Tisis launched herself at him, screaming incoherently.
He slapped her hard, as if he’d been waiting for it.
Then he leaned over, just as Quentin finally made his way to the front.
“Careful, sweetheart. I’m going to interpret that pathetic attack as spirit, fire, whatever you want to call it. But do it again, and I call it treason. And you’ve seen what I do to traitors.” He turned. “Now, then, what’s happening up on top of my tower?”
Tisis’s nose was streaming blood, but she rose to her hands and knees.
Just in front of her, one of the Lightguard shifted his weight and put a hand on his hip, flaring his cloak out around where his pistol was tucked, cocking it with the back of his hand as he did so, as if by accident. He cleared his throat to cover the sound, looking away.
Zymun’s back was turned, and the Lightguards were turning with him to head back to the Chromeria.
Tisis leapt to her feet, grabbing the pistol from the Lightguard’s belt. She leveled it at the back of Zymun’s head, not a pace away.
But a spear butt flashed up between them and threw the pistol into the sky. And in a blink the spear’s holder—the Lightguard commander, Aram—was holding Tisis, his spear under her neck, choking her.
“Treason!” Aram shouted.
Several other Lightguards took up the shout. It all had the feeling of something poorly choreographed. The people in the square looked merely horrified.
“My lord!” Aram said loudly. “What should we do with this traitor?”
Zymun put his hand to his heart as if sorely wounded. “No, no, no. Tisis, why?!” He lowered his voice. “Thank you for giving me the excuse, my dear. Oh, and just so you know—that pistol wasn’t even loaded. You stupid, stupid girl.”
He turned back to the crowd. “The Glare is too cruel for this poor woman. And I shouldn’t want her to have to wait for justice. Who knows what might happen before tomorrow? Put a rope up on the Glare, and hang her. Immediately.”
“No!” someone cried out in the crowd.
Zymun went purple. “What? You saw what she just tried to do! She tried to kill me!”
“Mercy, my lord, mercy!” someone shouted.
Others began to take up the chant.
“Enough!” Zymun screamed. “Who the fuck do all you people think you are, anyway? I am the High Lord Prism Zymun Guile. I am untouchable. Invincible. To dare to raise your hand against me is to die! And anyone who says different will share this traitor’s fate. The next to shout for mercy will hang beside her. This I swear!”
The crowd fell silent, aghast. A young man stepped forward as if to shout—but his family grabbed him and clamped a hand over his mouth.
“What’s the holdup?” Zymun demanded. “Hang her!”
The Lightguards shuffled their feet. “Sir, there’s . . . We don’t have any rope. All the supplies like that have been taken for the barricades. We—”
Zymun cursed them. “No one has rope? Surely someone here has rope! And someone, give me a musket. No, no, a blunderbuss. We Guiles are hard to kill, and I need to make sure about my brother.”
Quentin could tell no one was going to offer rope, not even if they had it.
Suddenly, he found himself stepping forward. “My lord! High Lord Prism, I don’t have a rope, but . . . but I do have this good strong belt.”
“Off with it, then. I have things to do.”
Quentin began unwinding his silk belt. He said, “I have a confession to make, High Lord Prism. As you are now the head of our faith, it is forbidden for me to keep secrets from you. Too long the High Magisterium has violated this dictum. With Gavin Guile, we—”
“Oh, hurry it up,” Zymun said. To a Lightguard, he said, “There, that blunderbuss. It is loaded, yes?”
“Lord Prism,” Quentin said loudly, “by the command of the promachos and the White, I was invested as a luxor.”
“A luxor?” Zymun asked.
“Yes, my lord. My sacred and, until now, secret duty is to root out filth in the Chromeria.”
“Good, good,” Zymun said, checking the flint. “I can certainly put you to work—”
With a tone of certainty and authority that Quentin had never before heard in his own voice, he declared, “In the eyes of God and the Magisterium, you, sir, are filth.”
“What?” Zymun asked, looking up, more surprised than outraged.
None of the Lightguards had thought to train a musket on the effete little rich-robed young man who was helping them. His two hands came up, and the two hammers of the most expensive pistols money could buy came down.
They fired simultaneously, blowing off half of Zymun’s head.
Both pistols had fired. Ilytian handiwork. One had to admire that. The Ilytians made fine pistols.
Chapter 137
This time, the magic came easily. It hit Dazen like liquid joy, spreading throughout his body as if he were a starving man eating a ripe peach, licking the juice from his fingertips, exulting in the sweetness.
As black had marched him like a prisoner to the brink of death, so white freed him and filled him with vigor. Within moments of beginning to drink from the fountain at his feet, he felt as if he had slept a long, full night in a feather bed and awakened to a gentle dawn, his bride warm beside him and the smells of a fine repast filling his nostrils.
White luxin was Orholam’s warm regard for the world.
How did we lose this? How could we let this go?
Like that sleeper waking, stretching his arms, Dazen stretched out his magic luxuriously toward the Chromeria, and the pains stretching thus brought him were pains leaving his body. White blazed out from him to the horizon and beyond, toward his beloved islands, his beloved wife, and all those many others he loved there. It was a great gift—a privilege!—to bring such light.
Dazen’s will burned white through the darkness, over the face of waters as if tracing the white-luxin line Kip had thrown toward him back to its source.
As he raced back, he felt a whisper of will in the fading white luxin Kip had cast. Was it a prayer? Desperation, but no message was discernible at this distance as the luxin was disappearing. Dazen’s heart leapt. It was Kip’s will, Kip’s voice!
Kip was alive?!
But then he realized, like a distant cannon’s flash outruns the sound of its firing, that what he was sensing now, becoming clearer and clearer with every league his will came closer, was only the last echo of his dead son’s voice. And yet he grabbed after it, desperately, that this one remaining piece of Kip might not be lost to him.
The message became clear only as Dazen closed on the Jaspers themselves.
“Please! God! Please, someone finish what I’ve . . .”
And that was it. Weakly, the voice and the will that had sustained it had trailed off.
Dazen had just heard his son’s final words.
And now the final filaments of the magic decayed so that even that message was lost. Bereaved afresh, Dazen’s will burst back through the still-smoking broken mirror that the slave boy Alvaro had sabotaged, and thence into the mirror network itself.
Kip was gone—dead and removed now from the execution scaffold and the mirrors’ grasp. No trace of living will remained, but the luxin he’d been weaving had not yet decayed completely, though it was unraveling by the moment.