Half an hour later, he and Karris skimmed away with little more than they’d brought with them three months ago. He didn’t explain himself. She’d seen the blood on him when he got back last night. She’d seen the look on his face. She didn’t berate him for leaving without her. She knew him. And without asking whether they were leaving, she’d said her goodbyes. She knew.
The crowds gathered once more as they walked to the beach, and they roared as he waved to them. Men and women wept for him. It
was an insanity of kindness that Gavin couldn’t understand, but he treasured it nonetheless. And then they left.
As Seers Island slowly disappeared into the distance behind them, Gavin examined it over his shoulder, discomfited. He and Karris talked little that day, each introspective, and camped on a beach near Ruic Head in Atash.
The next day, as Gavin switched the skimmer for the manual labor of the scull to close the final leagues to Little Jasper, he spied the towers, rising majestic against the noon sun. Against the stark colors of the other towers, the blue sat mute, gray. Its sister tower and neighbor, the green tower, was adorned with illusions beneath the luxin to make it look like a towering tree—this year they honored Atash by depicting the extinct atasifusta. But the color wasn’t right. Before the war, Gavin had seen the last grove of atasifusta.
There were storm clouds gathering over the Chromeria, and at first Gavin thought perhaps it was simply a trick of the light, but as they got closer, he became certain that wasn’t it.
Why would they make such a mistake? Surely some Atashian who remembered the trees would complain. The leaves of the giants were vibrant, radiant, a perfect complement to the green tower, not this sickly, gray-green mishmash.
Oh hells. Gavin drafted the green he needed for the scull’s flexibility. He could still do it, but it was like he was building the whole damn Brightwater Wall all over again, just to give a few corners of his boat some flexibility.
In that moment, he knew: after all he’d just done to save the world from a blue calamity, now he was losing green.
Commander Ironfist breathed. “Kip, do you have any idea…”
“No! I don’t.”
Commander Ironfist was already looking at the blade intently. “Strange. Why are two of the jewels colored and the others clear?”
“I was sort of hoping you’d tell me. Sir.”
“Kip, I don’t know that much about this blade except that it’s important, that the Spectrum itself used to keep it, and that it was lost during the war. I don’t know what it does besides look pretty, but people have killed for this knife. Literally. More than once. These materials—white metal, and black…” He reached a finger to touch them, but then stopped.
“Luxin?” Kip asked. “White and black luxin?”
Ironfist looked troubled. “I’d always thought black luxin was simply obsidian. Hellstone. This…”
Kip hadn’t noticed, maybe hadn’t really looked since he’d first examined the blade in the dim light of the barge, but the black metal threaded down the middle of the white blade looked different than he remembered. It looked like it shimmered dully, a tiny thready pulse.
Other discipulae had asked about white luxin and black luxin in Kip’s classes. The response had been tart—you’re not ready for those talks. All Kip knew was that no one had ever seen either, so he’d concentrated on more direct worries—like trying not to get his ass kicked and figuring out how to use a stupid abacus and memorizing seven hundred and thirty-six idiot cards that didn’t even include all the forbidden cards that were, apparently, all the most interesting ones. Kip reached out.
“Don’t touch the blade!” Ironfist said. “They call it the Marrow Sucker—and I don’t want to find out why the hard way.” Then his visage darkened. “This looks familiar. Where have I seen this?”
“Zymun, sir. This is the knife he tried to kill the Lord Prism with.”
“The assassin boy? From the barge?”
Kip nodded.
“How do you know his name?”
“He tried to kill me back in Rekton.”
“And how—never mind. You need to hide this, Kip. From everyone.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Kip said. “Andross Guile thinks I have it. Or at least he thinks I know where it is. I’m afraid what he’ll do for it.”
“As well you should be.” Commander Ironfist went over to a closet and started rummaging through a box. He came back with something with numerous leather straps. He threaded them through the dagger’s sheath. “Strap this on your calf, under your trousers. Now, Kip.”
Commander Ironfist went to the door, then pointed Kip to stand out of the line of sight. Kip did, and Ironfist cracked the door.
“Jade, I’m occupied. Don’t let in any messengers. Especially that damned snake.”
“With pleasure, sir,” a woman’s voice answered.
“Snake?” Kip asked, trouser leg up, not quite having figured out the straps yet.
“Andross Guile’s slave, Grinwoody. He was barely even a drafter, but Andross pulled strings and got him in to Blackguard testing, as a parting reward for good service, we supposed. He made it all the way through the training, made friends, learned secrets both personal and corporate, and on oath day decided to sign with Lord Guile instead. Who used those secrets. Twenty years ago, and still we remember. It’s not terribly uncommon that someone leaves right before they sign, but it wastes a huge amount of our time and effort. We go to all the work of training someone, and they leave us high and dry.”
“Grinwoody?” Kip asked. He couldn’t get over it. “That old stump was almost a Blackguard?”
“He’d be dead by now if he had been a Blackguard, of course. The constant drafting. So maybe he’s the smart one.”
“Doesn’t make it any less a betrayal,” Kip said.
After Kip pulled down his trouser leg to conceal the sheath now strapped to the outside of his calf, he extended a hand toward the commander for the knife. Ironfist looked at him, eyes hard. “Kip, thank you. Thank you for trusting me. And now, don’t ever do that again.”
“Sir?”
“Kip I know you’re lonely, and I know you want to trust someone. I understand. But you’re not in that place anymore. You don’t know what kind of pressure Andross Guile can bring to bear against me. You haven’t known me for three months, and you’ve just handed four great treasures into my hands. I could take them from you now and have you thrown out. I could buy myself a satrap’s seat with what you’ve got. You think I’m immune? You think I’m too good a man to do that?”
“Yes, sir,” Kip said.
“But you don’t
know
.”
“A man’s got to act without knowing everything, or he’ll never do anything.”
Commander Ironfist’s lip twitched. “So you’re a man now?”
“I’ve taken lives, and I’ve taken my own life in my hands and trusted a friend with it. Yes, sir, I’d say that makes me a man.”
“Neither makes you a man. The first makes you a killer. The second makes you a fool. Either may get you killed.”
“But not today?” Kip asked. For all his bravado, he couldn’t help but swallow, looking at the bare knife in Ironfist’s hand.
“Not today,” Commander Ironfist averred. He offered the blade to Kip.
Kip took it with a weak smile and sheathed it, then bloused his trouser leg over it.
“Now, let’s talk about the other things that can get you killed here,” the commander said. He picked up one of the cloaks. “One, shimmercloaks. Fantastic.” Commander Ironfist sighed, as if he’d blown through his entire allowance of incredulity in one orgy of wild spending. “In legend, there are twelve shimmercloaks. Supposedly, they always worked in pairs. Assassins.”
“Like the Order of the Broken Eye?” Kip asked.
“They were the pride of that supposed order.”
“Were? Supposed? You hold the fabric of legends in your hand. Literally.”
“So it seems.”
Kip showed Commander Ironfist the Shimmercloak card. “This man was one of them. His name was Vox, and his partner a woman named Niah.”
“And how did you kill two professional assassins, Kip?”
“He killed her. On accident. And I got lucky. They didn’t expect me to see them, and I did. They kept their weapons down until the last second so they wouldn’t displace their cloaks and then—”
“Rhetorical question, Kip.”
“Oh.”
Commander Ironfist sat on the edge of his bed. “Just when a man makes a decision that everything he’s believed his whole life is a lie, something comes along tempting him to believe again. Vanity. Quicksand.”
“Sir?”
Commander Ironfist rubbed his stubble-fuzzy scalp. “The pagans believed in separate gods, as you know. Either real, living entities that required their sacrifices and could be wooed by human gifts or, as
other pagans believed, simply as facets of humanity itself—as greed is part of each of us, or ambition, or passion—they believed the gods should be acknowledged only for how they revealed truths about our own souls. But talking about pagans as if they were one camp is an oversimplification. Even if you talked about the worshippers of Atirat—as apparently Vox was—you’d be speaking too broadly. They all agreed on the existence of multiple gods, but the agreement didn’t extend much beyond that.
“They were men like us: some were good, some evil, some believed nonsense. There were religious proscriptions that made no sense—like a deep suspicion that the use of spectacles was sinful, unnatural. But then some sects were happy to sacrifice their firstborn to bribe the gods to give them a fruitful harvest. Some venerated their color wights. Others drove them out. Others stoned them. The successful wights—for they claimed that such existed—would reign as demigods.”
“I don’t understand how this connects,” Kip said.
“Just because a man bases his entire life on nonsense doesn’t mean everything he believes is wrong.”
Kip raised his eyebrows. So…“The suspense is torture, sir.”
“Some pagans believed light splitting was a separate gift. Our teaching has been that light splitting is the sole gift of the Prism. It’s not holy writ, but it has been the teaching for hundreds of years.” Commander Ironfist waved the Shimmercloak card. “This is one card. It says, ‘If Lightsplitter…’ Which means light splitting is possible. Even if people denied what happened to you, these cards are true. They can’t be denied. This one card wouldn’t destroy the faith, but it would make every luxiat who’s ever spoken about light splitting look like a fool. It will be like when Pevarc proved once and for all that the world is round two hundred years ago. A few scholars had been whispering the same things for five hundred years before him, but no one thanked him for making fools of the luxiats. The navigational corrections that his better calculations allowed all came about years after he was lynched.”
“Lynched?” Kip asked, eyebrows climbing.
“For something else altogether—he proposed that light was an absence of darkness, rather than the inverse.” Seeing the befuddled look on Kip’s face, he said, “Don’t worry about that. Point is, light
splitting is real. Some of us had always suspected as much, which is why the Blackguard has always recruited drafters like Adrasteia. Not just because she can see concealed weapons, but because she could see an assassin who is invisible.”
“But how does it work?” Kip asked. “I didn’t think such things were possible.”
“You’re a dim, Kip. You don’t have the background to understand—”
“And if I did, I’d only know wrong things. So you don’t have to unteach me all the things I think I know.”
A dip of the head and a momentary grin conceded the point. Ironfist took a breath. “Light is power. The power always goes somewhere. Sunlight hits a cherrywood floor. We know that the sunlight is full-spectrum, from sub-red through superviolet, but the floor reflects only reddish brown. Where does the rest of the light go? It’s absorbed. And years later, compare that wood floor with a section of the same floor that was covered with a rug, or a shadow. The sun-exposed part is bleached. The light very slowly changed the nature of the wood itself—broke it down. Just like light darkens a man’s skin or lightens a woman’s hair. Just like a color does to a drafter’s body. Prisms don’t break the halo despite drafting vast amounts of light because they’re able to release
all
the light that hits them. The rest of us are less efficient, more susceptible to the damage. The point is that the light hitting a surface can’t be changed unless you can put a lens over the sun. The energy is constant. It must be dealt with.
“If it works the way I’ve heard guessed at, a lightsplitter acts like a wedge in the stream of light, lengthening the long spectra and shortening the shorter, so that all the visible light hitting her is released above and below the visible spectrum. If she does it perfectly, she’ll glow bright as a torch in the superviolet and the sub-red. I’ve heard tales of lightsplitters burning up if there’s too much light to handle, say on a bright day—because they’re turning so much visible light into heat, they can burn out. These cloaks make what they do easier. Like lenses make it easier for a drafter to draft her color.”
Kip had seen so many wonders in the past months, he had no trouble believing it. “So you’re telling me there may be hordes of invisible people walking among us?”