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.
Chapter 81
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.