The Blood Mirror

  Ironfist slapped at his helmet, trying to free his head so he could see, but the great swinging block impeded him. But only for a moment.

  As Teia fumbled, flinging paryl toward him, he tore away the pins on the gag and holding his head to the left.

  He reached over to free his right arm—

  —and finally Teia caught his spine, and his arms dropped.

  “Teia,” he said tersely. “For Orholam’s sake. I know it’s you. That height. That chop across the wrist. Of the Shadows only you’re that short. It’s you!”

  Teia’d grabbed the spine too low. He could still speak, and he was trying to crane his head to see his sister, but the helmet still blocked that from him.

  “She tried to kill Gavin,” Teia whispered.

  She shouldn’t have said anything. Shouldn’t have confirmed his suspicion that it was her.

  “She was going to kill you.”

  “I don’t care what she did! I damned myself for her!”

  Too loud. Teia shifted her grip on his spine upward, perilously close to where she might paralyze his lungs and not just his voice.

  She’d never handled two spine pinches at once. Had never known she could.

  “Teia, no. Teia, no,” Ironfist whimpered, but Teia held. Soon it would be too late for him to do anything.

  In those long minutes, as Teia’s courage faltered, she knew she should have thought of the Nuqaba’s betrayal of the Seven Satrapies, how that woman turning her back on her vows cost the lives of hundreds or maybe thousands in the Blood Forest and elsewhere as the White King’s armies advanced. Teia should have steeled her spine knowing that this woman had tortured and tried to murder Gavin Guile himself. She had tried to deprive Karris of her husband, and Kip of his dad.

  But Teia didn’t think of them. She thought of that little slave girl being ordered to remind the Nuqaba she should be whipped tomorrow morning. She thought of the thick scars all the way down to the sleeping slave’s calves.

  As the last spark of life fought to stay aglow in the Nuqaba’s eyes, Teia whispered, “Orholam is merciful… to the penitent. Burn in hell.”

  Teia reached a finger out and held the Nuqaba’s right eyelid, Mercy, closed. The left eye, the evil eye, Justice, went cold.

  The woman’s head lolled and sank, and she lost consciousness.

  Teia stayed, though, as Ironfist wept and until the last ripples of water in the bathtub were stilled, averring that Haruru hadn’t breathed for a long time. She checked; the heart had stopped.

  Blood pooled on the floor, and the bathwater was stained opaque.

  It was awful.

  But Teia was a soldier. She was a spy and a fighter. She was a free woman and a fierce friend. She could do awful.

  Now Ironfist. She’d loused up in letting him know it was she.

  But she couldn’t kill him. Even if he was a traitor.

  She had no orders to kill Ironfist—and couldn’t have killed her patron Blackguard even if she had.

  “You should shout before you break free,” Teia said, not yet releasing Ironfist. “If they find you standing over the body, they’ll think you murdered her rather than that she suicided.”

  He gasped a desperate, disbelieving breath, but couldn’t speak.

  “But take care what you shout. You’re the one angry and bloody and alone in the room with her. Blathering about invisible assassins will sound crazy, and will make the guilt land on you. You shout first, Commander, and when the chief eunuch comes in you’ll simply look like a bereaved brother trying to save his sister. You might even make it out of this alive.”

  Chapter 63

  “Tonight is the night,” the Third Eye said from behind him as he stood on the palace balcony. “There’s no way to delay it longer, my love.”

  “That’s not true.” Corvan Danavis looked unseeing over his fleet. He wore his dress uniform tonight, all brass buttons, battle sash, and medals, most of them given him by a man all now thought dead: Dazen Guile. His mustache had grown out to something near its former glory, gold beads adorning each side. They’d thought General Corvan Danavis dead, too.

  “We’ve talked about this,” the Third Eye said. “If we delay, others die as well. And in the end, it changes nothing. Someone once said, ‘Better to lose a scout today than a squad tomorrow or a city next week.’”

  ‘Someone’ had been he, of course. He tried to grin, but it failed.

  “I would sacrifice the world for another day with you,” he said. He couldn’t turn and look at her, still. He didn’t want to waste this precious time with weeping.

  She came to stand at the railing beside him. She put her sunburnt hand over his. She said, “Romantic… but if it were true, I never would have married you.”

  “‘A man may weaken,’” he said. Now he was quoting her to her. It was the problem of both of them being leaders. They both had to sling grandiose horse shit sometimes. The quote ended ‘without it invalidating all he believes.’

  Typical that his quote would be about giving others to death, and hers would be about extending grace to others’ failures.

  “I hope this one will,” she said.

  He turned to look at her for the first time tonight. She wore a white silk dress with black ties drawing it snug around the body he worshipped. She was terribly sunburnt, with blisters on her skin over scars from older blisters. Her power of Seeing required sunlight on her whole body, and she’d been Seeing as much as possible for this past year, desperate to save others’ lives by her own sacrifices. She’d known early on that there was no future in which she died of the skin cancers.

  He saw the scars and railed against how they pained her, but they didn’t dim her beauty in his eyes. The scars were only proof of her love made visible in her flesh, like a mother’s stretch marks. Anyone who couldn’t see beauty in them was a fool.

  Nor was she self-conscious about her red and tender skin.

  At thirty-nine years of age, his wife was the mistress of her body and her self. She knew her strengths and wasn’t threatened by her weaknesses. She was a woman whole: able to cry or laugh or be silly or be seductive, and move from each in her own time, and move you with her. Her confidence made her far more appealing than even the few women Corvan had met in his life who might be objectively more beautiful, if such a thing as objective beauty existed.

  For beauty isn’t passive; beauty acts upon its beholder, moving and changing him. Line up ten paintings of different women by the same artist and ten men might agree which subject is the most beautiful. But let those men and women mingle for an evening, and duels might be fought over the same question, with no one lying in either case, and each convinced of the rightness of his judgment.

  Corvan had lost two wives, but it was the loss of this third that would destroy him. The Broken Eye had sent one of its murderous Shadows for her. Something about the cloaks the assassins wore disrupted even Seers’ vision. But she had been able to track her own presences and absences to figure out all the futures down which she died, though not how.

  It is Orholam’s will, she would say. Orholam would provide for him after she was gone, she would say.

  Words strangled in his throat, he turned away from her. “I have not your faith,” he said.

  “Not like this, please,” she said, preempting him. “Let’s not spend our last night in those conversations.”

  She was right. One didn’t have to be a Seer to see how such talk would end with angry words and angry tears. This night was too precious.

  The yellow luxin tattoo on her forehead gleamed softly, and he felt calmed.

  “Using all your tricks on me again?” he said gruffly.

  “Tricks? I prefer to think of them as my charms,” she said, grinning. “And yes… before the night is over, all of them.”

  The yellow eye tattoo was a cunning piece of art that seemed to be a Seers Island secret, but the real cunning of it was that the Third Eye wasn’t only a yellow drafter. She was also an orange, and the
Seers had no absolute prescriptions against the use of hexes.

  Invisible behind the bright distraction of the gleaming yellow eye, she drew mood-changing hexes. No one could help but glance repeatedly at that yellow eye, so no one could help but be affected by the hexes there, hidden in plain sight. They’d been married before she told him of it. The Chromeria had a bad habit of executing hex casters.

  “Your scouts from Blood Forest get back yet?” she asked.

  He lifted his eyebrows. “You want to spend our last night talking about the war?”

  “It’s your calling,” she said, as if it were simple. “And when we talk about it, I feel I’m helping you and the world, and I feel closer to you than at any time other than when we make love.”

  “I hope I wasn’t presumptuous to expect—”

  “That’s next,” she said. “I’m greedy. I want to be with you in every way tonight.”

  It was surreal to talk so lightly about her death. But she was right. She usually was.

  “A number of scouts have come back, actually,” he said. “Piracy is rampant across the entire sea. Some new pirate queen named Pasha Mimi has got the Aborneans paying her to keep the Narrows open while they build their own fleet. She, naturally, is using the fortune they’re paying her to build her own fleet. My scouts looking for the White King seizing bane all came up empty, but it’s a big sea. They do report many superviolet bane storms, but it could be because so much sub-red is being used elsewhere in the world with so few superviolet drafters to balance that. The storms could be natural.”

  Of course, neither of them believed that. Aliviana had become the superviolet goddess, Ferrilux.

  “I’m sorry, dearest,” she said. “You saved her life and helped her win her freedom. How she uses it…”

  As if there were any meaningful choices after you bound yourself to dark forces.

  “I should have raised her better. Told her more,” Corvan said. “But… not tonight. Let’s not… Not tonight.” He forced a smile and set that grief aside that he might focus on this brief blessing before it too turned to grief. “What about Ironfist?”

  “He either is or will soon be on his way to the Chromeria with a heart full of rage. For him and those who love him most, I see only sorrow now.”

  Corvan fell silent. Their last night together, and he was picking at these future scabs. But he couldn’t help it.

  “Dazen?” he asked, hopefully. As if she wouldn’t have told him right away.

  “I tried again. I still couldn’t See him, Corvan.”

  So either he was wearing a shimmercloak all day every day, or he was hidden from her sight by some magic they’d never encountered—which was possible with the enemies he had! Possible, but not likely.

  Or he was dead.

  “One chance in five, you said?” For Aliviana, he meant.

  “She’s a Danavis. They’re a tough breed.” She squeezed his hand.

  There was nothing more to say on that. “Has Kip seen the trap?” he asked.

  “No. He’s still marching in the wrong direction. He may save the city.”

  “And lose the war. Dammit. It’s like he read all my books for nothing,” Corvan said.

  “Not everyone can be the best general of their time,” she said.

  “By definition I suppose there can only be one.”

  His wife, his daughter, his best friend, and his ward—it was as if Orholam was determined to take every light out of his life.

  “I have something to ask,” the Third Eye said. “Will you give this note to Karris?”

  “Of course. What’s it about?”

  “Locusts,” his wife said.

  He raised his eyebrows, but she said nothing as he tucked it away. She didn’t always intend him to understand. “Very well, then,” he said.

  “I just left things… I was unfair to her, I think.”

  “I’ll tell her so,” he said. They stood for a time, watching the sunset and the sea. She made the sign of the seven, and, unbeliever though he was, he made it, too, tapping heart and eyes and hands: what you believe, what you behold, how you behave—each leading inexorably to the next.

  “Now make love to me, and then go.” She smiled as if to soften the apparent command. “You have much to do tonight elsewhere. I’ll be fine until morning without you.”

  And then he understood. She thought the assassin was already in the room. She was telling the Shadow that Corvan would be gone soon, that she would be alone and vulnerable, if only he would wait.

  Corvan blew out a long breath, trying to get a hold of himself. She’d told him that if he tried to kill this Shadow, he would die. Period. She had told him the greatest gift he could give her this night was his total attention.

  So he blocked out his rage, and his indignation that some killer was watching this private moment, and everything but his wife and his love for her.

  They made love, and they shared breath and body. It was tenderness and desperation and clinging and resignation and acceptance. It was joy at what they’d had and sorrow at its brevity. It was golden heartbeats of pure unthinking pleasure pierced by iron arrows of grief.

  After a long time, after all too brief a time, they held each other. She sat in his lap, arms and legs embracing him. She didn’t lie down, though she was winded and sweat glistened on her skin. These were to be her last minutes. She wouldn’t waste them in seeking sleep.

  She touched her forehead to his, and kissed him. Then she reached one finger up to the yellow eye tattooed in luxin on her forehead. It went dark, and then frayed and disappeared.

  “I have run the course set before me,” she said. “I have finished the race.” Then she whispered in Corvan’s ear, “Polyhymnia.”

  A lone tear coursed down her cheek, contrasting with the brave smile on her lips.

  It was what she had laid down when she had taken up the title and duties and sacrifices of being the Third Eye: it was her name.

  “Go with my love, Corvan Danavis, my Titan of the Great Fountain.”

  It was an epithet he’d never heard. A glimpse into his own future, perhaps, a benediction and a farewell.

  He rose, tears blinding him, and dressed in silence, strapping Harbinger on his hip, not trusting his voice, not trusting his rage. His breath came in little gasps as he struggled for control. When he looked back to her from the door, she didn’t meet his eyes. She had thrown on a thin robe and sat, legs folded, hands resting in her lap, her back straight and proud.

  Her face as cool and peaceful and beautiful as a statue of the saints, she faced the eastern window, praying, waiting for a sunrise she would never see.

  Chapter 64

  It can’t be that big, was Kip’s first thought as he first saw Dúnbheo in the low light. From his maps and many descriptions of it, Kip knew exactly what Dúnbheo looked like. But as with so many things in life, there’s a difference between knowing and knowing.

  Unlike most cities, there had been only a few buildings outside the walls. The population of Dúnbheo had shrunk so much over the years—and been so huge before the Chromeria’s rise—that land inside the walls was cheap. The inns and food stalls that had set themselves up outside the walls for the convenience of travelers had been burnt or cannibalized for lumber and stone by the Blood Robe besiegers months ago.

  It made for an odd scene: the attackers set up in a wide crescent around the walls amid the great stumps of all the trees they’d cleared, their boats anchored in a neat crescent outside the river gate, and then the vast, incomprehensible greenery of the wall itself.

  Kip had seen the creation of one of the wonders of the world in Brightwater Wall, but the Greenwall surrounding Dúnbheo was something on a completely different scale. Kip had assumed Greenwall was a screen of impressive trees in front of a wall itself. When told the trees were the wall, he’d thought there must be fortifications stretched between each tree.

  That was wrong, too.

  Massive sabino cypresses made towers to hea
ven every thirty paces, and the gaps between them were filled with millennial cypress and other trees, trunk to straining trunk, growing more thickly than should have been possible and also more closely to their neighbors. But no branches hung out into the space over the invaders. Every limb had instead grown back into the mass of the wall itself, as if guided by some chelonian intelligence to make it impregnable.

  Over and through all the massive trees grew ivies and vines, further binding the trees together and clogging the spaces between them, but their leaves also gave the defenders perfect cover. An archer would part the leaves, take a shot through the makeshift murder hole, and then disappear, leaving not so much as a target.

  The impression of the whole was of a green cataract as far as the eye could see, cascading in every direction as if it were the old gods’ own verdant fountain. Flowers even sprouted everywhere, not deigning to accept the mortals’ war going on beneath them.

  In some places, the ivies had been burnt or pulled down in previous sallies, but it had done little. In fact, against the mammoth height of the tree wall, the tiny scars only made the efforts of man seem paltry and impotent.

  “Time,” Ferkudi said.

  In their months fighting together, Ben-hadad had fashioned clocks with deliberately weird intervals for each Nightbringer captain’s superviolet drafter. Kip didn’t need a clock to count out the six-minute-and-thirty-seven-second interval they were using today. Ferkudi counted it in his head. All the time. Without apparent distraction or even effort.

  Sometimes Kip wanted to kiss the big dope.

  He threw up a superviolet flare in the predawn gloom.

  For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. Then Kip saw the answering superviolet flare. The night mares were in place in the woods.

  “Time,” Ferkudi said.

  Around him, Kip saw men and women silently making the sign of the seven, preparing their immortal souls and hoping they wouldn’t find out if they had immortal souls today. Here we go.

  Kip gestured, and they released the fire birds. It had taken the will-casters and pyroturges a long time to figure out how to set birds on fire without actually burning them. But the Ghosts absolutely refused to intentionally harm the animals they partnered with. It was war, harm happened, but they did absolutely everything they could to avoid it. The fire birds went up in a broad fan in front of Kip and his lines, perfectly spaced. Their charges burnt for ten seconds, and then winked out.