by Brent Weeks
Teia barely spoke all night, but she soaked it up. It was light and life to her. She’d never felt part of something before, and she would pay anything to keep this. When she found herself stroking her necklace, she realized that for the first time, she was touching it with hope in her heart. Hope that she might actually throw the damned thing into the fire, and to hell with Aglaia Crassos.
Later, she was finally coaxed into drinking a single huge glass of ale. She felt like she was floating the rest of the night, drunk on companionship, drunk on belonging, maybe just drunk.
The scrubs walked home in a raucous pack, and no one even shushed them. But as they passed over the Lily’s Stem, Kip and Teia walking at the back of the pack with Cruxer and his partner, Lucia, Teia remembered something.
“Hey, you know that Blackguards are forbidden to have relationships with each other, right?” Teia was talking to Kip, but Cruxer and Lucia shot startled, guilty looks at her.
Kip looked terrifically scandalized. “Um, yes? Sure. Of course.”
“Then you should know that this isn’t that,” Teia said, still feeling warm inside. “This is just because of our ridiculous bet.”
Kip shrank into himself. “Um, you really don’t have—”
Teia put her hands on both sides of Kip’s face and kissed him full on the lips. When she released him, he looked so poleaxed that she burst out laughing.
“Ooh, I want to make a ridiculous bet,” Lucia said.
“No!” Kip said, jolted out of his stupor, hands rising defensively.
“Not with you, Kip!” Lucia said, laughing.
Kip put his hands over his face. “Let me die now, please.”
Cruxer threw his arm around Kip’s shoulders as the rest of the youths began to slow down and turn around to see what was so funny. “They do it to us all, Kip. They do it to us all.”
Chapter 55
Gavin was out skimming at dawn again. Today he was alone. Karris had been training some of the Seers in self-defense yesterday, and a storm had kicked up in the evening, trapping her in their little town on top of the volcano’s rim, Highland. Gavin yawned as the sun rose and took his eyes off the waves at just the wrong second. The skimmer turned a bit to the side and Gavin’s hands came off the reeds.
The loss of speed made him pop up on the next swell. The skimmer landed sideways in a trough, and Gavin went flying. He hit the waves at breathtaking speed, skipped across the top of one, and then was crushed by another.
Gavin swam back to the skimmer, which was bobbing merrily in the waves without him, and, fully awake now, pulled himself up on the deck. What had he told the Third Eye? Something about not making mistakes often? He laughed quietly at himself. Then froze. She’d asked him if he was a swimmer; he’d said only when he made mistakes skimming; and she’d said, “I see.”
Note to self: when a Seer says, “I see,” pay attention.
He’d been heading west this morning, to start part of his grid from within sight of the Red Cliffs. He’d already been skimming for an hour.
The Third Eye had told Gavin, “Three hours east, two and a half hours north. Get there before noon.” Five and a half hours from now put him an hour and a half after noon.
If she was talking about right now, there was no way he could get there before noon. So she must not have been talking about…
‘You like to cut corners, don’t you?’ she’d said.
Clever witch. Playing with him.
He didn’t need to go directly east and then directly south, he needed to go southeast… He did some figuring, his fingers flicking little imaginary beads. Taking the hypotenuse would take him… Four hours. Noon exactly.
Of course.
So he turned his little craft southeast and raced the sun.
Hours later, noon was nearly on him, and he thought he must have gone the wrong way or misunderstood the directions. It was a big sea, after all. But there was nothing for it but to keep going.
And then the sea changed, began to get calm. There was something odd about it. Gavin stopped the skimmer. He looked to either side. There was something like a shadow on the waves. It was as if a thin cloud were blocking the sun and he could see the edges of that shadow in the difference in color of the waves. But there were no clouds in the sky. This was some kind of slick, like oil calming the waters.
Gavin knelt on the edge of the skimmer and put his hand in the water and scooped up a handful. It was like thin slush, except it wasn’t cold. Gavin looked at it closely. There were thousands, tens of thousands of tiny spars, like needles, like fragments of snowflakes, and they were all lined up the same way. He couldn’t see blue, couldn’t draft it. If he could, maybe there’d be no mystery here. He smelled the water: salt, and the faint ephemeral smell of resin, the chalky mineral scent of blue luxin.
The waves were awash in blue luxin, trying to form itself in crystals, somehow spontaneously coming together, rather than breaking apart and breaking down in the sunlight as it ought to.
As his hand cupping the water turned, he noticed that so, too, did the little spars, like a compass needle. One end pointed toward the outer edge of the slick. So the other way had to be pointing toward the center—where he needed to go.
He was as ready as he could be. He strengthened and narrowed the pipes that propelled the skimmer, thought again, and made them join to one pipe. He’d want a hand free. Then he skimmed toward the center.
The water thickened, though his scoop extended beneath the sludge and still propelled him at good speed. Then it thickened more until he could see that the scoop pipe was swirling the water like a spoon stirring soup.
Then the crystals of blue luxin began to clump together and form larger sheets. His passage made a sound like rumpling rice paper as he broke the luxin ice.
Ahead, he could see a blue island, floating where no blue island should be. It bobbed very slowly in the great, crusty water, cracking huge sheets of the luxin ice with every move. Some of it melted immediately in the sun, but other parts had become so infused with blue luxin that they held.
Then he saw something that made him stop drafting altogether and freeze. He was in shallows now, solid luxin ice floating maybe one pace beneath the waves. With that white background, he could see that there were bodies floating in the shallow waters. Dozens—no, hundreds—of bodies, bobbing at the surface, naked and encrusted with crystals.
Oh hell. Not bodies. Blue wights. Not dead, but absorbing the sun and the luxin. The water was so heavily infused with luxin it was helping them make the transition to blue wights.
“Get there before noon,” the Third Eye had told him. Gavin suddenly had a sick intuition of what happened to the sleeping wights at noon.
He drafted an oar and maneuvered his way through the bobbing, unconscious wights until he reached the shore, his heart thundering in his chest. He threw his anchor ashore and jumped onto the ground. It was solid blue luxin.
It made an alien landscape. There were crystals as long as Gavin was tall. The action of the waves had shattered many of them, but the spars in general were pointed in the same direction—inland, always inland.
So Gavin began running. His goal was a huge spire at the center of the island, perhaps half a league distant. At first it was slow going, the ground simply so broken that he had to jump from gnarled crystal to odd glittering beam. Periodically, the ground would crack and a jet of blue crystals was shot into the air. Above, odd tornadoes circled, twisting top to bottom in mesmerizing mathematical motion. Twisted triangles like glass birds gyred on invisible zephyrs.
Crystal crunched beneath his feet like snow, but left glass behind, taking the heat and pressure of even his steps to make greater perfection.
As he moved inland, the order of blue began to assert itself more strongly.
He saw one spar, which was sticking at an angle to the ground, shiver. Then it slid even with the ground, seamless. The entire island here was flat, perfect. Ahead of him, he saw twelve shards of crystal, pillars
arranged in a circle around the base of the great spire.
The twelve pillars were each three paces tall. As Gavin approached the nearest, he saw inside it the most perfectly formed blue wight that he’d ever encountered. It had fully sloughed off its human skin. In its place was a woven tapestry of gems, the weaves themselves altering for exactly how much motion the muscles beneath demanded of the skin at each point. It was terribly beautiful, like someone had painted a masterpiece with blood.
Gavin didn’t hesitate. He ran toward the central spire. There were stairs up the outside of the thing in an odd square. No railing. Gavin ran up them, two at a time.
Ninety-seven steps to the top. The first thing Gavin noticed as he came around the corner was that he could see the White Mist from here. The mist, and the reef it hid, was legendary. Tales of its exact location varied, but all agreed it was somewhere in the middle of the Cerulean Sea. Maybe at its exact center, like a spider in the middle of its web.
What the hell was this floating island doing so close to White Mist Reef?
It could be a coincidence. Lots of those, recently.
Then his eyes fell on the pillar that shared the top of the spire with him. It was filled with bubbling water and churning gases—gray to Gavin’s eyes, so he had to believe it was blue. There was something inside, but he couldn’t see what it was. He leaned close. The sun, nearing its zenith, cut through the roiling gases. Gavin saw a curve at his eye level.
Oh no.
The sun reached the peak of the heavens and its pure light illumined the pillar fully. That curve at Gavin’s eye level was a shoulder.
It was noon.
A tremor passed through the entire blue island. The ground cracked, shooting splinters of crystal into the air at high speed. Only the pillar itself didn’t shake. In each of the twelve pillars surrounding him, Gavin saw movement. But he fixed his eyes on the one central pillar in front of him.
A huge figure was forming inside the pillar. Gavin was watching the birth of a god.
He drafted a yellow luxin sword, painfully slowly sealing it as the half-formed god’s eyes flicked open, focused far away, then noticed Gavin all in a rush. Light swelled within the pillar, and finally the sword was sealed. Gavin rammed it through the pillar under the god’s chin and out the back of its head.
Its eyes flared and exploded goo onto the glass.
Well, that was easy.
Gavin twisted the sword hard with both hands, feeling bones grind and yield. Then he drew the sword out. Goo slopped onto the ground at his feet. He pulled in intense sub-reds and red into his hand, set it afire, and punched his fist through the broken luxin. He found the creature’s neck, grabbed it, and ripped the figure out of the pillar.
This was no wight. This was Mot himself. Human flesh becoming one with luxin, even the human skeleton distending, yielding to this new, larger shape. This giant was imperfect, not wholly formed. It had been coalescing, and Gavin had aborted it.
Gavin hacked off the god’s head. He hacked off its skeletal arms, hacked off its legs—calves wholly formed, thighs still bony. He cut the spine—all in quick succession. There would be no resurrection. He picked up a gold necklace the creature had been wearing, adorned with a single black jewel, tucked it away, and sprayed the creature with pyrejelly, coating every limb. He set it aflame, stoking it with such deep sub-reds that it would be consumed utterly.
Mot melted, puddled, evaporated, burned completely away.
Only then did Gavin let his attention shift to what was happening on the island, to the island. Something was shrieking, distant, inhuman. The air was warmer. The triangle-birds were diving—no, falling, lifeless. The sun overhead had regained its normal hue. The tornadoes had turned to mist, and were everywhere blowing away.
Half of the twelve pillars had shattered. From one of them, a perfect blue wight was breaking free. The whole of the island seemed to be melting, and water was standing on the surface. The stench of released luxin was everywhere.
And in the distance, Gavin could see hundreds of blue wights standing from their pools, screaming.
Not least, he realized too late, the spire on which he stood was cracking.
Not good.
The spire split, and the chunk on which he stood sheared off to one side. It slid and then dropped fifteen feet, its jagged point stabbing into the island. For one second, Gavin thought he was just that lucky, and it was going to hold. Then the spire cracked again, and this time the fragment on which he stood leaned over crazily and threw him off.
Throwing jets of red luxin and fire downward worked only if you could find “downward.” Gavin was tossed upside down, twisting, flipping. He barely found down and threw flames that direction before he splashed at high speed into the ground. High speed sideways, fortunately, and the luxin ground was evaporating, leaving water. Soft, glorious, nonlethal water. He plowed through the water for what seemed like forever.
When he came to a stop he found himself staring into the eyes of one of the perfect wights. Its head was cocked to one side. It was very much awake.
Blue wights are bad at acting before they understand a thing. Gavin had never shared that flaw. He came up out of the water and skewered the blue bastard. He splattered a ball of flame over its face, then decapitated the monster. He began running through the knee-deep water. He came out of the water and over a slight rise and found himself facing thirty howling blue wights. They raised their hands in unison, light flooding into their palms, projectiles forming in a fraction of second.
The whistling of dozens of flechettes passed over his head as he hit the ground. A moment later, he was up, sweeping his hand, bringing up a huge green shield in front of his body. He charged. The woody shield jumped and shivered in his hand as dozens of projectiles hit it and stuck.
Then some of the wights started shooting longer, larger projectiles at Gavin. Then all of them copied the first in a moment. Damn giists, always understood what other giists were thinking in an instant. Gavin took a second longer, his body understanding before his brain did.
The huge shield was getting heavier by the second, and the big projectiles put that much more mass on Gavin’s arms.
Gavin’s brain had almost figured it out before the shield dipped dangerously low. Too late. The bottom edge of the shield hit the ground at his feet and stopped abruptly, and he ran right over himself, flipping forward, exposed, dropping the shield. He splashed in ankle-deep water, caught his shoulder, and rolled.
He came up in fire. His arms swept left and right in great billows of flame. He dropped as the stronger of the blue wights still managed to get their blades through the wall of flame.
There was no way to keep this up forever, though. In about two seconds, they were all going to realize that he was lying down, and they’d aim their missiles at the source of the flame.
Then Gavin got incredibly, ridiculously, mercifully lucky. The ground dissolved fully beneath them, dumping them all into the ocean.
Gavin got one good breath in before he went under.
He never thought he’d thank a sea demon, but his little fight by his fleet had taught him how to make himself move through the water like a fish. Gavin put his hands down at his waist, opened his palms, and began shooting out disks of green, each shot propelling him through the water.
Steering around the mechanically swimming blue wights was simple, and in thirty seconds Gavin found his skimmer, still floating. He shot himself up out of the water, took a huge gasping breath, and then shielded himself. A few lonely missiles thunked into his shield, but in moments he was up manning the reeds, picking up speed. He could hear the wights’ keening shrieks. Fury, from the depths of the supposedly purely rational blues. Fury that a man could best their blue perfection, fury that they could be wrong.
He circled the island as it broke up and sank, and divined from the wake even as it dissolved that the whole thing had been headed toward White Mist Reef, moving like a vast ship. Why?
But he didn�
��t have time to think about that. Even now, some of the blue wights were trying to draft boats to escape. One would figure out how, then the others would copy it. Gavin couldn’t let that happen.
Grimly, he drafted pontoons onto his skimmer and drafted yellow swords onto those, pointing downward into the water.
He skimmed in murderous circles at high speed, running over the swimming once-men, the sound of their glassine flesh being torn muted by the waters and his speed. Each death was announced by little more than a sound like a wagon wheel sliding off a particularly large cobblestone, sometimes accompanied by a rush of bubbles coming to the water’s surface, always by a blossoming of blood.
The Prism was a peerless warrior, and slaughter, too, is the necessary work of war. He was a tireless worker, circling, circling, like a buzzard. He circled until there was no more shrieking, until there was no more hatred, until crimson blood no longer sluiced from the pure yellow decks of his skimmer, until the full harvest of death was brought to hell’s gates.
Chapter 56
Aglaia Crassos found the visitor waiting in her parlor. He was fair, freckled, and bore a fringe of orangey-red hair combed over a knobby bald pate. He held a landed gentleman’s petasos in his hand, and wore a fitted coat in the new Ruthgari fashion. He looked like a solicitor or a banker, but broad across the shoulders. But then, who knew about these monkeys from Blood Forest?
“Welcome to my home, Master Sharp,” Aglaia said. “My man said you had some sort of proposal for me?”
“Indeed.” He helped himself to a seat and crossed his legs.
“I wouldn’t usually do business with a total stranger, but your references were sterling.”
“Mm. I went to a great deal of effort to extract those references.”
What an odd man. “Well then…” she said.
“Well then,” he said. He stared at her with unsettling eyes. She hadn’t noticed until now, but he had amber eyes. Not eyes dyed from a life as a drafter, simply the vanishingly rare true amber. “What is the worst deal you have ever accepted?” he asked. He was playing with a strand of pearls he wore under his shirt. Pearls, on a man? Was this a new fashion she hadn’t seen, or a quirk?
