by Brent Weeks
The cobbles of the street were slickened with the damp. Teia saw a star bobbing along above her, and it took her imagination moments to calm and realize it was nothing more than a watchman’s lantern. He passed directly above her on the wall, and he never even saw her. Teia brushed one hand along the wall, telling herself it wasn’t for reassurance.
You’re going to your death, the lantern seemed to whisper as it floated away into the distance. Find light!
I’m a slave, not a—
She stopped the thought. She wasn’t a slave. She could leave at any time. She had money in her pocket. She had money in the barracks. She could buy a commission and go home. She could go and … what?
But she could figure it out. She’d have time. She’d have her family. She’d—
Fear makes you stupid. Look at what I’ve got here. Look at what I’ve done. Who back home would believe that I’d even spoken to the White, much less been given an assignment vital to all of the Seven Satrapies by her? Who would believe that I trained with Commander Ironfist, much less led him in an assault on the fortress of Ruic Head? Hell, with my color, who will even believe I’m a drafter?
Out in the wide world, what use is paryl? I can kill people secretly? Oh, lovely. Get lots of chances to use that in polite society. I can see through clothing? Oh, perfect, please tell me how well endowed Lord Fuddykins is! Ha.
You’re not a slave anymore, Teia. So who are you going to be?
The Order isn’t going to kill me. If they’d wanted to do that, they would have already done it. Right? But what if they changed their minds? If they wanted to kill her in the future, it wouldn’t be that hard for them to find her, would it? Or her family.
Teia had to lean against the wall for a moment as her throat constricted. The darkness and fog were oppressive, heavy, clinging to her, making it hard to breathe, diving into her throat, invading her body. Her eyes widened and widened and she felt the tingle of paryl entering her.
Drafted it when I was scared. That’s progress, right?
A lantern of the stuff bloomed on her fist and pierced the darkness in every direction. It cut through the haze as if it weren’t even there and lent an odd metallic quality to the stones and the cobbles. She thought she heard something, and she looked behind her. Nothing.
When she turned around again, a hooded, cloaked man stood in front of her. Murder Sharp. He looked pleased with himself, or perhaps pleased to see her. “Good color there. Tight spectrum, almost no bleed. You’ve got a knack. With paryls, we have to take what we get. Walk with me.”
“You look different,” Teia said. The last time she’d seen him, he’d had a fringe of orange hair around a bald scalp. Apparently it had been a ruse, because he wasn’t bald. Now his hair had grown out, though it was still cropped short. It made him look quite a bit younger. He was growing out a beard, the scruff nicely delineated.
“I have the curse of being readily identifiable. I have to work harder for my disguises. I envy your bland prettiness.”
“Thanks?”
“It was a compliment. Do you have any idea how valuable it is to have a description of you be ‘slender, medium to dark skin, medium height, maybe a little on the short side, dark hair, fairly pretty’? Any distinguishing marks people will remember can be removable ones, like a beauty mark, or a wig—and with your skin tone, you can as easily seem to be a natural when wearing a wig of wavy dark blonde hair or black Parian curls. Being remembered or being forgotten is life and death in my work, so yes, I envy you. Here we are.”
He knocked an odd, syncopated beat on the door.
Great, I’m going to have to become a drummer on top of everything else.
The door opened, and with the light pouring out into the street, Teia constricted her eyes and let the paryl go.
Whoever had opened the door retreated back through another room beyond the entry. Murder Sharp handed her a white robe to put over her clothes. “Don’t identify yourself in any way. The others will be put in danger the more they know. Hearing your voice will be bad enough.” He gave her dark spectacles, too, and a white cloth veil. He dressed himself similarly, except he donned a mask with real white fur and yellow teeth, some snarling creature that looked like a cross between a weasel and a bear. Then he led her into the next room.
The building was a smithy. Lanterns provided cheery light and invaded the darkness outside. There were a dozen figures inside, chatting quietly. But all were cloaked and veiled. Only a few wore the weasel-bear masks. The veils were simple flaps of white cloth, hanging from each person’s hat, leaving only their eyes revealed. Some of the veiled figures wore dark spectacles. Those must be drafters, making sure that no one would be able to recognize them by the luxin patterns in their eyes.
Of course, the disguises meant nothing to a paryl drafter. If Teia tried, she could see through their clothes, through their masks, through their silliness. She went from terrified to on the verge of derisive laughter in a second.
Fine, so maybe it was hysterical laughter she was on the verge of. Easy there, Teia. She followed Master Sharp into the smithy and looked from one figure to another in the red light of the forge fire.
“Order,” a man with a gruff voice said.
Order, as in come to order? or like, Hey, you all from the Order, come to order? Teia almost laughed again. Whoa, hold it together, T.
She tried to clear her throat, failed, and didn’t dare try clear it again for fear of disturbing the newborn silence.
Though he was short, the others clearly deferred to the gruff one—and he was the only one who had two veils on. The one he wore under the white cloth veil appeared to be made of some kind of finely woven metal mail.
“If the Chromeria or its people find you here, or hear of it henceforth, you will be taken by the Office of Doctrine. You will be tortured. Your lands and titles will be seized. Your families will be punished. Your animals and houses will be burned, as if heresy could be purged with fire.” He paused. “If you have not the courage to die in silence, go now, and be part of this company no more. The door stands there.”
The idea of being tortured by the very people she was serving was ice in Teia’s stomach. Would the White claim her, if she were captured?
Only if it served her ends. And in such a war, claiming Teia might not be the White’s best move. Every threat Teia heard was real. And that was if she were found by her friends. How much worse would it be if she were discovered by the Order? She looked at the door, and wondered if they meant it. Could she leave now?
“We’ve no cowards among us,” the man said. “Good.”
Teia wanted to shout, Wait! I think I might be a coward! Can I think on it a bit longer?
But it was too late.
The members made a circle around the room, broken only on the side where the forge burned hot. Odd, at night. In the center stood a simple table. Teia felt a chill as she recognized the items piled there. They were all the things she had stolen for Aglaia Crassos—perfect blackmail materials to expose and ruin her, had she not already confessed all of it to the White.
“Hear the sermon of the first circle.”
“Hear, ye deceived,” the figures rumbled, as if invoking prayer.
“Everything you know about the Chromeria is lies,” the gruff man said.
“Hear, ye deceived,” the figures rumbled.
“Gavin and Dazen Guile ruined the world for their lust and pride. But out of the conflagration, out of the hundreds of thousands dead, some good came. Those of us who sided with Dazen Guile saw our hopes die when Gavin Guile came stumbling out of the smoke at Sundered Rock. The wiser of us ran. Most hid. But some were pursued by the vengeful, by murderers seeking to use the cover of war to hide their crimes, by assassins sent to silence us for what we knew.”
He stopped, and said nothing for a long time, as if reliving a memory. None of the others interjected, so Teia didn’t move either.
“In our flight, many were lost. Good men, women who’d committ
ed no crime but to lose. Others were dragged off into slavery, sold to the Ilytians in a trade the Chromeria condemned but did nothing to stop.”
“Hear, ye deceived.”
“But.” He raised a finger. “In every darkness, there is hope for light. For light cannot be chained.”
“Light cannot be chained,” they intoned with him.
“A small group of us fled into the Atashian desert, across the Cracked Lands, pursued for more than a month into the wastes, until our pursuers gave up and we found ourselves without enough water to make the trip back home. So we pressed on. We found the Great Rift the day after we’d drank the last of our water. We climbed down it, losing two more brothers in the hike. And at the bottom, we found an ancient, abandoned city, carved into the faces of the cliffs themselves. We found great cisterns of water, renewed by a small stream, and we found wild goats to eat, and we found luxin the likes of which we couldn’t believe, but most precious of all, we found truth.”
“Hear, ye deceived.”
“We were not the first wanderers to find this place. This was Braxos. A city thousands of years old. The pygmies of the darkest Blood Forest claim a common ancestry with the Braxians. We found the remains of a small, later community there—a scholar and his student, later his wife. They had come looking for the city, and had nearly died as we had, but two hundred years before. They stayed two years, tried to go home back to the Chromeria, and gave up and returned, certain the Cracked Lands were impassable. They stayed for the rest of their lives, had children. The community lasted three generations before it succumbed to the inbreeding that left them too feeble to survive those harsh lands.
“But what they did in those generations! They translated skins a thousand years old, and preserved them in script we could read. For the first time, we heard about the time before Lucidonius.” He looked at Teia, as if searching her soul. “It is time for you to hear the truth, and to decide.”
“Hear the truth, ye deceived.”
“The Braxians always lived a tenuous existence there, though the lands then were not yet the Cracked Lands. It was, still, a desert, and life was hard. In those times, it was believed that each color was a god or goddess, and men clung to one or another. Drafters could never serve two colors because each was at war with each, or at best antipathic. Drafters flowed to those parts of the world where their color could be found, and in so doing, made the differences more profound. The fertile plains of Ruthgar gave plentiful green, so the world’s greens left their own peoples and moved there, and the greens built their temple there, and fertilized the plains year after year, making them greener still. The Red Cliffs of Atash, likewise; the volcanoes of deep Tyrea, likewise. And so on.
“The Braxians had a different belief. To them, magic wasn’t primarily about light; light was a trigger, the conduit for allowing your will to flow into the world, and into your community. Nor did they believe—as the Chromeria later would—that Will is finite. They didn’t think they were using up their souls to make golems. They believed that Will is a muscle, and it is strengthened with every use, not depleted like sands from an hourglass.
“As gods rose and fell, all the nine kingdoms groaned under the weight of their struggles. When the reds gathered under Dagnu the Thirteenth’s banner and went to war and wiped out the blues to the last child, they threw off the balance. For a generation, with no blues drafting, red ran amok, deserts spread, the lands cracked, the seas choked. Droughts spread everywhere, and the Braxians among them all were most vulnerable. Their brother tribes in the desert perished. It was no better when the blues had their revenge, two generations later: the waters rose and flooded the floors of the canyons. So much water it flushed the good soil away. The Braxians decided they must come up with some power that would give them a say in events in a world that ignored them, and crushed them in their wars, all unknowing. For our part, may—”
“—we listen and believe,” the figures joined in with him.
Teia got the sense that the exact words of the stories varied, but there were trigger phrases for their responses. It made the flesh on her neck crawl.
“This was the birth of the Order. First, there was only one: Ora’lem, the Hidden, the first Shadow. He wore a cloak which had been infused with the entire will of a polychromatic lightsplitter, a woman who had the talent that the Chromeria deceitfully swears is only known to Prisms. But Ora’lem was killed when he faced a sub-red—for his cloak only hid him from the visible spectrum. After his death, his cloak was recovered only with great difficulty, and the Order decided that Shadows should always work in a team of man and woman, for there are places shut to men and places shut to women, and the strengths of each should cover the weaknesses of the other. Over the generations, the Order amassed fourteen cloaks, some finer than others. Two, now lost, which had been owned by the mist walkers of old, worked in all spectra.
“Those fourteen warriors, the first Shadows, moved unseen among all peoples of the world. Fourteen righteous blades that brought justice. Fourteen mist walkers protected the people of Braxos, and the vulnerable everywhere. They traveled among every kind of drafter, and whispered in the ears of those whose power threatened the balance, telling them to desist. It worked, some few times. But most often, it did not, and the fourteen brought death to a few to sustain life for the many.”
Balancing, as a Prism did, but by force. By murder.
“Braxos flowered, and knew greater prosperity than ever. The very word that the Braxians wished the reds to calm their use of magic meant the reds did, controlling their own priests, without need for death. There was peace, and magic flourished. When others couldn’t help and wights were terrorizing an area, it was the Shimmercloaks who intervened. The Order were the stern guardians of a harsh world.
“But the world is a spoiled child; it cannot long stand guardians, even when it needs them most.”
The figures said all together, “We are the guardians. We are the hands of night. We are the walkers unseen. We are the sword of morning and the bludgeon of midnight. We stand ready. For war, for peace, for life, for death, we stand ready.”
My new friends, the insane vigilante drafter murderers.
“In this world perpetually on the brink, with only our hands to steady it, a young man came during a time of upheaval. New technologies were being discovered, and the balance was threatened on every side. He became a Shimmercloak, and he was, we soon could tell, among the greatest of us that had ever lived. Diakoptês, his name was.”
“Diakoptês, the Betrayer!”
“The Braxian lens-grinders were the finest in the world, and it was they who discovered how to melt metals into glass to make the lenses that would change the world. Pitchblende and lead for red, theion and calcium for yellow, cadmium and brimstone for orange, orpiment and iron for green, cobalt and theion for blue. These were to be our secrets, and our new power. No longer would we have only to rely on the seven teams, on trying to find new polychromatic light-splitters to make new shimmercloaks when the old ones were stolen or destroyed. Then came a young man. Diakoptês, his name was.”
“Diakoptês, the Betrayer!”
“Diakoptês the Shadow had killed for us in every one of the nine kingdoms. As famous for his temper as he was for his skill with blade and bludgeon. He began experimenting with black luxin, a color that can only be drafted by those with great evil in their hearts. He grew corrupt, and he lusted after power. We sent people to him, old friends to entreat with him. He slew them. He stole his people’s designs, the very jewel of Braxian industry and two hundred years of innovation, and he equipped an army with it. And with his armies, he brought the bloodiest war the nine kingdoms had ever seen. He crushed them under his boot, and called himself a savior. He named free men heretics and brilliant women beasts. We know him by his true name: Diakoptês, his name was.”
“Diakoptês, the Betrayer!”
“But you may know him by his other name. The name he took for himself to make himself a god:
Lucidonius, the Giver of Light.”
Teia shouldn’t have been surprised that murderers and heretics should have blasphemous views of Lucidonius, but somehow, she was. Even the coarsest slave’s complaints about how Lucidonius had overlooked the plight of the slave still assumed that Lucidonius, being mortal, had merely overlooked them, not that he was evil.
She bit her lip and said nothing, looking from hooded figure to hooded figure. Last, she looked at the pile of things she’d stolen, sitting on the stool off to one side.
“The Magisterium teaches that we have but one life, one judgment, and one eternity. There is in them no mercy for those born to low circumstances, to only bad choices, as if the daughter of nobility and the daughter of ignominy have the same chances at a life of virtue. The Braxians were kinder, more humane. We know that…”
They intoned, “In death is the cleansing of sins. In rebirth is the hope for salvation.”
“He called himself the Second Eye of Orholam. And so it was that the Order to Break the Eye was born. So it was we slew our favorite son Diakoptês. Not in hatred, but in hope. Hope for his rebirth. Hope for salvation.”
Together, they said, “We wait with hope and expectation. Breakers unbroken, our Long Vigil continues.”
“Thus ends the sermon of the first circle. May we all be worthy to learn more.”
They chanted something in a language that Teia didn’t understand. Nor, it was clear, did some of them, from how they lagged behind the others with the unfamiliar syllables. Then, it seemed, they chanted a loose translation, not quite so rhythmic: “True in darkness. True in light. True in daytime. True at night. Honest, fierce, loyal, strong, but hidden till we right the wrong.”
The gruff leader came close, and lowered his voice enough that the others would likely only hear pieces of it over the whoosh of the bellows one of them was working. “You know what these are.” He picked up a silver bracelet, set it down.
“Things I stole on my mistress’s orders.”
“Blackmail,” he said.