The Blood Mirror

  In minutes, they emerged into an empty little hut with curtains drawn. In piles, and hanging from hooks, and standing in towers, were pitch and scrapers and lines and buoys and more lines and lanterns and various other implements for the keeping of ships. Gavin guessed it was one of the boat keepers’ shacks at the Chromeria’s back dock. It was still dark out, but a hint of light trickled around the cracks in the walls and around the curtains, hinting at coming dawn.

  Grinwoody picked up a wrapped bundle. “You asked before how you’re to do it.” He grinned. “If one is to kill a god, one must be properly armed.” Then Grinwoody—the hidden Old Man of the Desert, Anazâr—unwrapped a sword that was not a sword. Its blade was long, light, thin, with twin black whorls crisscrossing around each of seven shining jewels, one for each color, though to Gavin’s eye they were a uniform brightness and tone. Along its spine was a thin musket barrel, except for the last hand’s breadth, which was only a sweeping blade that served as both sword point and bayonet. The Blinding Knife.

  To cover his sudden fear, Gavin said, “You old bastard. You know my father wants this more than anything in the world, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what do you think happens when I pass the impassable reef, climb the tower that’s probably just a trick of the light, climb the footstool of the Lord of Light himself, and stab him with this?”

  Grinwoody grinned an arrogant grin. Shook his head. “Are you really as desperate to believe in gods and devils as the rest of them? Knowing what you know? Having done what you’ve done? Orholam is no god. It is merely the nexus of this world’s magic. It’s not sentient. It’s not a person or a godhead. It is the wobbling, unbalanced axle around which all magic rotates. It is the center that cannot hold.

  “If you destroy this nexus men call Orholam, you kill magic itself. It will be an end of the tyranny of the Chromeria and an end to the magical storms that have devastated our world for millennia beyond counting. It will end the world putting one man in power while another is his slave—merely because the first can do magic. For that hope, for that hope for justice, I have wagered everything.”

  “Regardless of the cost?” Gavin asked.

  “The cost to do nothing is greater.”

  “You really think the Blinding Knife will blind God himself.”

  “This is the problem with erasing your own history, as the Chromeria has done, never trusting its own with dangerous knowledge: sometimes the most dangerous things are exactly what you need to save yourself.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gavin asked. Erasing history? Was this some kind of Order conspiracy theory?

  “How I would love to sit and talk with you for an afternoon and tell you all the parts of your reign you owe to me, and all the things you misinterpreted through the decades. It would be better if your father were there, too, for he’s been the more substantial foe by far. But we have little time. Dawn comes, and light waits for no man, am I right?” He peeked out the curtain, then dropped it back in place.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What are your demands?”

  “Do you remember this?” Grinwoody asked. He upended a black velvet bag into his hand, and a jewel the color of midnight dropped into his hand. It somehow radiated darkness, or sucked light into itself. It was living black luxin, but it was something more. If the black luxin in Gavin’s eye patch was a child of eternal darkness, this was Mother Night herself.

  “The black seed crystal,” Grinwoody said. “You remember now?”

  “I have… no memory of that.” Except that he felt an instinctive fear and revulsion at the sight of it. It was too painful to even behold.

  “You created this. At Sundered Rock.” Grinwoody pushed back a curtain from a window and looked out at the water. Then he turned again to Gavin. “Or perhaps this is an older one. You see, the Chromeria used to deny that seed crystals exist—even while they hoarded them. The seed crystals call their color of drafters to themselves—which is why, unknowing, drafters have always come here for their teaching. But uncontrolled, unchecked, they create the bane, and the bane call wights much more powerfully.

  “The Chromeria likes to believe that there’s only one seed crystal of each color. As if one can wish that there should be only one volcano, or one hurricane, or one earthquake—because one is devastating enough. The truth is, any sufficiently powerful drafter can create one, like you did at Sundered Rock. Or they can spontaneously appear, as they have recently, if there’s too much of their color. Maybe it’s random, maybe it coalesces around a drafter of that color, like the first crystal in a freezing pond—what does it matter? When you create the right conditions, the bane appears. And the conditions now? Without you balancing? It’s like all magic is a pond below freezing, waiting for that first crystal. Only death can follow, Dazen Guile.”

  “Oh, good, here I was thinking things looked grim.”

  Grinwoody stared at him, unsmiling. “Apparently that irreverence has helped keep you alive and sane. I hope it continues to work for you.”

  Gavin swallowed, flippancy gone. “So what does the black do? Does it make a black bane?”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing, but then, they’d have erased that, too, if such didn’t spontaneously erase themselves from men’s memories as your conflagration at Sundered Rock did. No, Dazen, I’m not going to tell you any more. All you need to know is this…”

  He balanced the sword on the floor, tip down, and set the black seed crystal on its pommel. It sank into the pommel, melted, and a change rushed over the entire surface of the sword. What had been black and white entwined now shimmered with darkness. As Grinwoody turned the blade, entire sections dulled in the light as if they were a polarized lens.

  “… you find the nexus of magic, and you stab the Blinding Knife into it. I don’t care if it’s a thing or a person or God himself. You kill it, and our deal’s complete.”

  Simple.

  “Why me?” Gavin asked. “You’ve got dozens? Hundreds? of people loyal unto death to you.”

  “The Blinding Knife’s powers can only be activated by a Prism. Climbing the tower was once a pilgrimage open to all, but after Vician’s Sin, the priests at White Mist Reef created magical locks on the tower to keep drafters from reaching the top—to protect the nexus, you see? There’s a magical lock at each level, a blue lock to block blue drafters, a red to block reds, and so forth. So only a non-drafter will be able to reach the top of the tower.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The Chromeria has always tried but failed to gain a monopoly on old knowledge. We Braxians have protected our own histories.”

  “But if there are locks, surely there’s one for black.”

  “Not according to the records. Either black resists being formed in such ways, or the priests felt black defiled them to use. That’s why they formed the reef instead—failing to keep out the worst, they decided to keep out everyone.”

  “But you don’t know if this will work.”

  “Of course not. But I do know that you’re the only person in the world who has a chance,” Grinwoody said. “Only a non-drafter can reach Orholam. Only a Prism can use the Blinding Knife to kill him. Only you are both.”

  “I never expected to find you betting on me,” Gavin said.

  “One thing I like about you Guiles. People are usually either fighters or survivors. You’re both.”

  Gavin looked at the blade and couldn’t even think. It was like staring down an infinite chasm now, where before it had been like staring at the sun. Each was too terrible to behold for long.

  It felt hungry.

  “So let’s pretend I’m an enthusiastic participant,” he said. “How am I supposed to get through White Mist Reef? You have drafters who can handle a skimmer?”

  “I sent a skimmer already. It shattered in the stresses passage through the reef put on it. I’m sending you on a normal ship. Mostly.” Grinwoody checked the window again.

&nb
sp; Gavin was incredulous. “And what kind of a lunatic would be willing to attempt to sail through White Mist Reef?”

  “The kind that gambles.”

  What the fuck does that mean?

  Then Grinwoody opened the door. Gavin followed him out onto the Chromeria’s back dock. In the lightening gray of dawn, a magnificent white ship with a glimmering sheen was docked at the quay, but Gavin barely had a moment take it in.

  “My friend!” a voice boomed out of Gavin’s past. The human avatar of braggadocio ambled down the quay in an open jacket with no tunic beneath, wild hair, baggy trousers, and a huge, crooked-toothed grin.

  “Gunner,” Gavin said. “Of course it’s you.”

  “You look worst hand lass time,” Gunner said. Gavin thought it was a crack about his missing fingers at first, but then he translated: ‘Worse than last time.’

  But then Gunner stopped suddenly, stricken. His eyes were fixed on Gavin’s eye patch as if it were a serpent that might strike him. “What’s with the evil eye? Is it bad luck?”

  “Only for our enemies,” Grinwoody said.

  “Indeed?” Gunner asked Gavin, still disconcerted. The man could be childlike in his superstitions.

  “Troth,” Gavin said.

  “Diggity. Been told I got a fearsome aspect my own self. Guess I can use you to loosen the bowels of any poppy fiends we got. I’ll keep my deal,” he said, recovering his swaggering tone. “Gunner abides his bets.”

  Grinwoody lifted his eyebrows at the man’s insouciance, but said nothing.

  Gavin said, “You gambled for this?”

  “Nah… Sorta… I s’pose you could say… Yes. So you see, arter I lost the first time—my ante the gun-sword, his the ship yonder—he asked me if I wanted to go double or nothin’. I felt real down-like about losing your poky boom stick, plus I didn’t have anything left to lose ’cept this mighty fine jacket what I plundered from an Ilytian pirate king. Plust, whenever has Gunner’s luck been so bad he’s lost twice in a row?” He twisted his ratty beard. “So, uh, arter I lost again, he said I gots to sail my old bosom friend Guile through White Mist Reef. He calls that losing! An’ if we live, I keep the ship! You know our missing?” Gunner asked. ‘Our mission.’

  “Oh yes.”

  “Ain’t it exasperbating?!”

  Exciting? Exhilarating? That was one way to put it.

  “Not so loud, please,” Grinwoody said, glancing back toward the Chromeria looming above them all.

  “Can’t wait to show you my new girl!” Gunner said. “Guile! Brother! If we pull this off, we’ll be legends!”

  Gavin sighed. “Gunner… we’re already legends.”

  Gunner winked. “That’s Cap’n Gunner to you.”

  Gavin looked up at the Chromeria looming above him. Somewhere up there was Karris. She was this close. She was on this island, greeting this dawn, and she would never know he was here.

  He was about to get on a ship and leave—going to his death, no doubt—and she would never know he’d been this close.

  All that stuff about controlling the black luxin in Gavin’s eye patch could be a bluff. Could be. But the Order was here, armed, unstoppable, standing behind everyone and everything he loved.

  Grinwoody laid the Blinding Knife out over his palms. “Let me make something clear, Guile. I have watched you for decades now. I have seen you prevaricate and charm. I have seen you baffle and obfuscate. I have seen you stand steady as a mountain and then dodge the inevitable with the grace of a bull dancer. I have seen you appear to lose, only to emerge quietly victorious years later. Some would see you as diminished by the loss of your drafting. I don’t accept that. So let me tell you this, as a man who fully appreciates the powers of his opponent, and the dire position I’m putting that resourceful man in: I don’t know if Orholam can be destroyed, but I expect you to find a way to do it. I expect you to turn your whole heart and mind and soul to accomplishing it. If you fail, I will kill everyone you love. Her first.” He cast his eyes up toward the Prism’s Tower where Karris must be. “If anything happens to me or you reveal me, she dies. If she disappears, one of those she trusts enough to take with her will be mine, and she will die. If any of a hundred things happens that is not your obedience and success, I will take away every bright and happy thing in this world that you know.

  “On the other hand,” he said, his voice taking on a happy tone as if he hadn’t been threatening Gavin a moment before, “if you succeed, you will be the man who changed the world forever. Who, indeed, saved the world.” He offered the Blinding Knife in his hands to Gavin. “‘Some work of noble note may yet be done,’ eh? What will it be? Death? Or a chance?”

  Looking into Grinwoody’s black orbs—no, Anazâr’s, there was nothing of the sniveling slave in this man—Gavin believed him completely. There was no weaseling out of this. No third way. No drafting something so audacious that no one else had ever dreamed of it to escape.

  Perhaps it was a measure of Gavin’s stubborn arrogance, even here, even now, reduced to this, that his thought wasn’t of how impossible it all was. He thought, But what if I succeed?

  Magic was lost to him, but that was very different from killing magic altogether. Everything he’d done and built and dreamed and created had been because of and with magic. The whole society. His family’s wealth and privilege. His living while his brother died. The skimmers. The condor.

  Grinwoody couldn’t be right… but what if he was?

  Whistling a melodious little trill, Gunner nudged him. “C’mon, what’ll it be? Death or glory?”

  Gavin rubbed the eye patch, and the touch of the black luxin jewel sent unpleasant tingles through his fingers and down his wrist. He pulled his hand away. As the snowy-fingered dawn reached across the sky like a thief, he grabbed the dark Blinding Knife and said, “Let’s sail. Death and glory, Cap’n Gunner.”

  “Death or glory. Or,” Gunner said.

  Not likely.

  He cast his eyes up at the tower. Goodbye, Karris. Farewell, my love.

  Chapter 77

  “We’ve got a skimmer of Blackguards back, High Lady,” Samite reported as she strode into Karris’s staterooms. There was none of the usual levity from the square-shouldered woman. “There are casualties.”

  Karris broke off another damned negotiation for black powder with representatives of the Ilytian pirate kings—now with a pirate queen added in for variety—and left immediately.

  In minutes they were in the infirmary. Chirurgeons and luxiats bustled through a ward of gleaming white stone. The infirmary was ablaze with light all hours of the day and night. The sun’s rays were believed to have healing properties. Because that meant it was substantially warmer than other floors of the Prism’s Tower, it was held that the servants and luxiats here were allowed shortened sleeves and hemlines because of the heat.

  The truth was grimmer, told in the runnels and gutters in the infirmary floor: short sleeves and hems don’t drag in blood. In its long history, the Chromeria had seen its share of war and pestilence.

  Karris composed herself as she walked. She wasn’t the concerned friend or even a stern-faced commander here, she was Orholam’s left hand on earth. As he looked unblinking on every horror, and with mercy on every weakness, so must she appear caring but unmoved. She must be a pillar for others to lean on, never needy, never surprised, never weak. Iron.

  The rooms were surprisingly sedate. Karris hadn’t been down here since the last training accident more than a month ago, when two teenaged nunks ended up with scars across their faces from an explosive they’d created—with one blinded permanently.

  These days the infirmary was double staffed—evidence of Carver Black’s early preparations for the war—but it faced hardly more than the usual number of injuries, even as the war training of drafters had continued through the last year.

  Given the scarcity of other patients and their elevated status, the Blackguards had been given their own room. Most of the injuries were minor: a burn t
hat had seared Gill Greyling’s sleeve to his bicep, a cut across Jin Holvar’s back, an arrow stuck in Presser’s buttock that would be funny someday if it didn’t get infected. But for once, there was no humor, no attempts at levity.

  Gavin Greyling lay on a table surrounded by his brothers and sisters. Not a one didn’t have a hand on him. He was stripped to the waist, but Karris saw no wounds on the teenager.

  Karris came to stand by his head and put a hand on the dark, sweaty skin of his chest. She looked to his elder brother Gill, who winced as a chirurgeon ripped the fabric away from his own wound and pressed a bandage to it. The young man never moved his reassuring hand from his brother’s arm. So what was Gavin’s wound?

  With a groan, Gavin Greyling opened his eyes to see who had just touched him. And Karris knew.

  The sclera of his dark eyes were littered with the glowing blue fragments of his broken halos.

  “Ah fuck,” Karris said, forgetting everything she’d just prepared.

  It seemed to be the right thing to say, though. The Blackguards nodded and grumbled, and Gavin Greyling smiled weakly at her.

  “Broken, huh?” he said. “They didn’t want to tell me. I could feel it, though. Something wrong, something let loose in me. Shit.”

  “Shit,” Karris agreed. The cat was out of the bag now. What did it matter? These were her people: they would forgive her for remembering she’d been a Blackguard first.

  “Ambushed us,” Gavin Greyling said. “We were looking for Promachos.”

  “Of course you were,” Karris said. Orholam have mercy. They’d been looking for her husband. Quietly.

  Officially, Andross Guile had stopped sending out Blackguards to look for Gavin. They were overworked already, and didn’t need their deaths hastened by drafting more. Other eyes and ears had taken on those duties, searching foreign capitals and rival houses for any whisper of him.

  The Blackguards were professionals. They weren’t supposed to have favorites.