by Brent Weeks
“You … you demon,” Eirene said.
“If it makes you feel better, I’m sorry that my brother’s war cost you your mentor, in addition to all else. By Orholam’s beard, I’d give two fingers to have your father back.” He wiggled his half-hand at her.
Karris, you told me once that there was something in me that wanted my own destruction. I denied it. I was a fool.
“Fuck you! Burn in hell!”
“One thing I knew about Dervani; he wasn’t a man to torture the helpless. Stubborn, they said, but honorable. He’s got that on you.”
It seemed like a stupid thing to do: antagonize a woman whom he’d just told such lies. But you have to let the fish swallow the hook if you want it to set right. If he was angry enough to say something so obviously stupid to her face, surely he couldn’t also be so coldly cunning at the same moment to weave a flawless fabric of lies, could he?
She stared at him, silent, arms folded, almost hugging herself, face inscrutable.
But Gavin had to play a bigger game. What was happening under the surface here was the real test. Eirene was the real power in Ruthgar. The satrapah, Euterpe Ptolos, was under her thumb. Eirene’s father Dervani had joined the Color Prince. Whatever else the man had been doing for sixteen years—and it had been Dervani, Gavin had recognized the man, if not immediately. Whatever else he’d done in the intervening years, Dervani had thrown in his lot with the pagans at the end. By driving a wedge between Eirene and her father, Gavin was really serving the Seven Satrapies, for if Eirene’s hatred blotted out all else, she might drag Ruthgar over to the Color Prince’s side.
Such a move would be stupid beyond belief. Those at the top have nothing to gain in a revolution like the Color Prince was proposing. Inviting an aggrieved army into your city? You shouldn’t even invite a friend’s army into your cities.
But hatred and envy birth self-destruction in every heart that gives them a bed to breed in. To dislodge the Guiles, this woman without children might be willing to risk losing all her family owned as well.
So I lie, in service of the greater good. As always.
Still she stared.
There was nothing to be gained now. If she felt pushed into a decision, she’d doubt it in the future. Whatever action she took, she had to feel that it was hers, and inevitable with what she knew, then it would be irreversible, and their alliance unbreakable.
The fingers? She might never pay for that. Or at least not for a long time. Gavin would have to bank the coals of his rage, let them glow warm under the earth. Someday. Maybe. But not today. Not soon.
He didn’t hold her gaze. He looked at her, glanced away, looked back, easing his shoulders into a slump, as if he felt exposed. Not a challenge. It was important to let her think this through.
Finally, she said, “After the wars, my family had estates everywhere, but many of them had been devastated. They required huge piles of gold to restore. Tens of thousands of danars to import vines for the vineyards, to buy new slaves for the cotton fields, to pay the tuitions of drafters and indenture them afterward, to rent and then finally to buy the river barges to transport our goods. New axes for logging, iron for the brackets of new water wheels, millstones which if cut from local softer stone would cost half as much but only last a third as long versus those we shipped in. But every time I would do my calculations in my father’s ledgers—actually, the ledgers my father’s steward Melanthes kept, but he died during the Blood War—every time, I would see these line items: ‘Cost of Hired Guards,’ and sometimes ‘Bribes to Blood Forest Conns,’ and ‘Losses to Pirates.’ And at the end of the year, ‘Repairs for Damage from Raids’ and ‘Replacement Drafters from Raids.’
“Eventually, of course, I filled those ledgers and moved on to new ones, but I left those columns. And I studied what those costs had been. Old Melanthes was our steward for forty-five years, and he could predict those costs within a few points per hundred after a while. When you know you’re going to lose one boat in ten when they make a Tyrean orange run, you know what sort of profit you need to make in order to justify trying next year. Over time, it matters. My father never realized that Melanthes was the real reason we even had estates by the time the False Prism’s War and the Blood War were finished, though we lost too many sons and daughters.” She took a deep breath. “But every time I picked up those ledgers to make a decision about shipping this or that, I saw those costs. I haven’t had to pay those.
“I’m very good with numbers, and I’ve compared my numbers to Melanthes’s. And what I’ve learned, what I can never deny when I see those columns laid out before me, is that I owe you, Gavin Guile. How much is a matter of what assumptions I make. For though those parts-per-hundred losses are unyielding—I would have lost men and treasure to raids and murder and piracy at some point regardless—when I might have lost them matters most. If you lose a prize stallion and a mare from a herd of hundreds, it stings. If you lose them before you ever breed the herd, it destroys you. So, I worked my abacus many different ways and calculated what I could. I chose not to quantify any emotional toll of losing family members or trusted servants and slaves. I also found it impossible to quantify the merely possible, but significant cost of my own lost time, should enough of my own close family have been killed that I would have had to marry and bear my own children. Women in my family have tended to have quick recoveries, but it was impossible to calculate how many pregnancies I might have suffered, or exactly how much work I might have been able to do while in the late stages of pregnancy or early stages of recovery. And of course, I didn’t assign any value to not having to marry or bear children—as I now don’t. Given my present wealth, I would pay a great deal more for such a privilege than I would have were circumstances quite different. You see you present me with conundrums.”
“You may have lost me somewhere in there,” Gavin said. He thought he followed, but it was rarely a mistake to make an enemy think they were smarter than you.
“Because you stopped the war, Gavin. And then you wiped out the pirates. Several times. And that’s without crediting you for taxes falling because there was no longer a war to finance. One way or another, Gavin Guile, your family cost me my father, my last uncle, and four distant cousins.
“But from my calculations, I owe you somewhere between four years and twenty-three days, to twenty-seven years and sixteen days. Years of my labor. Years of my life. You’ve saved me perhaps a thousand thousand danars; you’ve allowed me to reestablish my family, and by stopping the Blood War, you have certainly saved me the blood of many people I love. I want to kill you so badly that my stomach aches, and I’ve been getting the kind of headaches that would bring an empire low just thinking about you. I am well-known, perhaps famous, for dealing straight. I’ve never cheated anyone, though it has been in my power to do so for quite some time. But how does one balance blood?”
“I leave a complicated legacy,” Gavin said drily.
“One balances blood with blood,” she said.
“Oh, that was a rhetorical question,” Gavin said. “But you seem both far too grim and far too elated at my suffering to be about to say, ‘Gavin, you’ve saved lives I love, so I will save yours.’”
“Whatever else you are—and you are many things, Gavin Guile—you’re not stupid. Did you hear about the Battle of Ox Ford?”
“I was so busy … felt like I was stuck rowing in endless circles. Missed it.”
“The Chromeria lost fifty-five thousand men in one day. Thirty-five thousand of those were Ruthgari. My people.”
Gavin felt like he’d been kicked. “What happened?”
“General Azmith thought to crush the Color Prince against the Ao River.”
“The Ao? That river’s not that deep, is it?” Gavin asked.
“Deep enough, during the wet season.”
Gavin had only seen the river in summer.
“The general tried to catch the Blood Robes as they crossed the ford. Their wight-drafters drafted new bridg
es within half an hour, encircled our armies, and crushed us against the river instead. The Blood Foresters hated the plan, and had sworn to withdraw, but General Azmith wasn’t moved. He went ahead without them. So the Color Prince invaded Blood Forest, and Blood Forest lost no one, while my people took a blow from which we may not recover.”
My people. She said it not as a native daughter, but as a leader. She must own Satrapah Ptolos outright. But that wasn’t the worst of it. With the battles of Ru and Ox Ford, the Seven Satrapies had endured two military disasters in a row. Even with the riches of Ruthgar, a satrapy could only stand to lose so many lives.
“Nor have things gotten better. After Ox Ford, he split his armies and sent half up around the headwaters of the Ao, trying to cut off their supply lines.”
That was a long trip, and a long time to be without half your army. Gavin would have sent small parties across the river to raid, not half his army.
“General Azmith entreated Raven Rock to hold out, told them that he would save them. They held, but he got there too late. He fled in disarray, leaving behind cannons and gunpowder, and whole wagons full of rations and muskets.”
“Clearly, there’s only one thing you can do,” Gavin said.
“And what’s that?”
“Free me.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because I win battles. Because if you want to keep track of debts owed in blood, then the Color Prince owes you most dearly.”
“I don’t know about that. I think the blood debt is yours.”
“Mine?” Gavin asked with real incredulity. “How could those lives possibly be put on me?”
“You let this war happen. You could have stopped it in Garriston, or long before then.”
“What? What?! Everything I’ve done I’ve done to stop this war! How bad are your spies if you believe anything else?”
“You’re a liar, Gavin Guile. They all agree on that.”
It was one thing to be killed for your sins, many as they were. It was something else altogether to be killed for the very thing you’d been trying to stop. He tried another tack. “Do you remember your number, in the lottery?”
“One fifty seven. Everyone remembers their Orholam-damned number. Two days with that damned thing folded in my hand, wondering if it would mean my death.”
The lottery had been a furious young Gavin’s way to end the interminable Blood War. Only the leading families of both sides had been given numbers. Two thousand of the richest and most connected people in Blood Forest and Ruthgar had been gathered at Gavin’s command. His Blackguards had apoplectic fits at the very thought of it. Not that that stopped him.
Gavin had invited them all to the hippodrome to pray for peace. Attendance was not voluntary. No drafters were allowed in except those who were members of the families, and Gavin’s Blackguards had relieved each person of larger weapons, though knives and the like for personal defense had been allowed, allaying their suspicions. The heads of all the families understood you didn’t want swords and ataghans and spears when you gathered bitter enemies in one place.
Each family had lined up in a column according to their number. A random number, so they thought. Felia Guile had helped Gavin decide who should be in the front ranks. She’d also helped with the deception itself: Gavin had marked each folded slip of paper with a superviolet number as each person dropped it in. Felia had worn Lucidonius’s superviolet spectacles around her neck, though no one knew they were that, and fewer still would have known what those spectacles did. With her head bowing as if in prayer each time she reached into the bowl, she’d look through the spectacles and grab out the appropriate paper.
It worked for all but one family, who had swapped their folded papers. Younger, and angrier, Gavin had merely shrugged and said, “They want to lie to the Prism? Sow the wind.” His mother knew how the saying ended. She’d acquiesced.
With the columns of families facing him in a circle, with only the lowest number from each family standing in the narrowest circle, facing Gavin, he had gestured to a large circular wooden table he’d placed on the raised spina with him. He had led a prayer for peace, some drivel he didn’t remember. After they’d all agreed to his sufficiently abstract and non-binding words to Orholam, bobbing their heads and making the sign of the seven, he’d gestured to that rough-hewn round table beside him. “My friends,” he said. “Here sits the table of peace. In the blessed light of Orholam, who will join me at it?”
One family, the Blue Bells, had sent their mother forward. The Blue Bells had once been numerous and fierce. Now they were a shadow. Two daughters, two distant cousins left, and not much land, no riches. They were within a breath of being commoners or being extinct.
Everyone else looked to their lady or lord, banconn or conn.
Gavin said, “I think you all don’t understand. Your war has stripped your lands bare. It has soaked every field in unclean blood, with each act rivaling the next in baseness and inhumanity. Your war is an affront to Orholam. All this you know, but your bloodlust is greater than your shame. You daren’t ask forgiveness for your atrocities because then you might have to extend forgiveness for your enemies’. Your bitterness is a boil on your faces, obscuring your sight. So every year, you send a tribute of your sons and daughters to death, so you can continue your foolishness and pride. And every year, you send a far greater tribute of those who have been pulled in the wake of your impiety, your blasphemy, your arrogance. You have not only insulted Orholam; you have insulted me. You have not only robbed your own families and your enemies’ families and the innocent, you have robbed the Seven Satrapies. You have had satraps and, yes, even Prisms come to you and to your fathers to stop these wars. You have responded with temporary truces and lies. Lulls in which you rearm and breed, picking sons and daughters based on who might be the strongest drafter, who might have the most colors.
“I know. Yes, I am the product of this breeding myself. But now I am Prism, and what I do today isn’t for my family; it is for the Seven Satrapies. Today, your war is finished. Now I ask again, will any join me at the table of peace?” He swept his hand, as if in invitation toward them.
None did. Gavin, who moved the world on the fulcrum of his desires, Gavin, loser and leader, drafter deceiver, exile executioner, Gavin was being ignored.
He stared at the sun, as if praying. It was one of those white-hot days, the delta air was thicker than blood, the sounds of the city coming in even to the center of the hippodrome. He prayed, but he wasn’t praying. He was filling himself with power.
“So be it,” Gavin said. He swept his hand again, and this time, blue luxin spikes shot out along the superviolet guide-wires he’d place at the throats of each man and woman in the first rank of the circle. Through the center of each throat, and into the center of each spine.
The front person in each family’s column dropped dead.
It was so sudden, so stark and brutal and so quiet that no one said a word. Many didn’t even know why the people had fallen.
“War seems so random,” Gavin shouted. “Does it not? Who lives, who dies? It’s like a lottery. But in my lottery, only you who are responsible for this war will die. I think the common folk will prefer this greatly. Now! Who will join me at the table of peace?”
For a moment, shock prevailed as every family looked at their dead. In each case, “Orholam” had picked the most pugnacious, the bitterest, the most hateful or guiltiest person in the whole family to be first in line. Some families had to be happy to be rid of their most troublesome member, and far more so to see the worst of the other families die.
But these were families bred to war, in many cases literally so.
“Are you insane?!” a Willow asked.
“You killed my father!” a sixteen-year-old, fiery-haired Green Apple shouted. Damned Blood Foresters and their tempers. The young man pulled out his belt dagger, a wild look in his eyes.
“Your father was a fool, and you’ll be a dead fool if you
attack me,” Gavin told him.
“Ahhh!” The young man charged the platform.
Some people simply don’t react well to surprise.
Gavin astounded everyone by turning his back. “There’s no need for anyone else to die,” he shouted. Behind his back, the rising young Blackguard Watch Captain Ironfist materialized from nowhere and cut the young man down before he reached Gavin.
It was so nonsensical that Gavin was swept into sudden fury. “Sit at the goddamn table, and no one else needs to die!” he roared.
Another pulse and another row of men and women died. He’d almost forgotten the sound of projectiles thunking into human flesh.
They broke and fled across the sands. He’d known they would. The damned cowards. Like he’d never set up an ambush in the course of the Prisms’ War. He still thought of it as the Prisms’ War as the losers did, though he didn’t think he’d failed once to call it the False Prism’s War when he spoke of it.