The Blinding Knife
Page 48
The Third Eye stared up at the sky and scowled. “I really thought it would start by now, hmm. What do you think is the worst decision you ever made in your life, Lord Prism?”
That was easy. Not killing his brother. “I had pity once.”
“You’re wrong. You didn’t spare Gavin out of pity. And you wouldn’t do any differently than you did if you could do it again.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that he almost missed it. And then it yanked him up short, like a dog catching scent of a rabbit and charging heedless—right until he got to the end of his chain. She’d said sparing Gavin. She knew both that he wasn’t that Gavin and that he had spared his brother. The air got dense, hard to breathe. Gavin’s chest tightened.
“What, did you think I was a charlatan? Adjust to the new reality, Dazen, and move on to the real point.”
There was no denial. No point. She hadn’t ventured it as a guess, or a trap, and if he made her repeat it, Karris might hear. Gavin’s heart was thundering. He swallowed, took some wine, swallowed again.
“My worst choice was not telling her.” Gavin was in a fog, a fugue. He didn’t want to say Karris’s name. They were far enough away that their voices should be a murmur to her, but hearing one’s own name tended to pique the ears.
“No, not that either. If you’d told her the truth when she was younger, she’d have exposed you. What you did wasn’t kind, or perhaps fair, but it was wise, and I’d advise you not to apologize for what you did when the time comes. Karris is better at adjusting to hard realities than she is at forgiving. It’s a character flaw.”
It was true. Deeply true. Telling Karris, “I was doing my duty” would probably work better than, “I’m so sorry.” She understood duty, cared about it. And yet something in Gavin bristled, wanted to defend Karris.
“So, what was it then?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t see everything. I just know what it wasn’t. I know that you’ve been asking the wrong questions, so you’ve had no hope of getting the right answers. So my part is done, sadly with no cries of passion or clawing of your back. Aside from two things. First, your people may stay. They will, I’m fairly certain, destroy our way of life. But perhaps it will one day turn into something better. I have little hope of that, but I’m too close to see this clearly, and I know that pushing fifty thousand starving people into the sea is not what Orholam would ask of me, regardless of what they will do to us once they are no longer starving.”
“And second?” Gavin asked. It was a huge victory. She was giving him everything he wanted, but you don’t laud victories, you consolidate them and press forward.
“And second, you’ve lost control of blue, and your… counterpart has broken out of his blue prison. I’d advise you to do something about it, because without a Prism, strange things start happening. First, they’re innocuous, weird little things. But they get worse.” She seemed to retreat into herself.
Gavin felt naked. Not in a good way. The news about his brother—if it was true—was cataclysmic. Not just a terrible shock, and not just terrible news, but too coincidental. Gavin had woven alarums into the drafting, of course, but they were alarums to notify someone in his own room in the tower: Marissia when he was gone. There was no way he should have been aware, no matter how dimly or on how visceral a level, that Dazen had broken out.
He had sunk a huge amount of his will into that prison, in ways long forbidden, so maybe he’d felt that breaking of his will dimly over the leagues. But huge talent though he was, the Chromeria was halfway across the sea.
Perhaps his losing blue had weakened the prison or broken it. There need be no coincidence. The one could have caused the other—but he didn’t know which way that causation flowed. Gavin felt like he was burrowing into the roots of a mountain, and the deeper he went, the faster he moved forward, the sooner the entire thing was going to come down on top of him.
But he didn’t know any way out.
Orholam, his brother was out of the blue? Did Marissia even remember how to switch over the chutes? Maybe Dazen would starve to death. No… no, he’d shown her, years and years ago, how to do it, against just this eventuality. She had an excellent memory. She’d do it right.
Nonetheless, he had to get back. And going back meant heading right into the middle of everything that threatened him most.
“Aha!” The Third Eye sniffed. “Here it is.”
Scrunching his forehead, Gavin glanced over at her. Noticed her nipples—dammit, got bigger things to worry about here, Gavin! She was leaning back, looking up again, this time not in prayer, though it again outlined her cold-stiffened nipples clearly against the fabric of her dress. He sniffed to see what she was talking about.
Smelled nothing. Sniffed again, and caught something very faint.
Something prickled on his skin, the lightest of touches. He looked over at the Third Eye.
She was grinning like a little girl. He didn’t understand. Then something touched his arm. He brought it close, but it melted before he could get a look at it. Snow?
It was cool tonight, but it wasn’t cold enough for snow. Not even close.
He could smell it now—the familiar mineral, chalky odor. Blue luxin.
More hit his upturned face, his arms. It was snowing.
“Blue delights in order,” the Third Eye said. “I know you can’t see it, but every flake is blue. Utterly beautiful, Lord Prism. I’ve never seen so stunning a harbinger of doom.”
Gavin’s heart dropped. Other than in the mountains of Paria and Tyrea, most of the Seven Satrapies went years without seeing snow. Gavin caught a flake on his sleeve, squinted at it. It looked like a snowflake. The blue luxin, free of his control, was running amok—but for blue, running amok meant randomly imposing order. Like organizing the crystals of a snowflake. It was a tenuous order; the unnatural snow was melting almost immediately.
“If it starts with this, what will it do next?” Gavin asked.
“Something worse,” the Seer said. “And it’s already doing it. We’re simply so far away that this is all that’s reaching us.”
“The bane,” Gavin whispered.
She nodded.
“Can you tell me where it is?”
“It’s moving, and I see outside of time.”
“So?”
“If something stays in one place, it doesn’t matter when I see it. But if something moves, finding it inside a particular time is problematic.”
“Which isn’t the same as impossible,” Gavin said, his heart leaping. If he could save himself the trip to Paria to see the Nuqaba, he could avoid all sorts of problems.
She scowled. “No, it’s not.”
Any time the Prism showed up in a major city, there were a thousand things that could only be done by him—not least endless rituals. The best he was ever able to get away with was doing one ritual for each color. And one of those would now expose him. He might be able to bluff his way past it, if he were there for only a week or two to find out what he needed, but the less he had to rely on his luck, the better. And if she could just tell him what he needed to know…
She looked over at him, and it obviously didn’t take a Seer for her to know what he was going to ask her next. She sighed. “I don’t see everything all the time all at once, Lord Prism. And I need light. I’ll look for it for you tomorrow.” She raised a finger. “I don’t promise that I’ll tell you all of what I see. I don’t promise that knowing won’t cost you something.”
That was easy. Not killing his brother. “I had pity once.”
“You’re wrong. You didn’t spare Gavin out of pity. And you wouldn’t do any differently than you did if you could do it again.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that he almost missed it. And then it yanked him up short, like a dog catching scent of a rabbit and charging heedless—right until he got to the end of his chain. She’d said sparing Gavin. She knew both that he wasn’t that Gavin and that he had spared his brother. The air got dense, hard to breathe. Gavin’s chest tightened.
“What, did you think I was a charlatan? Adjust to the new reality, Dazen, and move on to the real point.”
There was no denial. No point. She hadn’t ventured it as a guess, or a trap, and if he made her repeat it, Karris might hear. Gavin’s heart was thundering. He swallowed, took some wine, swallowed again.
“My worst choice was not telling her.” Gavin was in a fog, a fugue. He didn’t want to say Karris’s name. They were far enough away that their voices should be a murmur to her, but hearing one’s own name tended to pique the ears.
“No, not that either. If you’d told her the truth when she was younger, she’d have exposed you. What you did wasn’t kind, or perhaps fair, but it was wise, and I’d advise you not to apologize for what you did when the time comes. Karris is better at adjusting to hard realities than she is at forgiving. It’s a character flaw.”
It was true. Deeply true. Telling Karris, “I was doing my duty” would probably work better than, “I’m so sorry.” She understood duty, cared about it. And yet something in Gavin bristled, wanted to defend Karris.
“So, what was it then?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t see everything. I just know what it wasn’t. I know that you’ve been asking the wrong questions, so you’ve had no hope of getting the right answers. So my part is done, sadly with no cries of passion or clawing of your back. Aside from two things. First, your people may stay. They will, I’m fairly certain, destroy our way of life. But perhaps it will one day turn into something better. I have little hope of that, but I’m too close to see this clearly, and I know that pushing fifty thousand starving people into the sea is not what Orholam would ask of me, regardless of what they will do to us once they are no longer starving.”
“And second?” Gavin asked. It was a huge victory. She was giving him everything he wanted, but you don’t laud victories, you consolidate them and press forward.
“And second, you’ve lost control of blue, and your… counterpart has broken out of his blue prison. I’d advise you to do something about it, because without a Prism, strange things start happening. First, they’re innocuous, weird little things. But they get worse.” She seemed to retreat into herself.
Gavin felt naked. Not in a good way. The news about his brother—if it was true—was cataclysmic. Not just a terrible shock, and not just terrible news, but too coincidental. Gavin had woven alarums into the drafting, of course, but they were alarums to notify someone in his own room in the tower: Marissia when he was gone. There was no way he should have been aware, no matter how dimly or on how visceral a level, that Dazen had broken out.
He had sunk a huge amount of his will into that prison, in ways long forbidden, so maybe he’d felt that breaking of his will dimly over the leagues. But huge talent though he was, the Chromeria was halfway across the sea.
Perhaps his losing blue had weakened the prison or broken it. There need be no coincidence. The one could have caused the other—but he didn’t know which way that causation flowed. Gavin felt like he was burrowing into the roots of a mountain, and the deeper he went, the faster he moved forward, the sooner the entire thing was going to come down on top of him.
But he didn’t know any way out.
Orholam, his brother was out of the blue? Did Marissia even remember how to switch over the chutes? Maybe Dazen would starve to death. No… no, he’d shown her, years and years ago, how to do it, against just this eventuality. She had an excellent memory. She’d do it right.
Nonetheless, he had to get back. And going back meant heading right into the middle of everything that threatened him most.
“Aha!” The Third Eye sniffed. “Here it is.”
Scrunching his forehead, Gavin glanced over at her. Noticed her nipples—dammit, got bigger things to worry about here, Gavin! She was leaning back, looking up again, this time not in prayer, though it again outlined her cold-stiffened nipples clearly against the fabric of her dress. He sniffed to see what she was talking about.
Smelled nothing. Sniffed again, and caught something very faint.
Something prickled on his skin, the lightest of touches. He looked over at the Third Eye.
She was grinning like a little girl. He didn’t understand. Then something touched his arm. He brought it close, but it melted before he could get a look at it. Snow?
It was cool tonight, but it wasn’t cold enough for snow. Not even close.
He could smell it now—the familiar mineral, chalky odor. Blue luxin.
More hit his upturned face, his arms. It was snowing.
“Blue delights in order,” the Third Eye said. “I know you can’t see it, but every flake is blue. Utterly beautiful, Lord Prism. I’ve never seen so stunning a harbinger of doom.”
Gavin’s heart dropped. Other than in the mountains of Paria and Tyrea, most of the Seven Satrapies went years without seeing snow. Gavin caught a flake on his sleeve, squinted at it. It looked like a snowflake. The blue luxin, free of his control, was running amok—but for blue, running amok meant randomly imposing order. Like organizing the crystals of a snowflake. It was a tenuous order; the unnatural snow was melting almost immediately.
“If it starts with this, what will it do next?” Gavin asked.
“Something worse,” the Seer said. “And it’s already doing it. We’re simply so far away that this is all that’s reaching us.”
“The bane,” Gavin whispered.
She nodded.
“Can you tell me where it is?”
“It’s moving, and I see outside of time.”
“So?”
“If something stays in one place, it doesn’t matter when I see it. But if something moves, finding it inside a particular time is problematic.”
“Which isn’t the same as impossible,” Gavin said, his heart leaping. If he could save himself the trip to Paria to see the Nuqaba, he could avoid all sorts of problems.
She scowled. “No, it’s not.”
Any time the Prism showed up in a major city, there were a thousand things that could only be done by him—not least endless rituals. The best he was ever able to get away with was doing one ritual for each color. And one of those would now expose him. He might be able to bluff his way past it, if he were there for only a week or two to find out what he needed, but the less he had to rely on his luck, the better. And if she could just tell him what he needed to know…
She looked over at him, and it obviously didn’t take a Seer for her to know what he was going to ask her next. She sighed. “I don’t see everything all the time all at once, Lord Prism. And I need light. I’ll look for it for you tomorrow.” She raised a finger. “I don’t promise that I’ll tell you all of what I see. I don’t promise that knowing won’t cost you something.”
