Gavin was quivering on the floor. The vomiting had turned to dry heaves quickly enough, and the stomach cramps from the diarrhetic had passed some time ago. He’d been weakly sponge bathing himself since then. He was mostly clean now, for all the good that did him.
Grinwoody gave him water first. Gavin rinsed his mouth of the residual taste of vomit and spat it out. Then real food and clothes.
Nor did the old man rush him. But finally, when Gavin was feeling warm and full for the first time in a year, and a little tipsy from what could have only amounted to a single cup of wine, the counterfeit slave motioned it was time to go.
They left everything. “I’ll burn it later,” Grinwoody said.
Within a dozen paces out into a dim hall, he pushed against a section of wall, and a secret door opened on unseen hinges, silently.
“What’s this?” Gavin asked.
“I made another gamble, months ago. I bet that you would end up in the black cell eventually, because I know your father.”
The narrow tunnel ascended sharply, barely wide enough for Gavin’s turned shoulders to pass, and so short that he had to stoop to walk. But there was no stopping. He felt as if the darkness were chasing him with eager fingers.
In minutes, they emerged into an empty little hut with curtains drawn. In piles, and hanging from hooks, and standing in towers, were pitch and scrapers and lines and buoys and more lines and lanterns and various other implements for the keeping of ships. Gavin guessed it was one of the boat keepers’ shacks at the Chromeria’s back dock. It was still dark out, but a hint of light trickled around the cracks in the walls and around the curtains, hinting at coming dawn.
Grinwoody picked up a wrapped bundle. “You asked before how you’re to do it.” He grinned. “If one is to kill a god, one must be properly armed.” Then Grinwoody—the hidden Old Man of the Desert, Anazâr—unwrapped a sword that was not a sword. Its blade was long, light, thin, with twin black whorls crisscrossing around each of seven shining jewels, one for each color, though to Gavin’s eye they were a uniform brightness and tone. Along its spine was a thin musket barrel, except for the last hand’s breadth, which was only a sweeping blade that served as both sword point and bayonet. The Blinding Knife.
To cover his sudden fear, Gavin said, “You old bastard. You know my father wants this more than anything in the world, right?”
“Of course.”
“And what do you think happens when I pass the impassable reef, climb the tower that’s probably just a trick of the light, climb the footstool of the Lord of Light himself, and stab him with this?”
Grinwoody grinned an arrogant grin. Shook his head. “Are you really as desperate to believe in gods and devils as the rest of them? Knowing what you know? Having done what you’ve done? Orholam is no god. It is merely the nexus of this world’s magic. It’s not sentient. It’s not a person or a godhead. It is the wobbling, unbalanced axle around which all magic rotates. It is the center that cannot hold.
“If you destroy this nexus men call Orholam, you kill magic itself. It will be an end of the tyranny of the Chromeria and an end to the magical storms that have devastated our world for millennia beyond counting. It will end the world putting one man in power while another is his slave—merely because the first can do magic. For that hope, for that hope for justice, I have wagered everything.”
“Regardless of the cost?” Gavin asked.
“The cost to do nothing is greater.”
“You really think the Blinding Knife will blind God himself.”
“This is the problem with erasing your own history, as the Chromeria has done, never trusting its own with dangerous knowledge: sometimes the most dangerous things are exactly what you need to save yourself.”
“What are you talking about?” Gavin asked. Erasing history? Was this some kind of Order conspiracy theory?
“How I would love to sit and talk with you for an afternoon and tell you all the parts of your reign you owe to me, and all the things you misinterpreted through the decades. It would be better if your father were there, too, for he’s been the more substantial foe by far. But we have little time. Dawn comes, and light waits for no man, am I right?” He peeked out the curtain, then dropped it back in place.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What are your demands?”
“Do you remember this?” Grinwoody asked. He upended a black velvet bag into his hand, and a jewel the color of midnight dropped into his hand. It somehow radiated darkness, or sucked light into itself. It was living black luxin, but it was something more. If the black luxin in Gavin’s eye patch was a child of eternal darkness, this was Mother Night herself.
“The black seed crystal,” Grinwoody said. “You remember now?”
“I have… no memory of that.” Except that he felt an instinctive fear and revulsion at the sight of it. It was too painful to even behold.
“You created this. At Sundered Rock.” Grinwoody pushed back a curtain from a window and looked out at the water. Then he turned again to Gavin. “Or perhaps this is an older one. You see, the Chromeria used to deny that seed crystals exist—even while they hoarded them. The seed crystals call their color of drafters to themselves—which is why, unknowing, drafters have always come here for their teaching. But uncontrolled, unchecked, they create the bane, and the bane call wights much more powerfully.
“The Chromeria likes to believe that there’s only one seed crystal of each color. As if one can wish that there should be only one volcano, or one hurricane, or one earthquake—because one is devastating enough. The truth is, any sufficiently powerful drafter can create one, like you did at Sundered Rock. Or they can spontaneously appear, as they have recently, if there’s too much of their color. Maybe it’s random, maybe it coalesces around a drafter of that color, like the first crystal in a freezing pond—what does it matter? When you create the right conditions, the bane appears. And the conditions now? Without you balancing? It’s like all magic is a pond below freezing, waiting for that first crystal. Only death can follow, Dazen Guile.”
“Oh, good, here I was thinking things looked grim.”
Grinwoody stared at him, unsmiling. “Apparently that irreverence has helped keep you alive and sane. I hope it continues to work for you.”
Gavin swallowed, flippancy gone. “So what does the black do? Does it make a black bane?”