This game was not a game; it was his whole life. He had become a bread inspector.
Andross Guile wasn’t checking on him. Had never once come to talk.
There was no one to whom to prove himself. There was, finally, no escape.
Not for him.
There was an escape hatch in this cell. He’d put it there. It required drafting a key whose design he had carefully committed to memory, and affixing it to a pole he would draft in a particular shape to fish down around the corners of the cell’s waste hole and into one dead end. If he could draft, it would have taken him no more than a day to escape.
If he could draft.
“Eat,” the dead man said. “Let Karris be a widow. Let her move on. She probably already has. No one can mourn forever. Especially not a beautiful woman like that.”
Gavin said nothing.
“What if she’s already moved on? The mourning period is over. She probably needs allies badly. A political marriage to the White isn’t something anyone would scoff at. You staying alive only gives her a reason to feel guilty.”
“She doesn’t know I’m alive, so it doesn’t matter,” Gavin croaked. This will-casting was better than some of the others at getting him to talk. Or maybe Gavin was just that much weaker now.
“No, I meant when they find your body. If she finds out you lived past when she remarried, she’ll be devastated. Of course I wasn’t implying you’d actually get out and be reunited with her. I think we’ve all given up on that by now, haven’t we?”
Gavin cursed him, but without passion.
“Do you think your suffering is ennobling?” the dead man asked.
Gavin didn’t answer.
“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!” the dead man said.
It wasn’t, of course.
When Gavin woke the next morning, the dead man greeted him with the same gleeful words. “Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”
And then the next.
“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”
…
“Surely today is the day your father will relent.”
…
“Do you think today is the day your father will relent?”
…
“Perhaps Andross will show his merciful side today,” the dead man said, as if hopeful.
…
Sometimes he wouldn’t say it first thing, and Gavin would hope that perhaps he’d forgotten, or thought it wasn’t having an effect. But he always said it. “Dazen… psst, Dazen… do you think today might be the day?”
Other times he would ask twice or three times, making Gavin wonder if a day had passed without his noticing, increasing his disorientation.
He laughed through Gavin’s panics, the times he lay gasping, chest convulsing, certain he would die.
But death would be a relief, wouldn’t it?
And there was no mercy in Andross Guile. One can’t appeal to a side a man doesn’t have.
Gavin had a pleasant hallucination once. One, out of all the nightmares and disquieting dreams and constant anxiety. Be strong and of good courage. You are not alone.
It wasn’t a voice, it was a memory, and an unhelpful one at that. It had encouraged him for three days… what, sixty days ago now?
Gavin didn’t want encouragement. He wanted a side of beef and rivers of wine and his wife’s breath mingling with his and a bath and a bed and sun upon his face and his father dead at his feet and friends who weren’t figments of his imagination and the susurrus of the sea beneath the skimmer’s deck and the flexing of his arms and shoulders as he sailed. He wanted his powers back and the adoration of the crowd. And he wanted to have no secrets, to never feel a fraud again. He wanted to save everyone and be seen doing it. He wanted to be proud and beautiful again. He wanted all he’d had before and more.
He wanted that seventh goal he’d never told anyone.
But it was all gone.
But it was all folly. He would never have more than he’d had. He would never have as much as he’d had. He would never be as much as he’d been. He could only ever be less.
He couldn’t even be Prism without his powers.
The best he could hope for was to live broken and powerless and ugly. What had he said when they’d saved him from the hippodrome and he’d shot that man? ‘I’m not quite useless. Not yet’?
But now he was.
“Maybe today will be the day your father relents!” the dead man said as the bread came down the next morning.
But Gavin didn’t even care.
He ate the bread. All of it. Both loaves. They tasted wonderful.
He could hardly hear the dead man laughing, and not for long.
Chapter 54
The skimmer ride from Big Jasper to Azûlay showed Teia how fast this war was changing the world.
Like many great discoveries, Gavin Guile’s insight was simple in retrospect: instead of taking the oar as his paradigm, or the sail, he took the wind itself. The skimmers were powered by drafters who shot unfocused luxin to propel them.
But Andross Guile had seized on his son’s original insight and innovated upon it, realizing that the new technology had a cultural implication: the typical threshold by which a satrapy justified the cost of educating a drafter at the Chromeria was her ability to make a solid, stable luxin in one or more colors.
What Andross was the first to realize was that the reedsmen didn’t need to draft stable luxin. So he had called up all the discipulae who’d failed out of the Chromeria in the last four decades. Hundreds of suitable candidates had been found already. Thus, he gained an entire corps for transportation and saved the halos (and lives) of his trained drafters for war. Four of those now powered the ultralight skimmer that propelled Teia, the messenger, and barely more than the clothes on their backs across the sea to Paria.
But they made it in a day and a half. Gavin Guile was rumored to have been able to go twice as far in a single morning, but Gavin was also rumored now to have been ten feet tall, to have ended wars with a word, and to have been able to draft black and white luxin both. Gavin was said to have had a shining mien that made men gape and maidens swoon.
The mien part was basically true, but still. Though Teia would admit he was a man the likes of which the world would never see again, he wasn’t a god.
They also said now that he was going to come back to the Seven Satrapies in their hour of greatest need to save them all.
Would have been better if he hadn’t left us in our hour of greatest need, Teia thought. He was dead now. As like as not, the Order itself had killed him. He was simply too powerful and unpredictable for them to tolerate.
All too soon Teia and the messenger, a senior diplomat named Anjali Gates, were in sight of Azûlay. Teia tried to get all her gawking out of the way before they docked, but the grandeur of the city defied dismissal.
Their first glimpse was of the lighthouse called the Sword of Heaven. Its red glass dome gleamed in the sun like a ruby set in its pommel, walkways made the hilt, and the body of the lighthouse made a blade, its point buried in the earth. From the ground up, the first ten paces were blank gray stone like steel, above that the stone was whitewashed, and above that beaten gold had been laid over the stone into flames, as if fire were emanating from the hilt down the blade.
“You should see it on Sun Day,” Anjali Gates said, coming to stand next to Teia. “The pyroturges here make wonders to rival the Jaspers’. It’s why I joined the diplomatic corps. I wanted to see all the wonders of this world.”
She fell silent, and Teia asked, “And have you?”
Anjali grinned. “Well, I’ve not seen the City of Stone in the Cracked Lands, but no one else has either for at least four hundred years. As for the rest, mostly. From the Everdark Gates to the Melos Deeps, from the Rath Delta in flood to the Floating City. I’ve seen the colossi of the Iron Elephants above the Red Cliffs, and the four Ladies of Garriston at sunset, and I’ve seen a se
a demon circling White Mist Reef. I’ve played Nine Kings with satraps and danced a gciorcal with one of the last pygmy chiefs.”
“Really?” Teia asked.
“Really. We diplomats often stretch the truth, and sometimes make what we say seem to be the opposite of what we’re actually saying, but we do our best not to lie straight-out.” Anjali smiled. “Well, at least that’s the Chromeria’s school of thinking. Other nations, satrapies, and even clans have other approaches.”
“You just go from wonder to wonder? Nice work if you can get it, huh?” Teia said.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, most of my work has been much more tedious. It took me a full year to negotiate the passage taxes the Aborneans charge on the Narrows. A year working, for an agreement that only lasts ten. Though naturally, one flatters oneself that the representatives will simply renew it when it expires four years from now. If the satrapies last so long.”
“How’d you get to see all those things, though? You don’t even look that old. Er, sorry.”
Anjali grinned. “Easy. I gave myself all the interesting assignments.”
“You what? Wait, how senior are you?” Teia asked.
“Ambassadorships are given out to friends of satraps and Colors. They’re not quite sinecures, but they are largely ceremonial positions. Important for what they do, of course, but there are entire armies of people like me—the career diplomats, not the political appointees—who get the work done where the satrapies rub each other wrong. Fishing rights, piracy, extradition of criminals and runaway slaves, water rights, taxes, spot checks of compliance to the slave laws, and, of course, these days, communicating and compliance checks of the new balancing dictates.”
The new laws governing drafting that Promachos Guile and the Spectrum had instituted didn’t apply to drafters training for war, so Teia hadn’t even noticed them. Drafters elsewhere, however, had to compensate for the war effort—not drafting a certain color as news of light storms came into the Chromeria, or trying to draft more of its opposite color.
“I imagine that’s a nuisance,” Teia said. She was still studying the city they were rapidly approaching. Azûlay was built on a steep hill down to the sea after the arm of its protected bay and the lighthouse. Buildings were packed literally against each other, sharing walls up four and five stories and redbrick roofs, differentiated from their neighbors only by their individual bright-pastel walls. Ivies and greenery of all sorts sprouted everywhere.
“A nuisance? You have no idea, do you?” Anjali Gates said. “In the rich cities like Big Jasper, sure, drafters still use magic for entertainment and convenience. But in the villages where most people live, a ban on green in the fall might damage the olive harvest or mean only natural fertilizers can be used with the barley and wheat plantings. Sub-red is chronically restricted, so if the weather turns bad an entire grape harvest might be ruined. Worse, it means a new mother with a fever can’t be cooled. A nuisance? Child, people are dying so your compatriots can train with fire.”
Teia swallowed. She’d not even considered it.
“On the plus side, there haven’t been as many light storms since the rules were instituted, and no reports of bane in months, of course.”
Orholam’s ball sweat. But Teia said, “You never answered me, did you? About your position.”
“Oh, did I not?” But Anjali Gates smirked. “I’m the corregidor emeritus of the diplomatic corps.”
“That means you were the boss but you retired?” Teia said.
“Unretired now. Briefly. They needed someone who had a chance of reasoning with the… mercurial Nuqaba, and someone expendable, in case she does to me what has been done to messengers bearing unwelcome news from time immemorial.”
“Tough assignment,” Teia said.
“I volunteered.”
“I didn’t,” Teia groused.
“I know, that’s why I brought it up.”
“What do you mean you brought it up? I asked you out of the blue.”
“Did you? Regardless, if they seize me, you should get the hell out. If they take me, they’ll either kill me outright, or possibly do something to shame me. Send me back naked or shave my head or rape me. Each is its own word in the language of diplomacy. The Chromeria will respond appropriately, as it finds possible.”
“What the… what the hell does that even mean?” Teia asked.
“If the Chromeria were to later seize the Nuqaba alive, then if she has beheaded me without torture, she would be beheaded in turn. If she sends me back naked, she would likewise be paraded through the streets. If I were to be raped on her orders, she would be tortured horribly and shamed publicly as much as possible, though not raped, of course: we aren’t animals. Most leaders have an intuitive understanding of this kind of graduated retribution, if not an explicit one. Of course, how she conducts herself in the intervening time between my death and her reckoning could negate or change all of this.”
“And you volunteered?” Teia asked.
“I’m old,” Anjali said cheerfully. “After negotiating grain prices and cart widths hundreds of times, believe me, this is the kind of message we in the diplomatic corps dream of delivering—if only we can get away with it. But it also takes a certain gravitas to deliver a proper epistolary beating. If I pull this off, I’ll have to award myself the corps’s highest honor. If I don’t, I’ve left orders that they should award it to me posthumously.” She grinned at Teia.
“What’s an epistolary beating?”
“Watch the introduction. You’ll see what I mean. Just because I know the ceremonial bows and the twenty-seven titles of the Nuqaba Haruru doesn’t mean I like reciting them. You realize you’re part of this diplomatic grammar, right?”
“Huh?”
“One Blackguard accompanying me, not two, and the one they send is… petite. Forgive me for stating what others will think, I do not share this judgment and in fact know your reputation well—but the Nuqaba will see you as a little girl. Your slight stature makes you look even younger than you are. She might not even believe that you’re a Blackguard. The Chromeria sending you to accompany me is a small snub, but it also means they’re less likely to take or kill you. They’ll think you’re some child put into this role, and whatever glory they might find in defeating or humiliating a big man Blackguard is therefore absent.”
“My presence itself is an insult? And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Teia asked.
“I’m trying to help you gauge and define your own scope of actions here. This isn’t my assignment alone. It’s ours.”
“You really think we can reel them back in?” Teia asked. She hadn’t meant to ask a real question. She knew what she had to do here.
“I think diplomacy may resolve all conflicts between parties of goodwill.”
“That last bit is the part that bites you in the ass, isn’t it?”
“Rather, it’s the part that bites you in the ass, my young Blackguard friend. For where there’s no goodwill, my job ends.”
Teia had thought for a moment that they were very different indeed. Anjali the happy talker, traveling through the satrapies, her words bringing life and peace wherever she went, soothing conflict and finding outcomes acceptable to all parties; Teia the shield that came down on stiff necks.
But perhaps they were simply two different horses, pulling the same chariot of state. Anjali, at the front, saw different scenery wherever she went. Teia, pulling behind her, saw only horses’ asses and different kinds of road.
They passed under the very shadow of the lighthouse, the reedsmen artfully guiding their small craft between the hundreds of ships going in and out of the port. They headed straight into the small beach, threw cloths over the skimmer so as to keep its secrets from the curious, and then threw down a plank.
Teia put on blue spectacles and trotted down the plank first. People began pushing closer on the crowded beach to get a look at them, so Teia threw her cloak back off her shoulders to reveal the sword and pisto
ls at her belt and the rope spear wrapped around her waist, its long blade hanging down one thigh like another sword.
The crowd backed off, but Teia and Anjali didn’t even make it off the beach before they were stopped by a detachment of port guards. Evidently, the oddity that was the skimmer speeding across the waves had elicited some alarm.
Anjali Gates did all the talking, declaring them to be a delegation from the Chromeria and demanding the skimmer and their men be unmolested while they themselves should be accompanied to the satrapah’s palace. While the diplomat spoke, Teia did her best to look imposing without being threatening. It was doubly hard with her feet sunk into the sand while the port guards stood on the paving stones of the street just above them. Teia felt about as tall as Caelia Green.
No wonder Buskin had worn those shoes. Teia would give her second-favorite rope spear right now to be a little taller.
In short order, though, they found themselves being escorted through the streets. Teia wished that they could take their time in the city instead. Steep cobbled streets led up to a plateau where the majority of the city rested, and ivy adorned every building. Where the ivies or wisteria had torn apart stone or lumber, the people had simply rebuilt around them rather than trimming them back, even building supports to prop up ancient vines. Every window was a riot of flowering plants as well. The pastel paints were fresh and bright.
And the people, ah, the people.
Azûlay was as cosmopolitan as any of the other great cities of the Seven Satrapies, but here the many skin tones of the satrapies’ ethnicities were painted on a background of many Parians. It made Teia feel oddly at home, and she realized only slowly that it was because she didn’t feel odd. In Big Jasper she hadn’t stood out, simply because everyone stood out. But this was different. Homey.
She wasn’t able to enjoy it or explore any of the little alleys, though—each one adorned with murals, it seemed—or visit the little kopi counters or the kitchens wafting heavenly smells into the street. A great wide ribbon of less steep grand boulevard switchbacked up the great hill so wagons could make their way to and from the port, but the guards took them straight up, sometimes climbing steep stairs, muscling aside burnous-clad crowds when necessary.