“How did the tailor take my instructions?” Karris asked the younger of the slaves.

“I believe ‘apoplexy’ is the word. But obedience, too.”

Karris grinned at the Blackguards. “Pull this down. All this silk is under tension, and this razor embedded in this channel should cut it instantly. So if I need to fight—or, more likely, if I’m injured and you need to carry me away from danger or see how bad a wound is, you can cut the dress off in a matter of moments.” She turned to the slave. “Shorter sleeves next time.”

“He said if you asked for shorter sleeves to tell you to look for another tailor, because he’ll be jumping off each of the seven towers until one of them finally agrees to release him from this hell you’ve confined him in.”

Karris laughed. “Is it a universal rule that the more talented the artist, the more of a pain in the ass?”

“We’re all pains in the ass if we can get away with it,” Samite said. “Great artists are just allowed to get away with it more.”

Waving away the slaves now just fluffing her skirts, Karris asked, “How do I look? Never mind. Don’t answer that. It’s too late to change. Noon waits for no one.”

She stopped at the door, though.

“Some of you know already, but some of you are too young to know me. I don’t look forward to this. I’ve killed wights and men, and I don’t even like killing wights. There is a time to agonize, and there is a time to act. Today we do what must be done, and we don’t shrink from the truth or from our duty. Trainer Samite, you remember Ithiel Greyling?”

“Of course. Those Blue-Eyed Demon mercs put a dung-smeared arrow through his hand,” Samite said. “May Orholam send them to a lower hell.”

“Ithiel knew those arrows. You try to treat them, and you get gangrene. You die, always. The chirurgeon said he could just take the hand at the wrist, but you’d still risk death. If he’d done that, maybe Ithiel could have been a trainer, like you. But Ithiel had two boys. He didn’t want to give up fighting, didn’t want to give up the Blackguard he loved. His wife had already done that in order to marry him. But he loved his family, too, and wanted to be there for them. So we took off his arm at the elbow. Instantly.”

“Bravest thing I ever saw,” Samite said.

“To realize in an instant that you aren’t going to have the life you’d hoped for, but not waste a moment complaining, instead acting instantly to save what good you can? That’s more guts than I’d have had,” Karris said. Orholam have mercy, Karris hadn’t been thinking of Gavin until the very moment she said the words. She pushed it away, tried to get back on track. “He lived until just a couple years ago, didn’t he?”

“Indeed. And raised two damn fine sons,” said Watch Captain Tempus.

No one was looking at Gavin and Gill Greyling, but Teia saw tears streaking down both their faces to see their father honored so.

“What we do today, with this execution, is that cut,” Karris said quietly. “We may cut too deep. We may kill men who could have been saved. The one is all rot, but the other two, in gentler times… Perhaps they could be treated with gentler medicine. Today we cut deep so we may save the whole body. But I want you to know, I hate it, too.”

Quentin, Teia thought. We’re going to kill you. Dear Orholam, Quentin.

Chapter 22

I’m no better than my brother. But I live.

Gavin waited, starving, fasting, wondering if his father saw him or if he had been forgotten. His entire gambit rested on his father’s seeing him choose death, and the water flushing the cell every week erased all evidence of that.

Nor would Gavin necessarily even know if his father came down to observe him and left.

But you can never blink when you stare down a Guile.

There was only the bland trickle of water, so slight that it usually clung to the ceiling and coursed down the wall with only the occasional drip. It had, over the years, worn a slight gutter in the blue luxin. He plugged that gutter with the two remaining fingers of his left hand, watched the water back up and spill out of the gutter and finally course around his fingers and into oblivion.

Death always finds a way.

Stop what gaps you may;

Scream defiance that you live,

Life leaks through the mortal sieve.

When he’d constructed these cells, he’d thought that there were two main problems with any prison: what comes in, and what goes out. He’d spent restless nights figuring out exactly how to deliver the food, and how exactly to take away the waste and the water.

He’d gotten it exactly backward. The problem with a prison isn’t what comes and goes; it’s what stays.

When he shat—rarely now, it had been so long since he’d eaten, but it had been a problem from the beginning—he had to wipe with his left hand like the barbarians of old in the Broken Lands. There was no way to wash his hand adequately after. Thus, when he ate, he had to tear apart his bread with right hand and his teeth, feral.

Once in the first days, he forgot, and ate three bites with both hands.

The Mighty Gavin Guile, the High Lord Prism, the Emperor of the Seven Satrapies, the Promachos of Orholam, the Defender of the Faith—shit eater.

He’d pondered then, for days straight, whether that was to be the end of him. Would he get some infection and shit out his life, while his father watched—or, worse perhaps, didn’t? He had no idea how often his father checked on him, but it couldn’t be often. Regardless of how the old arachnid did it, getting down here wouldn’t be easy. Harder still to keep his passage secret and to come and have no one notice the absence.

Gavin had never gotten sick, though, which proved something profound about him or Orholam or the state of natural philosophy. What that profound something was, he wasn’t sure, which definitely proved something about himself.

At the very least, the shit eating and his sick fear afterward had made the fasting more palatable.

After the first days, the hunger had passed. He almost missed it, insane as that was, for it had been a constant distraction. A blessed distraction from what that demon in the glass, his own tormenting reflection, had said. ‘You, Dazen, are the Black Prism.’

He had convinced himself, somehow, that he hated Sun Day. That he hated ritually murdering all those drafters. He’d convinced himself that he was being noble when he hunted down wights personally. He was saving people’s lives! He’d convinced himself that he had gone to the White Oak estate that fateful day for love.