The Blood Mirror

  Later.

  Chapter 3

  “Oh, my lord, what have they done to you?”

  Gavin knew that voice. He opened his eye, tried to turn, but he was bound to a table, arms extended, nothing beneath them, as if on a raft over an ocean that was no longer there. His tongue was thick and parched, and a bandage covered his left eye.

  Marissia came hovering into view above him, and the pity on her face told him how awful he must look.

  “Wa… water,” Gavin rasped.

  But the first thing she did was unbind his arms and legs. Marissia had been his room slave for more than a decade. She knew how he hated to be bound, how even the encumbrance of blankets twisted around his legs in bed made him panic and flail. Marissia, here? But where was here?

  He remembered now. He must be at Amalu and Adini’s, the chirurgeons on Big Jasper. He must have been panicking, delirious. It had all been nightmares. Marissia was here. There was no prison. Everything was going to be fine.

  Karris had pulled him out of the hippodrome where they’d put out his eye, and he must have come down with a fever. He’d only dreamed he was in that blue hell he’d made for his brother. He’d only dreamed that his father knew everything. Fever dreams. Impossible dreams.

  Oh, thank Orholam.

  Marissia put a wet cloth in his mouth, and he sucked weakly. She wet it again and repeated the process, until he motioned that he’d had enough. She wiped the crusted spit from the corners of his mouth.

  Only then did he try to speak. “Marissia, where’s Karris?”

  “Your lady wife is safe, my lord. She’s been made the White.” It was oddly formal for Marissia, but Gavin hadn’t yet sorted out the blurred boundaries between his room slave and his new wife. Doubtless Marissia was upset that he had married, and who knew how Karris had been treating her? With Gavin’s absence, he was lucky Marissia was even still employed in his household. A more jealous wife would have sold off the room slave who’d been so close to her husband.

  But Gavin didn’t have time to worry about a slave’s feelings with all the problems facing him.

  “The White?” he asked. “You didn’t just say…”

  “Orea Pullawr has passed into the light, my lord. My lady Karris Guile has ascended to serve as the new White.”

  “I thought that old crone was going to live forever,” Gavin said. But he felt an intense surge of pride at his wife’s accomplishment. The White!

  In retrospect, though, maybe Orea had been preparing Karris for that all along.

  Orholam’s balls, the other families were going to lose their minds. Andross Guile as promachos, Karris Guile as the White, and Gavin Guile as the Prism?

  Well, that brought up a host of other problems. But Gavin was back, and with Karris beside him, there were few things he—“Marissia, is there something odd about the sound in here?”

  “My lord.” There was a dread monotone to her voice.

  With difficulty Gavin sat up. His bed was the kind of palanquin on which nobles were carried when injured, with drapes on all sides for privacy, but small and light so that slaves could navigate corners and narrow streets.

  A wall was not far behind Marissia. It curved.

  “Oh, Marissia, no.”

  That gray wall curved like a teardrop or a squashed ball. Gavin tore back the palanquin’s other curtains. Everywhere the one curving wall, sparkling quietly with inner light. Gavin couldn’t see the blue of it, but he could see all he needed to from that winking crystalline luxin. He was in the blue hell. His gaoler had somehow brought Marissia here to care for Gavin’s wounds. To keep him alive. For punishment.

  “How are you here?” he asked.

  “I was kidnapped. By Order assassins who were contracted by your father.”

  “What?!”

  “My lord, I have secrets I would tell you. I don’t know how long I have.”

  “You expect them to kill you.” He could see it in the tight calm of her face, like an improperly tanned hide stretched too far over a drum.

  “I was allowed to see my kidnappers’ faces. And High Lord Guile’s. Your father brought me here himself. Alone.”

  Gavin’s arm shook from the mere effort of holding himself seated. He fell back on the palanquin. “Of course he did,” he said. “He couldn’t let anyone know about this place. But someone had to care for me, and he guessed that you would know about these cells after so many years with me, so he accomplished numerous tasks at once. That’s my father. May Orholam damn him.”

  It was also very much Andross Guile to discard the slave after she’d served her purpose.

  He wouldn’t even guess that Gavin would be put out by it. Andross wouldn’t think of it as murdering Gavin’s lover; he would think of it as destroying a piece of Gavin’s property. Gavin could always buy another room slave, one prettier and younger, even. This one had to be more than thirty years old, after all.

  “Marissia, I’m—”

  He could see on her face that she knew it, too. “I don’t know how much time we have, my lord. Please don’t. My courage is leaking away by the moment. Please treat me like a scout or a captain in your armies, so I can think of myself as a warrior, because I can’t bear…” Her throat clenched as she lost her words to fear, the thief.

  Gavin hesitated and then gathered himself. “Water. The cup this time.” He didn’t try to sit up. With a trembling hand, she gave him water. He took it, clumsily, his left hand missing the third and fourth fingers.

  “Report,” he said when he was done, and though he lay on his back, his voice was all command.

  “What I have to say is quite sensitive, my lord. What do we do about eavesdroppers?”

  He thought about it. “If my father brought you here himself, it means he isn’t trusting even his closest spies to know about this place. So he would have to be eavesdropping himself. He knows I may sleep for another few days, so I doubt he’d gamble his time that way. Just sitting here, waiting for me to wake, doing nothing else while he doubtless needs to do much? No. Speaking is a risk, but it’s a risk I’ll take.”

  She took a deep breath, bracing herself. She looked away from his eye. “I am—that is, I was Orea Pullawr’s spymistress.”

  Gavin felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.

  Marissia hurried on. “At first I just met with a few of her contacts, but I did well. She kept expanding my role until, in the last few years, when she was losing mobility, I took over everything.”

  Gavin couldn’t look at her. He stared straight up. Furious, he tore off the palanquin’s roof.

  Marissia fell silent.

  The action left him exhausted, aware again of how sick he’d been. He could only stare up—up the anus of the blue hell, as it shat bread on the poor souls within. He would be eating Andross Guile’s shit-mercy for as long as he chose to live. “And how exactly did that fit with our arrangement, Marissia?”

  “I did my best to make it fit, my lord.”

  He half laughed. “You did your best?”

  “I never betrayed you.”

  “What did the White have over you? I was here! You’re mine!” he spat. “What could she threaten you with that I could not protect you from? I’m nothing now, but I was… I was indomitable. Do you not remember what I did for you? Do you not remember the Seaborns?”

  “I remember, my l—”

  “People think I killed that young asshole in a rage because he’d damaged my property. I did it so no one would ever harass you again. I killed a man and ended up having to purge his entire family—for you. For a slave. And for that—for that!—I get no loyalty? From you who shared my chambers and my bed. From you, whom I trusted more than I trusted even my own mother.”

  “My lord…” She was weakening, losing whatever courage she’d gathered to tell him all this.

  “What did you tell the White?” he asked, voice dangerous.

  “I told her nothing that we hadn’t agreed on. I swear. I swear.”

  Marissia
had been the White’s gift to Gavin. A young, pretty, smart virgin to be his room slave, untainted by the politics of Big Jasper or loyalties to any other family. She was a rich gift indeed, and an unusual one. She had a passing resemblance—more pronounced in those early years—to Karris. The White had obviously thought Gavin had a type.

  As a young, single Prism, he could have easily had many room slaves. Wealthy subjects were always giving gifts, looking for favor, and looking to place spies near him.

  A procession of room slaves wouldn’t have been a problem except for one reason: the food chute down to his brother’s prison connected to his own room. Regardless of whether a room slave’s duties were purely sexual or she acted as more of a chief slave, as Marissia had, a room slave was in one’s room constantly. So rather than trust that a hundred searching eyes would all miss one hidden secret, Gavin had decided to turn one spy to his own side. He’d assumed that the young Marissia had been ordered by the White to spy on him.

  But who was the White to command more loyalty than Gavin in his proud prime?

  The White had asked him to kindly give the girl a few weeks to adjust to her new life. It would be bewildering for a young slave from the reaches of the Blood Forest to adjust to life here, she said. Give her time.

  Gavin had gone further than that. He had plotted how to take full possession of his newest acquisition as a general might plot a military campaign. He had seduced her as if she were a princess. It was not a hard labor, and not entirely a deceitful one, either. He’d been immediately attracted to Marissia’s obvious intelligence, her beauty, and—no less important to the young, arrogant man he’d been—her desire to please.

  In that first year when Karris had left and he’d been so heartbroken and believed he would never see her again, Gavin had even thought that he was in love with Marissia.

  As if one could love a slave the way one loves a woman.

  It was the stuff of scandal. It was the subject of satirical stories and songs. An entire sequence of comedies was devoted to the dullard Old Giles, the henpecked lord who left his wife for his slave, left all his lands and titles to marry her, and had adventures as he cluelessly attempted the basic labors of farmers, or millers, or salt rakers, or brick makers, or bakers, always failing and always then having to try another occupation in the next story. Usually in another city. Usually because his lady wife had shown up at his place of business.

  Other tales of masters and slaves in love were darker and not sung much in front of lords or ladies. Those were tales of the too-pretty room slave whose jealous mistress sold her off to the silver mines or the brothels, or murdered her outright. Like every good gift, beauty was a blessing for the rich, but sometimes a curse for the poor.

  The frisson of danger for a lord, who might be mocked by his friends for being an Old Giles, didn’t compare to what a room slave had to feel, afraid on the one hand to please her master too little, and afraid on the other hand to be seen pleasing him too much.

  Gavin had decided many times that instead of feeling love-love, he loved Marissia as a master loves a favored hound. You could love a hound. A hound could love you. But loving a hound as one loves a woman? Unnatural. Disordered.

  Whatever his few qualms, he had won over Marissia’s heart along with his ownership of her body, and eventually, after he was sure she cared for him more than anything in the world, he’d confronted her with evidence of her spying for the White, pretending he felt betrayed by what he knew had been the point all along.

  It had, of course, been unfair. How could Marissia have said no to the White herself—her owner—when she hadn’t yet even met Gavin? But his scheme had worked. After shaming and terrifying her, Gavin had made his accommodation with her: Marissia would continue to spy for the White, but she would ask Gavin what she could share with Orea Pullawr first. There would be certain secrets the White could never know.

  And then, by degrees, Gavin had let her learn secrets and false secrets, always watching the White to see what she knew, always testing Marissia’s faithfulness. And faithful she had been, until Gavin had even trusted her with the bread. He hadn’t told her it was for his brother below, but she’d understood it was some awful secret, and Orea had never learned of it.

  And now the White, Orea Pullawr, was dead, and she hadn’t used whatever secrets Marissia had told her to destroy him. So what kind of partial betrayal was this?

  “Marissia,” Gavin said. “Why would you do this? What loyalty did you owe her?”

  Marissia straightened her back, and looked him in the eye. “My name is Marissia Pullawr. The White was my grandmother. You were my assignment. I was never a slave.”

  Chapter 4

  Karris Guile, the White, the Chosen of Orholam, the Lady of Seven Towers, the Mistress of the Breaking Light, the Left Hand of the Omnipotent, stared out over the Jaspers from her apartments atop the Prism’s Tower. Her word was law on every bit of land her eyes could see. Every drafter in the Seven Satrapies owed her obedience. To most people, she was a figure of near-mythic stature.

  She had never felt more powerless.

  She wasn’t about to let that continue.

  Around her the six other towers of the Chromeria rose as if in an embrace, but they were set lower than the Prism’s Tower, like children hugging her legs, offering encumbrance instead of comfort. Responsibilities to fulfill, duties to attend to, and too many of both. Karris, who had always had an affinity for the blue virtues of order and hierarchy—an affinity oft buried by her wanton drafting of green and red—was making a list not just of the facts facing her, but also of the actions she would need to take regarding each, shelving her emotions for the time being.

  She had only minutes before Andross Guile arrived, and she needed all her faculties for the confrontation. She had to make her own plans before he arrived, because if she weren’t firmly set on her course before he began speaking, he would steer her toward his destinations so skillfully that she would come out thinking it had been her idea.

  Gavin was gone. Her husband, her broken Prism—to save whom she had risked war with Paria and Ruthgar both—had vanished. As soon as she’d gotten out of the ceremony anointing her the new White, she’d sent an entire squad of Blackguards to the chirurgeons’ clinic where he’d been left. It had been wrecked. Everyone gone. Blood splattered about. The door splintered off its hinges.

  I have a contact who owns a tavern on that street.

  Ask contact if any unusual men were in the neighborhood today.

  But what counted as unusual on a Sun Day? The city was packed with visitors for the holy day festivities; everyone from pilgrims to pirates piled into the city to celebrate.

  In the distance, the cannon tower that had guarded East Bay still smoked. Seventy dead there. Sixty-four of them confirmed as Andross Guile’s Lightguard thugs. Six unknown.

  No, five unknown; one of the dead is reported to be Commander Ironfist himself or maybe his brother Tremblefist.

  Go view the body myself to confirm which of my friends it is.

  No, that wasn’t right at all.

  Go view the body myself to confirm its identity.

  She breathed out slowly. Tears weren’t an option now. Not when her people needed her. Her Blackguards needed to know that she was strong. Andross Guile needed to know she wasn’t weak.

  Next, two great crenellations had dropped from the top of the Prism’s Tower, becoming counterweights for two different great escape cables that had sprung up from hidden places—escape routes that Karris had never heard so much as a whisper of. Apparently no one else had known of them, either, because no one had maintained them. One had malfunctioned.

  The other had worked, though, and Kip and his squad—the Mighty, they were being called—had escaped.

  Question Carver Black. Did he know of this escape route?

  Coordinate with Carver Black to assign engineers and slave teams to put the crenellations back in place and fix the broken mechanisms.

  Assign dr
after-builders and divers to repair and bury the cables again.

  Why the Mighty had needed to escape was still a question that needed answering. And if Karris was furious that someone had exposed an ages-old secret of the escape route, she was more furious that they’d had good reason to do so. While Karris and the Colors and High Satraps had been sequestered to choose a new White, someone had been killing Blackguards in the very same tower.

  Kip was gone. In addition to being her stepson, he had been her discipulus for nine months, and she cared for him a great deal, even if she had been wretched at showing it. According to the Blackguard, the Lightguards had attempted to murder Kip without provocation, gunning down Goss, one of Kip’s Mighty. The Blackguard had apparently been ordered to stand down, and, damn them for their obedience, they had.

  Find out who ordered them to stand down.

  Interview each of the watch captains.

  Interrogate the member of Kip’s squad who was left behind, Daelos. Did he get his injury during the escape?

  Tisis Malargos, the younger sister of Eirene Malargos—the real power in Ruthgar—was gone. She was far down the list of Karris’s immediate problems, but there was still a war going on, and such details couldn’t be dismissed. Tisis had been the Chromeria’s hostage, guaranteeing Ruthgari loyalty. Why had she fled now? A hostage’s leaving without permission was a breach of treaty and thereby technically an act of war.

  Find Tisis’s friends and slaves. Interrogate.

  Commander Ironfist was missing. Promachos Andross Guile had relieved him of his position, but Karris would fight tooth and nail to reinstate him. Of course, first she had to find him, and he’d last been seen heading to the docks—which was exactly what she would have done if she’d found herself suddenly without a position and knowing Andross Guile was against her.

  Dear Orholam, what if it is Ironfist dead down at the cannon tower?