The Broken Eye (58 page)

“My father had a different take: she who controls the Prism controls everything,” Karris said.

They stared at each other for a long time, and for the very first time, Karris looked at Marissia as a woman; for the first time, she ignored the clipped ears and looked at her eyes. How had she missed it? She’d known Marissia was competent, of course. Blackguards liked working with competent slaves who made sure there were no distractions from the work at hand. Marissia directed her small army of subordinate slaves perfectly, making sure everything here was done precisely right, precisely on time. Such oversight was more than enough work for any one woman, much less any one slave.

Much less any one
slave
? An odd thought. Slaves came from every social stratum in every land. One poor decision or too many bad debts and no family willing pay for your foolishness, or bandits or pirates and no friends willing to pay your ransom. Whether you were at fault, or utterly innocent—it could be one tiny step away. When she was a girl, Karris had played with Taira Appleton, when they were young enough that complementary personalities had mattered more than differing stations.

But in the False Prism’s War, the Appletons’ lord had sided with Dazen Guile. The Appleton estate had been on the border of Blood Forest and Atash, directly in the path of Gavin’s army. Lady Appleton had known they would be overrun if she answered her lord’s call to arms. She did it anyway, loyalty overcoming sense, mistaking a question of smart and stupid for one of right and wrong. Karris still wasn’t sure whether the action was more praiseworthy or blameworthy. Within a week, Lady Appleton’s estates were taken, her six sons killed, her four daughters clipped and sold.

Marissia stared at Karris, and Karris studied her back, each silent, broken mirrors to each other, Marissia’s hair its natural red, Karris’s hair, naturally red, now dyed black.

Where was Taira now? Where were her sisters? Even knowing how easy it was to fall into slavery, Karris had somehow kept slaves at arm’s length, made them
other
. It made them more bearable. One misstep and she could have sat in Marissia’s place, serving some lord.

Come to think of it, if her own loathsome father hadn’t been careful to keep the White Oaks aligned with Gavin and Andross Guile …

No, no, no, Orholam, please no. She’d never thought of it this way. His maneuvering had been all cowardice; it hadn’t been …

She remembered her father’s face, during the feast, while the real Gavin Guile had mocked him and made bawdy jokes about bedding his daughter in exotic ways. Father had looked stricken. He’d looked pathetically weak. But what could he do?

With Dazen’s burning of their estate on Big Jasper, the White Oaks had lost the bulk of their fortune and all their best people. They’d also had enormous debts to nobles who’d sided with Dazen, debts they could never pay. Debts they might not be required to pay if Gavin won the war. From her father’s perspective, the White Oaks’ only hope was in binding themselves to the real Gavin Guile and his father, Andross.

What if father had thought, while the young, drunken Karris was being led away to be … forced … what if he thought, ‘Better she be forced once and be married to the Prism than that she be made a slave and raped by whoever wanted to, forever’?

Weak. Disgusting. Wrong. But not selfish. Not loveless. And he’d blown out his brains when Karris hated him for it.

She hadn’t shed one bitter tear for her father since she’d refused the abortifacient.

She felt suddenly very, very sick, but she tried to regain focus. No weakness here, not in front of this woman.

Marissia opened a cabinet, hesitated, choosing, and pulled out a decanter full of amber liquid. She produced a single, ornate crystal glass, and filled it with a more than generous double pour. She set the glass exactly in the middle of the small table. It was an homage to an old Blood Forest custom, born of a hospitality that defied poverty. A family might be able to afford only one nice goblet, but that one would be shared between host and guest.

Whether families retained the tradition as they grew in wealth or quickly discarded the tradition to give each person her own glass said a lot about how that family felt about their origins.

Marissia took the glass, inclined it to Karris, and drank.

Chromeria tradition, though, dictated that slaves and masters or mistresses not drink together. If two social unequals dined or drank together, at least the lesser was supposed to defer to the greater.

Marissia’s eyes danced, as if daring Karris: Am I your host who is sharing her own liquor with you, or a slave? Who am I to you? she asked.

To hell with it. In this, Marissia
was
Karris’s superior. She’d been running a spy network for how long? Besides, it had always been wine or brandy shared in Blood Forest, never whisky. Maybe it was time for new traditions.

Karris took the glass and took a gulp. It set her on fire, and pain had never felt so good. She counted it a victory that she didn’t cough. As the fire spread through her gut, she held up the glass, as if admiring the color. It was a thing aficionados seemed to do. “Barrenmoor?”

Whiskies were a niche taste, made even more so by the vast distances the barrels had to travel from the distilleries at the edge of Blood Forest in the highlands above Green Haven and their subsequent cost. Karris hadn’t been able to afford the stuff on her Blackguard wages. She’d guessed Barrenmoor only because it was one of the two best.

“Crag Tooth,” Marissia said, examining it in turn and taking another sip.

“Mmm,” Karris said. The other one. Dammit.

“Easy miss. This is the sixteen. After it’s matured sixteen years, it mellows to be easier drinking like Barrenmoor. I prefer it because it still retains its fiery character and complexity while time takes off the rough edges and impetuosity.”

Karris looked at Marissia sharply. Sixteen years? Rough edges and impetuosity? The woman’s eyes danced again.

Damn her, Karris was
not
going to like this woman.

“And how does it do as it ages further?”

“Crag Tooth hasn’t been a player for that long, but I’m confident that in the fullness of time it will bring Colors and satrapahs to their knees.”

They drank together, trading sips, each thinking private thoughts. They watched the storm smash all its rage on the Chromeria, lightning striking the tops of the towers themselves, power channeled down into the earth itself, diffused, harmless. Rain sheeting the windows so thickly it was impossible to see to any distance. Wind hammering the tower so hard it swayed, but was unbroken. And whether it was the warmth of the whisky or the fire or, oddly, the company, Karris found herself enjoying the storm.

The storm was subsiding by the time they finished their second whisky, a little light fighting through the clouds just at the horizon.

Karris set the glass down on the table, stood, and walked to the door without a word. She opened it and, looking back, saw woman, and storm, and light. The eye can see all at once, but only focus on one at a time. The clouds were still dark, angry.

She said, “You know, sharing a glass with you is—”
one thing, but there’s no way I’m sharing my husband with a …

But the words didn’t make it to completed thought, much less out of her mouth. There was a sudden stiffness in Marissia’s spine, a grief in her eyes at all that was denied her. As Karris had been a warrior in the Chromeria’s open battles, so had Marissia been one in its secret battles, and perhaps neither was content anymore to fight alone.

Karris started over. “Sharing a glass with you is the best thing I’ve done in months.”

Chapter 53

~Samila Sayeh~

Today is the day we make a god. The crowds are gathering, paying obeisance to me and to the other Elect around me, and above us, to the Color Prince himself. All the people are gathering today. A special day, a special victory, but also to commemorate our people’s great victory at Ox Ford, and mourn our losses. The Color Prince wishes to tie all these together in the small folks’ minds.

I find it terribly uninteresting, so instead I regard the mathematical precision with which I have remade my left hand with blue luxin. No, remade is too grandiose. Augmented. My hand has become superior in most ways to a human hand, but I am a mere mechanist. Perhaps I would have become a creator had not the Guiles’ War made a warrior of me.

It is, however, a masterpiece. Blue luxin is crystalline, solid, hard, nearly unbreakable on one plane but easy to snap or shatter if pushed from the side. Supplementing the human animal with all its shifting and bending and twisting forms is well nigh impossible to do without impinging on its functionality. Sheathe your arm in a blue luxin carapace? Easy. And then you sweat, and the sweat and oil gets trapped. The skin softens and, chafed incessantly, peels. Exposed to that sweat and oil and dead skin, after a time, infection sets in. Then the body attacks itself. Unable to swell, the blood gets cut off, the infection spreads, fever comes, and throughout, incredible pain.

It is my hypothesis that much of the madness of color wights has had nothing to do with luxin. It has been the result of unending pain, the sadly self-inflicted torture of incorporating luxin into one’s self imperfectly. Perhaps such madmen are so dangerous they must be put down for the safety of others, but to call madness evil is a grave error. The pre-Lucidonian philosopher said, ‘Every act intends some good.’

The damage done by wights has been done through ignorance. One doesn’t punish ignorance with death. One fights it with knowledge. Not darkness, but light.

My companion and I have long talks about this. She isn’t real, of course. She is merely a dialectical prop. She—I picture her as a grown-up version of my niece Meena, who was murdered at the Great Pyramid—questions my research, and we debate. It is the only way for me to have an equal here.

It makes me miss the Chromeria. So many fine minds there. Of course, they forbid all this research, but if they could overcome their fears as I have overcome mine … But of course, I know the Color Prince has people recruiting within the Chromeria. The people here are eager, but they aren’t disciplined thinkers. They think being Free means being free of the consequences of their actions, free of nature’s laws. It is an attitude the prince has not seen fit to curb. Not yet, not when he still needs soldiers and drafters to die for him. Later, he promises me, we will work to channel such fervor.

‘Light cannot be chained, but it can be directed,’ he tells me. He seems to like the phrase, and I can tell he will use it again. Later. After victory, after the first phrase has bought him willing martyrs and power, he will add that second clause to nullify the first. And those fool martyrs will have died only to put a new king with a different title on a new seat in the same place. Thus ever does a tyrant’s noose tighten, I suppose. Expanding, building that future speech in his head, he says, ‘All the world is open to the light, but our eyes can only look one way at a time.’

I see these rhythms, with Meena’s help. How nine kings became seven satraps, and how failed attempts at making a high king yielded to a successful attempt to make a Prism, and how the Prism’s power and the satraps’ was eroded by jealous Colors. As a wolf hungers for meat so a man lusts for power. It is unwise to get between either one and his prize. This is not a condemnation but a fact. And only a fool allows herself to become the prize.

This is the reason why someone else is becoming Mot today, not I, though I stand in the first rank for that honor. Dubious honor, I think. We each ‘get’ to wear a necklace of what the Color Prince claims is black luxin. Most likely it’s simply a clever illusion, but I find it unsettling.

Meena and I have discussed this position for me, at some length. She thinks that— Oh, more cheering. Everyone else on the podium is applauding. I join them.

She thinks that having an overseer would grate on me. I say, what’s the difference between having one overseer to direct me to do the Color Prince’s will, or having two overseers to direct me to do the Color Prince’s will? Plus, those who fail the prince directly feel his wrath directly. Dervani Malargos and Jerrosh Green fought tooth and nail to be the Atirat, and when the prince made his choice, he gave one godhood, and the other a musket ball in his brain pan. And soon thereafter Dervani had joined Jerrosh in death, albeit at Gavin Guile’s hand. Godhood is a dangerous business.

Still, Meena thinks I will chafe under the rule of a lesser mind. Ramia Corfu is certainly that, though the man is beautiful. One oughtn’t discount the power of beauty. It is a change I notice in myself. It has been months since I last took Usef Tep. We’d made love nine times in that last week before the Freeing, knowing it would be our last. We’d even slipped out of the line at the Freeing, fooling none, and not trying to fool them, either. Human delicacies break down in death’s acid gaze. While I had not Usef’s daily hunger, by now I would usually feel the lack keenly. Now my libido lies dormant. I look at Ramia’s well-proportioned face, and I understand that other women see only boyish charm and willfulness, smoldering good looks. It’s not that I don’t see it, or understand from memory what it will do to others; it’s that its effect on me is limited.

It matters not. My sole strategy with Ramia Corfu will be to make myself appear to be what I actually am: indispensable and utterly without ambition. Meena pretends to be content with this, though I think she has more ambitions for me than I do.

The Color Prince is going on, and seems to be doing a good job of it. He usually does. Then he gestures to Ramia to stand.

Ramia stands, with an arrogant grin that I suddenly realize I’m going to really, really hate within the span of—oh, I already hate it. He nods to the rest of us, as if we’re lucky to be seen with him. My face remains impassive, but some of the others bristle. It’s one thing to revel in such a triumph; it’s another to act as if you got there because you were smarter than the rest of us.