Essel reached to close the door, then hesitated. “Gav was a great kid. I miss him, too.”
Karris took a deep breath, letting the sorrow flow through her. “I miss a lot of us,” she said.
Essel nodded, though there was a flash of sorrow there. Even between them there was a bit of death, a gap of secrets held, old trust between comrades abrogated—not by malice but by duty and war. She went.
* * *
In the next hours as Karris read, over perfectly hot kopi—it turned out Amzîn was a sub-red—the worries and tribulations of the night faded away as her attention was seized wholly by the advice and the stories the Whites before her had left to help her. Here were lessons from hundreds of years of women and men who’d led and protected drafters through the reigns of Prisms great and good and wretched and bitter and venial (not just one or two of those having reputations from other sources that differed widely from what the Whites past reported). But then they began referring to things that Karris couldn’t understand. Sections were missing. There were blank lines, perfectly erased. Later Whites had clearly tried to piece together what was missing, obviously as perturbed as Karris was now.
And the revelations came in, like waves pounding wet sand in Karris’s heart. And a new dedication, a new direction, and a new mission was born as the night yielded to the dawn in a single-breath prayer that broke from a chrysalis of horror and blasphemy at Karris’s lips. “Oh my God,” she repeated, as she flipped the pages one by one.
“Oh my God.”
It wasn’t a reverent salutation beginning some sacerdotal benediction; it was the curse of a warrior who’d just taken a mortal wound.
“Oh my God.”
It wasn’t the hushed intonation of a supplicant seeking divine favor; it was the shock of an officer coming upon the scene of a massacre, with his men standing, bloody, near the innocent slain.
But given time, horror fades, and repetition makes what was unthinkable now normal; the monstrous is made manageable. For mankind adapts to every horror.
This can’t have happened.
This happened but not often.
This happened often, but this happens no longer.
This happens still but not often.
This happens often, but this is what must happen. This is what someone must do.
This is what I must do.
This is what I will do.
I am doing this.
I have done that, and it is what you must do in your turn.
“O my God,” Karris said, “please, please, save us.”
And the words were that commander’s grief, as he held a dead child in his arms, at finding out the massacre hadn’t been committed by some mortal foe but by his own men.
“O my God, save us from what we’ve done.” Save us, Orholam, from You.
Chapter 38
~The Guile~
38 years ago. (Age 28.)
“This is like no prophecy I’ve ever seen, Andross,” Felia says. She is nineteen years old and heavily pregnant with our first child. A son, she thinks. I’ve always wanted a girl first, to take care of me in my old age. It’s a disappointment I can’t hide from her, but she forgives me this, as she forgives so much else.
“I should hope not. This one might cost me drafting for thirty-eight years.”
She ignores that. Through another scroll we discovered when it’s likely the seal on the Everdark Gates will fail. That, plus this scroll, gives us either that the Lightbringer already came, years ago, and no one noticed; or that he is still to come thirty-eight years from now. So in order to see the prophecy fulfilled—if this prophecy is true—we’ll have to live another thirty-eight years. That means giving up drafting. Not exactly how either of us wants to live.
She sighs. “For a prophecy, that which hasn’t been redacted is so clear. Which makes me wonder if it’s somehow deceptive. You understand. You’ve seen the others: even the ones we know are from true prophets brim with phrases like ‘when brother turns against brother, and men put power over religion’ that obviously apply to every era. True, but useless. This . . . this is so different, it doesn’t surprise me that other scholars have questioned its veracity, its provenance, even the prophet’s sanity.”
She’s translated the scrolls for us. Felia has a knack for all learning, and with her charm and familial connections, she’s had the opportunity to study every discipline that has captured her interest with its foremost scholars. She is like unto a desert, leaving men once fat with knowledge desiccated. She is a hooded lamp, never bragging of her brightness, but taking for fuel everything that comes to the hungry wick of her intellect. She is now doubtless one of the great linguists of our age, and few of the others even suspect it.
Holding the ancient scroll in my hand, I ask, “Is any other translation possible?”
She chews on a finger. We both wonder if she’s missed something, so she goes through it phrase by phrase to see if I have any questions that might shine light on something she missed.
She says, “ ‘If upon that day,’ or ‘at the time,’ a constrained time, but usually it means ‘on the same day’ ‘when the Everdark Gates open full.’ That’s pretty clear: the Gates will have been open to some degree before then—and I do know that the translation of ‘Everdark Gates’ is certain; I’ve seen it elsewhere in even older scrolls. Unless you want to go really recursive, and say that ‘the Everdark Gates’ means ‘the gates of hell,’ since we know that’s how they got their name in the first place.”
“Let’s not get too deep here,” I say. “The whole premise was that this prophecy is remarkably unambiguous.”
“For a prophecy, yes,” she said. “But you’re right. Here we go: ‘and the bane touch the Jaspers’ is when the bane—plural, no note of how many—literally touch the Jaspers. If on that day, ‘there stands no Lightbringer’—again, ‘Lightbringer’ is used elsewhere, no ambiguity—‘on the Jaspers’ shore’—not necessarily literally standing, it’s often used colloquially the way we do: the Lightbringer is there, on the Jaspers, possibly literally on the shore of one island or the other. They didn’t call them the Jaspers then, but they referred to the islands in a manner that was consistent. They thought of them as four islands, including Cannon Island and another low island that is believed to have been sunk when the Everdark Gates closed and the sea rose. I have translated that bit as ‘the Jaspers’ for simplicity. ‘Then shall the Chromeria fall.’ In this context, ‘fall’ seems to mean both figuratively and literally. ‘As a river of blood pours from the Prism’s Tower’ is simply, ‘As a river of blood pours from or around a tower the Prism in some special sense climbs’—thus, ownership: ‘His or her tower.’ The same word for tower is used again in the next sentence.”
“Is ‘a river of blood’ sacrifices, or a massacre?” I ask.
“The Freeings have been going on a long time without causing a fall of the satrapies, so I’m guessing that the fall of the satrapies begins with this massacre around the Prism or his seat of power.”
“So maybe everyone on the Jaspers will be killed first,” I say.