That was Gavin’s fault. As Dazen. He’d sent a young, new general, Gad Delmarta, who had always been efficient and direct. Gavin had told Gad to secure Ru. General Delmarta had taken that to mean to secure it so that there could never be any resistance ever again. He’d exterminated the royal family—all fifty-six members of it and scores of their male retainers—publicly, one at a time, in the order of their succession, and burned down their great castle, the pride of Atash. When the people had fled, General Delmarta had sent fire drafters after the flotilla. Gavin had only found out about it afterward, and then what could he do? It was war, and his general had followed his orders, and when General Delmarta marched on the great city of Idoss next, it had surrendered without a fight because of their fear of the man, because of his cruelty.
“Maybe,” Gavin said, “we could count how many children died when you burned Garriston in retaliation and barred the gates so no one could escape? I seem to recall that all the Tyrean drafters and all but two hundred of the Tyrean soldiers were a hundred leagues away at the time. How long did it take for the river to clear of bodies? So many little corpses bobbing in the water. Even with all those hundreds of sharks turning the bay to bloody foam with their thrashing, it was weeks, wasn’t it?”
Gavin had never learned whose idea it was, but when Garriston had been burned, someone had stationed red drafters all around the walls. Soldiers shielded the drafters while they hurled red luxin back and forth in swathes throughout the city. Red luxin was used as fuel for lamps. Spread throughout a city, it had made a hell for the residents of Garriston. Tens of thousands had jumped into the river, and thousands more had jumped in on top of them. Their bodies themselves had almost been enough to dam the river in places. And then some of his older brother’s cleverer drafters had floated red luxin down the river in little boats of green or blue luxin, or mixed red and orange luxin to make a concoction so flammable it would burn even underwater, or mixed it with superviolet to make it float burning on the very water itself. Between the fire, the smoke, the water, the press of the crowds, the crushing deaths as whole buildings fell into the packed river, and the fire floating down the river itself, there had been death on a scale no one had imagined before.
Before the war, Garriston had been home to more than a hundred thousand people. His own conscriptions had thinned that to perhaps eighty thousand. After the fires, only ten thousand remained, and after the first winter, only five thousand.
“Enough,” the Black said. Carver was no drafter, and so in some respects he was the weakest member of the Spectrum. As the Black, he was responsible for most of the mundane aspects of ruling Little Jasper: importing food, managing trade, awarding contracts, recruiting and paying soldiers, maintenance for buildings and the docks, building ships, and everything else that the White ceded to his control so she could focus on managing the Chromeria itself. But he was a formidable man, and Gavin respected him. “We could list horrors all day, Lord Prism. What’s the point?”
The point is, out of my five great purposes left, the only purely altruistic one is to free Garriston. Those people are suffering because of me, and you bastards have stopped every attempt I’ve made to help them.
“The point is,” Gavin said, “that the Tyreans have as much reason to hate us as we have to hate them. We’ve been punishing them for the war for sixteen years. Most of the people paying the price now were children when the war started. They see no reason they should continue paying for what their dead fathers did or didn’t do. They hate us, and the fact is, none of us—none of the Seven Satrapies—want to go back there with an army.”
“What are you saying?” Luxlord Black asked. “Do you have specific intelligence of a threat?”
“I’m saying if we don’t pull out of Garriston and end the tribute on our terms, King Garadul is going to take Garriston by force and end it on his.” That’s what King Garadul had meant when he’d told Gavin, “We’re going to take back what you stole from us.” But Gavin couldn’t tell them about that without revealing more secrets, and they wouldn’t believe it anyway.
“I’m failing to see the humor here,” Klytos Blue said nervously. He was a coward in a dozen ways, but Ruthgar wasn’t going to give up Garriston easily, Gavin knew. “We’ve got a thousand soldiers and fifty drafters there. The drafters alone could hold off whatever army this ‘King’ Garadul could raise.”
“Knuckling under to a rebel, a man who declares himself a king—it’s unthinkable,” the Orange said. “He deserves death.”
Oh, father, it’s too bad you never come anymore. You would enjoy this. I can do one thing that you never could.
“First,” Gavin said, “us leaving is the right thing to do. We’re punishing people who have suffered too much already, and they hate us for it. We’ve been planting the seeds of another war for the last sixteen years. They started the war, yes. General Delmarta was born in Garriston, yes. But that doesn’t excuse us from what we’ve done, which is not just wrong, but also stupid.”
“Excuse me?” Delara Orange said. Her predecessor to the Orange—her mother—had been the architect of the rotating occupation scheme.
“You heard me,” Gavin said. “We get almost no Tyrean drafters. You think that’s because none are born there anymore? Ha! What if, instead of training here, where they are poor and reviled and suspected as traitors, what if someone decided to train them closer to home? A new school, a Chromeria dedicated to vengeance, started because of our pettiness and stupidity.”
“Nonsense,” Delara said. “We would have heard of such a thing.”
“But what if you hadn’t?” Gavin asked. “The quality of instruction might not be as good as ours. I hope it wouldn’t be. But even with a few rudimentary fire spells, how long could your fifty drafters stationed in Garriston hold out against several hundred? How long could your soldiers hold out against thousands of rebels who could hide in plain sight among the locals? The fact is, King Garadul will take Garriston. He will demand it, on terms that he knows are insufferable, and then he will seize it. The only question is, will we lose and lose face and make King Garadul seem like a winner, and finally get drawn into a war your satrapies don’t have the stomach for, or will we forgo a tribute which—after it’s divided six ways—is insignificant, and give away that which we can’t keep? If we give Garriston to King Garadul before he even asks, we look magnanimous. If we give him an apology, we look moral, and if we do both before he asks, we deprive him of a victory and a cause.”
“Do you have evidence of all this?” Delara asked. She was slippery, as oranges tended to be, but drafting red luxin made a drafter more aggressive and reckless over time, too. “Because it seems to me that you would like us to give away an entire city for little reason otherwise. We don’t know this new King Garadul. He has only recently taken power. He hasn’t sent us a single emissary, much less made demands.”
“You’re telling me none of you have spies at Garadul’s side?” Gavin shot back.
A few sardonic smiles and silence. No one was going to admit that, of course. They didn’t trust each other enough. There had been no wars in the last sixteen years, but that didn’t mean that everyone’s interests were aligned. The Chromeria and every capital was as full of spies as it had ever been.