The Blood Mirror

“She doesn’t know I’m alive, so it doesn’t matter,” Gavin croaked. This will-casting was better than some of the others at getting him to talk. Or maybe Gavin was just that much weaker now.

“No, I meant when they find your body. If she finds out you lived past when she remarried, she’ll be devastated. Of course I wasn’t implying you’d actually get out and be reunited with her. I think we’ve all given up on that by now, haven’t we?”

Gavin cursed him, but without passion.

“Do you think your suffering is ennobling?” the dead man asked.

Gavin didn’t answer.

“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!” the dead man said.

It wasn’t, of course.

When Gavin woke the next morning, the dead man greeted him with the same gleeful words. “Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”

And then the next.

“Perhaps today is the day your father will relent!”

…

“Surely today is the day your father will relent.”

…

“Do you think today is the day your father will relent?”

…

“Perhaps Andross will show his merciful side today,” the dead man said, as if hopeful.

…

Sometimes he wouldn’t say it first thing, and Gavin would hope that perhaps he’d forgotten, or thought it wasn’t having an effect. But he always said it. “Dazen… psst, Dazen… do you think today might be the day?”

Other times he would ask twice or three times, making Gavin wonder if a day had passed without his noticing, increasing his disorientation.

He laughed through Gavin’s panics, the times he lay gasping, chest convulsing, certain he would die.

But death would be a relief, wouldn’t it?

And there was no mercy in Andross Guile. One can’t appeal to a side a man doesn’t have.

Gavin had a pleasant hallucination once. One, out of all the nightmares and disquieting dreams and constant anxiety. Be strong and of good courage. You are not alone.

It wasn’t a voice, it was a memory, and an unhelpful one at that. It had encouraged him for three days… what, sixty days ago now?

Gavin didn’t want encouragement. He wanted a side of beef and rivers of wine and his wife’s breath mingling with his and a bath and a bed and sun upon his face and his father dead at his feet and friends who weren’t figments of his imagination and the susurrus of the sea beneath the skimmer’s deck and the flexing of his arms and shoulders as he sailed. He wanted his powers back and the adoration of the crowd. And he wanted to have no secrets, to never feel a fraud again. He wanted to save everyone and be seen doing it. He wanted to be proud and beautiful again. He wanted all he’d had before and more.

He wanted that seventh goal he’d never told anyone.

But it was all gone.

But it was all folly. He would never have more than he’d had. He would never have as much as he’d had. He would never be as much as he’d been. He could only ever be less.

He couldn’t even be Prism without his powers.

The best he could hope for was to live broken and powerless and ugly. What had he said when they’d saved him from the hippodrome and he’d shot that man? ‘I’m not quite useless. Not yet’?

But now he was.

“Maybe today will be the day your father relents!” the dead man said as the bread came down the next morning.

But Gavin didn’t even care.

He ate the bread. All of it. Both loaves. They tasted wonderful.

He could hardly hear the dead man laughing, and not for long.

Chapter 54

The skimmer ride from Big Jasper to Azûlay showed Teia how fast this war was changing the world.

Like many great discoveries, Gavin Guile’s insight was simple in retrospect: instead of taking the oar as his paradigm, or the sail, he took the wind itself. The skimmers were powered by drafters who shot unfocused luxin to propel them.

But Andross Guile had seized on his son’s original insight and innovated upon it, realizing that the new technology had a cultural implication: the typical threshold by which a satrapy justified the cost of educating a drafter at the Chromeria was her ability to make a solid, stable luxin in one or more colors.

What Andross was the first to realize was that the reedsmen didn’t need to draft stable luxin. So he had called up all the discipulae who’d failed out of the Chromeria in the last four decades. Hundreds of suitable candidates had been found already. Thus, he gained an entire corps for transportation and saved the halos (and lives) of his trained drafters for war. Four of those now powered the ultralight skimmer that propelled Teia, the messenger, and barely more than the clothes on their backs across the sea to Paria.

But they made it in a day and a half. Gavin Guile was rumored to have been able to go twice as far in a single morning, but Gavin was also rumored now to have been ten feet tall, to have ended wars with a word, and to have been able to draft black and white luxin both. Gavin was said to have had a shining mien that made men gape and maidens swoon.

The mien part was basically true, but still. Though Teia would admit he was a man the likes of which the world would never see again, he wasn’t a god.

They also said now that he was going to come back to the Seven Satrapies in their hour of greatest need to save them all.

Would have been better if he hadn’t left us in our hour of greatest need, Teia thought. He was dead now. As like as not, the Order itself had killed him. He was simply too powerful and unpredictable for them to tolerate.

All too soon Teia and the messenger, a senior diplomat named Anjali Gates, were in sight of Azûlay. Teia tried to get all her gawking out of the way before they docked, but the grandeur of the city defied dismissal.

Their first glimpse was of the lighthouse called the Sword of Heaven. Its red glass dome gleamed in the sun like a ruby set in its pommel, walkways made the hilt, and the body of the lighthouse made a blade, its point buried in the earth. From the ground up, the first ten paces were blank gray stone like steel, above that the stone was whitewashed, and above that beaten gold had been laid over the stone into flames, as if fire were emanating from the hilt down the blade.

“You should see it on Sun Day,” Anjali Gates said, coming to stand next to Teia. “The pyroturges here make wonders to rival the Jaspers’. It’s why I joined the diplomatic corps. I wanted to see all the wonders of this world.”