The Blood Mirror

  His father couldn’t have known that.

  The first bit of hellstone, deep in the wall, was star-shaped…

  He checked. So was the second.

  Gavin sat back, baffled. His father wasn’t this good, was he?

  Gavin had killed too many men to believe how his eyes and his memory were contradicting each other. He’d shot Gavin through the chest, a straight hole through his bony sternum. The other bullet had gone smashed through his chin and blew out the back of his head.

  Lead squished on impact. It mushroomed, spun, tore gashes through flesh and bone. It was possible for the hellstone cores of his bullets to have pierced his brother and still hit the wall, but unlikely. There wasn’t enough velocity left in the hellstone for this depth of impact, not usually, not through two layers of bone.

  And for the lead itself to have survived intact to hit the wall as well?

  That couldn’t happen.

  These musket balls were his own. These were the musket balls that had been in his pistols that night. He couldn’t deny that. But these musket balls hadn’t torn through a body—much less bone—before hitting the wall.

  Impossible.

  Gavin couldn’t be alive. Dazen hadn’t missed. Couldn’t have.

  But that was the only possible answer. Wasn’t it?

  Did his father know even Dazen’s musket-ball-casting method? It was possible, but why?

  “Oh, my dear Black Prism,” the dead man said. “You can’t say you weren’t warned. So tragic. And the perfect Guile memory is such a special thing, is it not? You did this to yourself. You knew the risks, but you couldn’t help but draft black, could you? Black, the color of… Say it.”

  Gavin’s mind went many places at once.

  He was standing on the beach with the Third Eye.

  He was standing in the hot, smoking ruins of Sundered Rock.

  He was standing in front of his mother, after returning from the war, with his brother unconscious in a trunk right behind him, telling her No, no, he was dead. He didn’t suffer.

  “Say it,” the dead man said.

  Gavin said, “Black is the color of oblivion. Black is the color of death. Black is the color… of…”

  ‘You didn’t spare Gavin out of pity,’ the Third Eye had said to him. And then she said, ‘Does the man who killed his brother expect the truth to be easy?’ He’d interpreted her words to be wry; he’d thought there must have been a little stress he missed in the moment: ‘Does the man who “killed his brother” expect the truth to be easy?’

  But there had been no wink or smile or nudge. Had there?

  She had known how he would take those words at the moment, hadn’t she? But she had also known that he would later remember those words. That was why she had been so very precise, so that without her lying to him, he could continue to delude himself until it was time to stop deluding himself.

  “Tell me,” the dead man said. “When did your nightmares about your brother stop?”

  “Around the time I killed him.”

  “No, Dazen. That’s when they began.”

  No. Impossible. The dreams about his brother’s escaping his prisons had begun right after the war ended, right after Sundered Rock. They had stopped only recently.

  “Because…” the dead man said, as if leading a very stupid pupil to an obvious truth, “because black is the color of…”

  “Of madness,” Gavin said hollowly.

  “Dazen, Gavin has been dead seventeen years. He was never imprisoned. You killed him at Sundered Rock.”

  “That’s not… that’s not…” Gavin felt suddenly lightheaded. The tightness in his chest returned. He fell to the floor.

  “All your contortions and striving have been to hide a man who wasn’t there. Did you think it was a coincidence that as you lost blue, you dreamed of him breaking out of your blue prison? That as you lost green, he broke out of green in your dreams? The black luxin hell you brought to earth at Sundered Rock killed one man, but it destroyed two. Do you remember the bowl in the blue prison? And the cloth woven of human hair?”

  Gavin remembered.

  “How would you remember that? He never told you about it. He hid it from you.”

  “I must have discovered them when I went through that cell.”

  “Where was it when you were in the blue cell just weeks ago?”

  “It must have been repaired.”

  “Your father bothered to repair a slight depression in luxin more than a foot thick? And reset the trapdoor? And he repaired the green chamber? And somehow he didn’t repair your trap in your work chamber where the rope didn’t burn properly? And he cast new musket balls, all to make you think now… after all this, that you’re mad? Does that sound like your father’s work? Gavin was never here. It was always you, it was always only you.”

  “And if I couldn’t know any of that stuff about him, how could you? I know these cells aren’t connected. I know it’s will-castings that I did. How could you know any of this?” Gavin asked.

  “We know, Dazen, because you came down and raved to us. Told us why it had to be this way. I, for one, always figured that the truth was, you made this prison for yourself. Surrounded by problems too big for you, you made a problem small enough for you to handle.”

  Dazen felt the tightness increasing in his chest. He remembered, as in a dream, coming down here that fateful night. He opened the yellow chamber and thought of closing himself inside. He argued with himself, aloud. There was no one here but his reflection, his own image crafted so carefully to look like a dead man, his brother.

  The dead man laughed. “Come now, think of it! Did you really think that after Sundered Rock you were able to stuff your brother in a box, and keep him alive but drugged for the whole journey home, and bring him into the Chromeria—and no one ever noticed?! You had a box that you wouldn’t let the servants touch. Do you think they wouldn’t tell your father and mother about such a thing? Do you think your father and mother didn’t break into it immediately?”

  There had been a chest. He opened it in his memory, and this time, overlaid on the phantasmal image of his brother unconscious, he could finally see the truth. Inside the chest had been a spear of living black luxin. Black luxin he’d drafted himself.

  It was the implement he’d drafted in those last desperate moments at Sundered Rock, the weapon with which he’d killed his brother. Beautiful and terrible as the night sky devouring itself unto eternity.

  He’d carved the cells out of the Chromeria’s heart with that spear, cutting through rock and the old bones of buried drafters and the luxin encased in their bodies with equal ease, until it too had failed, and broken apart into ten thousand pieces of hellstone.

  The ten thousand pieces that he had then used in crafting the tunnels themselves.

  How else could he have stolen such a kingdom’s fortune’s worth of hellstone without his father’s noticing?

  But what would his mother have done if she’d found that spear straight from hell in his belongings, still smeared with his brother’s blood?

  She would have wept, and prayed, and waited, and hoped that her last son would come back from his madness. She would have been gentle, and patient, and protective. As she had.

  And his father would have been scared, and distant, and angry, and watchful, and intrigued, and enraged, and uncertain. As he had.

  Dazen had thought he’d been so clever. He thought he’d fooled the people closest to him. In reality, they’d played along, pretending to be deceived because they had no other options, no other sons, because in their own ways they both still needed him: his mother needed him to keep her own hopes alive, and his father needed him in order to rule through him.

  “It didn’t take everything, though, did it?” the dead man asked. “Despite the black luxin, you knew certain truths. Or perhaps only certain hungers. You had to kill to keep drafting. You knew it would all fail eventually. That’s why you had the nightmares, the attacks of panic. You knew t
hat you were shameful, that you were a murderer, and everything you did to atone for your sins was a pile of glass baubles next to the mountain of shit that you built higher every year to keep yourself in power, to stay alive. You thought you were so clever. You thought yourself nigh unto a god, when in reality you were propped up by those who feared and hated you as much as by those who loved you. And even that wan love was tainted with fear and despair.”

  “You’re wrong,” Gavin said.

  “You know I’m not.”

  “No, you’re wrong about one thing,” Gavin said. “And perhaps one thing only.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “My father didn’t know. There’s no way my father has known all this time. He could never let anyone think they were fooling him. It isn’t in him to play along. I—”

  “Oh,” a voice said, “I think you’d be surprised at what is in me, son.”

  Gavin hadn’t noticed the chamber moving, hadn’t heard the slot open. He fell, nerveless, sliding against the unforgiving luxin wall to the ground.

  Not him. Not now. Please. No, God!

  “I came to see if you’d grasped the truth yet,” Andross Guile said. “And I find you ranting to a wall.”

  The dead man laughed, but Andross Guile didn’t hear it.

  “I want you to know, boy, I came down here just now seriously considering putting you back in power. Your brother’s son Zymun is a worm who will become a terror if I let him survive. Kip is fled and too sensible to return soon, if ever. The Color Prince—he now calls himself the White King—is grown more powerful than we could have imagined. You are needed at this hour, Dazen. Not all of your power was magical, though you refused to see that. Not all of your leadership was based on light, though you were blind to that. But you’ve gone only ever deeper into madness. Perhaps this is my fault. Perhaps I left you down here too long. But you’re mad now, and that I cannot change.”

  “It can’t be true,” Gavin said. “I wouldn’t do all this for no reason.”

  “Couldn’t. Wouldn’t,” Andross scoffed. “You did.” It was a death sentence. “This is your work. All of it. Once I knew to look for it, it was obvious. Brute-force drafting, even where it was elegant. Always using lots of luxin, even where a little would serve as well. No aesthetic except that bigger was always better, and strongest was best.”

  “This is all lies.”

  “I won’t leave you here, though. Lest all of this madness is an act, meant to lull me into a false confidence that you’re broken. Your cunning is without peer. You’ve doubtless put in an escape hatch of some sort. So. One last game, where the stakes are light. Every day, I will send down two loaves. One will be poisoned. You can try to figure out which, if it pleases you. Eventually you’ll fail, and when you’re unconscious, you’ll be moved somewhere more secure. Somewhere terminal. Or you can attempt to figure out where the drug is in each loaf, and hoard a stash of it, and take it all at once to kill yourself. That would solve a lot of problems for both of us, but you’ve never been interested in solving problems for me, have you?”

  “I hate you,” Gavin said.

  Andross stared at him with inscrutable eyes for a long time.

  “I know. And it’s too bad, because I have only ever loved you, Dazen.”

  Chapter 46

  “What is this?” Conn Arthur demanded. “You said nothing about this.”

  “This?” Kip asked. “What are you mad about, and why are you bringing it to me right now?”

  The sun was rising on another perfect morning on the Great River. According to their guides, they were about five minutes from Fechín Island. There they would rendezvous with the Cwn y Wawr.

  “You were supposed to take care of this!” Conn Arthur said, pointing at Tisis.

  “Easy!” Cruxer warned.

  The Mighty’s skimmer, already small with nine people on it, especially when that nine included men the size of Big Leo, Kip, and Conn Arthur, felt downright minuscule when the big bear was angry.

  “I was planning to!” Tisis said.

  “How?!” he demanded.

  “I hadn’t figured that out yet!” Tisis said. “I was kind of hoping we’d have a chance for you to show how useful… Shit!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kip said. “You have to tell—”

  “Ah shit!” Conn Arthur said. “There’s their scout. They’ve seen us. Now we’re committed.”

  Kip couldn’t see anyone until he flickered his vision to sub-red and saw the warm blotch in the trees along the riverbank.

  “Slow down to half speed,” Kip ordered. “It’s, um, only polite to give them a chance to prepare for our arrival.” He turned to Conn Arthur and Tisis. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  “The Cwn y Wawr?!” Conn Arthur said. “You never told us we were meeting with the Cwn y Wawr.”

  “I wasn’t hiding it,” Kip said. “I told you we saved two-hundred-some men. Why do you care?”

  “I thought the last conflict between you was a hundred years ago,” Tisis said.

  “That’s because we haven’t wanted to be slaughtered again. We’ve had to live so we can disappear at any moment, for any amount of time. When we hear they’re coming to the Grove in force, we leave and stay away until they lose interest.” Bitterly, he said, “It’s another reason they call us Ghosts.”

  “Wait,” Kip said. “Why do they hunt you?”

  “You should have told him,” the conn said. Below him, Sibéal was rubbing her face.

  “I was going to tell him,” Tisis shot back. “When the time was right. Apparently you thought you’d take that decision out of my hands.”

  “You didn’t think you could keep it from him forever, did you?” the conn said.

  “I wanted to give you a chance to prove your worth. The Chromeria is more than a little nervous—”

  “What is this about?” Kip demanded. “Now!”

  “Shady Grove isn’t separate from the Chromeria simply because some drafters want to stay in Blood Forest,” the conn said, mountainous shoulders slumping. “We’re will-casters.”

  “So what?” Kip said.

  “So what?!” The conn was baffled.

  “I thought you’d be angry,” Tisis said. “I thought that if they showed how incredibly useful their powers can be—”

  “I’m angry. I’m angry you kept something from me that you thought would make me mad. That absolutely infuriates me. We’ll talk about that later.” Kip remembered the fear accorded to Teia’s use of paryl. Paryl was scary, and it didn’t fit nicely into the Chromeria’s septophiliac teachings. He could easily imagine the same happening to other slightly divergent teachings. But will-casting? He’d used it himself against Grazner, and been told only not to try that so early in his drafting career. What was the big deal?

  Sibéal Siofra said, “We hoped to show you how we use a partner in battle to help explain, but the skimmers travel so quickly they couldn’t catch up.”

  A partner? What was—

  Tisis turned to Sibéal. “I don’t suppose the Third Eye said anything about what we’re supposed to do now?”

  “No.” Sibéal’s face was impossible to read, maybe a little tightening around the eyes, but the smile not moving. That was unnerving. Luckily, the he-bear of a conn was far more expressive. His already pale face went pasty. His fists clenched, and Kip could actually see the tight thews of his shoulders swell with sudden tension.

  “Kip,” Tisis said, “do you remember when you were going through your Blackguard initiation, and you grabbed that boy’s open-luxin spear and shattered it?”

  “How’d you know about that?” Kip asked.

  “Balls, Kip. You think the Blackguard trainees do anything in the Chromeria that isn’t immediately grist for the rumor mills?”

  Kip hadn’t really thought about it. But he supposed that the attractive, powerful young men’s and women’s fights would be fairly intriguing to the average drafter who never got to raise a fist in anger, much less throw a luxin m
issile. “Grazner was his name,” he said. “Commander Ironfist called it willjacking.”

  “Right. Willjacking is one tiny part of will-casting,” Tisis said.

  “Shit,” said Cruxer, who had just come up to join them. “I can’t believe I didn’t put the pieces together. Will-casters. That’s why Sibéal’s with you. That’s her people’s magic.”

  To Kip, Tisis interjected, “Will-casters draft only enough luxin to transmit their will. To objects and to animals.”

  “And to people,” Cruxer said.

  “Not to people,” Sibéal said quickly. “Not in the sense you mean.”

  Cruxer interrupted, “Forcing your will onto a person, making them do whatever you want? It’s mind rape—and often a precursor to actual rape. That’s what I was taught. Are you saying it isn’t used that way?”

  A frisson passed through the nearby boats, and Kip was keenly aware that Cruxer had just equated a hundred nearby drafters with rapists. Everyone in the boats within earshot went very quiet and very tense.

  “It can be used that way,” Sibéal admitted.

  “And animals.” His mouth twisted. “Uniting with an animal. Forcing yourself. On an innocent animal. It’s like—”

  “It’s a terrible thing to call good evil,” Sibéal interrupted. “Horny, shamed zealots often see perversity in innocent activities. Men like that would describe a mother changing her son’s soiled nappy as stripping an infant naked and rubbing his genitals. It’s true, but it’s misleading. When a man sees perversity everywhere, one must question who’s the pervert. I’d hate for you to become a person like that, Commander.”

  Cruxer looked as if he’d been slapped. “Yet even a shamed, imperfect man might actually find himself among those who pervert the gifts Orholam has given them.”

  It was a step back, but the crowd of will-casters didn’t see it that way. They moved from vindication to surly outrage in an instant. Point to Cruxer, but maybe this wasn’t an argument worth winning. Kip felt as if he were watching a team of runaway horses pulling a heavy-laden cart down a crowded street. Perhaps disaster couldn’t be averted forever.