The Black Prism(36)

Gavin looked at the boy they’d just killed thirty of Satrap Garadul’s elite bodyguards to save. He was maybe fifteen, chubby, awkward, with eyes round at what he’d just seen. The child turned and ran toward the river. At first Gavin thought he was fleeing in fear, but then he realized the boy was going to check on his friend, the one Gavin and Karris had come too late to save.

“What is the meaning of this?” a man shouted.

Gavin turned—and cursed himself. He’d been so concerned about the boy and Karris and what was happening down toward the river, he hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening up the road. The roar of the rapids and the waterfall had muffled the sound of hooves, but there was still no excuse. The man who’d shouted had the same weak chin that seemed to beg someone to stick a fist in it that he’d had sixteen years ago, the last time Gavin had seen him. His whole body was quivering with outrage as he took in the carnage that was all that remained of thirty of his supposedly invincible Mirrormen.

But Satrap Garadul’s face changed the moment he saw Gavin. He drew rein even as half a dozen of his drafters and a score of his Mirrormen surrounded him. “Gavin Guile?”





Chapter 17





The White was going to kill him.

Gavin deserved killing. The presence of Satrap Garadul himself changed everything. If these had merely been Satrap Garadul’s soldiers, as Gavin and Karris expected, Gavin could have killed the men and left. Satrap Garadul would be furious and would hunt the drafters who had done it, but he would have had no idea who he was after. It might have simply been that there was a powerful drafter living in—what was this worthless little town called? Rekton, that was it. Oh, the irony.

It was too late to grab the spectacles Gavin kept in a pocket against such eventualities. With spectacles, with what he’d done, he was a mysterious polychrome. Without them, he could only be the Prism.

So now the Prism himself had moved against Satrap Garadul, and there was no denying it. Rask Garadul knew him.

“Gavin?” Satrap Rask Garadul said again. There was something odd in his tone of voice, an intensity, maybe a trap. He was dressed in mail with segments of plate worked in. Smaller segments, not requiring articulated joints. His was a poor country.

He’d changed his seal. It used to be his family’s moon and two stars on a field sable, his personalized with a snarling fox. Now both fox and field had been done away with. The king’s new seal was a white chain, broken, on a black field. Gavin knew instantly that the symbol was important. Rask wasn’t merely repudiating his name and his father, whom he’d always despised as weak. This was new. Had he fallen under the sway of the heresy of the old gods that Gavin had heard rumors about? What was he doing? Why was he asking Gavin’s name when he already knew it was him? Was he giving Gavin an opportunity to lie, to say that he wasn’t the Prism?

If Gavin did so, what would Rask Garadul do? Kill him and explain later to the Chromeria that it had been a mistake; through no fault of his own, he’d killed an attacker who’d disavowed being Gavin Guile. If Rask thought he was going to kill Gavin with a handful of drafters and a score of Mirrormen, he was wrong, but what else could it be? Maybe Satrap Garadul was simply as surprised to see Gavin as Gavin was to see him, and he didn’t know how to play this.

If Gavin lied and Rask attacked, Gavin would have no choice but to kill him. If he killed Rask, he’d have to kill all of Rask’s men. And what would the satrapies make of that? More men were coming down the path behind the satrap even now. Gavin couldn’t kill them all. No matter how strong he was, if a hundred men fled in a hundred directions, some of them would get away. Word would get out that the Prism himself had come to Tyrea and assassinated the satrap without provocation.

It didn’t matter that Satrap Garadul was massacring everyone in this town. It was his town; he could do with it as he saw fit. At one time, a Prism could have destroyed or killed one of his satraps at will, but that time was long past. Perhaps back when the Seven Satrapies had really been satrapies. No longer. His power was ceremonial, religious only. The Prism wasn’t supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of a nation—and Gavin had already more than just interfered. If he killed everyone here, and skimmed back to the Chromeria so he got home within a few days of having left, the Chromeria could plausibly deny that he was responsible. It was too far away for him to have come and gone.

He would kill a man he’d never liked; he would stay out of trouble, and the only people to pay for it would be a bunch of soldiers in the most backward of the Seven Satrapies. Well, the boy might have to die too. Otherwise he could blackmail Gavin. And what would Karris think? Well, what did it matter what she thought? She was an impossibility for him already. He’d known he was going to lose what little he had with her today regardless.