The Black Prism

Chapter 31

Gavin had hunted down hundreds of color wights, and this one didn’t feel right.

The madness struck every color wight differently, but blue wights always reveled in order. They loved the hardness of blue luxin. Most eventually tried to remake themselves with it. Every one of them believed they could avoid madness if only they were careful enough, smart enough, and thought through every step. But what was a blue wight doing crossing the reddest desert in the Seven Satrapies?

Rondar Wit had been posted in one of the smaller coastal cities of Ruthgar. Married, four children, and a good relationship with his lord patron, who’d waited two weeks to report Rondar’s disappearance—no one liked to believe that their friend might go mad.

Gavin trudged through the desert. He’d stopped briefly at one of his contacts on the coast, got dressed entirely in red, and armed, and still thought he should reach the wight before dark. Still, he was exhausted. Skimming was fast, but his arms and shoulders and stomach and legs ached. His will felt sapped. He didn’t get lightsick when he drafted too much—but he did get tired and shaky.

Coming near the top of a dune, he stopped so as not to skyline himself and drafted a pair of long lenses. Tracking blues was usually easy because no matter how smart they were, most couldn’t bear to be illogical. If you figured out where they were going, you could guess they would take the most efficient route there. Gavin had no idea where this one was going, but he was following the coast. Unless his objective was nearby, Gavin was going to assume that the giist would continue heading down the coastline, staying far enough from the coast to avoid farms and towns. Of course, this wight had made a mistake, coming in too close from the desert for the sake of speed and access to water, and had been seen by a boy herding the rangy desert cattle the nomads kept. The boy had told his father, and his father had told everyone, including Gavin’s contact.

For a few days, the wight would try to put as much distance between himself and the herders as possible.

So Gavin made guesses, drafting blue to help himself think like one of them. Assuming the blue wight didn’t have a horse that the boy hadn’t seen—and horses usually hated color wights—a man pushing hard through this desert could only move so fast. Gavin had been through here before, and though he didn’t know it intimately, there were a number of points where a man had to decide if he wanted to follow the coastal road or take a trader’s route through the Cracked Lands. And there were places where the Cracked Lands were so broken and treacherous that there was no discernible traders’ route at all. Gavin wasn’t going to choose one or the other. He waited at one of the places where the roads met and diverged.

And waited. He untucked his shirt, pulled it askew, rebuttoned it offset one button, and tucked it back in. And waited. He drafted sub-red into fire crystals to bleed off heat from his body, watching the tiny crystals take shape, crinkle, and then flame out. Every ten minutes, he trudged back high on the great dune to poke his head over and scan the desert.

As the sun descended, he saw the telltale gleam. Aches forgotten, he was again, a circling hawk, waiting for the marmot to step just this far from his hole. He felt the same spasm of black fury that he felt every time. He should kill it, kill it instantly, and not listen to its lies, its justifications, its haughty madness.

No, this time, he needed to listen. First.

This giist’s skin was layered with blue luxin. It wasn’t just armor: it was a carapace. Chromaturgy changed all men, but blue wights were seduced by the perfections of magic. They sought to trade flesh for luxin. This one had progressed further than most. Talented, then, not to mention meticulous and likely brilliant. It still wore blue pants and shirt, though both were dirty and, uncharacteristically for a blue’s personality, torn. So it thought it was almost done with the need for clothing, but either the dangers of exposure in the desert or the possibility of needing just a bit more blue to draft from had convinced the creature to keep its clothing for a little longer. Its face, though, was the true wonder—or horror, depending on how you looked at it.

It had insinuated blue luxin beneath its very skin. Gavin had seen it before. The process had to be done slowly and carefully enough to not cause infections or rejection, but once begun, it had to be finished quickly. The skin lost feeling and began dying as soon as it was cut off from the body, so the wight began sloughing off rotting skin. This one’s forehead had split open, revealing robin’s egg blue beneath peeling, necrotic skin. It had drafted blue covers for its eyes arcing from brow to cheekbones in a solid dome so it would effectively always be wearing blue spectacles, but the result made it look like a bug with bulging blue eyes. It was, Gavin had always thought, one of the worst parts of giists trying to remake themselves. If all your skin died, your eyelids died. Even if you could draft a thin blue membrane every time you needed to clear your eyes—and it had to be held blue luxin, because rubbing blue glass against your eyeballs was never a good idea—even if you deal with that, you could never close your eyes to sleep. Even wights needed sleep.

An hour later, as the sun was almost touching the horizon, burning the desert beautiful, Gavin put on his borrowed red spectacles, gathered the red cloak around himself, cracked open a white mag torch, and stepped out in front of the giist.

The blue wight convulsed. Blues hated surprises, hated not having foreseen something, hated having their plans disrupted. But they were also hard to read, the blue perfection of a luxin face preventing facial expression of emotions even as the magic in their veins slowly obliterated their capacity to feel them.

But the surprise lasted only a moment. The giist sprinted straight for Gavin, its skin afire with blue, its eyes literally aglow, buggy, lit from within with refracting blue light. Gavin tossed the mag torch down in the sand in front of himself and threw open his red cloak, taking a wide stance on the side of the dune as the giist charged.

Gavin’s hand swept up past the weapons harness, little fingers of red luxin plucking all the tiny daggers from their sheaths. As he took one great step forward with his left foot, he drafted a dozen thin barrels along his arm. Then his right arm whipped forward with all the energy coiled in his body added to the force of his will. The dozen tiny daggers became steel missiles as he flung them. They flew at incredible speed, one after the other.

A blue shield sprang from the wight’s left arm and blossomed huge, to catch the splashing fire it expected from a red drafter with a mag torch. Instead, the steel daggers hit with a sound like hail on a tin roof. The shield pitted, cracked, cracked wide, and gaped open. The last three daggers sailed cleanly through. The first struck its cheek and deflected off its carapace. The next cut only the air next to its neck, and the last buried itself in the wight’s shoulder.

The giist had already begun its counterstroke, though. It flung its right fist forward and five enormous spikes formed in the air around its hand and stabbed for Gavin’s stomach in a line so that even if he moved left or right, he’d still be skewered.

Gavin cheated, of course. He drafted a solid platform beneath the sand to give himself a solid surface to jump off of and dove down the dune, flipping and landing in a great slide down the dune’s face.

The giist whipped around, dropping its luxin spears and drafting a blue great sword in their place. It saw that Gavin had lost his spectacles in his dive, and it twitched a smile. Its cheek had been sliced by Gavin’s dagger, and a flap of skin peeled open, drooping toward earth, showing a crosshatched network of blood vessels and blue luxin, though the luxin was cracked and broken at the point of impact, capillaries oozing blood. The dagger in its left shoulder seemed to be hampering its motion, but it was nothing lethal.

“You reds,” the giist said, its voice gravelly, as if it hadn’t spoken in some time. “So impulsive. You thought you could take me, alone, just because it’s sunset in a desert?”

Gavin glanced at his spectacles lying on the sand above him. The giist saw it and swung its great sword. The blade elongated in midair, closing the full five paces, and smashed the red spectacles to bits, then shortened again.

“You should leave murdering the Unchained to your Prism,” the giist said.

The Unchained?

Gavin said, “They told us the Prism was too important for you. They told us we should be able to handle one blue wight in the middle of a desert. They said Rondar Wit wasn’t that gifted.”

The giist laughed. “Was that supposed to make me angry? I’m not Rondar any longer. The Prism’s empire crumbles over your head, slave. Join us. See what it is to be free. You have, what, perhaps five years left? Not long, not even for a drafter in their world. Why die for their false god? Why die for their lies? Why die, ever?”

The giist was trying to recruit him? This was different. Gavin kept his eyes squinted. The less the giist saw his eyes, the less likely it was to notice how odd they were. “False god?” Gavin asked. Immortality?

Slimy held blue luxin swiped along the insides of its bug eyes, from the inner corner to the outer. Blinking. “Surely you don’t believe in Orholam? Are you all corrupt, or just stupid? If Orholam himself chooses the Prism as the Chromeria has preached since Lucidonius, how could there be two Prisms in one generation? Or are you one of the mental cowards who shrugs and calls it a mystery, who says Orholam’s ways are ineffable?”

It was one thing for a color wight to run: not even blues were immune to cowardice. But an attack on Orholam himself was a heresy that cut to the root of the world. If you called Orholam a fraud, and said everyone in power must know it, the Chromeria became the purveyor of lies, an oppressor who stole from you, not a friend who needed your help to sustain their worthy efforts. “I haven’t believed in Orholam for years,” Gavin said, honestly. “But why trade one superstition for another?”

The giist glanced at Gavin’s shirt, noticing the buttons weren’t done properly. Good. Any time it spent looking at his buttons was time it didn’t spend looking at his eyes. “You stop believing lies so you can believe the truth, not so you can believe nothing at all. King Garadul has…” He trailed off, looking at Gavin suspiciously. Putting something together.

“King Garadul, is he who leads the Unchained?” Gavin asked.

“Who are you?” it demanded. “You aren’t nervous. And you should be.” It tore the dagger out of its shoulder, sealed the wound, and tossed the dagger aside. It drew a long, ball-handled matchlock pistol from the ragged pouch, began loading in a precise manner with the odd, quick, but absentminded mode blue wights sometimes had. It used blue luxin like an extension of its hands. Blue luxin ramrod, blue luxin fingers to hold the slow match, blue luxin to draw out the powder horn and a lead ball. It grabbed the still-burning mag torch from the sand and held it up to light the slow match. “Foolish, rash red drafter,” the giist said, glancing down at Gavin’s misbuttoned shirt. “You should always spend the extra to buy a mag torch in your own color.”

“I did,” Gavin said.

The giist’s eyes snapped from the white torch to Gavin’s eyes. Even through the buggy eye cover and the frozen luxin face, Gavin read realization in every line of the giist’s body.

Before it could move, Gavin leapt forward with an insane scream.

Taken off guard, the giist lost concentration on the luxin hand holding the mag torch, and that hand disintegrated, dropping the flaming brand. The giist didn’t forget its great sword or the pistol, though. It lifted the blade to impale Gavin, raised the pistol.

Drafting parrying sticks of blue luxin in each hand, Gavin slapped the blade aside. He flung the giist’s hands wide. Letting the parrying sticks disintegrate, he drafted. A narrow blue blade sprang from his palm. He stepped close, inside the blue wight’s arms even as the pistol’s hammer clicked and the match slapped down. He slammed blade and palm into the giist’s chest, its carapace yielding with a popping sound. Gavin shed the remaining blue luxin with a flick of his arms and pulled in the hottest sub-reds he could handle into each hand. Flames curled around his fists as he clenched them.

The pistol roared and went spinning harmlessly out of the giist’s hand.

It staggered back, but Gavin stepped in close once again. He threw two quick jabs, left hand to the giist’s right eye, right hand to its left eye. The blue bug-eye lenses cracked, melted, releasing a quick burst of resin and chalk smells. It all happened so fast the blue wight couldn’t resist. Blues were slow to react when they found their presuppositions were wrong.

Broken, the giist sank, sat, tried to catch itself, and fell on the sand. Despite its solid blue lidless eyes, despite the burned skin and the crosshatched blue luxin through the cut on its cheek, to Gavin it looked abruptly human once more.

The startled look in those broken-haloed eyes.

The red red blood spilling down its chest.

And suddenly, the figure looked more like a man than like the monster that Gavin had found standing over Sevastian’s bed all those years ago, the window broken open behind him, light gleaming off blue skin and red blood.

Gavin took a deep, unsteady breath. He’d stopped it this time. No innocents had died. And there was one decency left to extend, not because Rondar Wit deserved it, but in spite of the fact that he didn’t.

“You gave the full measure, Rondar Wit. Your service will not be forgotten, but your failures are blotted out, forgotten, erased. I give you absolution. I give you freedom. I—”

“Dazen!” the giist shouted, hands clutching its wound, writhing.

Gavin was so startled he lost his place in the funerary rite.

“Dazen leads us, and the Color Prince is his strong right hand.” The giist laughed, blood flecking his segmented blue lips.

“Dazen’s dead,” Gavin said, his gut twisting.

“Light cannot be chained, Prism. Not even by you. You’re the heretic, not…” And then the darkness of death closed over the giist at last.