The Broken Eye (87 page)

“What the h—? Your pardon, High Mistress,” Karris said. “I’ve never seen such a thing. How…?”

“Gears and pulleys, he told me. All made of luxin. His trick was to completely encapsulate some open luxin within a couple of the belts, he said. It being open, I can push it with Will alone. Because it’s encapsulated, it doesn’t evaporate. Were I younger, I’d be flipping this chair over right now to understand exactly what he’s done. It can’t be as simple as he’s said, but if it is, or if it’s even close …

“We each tend to think of our time as the end product of all that has come before, which is true, but we like to believe our time is therefore the pinnacle, rather than another pearl on the string. This invention may remake a thousand things, or it may remake only one or two, depending on how efficient it can be made, and over what distances and for how long it can operate, and across what color bands. I may be dying just before the most interesting time in history. I may miss out on a revolution by this much. It’s either intolerable, or very hopeful. I can’t decide which.”

“Come now,” Karris said, “you’re going to live forever.”

“I’ll be dead by Sun Day,” the White said.

Steel bands crushed Karris’s chest. “You mean Sun Day next, surely,” she said, meaning more than a year away.

“I said what I meant.” The way the White said it, it was obvious she meant the Sun Day three days away. “And not another word about that. I’ve been gifted with a long life and a certainty about the date of my passing. Debate about a foregone conclusion is a waste of the little time I have left.”

Karris swallowed the dozen contentions warring to get out of her throat. Not only, if she was honest with herself, to try to convince the White and herself that the White would be around for a long time yet, but also to keep her from bringing up worse things. Sitting in the judgment seat beneath an authority you can’t deny is no place of comfort.

“It is almost sunset,” the White said. “Push my chair to your balcony, would you? I could Will myself there now, I suppose, but I tire.”

So Karris pushed her down the hall to her and Gavin’s rooms. And out to the balcony. The Blackguards insisted on being in the room, at least, with their recent bad experiences with balconies and assassins.

Karris found a heavy cloak for herself and some blankets for the White.

“Take my hand, dear,” the White said.

They watched the sun set together. And in flares of pink and orange and every red, the sun went down to the sea, leaving flaming clouds as a promise of its return. And in the beauty of the sun and sea and clouds and the iron grip of a frail hand that had protected and guided her in ways her own mother never had, Karris found her cheeks damp with tears for all the woundedness in the world. And for her own.

“Look upon the city, and tell me what you see,” the White said.

With the sun so close to the horizon, the city was being swallowed in soft shadows, rising from the ground up. The gleaming domes of every possible color and metal and design shone bright against the whitewashed walls, and the Thousand Stars sparkled, beaming their rays to and fro in their districts. The seven towers of the Chromeria were stunning in this light, too, reaching like longing hands toward the heavens. “I see the most beautiful city in the world,” Karris said. “I see a treasure worth protecting.”

“The Thousand Stars, odd, aren’t they?”

Karris shrugged. They were wonders; their oddness was undeniable, but also unquestionable.

“A vast expense to build such towers, merely to bring drafters a few extra minutes of light each morning and night, don’t you think?”

They were, of course, used for many other things than that: ceremonial, celebratory, practical, but the White knew all that. She meant something else.

Karris turned a questioning glance to the White, but the old woman had turned away from the city to look over the sea as the disk of the sun disappeared.

“Will you tell me about the second time you saw the green flash?” she asked the White.

“The second?! Did I tell you about the first?” the White asked, still looking over the sea. But the sun was fully down; there would be no green flash tonight.

“Gavin told me about the first. Said you saw it at a party and were so excited you jumped—and broke your future husband’s nose as he leaned past you for his wineglass.”

The White’s face broke into a grin at the memory, but she didn’t turn from the sea. “You know, he snored after that. Nose didn’t heal right. I knew I couldn’t really complain about it, but I was young, and I did.” Her smile was tugged down by that old sin, but rebounded. “I miss him so much. He told me I should remarry when he was gone. He never wanted me to be lonely, but I couldn’t find a man who compared to him. Problem with being exceptional, as you know. Perhaps great men are content with marrying a woman who is not their equal, but we great women … Our equals are rare enough in the first place, and then most of those we do find have married twits.”

“We’re victims of our own refined tastes?” Karris asked.

“If Gavin Guile is a refined taste. He’s a rare one, that’s for sure.”

Karris couldn’t talk about Gavin now. Couldn’t begin to touch the well of sorrow that was beginning to turn to rage: how dare he leave her here, alone, to face all this? And the guilt that followed the rage: where was he? What was he suffering? He wouldn’t be away if he could help it, she knew.

She hoped she knew.

“Look now,” the White said. The shadows like a rising tide had swallowed the walls of Big Jasper and rolled upward constantly, lights winking out around the curvature of the land until only the tallest buildings and the Thousand Stars were alight. Then only the Thousand Stars. They burned day into night.

It had been a long, long time since Karris had really looked.

“We drafters are those Thousand Stars, Karris. We have been turned to a hundred purposes, but at heart we have only one: to bring the light into darkness. Each high-set mirror is special indeed, brilliantly crafted, magically made, but in the end elevated not because of its innate specialness but because only by being set high can it serve to bring light where there is darkness. We are elevated to serve.”

For a time, they watched the light reflected from those many mirrors play over Big Jasper. Then the White said, “The second time I saw the green flash, what I call Orholam’s wink, was one of the hardest days of my tenure as White. I was on one of the lower balconies here, thinking about something I’d seen that had terrified me. I thought that if I did the wrong thing, the world would be plunged back into a war that it seemed had just ended. I thought that if I didn’t do something, though, a blacker fate might befall than even that.”

“After the war? What was it?” Karris asked. She’d already run away by then, but she wasn’t aware that there had been huge crises. Small ones, certainly. Perhaps all the putting down of pirates and rebels and the distribution of lands and pillage had been far more dangerous than she had thought, and they only seemed like small challenges because they had been so adeptly handled. Aside from the Tyrean solution, which, though immoral, had kept Tyrea weak for nearly two decades.

“It was the day Gavin came back from Sundered Rock.”

Karris held her breath, and her pulse became thunder in her ears. “Because he was still drugged and didn’t seem himself?” she asked, lying almost smoothly enough to do Lady Felia Guile proud.

“No,” the White said. “Or, alternately, precisely.”

She said nothing more, and Karris didn’t want to insult her by filling the space with words.

“I saw a thing that terrified me, and in my panic, I almost did something rash because I thought I needed to do
something
. And then … Orholam’s wink. I took it as a message that he was with me. He knew. Power is any action that results in consequences. But real power is action that results in the intended consequences. Real power is impossible if not guided by wisdom. I had the power to kill. But Orholam had another plan. That was the second wink.”

It was like the words were in a foreign language, and Karris was struggling to translate them. The White had seen Gavin—and?

And she knew.

Just like that? Instantly? Karris had been in love with the man. Had made love with him. Had focused every fiber of her young soul on her forbidden love—and she hadn’t seen it, but the White had?!

It made her furious. It made her feel stupider than words.

She almost reached out to draft red, to get that affirmation and validation that her rage was deserved. But then she realized she was comparing apples and oranges. The White had found Dazen while he was drugged and in the immediate aftermath of killing his brother. Karris hadn’t spent much time with him before fleeing to conceal her pregnancy. When she’d come back a year later, Dazen had had time to practice being Gavin. They’d only gotten reaquainted when all around him treated him as Gavin. His clothing, speech patterns, hair, and posture were all different.

The point was that the White had known. She’d
known
. And she hadn’t exposed Dazen.

The White said, “How much is a man’s soul worth? For what price will you buy his redemption? Is your answer different if he leads a nation? What if he could affect all of history? What price would be too much? What justice or vengeance would you forgo, for your hope?” She closed her eyes and sighed. Then her lips twisted in a little, reluctant grin, and she opened her eyes again. “He did turn out to be a pretty damn good Prism. Go figure.”

Karris let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. This was surreal. This just simply couldn’t be. “How did you keep it to yourself for so long?”

“To be a White is to know secrets, Karris. But that the position requires spying and skulduggery doesn’t relieve me of the moral obligation for how I use what I know.”

Another breath. “And you’ve known about … me, too? How long?”

“I’ve known about your son since the beginning. Other women I’ve known who have given up children have been haunted by it ever since. So over the years, I gave you several assignments where, had you wished, you could have extended your time to go looking for him without anyone being the wiser. You never took those chances.”

Woodenly, Karris said, “I was … afraid I’d lead spies right to him. Afraid of what I would do, of who he’d become, of what he thought of me.”

“The darkness has not served you well. From what I learned today, I believe now that Andross Guile has known about him for years as well. Be wise as a serpent, child.”

But Karris couldn’t wrestle with her thoughts about her son. Zymun. She hadn’t even known his name. There was too much there, and she didn’t trust herself how she’d react in front of the White. Her chin drifted up, and she pushed that open wound away. Just for the time being.

“I wish … I wish I had the kind of certainty you have. That Orholam is guiding me. I wish I could see him give me a visible sign, like he did you.”

The White chuckled. “Yes, two green flashes, in fifty years. What are the odds? It turns out, if you watch the sunset almost every day, pretty good. Karris, what we see is not determined solely by what is in the world, but also by what is in us. The lens is as important as the light. You think I haven’t questioned those two occasions a thousand thousand times? Besides, Orholam speaks differently to each of his children. I only thought of the green flash as a message because my own grandmother always called it Orholam’s wink. Had you seen it, you would have thought it a curious phenomenon. Orholam may speak to you in ways more pedestrian: through his holy writ, or through his followers’ words, related to you. Could you accept that?”

“Of course.”

“Then hear this word, which is his gift for you. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening. Did Orholam just tell you this now, or have you somehow steered me into this?”

“Orholam has told me this for you a thousand times. In fifteen years, I have never read these words without you filling my mind, but it has been my lot to know and not to tell. Part of the price I pay for my own sins. Even the forgiven must pay penance.”

Sins? What sins had the White committed? Did she think that not telling anyone about Gavin was a sin? Surely not. “What is the word?” Karris asked.

“The Most High will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”

Locusts hadn’t come to the Seven Satrapies since before Lucidonius, but Karris had a luxiat when she was a child who told stories that made the plague as real as a memory. Thought to be an effusion of an imbalance of a surfeit of both green and blue, they came in a cloud, with a sound like distant, unremitting thunder. They spread from horizon to horizon, literally shadowing the land. The mass was like a million chariots descending to pillage the land, and the ancient Seer Jo’El spoke of them marching as in ranks.

Drafters of every stripe, even in that ancient, fractured time, had fought in their waves. Blues tried to draft domes over entire fields. Oranges had tried to manipulate the hordes and turn them to foreign lands. Reds and sub-reds had sprayed the skies with fire. And like candles thrown into the ocean the drafters were extinguished, one by one by one by the thousands.

And everywhere the locusts went, they devoured everything. Nothing green was left. They wiped out not only crops, but whole forests. Trees, denuded of their leaves, simply died in their wake. Men went mad during the assault, screaming, open mouths filled with locusts. Men went mad after, as starvation’s scythe swung. The insect armies left nothing good and green and growing. Nothing but hollow-cheeked children with huge eyes and hunger-swollen bellies, walking on stick legs until they could no longer stand. They curled, not even waving the flies from their eyes. And they died.

And that had been Karris’s life, since the war. Even with Gavin’s coming back, and marrying her, she couldn’t but think of those sixteen years of her life, the flower of her youth, lost, blighted, devoured. And an impotent rage smoldered there, an ever-burning fire that she hadn’t even known was still aflame.

This was her slow suicide. This was her drafting red, so much red she would die young, not precisely on purpose, but not precisely not.