The Blinding Knife
Page 93

The green luxin wall opposite him was pitted and chipped to a depth of a hand. It had infuriated him at first. His brother had made the blue chamber thinner, and the blue drafter in Dazen had expected every chamber to have exactly the same dimensions. But his brother knew that green was weaker than blue, so of course he’d made the green walls thicker. It was logical. The blue in him had calmed.
He picked his targets with arithmetic precision to exploit the structural properties of green luxin. He didn’t know, of course, if he’d picked the correct wall. The ball shape of his chamber prohibited that. If his brother had irrationally made one wall thicker than the others, Dazen might simply get unlucky and pick the thickest wall.
That infuriated him. The uncertainty of it. The imprecision. It was wrong. He’d wasted at least a day in a weak stupor trying to figure out if there was some way to tell which wall was the right one. Hours wasted in calculation when action was required.
It was a warning sign of how deep the blue had sunk into him.
But he’d overcome that, as he’d overcome every struggle. As he would overcome even his brother.
He breathed deeply, ten breaths, gathering his will. Every projectile he fired hurt him, crushed his weakened body against the wall. But Dazen couldn’t yield, couldn’t shoot weakly. Shooting weakly meant that he’d wasted the days it took to draft the blue he needed. The wall could give anytime. It could give to this very shot.
Or, of course, it could take another twenty, and at any time, Gavin could come back and—
No! Don’t think it. Do this. Pain is nothing. Pain is an obstacle on the road to freedom. I cannot be stopped. I will not be stopped. I will have my vengeance and my freedom, and those who have done this will tremble.
He took the tenth breath, braced his right arm with his left, and gathered his power. Old scars ripped open on his palm as the blue luxin tore through his skin.
Dazen screamed rage and despair and hatred and pure, glorious will. A missile burst from him with incredible power.
During the False Prism’s War, he’d been hit in the chest with a war hammer once. It had cracked his shield and a rib. With his weakened body, this was worse. He passed out.
But when he opened his eyes, he saw his victory. The green luxin was broken. A few fibrous tendrils held on, but it was broken. He could see darkness beyond. His prison was broken.
With a calm willpower that would have stunned a younger version of himself, he drank some water, ate a little of the bread. Not so much that his long-empty stomach would revolt.
Then, only then, did he draft a tiny thread of green. It was light, it was life, it was power and connectedness and well-being and strength.
Only then did he allow himself a moment of triumph. He had done it. He had done it. He really was unstoppable. He was a god.
He stood, grinning, legs trembling, but strong enough to allow him to stand, and tottered over to the hole. He tore away the green luxin with his bare hands, opened the hole enough to peer through. To crawl through, once he gained a little more strength.
Poking his head through the hole, he drafted some green imperfectly into his hand, bathing the darkness in weak green light. The green egg in which he’d been imprisoned was, it appeared, contained within a greater chamber, only a little larger than the egg itself. It wouldn’t have mattered which wall Dazen broke through. All of them were equal.
For one stupid moment, he was furious at the time he’d wasted, wondering which side to attack. But then that passed. That day of vacillation was gone, it couldn’t be called back, and it was illogical to fret over it, to waste more of the present on the past. He pushed it away, and his smile came back.
To one side of the chamber, he saw a tunnel, floor glittering with sharp shards of hellstone.
Dazen laughed, low, quiet. It was a laugh at finally, finally being underestimated.
No, brother, that won’t work. Not this time.
Chapter 68
“Corvan, am I a good man?” Gavin asked.
“You’re a great man, my friend.”
“Not the same, are they?” Gavin asked. There had been blood in his dreams, blood staining the water from the blue he couldn’t see to the red he most certainly could. Red on gray. In his incipient blindness, he’d traded blue beauty for blood, all unwillingly.
Corvan said, “When you move the world, some will be crushed. How could it be else? When you sank the pirates at Tranquil Point, the slaves chained to the oars died first. What else were you to do? Leave the pirates to capture and make slaves of thousands more? But that’s not what I meant, my lord. You are a great man.”
Gavin chewed on that, put it in the hold of his memory. “And you, Corvan? What kind of man are you?”
“I am simply competent. A red by training but not by nature. Not a leader except when leadership is lacking. But you know these things better than anyone.” A quizzical, amused expression.
Not a leader except when leadership is lacking? It was true: Corvan had proven himself to be perfectly content to take orders—even orders he didn’t understand—from those who had won his trust. Then, without changing his nature, he’d assumed command of entire armies. He knew what needed to be done, and did it, somehow without it changing his appraisal of himself. He probably really had been content as a small-town dyer.
Gavin wondered how Corvan did it. He himself had never been content in any place but the first. Even under those wilier than he, like his father, or those wiser than he, like the White, he’d chafed. Burned.
It was, no doubt, a flaw in his character.
“I’m making you a satrap,” Gavin said. And let be crushed by that whoever may be.
Corvan coughed up tea. Most satisfying.
“Are you insane?” Corvan asked. “My lord.”
“It’s pretty much what you already are, and I am still the Prism. It is my prerogative. They’ll try to stop me, but so long as you don’t massacre the Seers, no one of the other satraps or members of the Spectrum are losing anything. I will propose that you get to name a Color on the Spectrum, but allow myself to lose on that point so they have some victory for their egos. Your new satrapy will be a second-rate satrapy for a few generations. Those will be political battles those who follow us will have to fight. Survival first.”
“But why?” Corvan asked. “What do you get?”
“We’ve already discussed this. Food. Seeds. We already know things are going to be tight, but the island is big enough to keep us from starvation until spring. But if we don’t get seeds for next year—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I give our people a sense of purpose, and I give them another reason to obey you, to make a new life here and stay, even once things start to go well enough that they could leave.”
Corvan set his teacup down. “Your pardon, Gavin, but you forget how well I know you. There’s more to it than that.”
Gavin smirked. “I need you to believe in me, Corvan. When the time comes. There are crises coming, and I will need to move quickly. I need to know you have my back, instantly.”
Corvan’s back stiffened, brow darkened. Gavin hadn’t seen the man angry in many years. “My lord, some men believe in Orholam, some believe in gold, but I believe in you, and to this I will hold. Fealty to One, as you should know.”