Louder knocking. “Sir, please let us in!”
Gavin ducked his head, to see if he could hide his eyes under the flap of the hood and thus be functionally invisible. When he did that, he saw nothing at all. Blackness so deep it struck a visceral fear into him.
So if he fell under piercing scrutiny, he’d have to make himself blind in order to be fully invisible. Lovely. Terrifying.
The window was already open. Gavin stood against a wall next to the door.
“Lord Prism,” Commander Ironfist shouted, “we’ve come to take you to the Spectrum. Please open the door, my lord.”
Thanks for the warning, old friend.
The Blackguards opened the door moments later. They had keys, of course. Ironfist led six men in. “Check the balcony,” Ironfist said.
Gavin snuck through the open door right behind them. The wind gusting through the open window and the hall made the cloak flutter around his leg. But no one saw anything. He made it into the hall.
From there, instead of heading for the lift, he walked the other way and went to the stairs leading out to the roof. He cracked the door open, dealt with another quick gust of wind, and slipped out quickly.
It was still hours before dawn. Gavin sat on a bench out of sight of the door. He had to see how bad things were before he did anything. But sitting, thinking, that was dangerous.
Orholam have mercy, he’d murdered that stupid girl. He rubbed his face. He wished he felt worse, but it wasn’t his first murder. He’d been murdering people every year in that damned barbaric ritual—hearing their sins and stabbing them in the heart. What was one more soul on his tally?
If he looked harder at that girl, doubtless he’d find out some pathetic tale. Like Ana’s family was on the brink of financial ruin, and she hoped that by seducing him they would be saved. Or that his father had blackmailed her into going to Gavin’s bed so he could then blackmail Gavin. Andross had said that Ana was in the list of contenders for a marriage, hadn’t he? Or… it didn’t matter. What she’d done, why. How she’d gotten past his guards. It might have been a conspiracy; more likely, it was simply miscommunication and inexperience.
But Gavin didn’t usually lose control of himself like that. He was steady, logical. For Orholam’s sake, Gavin was the whole man. Was. Had been.
No longer.
He’d lost blue. That wasn’t merely a magical fact, maybe it was a personal fact as well. He’d lost the cold, hard, passionless practicality of blue. There had been no reason to kill the girl, nothing but passion and hatred had impelled him to do such a thing. Passion and hatred unbridled by reason.
The loss of his powers wasn’t only the loss of power; Gavin was becoming less. Less in control, less intelligent, less of a man.
He’d thrown a girl off his balcony. What kind of a man did that? He hadn’t meant to—but that didn’t matter. He’d done it. And maybe he
had
meant to do it.
And he’d lost Karris. She’d come to his room, at midnight, dressed to make love. His heart was in his throat. Orholam have mercy. He didn’t know what she’d been doing, why she’d come now when they’d had every opportunity for months. But she’d come. Everything would be perfect if he’d done
anything
differently—had he not charmed his guards and told them he wanted companionship; had he awakened
earlier; had he stopped an unknown woman before she mounted him, perhaps?
I saw what I wanted to see, just like I always do. And my self-delusion cost me the real thing.
He wondered how long it would be before he lost yellow. How long before he lost the rest. It was another eight months until the Freeing. When he’d found out he’d lost blue, he’d thought he could make it that long. That wasn’t going to happen, he knew that now.
He thought of his goals.
Lucidonius, were things so bleak for you when the Ur trapped you in Hass Valley? Did you doubt yourself then? Or were you as willful as the tales tell? Were you just a man? You changed the world, but is this what you wanted to change it to?
Gavin had murdered his own mother, and she’d thanked him for it. What kind of broken world was this? She’d thanked him for it!
He remembered that artist, that damned genius addict artist, what was his name? Aheyyad Brightwater. He’d given the boy a name, and murdered him. Giving scraps with one hand, and taking away everything with the other. And Aheyyad had thanked him. Gavin had failed Garriston, lost them their city, their possessions, the lives of many they’d cared about—and they worshipped him as a god. They loved him.
How was he the only man who saw what he was?
There were no answers to be found in the waning stars. Like there were no gods, no Orholam, no light in the witching hour.
He could survive this, couldn’t he? Maybe if Ana Jorvis had been a slave. She wasn’t. Her father owned more than half of the barges that plied the Great River, and her mother was Arys of the Greenveils’s sister. Arys, the Sub-red. A former ally, passionate, and not averse to war. Arys had loved Ana. Arys would make destroying the man who’d murdered her niece her life’s work. With her passion and the recklessness that only having a couple of years of life left engendered? Hell, even Gavin losing her votes on the Spectrum meant…
Nothing was possible. It was all over.
The sun finally gripped the horizon with bloodied fingernails and pulled itself up. Gavin walked over to the great crystal mounted on its swivel and as the sunlight finally descended on him like Orholam’s heavy hand, he pulled off his shimmercloak and dropped it at his feet, then pulled off the dust cover and put his hands onto the great cold rock.
He extended himself, feeling, sensing the light. He couldn’t see the blue, but he could feel it. It wasn’t precisely out of balance—blue was about equal with red right now—but it was out of control. It felt uneven, a checkerboard of total chaos and excruciating control. He could feel a knot, though, tiny, far out into the Cerulean Sea, maybe not even in physical form yet, knitting itself back together, floating like one of the fabled glaciers from the great seas beyond the Everdark Gates. Gavin had destroyed the bane, but it would never be finished. In six months, there would be another. He could destroy bane after bane, but they would slowly heal, build themselves anew—until a real Prism tamed them again.
Then he felt the green. There was no order there, no clear checkerboard. Green was running rampant, but only in random streaks. The Verdant Plains were blooming now, in autumn, because a huge streak of verdure covered them. Then, gaps. Huge blooms of algae in the sea, empty spaces, and then another knot, just forming to the southwest. Where was that?
Orholam. Just outside Ru. Right in the path of the Color Prince’s advancing army.
Both… knots—whatever they were—were very slowly growing.
Putting his will into the great crystal, Gavin tried to balance, tried to impose the happy harmony on the entire world, as he had done so many times before.
This was what he was made for. This was what he had done, over and over, not even needing the crystal. This was his genius, his purpose, his aristeia!
Nothing. Vacuum. Emptiness. Lack. He was merely a man, merely a man pushing on a rock as if he thought he could squeeze liquid dreams out of it by wishing. A fool.
It was over. He was finished. A Prism who couldn’t balance was nothing, and without a Prism who could balance, the world was doomed. The problems would only get worse. Things would go back to the way they had been before Lucidonius: gods being born, drafters flocking to the god of their color, trying to become gods themselves, and every god at war with every other, the world itself torn by massive storms that lasted decades, the sea choked and dead, monstrous beasts roaming the plains, glaciers spilling through the mountains to abut directly on deserts. Starvation, privation, and constant war over scarce resources that might disappear completely in the very next
year. Nations broken down to tribes and clans. Cities burned. Libraries burned. Civilization ended.
If only half of what they said the world was like without Prisms was true, it would be a cataclysm to dwarf all others. Gavin sat and wrapped himself in the warmth of the cloak, drifting in and out of consciousness.
And slowly it came to him. In this insane world where nothing was as it was supposed to be, Gavin Guile wasn’t the only Prism. The tightness in his chest told him what he had to do.
Even my selfishness must have an end.
Gavin stood, turned his back on the light, and went to see his brother.
Dazen knew time was against him. Surely Gavin must have some way of knowing when he broke through his prisons.
Gavin.
Dazen? Even I’m confused.
Dazen, though younger, had always been the smarter brother. Well, I’m Dazen now. And I’ll outsmart you this time.
Dazen considered the easy way first. He could lay a plank of sealed green luxin on top of the hellstone in the hallway. So long as the luxin was sealed, the hellstone wouldn’t leach it, at least not quickly. If done in many layers and many trips, he should be able to take green all the way to the next prison. If the next hallway was as long as the first, given how weak Dazen was now, it would probably be two or three days’ work.
Did he have two or three days? He’d taken months to get this far, what was a couple more days?
He didn’t know. Maybe it would be all the difference in the world. Maybe Gavin had met some grisly end out there, and it made no difference at all.
Did Gavin think that his prisoner would be so inflamed by green that he would just charge down the hallway, like a mad dog seeking freedom?
No, that wasn’t how Gavin worked. He would know that Dazen, having been tricked into losing his luxin when he moved between the blue prison and the green one, would be extra cautious here. Surely the first thing Gavin would have thought of was the first thing Dazen was thinking of now.
And having thought of it, Gavin would have a plan. Gavin would have some kind of trap waiting. Once Dazen moved down that hallway, something would happen that would rob him of the green luxin.
So Dazen sat, thinking. The trigger on the trap—for surely, surely, there must be a trap—might be at any point in that hellstone tunnel. Until Dazen had a plan, he’d be a fool to go into the tunnel looking for it.
And he’d be a fool to sit too long waiting and planning. Gavin could be back at any moment. Coming to visit, coming to gloat. How Dazen wanted to smash that monster’s grinning face in!
He sat and ate, casting his mind about, searching, searching.
Knowing it was second best, he got up after a while and stood at the mouth of that tunnel to hell, the tunnel to the yellow prison. Very carefully and very slowly, he drafted and sealed a long thin stick out of green luxin. He probed the mouth of the tunnel, looking for tripwires concealed in the darkness.
No, this was hopeless. If he was paranoid, he’d never get out of here. He had to act boldly, had to take his own fate in his hands and smash through Gavin’s plans, destroy them. He couldn’t let himself be trapped here. He had to go, now! He had to—
Slow down, Dazen. That’s the green talking. You’re weak, the luxin has more power over you when you’re exhausted and sick.
Dazen released the green, emptied himself of it completely.
Without it, he felt wrung out, unbearably tired. No, the weakness was too great. If he didn’t take the green again, he’d sleep, and sleeping, he’d give Gavin time to come back—
But if he took the green, he’d do something stupid, just as Gavin expected. He’d fall right into the next trap, and that might leave him in a worse place than ever before. A yellow prison could well be unbreakable. He’d been lucky in the green. Gavin had made a mistake, letting him get blue bread. Dazen couldn’t count on that twice. He needed to make that one mistake count.
He imagined Gavin coming back down here, grinning that lopsided grin at him, taunting—
Wait. Gavin came down here. When Gavin came down here, he had to traverse this geometrical space.
Even without luxin, Dazen felt a burst of energy, life. Gavin came down here. That meant he had tunnels. He came close enough that he could talk to Dazen. That meant those tunnels were very, very close.
If Dazen could find one of those tunnels, he wouldn’t simply get past the yellow prison, he’d break out of
all
of the prisons. He didn’t have to break out of each in turn, he could simply
leave
.
Salvation was that close. His heart leapt. His heart burned within him. It was as if his fever was still burning him.
No, this was real joy. It had been so long since he’d felt it, he almost didn’t recognize the giddy, skittish thing. He laughed aloud. Then he started moving around the chamber surrounding the great green egg that had been his prison, knocking on the walls.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tonk.
Tonk, tonk, tonk.
The hollow sound was like a choir singing the Sun Day salutations.
Just to be sure, just to be careful, Dazen checked the rest of the chamber. Nothing. This one section, almost four paces long, was the thinnest. He looked for hidden hinges, but he couldn’t find any. Not that he expected them. After the prison was finished, Gavin doubtless would have fully sealed the tunnel. No reason to leave a weakness where Dazen might find it.