His father had pulled the rug out from under him. Very well, point to Andross Guile. His father had humiliated him by pummeling him with his fists. Fine.
Gavin was more than a match for the old spider. He would escape, and he would rise. He was unstoppable, unmatchable, superlative.
“Ah, Gavin Guile, surrounded with mirrors, and yet you refuse to see the simplest truths,” the dead man said.
“Dazen,” Gavin said. “I’m Dazen Guile.”
“Indeed. And what happened to Gavin?”
“Go to hell.”
“You seem not to have noticed,” the dead man said. He gestured to the cell. “Here am I.”
Orholam, I sure was a dick when I will-cast these walls with dead men.
I guess that was the point.
It wasn’t until Gavin moved to lap up some water that he saw the other wall of the cell. His blinded left side had faced toward that wall, and he’d been too addled from the fall and his hunger to fully examine this new hell.
He saw the bullet holes scarring the wall from when he’d blown off his brother’s head.
His breath caught as the memory filled his mind’s eye, as he lifted both Ilytian flintlock pistols and shot Gavin dead. One bullet through the center of his chest, the other right through the chin. If either pistol had misfired, he’d still have had a quick death.
“He was insane,” Gavin said aloud. “Maybe he was already insane before he came down here, but in my worship of him, I never saw it. Or maybe his madness was my fault. I know I’d not last sixteen years down here alone. Regardless, he was too far gone to be saved. It had to be done.”
“It was a mercy killing?” the dead man asked.
“Mercy too long delayed,” Gavin said. “And that is my fault indeed.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?”
“Do you have a point?” Gavin asked.
“Two.” The dead man pointed across the cell toward those impact holes.
Gavin stood with difficulty. He’d expected there to be blood spatter or brain matter or something similar for the dead man to torture him with.
There was no gore. Apparently the water wash had worked well.
Instead there were two simple holes, the squashed lead musket balls visible less than a thumb’s thickness inside each, the outside of each hole in the splintered yellow luxin forming short cracks in the top layer of the cell wall. He’d made the yellow luxin wall of this cell thicker than his hand; the bullets hadn’t even come close to fully piercing the wall.
“First thing that might catch your attention,” the dead man said, “is that there wasn’t any ricochet. Solid yellow luxin, and no ricochet? But then, with the positions of your hands when you fired, each shot was perfectly perpendicular to the angle of the wall. So it is odd, but not impossible.”
At first Gavin didn’t understand. And then he did.
“No,” he breathed. “This is a trick. No.”
“Oh, so you’ve spotted the impossibility, have you?”
Gavin shuffled over to the wall. He stuck his pinky finger into one of the bullet holes and scratched, trying to dislodge the lead.
“What is that going to prove?” the dead man asked.
“This is not my bullet. It’s impossible. He did this. My father. It’s a trick.”
“What are you doing? Picking it out of the wall won’t prove anything.”
“I can see if it’s one of my bullets,” Gavin said. Like many veterans, Gavin had cast his own bullets. One of the tricks he’d picked up in his many years of fighting wights had been to pour the lead around a core of hellstone. It penetrated luxin like nothing else. Lead tore flesh catastrophically, but some wights layered themselves thickly enough with luxin armor to stop lead.
In Dazen’s musket balls, the lead would tear away quickly, leaving a hellstone core that could pierce anything but thick solid yellow luxin. Few knew his trick, and of those who knew, fewer still could afford the hellstone necessary. In monetary terms, it was like shooting solid gold musket balls.
“Ah,” the dead man said. “Look at it at an angle. You used to draft brightwater so pure a man could see through it.”
It was a good idea. He put his face against the wall. There! A nugget of hellstone, a hand’s thickness deep in the wall.
Desperate, he went to the other bullet hole, and saw the same.
“Father could have shot balls from my own gun. He would have access to my ammo pouch, too.”
“I told you it wouldn’t solve anything,” the dead man said. “But think. Where the black luxin hasn’t corrupted you, your memory was once so, so perfect for a mortal. Can you remember which bullets you fired that night? Can the Gavin Guile of legend remember that?”
The problem with hellstone was how brittle it was. Sharper than any steel, but you couldn’t carve it. It fractured into bitter planes and hard curves and angles. It meant that when he was casting bullets, Gavin always had to make odd compromises. A star-shaped chunk of hellstone was what he always looked for—its weight balanced so it wouldn’t put an odd spin on the musket ball, and small enough to fit within the lead, but large enough to retain momentum if it struck luxin and lost its lead jacket. Most times he made do with rough squares, triangles, or diamonds. Every bullet was different because the hellstone crystals were always different. He’d always arranged them by reliability.
Only the two bullets in his fine Ilytian pistols’ chambers had had the star-shaped hellstone cores. Even he wasn’t so wealthy that he could demand perfection in every bullet. His ammo bag was always full of second-best musket balls.
His father couldn’t have known that.
The first bit of hellstone, deep in the wall, was star-shaped…
He checked. So was the second.
Gavin sat back, baffled. His father wasn’t this good, was he?
Gavin had killed too many men to believe how his eyes and his memory were contradicting each other. He’d shot Gavin through the chest, a straight hole through his bony sternum. The other bullet had gone smashed through his chin and blew out the back of his head.
Lead squished on impact. It mushroomed, spun, tore gashes through flesh and bone. It was possible for the hellstone cores of his bullets to have pierced his brother and still hit the wall, but unlikely. There wasn’t enough velocity left in the hellstone for this depth of impact, not usually, not through two layers of bone.