The black prism l-1

by Brent Weeks

  Patience, Gavin. Plenty of time for purpose six. Plenty of room to maneuver. You are Andross Guile's son.

  "We need to release the city of Garriston immediately, pull out all of our men, and give it back to King Garadul," Gavin said. "Preferably with an apology that we didn't do it sooner."

  Silence. Followed by awkward silence.

  Klytos Blue chuckled uncertainly. When no one else joined him, he fell silent.

  "King?" the White asked.

  "That's what he's calling himself." Gavin didn't elaborate.

  Sadah Superviolet said, "Surely you're not serious, Lord Prism. The governorship transfers to Paria in a few weeks. It's our right. People have made plans. Ships are sailing already. If we must have this conversation, let us have it two years from now."

  "Absolutely not," Delara Orange said. She was a forty-year-old bichrome, with great sagging breasts and the red and orange in her eyes pushing to the very edge of her irises. She was an Atashian. Atash got the governorship right after Paria's. "Paria took the very first rotation, when there were actually a few treasures left in the city. And you looted it all."

  "We also had to repair a city that had been burned to the ground and care for its injured and ill. We took only what was an appropriate recompense."

  "Stop," Gavin said, before it could go any further. "You're having the wrong fight. This isn't about who has the governorship, in what order, or for how long. It's been sixteen years since we crushed Tyrea. They still don't have a representative in this room. There are fewer Tyreans in the Chromeria every year. Why is that? Have they suddenly stopped bearing drafters there? Or is it because we have demanded a tribute from them so ruinous they can't support their drafters, which in turn impoverishes their land further? Then we hold Garriston, their main port and their largest city, and your governors tax every orange and pomegranate and melon. I've been to Garriston, and it's a shadow of its former greatness. The great irrigation canals are full of sand. The fields are worked by women and children or no one, and there's not a drafter to be found."

  "You pity them?" Delara Orange asked. "When my brothers rise from the dead and the Castle of Ru is rebuilt, I'll feel pity for Garriston. They joined Dazen. It was their war that killed tens of thousands. I saw them cast Satrapah Naheed's two-year-old son down the Great Steps. I saw them cut open her pregnant belly, take her babe, and make bets on how far down the steps one of their men could throw the screaming child. They cut off the satrapah's nose and ears and breasts and arms and legs and threw her down after. While we watched. The babe made it all the way to the last step, in case you're curious. I got some of its brain on my dress. I wanted to try to catch it, but I didn't move. No one did. Those are the people you wish us to have mercy on? Or maybe it's the people who sank the entire refugee flotilla, which had not a single drafter or armed man on board?"

  That was Gavin's fault. As Dazen. He'd sent a young, new general, Gad Delmarta, who had always been efficient and direct. Gavin had told Gad to secure Ru. General Delmarta had taken that to mean to secure it so that there could never be any resistance ever again. He'd exterminated the royal family-all fifty-six members of it and scores of their male retainers-publicly, one at a time, in the order of their succession, and burned down their great castle, the pride of Atash. When the people had fled, General Delmarta had sent fire drafters after the flotilla. Gavin had only found out about it afterward, and then what could he do? It was war, and his general had followed his orders, and when General Delmarta marched on the great city of Idoss next, it had surrendered without a fight because of their fear of the man, because of his cruelty.

  "Maybe," Gavin said, "we could count how many children died when you burned Garriston in retaliation and barred the gates so no one could escape? I seem to recall that all the Tyrean drafters and all but two hundred of the Tyrean soldiers were a hundred leagues away at the time. How long did it take for the river to clear of bodies? So many little corpses bobbing in the water. Even with all those hundreds of sharks turning the bay to bloody foam with their thrashing, it was weeks, wasn't it?"

  Gavin had never learned whose idea it was, but when Garriston had been burned, someone had stationed red drafters all around the walls. Soldiers shielded the drafters while they hurled red luxin back and forth in swathes throughout the city. Red luxin was used as fuel for lamps. Spread throughout a city, it had made a hell for the residents of Garriston. Tens of thousands had jumped into the river, and thousands more had jumped in on top of them. Their bodies themselves had almost been enough to dam the river in places. And then some of his older brother's cleverer drafters had floated red luxin down the river in little boats of green or blue luxin, or mixed red and orange luxin to make a concoction so flammable it would burn even underwater, or mixed it with superviolet to make it float burning on the very water itself. Between the fire, the smoke, the water, the press of the crowds, the crushing deaths as whole buildings fell into the packed river, and the fire floating down the river itself, there had been death on a scale no one had imagined before.

  Before the war, Garriston had been home to more than a hundred thousand people. His own conscriptions had thinned that to perhaps eighty thousand. After the fires, only ten thousand remained, and after the first winter, only five thousand.

  "Enough," the Black said. Carver was no drafter, and so in some respects he was the weakest member of the Spectrum. As the Black, he was responsible for most of the mundane aspects of ruling Little Jasper: importing food, managing trade, awarding contracts, recruiting and paying soldiers, maintenance for buildings and the docks, building ships, and everything else that the White ceded to his control so she could focus on managing the Chromeria itself. But he was a formidable man, and Gavin respected him. "We could list horrors all day, Lord Prism. What's the point?"

  The point is, out of my five great purposes left, the only purely altruistic one is to free Garriston. Those people are suffering because of me, and you bastards have stopped every attempt I've made to help them.

  "The point is," Gavin said, "that the Tyreans have as much reason to hate us as we have to hate them. We've been punishing them for the war for sixteen years. Most of the people paying the price now were children when the war started. They see no reason they should continue paying for what their dead fathers did or didn't do. They hate us, and the fact is, none of us-none of the Seven Satrapies-want to go back there with an army."

  "What are you saying?" Luxlord Black asked. "Do you have specific intelligence of a threat?"

  "I'm saying if we don't pull out of Garriston and end the tribute on our terms, King Garadul is going to take Garriston by force and end it on his." That's what King Garadul had meant when he'd told Gavin, "We're going to take back what you stole from us." But Gavin couldn't tell them about that without revealing more secrets, and they wouldn't believe it anyway.

  "I'm failing to see the humor here," Klytos Blue said nervously. He was a coward in a dozen ways, but Ruthgar wasn't going to give up Garriston easily, Gavin knew. "We've got a thousand soldiers and fifty drafters there. The drafters alone could hold off whatever army this 'King' Garadul could raise."

  "Knuckling under to a rebel, a man who declares himself a king-it's unthinkable," the Orange said. "He deserves death."

  Oh, father, it's too bad you never come anymore. You would enjoy this. I can do one thing that you never could.

  "First," Gavin said, "us leaving is the right thing to do. We're punishing people who have suffered too much already, and they hate us for it. We've been planting the seeds of another war for the last sixteen years. They started the war, yes. General Delmarta was born in Garriston, yes. But that doesn't excuse us from what we've done, which is not just wrong, but also stupid."

  "Excuse me?" Delara Orange said. Her predecessor to the Orange-her mother-had been the architect of the rotating occupation scheme.

  "You heard me," Gavin said. "We get almost no Tyrean drafters. You think that's because none are born there anymore? Ha! What i
f, instead of training here, where they are poor and reviled and suspected as traitors, what if someone decided to train them closer to home? A new school, a Chromeria dedicated to vengeance, started because of our pettiness and stupidity."

  "Nonsense," Delara said. "We would have heard of such a thing."

  "But what if you hadn't?" Gavin asked. "The quality of instruction might not be as good as ours. I hope it wouldn't be. But even with a few rudimentary fire spells, how long could your fifty drafters stationed in Garriston hold out against several hundred? How long could your soldiers hold out against thousands of rebels who could hide in plain sight among the locals? The fact is, King Garadul will take Garriston. He will demand it, on terms that he knows are insufferable, and then he will seize it. The only question is, will we lose and lose face and make King Garadul seem like a winner, and finally get drawn into a war your satrapies don't have the stomach for, or will we forgo a tribute which-after it's divided six ways-is insignificant, and give away that which we can't keep? If we give Garriston to King Garadul before he even asks, we look magnanimous. If we give him an apology, we look moral, and if we do both before he asks, we deprive him of a victory and a cause."

  "Do you have evidence of all this?" Delara asked. She was slippery, as oranges tended to be, but drafting red luxin made a drafter more aggressive and reckless over time, too. "Because it seems to me that you would like us to give away an entire city for little reason otherwise. We don't know this new King Garadul. He has only recently taken power. He hasn't sent us a single emissary, much less made demands."

  "You're telling me none of you have spies at Garadul's side?" Gavin shot back.

  A few sardonic smiles and silence. No one was going to admit that, of course. They didn't trust each other enough. There had been no wars in the last sixteen years, but that didn't mean that everyone's interests were aligned. The Chromeria and every capital was as full of spies as it had ever been.

  "If you don't," Gavin said in an imperious tone sure to needle them, "get some."

  "High Luxlord, we take your advice to the satrapies very seriously, of course-" Klytos Blue started to say. The Ruthgari hated Gavin, and had since he'd ended the war with the Blood Forest.

  Gavin cut him off. Time to play the hothead. "Listen, you morons. I don't know how you didn't see this coming. Or maybe some of you did. Your loyalty is noted. The fact remains, this is rebellion and it's heresy. King Garadul is talking about overthrowing the satrapies and the worship of Orholam himself. I would have thought Orholam would command better service from his Colors."

  "Enough! Enough, Lord Prism!" the White barked. She looked at Gavin like she couldn't believe what he'd said.

  Nothing like calling powerful men and women idiots, ingrates, disloyal, and impious all at once. Looking around the room, Gavin saw shock on some faces and hatred on others.

  In the silence, Klytos Blue spoke first. He was a blue. It was only natural he should think things through faster than anyone else. "I believe that we should take the Lord Prism seriously. It's only prudent that we serve the satrapies and Orholam as zealously as he does every day." The words were delivered straight, but the malice couldn't have been more evident. "I move that we send a delegation to Garriston, to assess the threat from the alleged rebel Garadul and report back to us directly."

  "A delegation?! Are you blind or stupid or corrupt?" Gavin demanded. "By the time they-"

  "Gavin!" the White said. "Enough!"

  She took the vote for a delegation to be sent and report back in two months' time. It passed, five to zero, with two abstentions.

  Gavin sat back in his chair, as if stunned, defeated. In the silence before anyone stood to leave, he shook his head. Said grimly, "I ceded power after the war, gave up the promachia. I became an adviser, when many wanted me to be an emperor in truth. And now you ignore me. Very well. But tell your satraps and satrapahs this: Prepare for war. King Garadul won't stop at taking Garriston. I guarantee it."

  You see, father, this is the one thing I can do that you never could: I can handle appearing to lose.

  Chapter 41

  Liv had barely seen her new apartments in the yellow tower before she'd gone out. Not to celebrate, not because she was impulsive, but because her courage had been fading with every passing second. She'd been to half the moneylenders on the islands before she found one willing to do business with her.

  Stepping inside her new room, she found that the tower's slaves had brought all her meager belongings over from the closet she'd called home for the last three years. And there was a woman sitting on her bed.

  "Salve, Liv, been out celebrating?" Aglaia Crassos asked.

  "What are you doing in my apartments?" Liv asked. "How'd you get in here?"

  "It's not good to forget your friends, Aliviana." Aglaia stood and came to stand a hand's breadth from Liv's face.

  "What? You're here to threaten me? I'm shaking."

  Something ugly crossed Aglaia's face, but then was replaced by that smooth mask again, and that disingenuous laugh. "Careful with that sharp tongue, girl. You may cut your own throat."

  "I'm done," Liv said. "Gavin Guile has-"

  "Bought you to be his bed slave. I heard."

  "Go to hell!" Liv said.

  "You're the one who'll do that, seeing how you're throwing yourself at the man who murdered your mother and destroyed your country."

  It was a tremendous slap. Liv took a step back.

  Aglaia had made a reference to the burning of Garriston before, but Liv had never heard anything remotely like that. In truth, Liv had no idea, but considering the source, she was willing to bet it was a lie. "The Prism didn't have anything to do with that."

  "And you know that because he said so? Your mother died in those fires. Your father led the fight against Gavin Guile."

  "What do you care about Garriston? Ruthgar fought on the Prism's side. Your father fought beside Gavin."

  "And my brother is the governor of Garriston, so I'm in a position to know things," Aglaia said. She lowered her voice and leaned in. "And maybe now you are too."

  So that was what this was about. "No," Liv said. "I'm finished with you, with Ruthgar, and with your lies." Fealty to One. That was the Danavis motto, with strong suggestion that it was fealty only to one. And Liv wasn't about to serve this one.

  "Welcome to your new life, Liv. You're important now. You are a player in the great game, and your hand isn't all bad. You see, Liv, you might be Tyrean, but no one's going to hold that against you anymore. It will only make you more remarkable for overcoming such a handicap. The good life can be yours."

  "You can't buy me," Liv said.

  "We already did."

  "Things are different now. By the Prism's own command."

  Aglaia's eyebrows rose slowly, making her horsey face seem even longer. It was a practiced gesture, but then, nothing about her was genuine. "I've been working with you for, what, three years now? And I went back through my notes. I never thought you were a thief, Aliviana Danavis. But now you're abandoning your duty after three years of schooling. Three years we've supported your every need-"

  "Oh so generously, too!" Liv said.

  "If it had been more generous, your debt would be that much greater now. Here's my question, Liv. What kind of woman are you?"

  It was the same question that had put a quill in Liv's hand to sign away a fortune. With her new friendship with Gavin, she could probably tell the Ruthgari to go bugger themselves. What could they say against the Prism's decision? And though Liv had gone from a nothing-a monochrome talented in a minimally useful color-to a bichrome, she still wasn't worth fighting over. Plenty of each nation's investments went bad. Drafters died or burned out, or switched loyalty in the last year of their training. Every nation tried to steal drafters, and the Ruthgari were more successful at it than anyone else, so surely they wouldn't fight too hard to keep Liv.

  But to be a Danavis was to act with honor. Always.

  "What do you wan
t?" Liv asked.

  "You've been an embarrassment to me, Liv. The hardly talented daughter of a rebel general. But now you're going to be a jewel in my crown. You will be my vengeance on those who thought to slight me. And for that, I need you to be a success. You'll already be collecting a generous allowance from the bursar out of the Chromeria's general fund. Keep that, and we'll pay you double as well. We'll forgive your debt and the years of service you already owe us. Hell, if you play your cards right, you can draw allowances from three or four nations before you leave the Jaspers. Indeed, you won't need to leave the Chromeria at all, if you serve us well. Think about that: you can have a life here, at the center of the world, where everything important happens. Bed who you want, marry who you want, give your children every advantage you were denied. Or you can go serve some lordling somewhere, writing letters and examining his wife's bed to see if she's faithful to him, hoping he'll give you permission to marry someone you can tolerate. Out of all the nations, Ruthgar is the best to serve. And the worst to offend."

  "But why do you want me to spy on the Prism? He's never done anything to offend Ruthgar."

  "We like to keep an eye on our friends. It helps us remain friends-"

  "And yet you were just telling me how I could do this to hurt the man who killed my mother. Which is it, Aglaia? Do you want me to betray him to hurt him, or it's not really a betrayal at all because you aren't going to hurt him?"

  "Well said," Aglaia said. But then she continued, unflappable, "The point is, you may be able to damage the man personally who is responsible for so much havoc in your country, but your interference, your betrayal-perverse girl, insisting on calling the service of your own country a betrayal-your 'betrayal' won't result in war. These lands have seen enough of that."

  It took Liv a moment to digest. It did make sense. In a way.

  "But this is impossible. I don't know the Prism. He's talked to me once. Once."