by Brent Weeks
How was he the only man who saw what he was?
There were no answers to be found in the waning stars. Like there were no gods, no Orholam, no light in the witching hour.
He could survive this, couldn’t he? Maybe if Ana Jorvis had been a slave. She wasn’t. Her father owned more than half of the barges that plied the Great River, and her mother was Arys of the Greenveils’s sister. Arys, the Sub-red. A former ally, passionate, and not averse to war. Arys had loved Ana. Arys would make destroying the man who’d murdered her niece her life’s work. With her passion and the recklessness that only having a couple of years of life left engendered? Hell, even Gavin losing her votes on the Spectrum meant…
Nothing was possible. It was all over.
The sun finally gripped the horizon with bloodied fingernails and pulled itself up. Gavin walked over to the great crystal mounted on its swivel and as the sunlight finally descended on him like Orholam’s heavy hand, he pulled off his shimmercloak and dropped it at his feet, then pulled off the dust cover and put his hands onto the great cold rock.
He extended himself, feeling, sensing the light. He couldn’t see the blue, but he could feel it. It wasn’t precisely out of balance-blue was about equal with red right now-but it was out of control. It felt uneven, a checkerboard of total chaos and excruciating control. He could feel a knot, though, tiny, far out into the Cerulean Sea, maybe not even in physical form yet, knitting itself back together, floating like one of the fabled glaciers from the great seas beyond the Everdark Gates. Gavin had destroyed the bane, but it would never be finished. In six months, there would be another. He could destroy bane after bane, but they would slowly heal, build themselves anew-until a real Prism tamed them again.
Then he felt the green. There was no order there, no clear checkerboard. Green was running rampant, but only in random streaks. The Verdant Plains were blooming now, in autumn, because a huge streak of verdure covered them. Then, gaps. Huge blooms of algae in the sea, empty spaces, and then another knot, just forming to the southwest. Where was that?
Orholam. Just outside Ru. Right in the path of the Color Prince’s advancing army.
Both… knots-whatever they were-were very slowly growing.
Putting his will into the great crystal, Gavin tried to balance, tried to impose the happy harmony on the entire world, as he had done so many times before.
This was what he was made for. This was what he had done, over and over, not even needing the crystal. This was his genius, his purpose, his aristeia!
Nothing. Vacuum. Emptiness. Lack. He was merely a man, merely a man pushing on a rock as if he thought he could squeeze liquid dreams out of it by wishing. A fool.
It was over. He was finished. A Prism who couldn’t balance was nothing, and without a Prism who could balance, the world was doomed. The problems would only get worse. Things would go back to the way they had been before Lucidonius: gods being born, drafters flocking to the god of their color, trying to become gods themselves, and every god at war with every other, the world itself torn by massive storms that lasted decades, the sea choked and dead, monstrous beasts roaming the plains, glaciers spilling through the mountains to abut directly on deserts. Starvation, privation, and constant war over scarce resources that might disappear completely in the very next year. Nations broken down to tribes and clans. Cities burned. Libraries burned. Civilization ended.
If only half of what they said the world was like without Prisms was true, it would be a cataclysm to dwarf all others. Gavin sat and wrapped himself in the warmth of the cloak, drifting in and out of consciousness.
And slowly it came to him. In this insane world where nothing was as it was supposed to be, Gavin Guile wasn’t the only Prism. The tightness in his chest told him what he had to do.
Even my selfishness must have an end.
Gavin stood, turned his back on the light, and went to see his brother.
Chapter 81
Dazen knew time was against him. Surely Gavin must have some way of knowing when he broke through his prisons.
Gavin. Dazen? Even I’m confused.
Dazen, though younger, had always been the smarter brother. Well, I’m Dazen now. And I’ll outsmart you this time.
Dazen considered the easy way first. He could lay a plank of sealed green luxin on top of the hellstone in the hallway. So long as the luxin was sealed, the hellstone wouldn’t leach it, at least not quickly. If done in many layers and many trips, he should be able to take green all the way to the next prison. If the next hallway was as long as the first, given how weak Dazen was now, it would probably be two or three days’ work.
Did he have two or three days? He’d taken months to get this far, what was a couple more days?
He didn’t know. Maybe it would be all the difference in the world. Maybe Gavin had met some grisly end out there, and it made no difference at all.
Did Gavin think that his prisoner would be so inflamed by green that he would just charge down the hallway, like a mad dog seeking freedom?
No, that wasn’t how Gavin worked. He would know that Dazen, having been tricked into losing his luxin when he moved between the blue prison and the green one, would be extra cautious here. Surely the first thing Gavin would have thought of was the first thing Dazen was thinking of now.
And having thought of it, Gavin would have a plan. Gavin would have some kind of trap waiting. Once Dazen moved down that hallway, something would happen that would rob him of the green luxin.
So Dazen sat, thinking. The trigger on the trap-for surely, surely, there must be a trap-might be at any point in that hellstone tunnel. Until Dazen had a plan, he’d be a fool to go into the tunnel looking for it.
And he’d be a fool to sit too long waiting and planning. Gavin could be back at any moment. Coming to visit, coming to gloat. How Dazen wanted to smash that monster’s grinning face in!
He sat and ate, casting his mind about, searching, searching.
Knowing it was second best, he got up after a while and stood at the mouth of that tunnel to hell, the tunnel to the yellow prison. Very carefully and very slowly, he drafted and sealed a long thin stick out of green luxin. He probed the mouth of the tunnel, looking for tripwires concealed in the darkness.
No, this was hopeless. If he was paranoid, he’d never get out of here. He had to act boldly, had to take his own fate in his hands and smash through Gavin’s plans, destroy them. He couldn’t let himself be trapped here. He had to go, now! He had to Slow down, Dazen. That’s the green talking. You’re weak, the luxin has more power over you when you’re exhausted and sick.
Dazen released the green, emptied himself of it completely.
Without it, he felt wrung out, unbearably tired. No, the weakness was too great. If he didn’t take the green again, he’d sleep, and sleeping, he’d give Gavin time to come back But if he took the green, he’d do something stupid, just as Gavin expected. He’d fall right into the next trap, and that might leave him in a worse place than ever before. A yellow prison could well be unbreakable. He’d been lucky in the green. Gavin had made a mistake, letting him get blue bread. Dazen couldn’t count on that twice. He needed to make that one mistake count.
He imagined Gavin coming back down here, grinning that lopsided grin at him, taunting Wait. Gavin came down here. When Gavin came down here, he had to traverse this geometrical space.
Even without luxin, Dazen felt a burst of energy, life. Gavin came down here. That meant he had tunnels. He came close enough that he could talk to Dazen. That meant those tunnels were very, very close.
If Dazen could find one of those tunnels, he wouldn’t simply get past the yellow prison, he’d break out of all of the prisons. He didn’t have to break out of each in turn, he could simply leave.
Salvation was that close. His heart leapt. His heart burned within him. It was as if his fever was still burning him.
No, this was real joy. It had been so long since he’d felt it, he almost didn’t recognize the giddy, skitt
ish thing. He laughed aloud. Then he started moving around the chamber surrounding the great green egg that had been his prison, knocking on the walls.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tonk.
Tonk, tonk, tonk. The hollow sound was like a choir singing the Sun Day salutations.
Just to be sure, just to be careful, Dazen checked the rest of the chamber. Nothing. This one section, almost four paces long, was the thinnest. He looked for hidden hinges, but he couldn’t find any. Not that he expected them. After the prison was finished, Gavin doubtless would have fully sealed the tunnel. No reason to leave a weakness where Dazen might find it.
Going back to the green cell was like going back to scoop up his own vomit and eat it. But back he went. Shivering with revulsion, he clambered through the hole he’d made and grabbed the husk of his blue bread.
He’d left all of the crust, broken open now to give him the maximum surface from which to draft.
He climbed back out of the green cell, but stood in its light. It took him another quarter of an hour to draft enough blue. It was a relief, though, when it came. The clarity of blue was a boon. He’d lived with blue for sixteen years, and he needed it. With the blue slowly filling him, he became aware once again of how fragile his health was. It had only been months since his fever had passed. The nasty cut across his chest had mostly healed in a nasty scar. His body had won the fight against the infection, but that didn’t mean he was up to full strength.
He didn’t know how long he had. He needed to blast the wall open, draft green for the necessary strength, and go as fast and far as he could. Once he found a safe place, he could worry about healing. It was a gamble, and his blue self hated gambles, but this was a gamble he had to play or die.
He thought of going back to the stone wall to knock again, to double-check, but he didn’t need to. He’d drafted blue for so long that he could practically see lines overlaying his vision that denoted the exact outline of the hollow space. He could envision the probable thickness of the stone. It was granite, and from some class he’d taken as a boy and had thought long lost, he remembered how granite broke.
That was blue for you, dredging up details from your own mind that you couldn’t believe you remembered. Granite broke in predictable wedges, Xs at sixty degrees and one hundred twenty degrees. Of course, the blue couldn’t tell him at what angle those wedges lay to him. So he braced himself and grasped his right wrist in his left hand. He gathered his will. The first missile would need to be about the size of his thumb or the granite might not crack and show him the appropriate angles.
He took a deep breath and gave the short, sharp cry. It tightened stomach, chest, and diaphragm, gave tension and a stable firing platform, and a small animal boost to the will. Mechanics meets the beast.
The blue bullet burst from him and smashed into the wall, in and through with a small explosion of granite dust and granite shrapnel.
No alarm sounded. At least none that he could hear. Dazen strode to the wall. It was too dark to see the hole well, but he traced his fingers around it, felt the fractures. Aha, tilted about twelve degrees.
His blue-enhanced mind laid the lines out easily, compensated for the angles, picked out lines along which it would fracture, and exactly where he would have to shoot the next missiles to make the hole big enough to climb through.
Taking his place back far enough that he wouldn’t get hit with the shrapnel but would still easily hit his targets, Dazen braced himself, one foot back, turned, both hands up. Each hand would shoot two missiles simultaneously: there and… there.
He shouted, and the missiles blasted out from him, hitting the wall in a blue explosion as parts of the luxin were torn back into light. Dust filled the tunnel, and Dazen choked on it, feeling suddenly empty. He staggered over to the green cell and drew in liquid life.
Looking at the hunks of blue bread at his feet, he had the passing thought that he should draft in blue as well, at least some, some thread-he ate the bread. There’d be plenty more blue where he was going. He needed the strength.
A tiny part of him protested, but it was little, and weak.
He pushed through the dark hole into the dark tunnel. He drafted imperfect green into his hand. Green made lousy torches, and even in the state he was in, he knew not to use all of his luxin up just to make it slightly brighter.
The tunnel-Gavin’s tunnel-was simple, rough-hewn. It was a workspace, barely wide enough for a man. Not really wide enough for a man with a torch, if he didn’t want to risk burning the hell out of himself. Of course.
Gavin would have used a luxin torch. Bastard.
Dazen hesitated once inside the tunnel. One way might gently slope up, and the other seemed to gently slope down, but he couldn’t be certain. His instinct was to choose the upward direction, but when he thought about it rationally, there was no guarantee that simply because this one tiny section of tunnel had a slope that the slope continued all the way to the surface. Really, he had no idea which way was out. If he went the wrong way, of course, he could simply turn around, but he’d be wasting time. Time that might be valuable. And he’d certainly be wasting energy, and even with the green alive inside him, he knew his bucket had holes in the bottom of it. He was emaciated, unhealthy underneath the veneer of wild energy green lent him. So he forced himself to hold still, wait.
The blue saved him. He wasn’t drafting it, but it had changed him in all those years. He stayed still and held his meager green light. The granite dust, still settling from the explosion and still settling from his own passage into the tunnel, now resumed its natural patterns.
There was a slight breeze between the two newly connected passages, too slight for Dazen to feel on his skin, but enough to see the dust slide into the tunnel and… up. If the wind was blowing that way, that was the way that was open. That was his way out.
Dazen went up. Up was good. Up was out.
A sudden sob racked his frame. Up was out. Dear gods. Up was out.
Chapter 82
“Here’s what I’m curious about,” Teia said as they sat down in Kip’s room. She was tired and her hair was askew from training with Karris White Oak. “I think Aram is the second best fighter in the scrubs.”
“He’s the tall kid, muscular?” Kip asked.
“And fast. And a yellow/green bichrome. He’s gotten some unlucky matchups, but I’m wondering if he’s playing sand spider.”
“Sand spider?” Kip asked. She’d said it like it was a saying he should know.
“Hiding in his hole so he can jump out at exactly the right time. He is a yellow. Maybe he thinks that he’s another Ayrad.”
“When you use one reference I don’t know to explain another I don’t know…” Kip said.
“Ayrad was a Blackguard seventy, eighty years ago now. He entered at the bottom of his class, at forty-nine, and each month at testing, he barely made it into the next month. Forty-nine, to thirty-five, to twenty-eight, to fourteen. And then on the last week, he beat everyone. Turned out he’d taken a vow or something.”
“So on the last week, he fought, what? Fourteen to eleven, eleven to eight, eight to five, five to two, and two to one? Orholam’s balls, that’s a lot of fights. I can’t imagine facing the best guy in the class after having already fought four times.” It was one of the controls that the tests had built in. Someone could technically fight from the last place to the first, but because they had to fight again immediately until they stopped winning fight tokens, the exhaustion piled on-and with each new fight, the challenger would be facing someone who was fresh.
“Kip, Ayrad didn’t skip fighters. He beat all of them. From fourteen, he challenged thirteen, from thirteen, twelve.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s the story.” Teia shrugged. “Karris did almost what you said, until she faced Fisk. She finished third, after four fights. And Fisk barely got her, they say.”
With all his study of magic and history and the cards, Kip almost despaire
d as he saw that there was another gigantic area of lore that he hadn’t even touched: the histories of the great Blackguards.
Teia picked up Kip’s slate and began writing on it.
“So how did Lucretia Verangheti take it when she lost you?” Kip asked. “I never even heard how the Red got her to give up your title.”
“I don’t know,” Teia said. “I haven’t seen her since then. Don’t want to.” She shrugged, then pointed to the slate quickly. “This is what I think the true ranking of the Blackguard scrubs should be. What do you think?”
There was something about how she’d glossed over her slavery that caught Kip’s attention, but then he got caught up in looking at the slate. Teia had Cruxer at first, Aram at second (second?), herself at twelfth, and Kip at… eighteenth. He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Um, sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could do better than that.”
“You’re apologizing for the wrong thing,” Kip said. “I don’t belong at eighteenth, do I?” He’d put himself around twentieth.
Teia cleared her throat. “You’re a polychrome, Kip. It makes a big difference. Huge, if you use it right.”
Kip scowled. A polychrome. They’d guessed that for a while. A full-spectrum polychrome? That was different. Totally different. And yet, with missing the practicum every day, he didn’t have nearly the skills he should have. In truth, as Teia had told him, if he really was a full-spectrum polychrome, all sorts of things would be different. They wouldn’t let him be a Blackguard unless Gavin intervened-he was too valuable. And they would want him to marry, young. It still wasn’t understood what made drafters, but enough people believed that drafters had children who could draft that the pressure for drafters to have children was intense. And more intense for the more gifted. Unless you got as powerful as Gavin Guile, and you could do whatever you wanted and everyone else could go to hell.