Inconclusive. How annoying.
But, after all, Kip was still only the backup plan. Andross sent a man on ahead to order his supper sent to his stateroom. It was going to be a long day, and he’d need his strength. He’d take a bite to eat and await Kip’s failure before heading up to the mirrors himself.
“I thought You’d beat me,” Andross said aloud, slowly turning a bitter gaze to the heavens. “But perhaps I may yet snatch the victory from Your greedy hands.”
Chapter 117
A thunderous waterfall blasted Dazen off his feet. He tumbled and rolled across bright marble, coming to rest with his head in his arms, bruised and battered and dazed, eyes stinging from the force of the blast.
But he wasn’t wet.
And as far as he could tell, he wasn’t dead, either.
He moved to push himself up off the ground and saw his arms. Both had gone fully invisible, except for those black thorns within them. He sat up to his knees and saw his dream made flesh: the black thorns were everywhere twined through his transparent flesh, everywhere weakening him, wrapped around his heart, infiltrating it in such fine threads it turned the sadly palpitating, pitiful pink organ gray.
He didn’t dare look at the mirror. His whole body was a playground of jagged dark thorns, and he didn’t want to see it, didn’t know if he could handle loathing himself more.
Okay, he thought. Maybe I’m dead after all. This could be hell. A very tricky introduction to it, what with the bloodfall and the bright colors, but—
The colors. They struck him all at once. God damn.
Dazen stood and took in the world. The stone at his feet was white marble, here. So too was everything changed, better. This was like a bright reflection of the real world.
No, that was exactly backward, he thought; this was the real world, and he’d lived in the dim reflection of it for his entire life.
The mirror stood just as tall here as it did atop the tower in his world, but the cataract here poured pure water. It flowed clear and bright and everywhere it brought life. Instead of howling, the wind soughed sweetly.
The tower itself was shaped somewhat differently, but Dazen lost all track of his thoughts as he saw the sunset.
His heart swelled within its black-barbed cage as he beheld the polychromatic miracle of a sunset once again. Here, with the sun just down, every hue wielded the weight of glory.
A long moment passed before he remembered to breathe.
For the first time he could remember since he was a boy, his mind went quiet. He turned from wonder to wonder, to see the winking stars brighten in their realms, to see the million gradations of color from the blackness of the night yielding to ruddy vitality on the horizon. The cosmos stretched luxuriant above him, around him, embracing him.
He could stay here forever, watching wonders unfold like the petals of a flower opening and opening anew. But then he felt his skin tingling. Reluctantly, he looked at himself again. Frowned.
A droplet of the bright water standing suspended on his invisible arm suddenly soaked into the skin, like rain into thirsty soil—and his skin blossomed from invisibility into visibility. Everywhere he’d been immersed—so, everywhere—Dazen saw his skin not so much reappear as seem to grow anew at the touch of the water. He held up his left hand, which was tingling sharply, and saw his pinky and ring fingers grow afresh from the hacked-off stubs the Nuqaba had left him with. He tapped the whole, perfect digits with his thumb, bewildered. There was feeling in them.
He dropped his hand to his side, though, and felt a flash of rage.
This wasn’t real. This could only be some new kind of torture. It was a trap, right?
And now he looked around intently, as he should have from the very first moment, for his Enemy.
But he could see no one else. He circled the tower peak slowly, to see if anyone hid behind the mirror.
The tower itself looked slightly odd, so once Dazen had assured himself that he was alone, he went to one edge. The tower itself wasn’t black as it was on his side of the mirror. Here it was lambent white, all the way up.
On a whim, Gavin went to the side where he’d left the old prophet below him.
Of course he wasn’t there.
“Orholam isn’t here, either,” Gavin said.
He suddenly barked a sad laugh. Orholam isn’t here.
There’s nothing here.
It’s beautiful . . . and there’s nothing for me here.
I came all this way, and now I’ve lost everything, and there’s nothing here.
Every effort had been wasted. Deluded.
Then he felt something tingling deep within him. He knew instantly what it was. It was as if a flame had touched an old black wick. He looked up to where the sky was still blue—and drafted blue luxin into his palm. Then he did the same with red. And with every color in turn.
His gift had been restored.
But only to torture him.
He sighed out all his hope. He released the colors from limp hands and groaned.
Maybe he should climb down the tower. Maybe he should try to live here, in this better world, where he was whole. Maybe there were versions here of all the people he had known . . . though that didn’t make sense. Sevastian and the old prophet were gone.
No. There was nothing for him here. It was perfect, and he was not. No matter that his skin had regrown, he could still feel those black thorns inside his body, sapping his strength, rending his flesh anew with every movement, no matter that here he healed immediately.
He’d made it here. Alive. He’d invaded Orholam’s own realm. But he didn’t belong here.
He looked at the great waterfall. He knew that when he went through it again, back to his world, he’d lose his fingers and his powers and even his color vision. Again.
He’d thought he might die, invading this realm, and instead he’d found life. Now, going back, he would find his drab life, adorned only with all the encroachments of death.
The black eye throbbed. It felt like it had been loosened in his skull by the cascading water, and now it ached. Gavin rubbed around it, carefully. He couldn’t bear to touch the damned thing here.
He took one last look around, locking the colors in the vault of his memory, and then before he could lose his courage, he took one last deep breath of air, so pure it made his lungs ache with goodness, and ducked quickly back through the waterfall—
—emerging soaked in blood.
He was disgusted, angry, full of contempt for the meanness, the stench, the sticky grotesquerie of all this world. It could be all he had just seen, and was relentlessly not.
Beauty is possible, but we choose ugliness.
He scraped the streaming, steaming, sticky blood from his face, and eyes, using his hand as a strigil to scrape away all the accusatory gore. His two fingers were gone again, as he knew they would be. Dogtooth gone. His sight once again black, white, and red.
Of course the red remained.
His gift was gone. Of course it was.
And his brother was gone. Sevastian, the one last good thing in this world was gone.
And yet Gavin lived, still. As ever.
Then he saw a familiar figure. The old prophet was sitting over at the edge of the tower, watching the sunset, heedless of the slow cascade of blood, sitting in it, apparently unperturbed by the mess. Apparently, the bloodfall from above had alarmed the old man and spurred him to make the last bit of the climb to find out what the hell was going on.