As if a Guile knew anything of love.
He knew what love was, surely. He knew what it would look like, smell like, act like. Though never wise, he was smart enough to know the real thing. He just could never feel it. He was Guile, and that meant corruption.
Orholam forgive him. Every small thing he’d done right had been feeble atonement for the murder of thousands. He could barely remember his knife strokes on all those Sun Days now, the insincere words offered to comfort those condemned to die. He’d corrupted the holiest day of the year into just another long day of labor.
I have to work so hard, he’d thought, as he slew the best and brightest and most dedicated men and women of the satrapies.
And added to his power with every death.
He had convinced himself, recently, for a time, perhaps… that his brother had been the villain after all. His brother must have been a murderer, a cheat, a rapist, a monster. And his father! Worse, worse still.
But Gavin—nay, Dazen. Dazen False-Face. Dazen the Impostor—Dazen himself was the monster here.
He himself had been the tyrant, the lone beast who would be a god. He just hadn’t been very successful. He had let his father remain in power. He had let the White oppose him. He had been less competent than he could believe.
And that stung worse than the idea that he was evil.
He was evil and he wasn’t even good at it.
But.
But. He survived. He was here. Maimed and bent. Eye burnt out. Fingers cut off. They’d broken everything but his will.
As long as he had that, he could overcome. And he would.
He was the bad guy? So be it.
He was a monster? He would be the best. He would emerge. He would comfort Karris, and he would avenge himself on his enemies.
She would be better off without him. He saw that now. But she didn’t see it. And she had how many years left, anyway? Five, maybe? He’d kept up a pretense of goodness for seventeen years. He could do five more for her sake.
I will be sweetness and light to her eyes, and bitter gall and hellfire to my enemies.
Goddammit, father! Come down here already!
“Want to talk?” the dead man asked.
Gavin said nothing. You don’t respond to a torturer who has only words as his rack.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, his father came.
Gavin was awakened by the slight tremor that he knew signaled the cell’s being lifted. He’d thought when he built the cell that it would be imperceptible. After his time here, though, the small change felt like an earthquake. He woke instantly and sat over his hole, placid, meditative.
When the slot in the wall opened from the apparently seamless blue, it wasn’t where Gavin had guessed it would be. Top-quality workmanship there, hiding its location. His own workmanship.
But almost as soon as the slot opened, something slid into the gap. When Dazen had come to visit the real Gavin down here, he’d left only open air between them. Andross Guile was not so confident, or so cocky, perhaps.
Andross Guile set a window between them, sparkling, crystalline, translucent but not fully transparent—thus, likely blue luxin. He was illuminated with an icy light.
Gavin stood on wobbly legs and faced his father. The elder Guile was visible only through Gavin’s own reflection. And Andross was a perverse mirror of him. He looked hale. He looked better than he had in twenty years.
In contrast, Gavin himself looked like hell. It was as if his father had stolen away all his youth. His skin was bronzed where Gavin’s was pallid. The fat of all his sedentary years had now melted into his sharp Guile jaw and broad Guile shoulders. Gloves gone, spectacles gone, he didn’t look anything like the invalid he had so recently been—or perhaps had merely pretended to be.
A dozen quiet expressions ran over Andross Guile’s face at the speed of his thoughts. Finally, all he said was, “Son.”
It was a kidney punch.
It shouldn’t have done any such thing, but it sent Gavin spinning. For no reason at all, he thought of his own son. Though not by birth, by adoption Kip was his, and Gavin loved him fiercely. He’d warmed to the boy only slowly, true. Only seen and loved the Guile in him by degrees. Gavin hadn’t been much of a father to him, but he’d done some things right. He’d gotten him into the Blackguard. He’d given Kip time amid those good people to help him grow straight and tall rather than crooked, as the other nobles’ pampered sons and daughters would have turned him.
And he’d saved Kip’s life, the once.
It wasn’t much, but it had been solely for Kip’s benefit, not his own. He had tried. In what little time he’d had with the boy, before this war had torn him away, he had tried. Once.
What had Andross Guile done for his sons, with all the time in the world? With all the wealth he’d accrued, and all the power he’d accumulated, with all the leisure he could want and limitless years, when had Andross Guile ever taken his eyes off himself and simply been a father?
“When I was a boy, why did I never go to you when I needed a father so desperately?” Gavin asked. “You were there. But where were you? What kind of man abandons his son to this? Never mind. Putting your kin in this hell is the least of your sins.” He waved at his father-reflection dismissively. “You call me son? No. This man-shaped grotesque is nothing to me. You are no father of mine.”
Gavin started crying, and he couldn’t help but shut his eyes. Tears getting into his eye hurt so much it blinded him. He saw only a single expression on his father’s face before he heard the scrape and snap of the slot’s slamming shut.
He staggered over to the wall, and leaned against it, whispering, “Damn you. Damn you for all you were and all you could have been. Damn you for all you should have been and were born to be, but never were.” And because the wall was fully reflective now, he whispered to that blue mirror where his sire might not be, and where his own reflection was, “Damn you to the hell you’ve built for yourself, Guile.”
Chapter 23
“Something ain’t right,” Big Leo said. “What is it that isn’t right about this? Anyone?”
“No oars,” Cruxer said. “How the hell did all of us forget oars?”
The Blue Falcon II had no oars; it was almost dark, and this was a problem for a luxin-propelled ship in a river with a current pulling them toward what might be enemies.
Standing at the prow of the skimmer, Big Leo said, “Not that this. That this. That. Something ain’t right about that.” He pointed toward the strangers waiting for them with his chin.