by Brent Weeks
“Someday, you cretin, you may lead this family and perhaps this world, if you aren’t too stupid to take what I hand to you. But that day is not today. From this day forth, you obey without question, and you prove yourself worthy of this family. I’m giving you one chance. You have a brother, and however much he pretends to oppose me, he and I have an understanding, and he serves me well. If he serves better than you do, I will not hesitate to make him the Guile heir. From Ataea Guile’s time, we have only practiced primogeniture when it suits us. The only way you will inherit is if you please me. And so you know, in this family, the one heir gets everything.”
The ambition on Zymun’s face was as naked as the hatred, but Andross Guile didn’t seem to notice. Zymun said, after a pause that was only a little too long, “Of course, grandfather. How may I best serve?”
Andross Guile stared at him and tossed back his liquor with a grimace. “Tomorrow we make you the Prism-elect.”
“I thought the White had to acquiesce to any recommendation the Spectrum brought her for that. I was under the impression she wasn’t a friend.”
“She isn’t, but she’s doing me a big favor tonight.”
“She’s signing off on it tonight?”
Andross Guile gave a thin-lipped smile that was all victory. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.
He didn’t explain any more to Zymun, seemingly pleased to deny a morsel of information to the young man, but Teia’s heart dropped. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t put it together before now. A woman that Andross Guile wanted dead, and Murder Sharp being here—after being at the Chromeria earlier.
Sharp wouldn’t go to the Chromeria simply to test Teia; the place was too dangerous for him. He’d come to scout, and he’d used Teia to scout the last part, and used what she reported to help him kill the White. No doubt now Sharp would make himself highly visible somewhere on the other side of Big Jasper for the entire night, just in case a drafter stumbled across some paryl in the old woman’s body.
Murder Sharp would have an alibi.
For a moment, blind rage flooded Teia. Who would hurt that kind old woman? How dare he? Murder Sharp was an animal, but he was merely a tool. It was Andross Guile Teia wanted to kill. How could he stand so close to goodness for so long, and hate it? Such things—for sure they are not men—should not be allowed to be.
She could kill him. She could kill Zymun. She could kill Grinwoody. No, not Grinwoody. Slaves shouldn’t be killed for the sins of their masters, no matter how much they seemed to enjoy facilitating them.
Would it not be a service to the greater good to kill these detestable men? Would it not be a fulfillment of the Blackguard’s oaths? She hadn’t taken the final oaths, but she knew them, and had wanted to take them for as long as she could remember.
I swear upon my life and light and sacred honor to protect the White, the Black, the Prism, and all the members of the Spectrum of the Seven Satrapies, and in the final exigency to protect the Seven Satrapies. I shall live not as a woman free, but as a slave to my duties and after them to my commanders. The final exigency was when a Prism went mad, and refused to lay down his powers, and had to be put down, but Teia supposed it also applied if a Color or even a promachos went mad and did the same.
She began filling herself with paryl, not simply the constant stream she needed to keep the shimmercloak functioning, but enough to make weapons.
‘Protect,’ Teia. The word is ‘protect.’ Not ‘avenge.’ You are not to be a blade in the darkness, you are a shield. You are not a woman alone, you are a soldier under authority.
If I kill now, I’m an assassin, not a Blackguard.
I am a special soldier, with uncommon skills and unique abilities, but I am a soldier under orders. If the White commands me to kill Andross Guile, I will kill with joy in my heart, and a conscience clean of murder, though guilty of rejoicing in it.
The world might be better if I were a law unto myself, if I killed these loathsome men.
She sat on that thought. She’d killed a man in that alley, almost on accident, but he’d been a man who would have killed her or her team if she hadn’t. Aside from the heaviness of killing at all, when she looked at the situation, she couldn’t see a moment when she would have acted differently. More competently, sure. But she’d trained as hard as she could for as long as she could. Her skills at that point in time weren’t something she could change. She would have done what she did again. This …
Dear Orholam, what harm will these men do that I might prevent?
But it wasn’t her place. Orholam had put her here, but he’d put her in the Blackguard, too, and he’d put a longing in her whole heart to be a Blackguard. She couldn’t betray all that. She was called to be a shield, and shield she would be.
And like that, the cobwebs cleared and what she had to do was simple.
The White wasn’t dead. Not yet.
Teia waited only until her chance came, and slipped out of the room. She made her way downstairs, stilled the bell above a servants’ door to the outside, and went out. She slipped past the Blackguards, climbed the roof of the stables in the back, and vaulted over the high fence. After a block, she dropped the invisibility and simply ran.
She was almost all the way back to the Chromeria before she realized that both Andross and Zymun could see in the sub-red. If it had occurred to either man to look in sub-red while she was in the room, she would be in a dungeon or dead right now. The thought made her sweat run cold.
Lucky, T. Now let’s hope that luck holds.
Chapter 83
Gavin had expected some casual cruelty on his way to the hippodrome, like being forced to wear a hood, or locked in a carriage or palanquin with something disgusting so that his last sight before the cheering crowds would be of filth. Instead, he was allowed to ride inside a normal carriage, albeit with doors that locked from the outside, and windows too small to wiggle through.
He was also chained and tied up nearly as much as he would have tied up himself in this situation. But still, he could see, and by luck, he got the better window.
He wanted to think that knowing these were among the last things he would see lent everything a certain poignancy, but the truth was that the Great River Delta was always beautiful, and now, with Sun Day on the morrow, it looked as vibrant as he’d ever seen a day in whites and grays look.
As the carriage rumbled through the cobbled switchbacks down Jaks Hill where the great families had their estates, Gavin could see the myriad farms stretched out on the plain below. With the warmer weather and the passing of time, the floodwaters had deposited their yearly tribute of fertile silt. Some fields were now dry. Others were muddy. Some few were still under a bare thumb of water. Thousands of shorebirds filled land and sky. Egrets and herons and cranes and ducks and geese and red-winged blackbirds had arrived from their migrations or emerged from hiding. Rushes and cattails and a thousand kinds of grass had sprung up in the lines between perfect fields. The land must be a debauched party of greens and browns and points of color like jeweled fingers flashing in torchlight.
Gavin’s monochromatic vision was a curse once again. This world had faded to textures.
He sank back into his carriage seat.
Some part of him still expected a crash at any moment, a violent stop, fighting—rescue.
But none came. The image of the baby black widow spiders rolling over him in a wave changed. Now the eggs were grains of black powder, wadded down the blossoming barrel of a blunderbuss. Gavin, the elder, watched: a hole in his forehead, a hole in his jaw, head bobbing like an old man with the twitching sickness because the tendons supporting his head had been clipped by the passage of bullets and brains out the back of his skull. Dead Gavin smiled around broken teeth, blood washing from the front of his head and his mouth and the back of his head, too, too much blood for a man to bleed when his brain had been stopped. Too much blood for a man to bleed, period. He cocked that blunderbuss, aimed it at his little brother’s stomach.
He fired.
The blunderbuss vomited black death through Dazen’s guts. He jerked, looked down with trepidation. All his soft tissues were gone. He stood on his spine alone. A writhing mass of black spiders fed on his guts, grew into adults in moments, and swarmed, devouring. They climbed his spine, wrapped under his hanging skin, and went inside his rib cage. They devoured his lungs. He couldn’t breathe, feeling them from the inside, taking life from his very core. And then they ate his heart. It seized, labored, thumped one last time, and stopped.
He fell. Opened his mouth to seek some forgiveness, but only spiders burst forth, burning his esophagus like bile, spewing over his tongue, crawling out of his nose. He was covered with black spiders, a living stinging biting blanket, sticky as tar. His brother stood over him and laughed. His eyes crinkled and he leaned forward—Dazen had forgotten how Gavin did that, how he doubled forward, eyes shut when he laughed hard.
Now Dead Gavin stood over him, laughing, and the sun shone through the hole in his head like a third eye. The beam of light fell on Dazen just as the spiders began crawling up his cheeks. They were going for his eyes! He jerked, but his arms were useless, his mouth pried opened. And then the spiders began attacking his eyes, biting, poison squirting deep into those orbs, filling his precious orisons with acid.
Gavin jerked awake. They were in the city proper now. He gulped and blinked, the sun high above, cutting through the gap in the carriage’s window curtain. Not quite noon. He was sleeping through his last sights. But still the dream clung to him. Would Gavin laugh at him like that, doubling over, out of breath? Or would he have some compassion for him now, at the end?
His guards chuckled. “Never seen a man who could sleep on his way to torture. You got stones, friend.”
Gavin looked at the guard, searching him for some sign of humanity. Was this man part of his escape plan? No. No. Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.
I shouldn’t have killed you like that, brother. It wasn’t worthy of me. It wasn’t worthy of you. I don’t think you would have taken shriving from me, but I should have offered. Should have given you a chance to prepare yourself. Killing you without warning, that was for me. That was for my nerve, which I knew would fail me.
Because I still loved you. And love you still.
A Guile’s love is a bullet through the brain.
He bowed his head even as the sounds of the hippodrome floated down into the street. A race must have been under way. The streets were packed, and though carriages had the right of way that came with crushing power, it still had to slow as they approached the enormous crowds around the hippodrome. The carriage added its tinny bell to the din: shouting voices of vendors, angry yells from other drivers, a distant yell decrying a thief, the throbbing roar of the crowd inside the hippodrome swelling in time to their favorite chariot coming round, the hoots and jeers of fans outside, the rattling of tuned bamboo wind chimes and more, cowbell and brass and drums competing among the fans.
But the colors were mute. Gray on gray on dark gray on black. The smell of cooking pork and curries and roasted nuts in caramel was far more vivacious. Gavin peered through his curtain and saw a little boy in rags, lean to the point of starvation, staring back at him.
A lookout for the rescue?
But the boy merely watched him go by.
The carriage turned and went down a long ramp, accompanied by many shouts, and then was swallowed by darkness. A gate rattled shut behind them. This area was off-limits to the public.
And Gavin’s last ember of hope died. They didn’t know he was here. Like so many other things, his father had been able to keep it secret. Gavin was going to lose his half-useless eyes, and then he was going to die. Funny how he was more worried about his eyes than his life.
They have stolen light from me. What is life without light?
The carriage door opened. He was bundled out, hands bound behind his back, hobbled by his chains so that he had to take tiny shuffling steps. They didn’t help him. After walking hundreds of paces through winding corridors beneath the very hippodrome itself—the roof rumbling with hoofbeats as the chariots raced overhead, the roar of the crowd barely rising to perception—Gavin was put in an iron-barred cell. More a cage, really. It was fitted with chains connected to gears, and high above, there was a panel that slid back. This cage would take him directly up into the stadium floor.
“On your knees,” a soldier said. He waited until Gavin complied before he came into the cage himself, carrying a bucket full of black liquid. Or dark liquid, anyway. The soldier was careful, too. He didn’t keep the key, but handed it off to another, outside the cell, and locked the door behind himself.
“Dunk your head. Not your skin, just your hair,” the soldier said. He didn’t seem to relish the duty. Gavin looked up at him, not understanding what he wanted.
The man locked up suddenly, muscles clenching so obviously that his friend called out, “Something wrong?”
“No,” the soldier said, after a brief hesitation. “I got this. I’ll call for you.”
And then Gavin recognized him.
“Captain Eutheos. Citation for Extraordinary Bravery at Blood Ridge, wasn’t it?” Gavin said. He remembered belatedly that that was his own memory, pinning that ribbon on the man’s chest. He’d been Dazen then. As Gavin, he should have no memory of Eutheos. Oops.
Ah well. What would have been a gigantic blunder at some other time now seemed a bit trivial.
There was a gigantic clatter and roar of wheels and hoofbeats pounding overhead as the massed chariots passed, but it was obviously a familiar, inconsequential sound to the captain.
The sudden joy on the soldier’s face bloomed and died in an instant, an abortion of hope.
“It can’t be,” he said. “They ordered me to dye your hair and eyebrows and make you look scruffy. I didn’t know why, but … High Lord Prism … Dazen Guile?” the soldier whispered.
A crushing weight settled on Gavin’s chest. There had been a time when he would have tried to turn this man, when he would have blithely ordered this man to do something that would cost him position, and reputation, and family, and probably life, all for the slimmest chance that Gavin might, might, escape.
But he’d been young then. All his invincibility had been built on other men’s bones.
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said. “It’s mine.”
“I swore you my fealty, my lord, all those years ago, but … I swore them my fealty, too, after the war.”
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said.
“I, I, I gave him the key. If I, if I have to call him back, I’ll have to steal it from him, hurt him—he’s my brother-in-law, and devoted to this land something fierce. He wasn’t in the war. He doesn’t know what it was like.” The captain looked around like a trapped animal. “Which oath does a man hold, when holding one means breaking the other, and he never saw it coming?”
“I wouldn’t ask it of you,” Gavin said.
“That’s why the hair black, and the charcoal. They don’t want to chance anyone recognizing you like I done—as either Prism or as Dazen, I s’pose. But how are you alive? What do I do?”
Gavin was still on his knees. “Eutheos,” he said. “Be still.”
And the man was still. This, at least, Gavin still had. His voice was sometimes magic over other men.
“Breathe.”
And Eutheos breathed.
Chariots passed overhead again, but they seemed far, far away.
There was no escape from here. If Eutheos unlocked Gavin’s chains, Gavin could go no more than a few hundred paces. He wasn’t strong enough to fight. He couldn’t draft. He couldn’t get out. And there was no point ruining a man and his family for a futile gesture.
“Captain, before I release you from your oaths, as your last duty to me, dye my hair, and black my eyebrows as you’ve been told. I ask only that you keep the dye from my eyes. They will burn soon en
ough.”
And so he did. He did his job thoroughly, and well, and silently, tears streaming down his face. He dried Gavin’s hair with a cloth, and blacked his eyebrows with coal, and then ground dirt and ash onto his ruddy skin to make him look no more than a beggar.
Gavin said, “I’ve no more right to compel you, soldier, but as a man, as a comrade who once took up arms with you, I ask a favor. Will you send a letter to Karris Guile at the Chromeria of my fate? And tell her that I will be murdered by the Nuqaba’s assassin as I arrive in Big Jasper. Don’t put your own name on this letter, nor anything that can be traced to you. It will be death for you if it is intercepted.”
Former Captain Eutheos nodded and swallowed. “My lord. You made me feel part of something. It was the only time in my life that I—” He cut off, clearing his throat as his brother-in-law the soldier came back, this time not alone. Eutheos said gruffly, “Let me outta here, would you? Got some dirt in my eyes.”
He was let out, and the other man unlocked and locked the door carefully, as if the still-bound Gavin might attack at any moment. The woman who was with that soldier, though, surprised Gavin. It was Eirene Malargos, not the Nuqaba. She dismissed them and they moved out of earshot.
She looked tired. “I didn’t want this,” she said. “You’ve done nothing here that would exact such a penalty under Ruthgari law—but you also know that I can’t let you attack my ally and do nothing. Were she forgiving, she would let us handle this in our way. She’s not chosen that route. I see why she is feared.”
Gavin simply stared at her. He reckoned from her mood that Eirene Malargos would shut down instantly if she felt she were being manipulated. Gavin’s golden tongue was suddenly worth what his eyes would be, soon.
She said, “I’ve been looking for any avenue that doesn’t lead to war? You damned men, always trying to prove who’s bigger. I just want to live. I want my people to live. I don’t know how to avert this. Do you know I tried to align us with the Guiles?”
