by Brent Weeks
As an adult who’d been involved in vast efforts, it was the engineering of the thing that awed him. The people who lived on the Great River had not conquered nature; they’d slipped a yoke on it. Every year the great floods came, and the farmers retreated to their little villages, and the rich to their estates. In each case, foundations had been dug deep, deep into that life-giving silt. Entire villages sat only five to six feet above the level of the rest of the ground. The villagers knew exactly how much the river could rise. The floodwaters held no terror for them.
Flood season became a time of relative rest. Marriages were performed, parties held, feats of sport and strength demonstrated, houses repaired, tools sharpened, songs sung, instruments dusted off, love made. And, until Gavin had settled the Blood War, walls fortified, boys and men drilled, and weapons honed for the inevitable raiding that would come some months hence.
But the yoking of the river never really ended. As the waters rose and until the farmers determined exactly how high the river would rise this year, the village elders directed channels to be opened or shut off, managing the speed of the waters’ flow so their own soil didn’t get scoured away. Through flood season, the old men would keep watch over the river as the old women kept watch over the people. As the floods finally began to recede, the elders would direct which channels would be opened in order to drain the waters from their fields slowly, only after depositing all their silt, always trying to strike a balance that would give them the longest growing season possible, and always ready to shore up levees in case of rainstorms.
Their gentle mastery of land and river and labor had meant perpetual bumper crops the likes of which the rest of the satrapies could only envy. And envy they did.
The same flat land that gave them so much food offered little defense. The Great River itself was a defender on only one side. There was too much river and too few people to put a watch on all of it—and that was assuming that no village chief would allow himself to be bribed to turn a blind eye to raiders who promised to wipe out the next village over, where some rival lived or some ancient wrong wanted avenging.
They hadn’t called these the Blood Plains of old for nothing, though that had also been the name of one of the nine kingdoms that had encompassed both what was now Blood Forest and Ruthgar. United, the warriors of the forests and the farmers of the river had been unstoppable. They’d had the first functioning navy in recorded history, with the riches required to build and maintain and staff a true fleet.
And the kings had used that fleet, one even navigating all the way up the Great River to the Floating City, a trip only possible in that time during flood season. It was more impressive for the logistical challenges they had overcome than the military ones. No one at the time had even dreamed of a standing army. The expense of paying farmers not to farm must have seemed an insanity. Everyone knew that raiding was for late summer.
And so when that fleet had reached the Floating City, the defenders had been entirely unprepared. The navy, filled with men who were starving after the arduous trip, which had included numerous portages, and furious at each other, had done unspeakable things when they reached the city. And their commanders, far from trying to restrain the baser passions, had inflamed them instead.
They had done their best to bury what they’d done there, to proclaim only a glorious victory. But a card of that time had survived.
Gavin had never viewed it. He’d seen enough slaughter in his life. Some cards couldn’t be unseen. Sometimes he wondered if that was what his older brother Gavin had done on his thirteenth birthday. Had his father taken him to see cards?
At thirteen? Surely their father wouldn’t be so foolish.
And yet Gavin had never been the same, and refused to speak of it, lashing out at Dazen and hitting him in the face for the first time ever when he wouldn’t let it go. It had opened a rift between the brothers, that innocent needling and that punch. Dazen had thought it was his own fault for pushing his brother too far. He’d seen the tears welling in Gavin’s eyes, like he couldn’t believe he’d hit his little brother either. But he’d stood over him. Hadn’t apologized. Hadn’t ever apologized.
That was where what had culminated at Sundered Rock had started.
I’m sorry, Dazen.
What the hell? I’m sorry, Dazen? I’ve worn this mask too long.
What was I thinking on the boat? Telling them I’m Dazen? Madness. Why would I do such a thing?
They hadn’t even treated him any differently. More importantly, in their brief few days with Antonius Malargos, it hadn’t seemed that any of them had told the boy that Gavin had once claimed to be Dazen.
Regardless, it was a slip. A slip at the top of the rope and you fall a few knots down. But a slip at the bottom of the rope meant a plunge, and Gavin was about as low as you could get.
The scenery rolled by, beautiful but dead to him. Then, as they wound their way up Jaks Hill, someone noticed his eyes were open. Mercifully, instead of smacking his head with something blunt, they merely pitched a blanket over him so he couldn’t see. Sometimes men surprise you with gentility when you least expect it.
Perhaps an hour later, after being slowly walked through a number of doors with the blanket still over his head, Gavin was deposited in a cell and only then allowed to see. He wasn’t there long when a door opened and a woman walked in.
“You willjacked the river dolphin,” Gavin said. “Clever.”
Eirene Malargos didn’t deign to respond. Despite the blanket, he was in a dungeon, which told him pretty much all he needed to know about his prospects.
“Punishable by death, that kind of magic, but undeniably clever,” Gavin said.
Still she said nothing. Eirene Malargos didn’t have her sister’s rare blonde hair, instead she had brown hair in a straight curtain that hung to her chin, sometimes obscuring half her face. Nor could she draft. Nor did she have her younger sister’s voluptuous curves, though it was hard to tell in the man’s tunic and trousers she wore. They did have the same heart-shaped face, and Eirene had an intensity Tisis lacked.
“Everything’s about magic to you, isn’t it? Take you Guiles out of your sphere, and you’re hopeless.” She shook her head. “How do you make the world follow … this? We trained the dolphins. The hard way, with treats and love and consistency and a firm hand.”
“Most likely a lie, but I appreciate the righteous indignation,” Gavin said. “Very convincing.” He swung his feet over the side of his cot and tried to stand. The pain in his ribs took his breath away. Cracked ribs. They’d been bound, and he’d been washed while he was unconscious, though. Maybe he did have a chance. He took a few light breaths, gathering his strength, and stood. There’s a power dynamic that can be seized by sitting when others stand and standing when they sit, or refusing to do so.
He was taller than Eirene Malargos, and meat speaks. The dominance of height and musculature, softened by his attractive face and features, usually undercut resistance quite a bit.
Even women who like women like a good-looking man.
Eirene Malargos frowned, which told him it was working. Of course, being attractive merely opens doors a crack. Especially cell doors.
“May I ask,” he said, “why I find myself in a cell? Apologies for my earlier unpleasantness. I find myself in a great deal of pain. It’s quite enough to make a man cranky.” He winced through a smile.
Careful not to overplay it, Gavin.
The dungeon wasn’t much of a dungeon, in truth. It was merely a cellar fitted with a few cells. It was dry, and there were no rats, which meant they kept cats, but also no sign of fur or odor of cat urine, which meant they kept a staff. With the substantial roof beams here, he had to be in the lower levels of a large house or mansion. So a large, wealthy house in one of the nicest sections of Jaks Hill. It was unlikely to be anything other than the Malargoses’ own mansion.
Which meant, in turn, that he was within shouting distance of his own home. Though he hadn’t vis
ited in years, the Guiles owned an estate here. They were neighbors with the Malargos family. With slightly better position, of course.
It had to be a constant thorn in all the Malargoses’ sides: the Guiles had, a generation past, only owned a sliver of swampland with a sad excuse for a rath on it. The family had made a play for power, binding together families on both sides of the river—but a reversal had left them with only their holdings in Blood Forest and that one, moldy rath. Andross Guile had leveraged that rath into representing Red for Ruthgar. And with the Red seat, he’d forced his way into the best estate on Jaks Hill, which doubtless the Malargos family had hoped to make theirs after the fall of the Maltheos family.
After acquiring the estate, the Guiles didn’t even live here; they rarely visited, and yet the Guiles had the premier estate as Andross’s pride demanded. It was, some said, better than the satrapah’s own, and she had to share her estate with all the machinery of government. And here Gavin was. He’d traveled all over the world, only to return home to a cell.
Eirene said nothing for some time, merely studying him. He kept his face pleasantly neutral, on the off chance that she would claim a misunderstanding. As the Strategist had said, if you want your enemy to fight to the death, cut off all escape; if you want your enemy to retreat, leave a path open. As a young man, Gavin had liked to cut off escape, had liked to overwhelm, dominate, and destroy, even if it carried a higher risk of defeat.
On some signal he hadn’t seen, a servant came from the hallway, where he must have been standing out of Gavin’s line of sight. In a silk-gloved hand, he presented his mistress with a glass of liquor on an electrum tray. There was no second glass.
She drank. Winced.
Gavin could smell it from where he stood. It smelled like burnt peat and fermented giant sweat. He was actually happy she hadn’t offered it.
“What is victory to you, Gavin Guile?”
“Pardon?” he asked.
“What is your plan? It’s plain you’ve been a galley slave. The scabs on your wrists haven’t healed, so you’ve worn manacles within the last two weeks. The stripes on your back are red, but healed, so you’ve been whipped in the last year but not the last month. If you last shaved when you were free, your beard says you’ve been enslaved perhaps six months. That lines up with the Battle of Ru. Surely in all your time on an oar, you were plotting.”
“Perhaps all my plotting was taken up on getting free of slavery. Freeing oneself from slavery is better than most galley slaves manage in six months, after all.”
“Most slaves don’t have my cousin rescue them.”
“So you, ahem, know about that?” Gavin said.
“He signaled us when you arrived in the harbor.”
Oh, the boy had a mirror. That was how Eirene had known to send a galley first thing in the morning to scoop him out of the water. A mirror. Gavin hadn’t even thought of it.
It’s the little things that get you.
“You stupid, stupid man,” Eirene said. She threw back her liquor. “I spoke with him last night. Do you know that he is quite enamored with you? With all these legends you’ve cultivated around you. He believes them all. He thought when he found you in that galley that he’d been sent by Orholam himself to rescue you. That it was destiny. Young, no men in his life, you understand. Puts you on a pedestal.”
“He’s a good boy. Not a boy much longer, either,” Gavin said truthfully.
Another glass of liquor appeared in her hand, but she waited until the servant—who avoided even looking in Gavin’s direction—was fully out of earshot before she continued. “Do you know that if you’d told him honestly why you didn’t want to come to Rath, he likely would have turned his back on all his family and gone with you? But you’re a liar. A fearful little man who wraps tales around himself like cloaks. You’re empty inside all those cloaks, Gavin Guile. He would have defied even me, who has been both mother and father to him. You understand? I’m having to manage him carefully even now, to make sure he doesn’t try to come rescue you or some foolishness. But I’ll watch. I won’t let him tie himself to you. You’ll get no help from that quarter.”
“And you’re going to silence an entire crew?” Gavin asked.
She didn’t like that. “It can be done,” she said. “I haven’t decided yet if I must do it.”
There was only one way to silence a hundred and twenty-two sailors. She’d sequestered them; now she was deciding if she’d kill them. How long could you even feed so many imprisoned men without word getting out? How long before one of them remembered Gavin had claimed to be Dazen, and traded that information in hope of gaining freedom?
“So, back to my question,” she said. “What is your plan, and how do you think you can get there from here?”
He was silent, but not even silence could hide all the truth from this woman.
“Because I have a plan,” she said, and there was nothing remotely pleasant in her tone. “My plan is to find out your plan, and then to allow you to achieve it, if you are indeed so capable.”
“But,” he said tentatively.
“But.” She smiled at him, big white teeth like tombstones in the sun. She grabbed on to the bars of his cell, about to speak, then her thin lips twisted in distaste and she took her hands away from the slick bars. She rubbed her fingertips together, disgusted, and looked up. A servant was there with a kerchief instantly. She took it and waved the servant away. “Gavin Guile, I want to know your plan. I want to know how you define victory so that when, against all odds, you achieve it, it tastes like water in the mouth of drowning man.”
“But that sounds like something bad.” As if puzzled. Patronizing.
Her eyes flashed, but she rolled her shoulders and finished her drink instead of striking him. “You’re many things, Gavin Guile, but you’re neither credulous nor stupid. You’ve got some plan.”
“And now that you have threatened me at length, in what insane world would I tell you about it?”
“This one.”
“Clearly you think so. The point is that you need to convince me of that.”
“If you don’t tell me, I kill you. Right now.” Her tone was flat and insulted and more than ready to kill, and less than remorseful. It was the voice of a woman who’d killed before, and attached no particular significance to the deed. He thought of a boat full of men who might die at her word. Could she get away with such a thing? In Rath? Unlikely. But it wouldn’t do those men or him any good after the fact to be proven right. What really mattered was if she thought she could get away with it, or if she simply didn’t care.
“Well. That isn’t very creative of you,” he said.
She didn’t even crack a smile. His charm was dust here. “Brutality oft accomplishes what creativity cannot.”
“I see that—”
She said, “I don’t want to hear another word out of you, unless it’s—”
“You really must—”
“That counts as another word. And don’t you dare tell what I must or must not do. I will not tolerate another interruption.”
Gavin stopped.
“Test me on this. One word out of turn.” She leveled a flat gaze at the man who had made satraps and Colors tremble, and he saw that she hoped he would test her.
She laughed as if she’d been joking. “Ha! You should have seen yourself just now, Gavin Guile!”
He smirked uncertainly.
“In fact, perhaps you should see yourself!” She looked around in an unconvincing search. “But I see no mirrors here. Why, you know, I know a torturer who claims that he can pluck out an eye with the sinews still attached, and that a man can be made to see his own face. Ought we try?”
A snake turned over in Gavin’s guts, and he felt that fear he’d felt in the war when he’d had to face drafters who’d broken the halo, who stared at him with eyes full of desperation that told him they might do anything. He remembered a man holding a burning slow match in his hand, sparking and spitting, as he sat
in the middle of camp on a barrel full of powder, quietly, absently singing, while Dazen and four hundred men crowded into a little cave, hiding from his elder brother’s passing patrols. None of his men could leave without alerting Gavin’s troops and dooming them all, but if the madman moved that slow match to the powder, most of them would certainly die. Gavin—then Dazen—had talked his way out of that. Carefully, and with no magic.
Giving her a moment to make sure she actually meant this to be a question, and that he now had leave to speak, Gavin said, “I’m sure I would be quite a sight for a sore eye.”
Her eyebrow twitched, but she didn’t smile.
“By which I mean, no thank you,” he said.
“So the question is simple, Gavin Guile, but I am not a simpleton to be taken in by your breezy charm and a smile that once weakened hymens for ten leagues around. Tell me less than the full truth, and you will die. Tell the full truth, and I will do all I can to make your victory almost impossible, but totally empty. What say you?”
I say you’re fucking insane and I’m going to ram a sharpened spoon through the side of your neck.
“So you want me to tell you my plan so you can make it nearly impossible, but not quite impossible?”
“And then I will do all I can to make it an empty victory once you achieve it. You see, I believe in you, Gavin Guile.”
She kept saying his name. It unnerved him as much as her flat, hating gaze.
“Perhaps your time in the galley has dulled your wits,” she said. “Let’s say your dream is to father a line of satraps and Prisms and Colors. I’ll let you leave here alive, rather than kill you. But I’ll cut off one of your testicles and crush the other. You’ll live thinking, perhaps, perhaps you can still father sons. And if you do, on your deathbed, I’ll let you know I’ve gelded your son. Do you understand now?”