by Brent Weeks
“Breaker, you’re impulsive, but you aren’t stupid. We didn’t believe for a heartbeat that you’d try to kill the Red. It’s ridiculous! You’re trying to become a Blackguard! Protecting Colors is part of what we do. You wouldn’t throw all that away. But if your father fell overboard, you jumping in after him without a thought? That’s you. Completely.”
Ouch. “How’d you … how’d you hear so fast?”
“Teia. Big gossip.”
“Hey,” Teia said. For some reason, she’d been glowering at Daelos, but she said nothing more.
Cruxer grinned again. “Commander Ironfist thought you’d be here. Said sometimes those who’ve been in battle are a little reticent when they first come back.”
“You weren’t supposed to share that last part, you oaf,” Teia said. “What were you doing there, Kip? With your foot?”
She looked eager to talk about training. Well she might, he supposed. She and Kip were going to talk about her being all bloody in town. But not now.
“You’re bleeding,” Cruxer said.
“Just an experiment,” Kip said.
They gathered around him. “Go on,” Ben-hadad said. He’d seemed uncharacteristically nervous until now, when his eyes lit up at the possibility of a new discovery.
So Kip explained, and then he kicked the bag again, showing them. When you used luxin from one site repeatedly, the body eventually adjusted and there was little blood. But the first few times, it acted like any mundane cut. A cloud of unsealed luxin and blood both shot out of his heel like smoke out of a gun barrel, and this time he didn’t lose his footing. He did nearly wrench his knee, though. The power was incredible.
But the bag lit up. Red.
Everyone stopped and looked at Kip.
“You could, uh, use this lots of ways,” Kip said. “You’d have to, um, figure out your own center of weight and everything, but if you shot some from your shoulders when you ran, you’d run faster. Or when you jumped, you could shoot some—”
“From your ass! You’d be the fart flyer!” Ferkudi shouted. He reminded Kip of an excitable puppy.
They laughed, but only briefly. They were all captivated by the thought of it.
“I was going to say from your hips,” Kip said. “I mean, if you did it from your feet, you’d probably flip over and fall on your head.”
“But you could do it from your ass if you want to, Ferkudi,” Teia said. “Might as well have a wide platform.”
They laughed again, then quieted.
Big Leo turned to Cruxer. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this. Is it forbidden?”
Cruxer shook his head. “It isn’t incarnitive, so I don’t see why it would be. On the other hand, if you were doing it all the time, you might burn through your life in no time.”
“But that’s true of any drafting,” Teia said. “Used judiciously, think of it. We’d be faster, stronger, jump farther.”
“This can’t be the first time anyone’s thought of this,” Kip said, suddenly embarrassed.
“Every brilliant discovery is obvious after someone’s made it,” Ben-hadad said.
“Did you really just come up with this?” Cruxer asked. “No one suggested it to you?”
Kip shrugged.
“He shall be a genius of magic,” Ben-hadad said quietly, as if quoting something. The rest of them stopped, looked at him, looked at each other. Kip could tell they’d talked about it among themselves before.
“Does this mean we’re going to have to fill ourselves full of holes?” Ferkudi asked.
Chapter 26
Aliviana Danavis stood high on the Great Pyramid of Ru, wrapping up teaching the women who would replace her. The four superviolet drafters who had been learning from Liv for the last four months were joined by Liv’s personal guards. That guard had been formed around the core of men who’d helped her seize this very structure during the liberation of Ru.
Phyros was Liv’s rock. Over six feet tall, wide as the sea. When they’d infiltrated the city, he hadn’t worn his lucky cape because it was too distinctive, but usually he didn’t go anywhere with it. It was the skin of a lion, the roaring mouth forming a cap for his head, the mane bunching around his shoulders. Over an alligator-leather vest with many straps, he wore a jade-and-turquoise belt that hooked with great, curving giant javelina tusks. The sheath for his belt knife was a hollowed-out sabre-cat’s fang. He claimed to have killed each of the beasts himself, armed only with that knife. He despised muskets and pistols, but otherwise didn’t have a favorite among weapons. He had two axes that looked like halberds with their hafts cut short in special slings on his back. Someday, he would craft a weapon from sea demon tooth, he said.
From anyone else, Liv would have thought it empty boasting, but Phyros she believed. She’d seen him without a tunic on, and he bore scars from claws and fangs like a man who had done everything he claimed.
The rest of her guard were less conspicuous, but perhaps no less dangerous. Tychos was an orange drafter, one of the best hex casters in the Blood Robes. He was a small man, violent, and strangely direct for an orange. Magic is no match for man, as an old saying went. There were crafty sub-reds and reckless blues. But here, it was probably one of the main reasons why he wasn’t in contention to become the prince’s candidate for Molokh. With one of Tychos’s hexes woven into her cloak, Liv could inspire awe in everyone who looked at it. Or dread. Simply being aware of the hex was usually enough to end the effect—it was an imposition of will and could be broken, but most people hadn’t fought hexes in hundreds of years. Tychos was a khat chewer, his teeth stained red from his constant use of the stimulant. With red teeth and orange eyes, the man would have looked a demon to Liv a few months ago.
But she’d come a long way since she’d left the Chromeria.
She finished up teaching the superviolet drafters how to manipulate the great mirror atop the pyramid, answering their questions, guiding their rough efforts to reach their drafting into the controls and shift the mirror to shoot light into any corner of the city, immediately empowering the drafters there, even late in the day when the shadows were long. Ru would never be as light as Big Jasper, with its Thousand Stars, but this mirror was a wonder. The light from it was as thick and potent as anything Liv had ever seen. It had helped birth a god—a god immediately slain by Gavin Guile, but still.
Unfortunately, turning the mirror this way and that to illuminate the city meant surveying the city itself. Unlike Garriston, Ru hadn’t accepted its liberation joyfully.
The Color Prince had bet it would. Ru had as many reasons to hate the Guiles as anyone: They mercilessly quashed rebellions that had been sponsored by the old royal family. The massacre of the Atashian nobility during the False Prism’s War. Even two short-lived and small uprisings since then. The streets of Ru had run with blood, blood the Chromeria had spilled. Freed of their satrap, they should have been natural allies.
Instead, its subjects had fought fiercely. The prince had been furious. He’d issued an ultimatum for several of the leaders of the resistance to be surrendered to him for immediate execution. When they hadn’t been, he’d gone insane with fury. He’d given his army leave to do whatever they wanted for three days to punish the city.
Liv’s guards had urged her not to go out in the city—even as they had taken turns going out themselves. The advice was simultaneously wise and patronizing. She hadn’t intended to go. But she wouldn’t be stopped from going out by any man. The Chromeria liked to cloak unpleasantness in soft ritual. Liv would have her truths served in hard light, thank you.
Phyros had tried to object one last time, as all of them shifted uneasily and armed themselves: “Eikona”—it was the term for the preeminent drafter of her color. The Blood Robes would have new titles. “Eikona, I understand you want to look. It’s natural. But you’re what? Seventeen years old? Pretty, and a woman.” He scowled. Like she hadn’t noticed her gender.
“Eighteen,” she said, even though she wouldn’
t be eighteen for another ten days. “Thank you for your concern, and fuck you.”
Still, when they went, they’d prominently displayed their Blood Robes.
It had been a nightmare tour. The sights were etched on her eyes. It didn’t bear thinking about now, even though some of the many fires burning in the city below her now were funeral pyres. Huge pyramids of flame. And still it wasn’t finished. There were places the patrols couldn’t go to collect the bodies for burning. It was still too dangerous. So disease spread.
She couldn’t leave too soon. She fingered the black jewel in her pocket. Black luxin, the prince claimed. She didn’t really believe it. It was likely obsidian only, though threads of darkness seemed to swim in the jewel. She didn’t know how the Color Prince had gotten it. Regardless, he believed that it was a means of control. She’d first thought that perhaps he spied through it, but simply seeing wouldn’t be enough to stop a god, would it? Surely it was something more dangerous.
She didn’t like to think about it. Didn’t like to look at it. Didn’t like the feel of it on her skin. But he’d forbidden her to go anywhere without it.
“You have my things?” she asked Phyros.
“Packed and on the galley.” Phyros’s voice was a deep, satisfying rumble that practically made your lungs vibrate themselves, like a tuning fork rung. It was, for some reason, incredibly comforting. She’d heard him bellow in rage with that voice, and having it on her side soothed all sorts of fears. Not that she’d ever let him know it.
The Color Prince didn’t have nearly the number of ships he needed, so Liv and her guard would be traveling in a cheap, poorly constructed galley. Of course, there were villages for the supply of galleys around the entire rim of the sea. Traveling by ship wouldn’t be fast, especially not when they would have to find ports to wait out every winter storm, but it would be faster than walking or riding, and much less dangerous. Any pirates who waylaid them would be in for several unpleasant surprises—though usually, merely announcing the presence of a drafter was enough to convince pirates not to attack. A little blast of luxin into the sky would be enough to turn back all but the most foolhardy.
Most of the class left, including one middle-aged woman who hadn’t even discovered she could draft superviolet until after the death of her husband. One of the Blood Robe drafters had stayed at her boarding house and had administered the test to her on a whim. Middle-aged drafters. It was odd to Liv, but the Color Prince’s vision was for a day when drafting wasn’t a death sentence. Perhaps that day would even come soon enough to make a difference for Liv.
She stepped up to the great mirror one last time. It was easy now. Whoever had built this had meant it to be used. Some long-dead master craftsman. She stopped musing and turned the mirror toward the horizon. Navigators and natural philosophers had known about the curvature of the earth for at least a millennium, but it was the first time Liv had ever had to worry about it. It was also, so far as she could guess, why each of the great mirrors had been constructed on the top of a tall building.
That curvature was why when you watched a departing ship, its hull disappeared first, and it appeared to sink as it got farther away. The natural philosophers had figured out that the rate of that drop was two feet per league. If ‘drop’ made any sense, on a surface that appeared to be flat. You’d think that the calculation of how tall a structure would have to be would be simple—just subtract the total curvature of the earth per league from the height of the structure. Easy. Given that the Great Pyramid was two hundred eighty cubits tall, or four hundred and eighty feet, you should be able to cast light from the beam to a distance of two hundred and forty leagues. If the receiving tower was equally tall, you should be able to double that, right?
Wrong, she’d found out. She’d struggled with her calculations, talking through them aloud with her guards. She’d had to explain to Phyros about the curvature of the earth twice, but then he’d been the one who grasped her model better than she did. She’d drawn on a parchment, then bent it, showing him how it worked. He’d pointed out that she was treating the mirror towers as if they were standing straight up in relation to each other. They stood straight in relation to the ground, but the ground was bent. It was like measuring the height of a man when he was standing straight up versus when he was leaning against a doorframe. The man might still be six feet tall, but the top of his head wasn’t going to be six feet from the ground.
She’d done more calculations, and finally figured it all out—and was still wrong. She had no idea why.
In the end, the Color Prince had sent Samila Sayeh to her. The blue drafter had fought in the Prisms’ War and made herself a legend. She’d fought against the Color Prince at Garriston, but had broken the halo, was captured, imprisoned, and, by his mercy, forgiven. She now fought with them. If the Color Prince’s armies could find the blue bane, the woman was one of the leading candidates to become the next Mot.
Samila Sayeh had begun the transition to full wight differently than any blue Liv knew. She was starting with her left hand only. She said if she could figure how to make hard, crystalline blue luxin work on a part of her body that required such dexterity and flexion first, the rest of her body would be simple. Given the woman’s status and fierce intellect, Liv shouldn’t have felt threatened by her. But something rankled. And Samila didn’t care, if she even noticed.
Samila had looked at Liv’s problem, figured out the correct equations to use, demanding whole lists of relevant and seemingly irrelevant numbers, and done the calculations in her head, only her hand twitching as if moving invisible abacus beads. She gave Liv the answers, not explaining what she’d done. And then she translated some ancient scratching below the mirror in some language Liv didn’t even recognize. There were instructions for exactly how to set the mirrors for dozens of major points around the world.
Then she left without a word. Not even the bare minimum of a nodded head and the “Eikona” that Liv’s status demanded.
The Chromeria’s lapdog luxiats preached that the sin of superviolet was pride. Maybe in this one thing they were on to something, because Liv could barely contain her fury at being made to look a fool.
Even with that help, it had taken Liv an embarrassing half hour to figure out what that meant for her. Finally, she’d been able to aim the mirror out to sweep the sea to search for the resonance points the Color Prince had directed her to. His intelligence had been good. There was one near the Everdark Gates—and hopefully not beyond them. That point was Liv’s goal. The superviolet bane was there, somewhere, on land or in the sea.
It was still there today. Liv was sure of it. Her mission was simple: she and her guards were to find either what the Color Prince called a seed crystal or the bane that would form around it, and take it for him.
Bending her knee to him alone, Liv was to become goddess. Fealty to One, as the Danavis motto proclaimed. To one only.
“The prince is giving us a two-week lead before he sends out the next team. Let’s not waste it,” Liv said. Dressed in her immaculate yellow silk dress, the trim dyed with murex purple, she handed her jacket to Phyros before she began her descent down the pyramid. He put it in the bulging pack that carried everything she might need.
A goddess-to-be had people for such things.
Chapter 27
Liv had barely reached the docks with her entourage when a young woman with nose rings attached by chains to her earrings came forward. She wore a beautiful flowing dress in sea foam green, edged with crimson. Wealthy. “Lady, Lady Aliviana!” the woman said. “Your Eminence. Uh, Eikona.” She lay prostrate on the road, heedless of the dust.
It was foolishness. Putting such garments in the dirt, for what? To show respect? To Liv? It was insane … and pleasing.
“A moment of your time, Lady Aliviana, please,” the woman said.
Phyros looked to Liv. In his bearskins and bulging muscles, he looked like a frowning barbarian colossus. “Eikona?” In Liv’s case, earning that title had
been almost embarrassingly easy. There were hundreds of green drafters, hundreds of blues, hundreds of reds. And ten superviolets. She knew she wasn’t as elite as the eikonos of green or blue or red, but the Color Prince treated them all the same, and made everyone else do likewise. She owed him for that.
Liv nodded. Phyros walked to the woman and picked her up by her neck. He was so big, he was somehow able to do it without strangling her, his big hand—one hand—wrapping completely around her throat. He lifted her to her feet and, ignoring all propriety, searched her for weapons quickly. The woman looked horrified, but she said nothing. Last, he clamped his big hand around her jaw and angled her face up. She instinctively tried to pull away, but he waited until she met his eyes, and gazed carefully at each eye in turn.
Satisfied she wasn’t a drafter or bearing any weapons, he still didn’t let her come directly to Liv. Phyros believed in picking your own battlefield, regardless of how inconvenient. He marched the woman up into the beached galley. Liv followed to her quarters.
Phyros drew back the skin hanging over the door and held it open for Liv. The woman followed her in, looking vexed. She pulled the skin to shut it behind her. Phyros held it firm, impassive. He looked at Liv. She nodded.
“Shout if,” Phyros said. Odd habit he had, not finishing common statements, accepting it for granted that you both knew how they ended, so there was no need to go through the effort of saying the whole thing.
The woman closed the skin tight, turned, and took a deep breath. “Eikona, thank you for meeting with me. My message is secret, and important. First, please see that I am no threat.” She knelt gracefully and spread her hands, palms up.
“Go on, and hurry, the ship casts off in minutes.”
“Yes, lady, of course. I come from the Order of the Broken Eye. We mean you no harm. Indeed, quite the opposite.”