The Broken Eye(281)

“Oh, I see what this is,” Gavin said. “You’re going to let her take my eyes, and you still think I might be made an ally afterward.”

Her lips thinned. “Your eyes are lost already, Gavin Guile. Put them in the ledger with my dead father and forty thousand other dead Ruthgari fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. Then do your calculations. If you want to save the Seven Satrapies, you need me.”

“If you attack me, you’ve already attacked the Seven Satrapies. I am the Seven Satrapies, and treason is death.”

Another, last chariot clattered overhead.

Her face steeled. “Look at yourself before you threaten me, Gavin Guile. You are not that which once you were. You’re a haggard old man with half a hand, and soon to be blind. You can’t draft. Orholam has begun your punishment, and I will finish it. Tomorrow is Sun Day, and you won’t have returned. You were absent on Sun Day last year. The Chromeria can’t be without a Prism for two years straight. The luxiats won’t tolerate it. You’ve probably already been stripped of that title in absentia, and you’ll be replaced with a Prism-elect tomorrow. There is nothing you can do to stop that. All you can do is try to save an empire that is no longer yours. That’s your option, but know this, Gavin Guile, once-Prism: no one spurns the Malargos family thrice.”

She spat on him. No doubt she’d intended to spit in his face, but most of it hit his shoulder.

Still, it communicated the feeling fairly clearly.

She walked out. “I’ll ring when it’s time,” she told the soldier. Then she was gone.

The soldier said nothing.

Gavin said nothing. Eirene had been his last hope. He knew it. He knew, and yet he couldn’t believe. There had always been some way out for Gavin Guile. There had always been a door that his genius and his power had let him open that no one else had even seen.

That was me.

Was.

Several minutes later, a bell rang. Gavin cracked his neck right and left. The soldier went to a lever and pulled, and Gavin began his ascent. The great trapdoor overhead sank and slid aside in a shower of sand and sunlight into his darkness.

He remembered, for one moment, that which he did not want to remember—he remembered emerging from the very bowels of darkness, bringing hell to earth at Sundered Rock, and climbing step by step out of it, the darkness finally parting and light pouring in, but light weaker, light stricken, light sickened. The world was not what it had been, before his victory, and he thought it not his eyes alone that had changed.

Until now. What I did was sixteen years in catching up to me. Why so long?

The great murmurs of a crowd of fifty thousand souls hit him first, before he even emerged from the darkness. Layered atop that was the thin, cutting voice of Eirene Malargos, projecting as loudly as she could. She had not the gift of orators and singers and generals, though. At the far points of the hippodrome’s open floor, women who did have that gift listened intently and then repeated each line perfectly. It gave an odd, delayed response, but Eirene had learned the art of keeping her speeches short and pointed. Some nonsense: this man attacked our guest; according to Parian law, this malefactor will lose his eyes for his crime.

What else was there to be said?

And the crowd, Orholam forgive them, whipped up by their favorites’ victories or losses, roared with bloodlust. Gavin’s people, they had been. Now they roared for his eyes.

And roared once again as he came level with the ground and they saw him for the first time.

And then he saw the Nuqaba’s crowning touch. The rich families of Ruthgar took turns sponsoring the games and races. Even the absent Guiles did it, though not as lavishly as others. Gavin couldn’t see the Guile red on the banners or on the tunics and ribbons worn by those—he assumed—few who still favored his family here. But he could recognize his family’s crest on the biggest flags. This was the Guiles’ race day. Gavin was going to be blinded at his own party.

You are one vindictive bitch, Haruru.

He was surrounded by soldiers and three drafters, each with their hands already stained with color. He guessed blue, red, and green, though there were too many scents in the air to tell for sure. That was where most people went for offensive magic. They were serious. Gavin was unchained, forced to stand, and marched over the sand toward the spina, the center line of the hippodrome, which had a raised platform on it that would insure that everyone would be able to see his punishment.

Same platform he’d stood on when he ended the Blood War.

He stumbled on his hobbles as he climbed the stairs, and laughter rang out.

His people. How he hated them.

Then he saw the coal bucket, smoking. Two iron pokers rested in it, each with a tip as narrow as a pupil. He looked around the hippodrome. Fifty thousand people, and not one friend. In the satrap’s box, he saw the Nuqaba looking at him, smiling. She was mouthing something to him. She was too far away for him to read her lips, but he could guess: ‘Useless.’ She was enjoying Gavin Guile impotent at least as much as she would enjoy seeing him blinded. Then she and everything else became a blur. He saw people moving, mouths moving, but he stopped hearing.