The Blood Mirror

“I haven’t seen it since I jumped…” Gavin started laughing quietly. “You asshole.”

“Pardon?”

“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? This whole conversation. Give me so many things to think about that I’d slip up. Orholam’s balls, father. If you wanted to know where the knife was, why didn’t you just ask?”

Andross didn’t deny anything. “I have an island, off Melos. Small house there. Excellent though small library, including many forbidden books. Stocked with enough provisions for you to stay there for years. Impossible to approach if you don’t have the chart, though. Terrible reefs. You go into exile there. I’ll even let you take a couple of slaves. But you never leave, and you never try to send a letter out. You’re dead to the world, you understand?”

“And in return, I give you the Blinding Knife?”

“You really have no idea what it is, do you? We can’t make Prisms without it, son. The Seven Satrapies will dissolve. The False Prism’s War will look like a village fair compared to what comes next.”

“You can balance manually, by dictate. It’s been done before. The satrapies can stand.”

“We’re already doing that. It’s failing. We don’t have enough people obeying to make up for those who don’t. What happens when half the satrapies are pagan? When you’re a blue drafter and a firestorm lays low your village because the Chromeria’s suggestions are ignored, will you obey their call next year to stop drafting blue so that those sub-red bastards who killed your family will be safe?”

“Maybe the Chromeria deserves to fall,” Gavin said.

“Oh, most certainly. Our regime is the absolute worst way to rule, except for all the others that have been tried. The Chromeria is an idea, son, and if it’s exposed as a hollow one, civilization falls. Not only to magic, but to the cycle of retribution and the Nine Kings. Drafters reviled by their own families if they happen to be born to draft the wrong color, drafters moving to a satrapy where they can be strong. Kings trying to stop them or killing them to keep them from going. Tyrants. One king after another rising as his people’s magic waxes, rampaging across the kingdoms that have wronged them, massacring drafters of other colors. The terrible magic storms and plagues. The collapse of that king as his color’s magic fails, and then the rise of his neighbors, doing the same, and wreaking vengeance on his people in turn. That’s the alternative. For thousands of years that’s what was. That’s what we stand against.”

“He’s not going to let you out,” the dead man said. “Once you give him what he wants, he’ll kill you.”

It was probably true. Would Andross really let Gavin go? Would he trust that he could smuggle Gavin away from the Chromeria itself? What if the smuggling failed? Would he put himself at risk that way?

If he gave his word, he would. Andross Guile was scrupulous about keeping his promises.

“Then I’m not the one who’s insane,” Gavin said. “All this? You mean the entire fate of the Seven Satrapies rests on one stupid knife?”

“If the White King wins, it’ll be a moot point, but long term, if the satrapies are to survive, yes. We must find it.”

“There’s only one? Can’t you make another? I mean, who made it in the first place?”

“The luxiats have stood in the way of previous attempts to make another. It’s a holy relic. Maybe Lucidonius made it. Maybe Karris Atiriel. Maybe the one we know was a much later replica. But the luxiats’ grandstanding doesn’t matter. There’s a key ingredient in the Blinder’s Knife that is extinct.”

Of course.

“White luxin,” Gavin said. He cursed. The dead man was a liar—or at least wrong.

“Indeed. The stories say that before Vician’s Sin, things were different. Drafters of white luxin were born every generation. A piece like the Blinder’s Knife was a stunning achievement, but not unique. In the intervening centuries, all of the others have been lost.”

“So if you could find even one white drafter or find one piece of white luxin from an earlier era, you could make a new knife? So surely you have such a knife somewhere, just waiting for a bit of white luxin?”

“No,” Andross admitted. “It was tried. There’s a level of unity of will that couldn’t be achieved by any team, not even one trying to save the world. A blinding knife has to be created by one person. He or she has to be a full-spectrum polychrome and a superchromat to handle the intricacies of balancing that kind of magic.”

“You mean a person like me.”

“Now you understand,” Andross said.

“So that’s the real reason you didn’t expose me, didn’t kill me. You kept me alive just so I could make you a new knife!” Of course there had been another reason, and one tied to Andross Guile’s own well-being. “But you never so much as hinted about this.”

“I criticized your brute-force drafting,” Andross said. “I hoped it would inspire you to learn more delicate work.”

“You asshole!”

“I thought we had at least another five years to get things in place.”

“Why not just tell me?” Gavin asked, though he should have known better.

“If I told you we absolutely needed you to craft an instrument which would allow you to be replaced, you would know that until you crafted it, you could do anything you pleased, anything at all, and we would not only not be able to oppose you, we would have to help and protect you. Even Orea agreed we had to keep that knowledge from you. And of course, this was all speculative anyway, contingent on us rediscovering white luxin—and you being able to draft it if we did. But even the hope of such a thing would have put tremendous power in your hands, if you’d known about it.”

It was like being punched in the stomach after already having had the wind knocked out of you. Gavin had been so consumed with keeping his own secrets that he had never pried into theirs. He hadn’t noticed that they’d also avoided talking about the Prism ceremony, because he’d been so terrified of their discovering his ignorance.

He’d been like a wayward youth, sneaking out late and getting drunk, thinking his parents must never know, thinking them fools who had never been young themselves, while they watched it all and hoped he grew up sooner rather than later.