The Blinding Knife

Chapter 80

When the pounding started on the door of the women’s side of the barracks, Karris thought it had to be Gavin come back again, but the voice was Watch Captain Blademan’s. “Hey! Why’s this door locked?! I said all hands on, dammit! I don’t care if you’re naked or on the shitter, I mean now!”

Karris threw the door open, instantly alert, tears forgotten. “What is it?” she asked.

Watch Captain Blademan looked at her, the cloak not covering her chemise, not covering her makeup, her perfume, her coiffed hair, her eyes puffy from crying. He hesitated only a moment, working through his surprise, then decided that whatever this was, it could wait. “All hands on, Karris. You’re needed upstairs immediately. Some girl just took a dive off the Prism’s balcony. She’s dead. We think he threw her.”

Gavin stared at the moon, drafting its feeble light slowly. His plan was simple-to draft a rope and dangle it out the window, making them think he’d escaped.

But he couldn’t draft green or blue now. A rope was impossible. He leaned on the doorframe, swallowed with difficulty. He’d never had to think this way before. The simplest answer had always been the best. With every color in his palette, he’d simply had to figure out the best materials for the job. Now… now he was like some normal drafter, trying to solve a problem with a limited set of tools. It was a totally different way of thinking. He hated it.

As he turned the problem over, he grabbed fresh clothes from his closet and got dressed. He could, he supposed, draft a yellow chain, but that would beg them to ask why he would choose to draft only yellow, which was much more difficult and time-consuming. Questions like that could be more deadly than killing a powerful nobleman’s daughter.

He pushed that out of his mind. No time.

Just an open window, then.

Then Gavin saw the shimmercloaks in his closet. He threw on the larger cloak. He knew the choker had to be important, so he put it on, drew it snug. He hated having things around his neck, and there were cold metal ridges along the inside that dug into his skin unpleasantly.

He stepped in front of a mirror. He was still very much visible. He drew the cloak closed. Still visible. He closed his eyes and imagined being invisible, willed it, desired it, lusted after it, believed it. Cracked an eye. Still there.

A soft knock sounded on the door. Gavin drafted instinctively to defend himself.

Daggers stabbed into his neck from either side. What felt like a sheet of flame shot up and down his body: cheeks hot, scalp aflame, chest burning, arms burning, legs burning. Then the heat passed, leaving tingling, and the tingling turned to sensitivity, like a tooth shy of a cold drink.

He looked into the mirror-and saw through himself. His face was visible, and a V of his neck where the cloak wasn’t fully closed. The collar had injected two needles into his neck. Gavin pulled the cloak fully closed, and found there were tiny hooks hidden in the fabric to keep the hood closed even over his face. Only his eyes remained. The rest of him was translucent-not perfectly transparent, but like looking through a dirty window. In low light, it would be more than acceptable. If he stayed still against a wall, it would be perfect. But moving fast in good light, he’d be easy to spot.

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.