The black prism l-1 Read online

  The scull's luxin hull barely brushed the pole and slid past.

  Kip shot a glance at the crossbowman as the scull slipped through the teeth of the bandits' trap. The man was only a few years older than Kip. He was laughing, happy, hand extended to one of the other men, asking for a skin of wine.

  Then Kip was through. The crossbowman turned, shaking his head, then froze as he saw Kip. In the dark, the translucent luxin must have been well-nigh invisible to the sentry's fire-spoiled night vision. He was seeing a fat boy running past him-on the river's surface. Impossible.

  Kip smiled and waved.

  The sentry lifted a hand and waved back. Froze. Looked back at his comrades at the fire. His mouth opened to shout an alarum, but nothing came out. He turned back to the river and looked for Kip.

  Kip was still within easy crossbow shot. He knew that, but he didn't speed up, even though-at this moment-he had energy to spare. Anything he did might spook the sentry.

  The sentry stared hard into the darkness at the disappearing ghost-and said nothing. He rubbed his forehead in consternation, shook his head, and turned back to his friends. Then Kip ran, not for long, but after a minute of running the scull was hundreds of paces downriver. Kip returned to his walk. He smiled. Stupid as it had been, he'd made it through without even waking the Prism.

  He didn't know how long he walked. He tried to keep an eye on the shore, but weariness had sunk into his bones. He passed smaller camps-whether of bandits or just innocent travelers, he couldn't tell. But each time he saw them, he slowed to a crawl until he could see that all the men in the camp were asleep. He even did his trick again of unfocusing his eyes, and he could see the sleeping lumps of several more men than his focused eyes could, but never another sentry.

  The sky didn't lighten for what seemed a thousand years. Kip's legs were burning. His lungs ached. He could barely feel his arms, but he refused to stop. Even at his bare trudge, the scull still moved twice as fast as a punt.

  Finally, the sun touched the mountains. As always, daylight came long before the sun could climb the Karsos Mountains' backs to announce sunrise. And still the Prism didn't wake. Kip wouldn't stop walking. Not now. He'd gone all night. Surely the Prism would wake any moment and see what Kip had done. He would be impressed. He would look at Kip with new eyes. Kip would be more than a burden, a shame, a bastard to be quietly admitted and then avoided.

  The Prism stirred, and Kip's heart leapt. But then the man settled back in, his breathing steady once more. Kip despaired. He looked to the rising sun. Was he going to have to wait until the light shone directly on the Prism's face? That would be another hour at least. Kip swallowed. His tongue felt thick and dry, raspy as a file. How long had it been since he'd had a drink? A river beneath his feet, and he was parched.

  He needed a drink. He was past needing a drink. If he didn't drink, he was going to pass out. The Prism's wineskin wasn't even a full pace away. Kip stopped walking. His legs quivered. His feet were numb, and now they hurt as the blood leached back into them. He extricated himself from the oar mechanism and stepped over to grab the wineskin.

  Or tried to. His numb feet got tangled up and he pitched forward, barely able to twist one way so he didn't crush the Prism. His turned shoulder slammed onto the scull's gunwale, and suddenly everything that had been good about the scull turned bad. The shallow displacement that had allowed the boat to slip over the bandits' trap meant no stability. The bowl-like flare of the slick hull that had allowed them to slide over rocks meant that the sudden shift in weight was cataclysmic.

  One moment, Kip was staring at the river from thumbs away. The next, the entire scull flipped. Kip's head went in first. And yet despite the water closing over his ears and the thrashing of his own stupid clumsy limbs and the crashing of the rest of the scull hitting the water, somehow he was certain he heard a man's startled yell.

  The river was warm. Kip was so mortified, he decided to just die and get it over with. He'd just dunked the Prism into the river. Orholam!

  Oh, he'll be real impressed now, Kip.

  Then his lungs started burning, and the idea of quietly dying to remove one ignominious blot from creation lost all appeal. Kip thrashed, weakly. His legs decided now would be a good time to cramp, and both did. Then his left arm. He flapped in the water like a lame bird, got one gulp of air, and plunged back down. Part of him knew he could float. He'd floated leagues down the river just yesterday, but panic had him fully in its grip. He floundered, took a breath at the wrong time, and sucked in water.

  His head hurt. Orholam, it was like someone was ripping out all of his hair.

  He spit and spluttered. He was in air! Sweet, precious air! Someone had grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out of the water. He coughed twice more and finally opened his eyes.

  The Prism was winking at him-no, not winking. The Prism was blinking away the water that Kip had just spat up into his face.

  Let me die now.

  The man hauled Kip into the scull-now wider, with a keel, and much more stable than before. Kip hung his head and rubbed his arm and legs until they could move again. The Prism was standing over him, waiting. Kip swallowed, wincing, and braced himself to meet the great man's fury. He looked up sheepishly.

  "Love a morning swim," Gavin said. "Quite bracing." And he winked.

  Chapter 22

  Dazen Guile woke slowly, senses bombarded with the stultifying blue blandness of his dungeon. Three thunks, three hisses, and his breakfast fell onto the dungeon floor. Ignoring the cold in his limbs, ignoring the stiffness and pain in his body from sleeping on blue luxin with only a thin blanket, he sat and folded his arms.

  The dead man was whistling tunelessly, sitting against the opposite wall, bobbing his head to a nonexistent beat.

  The madness of blue was a madness of order. A giist would understand every nuance of Gavin's prison. But every time Dazen sank into the madness, he was frightened that he'd never come out of it. The last time he'd tried must have been years ago. He'd drafted a lot of blue since then. Choosing a descent into the blue again might well be choosing annihilation.

  "Dazen," the dead man said. "You are Dazen this morning, aren't you?" It was a favorite trick of the dead man's, pretending Dazen was the crazy one. "You aren't thinking of going giist, are you?"

  He hated his brother for doing this, for forcing this choice. But there was no passion to his hatred. It was a bare fact, as naked as his own limbs, stripped of mystery.

  Enough. Better oblivion chosen of his own will than torture forever according to his brother's.

  Dazen drafted blue like he was taking a deep breath. His fingernails turned that hateful blue, his hands, arms. It spread over his chest like an icy cancer, and it cooled him. His hatred itself became an oddity, a mystery, something so irrational and powerful it couldn't be quantified or understood, merely accounted for approximately. The blue suffused his entire body.

  "Bad idea," the dead man said. "I don't think you'll come out of it this time." He started juggling little blue luxin globes. He could handle five now. When Dazen had first met him, the dead man couldn't even juggle three.

  Without passion clouding his study, he could appreciate the cell. His brother was brilliant. What had he said after imprisoning him? "I made this dungeon in a month, you will have as long to break out as it takes. Consider it a test." Every time he had given up, he'd returned to that statement. It was an admission of imperfection. The cell could be broken. There was a weakness; he merely had to find it.

  "The hellstone isn't the weakness," the dead man said. "Didn't I tell you? He respects you too much. It won't go a few thumbs deep, it'll go two paces."

  He was aware, briefly, of a human emotion barely at the threshold of his perception. Loss-fury at how he'd scrubbed piss and oil for years, years of degradation, for nothing. His brother had no interest in degrading him. That wasn't his way. All that effort, for nothing. He turned those feelings over like an odd stone in his hands, then tossed them asid
e. They only clouded his vision.

  Something was sitting right in front of his face, and he wasn't seeing it. It had to be something obvious, something that simply required him to look at the problem from a new angle. His brother had been so good at that kind of thinking.

  "Maybe the only question is, are you going to do this Gavin's way, or Dazen's?" the dead man asked. He had that little superior, mocking smile. Dazen wanted to smash his face in when he grinned like that.

  But maybe he was right. That was the trap: trying to do this Gavin's way. If he did this his brother's way, it would only lead deeper.

  He put his luxin-filled hands to the ground, feeling the outline of the whole structure. The cell was sealed, of course, hardened and guarded against simple magical tampering, but as before, it felt different to the south. Not that he was sure it was the south side, he'd merely decided that the one area that felt different would be the south for him, his lodestone. That was where his brother stood when he came to see him. It hadn't happened in a long time, but there was a room beyond the blue luxin walls there, where Gavin could come when he wanted to check on his brother, to assure himself that he was still a prisoner, still safely kept from the world, still suffering as much as he hoped.

  That would be the weakness. The luxin there had to be thinner, simpler, so Gavin could manipulate it so that he could see through it. It would be warded, of course, but Gavin couldn't have thought of everything. He'd only had a month.

  But Dazen's every attempt with fire had been a failure. Red luxin was flammable, so he'd thought that if he cut himself, he could draft red luxin. He could, a little. But that was good for nothing unless he could make it burn. A fire would give him full-spectrum light to work with-and he would be able to get out. But he had nothing to make a spark. Trying to leach heat from his own body had nearly worked-or at least he'd thought he was close, and he'd nearly killed himself the last time by cooling his body too much.

  It just wasn't possible. He was going to die down here. There was nothing he could do.

  He drafted a sledgehammer and, screaming, smashed it against the wall. It shattered, of course. It didn't leave so much as a scratch.

  Dazen rubbed his face. No, the enemy was despair. He had to conserve his strength. Tomorrow he'd rub the bowl more. Maybe tomorrow would be the day.

  He knew it wouldn't, but he held on to the lie anyway.

  In the wall, the dead man was cackling.

  Chapter 23

  "We need to talk about your future," Gavin said. "You have some choices."

  Kip looked at the Prism across their fire. Night was coming on fast in their little island. Kip had slept for hours, apparently, completely missing Garriston and only waking as their boat lurched, hitting the sand as night fell.

  "How long will I live?" Kip asked. He was grumpy, hungry, and just starting to comprehend some of the implications of what had happened in the last two days.

  "A question for Orholam himself. I'm just his humble Prism," Gavin said, a wry smile twisting his lips. He was looking out into the darkness.

  "You know what I mean." It came out sharper than Kip meant. Everyone he knew was dead, and he was going to be a green drafter. He'd seen his future in the color wight: death or madness and then death.

  Gavin's eyes snapped back to Kip. He moved to speak, stopped, then said, "When you draft, it changes your body, and your body interprets that change as damage-it heals what it can, but it's always a losing battle, like aging. Most male drafters make it to forty. Women average fifty."

  "Then the Chromeria kills us or we go mad?"

  Gavin's face went hard. "You're getting emotional. I don't think you're ready for this."

  "Not ready?" Kip said. Gavin was right, Kip knew it. He was on edge. He should just shut up, but he couldn't help himself. "I wasn't ready for everyone I know to be murdered. I wasn't ready to impale some horsemen and jump over a waterfall. Words are nothing. What is it? Once we aren't useful anymore, we have to kill ourselves?" Why was he yelling? Why was he trembling? Orholam, he'd sworn on his soul to kill a king, was he mad already?

  "Something like that."

  "That or turn into a color wight?" Kip asked.

  "That's right."

  "Well, I guess we've talked about my future," Kip said bitterly. He knew he was being snotty, but he couldn't stop himself.

  "That wasn't what I meant, and you know it," Gavin said.

  "How would you know what I know, father?"

  It was like watching a spring release. One second, the Prism was sitting across the fire from Kip. The next, he stood right in front of Kip, his arm drawn back. The next, Kip was hitting the sand, head ringing from Gavin's openhanded blow, ass scraped from sliding off his log, his wind taken by the fall.

  "You've been through hell, so I've given you more slack than I give any man. You wanted to find the line? You've found it."

  Kip rolled face up as he caught his breath. He had sand sticking to the wetness at the corner of his mouth. He rubbed it. Just slobber, not blood. "Orholam's balls!" he said. "Guess what I've found? A line! I'm the greatest discoverer since Ariss the Navigator!"

  Gavin trembled, his face a mask. He rolled his shoulders, popped his neck right and left. Though his back was to their fire, Kip could see red luxin smoke-swirls curling into his eyes.

  "What are you going to do? Beat me?" Kip demanded. It's just pain.

  Sometimes Kip hated himself for how he saw weakness. The Prism threatened him and the first thing Kip saw was the threat's emptiness. Gavin couldn't beat him precisely because Gavin was a good man and Kip was defenseless.

  Gavin's look darkened to murder for one moment, then cleared to simple intensity. The briefest flicker of amusement. "Take a deep breath," he said quietly.

  "What?"

  The Prism made a little backhanded gesture, as if whisking away a fly. A gob of red luxin flicked out of his hand and splattered over Kip's mouth. Kip took a deep breath through his nose before the luxin spread and covered that, too. Then it wrapped around the back of his head, spread over the top of his head, and solidified. Only Kip's eyes were uncovered, mouth and nose were covered, utterly blocked. He couldn't breathe.

  Gavin said, "You remind me of my brother. I could never win against him growing up. And when I did, he'd give me some patronizing praise that made me wonder if he'd let me win. You see the cracks in things? Fine. It's proof enough that you're a Guile. Our whole family has it. Including me. Think about this, Kip: there are a lot of problems that would go away for me if I leave that mask on your face until you're dead. You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one."

  Kip listened, conserving his strength against his rising panic, certain that after Gavin was done talking, he would take the luxin off his face. But Gavin stopped talking, and he didn't remove the mask. Kip's stomach churned as his diaphragm worked to suck in more air, pumped down to expel the dead air he held in. Nothing.

  He reached up to his neck, trying to find the seam where luxin abutted skin. But the line was smooth, the luxin sticking close to the skin. He couldn't get his fingernails under it. He reached up around his head, his eyes. If he stabbed his fingernails into the soft skin next to his eyes, he could lift the edge of the mask and get one finger underneath it. His vision was darkening. He looked at Gavin, pleading, sure that the man would step in now.

  Gavin watched him, pitiless. "If the only thing you're going to respect is strength, Kip, first, you're a fool, and second, you've come to the right man."

  The panic came. He should have known better. Kip thrashed, tried to scream, reached up to that thin ridge of luxin by his eyes-but he barely touched it before his hands drooped. He should have known he couldn't trust…

  Chapter 24

  After traveling all day and into the night, Karris first became aware of Rekton in the distance as a great, unvariegated glow as she stalked through the forest. It was long after nightfall now, the air coo
l in the undergrowth. She was enough of a sub-red to use dark vision, but it wasn't perfect, and on a moonlit night like tonight she kept switching back and forth from normal to dark vision. Light below the visible spectrum was rougher; it didn't lend itself to fine differentiation of features. Even faces simply looked like warm blobs, brighter here and there, but it was much more difficult to make out expressions or fine movements-or even to identify a face from much of a distance.

  The glow meant Rekton was still burning. Karris circled it slowly, climbing the last hill. She stayed off the road, admiring the waterfall just below the town in the silver moonlight. She hadn't seen anyone on the road all day, which she found odd. If no one was fleeing downriver from Rekton, it probably meant no one had made it out. But it was also strange to follow the river through arable land and not come across any other settlements. She'd seen orange orchards that clearly hadn't been tended since the war, but they were still growing fruit. The fruit was sparse and the trees leafy and chaotic and growing haphazardly in comparison to the paintings Karris had seen of orange harvests, but they were still here. With the price Tyrean oranges fetched, she found that hard to believe. Tyrean oranges were smaller but sweeter and juicier than Atashian oranges, and the Parian oranges didn't even compare. No one had moved back after the war?

  Had the Battle of Sundered Rock really killed so many that even now, sixteen years later, the land lay fallow, bearing fruit for deer and bears alone?

  Karris didn't see any bodies until she crept into the still-burning town, wrapped in her hooded black cloak. She was following the main road, its cobbles even and well maintained: a symbol in Karris's mind of a place well governed. A burned body lay in the middle of the street, facedown, one arm extended, a finger pointing deeper into the town. Only the hand and pointing finger were unburned. The head was missing.