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.”
An unwilling shiver went through Liv. She’d wanted to believe that Mistress Helel trying to assassinate Kip was an aberration, a woman ill in the head, delusional. She’d wanted to believe, as Gavin and Ironfist had said, that the Order was a loose collection of thugs taking on an old legendary name in order to raise their prices. But this woman seemed calm, professional, not a braggart. And the use of Mistress Helel as an assassin was nothing short of brilliant. Who would suspect a heavy, middle-aged woman of being an assassin?
So it was possible the Order was real. It was no wonder this woman was being so careful to show she posed no threat.
Seeing that Liv wasn’t going to speak, the woman hurried on. “The prince gave you a necklace; on it, there is a chunk of living black luxin. That jewel is a death sentence. It is the way he believes he can control you.”
“What? How does it work?”
She paused, painfully. “We don’t know, except that he believes he’s mastered it, and that it will compel obedience. He believes it enough that he’s willing to make gods.”
“You speak dangerous words.”
“Does he seem a man content with others having greater power than he does? He wishes to be a god of gods.”
“What do you wish of me?” Liv demanded. “You think to test my loyalty so easily?”
“The prince espouses freedom, does he not? How is a leash freedom?”
“Freedom doesn’t mean a lack of responsibilities. It means a choice between them. He is to make me a god.”
“Forgive me, Eikona, but you will make yourself a god, or fail. On your own. And black luxin is not so easily tamed as the prince believes.”
A shout from outside drifted in. “Casting off in two! Rowers to your places!”
“Black luxin,” Liv scoffed. “It’s merely obsidian.”
“How can you say so? You who have seen it?”
Liv turned away. The swirling jewel was in her pocket, ever in her pocket. And the prince’s instructions were clear: she must put it on before she claimed the bane. “It is… merely cunningly cut. Tricks of the light.”
“The stones are related, lady. The old stories aren’t lies, but they’ve been corrupted. Obsidian is black luxin, dead black luxin. It is said that all the obsidian in the world is the last remnant of a great war, thousands of years before Lucidonius. A holocaust that devoured light and life for millennia, from which we are still recovering. The living stuff… Eikona, it has will. It is insanity given form. It is a hole of nothingness that can never be filled. If you put it to your neck to feed and the prince’s control slips, it will kill you. It has will; it may have intellect, too. If it devours a goddess, who is to say what it would do next?”
So Liv had been right to be leery of having the thing next to her skin. If this girl was telling the truth. “What does the Order want?”
“Most of our knowledge has been lost to time and bloody purges. We are a weak, wan thing. A shadow of a shadow. And I the least of our folk, in case I was captured and tortured. We’re not your enemies, Eikona. Become Ferrilux. Serve the Color Prince. Do all that you wish, but do not put black luxin in the nexus of your power. Do not put it in the center of the bane. One slip, whether the prince’s or yours, and who is to say but that it would eat all the magic in the world?”
Chapter 28
They needed to have this out. Teia was in some sort of trouble, and Kip was going to make her tell him what it was. During a rest at practice, he’d told the squad a little about his adventure and alm
ost the whole truth about what had happened to Gavin.
“There was a fight, over a dagger. Grinwoody tried to grab it and I tangled with him. Andross joined in and Gavin intervened. Everyone tangled up. My father diverted the blade into himself so I wouldn’t get stabbed.”
More than a few puzzled glances at that. Why was it harder to tell a partial truth than a complete lie? Kip rushed on. “But that wasn’t the amazing thing. I jumped in after him. I lit some red to make a beacon, and when we got pulled out by this pirate, the dagger was a dagger no longer. It was a full-length sword with seven jewels of each of the seven primes in the blade. And when they pulled it out, Gavin… Gavin was alive. He didn’t even bleed.”
They asked him questions then, most of which he couldn’t answer, and Cruxer swore them all to secrecy; then, because their break had already extended for half an hour, he called it a day.
Teia had slipped out of practice before he’d noticed, and he hadn’t seen her at dinner, so now he was waiting up for her in their room.
He’d been waiting half an hour, getting more and more cross, when he had a thought. He went to the tiny desk and found no papers. He hadn’t noticed before because they simply weren’t there. His ownership papers of Teia, that he’d already signed over. She’d taken them from his room, thinking him dead, and turned them in.
Of course she had. He couldn’t blame her for worrying that with him gone, anyone might take his signed transfer of title. That was why she wasn’t here. No longer his slave, she’d moved into the barracks. Good for her.
She owed him nothing, and the bond of master to slave—unwelcome though it had been—was gone. But maybe that had been the only bond they’d shared, and it felt like she’d given up on him.
He’d wanted her to be free, but he’d still wanted her to owe him, to be eternally grateful, to be somehow therefore subordinate. He’d wanted her to be free, but he wanted to decide for her how she should use her freedom.
Kip swore aloud, and went to bed.
The next morning, he went to breakfast, then checked the lists. He wasn’t on any work details. He supposed that meant he should go to class.
Class. Ugh. He stood in front of the lift with all the other students and withdrew into himself, carrying his black little storm cloud around with him.
Of course, there were a thousand things Kip still needed to learn. He had some experiential knowledge, but almost no other kind. It would hamper him eventually, he knew. Hell, it already had. The extent of his knowledge was the bouncy green balls of doom. Well, practically. It wasn’t going to be enough to keep him alive in the coming war.
Plus he’d managed to lose the knife that he was now more and more afraid was Important. Andross Guile had called it the Blinder’s Knife. It was only because he’d been vague with the squad about where it came from that they hadn’t asked him more about it. He’d let them think that it was Gavin’s.
And how did my mother come by that, anyway?
Kip walked in to Magister Kadah’s classroom. It was hard to believe that he’d first walked in here only a few months ago. He felt like he was ten years older. He sat at the back of the room. Even in a discipulus’s clothing again, he didn’t think he’d be able to escape notice, but there was no reason to stick his thumb in Magister Kadah’s eye.
More than he had to, anyway.
A voice whispered in his ear: “I hear you’ve connived your way into being declared legitimate, little bastard. Don’t think it changes anything. I know what you are.”
Kip turned. “So nice to see you, Magister.” He said it like he meant it.
She gave him a nasty grin. Kip’s training and fighting had changed him so much that perhaps he should have taken some solace in the fact that Magister Kadah looked exactly the same: shrunken like an old woman despite only being in her early thirties, disheveled with hair that hadn’t seen a pick since the last time Kip had been in class, green spectacles on a gold chain around her neck. “Should I get my switch ready?”
“I don’t know,” Kip said. “I’m just the ignoramus son of a whore.” He winced. Kip the Lip wasn’t so far in the past, apparently.
“Any more language like that, Kip Guile, and it’ll be knuckles. You remember, I believe?” Magister Kadah said.
Kip put his hands on the desk before him. The fingers of his left hand still bowed upward, stiff and stubborn, though he was working on them. The pain of getting that hand smashed with a switch would be excruciating. The whole hand still felt like one exposed nerve.
He looked up at the magister, puzzled. What? He was supposed to be afraid of getting his knuckles rapped?
Teia and Ben-hadad came in right before class was supposed to start. They saw Kip, and mirrored each other’s surprise at seeing him there, looked at each other, and then sat next to him.
The magister went to the front of the class, cleared her throat, and waited the moment it took for the class to fall silent. “Discipulae.”
“Magister,” the class answered. Kip joined them. A new start, Kip.
“Discipulae, today we’re going to be discussing orange. Any orange drafters here today?”
A few discipulae raised their hands. Kip debated raising his, and raised a couple fingers.
“Orange is singularly useless,” Magister Kadah said. She grinned nastily. “You’ll spend your lives making lubrication for machines and for storing away metals so they don’t rust. It is, however, a relatively easy life. Your patron may have you draft barrels of the stuff each day, which may take you from sunrise to noon, and then to keep you from dying early, you’ll be done by noon every day. Some will, happily, have other duties for you to perform. Usually non-magical ones: cleaning stables, dusting furniture, mopping barracks. Yes, Ben-hadad?”
“Orange can be used for more than that,” Ben-hadad said. “And with a war looming that could destroy all of us, I think we should start training oranges to live up to their full potential.”
“Their full potential?” Magister Kadah asked. Her tone was meant to be a warning, but Ben-hadad seemed to think it was a real question.
“Oranges can craft hexes. It’s said that in Ru, orange spies infiltrating the city crafted fear hexes invisible to the naked eye but so potent that people avoided whole neighborhoods—allowing the heretics to tunnel under the walls unopposed. Oranges can spike food and drink. Fear-casting, tromoturgy. Pathomancy. Will-blunting.”
“Forbidden!” Magister Kadah snapped. “And at your level, forbidden to even discuss!”
“We’re at war!” Ben-hadad said. “I just heard that the last fort below Ruic Neck fell. From there, there’s nothing to stop the Color Prince until they reach the Ao River. Even if you won’t teach the oranges to craft hexes, you should be teaching us all how to resist them, and certainly how to recognize them.”
“This Color Prince will doubtless be put down in weeks if he hasn’t already been. None of you will have to face orange heretics.”
“There are people who have already faced the Blood Robes in this very room,” Ben-hadad said.
Thanks, Ben.
“I see. So you are friends now, is that it?” Magister Kadah asked Ben-hadad, looking from him to Kip. “Trying to make the ‘Guile’ look good? Quite the pair you make, huh? The ignoramus and the boy who can’t even read? How’d you learn all this?”
“I can read,” Ben-hadad hissed.
“The words just get scrambled for him is all, Magister,” Teia said. “He can read if he goes slow.”
“Slow is a nice way of saying stupid,” Magister Kadah said.
Kip sighed. He’d had the best intentions.
“Ben-hadad, you think being friends with this lordling will help you?” Magister Kadah asked. The whole class was silent, expectant.
“I’m not his friend because he can do something for me,” Ben-hadad said. “And I resent your implication. You dishonor me and you dishonor yourself by speaking such petty vileness.”
A wave of shock passed through the young tee
ns. They looked like they didn’t want to look away for a heartbeat, in case they missed Magister Kadah’s head exploding.
Magister Kadah’s eyes widened, fists balled. “You think he can protect you?” she demanded. “Report yourself immediately, Ben-hadad… for expulsion.”
There was a collective gasp.
“Expulsion?” Ben-hadad asked, disbelieving.
“For gross insubordination. I’ve not used my power to expel a discipulus in three years. Perhaps it is time. You’re worthless as a drafter; you’ll be useful as an example.”
The old Kip would have jumped out of his seat and started shouting furiously. He would have tapped into the well of hatred at injustice that he’d carried since growing up with his addled mother. Growing up, it had never felt safe to be furious with her on his own behalf, but when he’d seen others suffering injustice, it had been there, hot and ready, a powerful insanity he could put on and only take off when he was exhausted. Kip had been going green golem since long before he could draft. Even Ram had feared him when he’d been like that.
Kip stood slowly. Teia tried to grab him, tried to keep him in his seat.
“What do you think you’re doing, Kip ‘Guile’? You think I can’t expel you, too?”
Of course she couldn’t. “You can’t even expel Ben-hadad,” Kip said. He spoke evenly, respectfully, even mournfully. He didn’t raise his voice, but he spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “He’s a Blackguard inductee, and if you think Commander Ironfist is going to let you thin his already strained ranks in a time of war, I wish you luck in the conflagration that will be your own career.”
A profound silence fell over the room. The whispering teenagers weren’t even whispering, and Kip’s tone somehow defanged Magister Kadah.
Respectfully, regretfully, Kip continued. “Magister, you weren’t always like this. You don’t like children, I understand that. It’s a failing, but all Orholam’s sons and daughters have failings. You’ve been assigned by an angry superior or perhaps through cruel chance to do work that has never fit you. You’ve served quietly in a difficult posting because you love Orholam and you love the Chromeria and you love the Seven Satrapies. But you hate your work, and I bet that you hate what you’ve become. You’re better than this. You’ve been punished for something, or perhaps for nothing, and you’ve done a lot of damage in turn. Not least of all to yourself. I will do what I can to help you.”