The Black Prism

Chapter 75

When Gavin opened his eyes, it was bright out. There was a figure sitting beside his bed. He looked at her. His mother.

“Oh, thank Orholam. I thought I was awake,” Gavin said.

Felia Guile laughed, and he knew he wasn’t dreaming. His mother’s laughter sounded somehow freer than it had in years. “It’s almost noon, son. I know I hardly have to lecture you on duty, but you really should get up.”

“Noon?” Gavin sat bolt upright. It was a mistake. His whole body hurt. His head hurt. His eyes hurt. He held himself still while the hammer blows to the back of his head receded from ten-weight sledges to five-weight sledges and his eyes found focus once more. He usually didn’t get lightsick—but then, he’d never used so much magic as he had yesterday, either. Not since Sundered Rock, and he’d been young then. “It’s almost noon on Sun Day?” he asked.

“We thought it best to spare you greeting the sun and the dawn processional. It was going be a more informal Sun Day this year, regardless. Orholam will forgive us.”

“Mother, what are you doing here?”

“It’s time… Gavin.”

“Time?”

“For my Freeing.”

Gavin felt a wave of cold dread course down his body from head to toe. No. Not his mother. She’d said sometime in the next five years. She’d given him time to prepare, but it couldn’t be this early. “Father?” he asked instead.

She folded her hands in her lap, her voice holding quiet dignity. “Your father has made far too many decisions for me. The Freeing is between a drafter and Orholam.”

“So he doesn’t know,” Gavin said.

“I’m sure he knows by now,” she said, a little sparkle in her eyes.

“You ran away?” And that would have been what it was, too. She would have slipped out at night, bribed a ship captain some obscene amount, and gone before Andross Guile’s spies could even report back. She would have chosen the fastest ship in port so that even if Andross sent a ship with the next tide, his men would still arrive too late. It was, Gavin had to admit, brilliant.

And it would not go over well with Andross Guile. Not at all.

She was quiet for a long moment. “Son, I’ve told your father I wished to join the Freeing every year for the last five years. He forbade it. I can feel myself slipping away. I haven’t drafted for three years, and my life feels gray. I love your father dearly, but he’s always been a very selfish man. Andross wants to hold on to his life and his power forever, and he doesn’t want to be alone. I… pity him, son, and I’ve given him these years for the love we once shared. You know I’m loyal, but we both know he’ll see this as a betrayal. And I know that he’ll blame you rather than himself, but if I have to choose between my duty to your father and my duty to Orholam…”

“Orholam wins.”

She patted his knee. “I’ve sent a courier to Corvan Danavis—”

“Corvan’s alive? At the wall, I was afraid…”

She smiled sadly. “He’s well. But your defenders lost the wall, despite your heroics.”

My heroics. Only his mother could talk about his heroics without a hint of irony in her voice. What would you think about that, down in your prison, brother?

“Anyway, I’ve sent a courier to let him know you’re awake. I’m glad to see him again. He’s a good man.” She knew, of course, that Corvan had taken a life in exile in order for Gavin’s masquerade to work, but as always, she was circumspect, just in case there were spies eavesdropping. Gavin’s mother had always had a gift for figuring out how to live her life and let her opinions be known despite the pressures of court life and the demands of protocol, secrecy, and discretion. “I’ll see you tonight, son.”

Gavin got dressed slowly after she left, testing his body to see if he’d done any permanent damage with yesterday’s exertions. He was sore, but he surely deserved worse. His muscles would loosen up as the day progressed, and he thought he’d be ready to draft the necessities this evening. Past noon on a Sun Day.

There was a quick little flurry of light knocks on the door, the tempo of an old song he and Corvan used to enjoy. The door opened.

Corvan came in. “You’re up.” He sounded surprised.

“Not much the worse for wear. Thanks for letting me sleep in, but you know you need my help today. What’s the situation?” Gavin was lacing up his shirt.

Corvan grabbed Gavin’s face in both of his hands and stared in his eyes. Gavin slapped his hands to knock them away, but Corvan held him firmly.

“What the hell are you doing?” Gavin demanded.

“You should be dead,” Corvan said. “Do you remember how much you drafted yesterday?”

“I remember it vividly, thank you, including quite a headache that you’re not making any better.”

After staring for a few more moments, Corvan released him. “I’m sorry, Lord Prism. They say there are signs when a Prism starts dying. I have no idea what they are, but I figured if anything would break you, it would be what you did yesterday. Even a Prism shouldn’t be able to draft that much. But your eyes look fine.”

Gavin shrugged it off. “How did we lose the wall?”

Corvan blew out a breath. “Rask Garadul is either brilliant and crazy, or just crazy, that’s how.”

“So no one shot that moron as he charged the gate?”

“They got lucky. I think you scared both sides half to death with… with what you did. The snipers were shaking so hard they couldn’t hit an easy target. Then, when the men saw that Rask was charging and you had fallen, they thought you were dead—that he’d somehow defeated you. The Blackguards pulled out to take you to safety and most of the best Tyreans we had had already been killed in the fighting.” He pinched his nose between his eyes. Tension headaches. Gavin had forgotten how Corvan always got those when there was fighting to be done. Gavin could imagine it now—the Prism down, the elite Blackguards suddenly pulling out, and the enemy charging as if unfazed by all Gavin had done. No wonder the Tyreans had lost courage.

“So King Garadul’s men joined his charge and what… our men melted? Got massacred? What?”

“They actually held the gate for a few minutes. They bungled the troop refresher maneuvers I tried to teach them, though.” That was when fresh musketeers with loaded weapons would switch with the frontline troops. “But they were passing loaded muskets up the ranks, handing back fired muskets to be reloaded. They were losing ground, but not fast, and the wall defenses were holding. It was getting dark—I thought we were going to hold it.”

“And then?”

“They ran out of powder.” He sighed. Gavin could tell that the general took it as a personal failure. “There was plenty elsewhere, of course. I’d sent men to take care of it, but… war happens.” Confusion, or spies, or the couriers being killed, or the wagon men who were supposed to bring the black powder forward deserting, on top of officers not checking back in and double-checking that the orders had been followed, either through their own inexperience or cowardice or death. Any link in the entire chain could break with an army in which few men had trained at all, and few units had trained together. It was simply that the supply of black powder was the link that had broken.

Of course, that wouldn’t have mattered if Gavin had built the damned gate first. Or if he’d been stronger. Or if that cannonball hadn’t crashed through his forms. But second-guessing was futile.

“Our defenders broke and ran,” Corvan said. “King Garadul didn’t send anyone after us. I managed a fairly orderly retreat for the men in the wall. I suppose Garadul thinks we’ll surrender. Maybe he thought mercy would accomplish his objectives more quickly than wiping out as many men as he could. Or he didn’t want his men killing each other in the darkness. Or he’s devout and this new religion of his forbids night fighting.”

“Old religion, I think,” Gavin said.

“They’re not giving any sign of attacking today.”

“Sun Day is holy even to pagans,” Gavin said.

“So we have until tomorrow. What do you want to do, Lord Prism?”

“When you thought I was incapacitated, what did you decide to do?”

“Whatever goodwill King Garadul gained in the city by sparing the men who fled yesterday, he more than lost by using color wights in battle. The city is wild with tales of monsters. They’re terrified. Two days ago, I was worried they would turn against us in a heartbeat. They watched you build a wall to protect them, and they saw what you were protecting them from. So now they trust you and they revile the man who slaughtered their friends with the help of abominations. This whole city is yours. If you show your face, they’ll follow you to the gates of the evernight.”

“Corvan. The question.”

Corvan rubbed his neck. Hesitated. “We can’t win. The old stone wall around the city couldn’t keep out a determined mule. Rask took most of our gunpowder when he took the wall, and all of our cannons. Half our muskets were left on the field as men dropped them when they fled. We’d be lucky to kill a few thousand before they took the inner wall, and once we start fighting street to street, we could kill quite a few at some choke points, but eventually their numbers guarantee it will be a slaughter. With their numbers and our lack of matériel, this city is indefensible. There’s no strategy I can imagine in which we win. We can hurt them badly while we lose, but that’s not the same.” He grimaced. “I was preparing a retreat.”

“A retreat.” Corvan Danavis had never lost a battle—well, if one didn’t count Sundered Rock as a loss, which Gavin didn’t. If you mean to lose, and you do, in exactly the way you intended, it’s not really a loss, is it?

“Even a retreat is beset with unforeseen difficulties, Lord Prism. The presence of the ‘monsters’ that put everyone in the city on our side also means everyone in the city wants out. They think they’ll be slaughtered and eaten if they stay, and there’s no way we can evacuate so many people with the ships and the time we have.”

Gavin rubbed his forehead. Threw on his ceremonial white cloak. Stalled, basically. “Have our spies reported anything about Karris?” he asked, trying to sound disinterested. Not that Corvan would be fooled.

“Still alive as of yesterday. I imagine he was planning to use her to barter with, if he needed to.” Which now, of course, he wouldn’t. Meaning Karris had become expendable. Corvan didn’t have to say it aloud.

“Kip or Liv or Ironfist?” If Gavin had been thinking, or a little less self-centered, he’d have asked about Corvan’s daughter first.

“No word,” Corvan said. His jaw was tight.

“Which could be good news, right? If they’d done anything disastrous, our spies would be more likely to hear about it, right?”

Corvan didn’t say anything for a while, refusing to take such weak solace. He wasn’t a man to grasp after straws or to believe that tragedy couldn’t befall him. The deaths of two wives had cured him of idealism. “Our spies did report that there’s some kind of king of the color wights, a polychrome wight. They’re calling him Lord Omnichrome. No word on who he was before breaking the Pact—unless he’s a true wild polychrome.”

Gavin shrugged. Just another problem among hundreds, but he knew Corvan was laying all the potential problems on the table so Gavin could make his own choices about what was and was not important.

“What do you want to do, Lord Prism?”

He meant about the battle or the evacuation, of course.

“I want to kill Rask Garadul.”

Corvan said nothing, didn’t move to order an assassination or something similarly stupid.

Damn him, but Gavin’s father had predicted even this. If you lose the city, kill Rask Garadul, Andross Guile had said. Gavin had been sure he could save the city—and hadn’t arranged assassins to kill Rask. He should have done both. Too late now, unless Rask charged him tomorrow as foolishly as he had done yesterday.

Gavin moved to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. He cleared his throat, trying to remove the taste of failure. “I’ll help as much as I can while performing my religious duties, but…” He cleared his throat again. Seven years, seven great purposes. Here I was trying to do something good for once. “I’ve failed, Corvan. Order the evacuation.”