Gavin had to swallow again.
“So I guess, you know, I guess I miss my big brother. And I miss Sevastian. And I miss my mother, who never let me in all the way, even though she loved me. I trusted her and she had my back, but she didn’t trust me. Not with the truth. She was ashamed, I guess. And I miss my father, or the man he was before all this . . . I miss the man he should’ve become. The grandfather he should’ve been to Kip. I miss Kip, and the father I should’ve become for him. I miss all the things I cost me. I miss Karris, and the great years I should’ve had with her. I miss Corvan, who was my best friend, and who I abandoned. I . . . shit. I miss things that never were and mourn things that ought to have been. Ridiculous, huh? It doesn’t matter now. It’s too late.”
Gavin tried to shake it off, finally turning to look at the old prophet with a lopsided half grin. “So, should I complain some more about my unhappy decades as the richest, most powerful and admired man in the world? It’s all pretty much the same, though: ‘Ugh, all this rich food doesn’t taste good while I’m feeling so guilty.’ ‘Poor me! All these women want me, but I’m in love with one who I’ve given good reason to hate me.’ The story’s a real tearjerker! But what about you? What were you doing then, Orholam? Oh, you were enslaved and chained to the oar all those years? Beaten daily, nearly drowned a dozen times? Yeah . . . that does sound almost as bad as I had it. So, you know, maybe I can be done.” He turned up the corners of his mouth and gestured over to the old man. “But really. I’ve gone on enough. What was your family like before the whole call-to-prophecy-and-running-away thing happened? What do you miss?”
Orholam cocked his head, lips curling in a smile. “Can I tell you a story?”
“It is your turn,” Gavin said.
“Not my story.”
“Meh, it’s still your turn. Maybe a cryptic parable will do me good.” Gavin doubted it, but he owed the old man this much, and he was embarrassed at how he’d gone on.
Orholam said, “After Dazen Guile killed his brother at Sundered Rock, he built a prison. Not one cell or two, but an eightfold prison.”
“Uh. Look, I know this story. How ’bout that cryptic parable instead? A prophecy? You can even make it rhyme. I can’t even tell you how ready I am for some awkward rhyming couplets that don’t quite fit a meter.”
Orholam said nothing, and Gavin felt like an asshole. “I just said I’d listen, and I interrupted first thing, didn’t I?”
Orholam said nothing.
Gavin sighed. “I built it because I went mad. I wasted—”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“In your climb through the seven circles to reach this, the roof of the world, you’ve seen that you were worse than you knew. It’s time for you to see that you were also better.”
“Better?”
“Dazen built those prisons because he knew what men had wrought. In seeking immortality and power, man had released the infernals into this world. The gods of old, the immortals, could walk here. The Chromeria had obscured the knowledge as well as it could, but such could not be hidden forever. And so Dazen dedicated himself, alone, to fighting those whom the Chromeria denies even exist. He discovered that to wield the greatest power, the infernals have to partner with a human host, a drafter who will share her or his body with them. And so to expiate his sins, Dazen became a hunter. Not a hunter of wights, but rather of the powers who prey upon those dying drafters called wights, all over the world.”
“This . . . isn’t . . .”
“He couldn’t kill these gods. That took something beyond him, something he didn’t have, the Blinding Knife, which his brother and father had lost. But he, who so often did what others called impossible, did the impossible once more. With the greatest secrecy and cunning, one at a time, he imprisoned eight of the immortals. One for each of the seven Chromeria-recognized colors, and one of the greater elohim in the black prison. Chi and paryl were too rare or too careful for him to find, and white, he was certain, was a myth.”
“What are you—” But Gavin’s throat was tight. It was hard to breathe. Why was it hard to breathe?
Orholam said, “So it was that after he had imprisoned these immortals, he came to believe that the only person who might undo his labors was he himself, for he knew himself corruptible and corrupted already. So rather than seek more power, this remarkable hero sought to throw his power away: he brought death and oblivion into his own heart. This true Prism sacrificed what was more precious to him than even his own life—he sacrificed his Guile memory and his own reputation, even in his own mind.”
“No,” Gavin said. He could barely form words over the encroaching tears, could barely breathe. It was impossible. It was lies. “No. That’s all very flattering, but you don’t know. You don’t know me.”
But then he remembered the voices from his prisons. They hadn’t known him. They hadn’t spoken quite right. If he’d cast bits of himself into those walls, they’d have spoken to him differently. The infernals cast into those walls hadn’t known what lies the others had told him, so each had tried its own tack against him, bluffing.
The last one had cursed him, called him That was a tongue Gavin had never known, nor Dazen, either. It was a word not made for human throats. It was the slip that should have given the whole game away.
Gavin had hunted wights, so he remembered. He’d wanted to eliminate all the blue wights in the world. That much made sense, after Sevastian, but he’d not hunted only blues; he’d hunted every color. Why?
Had it been simple equanimity? A feeling of duty to all of the Seven Satrapies? But after a while, he’d stopped going so often after certain colors, hadn’t he? He’d let local drafters or the Blackguards handle such things, sometimes, unless it was on his way somewhere else. But then he’d still insisted on going alone to others. Totally alone. Sometimes.
They’d always been furious. Orea Pullawr had been furious. Why would he endanger himself like that? Why go alone? Why go alone sometimes but not other times?
Because he had to be alone when he tried to trap an infernal. Because he could protect himself from their malign will, but he couldn’t protect anyone who went with him. Anyone who went with him, he might have to kill himself.
It was true.
“No,” he said. “I killed for power. I’m the bad guy. I’ve always been the bad guy.”
“You’ve lost a lot of yourself. It’s what evil does: it promises an easy way out of one problem at the cost of causing worse ones. But I saw you at the hippodrome.”
“The hippodrome? When they put out my eye? You were there?”
“You didn’t draft black. And you wanted to. You knew you could.”
“Good thing, right? Lucky. It would have killed Karris. And Iron-fist. I mean, fuck all the rest of the tens of thousands of people there. Me, I only care about my friends.” He bared his teeth, but couldn’t make it a smile.
“You did the right thing. And it cost you your eye, but you believed it was going to cost you both your eyes and your life. It did save Karris and Ironfist—but you didn’t know it was going to do that. That wasn’t why you held back. The world may never know or understand, but that was your greatest moment. Dazen, you laid down your life for people jeering at you and enjoying your torture.”