“And there’s no clue who does it. Maybe the Angari who come in through the Everdark Gates? But I’m getting ahead of myself. ‘Then will seven towers collapse, and with them, seven satrapies.’ Obviously the falls of the seven towers and satrapies are figurative—collapse, political dissolution. Sorry, I’m overexplaining, of course you know that.”
“We’re grasping at straws. Too much explanation might actually be the perfect amount to trigger some new understanding. Please go on.”
She does: “ ‘Ye shall know the time is short when bane rise from the seas.’ I preserved the ‘ye’ instead of ‘you’ because he adopts a high tone here, an almost heraldic alarum. And apparently, this prophet believes the bane to be literal, physical things. He believes the loci damnata are real places, real temples of the false gods, the damned. ‘Atirat will rise off Ruic Head.’ ‘Off Ruic Head’ is a little tricky. Ruic Head wasn’t called Ruic Head at the time. It was the ‘fist sinister of the Iron Mountains.’ So the left hand of the Red Cliffs. Most agree that means Ruic Head, but it is a bit of an extrapolation. Further, ‘off’ could mean near or even on Ruic Head. It’s more often ‘inside Ruic Head,’ so it might mean ‘on Ruic Bay’? Or maybe ‘buried in the ground beneath Ruic Head itself’? Alternately, if we wanted to take it a metaphorical direction, ‘inside the left fist’ could merely mean ‘in the power of’ a political entity near Ruic Head, the city of Ru itself. But I don’t think so.”
“If a bane appears near Ruic Head, I imagine we’ll notice,” I say drily. “So it doesn’t matter. The ambiguity will likely clear itself up in time.”
She continues, “ ‘and she who births him will become Ferrilux.’ This could be an actual birth, but I’ve never heard of the gods literally giving birth to other gods, especially of such disparate colors as super-violet and green. And that Atirat rises from nearby doesn’t suggest growing up from infancy; rather it suggests a god in full.”
“So this woman will help Atirat . . . become Atirat?” I ask. We have so little idea how godhood is conferred or perhaps recognized. It is not something lost to the black, I don’t think, though; I think it has always been secret.
Felia says, “And then this woman, this goddess, will at some indeterminate point later become Ferrilux, which is intriguing as Ferrilux is traditionally male. I’ve considered that this may be symbolic if the ‘she’ is a nation or a satrapy, but that would be a strange construction.”
“Not that prophecies are noted for their plain language.”
“Which makes this one all the more striking,” Felia says. “It could be a poetic phrasing, because that seemed appropriate to the subject matter of goddesses?” She spreads her hands, as puzzled as I am.
“As you were,” I say.
“Then ‘She will open the Gates fully, which have been cracked.’ The ‘have been cracked’ isn’t the same as our idiom ‘opened a crack.’ It means ‘leaking’ as in ‘slightly broken,’ like a cracked egg. Some believe—and I concur—that at some point during Lucidonius’s or Vician’s time, the Gates were fully closed and let no water at all through, which hasn’t of course been the case for centuries. But this woman will open the gates all the way.”
“Which would make us entirely vulnerable to the Angari.”
“Maybe they aren’t warlike anymore. It’s been centuries,” Felia says. “But then, this prophecy doesn’t exactly strike such a hopeful note.”
“On the other hand,” I say, “if ‘the Everdark Gates’ actually does mean the gates of hell . . . there might be something worse than the Angari waiting to come through.”
Felia purses her lips. “Not a hopeful note at all, huh? ‘From Tyrea’ is the last fragment, and then the rest is redacted. She, the new Ferrilux, will come from Tyrea, or something or someone else? There’s not enough context to guess.”
I look at the words again:
If upon the day when the Everdark Gates open full and the bane touch the Jaspers, there stands no Lightbringer on the Jaspers’ shore, then shall the Chromeria fall. As a river of blood pours from the Prism’s Tower, then will seven towers collapse, and with them, seven satrapies. Ye shall know the time is short when bane rise from the seas. Atirat will rise off Ruic Head, and she who births him will become Ferrilux. She will open the Gates fully, which have been cracked. From Tyrea—
The words seem writ in fire to me. I have no doubt they are true. This prophecy alone doesn’t give us the evidence we’d hoped for, but it gives us what’s at stake, and the time frame.
“What do we do?” I ask.
Felia is the only one in the world of whom I would ask such a question.
She studies me with eyes aglow with orange luxin, with love, with intelligence, and with pride. A man cannot long endure a look of total love and acceptance without turning aside or being changed forever.
I hold her gaze.
She puts her hands on my forearms, looking up at me, and when she speaks, her voice is soft but unyielding. “How we direct all the resources of our wealth and our connections and our intelligences and our considerable powers hinges on your answer to one question. My husband, my lord . . .”
Suddenly, I can feel the waters of history streaming past us, the passions of men and the desires of nations, the Chromeria spinning like a great wheel of a water mill driven by the politics of satraps and satrapahs, ambitious Colors riding the wheel up and eventually down, but the mill’s gears disengaged, its teeth whizzing purposelessly, all our power not even touching the great stationary millstone of history. But I stand at the lever. With one word, one decision, I may grind nations into wheat and chaff, I can be destroyer or savior. Both.
And I want to. If only to show that I can.
She studies me, and she knows. She translates my every blink and half-formed grin and twitched expression effortlessly, perfectly, my puzzling heart pellucid to her perspicacity. I am a text full open to her translation.
And yet she trusts me.
She speaks the question we have hinted at and dodged and joked about and hungered to know, but have never, never said aloud: she says, “After all we’ve seen and all we’ve learned . . . who are you, Andross Guile?”
“I am . . .” and the next words hang gleaming in the air like a glittering sword, a challenge, a taunt to those who had reached for it before me and been crushed by the unsupported weight of their presumption. “I am . . .” I say, and I leap into the teeth of history, and I break open its jaws with the lever of my audacity and power. “I, Andross Guile, am the Lightbringer.”
Chapter 39
Kip and Tisis stood atop Greenwall where Ben-hadad had placed one of the mirrors he’d found in storage. It had fit perfectly in the frame, and with a little grease, it spun easily, just as Ben predicted. Kip had dismissed them all then. There were preparations to make, regardless of what he decided here tonight. Whatever he decided, he was going to get a lot of people killed.
He looked out over his city, his people, and what could be his satrapy.
Partly to avoid what he had to decide, but also partly because he was tired of everything being all about him all the time, he took his wife’s hand and said, “What’d you do today, dear?”