by Brent Weeks
"Alone?"
He looked surprised at the question. "Everyone else was dead," he said.
Except for one young family, not ten paces from the stairs. Had Corvan fought at all, or had he immediately retreated downstairs and locked the door behind himself, dooming the townsfolk to fiery death? The soldiers had carried away their dead, and the fires had obscured most of the evidence of battle in the temple, so Karris couldn't know for sure.
"So this is where you tell me how you used the most flammable luxin to escape a fire," Karris said.
"Do you know why you blow on a flame when you're starting a campfire?" Corvan asked. He didn't wait for Karris to answer. "Because fire needs to breathe. I'm a monochrome, Lady White Oak. We have to be more creative than near-polychromes like you."
"Just tell me what you did," Karris said. How did he know she was nearly a poly? She was still trying to decide if it was even possible that this could be General Danavis. In this backwater? And from a Blood Forester family? The eyes and freckles spoke of Blood Forester heritage, but with that skin? Of course, he had grown up in a noble family, and a family breeding its sons for war. The perfect combination for a warrior drafter was black skin with blue eyes. Even caramel skin was far better than pale Blood Forester skin to give a warrior an extra fraction of a second before their opponents knew what color they were drafting. So it was possible. Noble families had certainly married off their daughters and sons for lesser reasons. Fearing that your children wouldn't look like natives of their own land might move far down the list of concerns when pure survival was at stake.
"When I went downstairs," Corvan continued, "I knew they'd come after me, so I covered every surface in the room with red luxin. I sealed the room completely and coated myself in the luxin as well. When the soldiers came in, I closed the door behind them and set it all afire. The conflagration devoured all the air in the room, and both the fire and the soldiers died." So that was why the red luxin had had a crust rather than burning away cleanly. No air.
"And the tubes?" Karris had crashed through some tubes when she'd fallen.
"They led outside. So I could breathe."
"So why didn't you leave after you killed them?"
He stared hard at her. "Because if I didn't wait until every last ember burned itself out, I'd be inviting the entire room to explode. As you might have noticed when you brought burning embers with you and made the entire room explode."
Oh.
"Why is King Garadul gathering an army?" Karris said. "Why now?"
"To assert himself, I'd imagine. New king, wants to show he's tough. Does it have to be more complicated? Rask Garadul was always a crazy little bastard."
"If you really are Corvan Danavis, you just lied to me," Karris said. A general of Corvan's standing would have been delving into the possible strategies Rask might be pursuing. A general with Corvan's record of success would have come up with a dozen already.
Corvan paused, and if anything, Karris thought he looked pleased. "So little Karris White Oak is all grown up," Corvan said. "Joined the Blackguard, and now a Chromeria spy."
"What are you talking about?" Karris said. She felt like she'd been hit in the stomach.
"The only question is, who wants to kill you, Karris? Not only are you more conspicuous in Tyrea than even I am, what with that fine hair and fair skin, but you of all people? They sent you? Here?"
"Why shouldn't I be here? I came to research the southern desert reds-"
"Seriously, Karris. Don't demean us both. At the very least, I'm an enemy of your enemy. You're here for information. I'll give it, but not if you lie to me. If you go unprepared against these people, you'll die."
He could have killed her in the church, Karris realized. Or he could have left her and let the fire do it. Corvan did have a sterling reputation, even among his enemies, and she needed to know what he knew. She surrendered, lifting her open hands. She winced. Ow, her left arm was killing her. "Why can't I be here?" she asked.
"Do you have any idea what happened to all the men and women who fought for Dazen?" Corvan asked.
"They went home."
"It's always harder for the losers to go home. Dazen's armies were a motley bunch. A lot of bad men, and some good ones who'd been wronged."
"Like you," Karris interjected sarcastically.
"This isn't about me. Point is, a lot of us couldn't go home. Some went to Green Haven; the Aborneans accepted a few small communities, and the Ilytians claimed to be willing to take anyone, but the only thing anyone got from them was a clipped ear."
Karris shuddered. It was how the Ilytians marked slaves. They heated shears red-hot and cut the slave's left ear nearly in half. The scar tissue kept the ear from ever fusing back together and made it easy to identify who was a slave.
"Some of us were more fortunate," Corvan said. "Our armies raged back and forth across this land for a few months, and the people here had no reason to love either side. We wiped out whole villages. Those that survived had nothing but young children, old men, and a few women. Most of the towns reviled the soldiers, and where former soldiers tried to stay by force, Rask's father, Satrap Perses Garadul, wiped them out. But a few towns realized that if they were ever going to rebuild, they needed men. The alcaldesa of Rekton was one of those. She chose two hundred soldiers and let us stay, and she chose well. A few nearby towns did the same. Other men, of course, became bandits, and even Perses Garadul couldn't hunt all of those down."
"How did you get to stay?" Karris asked. "As a general, you were more responsible for what happened to this country than most."
"My wife was Tyrean. We'd married a few years before the war. She was in Garriston when… when it burned. One of her retainers survived and saved our daughter and brought her to me. So I had a year-old little girl, and the alcaldesa took pity on me. The point is, people around here remember the war a little differently than Gavin's people do."
Not terribly surprising, considering they got the ass-end of the deal.
"They remember it as a fight over a woman," Corvan said blandly.
"That's-that's ridiculous!" Karris spluttered. Orholam have mercy.
"You're a great favorite of artists here. Not that we have many talented ones, but the fair-skinned, exotic beauty with fiery hair still inspires artists good and bad to raptures. Even if most men wouldn't dare believe you were the same woman-you're usually portrayed in a wedding dress, sometimes torn-Rask doubtless owns paintings by talented artists who'd actually seen you."
"It wasn't like that," Karris said.
"But it makes a good story."
"A good story?"
"Good tragic. Good interesting. Not good happy." Corvan cleared his throat. "I can't believe you don't know this."
"There are almost no Tyreans on the Jaspers now. And no one speaks to me of those days."
Corvan looked on the edge of saying something, but he held his tongue. Finally, he said, "So the question is, who would send you to our new King Garadul, knowing that he would surely recognize you, and what did they hope to achieve by delivering you into his hands?"
The White. The White betrayed me? Why?
Chapter 34
It had been a long morning already. Gavin had woken painfully early to reach the coast by the dawn, and then had skimmed as soon as he'd been able to draft the sun's first rays. Then he'd sculled to Cannon Island and made an unpleasant, claustrophobic trip through the escape tunnel, leaving him dirty, sweaty, sore, and deprived of sleep. But there was no other option than to push; not after what the color wight had told him.
The tunnel met the Chromeria at a disused storage room in the basement, three levels underground. There was a plain closet set in the back of one of the rooms, and a hidden door in the back of that closet. Gavin grabbed a lantern from a hook, twisted the flint, and was gratified to see it light instantly. He released the luxin he'd been holding into two puddles on the floor that quickly dissolved-no need to terrify anyone he ran into-and slipped into t
he closet.
The hidden door closed smoothly behind him. He opened the closet door. A hand's breadth, then it stopped, blocked. With the light of the lantern only cutting through the little crack, he couldn't see what the problem was. He reached through the crack into the darkness. Polished wood greeted his fingertips, smooth and straight, then more, right on top of it. Chairs.
Well, that was the problem of a super-secret door hidden in a disused storage room, wasn't it? Sometimes people saw a disused storage room and thought it should be used to store things.
Sighing, Gavin set down the lamp and braced his shoulder against the door. He pushed, hard, harder. The door slid another hand's breadth or two as the stacked chairs shifted, then stuck fast. He glanced at the lantern, drafted a green wand, and stuck a blob of red luxin to the end. He lit the red with sub-red and poked his narrow torch through the gap, holding it high. He poked his head through the gap after it.
The entire room was packed with furniture, as if half a dozen lecture halls and dining areas had been cleared out and everything put in here. Dear Orholam. Gavin swore quietly. The only clearance was down at floor level. The only way out was to crawl between the legs of the chairs and tables.
There was nothing for it. Unless Gavin wanted to start a fire, draft huge amounts, and obliterate everything in the room so he could simply walk out-not terribly discreet-he was going to be mopping the floor with his body. Great. He let the luxin torch disintegrate and started crawling.
Ten minutes later, he stood. He didn't try to brush the dust from his clothing. There wasn't much point. He was muddy with dust, that's how much dust there was, along with damp floors and sweat and dust he knocked off of the chairs and tables above him. He listened at the door for a full minute, heard nothing.
Stepping into the hall lightly, he closed the door behind himself. He extinguished his lantern with a puff; the halls were brightly lit. Even three floors below the sea, the cherry glims (the red-drafting second- to fourth-year students) were expected to keep the lamps fueled with red luxin. The storeroom, wisely, was set almost at the end of one of the long hallways. Gavin ducked down to the lift at the end, mere paces away.
The lifts had to serve the entire Chromeria, which meant they had to be serviceable by slaves or the dims, the newest students. So it was entirely mechanical. As anyone stepped into the lift, a scale would indicate how many counterweights were needed. If a drafter chose to use less counterweight, she would have to pull herself up the rope, albeit only lifting a fraction of her own weight. If she used more counterweight than her own weight, it could be difficult to stop at the correct floor. A central lift handled all the heavier loads and moved entire classes, while these side lifts took smaller loads. Additionally, each lift bay had numerous slots and ropes so that ambassadors wouldn't have to wait while dozens of dims made their way to class.
Gavin grabbed the second to the last rope. Secrecy meant he couldn't take the last one, though if someone saw and recognized him, they would wonder why he wasn't taking the lift reserved for a man of his rank, so it was probably a wash as to which way was more discreet. He drafted a brake, threw the lever to double his own weight, and kicked the release.
He flew upward at great speed. Though he started deep beneath the earth, the lifts were brightly lit. At the top of each chute were holes to the outside, and mounted there were highly polished mirrors from Atash that sent natural light down the chutes for as long as the sun was visible to that chute each day. Adjusting the mirrors every few minutes was another fun job for the dims, and every evening they would have to crank all the counterweights back into place. Gavin could remember doing that himself. As memories went, it wasn't a terribly pleasant one.
The lift didn't go all the way to his chamber near the top of the Chromeria, of course. That would be far too convenient-or, as the Blackguards preferred to say, insecure. No reason to give assassins a direct path to the Prism or anyone else important. Instead, after whizzing upward at high speed halfway up the Chromeria, zipping past students and magisters and servants and slaves so fast that they had no chance to see who was in such a hurry, Gavin threw the brake.
He stopped at the top of the chute and stepped out in front of the guard station that protected this floor. There were four men here, guards, not Blackguards, all looking up from their dice guiltily. Apparently they hadn't noticed the whizzing rope until too late. Their mouths hung open at the sight of him, Gavin Guile himself, sweaty, dirty, and here.
"Tell you what," Gavin said, tucking the brake into his belt. "You keep this quiet and I will too." He stared significantly at their dice and the coins on their table. Guarding the lift at this high a floor had to be boring, but Luxlord Black wouldn't be pleased to learn that his soldiers were gambling on duty.
Four heads bobbed as one. Gavin stepped into the next lift, which was right next to the one he'd exited, and got in his accustomed position. This time, he chose a more human speed.
There were two Blackguards guarding the lift at his level, and these men weren't dicing. They were barely even blinking. Both had their spears in hand, knees lightly bent, spectacles on.
When the Blackguards were on duty, they were on duty.
The men snapped salutes and slapped their spears crisply to their shoulders, swiveling smoothly back into their spots. Gavin walked past and slipped into his room. A bit of superviolet dropped all the shades, giving him light. He pulled a summons chain by his desk and walked over to his bathtub. Today was going to involve a lot of diplomacy, but most importantly, it was going to involve his brother, and there was no way he could appear before Dazen disheveled. It might be interpreted as weakness. He opened the tap, tested the water, and heated it with sub-red.
He was starting to take off his clothes when the door opened and his room slave Marissia walked in. She'd been captured during the war between Ruthgar and the Blood Foresters. Like most of her people, she was red-haired and freckled, eyes like jade. Karris had Blood Forester blood. Gavin had never thought it a coincidence that his room slave was a young, pretty girl from the Blood Forest. The White had hoped, doubtless, to dull some of his appetites that had caused so much trouble before the war. The girl had even been a virgin when she came to serve him ten years ago, which meant that the Ruthgari who'd captured her had had more of a taste for gold than flesh.
Marissia helped him strip off his filthy clothes and piled them to take them for laundering. Then Gavin stepped in the bath. "I have messages for you," she said. "Are you ready to take them?"
Gavin held a hand out, telling her to wait, then sighed as he slipped into the hot water. Messages, demands, barely a minute to think.
"Call a meeting of the full Spectrum. When do you think is the earliest possible, Marissia?"
Marissia had already loosened the laces of her dress, and now she pulled it and her shift over her head, folding them right side out next to the tub. If there was one skill Marissia hadn't mastered in her ten years serving Gavin, it was pretending that the rest of the world ceased to exist when there was the possibility of making love with him. She would bathe with Gavin, she would make love with Gavin if he wanted to, but she wouldn't let her hair get wet, and afterward she would pick up her perfectly folded dress, slip it on in a moment, and be on to her next duty. Marissia was many excellent things, but "abandoned to the moment" wasn't one of them.
"Luxlords Blue and Yellow are over on Big Jasper today," she said, picking up soap and a washcloth. "Yellow has family visiting and is hiding out in one of the taverns. Black is working on his ledger and swearing at anyone within a league, and Red is likely in the kitchens. So far as I know, the others are in their normal places on Little Jasper."
For as pretty as she was-and how the White had obviously chosen her because she looked like Karris-the most surprising thing about Marissia was how competent she was. She knew everything, and carried everything she knew right at her fingertips. Gavin had taken great care to win her full loyalty, knowing there was no way he could keep h
is prisoner's existence secret from his room slave-not forever-and knowing full well that she'd been sent to spy on him by the White.
Gavin's options had been simple: to let a succession of room slaves parade through his chambers, getting rid of each quickly, hoping that they didn't have enough time to discover his secret, or win one's loyalty completely. Karris didn't like Marissia, but she ignored her. It would have been ten times worse if Gavin had a new room slave every month-and doing so would doubtless also have meant that over time he was allowing a spy for every noble family to ransack his room and report the most intimate details about him to all the satrapies.
Besides, he needed someone to throw bread down the chute when he was gone.
Still, the White had shown impeccable taste in choosing Marissia. Though her body was nearly as familiar as his own after ten years, it was still a joy to see her lean curves. She slid into the tub behind him, holding soap and a washcloth, and began washing his back and shoulders.
"Tonight, then, after dinner. Let the White know I would like to see her in an hour."
"Yes, Lord Prism. Is there anything else before I give you the messages?"
"Go ahead."
"Your father wishes to speak with you."
Gavin gritted his teeth. "He'll have to wait." He lifted an arm as Marissia scrubbed his armpit.
"And the White wishes to remind you that you promised to teach that cohort of superviolets when you returned."