The Black Prism

Chapter 22

Dazen Guile woke slowly, senses bombarded with the stultifying blue blandness of his dungeon. Three thunks, three hisses, and his breakfast fell onto the dungeon floor. Ignoring the cold in his limbs, ignoring the stiffness and pain in his body from sleeping on blue luxin with only a thin blanket, he sat and folded his arms.

The dead man was whistling tunelessly, sitting against the opposite wall, bobbing his head to a nonexistent beat.

The madness of blue was a madness of order. A giist would understand every nuance of Gavin’s prison. But every time Dazen sank into the madness, he was frightened that he’d never come out of it. The last time he’d tried must have been years ago. He’d drafted a lot of blue since then. Choosing a descent into the blue again might well be choosing annihilation.

“Dazen,” the dead man said. “You are Dazen this morning, aren’t you?” It was a favorite trick of the dead man’s, pretending Dazen was the crazy one. “You aren’t thinking of going giist, are you?”

He hated his brother for doing this, for forcing this choice. But there was no passion to his hatred. It was a bare fact, as naked as his own limbs, stripped of mystery.

Enough. Better oblivion chosen of his own will than torture forever according to his brother’s.

Dazen drafted blue like he was taking a deep breath. His fingernails turned that hateful blue, his hands, arms. It spread over his chest like an icy cancer, and it cooled him. His hatred itself became an oddity, a mystery, something so irrational and powerful it couldn’t be quantified or understood, merely accounted for approximately. The blue suffused his entire body.

“Bad idea,” the dead man said. “I don’t think you’ll come out of it this time.” He started juggling little blue luxin globes. He could handle five now. When Dazen had first met him, the dead man couldn’t even juggle three.

Without passion clouding his study, he could appreciate the cell. His brother was brilliant. What had he said after imprisoning him? “I made this dungeon in a month, you will have as long to break out as it takes. Consider it a test.” Every time he had given up, he’d returned to that statement. It was an admission of imperfection. The cell could be broken. There was a weakness; he merely had to find it.

“The hellstone isn’t the weakness,” the dead man said. “Didn’t I tell you? He respects you too much. It won’t go a few thumbs deep, it’ll go two paces.”

He was aware, briefly, of a human emotion barely at the threshold of his perception. Loss—fury at how he’d scrubbed piss and oil for years, years of degradation, for nothing. His brother had no interest in degrading him. That wasn’t his way. All that effort, for nothing. He turned those feelings over like an odd stone in his hands, then tossed them aside. They only clouded his vision.

Something was sitting right in front of his face, and he wasn’t seeing it. It had to be something obvious, something that simply required him to look at the problem from a new angle. His brother had been so good at that kind of thinking.

“Maybe the only question is, are you going to do this Gavin’s way, or Dazen’s?” the dead man asked. He had that little superior, mocking smile. Dazen wanted to smash his face in when he grinned like that.

But maybe he was right. That was the trap: trying to do this Gavin’s way. If he did this his brother’s way, it would only lead deeper.

He put his luxin-filled hands to the ground, feeling the outline of the whole structure. The cell was sealed, of course, hardened and guarded against simple magical tampering, but as before, it felt different to the south. Not that he was sure it was the south side, he’d merely decided that the one area that felt different would be the south for him, his lodestone. That was where his brother stood when he came to see him. It hadn’t happened in a long time, but there was a room beyond the blue luxin walls there, where Gavin could come when he wanted to check on his brother, to assure himself that he was still a prisoner, still safely kept from the world, still suffering as much as he hoped.

That would be the weakness. The luxin there had to be thinner, simpler, so Gavin could manipulate it so that he could see through it. It would be warded, of course, but Gavin couldn’t have thought of everything. He’d only had a month.

But Dazen’s every attempt with fire had been a failure. Red luxin was flammable, so he’d thought that if he cut himself, he could draft red luxin. He could, a little. But that was good for nothing unless he could make it burn. A fire would give him full-spectrum light to work with—and he would be able to get out. But he had nothing to make a spark. Trying to leach heat from his own body had nearly worked—or at least he’d thought he was close, and he’d nearly killed himself the last time by cooling his body too much.

It just wasn’t possible. He was going to die down here. There was nothing he could do.

He drafted a sledgehammer and, screaming, smashed it against the wall. It shattered, of course. It didn’t leave so much as a scratch.

Dazen rubbed his face. No, the enemy was despair. He had to conserve his strength. Tomorrow he’d rub the bowl more. Maybe tomorrow would be the day.

He knew it wouldn’t, but he held on to the lie anyway.

In the wall, the dead man was cackling.