The Blinding Knife (69 page)

Something glimmered on the far wall, directly over the tunnel mouth.

“Oh, by all means, go look at the shiny. Right. That couldn’t
possibly
be a trap,” the dead man said.

“Why don’t you stay here, and I’ll go on without you?” Dazen said. “Then we’ll both be happy.”

“By all means, I’m not the one talking to myself. You can leave me behind whenever you’re good and ready.”

“Go to hell,” Dazen said. “It’s over by the tunnel. I have to go that way regardless.”

Still, he went carefully. It was easy to get fixated, get tunnel vision.

“Ha! Punning!” the dead man said.

What? Oh. “Bugger off.”

Dazen blinked, rubbed his eyes, studied the floor, tested every step. He couldn’t go at this pace for long or he’d never get out. But it was worth it here. No matter that the dead man was mocking him, he
did
have a point.

Whatever the shiny was, it was etched into the rock. Perhaps a natural vein of some ore? Gold? Dazen knew nothing about mining, but he was deep under the earth somewhere. The distribution looked random at first, but as he got closer—

“Trap. I’m telling you. Trap,” the dead man said.

“I’m not touching it, you asshole. Stop distracting me.” Trap it might be, but Dazen wasn’t going to put his head right underneath
that thing to step into the tunnel beyond it if it was going to snap down without a moment’s notice.

Keeping his distance, he stood up on tiptoe and held the lux torch high. Whatever it was, it sat deep in grooves, and only fell full under the torch’s light when he lifted it. He heard a little hiss and he froze.

This was the trap. He needed to do something immediately, but he didn’t know what.

In an instant, the luxin—for it was luxin—in the grooves ignited and glowed a dull, infernal red. Dazen remembered the formulation. Gavin’s work, a blend of yellow and red so unstable that even being hit with light would cause it to combust. He felt a stab of fury—and then the whole design bloomed with light, ignited by the light of his lux torch.

It was a single, roughly shaped word, two paces across, drawn with a jaunty, cocky hand. It unfurled in yellow-red fire:
Almost.

Dazen’s feet became unstuck and he leapt backward and ran for the tunnel behind him.

The light of his lux torch, which had been directed solely forward as he’d entered the chamber, now cut into deep grooves in the wall back behind him that he hadn’t even seen. These flashed to fire, the fires cut ropes, and the floor dropped out from under him.

He tumbled head over heels into the darkness down a tube, then abruptly dropped straight onto a flat surface. He impaled himself on several tiny spikes, not longer than his first knuckle. It took his breath—and his luxin. Hellstone!

Then that floor swung open and he tumbled down farther, farther. He smashed into a door that swung open and then shut behind him.

Dizzy, back and arms bleeding from tiny stab wounds and disoriented, Dazen nonetheless immediately knew where he was by the light that stabbed through his eyelids, mocking him.

He rolled over, opened his eyes. The room was shaped like a squashed ball, one hole above for food and water, one hole below for his waste. And in the round, curving wall of his new yellow cell sat the dead man.

In a mad falsetto, he said, “Told you so.”

The shimmercloak made it easy for Gavin to get back to his room. Indeed, he passed only a single Blackguard who glanced toward the door to the roof when a bit of wind gusted in, but Gavin closed it quickly behind him.

The young woman looked up the stairs but dismissed it. Gavin made it past her, and when she finally decided to go check, he used the opportunity to slip into his room.

Clearly, they’d searched the room for him, but it had been a cursory search. What had he been thinking, inviting a search of his room? They could have found the door in his closet.

Not that it mattered now. Gavin went to the picture of the blue colossus and pulled it open. He almost laughed. The alarm panel was glowing yellow.

His brother had broken out of green,
last night
. Insanely, Gavin felt proud of him. He was a fighter. Maybe enough of one.

Well, at least the second alarm worked. Gavin swung the painting shut and went to his closet and began moving his clothes.

“My lord, may I help?”

Gavin wheeled around to find Marissia. She was kneeling beside the bed, head down. Apparently waiting for him, paying some sort of penance by making her vigil here. Her face was drawn, haggard.

He felt a rush of warmth for the woman. She’d been more than his room slave. She’d served with her whole heart, and in difficult circumstances.

“Marissia, there’s a letter in my desk drawer. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Please get it for me.”

She got it for him while he continued piling his clothes out of the way in the closet. She brought it back, wooden. It was her letter of manumission. Instead of having the standard thing written up and then signing it, Gavin had written it all in his own hand. He’d heard tales of room slaves being accused of forging their own manumission papers and kept in slavery because of it. Marissia was beautiful and valuable for a dozen reasons. Gavin wasn’t going to let them have her.

He looked it over, though he had the contents memorized. It was not only manumission, but also a grant of ten thousand danars. A
fortune, enough to start a business and marry, or just to live off for the rest of her life. He signed it. Then he grabbed another scrap of paper and wrote down a series of letters and numbers. “My father might seize this money through some pretext or another. They know I care about you, so they’ll suspect that I’d leave you something. This code will open another account to you. Speak to the Ilytian banker Prestor Onesto at Varig and Green.”

“My lord, why are you speaking this way?” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“Please give five thousand of what’s in that account to Karris and five thousand to Kip. The rest is for you.” He handed the writ to her. “Memorize that sequence and then burn that; Onesto will release the money to anyone who has that number.”

“Lord Prism…” She held the papers limply. She looked bereaved.

“I’ve freed you. You’re supposed to be happy.” Gavin looked away. Of course it stroked his ego that his slave didn’t seem delighted to be free, but perhaps that was simply because she knew to cover her delight for his sake. In case it was a lie, he didn’t want to see through it, so he looked away.

“This is my fault, isn’t it, my lord?” she said. “I did something wrong, didn’t I? I missed the alarm somehow.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s not your fault. My alarm failed. It was my work. Everything had to go right, for too long. Something happened. But it wasn’t you.”

“I should have been here for you. That Ana girl… I should never have left. I’m so sorry, my lord.” She was right; if Marissia had been in his bed where Gavin wanted her, things would have been very different. But he was the master of his own fate. No one had forced him to throw that girl out onto his balcony.

What had he been thinking, anyway? Just that he wanted her out of his room? Just that he wanted to frighten her? Or had his rage been murderous all along?

Maybe intent didn’t matter. She was dead. It was all finished.

“It’s not your fault, Marissia. It’s mine. You have been a good servant, a good companion, a good friend. I want you to go now so you don’t get sucked down by the wreckage.”

Her eyebrows tented in dismay. “My lord, you are a good man. Please don’t—”

He snorted. “A good man would have freed you long ago. I was
afraid of how you’d use your freedom, so I withheld it from you. I’ve a small and mean spirit. The master who fears the choices his people will make enough to take those choices away isn’t worth serving. You’ve served me well, despite my shortcomings. Thank you, Marissia. Please take these two cloaks down to my secret room. Then go. I may not come back up alone. I may not come back up at all, but someone else will. You oughtn’t be here when he does.”

She turned her hands up, helpless for once. “My lord,” she said plaintively.

He opened the closet and drafted the board for his feet—out of yellow luxin now, since he couldn’t do blue.

“Tell Kip I’m sorry. Tell Karris… No, I suppose you can’t. Fare thee well, Marissia.” He stepped into the closet and closed the door.

He could hear her weeping as soon as the door closed, though she was trying to hold it back.

Gavin slid open the floor, found the rope, and fitted the board onto it. In moments, he was whizzing downward into the darkness.

When he got to the bottom of the shaft, he groped around until he found the lux torches, then pulled one off the wall. He hadn’t been able to use them before because he hadn’t wanted to cast yellow light into any of his brother’s cells. Now that Dazen was in the yellow cell, it didn’t matter anymore.

He found the controls and pulled the levers to bring the yellow cell up. It would take about five minutes for the cell to lift and rotate into position. He’d built it that way so that his brother would always think that the place where the window sat was a weakness in the design, when in fact he’d hardened that spot above all others.

The wait gave him time to think about the spasm of creative genius he’d had in constructing this prison. He’d built the first, blue cell in a month, and then spent the better part of a year constructing all the other cells. He wondered how much different the world would be if he’d simply killed his brother and turned his attention immediately to fighting the Spectrum and changing the injustices he saw them committing everywhere. A waste, all for one man.

Never had the guts to let him go. Never had the guts to murder him in cold blood.

Slowly, slowly, the orb came into view, and then slowly settled. There was a slide to pull back to reveal the window, but Gavin found himself looking blankly at that slide, afraid to pull it open.

Ridiculous. He was here to die. He was here to let his brother out. This should be easy. It was all finished. His heart hammered protests in his chest, and he thought it was going to seize up. His throat constricted. He was sweating.

He pulled back the slide.

A man charged from the other side and swung a club straight at his face.

Gavin threw himself backward. His brother’s lux torch hit the yellow luxin window and shattered in a flash of released yellow brightwater. But the prisoner wasn’t finished. He didn’t laugh with cool resolve at scaring Gavin. Instead, he attacked with the fury of a rabid wolf, beating the lux torch against the window with great blows until the wood shaft splintered in his hands, broke.

“You motherfucker!” the prisoner shouted. “I am going to kill you and everyone you ever loved. I’m going to rip your fucking head off and sodomize you with it.”

Gavin stood, brushed himself off, and put his own lux torch into a bracket.

“You hear me,
Gavin
?” the prisoner shouted. “You think you’re so clever. Good! You know what? You are clever. You always wanted me to say you’re the smarter brother. You know what? You are. You know what else you are? You’re the weaker brother. You ever wonder why I’m father’s favorite? Look at this. This prison. Ingenious. And
pathetic
. I thought you made this prison to prove you were smarter than me, brother. I know better now. You made it because you can’t kill me. Because you’re afraid.

“That’s why father loves me. Oh, I’m a disappointment, too. He wishes his son were both smart and ruthless, fearless, but he had to choose one, and he chose me. And he chose right, you spineless, scrofulous sack of shit. Because I can hold a grudge. I can nurse it, feed it, grow it. And I will. You’re going to sit out there, worrying. Just like when you were a kid, huh? You still get the bad dreams, don’t you? You still wake up crying, don’t you? You still piss yourself,
Gavin
? Now you’ve got a reason to. I’m coming!” The prisoner was so close, his spit flecked the window.

“You could kill me,” he said, “but you won’t. I bet you think about it every single morning when you send me my bread. I could poison this, you think. I could just not feed him, you think. But you can’t. You don’t have it in you. You know, Gavin, you’re right. You don’t.
But I do. If our positions had been reversed, I’d have killed you as you lay unconscious at Sundered Rock. I would have cut off your head and filled your mouth with your own feces and put you on a pike. Because that’s how you win, Gavin. That’s how you show you can’t be crossed. Peace through terror, Gavin. That probably doesn’t even make any sense to you, does it? No, you were always like mother, all sweet manipulations and bullshit. She—”

“Mother’s dead,” Gavin said. He didn’t want Dazen to slur her in his moment of anger.

“Fuck her,” Dazen said. “As good a liar as she was, she never even bothered to pretend she didn’t love you more.”

What?

“You killed her?” Dazen asked, seeing a chink in Gavin’s armor in the shock on his face. “You shrive her first? What’d she tell you? Do you think she was honest with you, even then? Or was she angling you to do what she wanted, even then? She might be dead, but I bet she’s not gone, is she? Little spider bitch.”