by Brent Weeks
He was so furious he thought of waiting until they were in its teeth to trigger the trap. No. No. Enough killing. The point was to shock them into submission, not to turn the few survivors against him forever.
He reached into the superviolet he’d laid under the sand out in a great ring and pushed luxin into it, hard. A great spike-toothed ring of death leapt out of the sand in a fence around all the nobles. Green and blue and yellow luxin twined, shivered, begged the nobles to impale themselves on the barbs.
The nobles tripped over each other, literally falling and smashing into each other as they stopped.
Beyond the glowing wall of death, blocking each exit from the hippodrome, they saw stony-eyed Blackguards, weapons unsheathed, in the loose, easy posture of killers, luxin readied.
“No one else need die!” Gavin shouted. “Get back to your lines.”
His Blackguards and the drafters he’d brought echoed his command, circling outside the wall, bellowing at the people inside, “Back to your line. Now! Move!”
Others were gentler, but the result was the same. In minutes, the lines had reformed. Now, more quietly, Gavin said, “Would you rather die than have peace? No one else in your family or on your lands has to die.”
“If I take your offer,” one grandmother said, “I’ll be setting myself against all of them. How is my little family to stand against the might of the Willows on one side and the Malargoses on the other?”
“Whoever takes my peace gains my protection,” Gavin said. “Whoever breaks my peace gains swift and brutal death.” He swept a hand slowly across the columns, and this time set glowing yellow targets where the next missiles would fly. In the front of many of the columns were children, or favorite aunts, favorite sons. Orholam forgive the families if they were too stubborn even now. Orholam forgive him.
He held the tense silence until someone was about to speak, and then he swung a hand so fast at the table that the entire crowd flinched, thinking it another attack. He sent out waves of sub-red so that the air around him shimmered, a trick he’d honed in the war to make it look like he was radiating power, and roared, pointing at the table, “This is the end of your war. Who. Will. Sit?”
Over the bodies of the dead obstinate and the dead murderers and the dead proud, they made peace. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been quick. Not all justice could be done: how far back does one go with judgment, after what horror in the chain does one say, ‘All before this is forgiven’? But peace had been forged. Hostages were exchanged, and hostages were sent to the Chromeria where Gavin would have personal oversight of them. In the years that followed, a test of the Prism’s Peace had come, of course. It had come from a Guile cousin, Marcos-Sevastian Guile, who’d exacted vengeance for a wartime rape in like fashion, doubtless thinking his blood connection to Gavin gave him extra leeway. If he’d had a shred of the Guile intellect, he’d have known it meant exactly the opposite.
Marcos-Sevastian had been found mutilated in the town square, limbs piled neatly nearby, a sign propped under his bloody chin: “So too to all who break the Prism’s Peace.”
And later, Gavin had needed to send an emissary to a Ruthgari lord using his economic might to ruin one of his vassals who’d turned on him early that day.
That had required only a stern talk. Blood and words. Peace by sword and will.
Eirene Malargos had been the first of the heads of the most powerful families to sign.
Now Gavin said to her, “Do you think that lottery was random? Your uncle Perakles was a warrior coward. Happy to take insult, happy to send men to die, but would never dare the line himself. And his wife Thera? You think that vicious heifer had it in her to lead a great family to a picnic, much less to a peace? Think of those who died that day: they were—except that regrettable young Green Apple idiot with the knife—exactly the people who couldn’t countenance peace, or who had done such horrific things the other families couldn’t countenance peace while they lived. If that was Orholam’s hand, it was his hand working through me. And my mother. It was she who helped me sift the nobles and the conns and the banconns. Only she knew them all well enough to know. She selected you, Eirene. Do you remember the moment at the table, when they wanted you to be the hostage at the Chromeria, because Tisis was too young? My mother picked you to lead your family. Your lottery number was her choice. So you can decide if you owe me everything or nothing, but your life and your position, those you owe to my mother.”
Eirene’s eyes were damp, and Gavin didn’t know if she was thinking of those who’d died that day, or her father who’d died before, or all that she had lost in leading her family, or whether she was thinking about Felia Guile and the friendship of that great woman that she’d been deprived of. “Did she … did she speak of me? At the end?”
The most tempting lies are often best shunned. It proves your honesty. Gavin shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. Our time was … very limited. The Color Prince was almost literally at the door, and we had a city to defend. It was an abbreviated Freeing, at best.”
And he had her. By Orholam’s beard, he had her. He was going to claw his way up out of this cell, and out of this country, and he was going to climb the heavens. He would fell the sun. There was nothing Gavin Guile couldn’t do. He was not only his magic. He was a man unlike any other man who’d ever gone before. He was a man to rival Lucidonius himself. He was a god.
“Lady Malargos, set me free. I will win this war, and I will repay every debt you are owed, and I will make the Color Prince pay in blood.”
But then the door opened, and of all people, of all the real Gavin’s old friends and lovers and enemies and those who were all three in a singular body, the Nuqaba walked in. She was dressed in the casual style that a Parian lady would usually only wear in her own home, among her ladies and eunuchs, and that she was dressed so here told Gavin that she was an honored guest and a close friend of Eirene Malargos. She wore jeweled slippers, women’s loose mid-calf-length trousers secured with a multifolded brocade belt with long fringe, a light blouse open in the front, and a vest snug about the bust decorated with precious stones matching those on a number of necklaces and a loose scarf about her hair.
She wore the small tattoos of her position as Nuqaba, almost invisible against her rich black skin: one just below her lower lip, and one under each eye in decorative Old Parian script. Under the left eye, it read, “Cursed Accuser,” and under the right “Blessed Redeemer.”
“Greetings, Gavin,” the leader of Paria said, “do you know what this is?” She held up a metallic chain with a large jewel on it like living fire captured in amber. “This is the seed crystal of the orange bane. Among other things, it detects lies, and you, you glorious fuck, you are a liar.”
Chapter 57
“I’ve figured out something really exciting,” Quentin said. He was standing on the table in the restricted library. His hair was askew, and he had a few days’ growth of scrubby uneven beard. “Unfortunately, it’s trivial and not at all helpful!” He laughed, and it was the ragged sound of someone right on the edge.
Kip said, “Quentin, why are your teeth red? Tell me that isn’t blood.”
“Heh-heh-heh.” His voice pitched up crazily. “Nah, it’s not blood. Khat. You know khat? It’s a stimulant. Never used it until today—uh, three days ago. With kopi and khat and…” He looked down at several bowls below the table.
“Please tell me you haven’t been using the High Luxiats’ flower jars as chamber pots,” Kip said.
“Kip, under a thin veneer of excitement, I think I might be about to collapse.”
“That seems likely,” Kip said. “What did—did you drink the flowers’ water first?”
“I couldn’t drink it second. That would be gross. Plus, there wouldn’t be any room.”
Kip shook his head. He reached up and grabbed Quentin and put the young man down on the floor. He didn’t trust Quentin to jump down without hurting himself. The reedy scholar barely weighed more than Teia.
>
“Um, thanks?” Quentin said. “And please don’t touch me again. I don’t … I just don’t like being touched. Thanks.”
Kip shrugged. So Quentin was weird. Not any weirder than the rest of them. “So…?”
“The Black Cards and the Lightbringer are connected!”
“That is … exciting. I guess. How?”
“That we don’t know anything about either of them! Ha!”
Kip said, “Not so exciting.”
“I, I, I told you that I figured out the organization scheme, right?”
“That was like three weeks ago.”
“Right, right. I, I found all the references to the Lightbringer—I’ll show you those in, in, presently—and there was a problem with all of them—”
“Problem?” Kip interrupted. “What kind of problem?”
“One moment, one moment! So I had this thought and I went and I found all the books on the Black Cards. I couldn’t find them at first, but then I didn’t look for books on Black Cards—those have all been burned or stolen or what, what have you—so instead I looked for books about all the cards, but written before the Black Cards were declared black, that is, heretical, see?”
“Smart.” Kip wasn’t following, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“And I found the very same thing!”
“Same as what?” Kip asked.
“Same as the Lightbringer mentions!”
“But you didn’t tell—”
“Oh, right, right. Look.” Quentin pointed to a tiny book on the table.
The leaves were so old they were fragile and stained. “What is this?” Kip asked.
“It’s a luxiat’s prayer book. It was stitched into book form rather than a scroll so it could be thumbed through more easily, and fit in a pocket. They made them durable, and with plenty of empty pages at the back for the luxiat to record notes or prayers or dreams from Orholam or prophecies. This one belonged to Darjan himself.”
“The warrior-priest?”
“A leader of the aħdar qassis gwardjan. A green guardian priest.”
“The writing looks funny,” Kip said.
“The text? It looks funny to me, too. I don’t speak all these languages. I paired all the oldest books not in Parian or Old Parian with their translations. Sort of handy that the translations have been moved to this library, too.”
Kip hadn’t meant the text per se, though of course he couldn’t read it. He meant that there were blanks in the text. Spaces floated as if someone had written in invisible ink in them, but there were no words there. “What’s with the gaps?”
“Look at the translation book, right, right below it.”
The book of translation had gaps, too. They weren’t precisely aligned with gaps in the original, at least not by spacing. But Kip could guess that they must be aligned by meaning.
“It’s, it’s the same in all of these,” Quentin said. “Someone’s erased a lot.”
“Erased ink?”
“Or, or, or … or they wrote in some invisible ink. You’re the polychrome. You tell me.”
Kip shielded his eyes from the lantern and widened his pupils out to look in sub-red. Nothing. He soaked up some sub-red luxin from the lantern and brought it to his fingers—
“Kip, you’re forbidden to draft sub-red in a library!” Quentin said. “You can get expelled!” He obviously meant to whisper the last word, but he did it so loudly he might as well have been shouting.
But Kip was already done. There were no heat-reactive inks. He narrowed his gaze to superviolet—so often used for secret writing. Nothing there. He gently streamed superviolet luxin over the page, but nothing fluoresced. Then he donned each pair of colored spectacles in turn and gazed at the page. Nothing, nothing in any color.
But when he drew forth his superviolet spectacles, he found that one lens was broken.
“Oh, hells,” he said.
“Oh, Ben-hadad didn’t tell you about— Oops!” Quentin said.
“Tell me about what?”
“So! Nothing in any color?” Quentin asked.
“Tell me about what?”
“They all thought you were dead. He had some experiments he needed to do. Something happened. And then I think he’s been trying to find the right time to tell you. He, he feels terrible.”
“Then why are you telling me this?”
He looked nonplussed. “It slipped.”
“I didn’t mean why you, I meant why not him. Forget that. Show me this.”
“It’s all the same. I’ve copied them all out. In each book, in each translation, there are fragments only of Lightbringer prophecies. I thought at first they might have used bad ink. You can see that in some old manuscripts: ink that fades with age and gets illegible. But you wouldn’t have the translations with blanks in exactly the same places.”
“Why not? I mean, if the gap was already there when they wrote the translation, why wouldn’t they leave a gap, too?”
“Because I looked at the various times in which each of these translations were made, and there have been different copyists’ notations used to show that a text was illegible or absent. None wrote those notations in these gaps, and none of their methods involved leaving long blanks, it’s an inefficient use of the space on the pages, which are often expensive. So, so someone erased the relevant sections in the copies and the translations. We didn’t lose all of the Lightbringer prophecies in existence, of course. But in these books, we get only fragments. And not all the texts have translations, so some of these translations are my own.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kip said. “How did they erase ink?”
“With hide you can scrape it off. Often followed by putting down another layer of whitewashing solution. With papyrus, you—”
“But I don’t see any change between the scrolls where there’s writing and where there isn’t. It doesn’t look like it’s been treated.”
“The treatment may be so old that it’s impossible to tell the difference.”
“Meaning that the erasures happened a long time ago?”
“Well, that makes sense with those with old translations, but that’s not applicable to all of them. If there was a single time period where someone erased lots of documents all at once—”
“Like the Office of Doctrine? When the Chromeria anointed luxors?”
Quentin bobbed his head, chagrined. “They must have figured out some mixtures of luxins that would bond with ink and lift it out. When combating heresy, it’s the kind of thing they would have loved to find. And use.”
“Those assholes,” Kip said. “Long dead and still causing problems.” If Teia had been alive during that time, the luxors would have burned her on Orholam’s Glare as a heretic.
“Anyway, here’s the prophecies I’ve got, and then I want to tell you one more thing.”
Kip read:
Death in hand, his card, his lot
He fights/struggles with/kills forethought
“He fights/struggles with/kills?” Kip asked.
“That was my translation. Sorry. It was a tough one. It could mean he’s impulsive? Maybe he kills without thinking ahead?”
“Are they all this bad?” Kip asked.
He could tell the words wounded Quentin. “Some of these languages are highly contextual, and the pertinent portions have been deliberately erased. Someone did this exactly so it would be impossible to reconstruct.”
In the dusk of times the jinn will rise
Rivers flow blood and moon shine blue
Of Two Hundred will come the Nine
To bring about the end of time.
Kip looked up at Quentin. “That doesn’t sound so good. Jinn?”
“Spirits? Powerful ones, though. Demigods?”
“And you’re sure it’s a Lightbringer prophecy?”
“Yes. It’s not choruses or lions frolicking with lambs kind of stuff.”
The rebels rise, the old ways lost,
Heresy, hypocrisy—
&nb
sp; “That’s the whole fragment? Not helpful,” Kip said.
Back to the spinner’s wheel
Rejected in blood
Victim of the Promethean’s brood
“Promethean’s”? Kip asked. It sounded like Old Ruthgari.
“Usually it’s a personification of someone who takes violent action intended for some good. Kind of dark overtones to it? But you still haven’t seen the best one yet.”
Kip looked. The last one was only a title. On the Gift of Light. “Um, that’s great, Quentin. Where’s the poem?”
“No, that’s, that’s it. But look!” He pulled out the two books side by side. “The translation is wrong, so it wasn’t erased. They missed it. The ablative with this phrasing usually would mean ‘on the gift of light,’ but it could also mean ‘on the giver of light.’”
“You keep looking at me like I’m supposed to have a revelation,” Kip said.
“In the original, the common way to construct it would be ‘doniae luxi.’ But the word order doesn’t matter in an inflected language except for emphasis, but here it’s ‘luxi doniae.’”
“Still not—”
“Centuries ago the Parian accent gave way to the Ruthgari, and ‘luxi’ started to be transcribed as ‘luci’.”
“Still…”
“Luci doniae. Which in the nominative case is … C’mon. This is like having to explain the punch line of a dirty joke.”
“Oh! Lucidonius! So a poem ‘On Lucidonius’? But what does that mean?”
Quentin deflated. “Well, I don’t know. But it does mean the Lightbringer is tied to Lucidonius somehow. The Light Giver and the Light Bringer? What if they’re the same? What if the Lightbringer has already come?”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Everyone noticed Lucidonius. He changed—he changed the whole world.”
“But they didn’t notice that he was the same person they’d prophesied about?”