons with acid.
Gavin jerked awake. They were in the city proper now. He gulped and blinked, the sun high above, cutting through the gap in the carriage’s window curtain. Not quite noon. He was sleeping through his last sights. But still the dream clung to him. Would Gavin laugh at him like that, doubling over, out of breath? Or would he have some compassion for him now, at the end?
His guards chuckled. “Never seen a man who could sleep on his way to torture. You got stones, friend.”
Gavin looked at the guard, searching him for some sign of humanity. Was this man part of his escape plan? No. No. Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.
I shouldn’t have killed you like that, brother. It wasn’t worthy of me. It wasn’t worthy of you. I don’t think you would have taken shriving from me, but I should have offered. Should have given you a chance to prepare yourself. Killing you without warning, that was for me. That was for my nerve, which I knew would fail me.
Because I still loved you. And love you still.
A Guile’s love is a bullet through the brain.
He bowed his head even as the sounds of the hippodrome floated down into the street. A race must have been under way. The streets were packed, and though carriages had the right of way that came with crushing power, it still had to slow as they approached the enormous crowds around the hippodrome. The carriage added its tinny bell to the din: shouting voices of vendors, angry yells from other drivers, a distant yell decrying a thief, the throbbing roar of the crowd inside the hippodrome swelling in time to their favorite chariot coming round, the hoots and jeers of fans outside, the rattling of tuned bamboo wind chimes and more, cowbell and brass and drums competing among the fans.
But the colors were mute. Gray on gray on dark gray on black. The smell of cooking pork and curries and roasted nuts in caramel was far more vivacious. Gavin peered through his curtain and saw a little boy in rags, lean to the point of starvation, staring back at him.
A lookout for the rescue?
But the boy merely watched him go by.
The carriage turned and went down a long ramp, accompanied by many shouts, and then was swallowed by darkness. A gate rattled shut behind them. This area was off-limits to the public.
And Gavin’s last ember of hope died. They didn’t know he was here. Like so many other things, his father had been able to keep it secret. Gavin was going to lose his half-useless eyes, and then he was going to die. Funny how he was more worried about his eyes than his life.
They have stolen light from me. What is life without light?
The carriage door opened. He was bundled out, hands bound behind his back, hobbled by his chains so that he had to take tiny shuffling steps. They didn’t help him. After walking hundreds of paces through winding corridors beneath the very hippodrome itself—the roof rumbling with hoofbeats as the chariots raced overhead, the roar of the crowd barely rising to perception—Gavin was put in an iron-barred cell. More a cage, really. It was fitted with chains connected to gears, and high above, there was a panel that slid back. This cage would take him directly up into the stadium floor.
“On your knees,” a soldier said. He waited until Gavin complied before he came into the cage himself, carrying a bucket full of black liquid. Or dark liquid, anyway. The soldier was careful, too. He didn’t keep the key, but handed it off to another, outside the cell, and locked the door behind himself.
“Dunk your head. Not your skin, just your hair,” the soldier said. He didn’t seem to relish the duty. Gavin looked up at him, not understanding what he wanted.
The man locked up suddenly, muscles clenching so obviously that his friend called out, “Something wrong?”
“No,” the soldier said, after a brief hesitation. “I got this. I’ll call for you.”
And then Gavin recognized him.
“Captain Eutheos. Citation for Extraordinary Bravery at Blood Ridge, wasn’t it?” Gavin said. He remembered belatedly that that was his own memory, pinning that ribbon on the man’s chest. He’d been Dazen then. As Gavin, he should have no memory of Eutheos. Oops.
Ah well. What would have been a gigantic blunder at some other time now seemed a bit trivial.
There was a gigantic clatter and roar of wheels and hoofbeats pounding overhead as the massed chariots passed, but it was obviously a familiar, inconsequential sound to the captain.
The sudden joy on the soldier’s face bloomed and died in an instant, an abortion of hope.
“It can’t be,” he said. “They ordered me to dye your hair and eyebrows and make you look scruffy. I didn’t know why, but … High Lord Prism … Dazen Guile?” the soldier whispered.
A crushing weight settled on Gavin’s chest. There had been a time when he would have tried to turn this man, when he would have blithely ordered this man to do something that would cost him position, and reputation, and family, and probably life, all for the slimmest chance that Gavin might, might, escape.
But he’d been young then. All his invincibility had been built on other men’s bones.
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said. “It’s mine.”
“I swore you my fealty, my lord, all those years ago, but … I swore them my fealty, too, after the war.”
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said.
“I, I, I gave him the key. If I, if I have to call him back, I’ll have to steal it from him, hurt him—he’s my brother-in-law, and devoted to this land something fierce. He wasn’t in the war. He doesn’t know what it was like.” The captain looked around like a trapped animal. “Which oath does a man hold, when holding one means breaking the other, and he never saw it coming?”
“I wouldn’t ask it of you,” Gavin said.
“That’s why the hair black, and the charcoal. They don’t want to chance anyone recognizing you like I done—as either Prism or as Dazen, I s’pose. But how are you alive? What do I do?”
Gavin was still on his knees. “Eutheos,” he said. “Be still.”
And the man was still. This, at least, Gavin still had. His voice was sometimes magic over other men.
“Breathe.”
And Eutheos breathed.
Chariots passed overhead again, but they seemed far, far away.
There was no escape from here. If Eutheos unlocked Gavin’s chains, Gavin could go no more than a few hundred paces. He wasn’t strong enough to fight. He couldn’t draft. He couldn’t get out. And there was no point ruining a man and his family for a futile gesture.
“Captain, before I release you from your oaths, as your last duty to me, dye my hair, and black my eyebrows as you’ve been told. I ask only that you keep the dye from my eyes. They will burn soon enough.”
And so he did. He did his job thoroughly, and well, and silently, tears streaming down his face. He dried Gavin’s hair with a cloth, and blacked his eyebrows with coal, and then ground dirt and ash onto his ruddy skin to make him look no more than a beggar.
Gavin said, “I’ve no more right to compel you, soldier, but as a man, as a comrade who once took up arms with you, I ask a favor. Will you send a letter to Karris Guile at the Chromeria of my fate? And tell her that I will be murdered by the Nuqaba’s assassin as I arrive in Big Jasper. Don’t put your own name on this letter, nor anything that can be traced to you. It will be death for you if it is intercepted.”
Former Captain Eutheos nodded and swallowed. “My lord. You made me feel part of something. It was the only time in my life that I—” He cut off, clearing his throat as his brother-in-law the soldier came back, this time not alone. Eutheos said gruffly, “Let me outta here, would you? Got some dirt in my eyes.”
He was let out, and the other man unlocked and locked the door carefully, as if the still-bound Gavin might attack at any moment. The woman who was with that soldier, though, surprised Gavin. It was Eirene Malargos, not the Nuqaba. She dismissed them and they moved out of earshot.
She looked tired. “I didn’t want this,” she said. “You’ve done nothing here that would exact such a penalty under Ruthgari law—but you also know that I can’t let you attack my ally and do nothing. Were she forgiving, she would let us handle this in our way. She’s not chosen that route. I see why she is feared.”
Gavin simply stared at her. He reckoned from her mood that Eirene Malargos would shut down instantly if she felt she were being manipulated. Gavin’s golden tongue was suddenly worth what his eyes would be, soon.
She said, “I’ve been looking for any avenue that doesn’t lead to war? You damned men, always trying to prove who’s bigger. I just want to live. I want my people to live. I don’t know how to avert this. Do you know I tried to align us with the Guiles?”
Gavin’s eyebrows must have twitched, betraying his disbelief.
“Even after the insult of you rejecting our proposal that you marry Tisis, I proposed your father marry her instead. A temporary alliance, perhaps, given that your father is probably too old to give her children, but a gamble worth making with so many lives at stake.”
My father? With Teats Tisis? Me with her?
A thunderous clamoring resounded overhead as a mass of chariots passed all at once.
“But he spurned her,” she said.
“Outright?” Gavin asked. “That doesn’t sound like my father. Does he not know how close you are to betraying him?”
“I don’t know what he knows. I sent a ship with my diplomats and instructions for my sister. It was intercepted by pirates. Perhaps you remember?”
Oh. In more ordinary times, that the ship Gavin had been rowing on had intercepted the very ship that his enemy was depending on for vital communications would have been a stroke of extraordinary luck. It still was extraordinary luck, he supposed, just not the good kind.
A huge cheer went up, above. The race had a winner.
“Believe me,” she said, “I’d prefer to wait until I hear more from the Chromeria, but the Nuqaba is insistent. And I can’t split with her. If Blood Forest falls—and it is falling, even now—I can’t stand against the Color Prince on my own. Even if the Chromeria finally decides to send enough help to change things, I’ll have trouble securing one border against the Color Prince. What if the Nuqaba attacks me from the east? We would be lost in little more than the time it takes her armies to march.”
“Oh, I see what this is,” Gavin said. “You’re going to let her take my eyes, and you still think I might be made an ally afterward.”
Her lips thinned. “Your eyes are lost already, Gavin Guile. Put them in the ledger with my dead father and forty thousand other dead Ruthgari fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. Then do your calculations. If you want to save the Seven Satrapies, you need me.”
“If you attack me, you’ve already attacked the Seven Satrapies. I am the Seven Satrapies, and treason is death.”
Another, last chariot clattered overhead.
Her face steeled. “Look at yourself before you threaten me, Gavin Guile. You are not that which once you were. You’re a haggard old man with half a hand, and soon to be blind. You can’t draft. Orholam has begun your punishment, and I will finish it. Tomorrow is Sun Day, and you won’t have returned. You were absent on Sun Day last year. The Chromeria can’t be without a Prism for two years straight. The luxiats won’t tolerate it. You’ve probably already been stripped of that title in absentia, and you’ll be replaced with a Prism-elect tomorrow. There is nothing you can do to stop that. All you can do is try to save an empire that is no longer yours. That’s your option, but know this, Gavin Guile, once-Prism: no one spurns the Malargos family thrice.”
She spat on him. No doubt she’d intended to spit in his face, but most of it hit his shoulder.
Still, it communicated the feeling fairly clearly.
She walked out. “I’ll ring when it’s time,” she told the soldier. Then she was gone.
The soldier said nothing.
Gavin said nothing. Eirene had been his last hope. He knew it. He knew, and yet he couldn’t believe. There had always been some way out for Gavin Guile. There had always been a door that his genius and his power had let him open that no one else had even seen.
That was me.
Was.
Several minutes later, a bell rang. Gavin cracked his neck right and left. The soldier went to a lever and pulled, and Gavin began his ascent. The great trapdoor overhead sank and slid aside in a shower of sand and sunlight into his darkness.
He remembered, for one moment, that which he did not want to remember—he remembered emerging from the very bowels of darkness, bringing hell to earth at Sundered Rock, and climbing step by step out of it, the darkness finally parting and light pouring in, but light weaker, light stricken, light sickened. The world was not what it had been, before his victory, and he thought it not his eyes alone that had changed.
Until now. What I did was sixteen years in catching up to me. Why so long?
The great murmurs of a crowd of fifty thousand souls hit him first, before he even emerged from the darkness. Layered atop that was the thin, cutting voice of Eirene Malargos, projecting as loudly as she could. She had not the gift of orators and singers and generals, though. At the far points of the hippodrome’s open floor, women who did have that gift listened intently and then repeated each line perfectly. It gave an odd, delayed response, but Eirene had learned the art of keeping her speeches short and pointed. Some nonsense: this man attacked our guest; according to Parian law, this malefactor will lose his eyes for his crime.
What else was there to be said?
And the crowd, Orholam forgive them, whipped up by their favorites’ victories or losses, roared with bloodlust. Gavin’s people, they had been. Now they roared for his eyes.
And roared once again as he came level with the ground and they saw him for the first time.
And then he saw the Nuqaba’s crowning touch. The rich families of Ruthgar took turns sponsoring the games and races. Even the absent Guiles did it, though not as lavishly as others. Gavin couldn’t see the Guile red on the banners or on the tunics and ribbons worn by those—he assumed—few who still favored his family here. But he could recognize his family’s crest on the biggest flags. This was the Guiles’ race day. Gavin was going to be blinded at his own party.
You are one vindictive bitch, Haruru.
He was surrounded by soldiers and three drafters, each with their hands already stained with color. He guessed blue, red, and green, though there were too many scents in the air to tell for sure. That was where most people went for offensive magic. They were serious. Gavin was unchained, forced to stand, and marched over the sand toward the spina, the center line of the hippodrome, which had a raised platform on it that would insure that everyone would be able to see his punishment.
Same platform he’d stood on when he ended the Blood War.
He stumbled on his hobbles as he climbed the stairs, and laughter rang out.
His people. How he hated them.
Then he saw the coal bucket, smoking. Two iron pokers rested in it, each with a tip as narrow as a pupil. He looked around the hippodrome. Fifty thousand people, and not one friend. In the satrap’s box, he saw the Nuqaba looking at him, smiling. She was mouthing something to him. She was too far away for him to read her lips, but he could guess: ‘Useless.’ She was enjoying Gavin Guile impotent at least as much as she would enjoy seeing him blinded. Then she and everything else became a blur. He saw people moving, mouths moving, but he stopped hearing.
He remembered, strangely, as if cobwebs were being cleared from a hall of memory he’d not trod in decades, Lady Janus Borig visiting when he was a child, treating his mother like no one treated his mother, and telling him, ‘Black luxin is the scourge of history. It is madness in luxin form. It is the soul poison. Once touched, it lives within a drafter forever, slowly eroding her from the inside. In every world, there is that which is haram, that which is forbidden, and in every world, that is the thing most desired, for there is that in us which loves destruction. Here is a test for your wisdom, young Guile. It is the only test that matters. In this world, Orholam has given us such power as even the angels have not. It is the power of evil unfettered. It is the destruction of history itself. It is madness and death and being-not. It is void and darkness. It is the lack of light, the lack of God himself—the lack that men rightly call hell. It is black luxin, and that color—though color it is not—that color, Dazen Guile, is your color.’
And he’d believed her. He’d known then he was the cursed brother, the evil brother. And what she’d said had been true.
And at the end of all things, when every color is gone, darkness remains.
Gavin could see only in shades of gray.
And black.
How did I forget that? How did I, who remember all things, forget that day? Is that a real memory? Was it merely lost among all the myriad others?
But there was no time for that now. Not on this, his last walk.
Drafting black luxin wasn’t something you could test. It was a cocked and loaded pistol. You pulled the trigger, or you didn’t. And if you were able to draft it, and you did …
Hell, hell on earth. The smoking ruins of Sundered Rock. The charnel house, the gore, the rage and madness and slaughter and vileness of poison poured onto the world as from a spigot as big as the sky itself.
Gavin looked around the hippodrome, and in shades of gray and black, he saw not a single friend. They jeered and they hated and they knew him not. They, whom he had saved from a war that would never end, they hated him and wished pain and death upon him. For nothing more than their amusement.
They were, in this moment of bloodlust and casual cruelty, an open window into hell.
Gavin could bring hell to them, and in so doing, save himself.
It was the only way to save himself.
He looked at the mutely roaring masses: the sounds might have been the susurrus of the waves on the shore for all he heard them, and he realized that if they had been threatening him with death, he wouldn’t do it. He would die for these ingrates. Not happily, but willingly.
But to be blinded, to be made useless, to be disgraced, to be mocked, to be impotent, to be pitied? To be shorn of sight and light and power was to be made not–Gavin Guile. It was all he had built for his whole life. It was all his worth.
Or he could draft the black once more, triumph once more, rise once more, a shadow figure caked in the ashes of his enemies’ burnt flesh and dreams.
To be Guile is to have will titanic. It is to move the world according to my pleasure. To be an Unmoved Mover, to be like unto God.
To be Guile is to kill without hesitation those who stand in your way. Even if it be a stadium full. Even if it be your brother.
To be Guile is to be great but not good.
But I’m not only Guile, not anymore. I’m a husband and a father now. I’m more than a conqueror. What if what I’m losing isn’t worth what I’ll lose to keep it?
Karris, will you understand? Kip, will you someday see that this isn’t my moment of weakness?
They seized him, and of all the acts of will in a life famed for them, it was by far the greatest that he resisted them not.
They bound him to a table. It had a lip to hold in several thumbs’ depth of sand. To soak up blood, he supposed. First, they put thick leather straps on his feet and wrists. Then luxin locked even his head in place.
He was on his back, on sand, staring at the sky. Like he was afloat on the ocean, lying in the skimmer, dangling his arms out to each side, looking at the placid heavens. Either this was Orholam’s peace, or Gavin had finally lost his mind.
A man came to stand over Gavin and pushed his eyelid down, making him blink. Then luxin flowed around his eye and opened the eyelid. The luxin gelled, solidified, and held his left eye wide open. Bound to the table as he was, it left him looking directly at the noonday sun.
You can’t stare at the sun. You might go blind.
Gavin burst out laughing.
He was staring eye to eye with Orholam’s Eye, the sun. And he couldn’t look away.
What had that scurvied pirate said? You keep up your lies, and you’ll be stricken blind? What lie was I supposed to not tell? There were so many. Was it only telling the truth to Antonius Malargos? I am a fabric of shadows, Orholam. There is naught else to me.
The drafter spoke to him, but Gavin was beyond words now.
Staring a challenge at the sun, but still I could draft the black. I could take my noonday shadow, withered though it is, and cast it over all the world.
A woman in a chirurgeon’s coat stepped close, looming over Gavin. She was plain, and pale, and paler than her usual pallor, Gavin guessed. Blanched white as only the pallid people at this arc of the satrapies could blanch. She wore two heavy leather gloves. He couldn’t hear her, but he could read her lips. Though she didn’t know he was the Prism, she was begging for his forgiveness. He’d seen those words pass lips in their thousands and thousands, every Sun Day.
Still I could draft the black. Orholam, you do not show half the mercy I do.
Karris, I will miss seeing your smile.
The chirurgeon lifted the first white-hot metal poker from the barrel and scuffed the coal particles from the metal with quick strokes. She braced her hip against the table and brought the smoking hot point over his head, holding it in both hands, burning like a second sun. She moved carefully, carefully.
Last second. Last chance. This is it.
The glowing metal descended, the bright white point of that terrestrial sun blotting out the celestial one.
He’d been like this. Last time. At the point of death. And had refused to die. Hands outstretched, like now, only facedown that time. Arms outstretched, and he’d reached out and embraced all hell.
And it was there, beneath his fingers like a smothering blanket of black spiders, ready to be thrown over the face of the world, over the face of the sun.
The black luxin trailed under his fingertips like all the waters of the world. To claim it, he had only to make a fist.
Still I can— His fingers went rigid, but didn’t clench.
Tssss. The sound of his sizzling eyeball was the first thing he heard as all sound came back.
He’d known it would hurt.
He’d had no idea.
He screamed his soul.