When he’d stepped through to the other side of the mirror, the tower in that other world had been white. It had been as it ought to be, maybe as it had been on this side of the mirror before Vician’s Sin, before the relentless tide of the Chromeria’s murders.
Surely now every bit of the black tower was covered in a great cascade of blood flowing from the Mirror of Waking.
There was an entire tower’s worth of unadulterated black luxin at Dazen’s feet. Pure, concentrated darkness, and the blood of martyrs connected him with all of it.
Dazen plunged his hands again into the flowing blood, smeared it up the blade until it made an unbroken line to his hand.
He gazed at the bloody thing that would be the instrument of his own execution. He had lived by the blade, wrongly sacrificing the innocent. It was only right he himself should be its final sacrifice.
This is for you, Vell Parsham, my first murder. You tried to warn me.
She’d said, ‘End me now, Lord Prism, but someday, may you end it all or be ended. Know that Orholam is just, and tremble.’
This is for you, Edna, who thought your sins so black you couldn’t speak them. I understand you now as I couldn’t then.
This is for you, Titrit, whom I despised. I came to despise myself more.
This is for Dulcina Dulceana . . . He couldn’t think of her, but he remembered her words and his own disbelief at her quiet, her peace. She’d said, ‘You’ve been doing Orholam’s work all day, and will do so all night and through the morrow. Let me give you a gift. The only gift I have. The gift of my five minutes. You may speak or we can be silent. You can Free me first if you prefer solitude, or at the end if you prefer company. As you will.’ She’d believed in him so much—she’d been so generous of spirit that she’d given him her last five minutes: a poor woman giving her last mite to a man whose treasury overflowed.
Her grace had broken him.
Going in to his first Freeing, Gavin had believed in two gods, and with her had died his faith in the wrong one.
This is for you Aheyyad Brightwater, that flower I plucked too soon.
This is for . . . this is for all of you.
Standing beside him, Orholam extended His hand again. Even though He’d just been holding Dazen’s bloody hand moments ago, His own hand was clean. “You want to do this with Me, or alone?”
Dazen slapped his hand into the old man’s. He didn’t know what, if anything, Orholam was going to do, but he’d been a fool trying to do everything on his own for long enough. If a bit of help would help him help those he loved, he wasn’t gonna turn it down.
He braced his feet wide, and taking a deep breath, he put his right hand on the blade before him. His source was a perfect black, unpolluted, deeper than the darkest night, but even with such a source, drafting from a color’s luxin was never efficient; it always generated heat and discomfort, even if you only drafted a little.
Dazen didn’t plan to draft a little.
Dazen never did anything little.
He threw his will down into the whole tower. Everywhere the blood touched, his will connected with the old black luxin.
It shot up into him like an erupting geyser, and filled him, impossibly fast. Beside him, he saw omnichromatic fire erupting from Orholam’s other hand, as if He were scraping the dross from all the black and venting it, allowing Dazen to be filled with purest black alone.
Dazen became the lens focusing a vast well of black light onto a point hundreds of leagues distant.
Then Dazen was filled beyond bursting, and with one last, mighty shout, he threw all his will into one final burst toward that dimly flickering light on the horizon, his beloved White . . .
* * *
With a foot kicking hard against the wight’s chest, Gill Greyling cleared his spear from the still-standing body of his foe, and in the same motion, lengthened his body out as if he were a striking serpent, smashing the spear’s butt directly into the throat of a red wight swinging a war hammer wreathed in flames at Karris’s back. Before the wight even hit the ground, Gill’s spear had spun an arc to slash through his crushed throat.
Ending threats forcefully and with finality, Karris thought dimly. It was what they were trained to do.
But she was a ghost. Already dead inside, she walked the battlefield with the other spirits of the dead lingering only shortly on this side of the veil. The air had shifted. The black-luxin fingers that had reached from beyond the horizon were gone.
Gavin’s will had let go. He was gone. Finally gone.
She had given up on him. She’d failed him. She had thought she wouldn’t know when he died, that such thoughts were the nonsense of young fools in love. But she knew now.
She knew.
And then the air shifted again. Something to do with the black luxin. As if its withdrawal hadn’t been the withdrawal of an attack abandoned but the temporary withdrawal of ocean after an earthquake.
Even the wights seemed suddenly discomfited. Men and wights both paused in their fighting, backing away from their enemies.
“What is it?” Gill asked. “What’s happening?”
Karris was looking out to sea toward her lost love, so she saw it first.
Far out beyond East Bay, the lights of a ship winked out. Then another’s, far to one side. A burning ship’s fires simply disappeared. Then she noticed that the stars on the horizon were gone.
Her breath caught in her throat as she saw it for what it was. Like a sandstorm thundering across the desert, towering into the night, an immense black wave broke over the horizon, wider than the Jaspers themselves, and as high as the clouds.
In the distance, she heard screams at its onslaught.
As if the sea were swelling and devouring all before it in a massive wave, every light on every ship was extinguished in turn, into the bay, and then over the towers, over the walls, and then—in the time it takes to suck in a startled breath—over the Jaspers entire.
All went utterly, utterly black. Blacker than mere night. This was the black of blindness, after a life spent working light. It penetrated everything, soaking everything as water does—then scouring it away with all the strength of an earthquake’s wave.
Eerily, it was silent.
And it was, unmistakably, unquestionably, Gavin.
Then, just as the wails of alarm and despair were rising up from women and men struck blind and dismayed at their sudden loss—the wave was gone.
As light returned to their eyes, Karris could feel the wave dissipating. It had been held together this far, but it wouldn’t last even another league. Gavin had . . .
“promachos,” Gill whispered, awed. “That was him. That was Gavin, wasn’t it? I could feel—How could he draft so much? What did he do?”
A snap and hiss popped next to them, illuminating the merely natural dark of the night with glorious green light. Samite grinned in that wild light.
“The bane,” she said. “Their power’s broken. We can draft!”
Numerous bane-islands were still out there, so at first no one believed her, but then there were slowly the snaps and hisses of glorious colors coming alive from burning mag torches. First a few, then dozens of them drenched the Blackguards and their allies in heady, potent light.
The twenty remaining wights turned and fled.
It was still night. Their position was still precarious. They had only whatever magic they could draft off of their mag torches. But now—now they had a chance!