by Brent Weeks
“To be a White is to know secrets, Karris. But that the position requires spying and skulduggery doesn’t relieve me of the moral obligation for how I use what I know.”
Another breath. “And you’ve known about … me, too? How long?”
“I’ve known about your son since the beginning. Other women I’ve known who have given up children have been haunted by it ever since. So over the years, I gave you several assignments where, had you wished, you could have extended your time to go looking for him without anyone being the wiser. You never took those chances.”
Woodenly, Karris said, “I was … afraid I’d lead spies right to him. Afraid of what I would do, of who he’d become, of what he thought of me.”
“The darkness has not served you well. From what I learned today, I believe now that Andross Guile has known about him for years as well. Be wise as a serpent, child.”
But Karris couldn’t wrestle with her thoughts about her son. Zymun. She hadn’t even known his name. There was too much there, and she didn’t trust herself how she’d react in front of the White. Her chin drifted up, and she pushed that open wound away. Just for the time being.
“I wish … I wish I had the kind of certainty you have. That Orholam is guiding me. I wish I could see him give me a visible sign, like he did you.”
The White chuckled. “Yes, two green flashes, in fifty years. What are the odds? It turns out, if you watch the sunset almost every day, pretty good. Karris, what we see is not determined solely by what is in the world, but also by what is in us. The lens is as important as the light. You think I haven’t questioned those two occasions a thousand thousand times? Besides, Orholam speaks differently to each of his children. I only thought of the green flash as a message because my own grandmother always called it Orholam’s wink. Had you seen it, you would have thought it a curious phenomenon. Orholam may speak to you in ways more pedestrian: through his holy writ, or through his followers’ words, related to you. Could you accept that?”
“Of course.”
“Then hear this word, which is his gift for you. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening. Did Orholam just tell you this now, or have you somehow steered me into this?”
“Orholam has told me this for you a thousand times. In fifteen years, I have never read these words without you filling my mind, but it has been my lot to know and not to tell. Part of the price I pay for my own sins. Even the forgiven must pay penance.”
Sins? What sins had the White committed? Did she think that not telling anyone about Gavin was a sin? Surely not. “What is the word?” Karris asked.
“The Most High will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
Locusts hadn’t come to the Seven Satrapies since before Lucidonius, but Karris had a luxiat when she was a child who told stories that made the plague as real as a memory. Thought to be an effusion of an imbalance of a surfeit of both green and blue, they came in a cloud, with a sound like distant, unremitting thunder. They spread from horizon to horizon, literally shadowing the land. The mass was like a million chariots descending to pillage the land, and the ancient Seer Jo’El spoke of them marching as in ranks.
Drafters of every stripe, even in that ancient, fractured time, had fought in their waves. Blues tried to draft domes over entire fields. Oranges had tried to manipulate the hordes and turn them to foreign lands. Reds and sub-reds had sprayed the skies with fire. And like candles thrown into the ocean the drafters were extinguished, one by one by one by the thousands.
And everywhere the locusts went, they devoured everything. Nothing green was left. They wiped out not only crops, but whole forests. Trees, denuded of their leaves, simply died in their wake. Men went mad during the assault, screaming, open mouths filled with locusts. Men went mad after, as starvation’s scythe swung. The insect armies left nothing good and green and growing. Nothing but hollow-cheeked children with huge eyes and hunger-swollen bellies, walking on stick legs until they could no longer stand. They curled, not even waving the flies from their eyes. And they died.
And that had been Karris’s life, since the war. Even with Gavin’s coming back, and marrying her, she couldn’t but think of those sixteen years of her life, the flower of her youth, lost, blighted, devoured. And an impotent rage smoldered there, an ever-burning fire that she hadn’t even known was still aflame.
This was her slow suicide. This was her drafting red, so much red she would die young, not precisely on purpose, but not precisely not.
The words themselves were a fist that punched through her stomach, ripped off a dozen layers of ill-fitting plate, and gave her a warm, clean robe in their place.
“Karris, you will be at your most formidable when you bear no sword and wear no armor,” the White said gently. “This is the power of the word.”
Karris couldn’t move. She held herself rigid. I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten. That promise held everything she’d ever hoped to hear, and from Orholam. It felt like someone had picked her soul up out of her body and shaken it gently, and all the dirt and grime and hatred and rage had simply sloughed off and fallen, and he dropped her back into her own shoes. Everything was the same, but her eyes were different, healing. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Finally, she said, “You have been the mother to me that my mother could never be. You have been more. Thank you.” She knelt, and kissed the White’s hand.
The White held her cheek fondly, then patted her, signaling she should stand. “I must go now, my dear. I will pray for you, Karris, and I will pray that Orholam gives you your own green flash when the time is right.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Karris said. “Not ever.”
The White smiled sadly. “Thank you, child. Do me a favor, will you?”
“Anything. Anything.”
“Be kind to Marissia. She has done excellent service in harder circumstances than you can know.”
The request, as reasonable as it was, reached nonetheless straight into that hot core where the rage fire had burned. For what was that red-haired beauty but a walking symbol of all Karris had lost in those sixteen years? She, a slave, had had what Karris with her wealth and position could not have. Not just a man—as if a man’s affections could be traded as one would trade a cow—but a position, a purpose, a place that she fit perfectly. ‘Blackguard’ had been a cloak that Karris had worn because she was excellent enough at the attendant skills that she couldn’t be denied it, but she hadn’t been Blackguard as Commander Ironfist was Blackguard. It was not a task to him, but an identity. Thus Karris had always been given the odd assignments, as the White’s fetch-and-carry girl, as Gavin’s partner in hunting wights, as liaison here and there. She’d always been different, and not just in the tone of her skin or background. Her Blackguard brothers had accepted her as you accept a sister with a limp: fiercely, because it was so obvious that she didn’t quite fit.
Marissia had always fit. Her staff was invisible, because they served perfectly. And so too had she served excellently at a myriad other duties that Karris was only seeing now. And of course, Gavin Guile’s longtime room slave was accorded treatment no other slave in the Seven Satrapies got. Not even Grinwoody was treated like Marissia. The younger, wilder Gavin fresh from the war had made sure of it.
A young lord Seaborn had gotten grabby and, when his advances were rebuffed, had blackened young Marissia’s eyes.
Gavin had melted his face and mounted his head over the Chromeria’s front gate—briefly. The White had seen it taken down within hours.
It was enough of an insult that the family had sworn vengeance. But through mysterious circumstances that most of the Blackguards later attributed to the Red, the Seaborns quickly found themselves without allies. The family had eventually sided with pirates attacking the Guiles and their retainers’ ships.
They’d all been hanged, and their lands seized and given to the Red’s friends, including, incidentally, some of the Seaborns’ old all
ies who’d abandoned them.
And Gavin showed not the least sorrow for it. He was a hard man, but that made him a safe friend, and a fearsome foe. When he came to your door and gave you the choice which to be, such stories came to mind.
The White said, “I know you envy her, though truth be told, she envies you more.”
“She envies me? But she’s a slave.” A slave shouldn’t dare to envy her owners.
“And yet a woman still.”
“More’s the pity.”
The White folded her hands in her lap, her very silence a reproach. When Karris met her gaze, chagrined, the White said, “The choice to give up bitterness is not easy, but it is simple: peace or poison. And don’t wait until you feel like making it. You never will.”
Karris took a deep breath and went back inside. The White followed her in.
“Gill has a package for you. It’s your inheritance. Please don’t open it until you hear of my passing.”
Karris swallowed. She opened the door and Gill handed her a package tied with red ribbon. It felt like nothing more than half a dozen pieces of paper. Seemed a small inheritance, but then, the White had treasured information above all, and who was to say what was written there. Thinking of that—“What am I supposed to do with the spies? I’ve spent all this time…”
“I’ve explained that in those papers. Maybe not to your full satisfaction, but as well as I can. Please don’t let those fall into enemy hands.”
“And burn them as soon as I’ve memorized them, which I should do instantly. Yes, I’m familiar,” Karris said. They shared a grin.
“One last thing,” the White said. “While you’re doing hard things. When the time comes, please, forgive me, too.”
“For what?”
“For failing you a thousand ways, as every mother does. Know that you are loved, Karris. And remember this: even a small woman, if she stands near a great light, casts a long shadow.”
“A small woman? You’re a giant,” Karris said through damp eyes.
The White grinned, and it wasn’t until she and her Blackguards had disappeared into the hall that Karris realized the White hadn’t meant herself; she’d meant Karris.
Chapter 78
Days passed. Weeks.
Gavin was fed and given watered wine, but the guards who tended him never said a word. Never answered a query. Avoided eye contact. When one did accidentally meet his eyes, Gavin saw the worst thing possible: pity.
They thought Gavin was mad. Without his prismatic eyes, no one believed he was the Prism. Without his drafting, without his regalia, without his Blackguard escort, his impish imperial imperiousness seemed the struttings of insanity.
Was what Gavin had woven in all those years of power so thin a veil? Is a man no more than his magic?
Then one day, the door opened and the Nuqaba came in, bracketed by her Tafok Amagez. She limped a little as she came to stand in front of him. She waved the guards away. They hesitated, obviously mindful of what had happened last time. Her jaw set, and they left.
“You may be pleased to know we’ve come to an agreement,” she said.
“We?”
“Eirene and I. Your father and the two of us. We are going to sell you to him. After you’ve faced justice.”
“Justice?” Gavin asked. “So you’ve come to wash my feet and begin begging to know how you might pay restitution.” Lies and illusions and bluster. But it was all he had.
“You’ve assaulted the Nuqaba. A drafter who assaults the Nuqaba is punished by having his eyes burnt out. Everyone wins.”
She meant it. Every word. Even after all he’d said.
You can’t barter with crazy.
“Even you win,” she said. “With your eyes burned out, your father doesn’t need to know you lost your power. Eirene wasn’t going to go along with it, until I pointed out that your father might deny that you were you. After all, without your prismatic eyes, what are you? Useless, that’s what. Useless.”
She leaned close, but not close enough for him to snatch her haik and pull her against the bars and brain her.
“You’ll be gagged, of course, and in the very stadium where you killed so many, you will be publicly blinded. While people cheer. You always did so love a spectacle, didn’t you? On the ship home, you’ll be scrubbed and shaved and given a haircut and put back in clothes befitting your former rank. Your father has to accept receipt of you, of course. Has to accept that it’s you. But I want you to know something. On that ship with you, there will be an assassin. A man loyal to me unto death. After you’ve been accepted, he will shout some nonsense about the Color Prince, and kill you. Do you know how hard it is to stop an assassin who doesn’t care if he dies?” She sighed. “Your death is necessary, I’m afraid. It’s my fault. I was careless. I spoke too freely, earlier. I searched all our laws to see if I could cut out your tongue and remove all your fingers instead so that you wouldn’t be able to tell him what I said, but there’s no such punishment. Blinding will have to do.”
Her tone was so light and joyous that Gavin thought she must be joking.
She wasn’t joking.
“Do you know,” she said, “it used to be quite common? Blinding drafters, that is. I think they had more drafters then. They said that if a man misused the light Orholam gave him, he should be denied light altogether, that perhaps he would repent and not lose his soul. Tell me, Gavin, don’t you agree that you’ve misused the light that Orholam gave you?”
Yes. Yes, I have.
He said nothing.
“There are instructions for how to do it—hear this—humanely. Because if you’re going to put out a man’s eyes, you should do it without unnecessary suffering, right? Ha. Apparently, it requires all sorts of strapping down. They used to build this machine. Quite ingenious. Two pokers that could be adjusted to the wideness of each man’s face. The tines heated glowing hot. A stopblock so that eyes would be fully burnt out, without piercing the brain and killing the blasphemer, no matter how he might thrash. There are even instructions on what luxin to use to prop the eyelids open. If you burn the eyelids, the blasphemers would often get an infection and die. You want them to live, not die of a fever. How can they repent if they aren’t in their right mind, right? They said they did both eyes at once because after losing one eye, a man’s anticipation of the pain of losing the second was so great they’d often go mad.” She smirked. “We, of course, have no machine. We’ll do one eye at a time. I want you to think of one thing, Gavin Guile. Tssssss.”
He looked at her, confused.
“That’ll be the sound of your eyeball steaming as red-hot iron enters it.” A chill went through his very core. This was the woman who it was rumored had tortured her husband for years. Suddenly, he believed it.
“And know this, if you shout anything other than screams of pain, if you claim to be Gavin Guile, we’ll shout you down and beat you for blaspheming and tear out your tongue. There aren’t instructions in my scrolls how to do that, but I don’t need them. I already know.”
She was a worse butcher than her brother ever was. “What happened to you?” Gavin asked. She wasn’t like this, before, was she? Or had it been there all along?
“I refused to merely survive.”
“You’re the Nuqaba; you’re sworn to Orholam.” Though as the words came out, the irony wasn’t lost on Gavin that he should be the one speaking them.
She glanced around for eavesdroppers, then the expression instantly morphed from appalled to grimly amused. “A dead faith that keeps rolling only from its own momentum. Men want to worship, and worshipping abstractions is hard. I give them something easier: me. As you used to.”
“I never asked for men’s worship,” Gavin said. He’d lost faith, but he’d taken it as his responsibility to safeguard the religion for those who did believe. Why destroy it for others, if it made them happy? Why destroy it, if there was a slim chance that it was true?
“Did you not?” She shook her head. “I don’t eve
n need the seed crystal to tell me that you’re deceiving yourself. I have preparations to make. Just remember: tssssss.”
She laughed, and left.
Gavin sank to the ground of his cell. His eyes. Dear Orholam, his eyes. His fucking eyes had been betraying him all his life.
During the war, men and women, satrapahs and conns had believed in him because of his prismatic eyes, he knew. His impossible eyes. His brother had seen the onset of their prismatic glory. That had torn his brother’s soul; Karris had only been the pebble that upended the cart. With one glance, his eyes had proved to the world that what the Chromeria said could never happen, had happened. Two Prisms in one generation. And if one had to pick between brothers, it was hard not to choose whichever brother who stood before you, threatening you, wasn’t it?
You are nothing more than your magic, Gavin Guile.
Gavin remembered his first conversations with his older brother about magic. Gavin, the elder, had known everything. Or speculated with such confidence that Dazen had never failed to be impressed. He’d worshipped Gavin.
He still did.
He wondered how much of his persona as Prism was a projection of that winsome, pretend perfection his big brother had embodied to Dazen as a child. Gavin was the oak around which Dazen had grown, like ivy. The parasite vine climbed high and decorative, slowly choking the life out of that which it embraced. No wonder Gavin had hated his little brother with the boyish hatred of encumbrances.
Even after the war, Dazen had grown round the great expanse that had been Gavin, draping his own foliage over the widespread branches and calling himself an oak. Calling it life, when it was death. Blocking out the sun, light, and life intended for another.
And now that Gavin was dead, and the oak rotted, what happened to the ivy? On its own, it had no strength to stand.
I haven’t mourned him. I put two bullets in his face, and I haven’t mourned him.
I wonder what it smells like down there. I left his body to rot. I didn’t even have the decency to wrap him in funeral cloths. Didn’t want to get bloody.
