The black prism l-1

by Brent Weeks

  He held her, weeping. There was no absolution for him. Sevastian was still dead, and her other son rotted in a hell Gavin had created for him. She wouldn't have forgiven that. But he wept and she held him, soothing him like a child once more.

  Then, all too soon, she pushed him back. "It's time," she said. She took a deep breath. "Is it… is it acceptable for me to draft one last time? It's been years."

  "Absolutely," Gavin said, trying to put himself back together. He gestured to the orange panel of the wall.

  She drew in orange luxin. Shivered. Sighed. "It feels like life, doesn't it?" She knelt gracefully. "Remember what I said," she said.

  "Everything," he swore. Even if I don't believe it.

  "It's all right," she said. "You'll believe it someday."

  He blinked.

  Felia Guile chuckled. "You don't get all your smarts from your father, you know."

  "I never doubted it."

  She drew her hair back over her shoulders to give him a clear path to her heart. She placed her hand on his thigh, looked up at him. She let the orange luxin go. "I'm ready," she said.

  "I love you," Gavin said. He took a deep breath. "Felia Guile, you gave the full measure. Your service will not be forgotten, but your failures are hereby blotted out, forgotten, erased. I give you absolution. I give you freedom. Well done, good and faithful servant."

  He stabbed her in the heart. Then he held her, kneeling with her, kissing her face as she died. It was several long minutes before he had the strength to stand and summon the Blackguards.

  When they opened the door, he saw that there were a hundred drafters in the hall, waiting for him. They weren't smiling. The enormous Usef Tep, the Purple Bear, stepped forward. "We didn't want to cause a disturbance while you were with your mother, but sir, we need to talk."

  Sir. Not Lord Prism. Not Gavin.

  So begins the end.

  Chapter 80

  "Kip, whatever happens, stay close to me," Karris whispered, leaning close.

  She said it with a tension and certainty that told Kip something was going to happen. Soon. Though he wanted to, he didn't ask. Their guards were close, though everyone's attention was focused on Lord Rainbow up front and his verbal feces about duty and justice. Kip had long ago stopped paying attention. He was staring at a girl, not ten paces away. Liv.

  He could have sworn she'd been pushing closer to him and Karris for a while, but for the last ten minutes she'd stood as though frozen, listening to Lord Rainbow. The crowd between them moved, and he saw that she was wearing yellow cloth vambraces. Liv was a yellow. It had to be her.

  Kip craned his head around, looking toward Brightwater Wall.

  "Stop acting suspicious," Karris said through gritted teeth. Which left Kip with absolutely zero places to look. If he stared at Liv, that would draw attention to her, the speech disgusted him, he couldn't look at the wall, and when he looked at Karris, he couldn't help but notice her dress. Karris had been thought-freezingly gorgeous when Kip had seen her wrapped in a heavy black cloak over her Blackguard garb. In the thin black dress she was wearing, her beauty ripped Kip's breath out of his chest, stomped on it, and set it on fire. She stood straight, imperious, regal, elegance personified. No one had given her a shawl despite the coolness of the night. In the rising light, Kip could see the gooseflesh on her arms.

  "Cold out, huh?" he said.

  One of their guards snorted.

  "I will beat you to death if you ask for it," Karris said, still staring straight ahead.

  Kip had no idea what she was talking about, or why the guard was laughing. "What did-" He looked down at her chest. Her nipples were clearly defined against the thin silk. Kip gaped just as she looked over and caught him looking.

  "Kip. Dark spectacles are not a license to ogle."

  Will the earth please open and swallow me now? She thought he'd been being snarky about… Oh, Orholam. He was the stupidest boy in history.

  The speech ended without anything special happening. Kip glanced carefully at Karris. She looked toward the east, where the sky was lightening.

  "He's waiting until it's almost dawn," Karris whispered, as their guards pushed them to start walking. "Be ready."

  "He?" Kip asked.

  "Shut it!" the Mirrorman to Kip's left said. He smacked Kip with the butt of his musket.

  Oh, I can make inappropriate jokes on accident, but you've got a problem when I'm just trying to escape?

  At first, Kip couldn't see very well where they were going through the vast crowd. Gradually, though, he saw that the drafters were joining a much larger group that was being addressed by King Garadul.

  Kip lost sight of Liv quickly. The dark spectacles he was wearing made him almost blind. He could see out of the sides if he strained, but it made it impossible to search the crowd. With his hands tied behind his back, there was no way to fix that either.

  Tens of thousands of soldiers surrounded King Garadul. The man was waving his arms, shouting, but Kip could only hear snippets as the drafters joined the outskirts of that group: "cleanse this city… Take back what has been stolen from us… punish…" It sounded pretty grim.

  Again, Kip seemed to be the only person who wasn't hanging on every word, so as the sun rose, first touching Brightwater Wall behind them because it was higher than the plain below, he saw movement on the wall.

  He couldn't see it well around the frame of the spectacles, but the forms of five men-a cannon crew-became three, then in a violent motion two, then just one. The cannon on the wall had been pointed at a high trajectory toward Garriston, but the man was angling it down and down.

  A quick spark.

  Boom!

  The cannon spat fire. Kip didn't see the shell hit, but he felt it. The earth seemed to jump.

  For a moment, no one did anything, thinking it must have been a mistake. Screams of fright and pain. Then Karris collided with him, knocking him off his feet.

  Kip smacked his head as he fell, so at first he wasn't sure if the second explosion was just his imagination.

  "Canister shot!" Karris said. "Shit! We have to move! Ironfist's aiming for that wagon."

  Wagon? Ironfist? Why was Ironfist shooting at them?

  Kip was blinking. Something was strange about his vision-oh! Smacking his head against the ground had knocked one of the black lenses out of the frame of his spectacles.

  "Grab that lens and cut my hands free!" Karris barked.

  They were both lying on the ground, hands bound. The crackle of musket fire filled the air.

  One of the Mirrorman guards grabbed Kip, trying to haul him to his feet.

  Despite lying flat on her back, Karris kicked the back of the man's knee with her left foot. He folded, and by the time he landed on his back her right foot had swept up and then down in an ax kick across his throat. There was a crunch and blood sprayed through the mail flap over the man's mouth.

  Kip could hardly believe what he'd just seen, but Karris was already moving on. She scrambled over the dying man, lying right on top of him. With her hands still behind her back, she drew the man's belt knife a hand's breadth and cut her wrists free.

  "Stop!" a Mirrorman yelled, his musket pointed at Karris's head.

  There was still screaming everywhere. Chaos. Shouting and gunfire and the screams of the dying.

  Kip lashed out, kicking for the Mirrorman's knee as Karris had done seconds before.

  The Mirrorman saw it coming and swung the butt of his musket for Kip's leg-

  – and was flung away like Orholam's own hand had slapped him.

  A concussion, a roar, a pressure so vast Kip's vision went black for an instant. Everyone standing was torn off their feet. Things-Kip couldn't even tell what they were-blasted overhead.

  He must have lost a few seconds. He rolled over, tried to stand, fell. His wrists were bloody, but no longer bound. The acrid aroma of gunpowder filled the air. Bits of wood rained down on the ground.

  When Kip tried to stand again, someo
ne helped him. Not even a hundred paces away where the powder wagon had been, he saw a crater in the ground a good ten paces across and at least two paces deep. Everyone in a huge circle around it was dead.

  Karris turned him around, her mouth moving, skin smudged with powder. He couldn't hear her.

  He saw her mouth a curse as she realized the same thing. He was pretty sure she was mouthing "Ironfist" and a series of curses. She put a musket in his hands and said, slowly enough that Kip could read her lips, "Can you walk?"

  Kip nodded, not sure how much he was hearing her and how much he was reading her lips. She pulled at him and they started jogging. He was still disoriented, but he saw that he wasn't the only one. Dozens of men and women with powder-darkened skin and clothes were staggering around, some of them bleeding from their ears. A man was carrying his left hand in his right hand, looking for the rest of his arm as blood pumped out of his mangled shoulder.

  Teams of soldiers were forming up now and running toward the wall. Others stood back and were firing their muskets at the gun emplacement, but Kip didn't see anyone on top of the wall returning fire.

  Someone was shouting at Kip. Good, so he could hear. He turned.

  He didn't recognize the soldier standing in front of him. "Form up, soldier!" the man shouted. "Move it!"

  They thought he was a soldier because he had a musket. But then, with his powder-blackened clothes, it was no wonder.

  "Come on, soldier, we've got a city to take!"

  There were at least twenty soldiers with the man, and only the officer had a real uniform. Kip shot a glance at Karris. She was wobbling back and forth, holding her hands over her eyes like she was blind, just another wounded person. Kip realized that if they saw the violet caps over her eyes, they'd capture her immediately. Or kill her outright. With that dress, it was best not to let their attention alight on her any longer than necessary.

  If Kip refused, the man could summarily execute him. And he looked grim, ready to do it. "Yes, sir!" Kip said. He joined the lines, glanced at Karris, looked once more for Liv and didn't see her, and then ran with the soldiers toward the city and the sound of guns and the flash of magic.

  Chapter 81

  Gavin squared his shoulders and confronted his accusers. A hallway in the Travertine Palace. It wasn't exactly where he would have picked to die, but he supposed it was better than some dungeon somewhere. Better than I gave you, Gavin. At least he could face this with dignity.

  "What do you want?" he demanded.

  "We know what you're doing," Usef Tep said. "Sir." The "sir" was belated. It always was with the Purple Bear.

  Samila Sayeh came forward, put a hand on Usef's meaty arm. "We've come together to stop you, Gavin Guile."

  "And how do you propose to do that?" Gavin asked.

  "By volunteering."

  Huh? Gavin tottered on the edge of drafting everything he could. Stopped. Tried to keep his idiot perplexity off his face.

  "It's noble, Lord Prism, but it's not wise."

  What? Well sometimes when you don't know what the hell someone's talking about, the best thing to do is play along.

  "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Gavin said. Oops.

  "The Freeing is the holiest moment in a drafter's life," Samila said. "You're trying to protect that for us. And we thank you for that. But we're warriors. All of us fought in the war. We're willing to fight again."

  "I die this day," Usef said. "It's my duty to make an end, and I accept that. But I've got no patience for all this Orholam this and Orholam that. I'd rather go down fighting."

  "Lord Prism," Samila Sayeh said, "we have to hold the city long enough for everyone to escape. Holding the walls is a death sentence. Why not give it to us? We're dead anyway."

  Their talking had given Gavin a few moments to think, to recover his balance. "If I send you out there, you'll all break the halo. That's why you're here. Next year I'll have to face you fighting for him. They don't put down color wights. It's not just your souls we're talking about here. It's your sanity. And you're right, you're all warriors. That makes you ten times as dangerous when you break."

  "We'll fight in teams. Each with a pistol and a knife. When we break, we'll do as the Blackguards do."

  When a comrade broke the halo on the battlefield, the Blackguards considered them dead-and indeed, it did usually render a person unconscious temporarily. The Blackguards would check the eyes of a fallen comrade, and if the halo was broken, they'd slit their throat.

  "Except when a team's down to one, we end ourselves too," Samila said. It was, for some, a thorny theological point, though not without precedent. Was suicide a sin when you knew you were going mad and would likely hurt or kill innocents? "You are the Prism, you could make a special dispensation."

  "Future generations would believe that implied special dispensation is needed," Talon Gim said, scowling. He had always had very definite theological views.

  Maros Orlos stepped forward. "Lord Prism, we've already sent to be Freed all the drafters we knew were too far gone to be any use on the battlefield. What is the greater good here? That we do things as they've always been done, or that we save an entire city?"

  There was no contest, of course. Gavin was trembling. "I think such a sacrifice would honor Orholam. I will give each of you a… special blessing as you take up this burden. I am… deeply humbled by this act of devotion. Deeply grateful."

  That much was no lie.

  After making the decision to let the Freeing class fight to the death instead of be Freed on his knife, Gavin still met with each of them. He shrived them, listened to their concerns about dying, and blessed them. It was exactly the same as he would have done otherwise-minus the killing. But to Gavin, it was entirely different. Usually, he was so sickened by what he had to do that he couldn't give their words his full attention. He tried. He pretended. He knew they deserved his best.

  But today, he did it. They weren't really talking to him as they spoke; they were talking to Orholam. Gavin was simply an instrument to make their confessions easier than addressing an empty room. What they were doing was an act of devotion. It was an act of sacrifice.

  To others, it wouldn't seem that different than what some did every year at the Freeing. It would end with a dead drafter who'd gone to death bravely. But without the burden of shedding their blood, Gavin was able to see it clearly for the first time. These people were heroes.

  If Gavin hadn't pulled one over on the whole world and on Orholam himself by masquerading as his own brother, perhaps the Freeing would have seemed this holy every year. It was supposed to be something to celebrate, but Gavin had dreaded it. Always.

  Now, as he prayed with each drafter, he could almost believe Orholam listened.

  Samila Sayeh was the last. She was, Gavin was reminded, a woman whose beauty withstood scrutiny. Her skin, even in her forties, was nearly flawless. A few smile lines, but clear and glowing. Slim. Stunning blue eyes against Atashian olive skin. Impeccably dressed.

  "I had an affair with your brother, you know," she said.

  Gavin froze. He knew that he, Dazen, had not had an affair with Samila Sayeh-which could only mean one thing: she knew. "Sometimes a man likes to pretend that nothing has happened between him and an old lover," Gavin said quickly. "Especially when it was a great mistake."

  She laughed. "I've wondered often over the years, are you just so good that you've never been discovered, or does everyone who could expose you have an ulterior motive for not doing so?" She stared at him, but he said nothing. "You know, Evi was looking at your wall. She said, 'I don't remember Gavin being a superchromat. He shouldn't be able to craft a yellow this perfect.' And do you know what she said after that? She said that Orholam must have blessed your effort. That it was proof you were doing his will. And everyone nodded their heads. Can you believe it?"

  Gavin felt a chill.

  "Gavin would have made a wall that would last a month and bragged it would last forever. You made a wa
ll that will last forever, and said it might last a few years. You just couldn't stand to make an inferior product, could you, Dazen?" Someone who'd been drafting blue for twenty-five years would be pleased to see the order in this: Dazen was a perfectionist, so even though he could make his mask better with imperfection, it didn't match his personality to do so.

  "No," he said quietly.

  "I fought for your brother. I killed for him," Samila said.

  "We all did an awful lot of that," Gavin said.

  "I felt so betrayed by you, that you wouldn't even acknowledge me after what we'd had. I felt a glimmer of hope when you broke your betrothal with Karris. When I finally figured it all out, I still wasn't sure of myself. Gavin told us things about you, about what you would do if you won. And you weren't doing them. Was your brother a liar all along, or did you change? You were supposed to be a monster, Dazen."

  "I am a monster."

  "Glib, still. The snot-nosed younger brother with a quick tongue. I mean it." She looked at him long and hard. Looked at the Freeing knife that he hadn't drawn. "How well do you know yourself?"

  He thought about the years, the goals he'd achieved, and the ultimate goal it was serving. "The Philosopher said that a man alone is either a god or a monster," Gavin said. "I'm no god."

  She stared at him for one moment more, those intense blue eyes unreadable. She smiled. "Well then. Maybe the times call for a monster." She knelt at his feet, and he blessed her.

  Chapter 82

  Kip had always pictured a charge as being somehow glorious. Whatever he'd pictured, it wasn't this. He held his pants up with his wounded left hand and the musket in his right. And the musket was heavy! His heart was heaving and everyone else was running faster than he was.

  He had little sense of what was happening anywhere else. A man who roared that the soldiers could call him either god or Master Sergeant Galan Delelo ran at the front, urging his men on. The backs of the other soldiers filled the rest of Kip's vision, and the pain of running distracted him from all else except for the intermittent whistling, which he couldn't place at first-until he realized it was the sound of musket balls flying past, and then he could hardly think of anything else.