The Black Prism

by Brent Weeks

  Liv was going to go way out on a limb and guess that the fan was available for a small additional cost.

  Now that she was looking, she realized the greeter was herself a superviolet drafter, her pupils bearing the halo barely a third of the way through her irises. No wonder Liv hadn’t noticed right away. When a superviolet drafter got much further along, the color in their eyes began to bleed over into the visible range, lending a slight violet tinge that was difficult to see in brown eyes and made blue eyes astonishingly beautiful—not that Liv was ever going to get that, with her bland browns.

  “Actually…” Liv said. She turned her cloak so the woman could see the back. It was common for superviolets to weave some extra pattern into their clothing so that other superviolets could identify them.

  The greeter’s pupils tightened to pinpricks in a heartbeat as she glanced at Liv’s cloak. “Very finely done. Superviolets are welcome to draft their own muting, just let us know you’re going to be using muting when you visit so our servers don’t make any mistakes.”

  The woman took Liv to a table by the windows on the south side where she could get sunlight through open windows. There was plenty of sunlight here in the clerestory—the arches and flying buttresses supported all the weight of the roof easily, so the second story had windows from floor to ceiling—but one of the downsides of being a superviolet was that thick windows like those used here interfered with light collection. Any skilled drafter could still use magic, but it took longer and gave some drafters headaches.

  Liv sat and watched how the staff worked, weaving effortlessly between tables, giving a wider berth to those surrounded by superviolet shells. A slender young serving man with short kinky hair and a gorgeous smile came to her table, pausing just outside where her bubble would have been if she had already drafted one. He was probably only a few years older than her, and devastatingly beautiful, his jacket expertly tailored to a leanly muscled body.

  Somehow, she managed to give him her order. Just a kopi. Which would doubtless cost a full danar. When he brought it back, steaming hot and dark as hellstone, and gave her a long smile, Liv decided the kopi was definitely worth a danar. Maybe more.

  Her good mood died at the sight of Aglaia Crassos climbing the stairs with her butt-puckered gait. The twenty-something-year-old Ruthgari was, as best Liv could tell, the youngest daughter of some important family. She had the prized, vanishingly rare Ruthgari blonde hair, but other than that, she was no beauty. She had the blue eyes that were wasted on non-drafters, a long, horsey face, and a huge nose. Stationed at the Ruthgari embassy to get some political experience before she married some fiancé she hadn’t met back in the city of Rath, she had always acted like she was too good to handle Liv. She’d even told Liv that being assigned Liv’s case had been her punishment for some indiscretion with the Atashian ambassador’s son. Mostly, she handled bichromes and polychromes and real spies.

  Catching sight of Liv, Aglaia came right over, giving a little wave to a few patrons and a wink to one.

  “Aliviana,” Aglaia said, coming to stand before her table, “you’re looking so… active this morning.” The pause said it all. The searching expression, as if she was really trying to find something good to say. From some women, it might have been an accident.

  You want to play it like that? Fine. “Such a pleasure to see you, Aglaia. You wear petty malice so well,” Liv said. Oops.

  Aglaia’s eyes widened momentarily, and then she faked a laugh. “Always were a sharp instrument to handle, weren’t you, Liv? I love that about you.” She sat across from Liv. “Or is it just that you’re too stupid to understand your situation?”

  My father told me not to come here. Sharks and sea demons, he said. I should have listened. I’m antagonizing the woman who holds my future.

  “I…” Liv licked dry lips, as if a little lubrication would help her force submissive words out. “I’m sorry. How may I be of assistance, Mistress?”

  Aglaia’s eyes lit up. “Say that again.”

  Liv hesitated, clenched her jaw. Forced herself to relax. “How may I be of assistance, Mistress?”

  “Draft us a bubble.”

  Liv drafted the muting bubble, complete with a fan.

  “Such a proud girl you are, Liv Danavis. The next time I have a party, I’ll have to remember to have you come serve the food. Or perhaps clean the chamber pots.”

  “Oh, I love cleaning chamber pots. And I love telling all my friends who haven’t yet signed contracts how well the Ruthgari treat their drafters,” Liv said.

  Aglaia laughed. She really did have an unpleasant laugh. “Well played, Liv. That was an empty threat, and I deserved to be called on it. You’re from Rekton, aren’t you?”

  Liv was instantly on her guard. Aglaia had let an insult pass? Liv would have expected that after being called on an empty threat, Aglaia would lay out a real one—and she had quite a few possibilities at her disposal. That she didn’t should have made Liv feel better. It didn’t.

  “Yes,” Liv admitted. There was no reason to lie. Nothing came from Rekton. Besides, Aglaia would have a record of where Liv was from. It was on her contract. “It’s a small town. Inconsequential.”

  “Who is Lina?”

  What? “She’s a serving woman. Katalina Delauria. Takes odd jobs.” An addict, a disgrace, and a nightmare of a mother. But Aglaia didn’t need to know that, and Liv wasn’t going to say anything bad about the folks back home.

  “Any family?”

  “None,” Liv lied. “She settled in Rekton after the war, like my father did.”

  “So she’s not Tyrean?”

  “You mean originally? I don’t know. Some Parian or Ilytian blood, maybe,” Liv said. “Why?”

  “What’s she look like?”

  Too skinny, with bloodshot eyes and bad teeth from smoking haze. “Tall, short kinky hair, mahogany skin, stunning hazel eyes.” Now that Liv thought about it, Lina had probably been a real beauty once.

  “And Kip? Who’s he?”

  Oh, hell, caught. “Uh, her son.”

  “Oh, she does have family, then.”

  “I thought you meant does she have any people around Rekton.”

  “Right,” Aglaia said. “How old is Kip?”

  “Fifteen now, I suppose.” Kip was nice, though it had been obvious the last time Liv was home that he was terribly infatuated with her.

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Why do you want to know all this?” Liv asked.

  “Answer the question.”

  “I haven’t seen him for three years. He probably looks totally different now.” Liv threw up her hands, but Aglaia didn’t relent. “A bit chubby. A little shorter than me, the last time I saw him—”

  “For Orholam’s sake, girl, his eyes, his skin, his hair!”

  “Well I don’t know what you’re looking for!”

  “Now you do,” Aglaia said.

  “Blue eyes, medium skin, not as dark as his mother’s. Kinky hair.”

  “Half-breed?”

  “I guess so.” Though Liv couldn’t have said what Kip’s halves would be. Parian and Atashian? Ilytian and Blood Forester? Something else? Probably not simple halves, whatever he was. “Half-breed” was a mean description, though, and completely unfair. The finest families and all the nobles in the Seven Satrapies intermarried far more often than commoners, and they were never called half-breeds.

  “Blue eyes, though. That’s interesting. Not many people in your town with blue eyes, are there?”

  “My father has blue eyes. There’s a few among people who settled there after the war, but no, we’re like the rest of Tyrea.”

  “Is he a drafter?”

  “Of course he is. My father’s one of the most famous red—”

  “Not your father, idiot girl. Kip.”

  “Kip? No! Well, not the last time I saw him. He was twelve or thirteen then.”

  Aglaia sat back. “I should let you grope in the dark after your attitude to
day, but then you’d be even more likely to muss everything than you already are. I have an assignment for you, Liv Danavis. It turns out that my punishment of having to deal with you was Orholam’s gift in disguise. We intercepted a letter this woman Lina wrote to the Prism.”

  “She what?”

  “She claimed Kip was his bastard.”

  Liv laughed, it was so ridiculous. Aglaia’s face said she wasn’t kidding.

  “What?!” Liv asked.

  “She said she was dying, and she wanted Gavin to meet his son Kip. We don’t know if it’s their first communication or not. But she didn’t ask for anything, or threaten him. Kip’s the right age, and Gavin had blue eyes before becoming the Prism. The rest is inconclusive, but the note was written as if it were true. As if Gavin knows her.” Aglaia smiled. “Liv, I’m going to give you an opportunity at a better life, and I hope I don’t need to tell you that I can already make you have a much worse life, if I so choose. You tested as a superviolet and a marginal yellow. For obvious reasons, your sponsor chose not to train you as a bichrome.”

  Yes, Liv knew it well. A bichrome was expected to be kept in a certain style, or it reflected badly on the sponsor and the sponsoring country. And yellow was so hard to draft well that few who were trained in yellow passed the final examination. So supporting a yellow bichrome was a huge investment, with little possibility of a return. Liv’s sponsor had pretended she wasn’t a bichrome to save his money. It wasn’t fair, but there was no one to speak up for Tyreans.

  “Here’s your assignment, girl. I’ve maneuvered things so that your class will be up next for the Prism’s personal instruction. Get close to him—”

  “You want me to spy on the Prism?” Liv asked. The very notion was nearly… blasphemous.

  “Of course we do. He may solicit you for information about his son and this woman Lina. Use that opportunity. Become indispensable to him. Become his lover. Whatever you need to—”

  “What? He’s twice my age!”

  “And that would be horrible—if you were forty years old. You’re not. It’s not like we’re talking about someone old and decrepit. Tell me the truth, you’ve already dreamed about him tearing off your clothes, haven’t you?”

  “No, absolutely not!” Really she’d just admired him. Every girl did that. But for Liv, it had been completely abstract. Platonic.

  “Oh, a saint you are. Or a liar. I guarantee every other red-blooded woman in the Chromeria has dreamed about it. No matter. You’ll think about it now.”

  “You want me to seduce him?!”

  “It is the easiest way to be in a man’s room while he’s sleeping. Then if he wakes while you’re rifling through his letters, you can pretend to be jealous and say you’re looking for letters from some other lover. Truth is, we don’t care how you get close to him, but let’s be honest: what do you have to offer the Prism? Witty conversation? Insight? Not so much. On the other hand, you’re pretty for a Tyrean. You’re young, not very bright, uncultured, not powerful, not a scholar or a poet or a singer. If you can get close to him some other way, great. I’m just betting the odds.”

  It was the most eviscerating way to be told you were pretty that Liv had ever heard. “Forget it. I’m not going to be your whore.”

  “Your piety’s touching, but it’s not whoring if you want to do it, is it? You’ve seen him. He’s gorgeous. So you get a few extra benefits. You can enjoy him, you can bask in every woman’s jealousy, you get everything that we offer—”

  “I don’t want anything more from you.”

  “You should have thought of that before you signed your contract. But that’s in the past. Liv, if you can get even one private meeting with Gavin Guile, we will set you up as a bichrome. Get close to him, and we’ll make your rewards even richer than that. But spit in my face, and everything in your life can turn to hellstone. I have full power over your contract, and I will use it.”

  The offer of setting up Liv as a bichrome seemed awfully generous just for getting one meeting with the Prism, but she saw the logic behind it. A Prism could do what he wanted, but sleeping with a Tyrean monochrome would seem questionable, tasteless. Slumming. A bichrome, on the other hand, at least had some standing. The truth was, the offer was still probably generous, and might make Gavin more suspicious of them, but the prize—having a spy next to the Prism himself—was worth so much that the Ruthgari were willing to risk it. They needed Liv to say yes.

  “Besides,” Aglaia said. “If you’re smarter than I think you are, you can find out for yourself who gave the orders to burn Garriston. You could find out who’s responsible for your mother’s death.”

  Chapter 31

  Gavin had hunted down hundreds of color wights, and this one didn’t feel right.

  The madness struck every color wight differently, but blue wights always reveled in order. They loved the hardness of blue luxin. Most eventually tried to remake themselves with it. Every one of them believed they could avoid madness if only they were careful enough, smart enough, and thought through every step. But what was a blue wight doing crossing the reddest desert in the Seven Satrapies?

  Rondar Wit had been posted in one of the smaller coastal cities of Ruthgar. Married, four children, and a good relationship with his lord patron, who’d waited two weeks to report Rondar’s disappearance—no one liked to believe that their friend might go mad.

  Gavin trudged through the desert. He’d stopped briefly at one of his contacts on the coast, got dressed entirely in red, and armed, and still thought he should reach the wight before dark. Still, he was exhausted. Skimming was fast, but his arms and shoulders and stomach and legs ached. His will felt sapped. He didn’t get lightsick when he drafted too much—but he did get tired and shaky.

  Coming near the top of a dune, he stopped so as not to skyline himself and drafted a pair of long lenses. Tracking blues was usually easy because no matter how smart they were, most couldn’t bear to be illogical. If you figured out where they were going, you could guess they would take the most efficient route there. Gavin had no idea where this one was going, but he was following the coast. Unless his objective was nearby, Gavin was going to assume that the giist would continue heading down the coastline, staying far enough from the coast to avoid farms and towns. Of course, this wight had made a mistake, coming in too close from the desert for the sake of speed and access to water, and had been seen by a boy herding the rangy desert cattle the nomads kept. The boy had told his father, and his father had told everyone, including Gavin’s contact.

  For a few days, the wight would try to put as much distance between himself and the herders as possible.

  So Gavin made guesses, drafting blue to help himself think like one of them. Assuming the blue wight didn’t have a horse that the boy hadn’t seen—and horses usually hated color wights—a man pushing hard through this desert could only move so fast. Gavin had been through here before, and though he didn’t know it intimately, there were a number of points where a man had to decide if he wanted to follow the coastal road or take a trader’s route through the Cracked Lands. And there were places where the Cracked Lands were so broken and treacherous that there was no discernible traders’ route at all. Gavin wasn’t going to choose one or the other. He waited at one of the places where the roads met and diverged.

  And waited. He untucked his shirt, pulled it askew, rebuttoned it offset one button, and tucked it back in. And waited. He drafted sub-red into fire crystals to bleed off heat from his body, watching the tiny crystals take shape, crinkle, and then flame out. Every ten minutes, he trudged back high on the great dune to poke his head over and scan the desert.

  As the sun descended, he saw the telltale gleam. Aches forgotten, he was again, a circling hawk, waiting for the marmot to step just this far from his hole. He felt the same spasm of black fury that he felt every time. He should kill it, kill it instantly, and not listen to its lies, its justifications, its haughty madness.

  No, this time, he needed to listen.
First.

  This giist’s skin was layered with blue luxin. It wasn’t just armor: it was a carapace. Chromaturgy changed all men, but blue wights were seduced by the perfections of magic. They sought to trade flesh for luxin. This one had progressed further than most. Talented, then, not to mention meticulous and likely brilliant. It still wore blue pants and shirt, though both were dirty and, uncharacteristically for a blue’s personality, torn. So it thought it was almost done with the need for clothing, but either the dangers of exposure in the desert or the possibility of needing just a bit more blue to draft from had convinced the creature to keep its clothing for a little longer. Its face, though, was the true wonder—or horror, depending on how you looked at it.

  It had insinuated blue luxin beneath its very skin. Gavin had seen it before. The process had to be done slowly and carefully enough to not cause infections or rejection, but once begun, it had to be finished quickly. The skin lost feeling and began dying as soon as it was cut off from the body, so the wight began sloughing off rotting skin. This one’s forehead had split open, revealing robin’s egg blue beneath peeling, necrotic skin. It had drafted blue covers for its eyes arcing from brow to cheekbones in a solid dome so it would effectively always be wearing blue spectacles, but the result made it look like a bug with bulging blue eyes. It was, Gavin had always thought, one of the worst parts of giists trying to remake themselves. If all your skin died, your eyelids died. Even if you could draft a thin blue membrane every time you needed to clear your eyes—and it had to be held blue luxin, because rubbing blue glass against your eyeballs was never a good idea—even if you deal with that, you could never close your eyes to sleep. Even wights needed sleep.

  An hour later, as the sun was almost touching the horizon, burning the desert beautiful, Gavin put on his borrowed red spectacles, gathered the red cloak around himself, cracked open a white mag torch, and stepped out in front of the giist.