Why was he confused about that? Had he remembered it being that way, or was that something he’d been told? What was wrong with his memory?
His left eye throbbed. He rubbed it.
The pain helped Gavin refocus. It felt oddly good. None of that mattered now, anyway.
The last edge of the sun disappeared from the horizon.
“It really is you, isn’t it?” Gavin said. But he was worried all this was a hallucination. “Karris is going to die if I don’t . . . try, anyway, to kill this—” He waved toward the mirror. “And you, I guess. I don’t know.” He looked at the Blinding Knife in his hand. Could he really use it to kill his own brother a second time, this blade that had stolen both brothers from him, and his father, too? And his mother.
Was he going to use this blade to serve Grinwoody? For some slim hope that that monster back at the Chromeria might spare Karris?
Really?
“Time’s running out. What am I supposed to do?”
“Be Dazen,” Sevastian said.
“I don’t know who that is anymore,” Dazen said.
There was an echo of the little boy Sevastian had been as the man before Dazen turned his palms up helplessly, but then he tossed his head to the side as if very-unsubtly subtly trying to direct Dazen’s attention.
Dazen turned and saw his brother was trying to get him to look at the Great Mirror. He snorted and then shook his head. “Goddammit, Sevastian.”
“Rather the opposite, I hope,” Sevastian said, suddenly serious.
Dazen looked at the Great Mirror. In all the long day of fighting, he’d never had a moment to spare to question the thing. The monument stood impossibly thin and tall, without supports, the wind bothering it not at all: an immense mirror, flawless except for that great crack, with only his experience having touched it and some old Tyrean Empire filigree as evidence that it was a physical thing at all, resting as if weightless on the ground as it did.
He’d only seen glimpses of his own image reflected there. Hadn’t wanted to look longer, maybe.
Now Gavin sneered at his second self. The figure seemed to flicker, seemed to split his head, as if his eyes were sending him opposing visions. He rubbed his right eye, wondering what was wrong with him.
Through his dead eye, through the black seed crystal embedded there, he could see himself truly. Only his memory could be so perfect. Or maybe this was how madness felt—normal. He examined himself.
Here behold Gavin Guile, in all his glory. Ha!
As he barked a laugh, aloud, he saw the empty tooth socket where his dogtooth had been. He’d broken it out of his own head in his bid to escape prison beneath the Chromeria. It had been a longed-for freedom that was as much a lie as all his years of service. His dogtooth was gone.
Nor was that the last of his deformities. He held up his left hand, as if waving to that loathsome figure: Hey! Looking good! The hand had only two fingers and a thumb.
It—he—was gaunt, one-eyed, hardly more than one-handed, gap-toothed. He, who had been beauty itself. He was revealed, finally, as the wretch he had always been. A cripple outside where he’d been a cripple for years within.
He’d told himself he was a victim of circumstance, who’d only chosen to survive.
His heart plummeted.
That was all lies, wasn’t it? He’d chosen to pursue his young love Karris after he’d barely met her, knowing his father would be outraged, knowing his elder brother would be furious. He’d chosen to strike the White Oaks when he was afraid. He’d chosen to keep that gate locked when he thought Karris’s lady-in-waiting had betrayed him. He’d not intended for anyone else to die, maybe, but he’d left her to the fire, to die a horrible death.
Gavin hadn’t merely chosen to live; he’d chosen to kill so that he could live.
‘You know this is wrong! I see it in your eyes!’ a drafter had said to him on the night of a Freeing, furious, eyes straining his halos.
How many times had Gavin heard some variation of those words? At every single Freeing. And often in between.
Gavin staggered. Shying away from looking at his brother, he braced himself on the Great Mirror.
Like spring ice, the cracked mirror gave way. His hand plunged through it.
A chill shot through his entire body as if his blood were icing over, and when he ripped his arm back from the mirror’s cold grip, his hand was gone.
He backed away from the mirror in horror, stumbled—fell.
Cracks spidered from the hole in the mirror toward every edge.
Pushing off the ground, Gavin leapt to his feet, certain some monstrous threat was about to pounce through it at him.
Then he realized he had pushed off the ground with both hands. He couldn’t help but glance at his hand. It hadn’t been lopped off; he hadn’t lost it . . . but his flesh and bones had turned invisible; only weird, thick, dark veins remained, still opaque. As he turned his wrist, to his color-blind sight his veins were like black thorns waving in the wind, pulsing with a gentle darkness.
He flexed the fingers of his glassine right hand. His hand was still there, whatever this illusion was, merely invisible except for the thorns within it.
Up the mirror’s pure gleaming surface, the cracks shot toward heaven. As they finally touched the top of the mirror and every edge simultaneously, a boom like thunder shook him and the tower, then modulated with the wom- wom- wom of a great temple bell.
It was so low it shook his belly and palpated the air in his lungs. The Great Mirror trembled.
High above, over the top of the Great Mirror, blood began pulsing. Not spilling down the mirror’s surface as if poured out from a glass, but pumping, as if each of the myriad hearts Gavin had stilled was waking from death to condemn him. Rivulets streamed and stuck and raced together toward the ground, widened. The blood doubled and redoubled until not even a finger’s width of shining glass remained clean. Like a curtain dropping, the blood draped the mirror entire.
It draped it red.
All the world was black and white . . . and now red, as if Orholam, who gives and takes away, had now given him the cursed gift of seeing his own crimson guilt in vibrant color. In his world of gray and the leeched nothingness of white and the triumph of gathering midnight-black, the vermilion hues sank into his skull like daggers into his eye sockets.
Red, everywhere red.
And in the blood mirror, Gavin saw himself again.
As every Freeing came around, Gavin had braced himself, and he’d felt bad . . . and he’d done the murdering expected of him. And he’d wept and he’d repented privately and he’d gotten drunk and he’d tried to forget. And the next year, he did it again. Over and over.
What would the Spectrum have done if instead he’d stood up on Sun Day and used his platform to declare, ‘This ends now! I will not kill in your name. This is evil. It is finished!’
What if he’d spent his life trying to find some other way? Things had been different before Vician’s Sin; they all knew that. What if Dazen, who routinely did the impossible, had turned himself to the impossible task of fixing the Chromeria and the Seven Satrapies?
Instead, Gavin had spent all his charisma on himself. He’d hidden when he could have fought.
The blood reached the bottom of the mirror. It poured out onto the obsidian of the tower’s top, rushed past his feet, sticky.
He could smell it.