The Blood Mirror

  “Who are you?” Gavin asked.

  “Upon my majority, my people named me Amalu Anazâr, the Daring Rebel in Shadows, the Dark Defiant One. More know me as the Old Man of the Desert.”

  Gavin almost broke out laughing.

  “Not the response I was expecting,” Grinwoody said. “But then, you have been down here a long time, haven’t you?”

  He didn’t ask what was funny, which was just as well. Gavin wouldn’t have told him. Both he and his father had unknowingly brought spies as close to themselves as possible—his father an old, withered man, and himself a young, beautiful girl. But both slaves, like a dark and a light mirror, had been spies on the Guile men, father and son. Spies serving in places no one would dare, serving quietly, serving well, and serving traitorously. Both Guiles had been blind to those closest to them.

  Perhaps not funny after all. Perhaps not coincidental, either. Like father, like son. Except Gavin had been protected by the White and his mother. They had chosen a good traitor, in both senses of the word.

  But that Marissia should be dead while this vile thing lived on was milk curdling in his mouth.

  “So, Old Man. What is it you want?”

  “I direct assassins, Gavin Guile, what do you think I want?”

  “Ha. You. I’m still having a hard time… Who would you want me to kill?” Gavin asked suddenly. Who out there would require a washed-up former Prism to kill them?

  “In return for your freedom and your life, you go to White Mist Reef, climb the Tower of Heaven, and kill Orholam.”

  Oh, come on, I thought I got to be the crazy one in this room.

  “Pardon?” Gavin took a sip of the wine. Orholam only knew when he’d get another chance.

  “I know your seventh goal, Dazen. Maybe this will allow that. Unlikely, but possible.”

  “Are you mad? It’s impossible. All of it. Legends and idiocy.”

  “And yet you’re more irritated that I know your seventh goal.”

  Gavin sneered. “I’ve never said it aloud. Never written it once. Barely even thought it.”

  “It’s impossible for you not to think it. Great men dream of being the promachos. Great drafters dream of being the Prism. What does the greatest promachos and Prism of all time dream of?”

  Gavin said, “Even if it were true, it’s impossible.”

  “Improbable. But I believe in taking long-odds wagers, and in following them to their end. I’ve arranged everything to give you this one chance. And, of course, if you choose death, all my work will have been for nothing.”

  “And how am I supposed to kill Orholam? With very sharp words? The cutting edge of my disbelief? The poison of a Prism’s hypocrisy?”

  “Put this on.” Grinwoody extended the jewel toward Gavin. “Or die. Now.”

  The old Gavin would have taken the opportunity to attack while the slave-king had one hand occupied. But Gavin had no strength and one clumsy half hand, and he’d seen the old man move. Though aged, Grinwoody was a martial artist, and Gavin could barely move. Worse, with the rich food in his stomach, he’d probably just throw up.

  Gavin took the jewel.

  At first glance, he’d assumed the setting had been changed simply so he could wear the jewel lower on his neck than a choker would allow. He’d been wrong. There were too many straps for that, and they were too short. The glittering black jewel was set through the middle of an eye patch. It looked like a veritable eye of darkness.

  “I took some liberties from the original design,” Grinwoody said. “It will still kill you if you try to remove it. When you bathe, you can hold it in your hand. Just make sure it never loses contact with your skin.”

  Gavin put it on. It snugged against his left eyelid tight enough that it pressed skin into the divot where his pupil lay, lensless. A chill went down Gavin’s spine, and he wasn’t sure it was entirely natural.

  Grinwoody’s demonically gleeful look of triumph made Gavin want to punch him in the face.

  “It’s a good look on you. Follow me,” the old man said.

  He turned his back on Gavin, utterly dismissive of what had once been the most dangerous man in the world.

  “Guile,” the dead man said. But now he didn’t speak with Gavin’s voice, but what might have been his own guttural growl. “Take me. I’m the only one who can save you. Touch that black stone in your eye patch to the wall, and I will make you emperor of this world in truth.”

  Gavin could swear that in the black-on-black he could make out a pair of hateful gleaming eyes.

  He smiled into the darkness. “What kind of a raka do you take me for?”

  Expecting claws to dig into his head and pull him back into hell at any moment, Gavin slowly stepped out of the cell.

  Another step. Another.

  “This way,” Grinwoody said after he swung the door to the black cell shut. “There’s… old superstitions among the Braxians that there’s something terrible below the Chromeria. Like about how you can’t take anything out of there, or something cataclysmic would happen. Andross was always very careful to strip and wash before he came out of here. I also put an emetic in that food. Just in case. Sometimes old traditions and old fears do hide wisdom.”

  “What?” Gavin said. But he already could feel the answer to that in his belly. Orholam have mercy, what did the man think, he’d swallowed a stone?

  Grinwoody came to a stop in a small chamber. The Old Man was already stripping off his own clothes and washing himself. He gestured to a basin. Gavin staggered over and was messily sick. But apparently it wasn’t an emetic only.

  “Can’t take any risks that you swallowed something,” Grinwoody said. “I have somewhere to be. I’ll be back with clothes and real food. Don’t forget: you try anything—and I mean even yell—and that black crystal will go straight through your skull.”

  But Gavin was too busy being sick to even think of escape.

  Chapter 74

  “Your lady awaits in the honeymoon chamber, my lord,” Cruxer said.

  They were not, perhaps, words that should have inspired dread.

  Kip blew out a breath. He and Cruxer were virtually alone in the Council’s chamber, which they’d converted to a war room. It was late. Big Leo was the only other person in the room, and he was propped against a wall, reading a book.

  The first night in Dúnbheo, the Divines had either been in disarray or had intentionally snubbed Kip by not having a room made ready. Kip and Tisis had worked so late they’d simply grabbed the nearest defensible room and slept. He didn’t actually care, but he’d known that other people would—and that they would take his acceptance of an insult as a sign of weakness or barbarity—so he’d made a passing comment about how it was strange a people so famed for their hospitality could make such an oversight.

  Tisis had helped, musing that maybe hospitality was more a virtue of the rural areas. The palace staff had been mortified. Outclassed by bumpkins? Unthinkable.

  The conveniently dead Lord Comán had been blamed, and the staff had been almost painfully punctilious. Tonight they had prepared a room that was apparently not simply the city’s finest, but a cultural treasure of some sort.

  “Breaker?” Cruxer asked.

  Kip was staring at the map. “Uh, right. I’m just waiting for one last report.”

  “He’s gone, Breaker,” Cruxer said. “It’s not giving up on him to admit it. He just couldn’t take it. Death isn’t the only way we lose people in war.”

  Contrary to his promise, Conn Arthur had left immediately, slipping away while the rest of the Nightbringers marched into the city. No one had seen or heard from him since.

  “It’s not just him,” Kip said. “Sibéal’s gone, too.”

  “Gone? No note?”

  “Nothing,” Kip said. “I don’t know if she went after Conn Arthur or if I’m looking at the beginning of a general desertion by the Ghosts.”

  “That’s impossible,” Cruxer said. “Why would they?”

  “Maybe
they think if we save Green Haven they’ll be back under the Chromeria’s thumb and it’ll be the end of them. I don’t know,” Kip said.

  “No. Not gonna happen,” Cruxer said with total certainty.

  Kip loved him for that.

  “And this is not something you need to worry about tonight. Sometimes you move heaven and earth, Breaker, and sometimes you just go to bed and let your wife make you happy. Very happy, if the gleam in her eye tells me anything.”

  “You’re a moron to keep her waiting,” Big Leo said from the corner, speaking for the first time in hours.

  But Kip didn’t move. That damned map.

  “There other problems?” Cruxer asked quietly enough Big Leo wouldn’t overhear. “I mean, between you and her?”

  Kip met his eye and was tempted to tell him everything, but how could Cruxer understand? And was it any of his business, anyway? “Nah, it’s, it’s fine. It’s great.”

  Cruxer saw straight through the lie. Kip could tell. But he seemed to forgive it immediately. There are things a man just doesn’t want to share about his marriage. “Well, uh, even if there were some, uh, tough things going on, she didn’t seem in a mood to fight tonight.”

  “Thanks,” Kip said. “I mean, thanks, really.” For putting up with a lie. That wasn’t worthy of me.

  “Nah, I’d say she was in a different mood altogether,” Big Leo said from his corner. Apparently they hadn’t been speaking quietly enough.

  But that damned map. Tisis had been working with the refugees from all over the Forest, all day long, to fill in more reports about the White King’s movements. Kip rewound it and watched the light blossom again, everything they had since Ox Ford and even before up to the present.

  He was missing something.

  “Well, don’t thank me, get a move on,” Cruxer said happily.

  But Kip didn’t move. He reached for the bag with the rope spear and tried to think. He bathed himself in yellow light from a special lantern. The problem was, he was almost done. He needed only to make the spear point now, and he wasn’t certain that luxin would make the best material for it. He’d thought about tying a tassel to the spearhead to distract the eye or perhaps filling it with off-spectrum brightwater so it would shimmer and gleam as it moved, but he hadn’t decided yet.

  “Two things,” Cruxer said.

  Kip looked at up at his friend. Cruxer drew a black spearhead from a bag.

  Not just black, hellstone. He handed it to Kip. A setting of blackened steel graced the base of the blighted leaf-blade. Kip examined it and then the mantle of the rope spear. They snapped together perfectly.

  “You want to explain this?” Kip asked.

  “The hellstone came from the treasury here.”

  That wasn’t what Kip was asking, and Cruxer had to know. “Ben-hadad do this?” he asked.

  “We sort of all thought it was about time you were done with that damn thing,” Big Leo said, still without looking up from his book.

  “What are you talking about?” Kip asked.

  “Permission to speak bluntly, my lord?” Cruxer asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, really bluntly.”

  “Come on,” Kip said. As if he’d take offense.

  “I figure a good friend gets one free chance to tell you you’re being an asshole in your life. And if he’s right, he gets one more.”

  “That is an excellent introduction into whatever you’re about to tell me,” Kip said.

  “Are you just tolerating that amazing fucking woman down the hall there, hoping you can trade her for Teia someday? Grow some balls, man. Make a choice. You know we all love Teia. You know we do. But you’re being an asshole to a woman who is better than I think you appreciate.”

  “I appreciate her!” Kip protested.

  “The question, Breaker,” Big Leo said, looking up from his book, his feet still propped up, “isn’t if you appreciate her. It’s whether you’re an asshole or a moron.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kip said. “Wait, is this about the rope spear? Are you joking? You think I’ve been making this for Teia?”

  Big Leo closed his book, sighed, and walked toward the door.

  “I’m glad you all have been so thoroughly won over by my wife,” Kip said to Cruxer. “But you’re sadly mistaken about the whole rope spear thing.”

  Cruxer looked at him flatly. “Yes, my lord.”

  Kip looked at him, peeved. Of course, if they’d been mistaken, then mightn’t she…

  And then he thought of all the times Tisis had seemed disappointed or hurt when he’d pulled out his little project to work on. Surely she couldn’t have made the same mistake.

  Oh hells. She thought he hadn’t really chosen her.

  Hadn’t chosen her? Come on! What bullshit… what totally, goddamned… accurate bullshit.

  He was making the best of the hand life had given them.

  But that was different, wasn’t it? It wasn’t making the choice his. It wasn’t owning it.

  Kip looked at the rope spear he’d made. It was a perfect weapon, and completely hypothetical. He couldn’t use it.

  He hadn’t chosen Tisis, had he? Despite everything. He’d called what they had ‘fun’ and told her he ‘cared for her,’ and he’d spent his spare time—for a year!—on a gift for another woman.

  He stood up and tossed the damn thing to Cruxer.

  “What do you want me to do with it?” Cruxer asked.

  “I don’t care,” Kip said.

  “You spent a year on that thing,” Big Leo said, standing up and closing his book. “It’s brilliant. I mean, the execution, not the idea of you doing it. Or working on it in front of your wife. Or taking time away from—”

  “Thanks, Big Leo! Enough!” Kip said.

  “You are going to at least name it, right?” Big Leo said. “Magical weapons have to have names. It’s a rule or something.”

  “Sorry,” Kip said, ducking past the big man and out into the hall.

  “Wait!” Big Leo said. “Is that you refusing to name it, or is that its name?”

  Chapter 75

  A paryl trip wire perched across the top step, waiting for Teia. It was an impressive distance from the mirror room, farther than she’d thought possible. Either Murder Sharp had just arrived, or he was a better paryl drafter than she had known.

  She rubbed her face with her hands, as if she could scrub away fear as easily as she could rub fog off a window. It was about as effective. She checked quickly that no one could possibly see her in the stairwell, but of course the path to the mirror room was abandoned on the night of a new moon. Seeing it was safe, she made the sign of the seven, splaying her fingers to touch forehead, eyes, and mouth, then tapping them to heart and hands. The deeper she’d gotten into the secrets of the Order through the winter and into this spring, the more she needed to make an outward show of her own beliefs. The deeper she fell into the pits of heresy, the more orthodox she was becoming. But fear fogs the windows again at any hesitation, so there was time for only one sign and one breath prayer. Orholam, let your light guard me in this darkness.

  It didn’t seem to do anything, but she kicked through the trip wire anyway. She walked down the hallway quietly, as if she didn’t know her entrance had been announced. There was another trip wire outside the door. She paused, then stepped over it, opening the door slowly.

  The door squeaked. Of course it did.

  She let out a cloud of paryl from her fingertips. It billowed freely through the room full of silent mirrors mounted on their great spinning frames. The paryl cloud spread from her outstretched hands like the slow blast of a blunderbuss: lighter paryl from her right hand floating up toward the ceiling while heavier, nearly solid paryl spilled across the floor and drizzled down the great circular holes in the floor. The slowly erupting cloud crashed against an invisible form in front of her, and curled around it like a thunderhead parting around a mountain.

  The Shadow stood silent, his
head bowed to hide his eyes.

  Then a hand extended from his shimmercloak, and as easily as if he were tearing the covers off a bed, he ripped away the entire cloud of paryl and was invisible once more.

  She was left aghast at how easily he’d done it; his will had suffused the entire cloud, had touched her own. Having will touch will unexpectedly was like having a stranger walk up to you and caress your face with both hands—not violent, but still violating.

  He was invisible again. Heart straining, chest tight, she strained to hear the whisper of cloth on cloth that would be her sole warning of his attack.

  But then the figure shimmered into visibility, and Murder Sharp flung back his hood.

  “You made one mistake,” he said.

  “Mistake?”

  “When I was a younger man,” Sharp said, “I fancied myself to be formidable. I flattered myself that I was scary.”

  Sharp had changed again in all the months he’d been gone. His hair had grown out and, while still short, had been trimmed neatly in a swept style preferred by some young nobles, and it was dyed to auburn from its previous fiery red. His naturally golden eyes had been colored somehow to brown—lenses that sat on the eye itself? Was such a thing possible? The scleras of his eyes were red from the irritation of wearing them, but no more than a haze smoker’s.

  Worse, he wore the white uniform and gold insignia of a Lightguard captain.

  “I had to be reined in,” he said. “Violently. I was bitter about it for a time, but now I see that every gem needs to have its rough edges chipped away before the stone can be polished to gleam.”

  He reached up to his mouth, fingering his immaculate teeth. And then he pulled out the dentures with a sucking sound and a dribble of spit. He examined the human teeth on his dentures with a craftsman’s eye, scrubbing at some imperceptible imperfection on the dogtooth, then tucked the dentures away in a special box.

  From a pocket, he produced another box, but he didn’t open it immediately.

  “But you. You, Adrasteia, I don’t think the Old Man will be as gentle with you as he was with me.”