The Blood Mirror

It was open. Thank you, Orholam, for people who aren’t paranoid enough.

The wide hallway was enclosed with a glass dome from the interior wall down one side and down to the ground on the garden side. Profusions of immaculately trimmed flowers yielded one to another in a pleasing sequence of colors and textures. In between large private rooms for the Nuqaba, there were little garrets for slaves everywhere. Private chapel, slaves’ closet, private library, slaves’ closet, drawing room, slaves’ closet, music and art parlor, more slaves, rock-and-water garden, still more.

Most of the slaves’ rooms didn’t even have doors, merely a sharp bend upon entry so the slaves themselves wouldn’t be visible. Teia peeked in one. She couldn’t help herself. Four men slept on a single narrow bunk bed in a room not even as wide as Teia’s stretched arms. A small washbasin sat against the far wall, and they’d hung their clothes flat against the wall. A few personal effects were stuffed under the bunk, with room to spare. They didn’t even have shoes.

One of the men had his legs uncovered with his bedmate taking their too-small blanket, and Teia saw whip scars down his very calves. She was glad she couldn’t see his back. Above their door was a small bell attached to a string, and a bundle of other strings passing through their wall to and from the rooms on either side. Teia moved in the direction their bell’s string came from.

After passing a few more rooms—a swimming area and a hot room?—Teia found the chief eunuch’s room. It was the center where all the bell strings led. Doubtless on being summoned he would then summon the appropriate slaves—because it’s just too hard for a slave owner to figure out for herself which slaves she should call to address her doubtless urgent needs. Probably the bells were only for nighttime. The Nuqaba would be attended at all times when awake.

The next room was the Nuqaba’s own, and Teia heard the woman’s voice before she got there.

“Too hot, you idiot! Get out! No, stop, hold still.”

The crack of a heavy slap connecting with bare skin, and then a slave girl not twelve years old burst through the door, bucket in hand, sobbing. She tried to sob quietly.

Teia remembered that shit: Stop crying! Slap. Stop crying! Slap. You dare defy me? Report for whipping, you stupid bitch!

One learned to cry quietly. To save tears up for later.

Teia slipped in before the slave standing outside the door could close it. This was the Nuqaba’s bed chamber, but though she had entire rooms devoted to baths just steps down the hall, they’d brought in a copper tub full of steaming water.

The Nuqaba herself was pacing the room in a bathing robe—Teia had forgotten that Parian women rarely bathed nude, which had always struck her as a weirdly backward custom for an otherwise reasonable people. How do you get really clean when you wear clothing into the bath? The noblewoman’s hair was bound up on top of her head with aromatic oils to moisturize it through the night, her skin scrubbed of all cosmetics. But her eyes were puffy from tears and bloodshot from either whatever was burning in the hookah on the table, or the bundle of haze beside it, or the mushrooms she had diced very finely in a dish.

If only Teia hadn’t been such a straight arrow growing up, she might know how much of which intoxicant would kill you. It would have been a nicely believable accidental suicide.

I’m a soldier, not an assassin.

But as the door closed quietly behind her, Teia was arrested by something else, and she instantly forgot all about the Nuqaba and assassinations and stealth and consequences.

Chained against the Nuqaba’s wall, head imprisoned within a helm with blackened glass over the eye slits to keep him from drafting, but unmistakable from his towering form and chiseled body, was Commander Ironfist.

Chapter 61

He woke in the deepest darkness he had ever known. When his panic subsided, he examined his surroundings. He’d been moved while he was unconscious.

It was a black cell, but otherwise identical to the ones Gavin had made. Just more cruel.

More secure, too, naturally. It was very Andross Guile. This cell didn’t even have to be made of luxin. Dark stone of any kind, plus no light, and there could be no escape.

“Feel it,” a voice said.

Oh no. “Who are you?” Gavin asked. That wasn’t his father’s voice.

“Feel the stone,” the dead man said.

“You can’t be here. You…”

“Feel the stone!”

Gavin felt it. Not granite, smoother. Marble? But without the slick coolness of marble. This was more metallic, as if rather than simply being cold, it was sucking the warmth right out of his skin.

“No,” he said.

“No one has drafted so much black luxin since Lucidonius,” the voice said. “Here lies your masterpiece, and no one but your father will ever know.”

I made this? An entire cell of black luxin, a dark mirror of the others. Why?

I should feel distrust. I should have my guard up here, against this dead man, surely the worst part of me. Instead I feel only a cavernous desolation that sits below my rib cage, burrowing at my heart.

I am a skin suit. A hollow man. I am a disguise buttoned up over nothing.

I am as empty as the eye they burnt out. Lensless, I gawp and stare. Bathed in light, I remain a black Prism, reflecting nothing, spitting only facets of myself into these cells. I am the unseeing I.

“Of all the dead men, surely you would be the greatest liar. Why should I believe anything you say?” Gavin asked. But he believed.

“Because you know what makes the best lies, and you think you’re smart enough to winnow out the facts even if I did lie to you.”

“That does sound like me,” Gavin admitted to the voice of the darkness. The younger me. Am I really talking to a part of myself in each of these cells? Shouldn’t I be a good man, then, if I drained so much bile into these abominations?

“I created us one at a time,” the voice said. “Blue first, then green sometime later, yellow, orange quite a while later—the technical problems made it difficult to craft a chamber entirely of orange. It was important to me, to you, not to cheat and use multiple colors. We fixated on that. Red we did with many layers of seared red luxin and liquid red. Anyone else would have worried about placing what amounts to a bomb in the Chromeria’s heart. Superviolet and sub-red not even I could figure out.”

“But I did,” Gavin said, thinking he’d caught his dark mirror in a lie. He had some inkling of this, scratching around the back of his skull.