The Blinding Knife

  She smiled. Gleaming white teeth, perfect smile. “Gifts can be curses, can’t they, Lord Prism?”

  “I suppo—”

  “You’re beautiful,” she said, cutting him off. “Always did like a man with muscles, and the sight of yours has been filling my mind all day. Quite distracting.”

  “Um, thank you?”

  “Are you a swimmer?” she asked, glancing at the breadth of his shoulders.

  “Only when I make mistakes skimming. Which isn’t often.”

  Her pupils flared. “I see. You know, that masterful, cocky thing you do makes me want to tie you to my bed and ravish you.” Her eyes trailed over him and Gavin knew she was picturing it in her mind.

  Gavin swallowed. There’s no subtle way to adjust yourself when you’re sitting cross-legged. He glanced guiltily over at Karris.

  “Exactly,” the Third Eye said. “You need her more than she needs you, Prism. She makes you human.”

  She tilted her head down and closed her eyes. The tattoo-and-luxin yellow eye on her forehead glowed, then she opened her eyes as it continued to pulse like a heartbeat. Then it faded.

  “I see outside of time. And if that doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t to me either. Nor is it perfect, how I see. I’m not Orholam. I still have my own desires and prejudices that can color what I see or how I interpret what I see—how I put into words those visions that come before my eye. Tell me, Prism, do you think mercy is weakness?”

  “No.”

  “Wrong question; your pardon. What I meant was, do you think justice is better, or mercy?”

  “It depends.”

  “Who decides?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Are pity and mercy the same?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t believe in pity.”

  “Liar.” She grinned.

  “Excuse me?” Gavin said.

  “There are two kinds of people who make excellent liars: monsters with no conscience, and those who become excellent liars from practice and necessity because they’re deeply ashamed. I don’t think you’re a monster, Lord Prism. You’ve played beautifully. Your mask is compelling, gorgeous, alluring. It makes me want to get naked and subdue you with pleasure until you’re too exhausted to maintain that façade and I can rip it off and show you what’s underneath. Because I already know, and I judge that man beneath your mask much less harshly than you do.”

  Fortune-teller tripe. Albeit tripe with a fine sexual edge to it.

  “Are you sure you’re not trying to seduce me?” Gavin asked lightly.

  “Ah, Prism, you always do like to cut corners, don’t you? It’s a strength, I suppose. Remember it. But then, you remember most everything, don’t you?”

  He was confused.

  She smiled. “What I’m sure of is that bedding you would be a disaster for you and for Karris and for the Seven Satrapies. I’m also pretty sure it would be really, really good for me. Both in the moment and in the long run. Which is why I’m doing everything I can to be completely over the top and disgust you with my wanton ways. If I make you uninterested, then that disaster won’t be an option anymore.”

  He laughed—and could tell she wasn’t joking. She was acting as sex-starved as he felt, and something about her relentlessly frank style convinced him that she would be the best he’d ever had. He said, “The ‘wanton ways’ gambit is having an effect, but perhaps not the one you’d planned.” Orholam’s royal blue balls, Karris wasn’t ten paces away. Gavin was going to die.

  The Third Eye stared up at the sky and scowled. “I really thought it would start by now, hmm. What do you think is the worst decision you ever made in your life, Lord Prism?”

  That was easy. Not killing his brother. “I had pity once.”

  “You’re wrong. You didn’t spare Gavin out of pity. And you wouldn’t do any differently than you did if you could do it again.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly that he almost missed it. And then it yanked him up short, like a dog catching scent of a rabbit and charging heedless—right until he got to the end of his chain. She’d said sparing Gavin. She knew both that he wasn’t that Gavin and that he had spared his brother. The air got dense, hard to breathe. Gavin’s chest tightened.

  “What, did you think I was a charlatan? Adjust to the new reality, Dazen, and move on to the real point.”

  There was no denial. No point. She hadn’t ventured it as a guess, or a trap, and if he made her repeat it, Karris might hear. Gavin’s heart was thundering. He swallowed, took some wine, swallowed again.

  “My worst choice was not telling her.” Gavin was in a fog, a fugue. He didn’t want to say Karris’s name. They were far enough away that their voices should be a murmur to her, but hearing one’s own name tended to pique the ears.

  “No, not that either. If you’d told her the truth when she was younger, she’d have exposed you. What you did wasn’t kind, or perhaps fair, but it was wise, and I’d advise you not to apologize for what you did when the time comes. Karris is better at adjusting to hard realities than she is at forgiving. It’s a character flaw.”

  It was true. Deeply true. Telling Karris, “I was doing my duty” would probably work better than, “I’m so sorry.” She understood duty, cared about it. And yet something in Gavin bristled, wanted to defend Karris.

  “So, what was it then?” Gavin asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t see everything. I just know what it wasn’t. I know that you’ve been asking the wrong questions, so you’ve had no hope of getting the right answers. So my part is done, sadly with no cries of passion or clawing of your back. Aside from two things. First, your people may stay. They will, I’m fairly certain, destroy our way of life. But perhaps it will one day turn into something better. I have little hope of that, but I’m too close to see this clearly, and I know that pushing fifty thousand starving people into the sea is not what Orholam would ask of me, regardless of what they will do to us once they are no longer starving.”

  “And second?” Gavin asked. It was a huge victory. She was giving him everything he wanted, but you don’t laud victories, you consolidate them and press forward.

  “And second, you’ve lost control of blue, and your… counterpart has broken out of his blue prison. I’d advise you to do something about it, because without a Prism, strange things start happening. First, they’re innocuous, weird little things. But they get worse.” She seemed to retreat into herself.

  Gavin felt naked. Not in a good way. The news about his brother—if it was true—was cataclysmic. Not just a terrible shock, and not just terrible news, but too coincidental. Gavin had woven alarums into the drafting, of course, but they were alarums to notify someone in his own room in the tower: Marissia when he was gone. There was no way he should have been aware, no matter how dimly or on how visceral a level, that Dazen had broken out.

  He had sunk a huge amount of his will into that prison, in ways long forbidden, so maybe he’d felt that breaking of his will dimly over the leagues. But huge talent though he was, the Chromeria was halfway across the sea.

  Perhaps his losing blue had weakened the prison or broken it. There need be no coincidence. The one could have caused the other—but he didn’t know which way that causation flowed. Gavin felt like he was burrowing into the roots of a mountain, and the deeper he went, the faster he moved forward, the sooner the entire thing was going to come down on top of him.

  But he didn’t know any way out.

  Orholam, his brother was out of the blue? Did Marissia even remember how to switch over the chutes? Maybe Dazen would starve to death. No… no, he’d shown her, years and years ago, how to do it, against just this eventuality. She had an excellent memory. She’d do it right.

  Nonetheless, he had to get back. And going back meant heading right into the middle of everything that threatened him most.

  “Aha!” The Third Eye sniffed. “Here it
is.”

  Scrunching his forehead, Gavin glanced over at her. Noticed her nipples—dammit, got bigger things to worry about here, Gavin! She was leaning back, looking up again, this time not in prayer, though it again outlined her cold-stiffened nipples clearly against the fabric of her dress. He sniffed to see what she was talking about.

  Smelled nothing. Sniffed again, and caught something very faint.

  Something prickled on his skin, the lightest of touches. He looked over at the Third Eye.

  She was grinning like a little girl. He didn’t understand. Then something touched his arm. He brought it close, but it melted before he could get a look at it. Snow?

  It was cool tonight, but it wasn’t cold enough for snow. Not even close.

  He could smell it now—the familiar mineral, chalky odor. Blue luxin.

  More hit his upturned face, his arms. It was snowing.

  “Blue delights in order,” the Third Eye said. “I know you can’t see it, but every flake is blue. Utterly beautiful, Lord Prism. I’ve never seen so stunning a harbinger of doom.”

  Gavin’s heart dropped. Other than in the mountains of Paria and Tyrea, most of the Seven Satrapies went years without seeing snow. Gavin caught a flake on his sleeve, squinted at it. It looked like a snowflake. The blue luxin, free of his control, was running amok—but for blue, running amok meant randomly imposing order. Like organizing the crystals of a snowflake. It was a tenuous order; the unnatural snow was melting almost immediately.

  “If it starts with this, what will it do next?” Gavin asked.

  “Something worse,” the Seer said. “And it’s already doing it. We’re simply so far away that this is all that’s reaching us.”

  “The bane,” Gavin whispered.

  She nodded.

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “It’s moving, and I see outside of time.”

  “So?”

  “If something stays in one place, it doesn’t matter when I see it. But if something moves, finding it inside a particular time is problematic.”

  “Which isn’t the same as impossible,” Gavin said, his heart leaping. If he could save himself the trip to Paria to see the Nuqaba, he could avoid all sorts of problems.

  She scowled. “No, it’s not.”

  Any time the Prism showed up in a major city, there were a thousand things that could only be done by him—not least endless rituals. The best he was ever able to get away with was doing one ritual for each color. And one of those would now expose him. He might be able to bluff his way past it, if he were there for only a week or two to find out what he needed, but the less he had to rely on his luck, the better. And if she could just tell him what he needed to know…

  She looked over at him, and it obviously didn’t take a Seer for her to know what he was going to ask her next. She sighed. “I don’t see everything all the time all at once, Lord Prism. And I need light. I’ll look for it for you tomorrow.” She raised a finger. “I don’t promise that I’ll tell you all of what I see. I don’t promise that knowing won’t cost you something.”

  “Aha, so now comes the bargaining. You’re going to save me at least two weeks and lots of awkward conversations with a powerful woman I once outmaneuvered. What’s it going to cost me?” He was trying to set the floor low. The Third Eye would be saving him a whole lot more than that. And, being who she was, she could probably find that out, if she really cared to take the time to look. But as she’d said, she was human, and there was a lot of history and future for her to dig through.

  But she shook her head. “I didn’t mean that kind of cost. My help will be a gift. You don’t need to earn it. But though truth is a gift, it’s not always one people thank you for.”

  “Ah. That kind of cost,” Gavin said, suddenly grim.

  “Does the man who ‘killed his brother’ expect the truth to be easy?”

  Killed my brother. If only. But of course, she knew that. She knew what it was costing him to maintain that deception and why he’d done it and what the truth would cost the world if it came out. She must also know the price of truth through her own gift in a thousand ways that Gavin would never know.

  The Third Eye looked over at him, compassion in her eyes, and suddenly Gavin saw that she was a woman of tremendous depth. A leader in her own right. A woman who understood what Gavin was doing, why, and what he faced. He found her tremendously appealing. If his damn stubborn heart hadn’t already been claimed, he could have fallen for her. She knew it, too. She hadn’t been lying earlier: she really had been trying to make the attraction purely sexual—so that there wasn’t the danger of something deeper.

  As crystalline flurries spun around them, flecks of order spun in chaos, Gavin peered into the night as if he could unravel its mysteries. “So, you and me, disaster, huh?”

  She smiled, full red lips, perfect teeth. Nodded, met his gaze. A remorseful twitch touched the corner of her mouth. “Utter.” She gazed at him appreciatively, but as if saying farewell to the prospect of bedding him. “But I do have one prophecy for you already, Lord Prism, in the style you so love: Get there before noon. Three hours east, two and a half hours north.”

  Sounded simple enough. He did like that. And then he realized that she hadn’t told him north and east from where. He said, “That’s only going to be helpful in retrospect, isn’t it?”

  She grinned cryptically.

  “You enjoy this, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Immensely.”

  “I haven’t really had much use for prophecy,” Gavin said.

  “I know,” she said. “It was one of the first things I saw about you. What happened?”

  “Happened? I think I always thought it was—oh, no, there was something. When I was a boy and my brother stopped playing with me, I’d find these prophecies in old books, and I’d dream that I could decipher them. There was this one: how’d it go?”

  He was asking himself, but the Third Eye said quietly,

  “Of red cunning, the youngest son,

  Will cleave father and father and father and son.”

  “How’d you…?” he asked.

  “I see that line burning in bitter fire over your head, Lord Prism. What did you take it to mean?”

  “The youngest son of red cunning—the youngest son of the red Guile—the youngest son of the Guile who becomes the Red. So Andross Guile’s youngest son. It was a prophecy about my little brother Sevastian.”

  “And then he died. Murdered.”

  “By a blue wight. He was everything that is good about my family with none of the bad. If he were alive, everything would be different.” He shook it off. “Your prophecies aren’t like that. I mean, maddeningly vague. I mean, except for this last one.” He grinned. “Why is that?”

  She touched her third eye thoughtfully. “We’re human, Gavin. My gift didn’t come with a list of rules. I’m muddling through. I’m making it up as I go. But I feel the same temptations I’m sure all my predecessors have felt: to be important, to help those I love and harm those I hate, to be held as almost a god, to guide and be loved—or to say hell with it, I’m not responsible for this damned thing, and just spew everything I see. I hold my tongue when I’m not sure. I think others have spoken more, but more cryptically, hoping that they wouldn’t be held responsible if things went wrong. And then, of course, there have been frauds: Seers who were not Seers at all.”

  “Can you tell me if that prophecy was a fraud?”

  “I have no idea where to even start looking.”

  “You said you saw it in bitter fire over my head,” Gavin said. “How about there?”

  “I saw the words for a moment, yes. That doesn’t mean they’re true.”

  “You’re honest to a fault, aren’t you?” Gavin said.

  “I hope not,” she said. She smirked, a devious, playful twist on her full lips.

  Gavin wanted to tear her clothes off.

  He looked away and cleared his throat. “My lady, good night, and ahem,
now that we’ve decided not to make a most delightful mistake together, I hope together we make our next meeting less… strained.” He stood and brushed nonexistent crumbs off his lap pointedly. He grinned. But he wanted her agreement in this. He’d made mistakes that he knew were mistakes before.

  She offered her hand and allowed him to help her stand. She stretched as if tired, but quite obviously to give him a chance to admire her while she looked away. He could tell what she was doing, and yet he admired her all the same. She gave a small, naughty smile. “You know,” she said, “I’m actually really quite modest most of the time.”

  No, actually, I don’t know that. He merely cocked a dubious eyebrow, quickly smoothed it away, and like a gentleman politely lying said, “Of course you are.”

  She laughed. “That you’re impossible makes you somehow even more fun to play with,” she said.

  “When most people flirt with disaster, it’s a figure of speech,” Gavin said.

  “Dangerous toys are the best toys. I pray you sleep well, Lord Prism.”

  Well, there was a prayer they both knew wasn’t going to be answered.

  Chapter 38

  “The old gods weren’t worshipped because the people of the Seven Satrapies were ignorant fools,” Zymun told Liv. They were walking together to the outskirts of Garriston, heading through the Hag’s Gate to the plain between the old wall and Brightwater Wall, where most of the drafters were camped. “The old gods were worshipped because they were real.”

  “Go on,” Liv said, not doing a great job keeping her skepticism back.

  A brief look of fury shot across Zymun’s face, quickly smoothed away. He looked at her intensely. Who’s the tutor here?

  Liv blushed. Her instant reaction had been an artifact of her old beliefs. She’d always heard that the old gods were figments of the primitive imaginations of the peoples who lived around the Cerulean Sea before Lucidonius came. But if the Chromeria lied about other things, then that could be a lie as well. She cleared her throat. “I mean, go on.”

  “I think the peoples of the Seven Satrapies knew it, too. From nowhere, it seems, little statues of the gods have resurfaced. Hidden in attics, in cellars, in secret family shrines in the woods. Keep your eyes open as you walk the camp, you’ll see little signs. Soon, there will be priesthoods reestablished, worship will become public. You look skeptical.”