The Black Prism

As in all battles, there was simply too much to see, too much happening all at the same time to put everything together. Gavin looked toward the sun, poised above the horizon.

Two hours. All I need is two hours. Protecting these people is one great purpose I have that you must approve of. So if you’re up there, would you please get off your holy ass and help me?

General Danavis had been organizing, training, promoting, firing, and training Garriston’s defenders for the past week. Twenty hours a day, sometimes twenty-two. It was inhuman, and yet it wasn’t enough. Gavin was accustomed to the discipline and ease of working with veterans. By the end of the Prisms’ War, his men had worked together fluidly. Stocking this wall with supplies would have taken his veterans literally one-third of the time it was taking these men. His veteran cannoneers would already be sighted in, with distances marked off. These men barely knew each other, much less trusted each other. It made everything painfully slow, and Gavin was slow to adjust to how slow they were.

We’re doomed.

But then he drafted a quick platform to walk out on in front of the open arch—necessary to gather some of his open threads of luxin—and he caught his first sight of the wall as his enemies would see it.

That damned boy artist had made his masterpiece.

Gavin had been the one who filled the forms, but he’d always been hovering above them, and while he was getting the sections to fit together he’d always been on the other side of the wall. Now he saw the whole.

The entire wall—the entire great curving league of it—glowed the color of the sun when it first shows its face. That glow came from the liquid yellow—a hair’s breadth from being perfect, hard yellow—that floated behind the first layer of perfect yellow. The liquid yellow would mend any damage that did scar the outer wall. But then, within that thin layer, Gavin saw that his old drafters, doubtless under the direction of Aheyyad, had added their own touches. As an enemy approached, he would see that the entire wall was swarming with loathsome things. Spiders the size of a man’s head appeared to be crawling across the wall, stopping, little jaws clacking. Small dragons appeared to swoop and spin. Disapproving faces swirled up out of the gloom. A woman ran from some many-fanged thing and was torn to pieces and devoured alive, her face painted with despair. A man who appeared to be walking along the base of the wall was seized by hands that swirled out of the mist and yanked him in. Beautiful women turned into monsters with forked tongues and huge claws. Blood seeped and pooled on the ground. And those were just the things Gavin could see in a cursory glance. It was as if the drafters had gotten together and taken every nightmare any of them had ever had and put it into the wall. They were illusions, all of them mere images within the wall, but an enemy wouldn’t know that at first, and even if they did know it, it was scary as the evernight itself. Better, it would certainly distract enemy archers and musketeers from making accurate shots at the murder holes hidden by those images.

And that was just the wide blank sections of the wall. At every corbel, the scowling, forbidding figure of a Prism looked down on the attackers. As Gavin looked, he saw that every Prism for the past four hundred years had been crafted into the wall, with Lucidonius at the right hand of the figure who dominated all and Gavin himself at the left hand. Above them, over the huge gate gap, loomed the scowling figure of Orholam himself, radiant and furious, his planted arms making the arches of the gate. Anyone attacking this gate would be attacking Orholam himself, and all his Prisms. A brilliant little trick to make the attackers feel uneasy. Each figure, including Orholam, had cunningly hidden machicolations to drop stones or fire or magic on attackers.

Gavin bit off another curse. He’d paused for a good five seconds, admiring his own damned wall. He didn’t have time.

For a moment, he thought of simply closing the gate gap, just making pure wall. But at this point, that wouldn’t be any faster. The forms were already shaped to make a gate. All he had to do was fill them and tie them—just on one side, the cleverness he’d use for the rest of the wall would have to wait. Tomorrow, if they lived that long.

Gavin gathered the spools of superviolet that connected the whole superstructure of the wall and began pouring in yellow luxin.

Orholam, he was exhausted. He’d been drafting to his absolute limit every day for the last five days, and all through this day in particular since the first rays of dawn. If he’d been a normal drafter, he’d have gone mad long ago. Even most Prisms would have killed themselves with the amount of drafting Gavin had done. The others knew it too. If anything, Gavin had gotten more powerful since the war, and far more efficient. He’d seen women like Tala—whom he’d never seen impressed by anything in her life—shoot glances his way during unguarded moments like he was downright frightening. But there was only so much even he could draft.

Nonetheless, he poured perfect yellow luxin into the forms. The real Gavin couldn’t have done this: he wasn’t a superchromat, he couldn’t draft a perfect yellow. But Gavin couldn’t go halfway. There was no “good enough” with yellow luxin; if it weren’t drafted perfectly, it would dissolve. Simple as that.

Something rocked the wall, and Gavin almost fell from his perch. Someone steadied him, and he saw that Tremblefist was standing beside him, holding him up. A moment later, he heard the delayed rumble of distant artillery.

“I’ve got you,” Tremblefist said. He wasn’t quite as big as his older brother, but he too had worked with Gavin a long time. He must have seen the glazed, stupefied look in Gavin’s eyes, because he said, “Our own cannons will start in a moment. Don’t be… distracted.” Don’t be alarmed, he meant. Don’t be frightened. Don’t botch the gate and get us all killed.

More of King Garadul’s artillery began landing in the field, most of it far short of Brightwater Wall. The sound of the enemy culverins became a thunderstorm in the distance. Gavin gathered his will and kept drafting. He didn’t realize that he was weaving on his feet until he felt Tremblefist’s big hands close on his shoulders. Several other Blackguards pressed close.

“Raise the cowl!” General Danavis yelled.

As yellow luxin splashed from Gavin’s hands into the forms below him, he felt the wall shudder as each section of the cowl swung into place on counterweights. The cowl was his architect’s invention. Basically, it was a removable roof for use during artillery bombardment. There were plenty of times when an open roof was preferable—to gather rainwater, when it was unbearably hot, or when men had to carry great loads or carts had to pass down the length of the wall. But during a bombardment, it would shield defenders from howitzers and mortar fire. The wall’s own artillery was left free to fire on the same basic defensive design as an arrow slit—easy to fire out at a wide angle, but requiring a direct hit from the other side to put it out of commission.

“What the hell is that?” Tremblefist breathed. Gavin wouldn’t have even heard him except that the man was basically holding him up. And Tremblefist didn’t talk to himself much.

Gavin looked up, giving himself a small break, and looked over the plain.

The army was rumbling ever closer, catching up with their culverins. In front of them were teams setting up the howitzers—the defenders still hadn’t fired a single shot, a fact that had General Danavis screaming at the nearest crews.