He strode quickly through the single hall that separated the halves of this level. He and the White each had one-half of the floor. Because of the Chromeria's rotation, Gavin's half was always pointed toward the sun. An odd irony that the White should be forever in shadow, though in her elder years this White had appreciated it. It minimized the temptations of drafting and hastening her own death. Gavin wondered again how she did it. Without drafting, he would feel empty, weak. Life wouldn't be worth living without chromaturgy. It defined who he was. Surely it had done the same for the White, and yet she lived on, her will still iron, her back unbowed.

Stepping past the Blackguards guarding her room, he knocked on her door.

"She's not here," the man on the left said. "The White has gone to meet with the Chromeria. She thought it would be rude to keep the full Spectrum waiting because of one man's tardiness."

This was how the Blackguards registered their displeasure. His own Blackguards knew where he was going as soon as he turned toward the White's room rather than toward the lift, but they didn't tell him. The White's Blackguards knew where he was going as soon as they saw him, but they didn't tell him the White was gone until he knocked, causing him to waste more time and be even later. One man's tardiness? What's the Spectrum going to talk about without me? I called the meeting.

As was typical, the Blackguards were careful in showing their irritation. There would be no more trouble from them for a while, Ironfist would see to that. If they peeved Gavin more than occasionally, he would do more to avoid them and they wouldn't be able to do their job of protecting him. Still, they wanted him to respect them. Which he did, after a fashion.

It's an odd person who volunteers to jump in front of an arrow when they don't even know if they'll like the Prism or White that they'll be assigned to guard. But he wouldn't be chained. Power was freedom. Power had to be maintained.

"If you can't serve me well," Gavin said to his own two Blackguards, "you can't serve me at all." He turned on his heel and started walking toward the lift.

Of course they said nothing. They simply accompanied him on his left and right. Commander Ironfist trained them to ignore orders that put their charges in danger.

Gavin waved his arms down, drafting bars of blue luxin strengthened with yellow down to his left and right. His Blackguards hesitated momentarily as he kept walking briskly, and he closed the gap in the middle. He kept walking, not even looking back as he threw up walls of solid blue, red, green, yellow, and superviolet.

It satisfied a small part of him. His brother really had gotten under his skin. The bastard.

But at the same time, this was necessary. The Blackguard had to know they couldn't control him. That was how smart bodyguards worked: impede your freedom a little, then a little more, and soon they had their way. Gavin wasn't going to let that happen. If he had the Blackguard hovering around him at all times-as they ultimately wished-they would learn not just his secrets like the skimmer and the condor, but his final secret. What would the Blackguard do if they found out that Gavin wasn't Gavin at all? They might decide he was the de facto Prism and that was enough. Or they might decide he was a threat to the real Prism. Or he might split the Blackguard into warring camps. Pleasant thought, a bunch of elite warrior-drafters trying to destroy each other. That was what made this necessary. The Blackguard must be taught and taught again to accept the crumbs Gavin let drop: You can protect me if you serve me wholeheartedly, and I'll withdraw that privilege whenever I please for any reason or none.

At first, years ago, Commander Spear had punished those Blackguards who let Gavin escape them. When that didn't work, he'd made the punishments public, shaming the Blackguards for that which wasn't their fault. Gavin had felt awful, and had not changed a bit. Commander Spear had escalated the punishments, publicly flogging several men, including a young Ironfist. Gavin had responded by yawning and not letting any Blackguards near him for a month. Then he'd walked through crowded markets, leaving bound and gagged the Blackguards that Commander Spear sent, and he'd done it in the aftermath of the war, when there had been not a few men who would have gladly killed him.

When there finally was an assassination attempt and no Blackguards present, Commander Spear had discharged the six Blackguards who were supposed to be protecting Gavin. The White had finally stepped in and discharged Commander Spear instead. Gavin hadn't felt sorry for the man. Once he'd learned that using Gavin's guilt against him wouldn't work, he should have tried something else. A man who couldn't change tactics shouldn't be in charge of the Blackguard in the first place.

The move hadn't made Gavin any friends, but it had left him in charge. Besides, he didn't need friends. The two Blackguards at the lift looked at each other as he approached. The woman on the left was short but as thick as a bull. She said, "High Lord Prism, I notice you don't have an escort. May I join you?"

Gavin grinned. "Since you ask so nicely," he said.

They opened the lift for him, and in moments he was on the next level below his and the White's floor. The Blackguards on watch blinked at his sole escort. Doubtless they knew the guard rotation, and knew she wasn't supposed to be on Prism duty, nor was the Prism supposed to be guarded by only one Blackguard.

"High Lord Prism," one of them said, a tall red/orange bichrome youth only twenty years old, thus quite talented. "May I accompany you?"

"Thank you, but no," Gavin said. "You can't protect me from what's waiting here."

Gavin had told Kip that the White tried to balance the Prism's power, but he didn't like it much when she did.

He stepped into the council room. The Colors were scattered around the table. For formal events, they would sit in order around the table: Sub-red, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Superviolet, Black, Prism, White. For meetings like this one, however, the pull of sitting by friends or the lure of grabbing one of the more comfortable chairs outweighed the natural tendency to sit in the same spot every time. Gavin found the last spot, between the Superviolet, a tall, skin-and-bones coal-black Parian woman named Sadah, and the soft, lighter-skinned Ruthgari man with the beaded beard, Klytos Blue.

Gavin had told Kip that each Color represented a country, and that was mostly true. Each satrap or satrapah appointed one Color. It was the most important decision most rulers ever made. But the system had begun to break down even before the False Prism's War, when Andross Guile had bribed and blackmailed his way into the Red seat, though the Blood Forest already had one Color. He'd been so audacious, he'd stolen that seat from Ruthgar, claiming that the Guiles' sliver of swampland in Ruthgari made him eligible for the Ruthgari seat.

Of course, after the war, similar logic had been used to deprive Tyrea of a seat.

There were so many interlocking and overlapping layers of loyalty it was dizzying. Both the Red and the Green were Ruthgari and thus likely to unite on any issue concerning Ruthgar. But the Green was also cousins with Jia Tolver, an Abornean woman who was the Yellow. The Aborneans strangled both Parian and Ruthgari trade through the Narrows, so anything to do with trade would see them at each other's throats, but on anything else they might try to form a bloc. The Sub-red was a Blood Forester, who were allies now with their stronger neighbors the Ruthgari, but her parents had been killed in the war by the Green's brothers. And on it went. Every noble family in the Seven Satrapies did everything it could to get at least one son or daughter into the Chromeria, if for nothing else than to try to watch their backs.