He pushed off the wall and kept walking, leaning heavily on the wall.
Ironfist had known nothing special to tell the Prism, no family secrets. But he’d delved into the subject for some months before finally abandoning it as nothing more than the Prism’s whim.
That piece, and Gavin’s fierce insistence that he hunt wights alone—though not always alone. Sometimes he’d fought the Blackguard most to fight alone when the wight was the most powerful, and let others come to help him when one seemed least dangerous.
Ironfist reached the portal to the green cell. Gavin wasn’t there, either. Some skeletal tree-thing, like climbing ivy twisted around itself, dragged branch claws against its circular walls, fists knotting.
Not here either, go on.
The djinn were the old gods. To the pagans, they were immortal gods, spirits who sometimes partnered with favored humans—high priests or heroes—and might extend a human’s life indefinitely. The Old Parians had believed the djinn were malignant, that they waited until the hour of death so they could take possession of a body, a host that was always a drafter, in whose body they might then walk the earth. Sometimes they waited for old age; other times they prompted young heroes and heroines to an early death through heroism or suicide. Thus, with their stolen bodies, these spirits might experience physical life—sex and food and time and human relationships, parenthood, even the feel of the wind across one’s face—treasured novelties for the otherwise incorporeal.
The yellow god in the yellow cell was like a taste of sickly sunlight. It was liquid gold coruscating and crashing like ocean waves as it alternately threw itself against the walls and then meditated quietly, lights sloshing about its incorporeal figure, eyes like unquiet stars.
No Gavin.
Weakening further still, Ironfist moved on. Hallucinations. These must be the hallucinations of trauma and fear of impending death.
After all the study Ironfist had done, Gavin had never inquired about the djinn again. Ironfist had dismissed it as the young Prism’s capricious, capacious intellect shining its light every which way, even into dead histories.
As for Gavin’s question, everyone supposed that the djinn simply slipped back into a spirit form when their host finally died, for even their magic couldn’t keep a human body alive forever.
And that was the final piece of the mosaic.
That was why Gavin had hunted alone on those times. He was hunting the contemporary equivalent of high priests, the men and women who might be hosting immortals. He hadn’t been hunting men; he’d been hunting gods. With each successful hunt, Gavin had brought a host and djinn here. Somehow he’d figured out how to bind the spirit of the immortals within this prison. Maybe he’d even made the prison itself.
But now Gavin wasn’t in the orange, and there was no obvious escape route from this one. The orange thing sat, quiet, just a little orange man, not scary, not fascinating, just pathetic. Just longing to be free.
An altogether understandable wish, and why shouldn’t he be free? Ironfist wondered if there wasn’t some way he could help the poor—
It’s a hex. Many, many hexes together, Ironfist saw now, swimming under the surface of the thing’s orange skin.
He blinked and looked away. He didn’t dare look again.
But he buckled at the next step, and he wouldn’t have been able to stand if he hadn’t been helped.
He took up the mag torch again. “Tore open my wound pretty good,” he said to—
To whom? He looked around him.
Who’d helped him up just now?
And what had kept him from falling outside, when he’d been ten paces from the boathouse?
Most mortals can’t see them. You only can because you’re so close to death, where the veil thins between your world and reality. This next part is going to be hard for you.
The voice seemed so familiar, but Ironfist couldn’t place it.
Ironfist pushed along the corridor. Past the red immortal—Dagnu, he realized now—who was in the form of a man yet looked like a thousand tiny embers catching flame, descending as ash, and catching flame and climbing again. It turned and glared fire at him as he staggered past.
Gavin wasn’t in there.
Gavin wasn’t in the superviolet cell that hurt the eyes.
Gavin wasn’t in the sub-red inferno, where a face of flame floated.
Gavin wasn’t in the black cell, where Ironfist couldn’t see any creature, but could feel a malignant presence watching him back.
“I can save you,” a quiet, calm, reasonable voice from that cell said. “He cannot. I can heal you. What use are you in this condition? Do not believe what the liars have told you. You know they’re liars, do you not? They weaken the strong, and you, you could be very, very strong indeed. With my help.”
But Ironfist had been around men and women more persuasive than himself for his entire life. Simplicity was the cloak that fit him.
Every time he tried subtlety and lies, it turned to blood.
Like today.
Oh, Cruxer. Orholam forgive me.
He stepped away.
Touch this.
Under his fingers he found hellstone, and he pressed it hard, making sure he was drafting nothing, making sure the magic of the old gods didn’t cling to him.
How did he know to do that?
But then, within sight of the exit, he suddenly grew faint as the realization finally crested over him like a tsunami wave. He was leaving. He’d searched all the prisons.
Gavin Guile had been here. He had—unbelievably, horribly, unthinkably—been imprisoned with these things.
But Gavin was here no longer. Which meant . . .
It meant Ironfist had murdered Cruxer for nothing.
He fell to the cold stones of the tunnel. His mag torch finally sputtered out, leaving him in darkness.
It was all for nothing. He’d come too late. He’d faltered on the last lap. If Gavin wasn’t here, and no one had heard of him since he’d left, that meant he was dead.
Ironfist had failed. He had tried to compete in subtlety with the Orea Pullawrs and the Andross Guiles and the Amalu Anazâr Tlanus of the world, and he’d failed.
He sank down, down. He could go on no longer.
God, he cried out, damn me! Give me what I deserve! Let me die. I’m finished. No more. No more.
You’re not dying today, brother. I won’t let you. We’re not going to quit. Not today.
What? Ironfist thought.
Something was glowing in the darkness.
“Don’t you make me carry you,” Tremblefist said.
It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Ironfist knew that. He was dying, and his mind was playing tricks. Torturing him or comforting him. It wasn’t reliable, that was all that mattered.
He lay down.
“You are the most loyal man I know,” Tremblefist said. “I know you, brother.”
A hallucination. A bitter memory. Ironfist settled his head against the stones to die.
“You think they cheered only because you carried me?” this phantasm of Tremblefist said. “Do you not remember your own wounds?”
No. He hadn’t been harmed, had he? Hanishu had taken all the brunt of the Tiru fans’ rage.
And then he remembered the blood. He’d taken blows in the face, a broken nose, a sliced forehead. Two or three broken ribs. He’d forgotten those.
By the time he’d crossed the finish line, he and Hanishu had been a gory mess together.