The black prism l-1

by Brent Weeks

  "Oh, that's… amazing. A boat."

  Gavin looked nonplussed. "Point is, I don't want anyone to know how fast I am. There's war coming, and if I need to unveil it, I need it to be a surprise. You understand?"

  "Of course," Kip said.

  "Then I need you to tell me what you want. I'm going to go take care of some things while you're being initiated."

  "Initiated?"

  "Just some tests to determine the rest of your life. You're late, though, all the other students have already started, so we have to hustle you in. After initiation, you can stay and be trained."

  Kip's throat tightened. Dropped alone on a strange island, knowing no one, and having little time to prepare for a test that was supposed to determine the rest of his life? On the other hand, the Chromeria was where he'd learn the magic he needed to kill King Garadul. "What's the other option?"

  "You come with me."

  It was light at the end of a tunnel. Kip's heart flipped. "And what are you going to do?"

  "What I'm good at, Kip." Gavin stared up, his irises swirling rainbows. He smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was cold and distant as the moon. "I'm going to make war."

  Kip swallowed. Sometimes looking at Gavin, he felt like he was staring through trees, getting glimpses of a giant striding through a forest, crushing everything in his path.

  Gavin turned his eyes back to Kip. His face softened. "Which mostly involves boring meetings to convince cowards to spend money on things other than parties and pretty clothes." He grinned. "I'm afraid you've probably seen more magic out of me already than most of my soldiers ever did." His eyes clouded. "Well, not quite. You look confused."

  "It's not really about what you just said, but-" Kip stopped. It seemed like a pretty offensive question, now that it was halfway out of his mouth. "What do you do?"

  "As Prism?"

  "Yes. Um, sir. I mean, I know you're the emperor, but it doesn't seem like…"

  "Like anyone listens to me?" Gavin laughed. "Seems like it to me too. The bald truth of it is that Prisms come and go. Usually every seven years. Prisms have all the foibles of lesser men, and huge shifts of power every seven years can be devastating. If one Prism sets up his family members to govern every satrapy, and the next Prism tries to set up his own in their places, things get bloody fast. The Colors, on the other hand, the seven members of the Spectrum, are often around for decades. And they're usually pretty smart, so Prisms have been managed more and more over time, given religious duties to fill their days. The Spectrum and the satraps rule together. Each satrapy has one Color on the Spectrum, and each Color is supposed to obey the orders of his or her satrap. In practice, the Colors often become co-satraps in all but name. The jockeying between Color and satrap, and all the Colors and the White, and all the Colors and the White against the Prism, pretty much keeps order. Each satrapy can do what it wants at home as long as it doesn't rile up any other satrapy and trade keeps flowing, so everyone has an interest in keeping everyone else in check. It's not quite that simple, of course, but that's the gist."

  It sounded plenty complicated enough. "But during the war…?"

  "I was appointed promachos. Absolute rule during wartime. Makes everyone nervous, in case the promachos decides that the 'war' lasts forever."

  "But you gave it up?" It was a dumb question, Kip realized.

  But Gavin smiled. "And wonder of wonders, I haven't been assassinated. The Blackguard doesn't only protect Prisms, Kip. They protect the world from us."

  Orholam. Gavin's world sounded more dangerous than what Kip had just left. "So you'll teach me to draft?" he asked. It was the best of all worlds. He would learn what he needed to learn, without being set on a strange island alone. And who could teach drafting better than the Prism himself?

  "Of course. But first there's some things we have to do."

  Kip looked longingly at the sausage rope Gavin still held. "Like eat more?"

  Chapter 26

  By noon the next day, Kip had fully swallowed his teasing about a fast boat. They were flying across the waves at mind-boggling speed, and Gavin had enclosed the boat, muttering something about that woman and her ideas, so now, despite the speed, they could speak.

  "So you've used green," Gavin said, as if it were normal for him to be leaning hard forward, skin entirely red, feet strapped in, hands gripping two translucent blue posts, throwing great plugs of red luxin down into the water, sweating profusely, muscles knotted. "That's a good color. Everyone needs green drafters."

  "I think I can see heat, too. And Master Danavis said I'm a superchromat."

  "What?"

  "Master Danavis was the dyer in town. Sometimes I'd help him. He had trouble matching the reds as well as the alcaldesa's husband liked."

  "Corvan Danavis? Corvan Danavis lived in Rekton?"

  "Y-yes."

  "Slender, about forty, beaded mustache, couple freckles, and some red in his hair?"

  "No mustache," Kip said. "But, otherwise."

  Gavin swore quietly.

  "You know our dyer?" Kip asked, incredulous.

  "You could say that. He fought against me in the war. I'm more curious about you seeing heat. Tell me what you do."

  "Master Danavis taught me to look at the edges of my vision. Sometimes when I do, people glow, especially their bare skin, armpits, and… you know."

  "Groin?"

  "Right." Kip cleared his throat.

  "Blind me," Gavin said. He chuckled.

  "What? What's that mean?"

  "We'll see later."

  "Later? Like what, a year or two? Why do all adults talk to me like I'm stupid?"

  "Fair enough. Unless you're truly freakish, you're likely a discontiguous bichrome."

  Kip blinked. A what what? "I said I'm not stupid; ignorant's different."

  "And I meant later today," Gavin said.

  "Oh."

  "There are two special cases in drafting-well, there are lots of special cases. Orholam's great bloody-I've never tried to teach the early stuff. Have you ever wondered if you were the only real person in the world, and everything and everyone else was just your imagination?"

  Kip blushed. Back home, he'd even tried to stop imagining Ram, hoping the boy would simply cease to exist. "I guess so."

  "Right, it's one of a puerile mind's first flirtations with egoism. No offense."

  "None taken." Since I have no idea what you just said.

  "It's attractive because it validates your own importance, allows you to do whatever the hell you want, and it can't be disproven. Teaching drafting runs into the same problem. I'm going to assume here that you do accept that other people exist."

  "Sure. I'm not much for lecturing myself," Kip said. He grinned.

  Gavin squinted at the horizon. He'd rigged up two lenses separated by an arm's length and mounted on the luxin canopy so he could scan the seas. He must have seen something, because he banked the skimmer hard left-port! Hard to port.

  When he turned back, he'd apparently missed Kip's quip.

  "Anyway, where were we? Ah. The problem with teaching drafting is that color exists-it's separate from us-but we only know it through our experience of it. We don't know why, but some men-subchromats-can't differentiate between red and green. Other subchromats can't differentiate between blue and yellow. Obviously, when you tell a man that he can't see a color he's never seen, he might not believe you. Everyone else who tells him red and green are different colors could be just playing a cruel joke on him. Or he must accept the existence of something he'll never see. There are theological implications, but I'll spare you. To make it simple, if there are color-deficient men-incidentally, it is almost always men-why could there not also be those who are extremely color-sensitive, superchromats? And it turns out there are. But they're almost always women. In fact, about half of women can differentiate between colors at an extreme level. For men, it's one in tens of thousands."

  "Wait, so men lose both ways? Blind
to colors more often and really good at seeing them less often? That's not fair."

  "But we can lift heavy things."

  Kip grumbled. "And pee standing up, right?"

  "Very useful around poison ivy. I was on a mission with Karris this one time…" Gavin whistled.

  "She didn't," Kip said, horrified.

  "You thought she was mad at me back on the river? Somehow, it was my fault that time, too." Gavin grinned. "Anyway, to wend my way back to my point, most of us can see the normal range of colors. Hmm, tautology there."

  "What?" Kip asked.

  "That's a digression too far. Just because you can see a color doesn't mean you can draft it. But if you can't see a color, you'll draft it poorly. So men aren't as accurate when drafting certain colors as superchromat women, which is half of them. Will can cover a lot of mistakes, but it's better if there aren't mistakes to begin with. This becomes vital if you're trying to build a luxin building that won't fall down."

  "They make luxin buildings?"

  Gavin ignored him. "The special cases that I started all this to tell you about are sub-red and superviolet. If you can see heat, Kip, there's a good chance you can draft it."

  "You mean I can start a fire like whoosh?!" Kip made a grand sweeping gesture.

  "Only if you say 'whoosh!' when you do it." Gavin laughed.

  Kip blushed again, but Gavin's laughter wasn't mocking. It didn't make him feel stupid, just silly. There was plenty scary about the man, like Master Danavis was scary sometimes. But neither seemed mean. Neither seemed bad.

  "And that would be very strange," Gavin said, "because you've drafted green." He looked like he was trying to figure out how to teach something. "Have you ever seen a rainbow?"

  "A rain-what?" Kip asked, doe-eyed.

  "It was a rhetorical question, smarty. The order of colors is superviolet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, sub-red. Usually, a bichrome simply spans a broader arc. So they draft superviolet and blue, or blue and green, or green and yellow. A polychrome-much rarer-might draft green, yellow, and orange. A drafter who drafts colors that don't border each other is rare. Karris is one. She drafts green, but not yellow, not orange, and then she drafts most of red and into sub-red."

  "So she's a polychrome."

  "Close. Karris can't quite draft sustainable sub-red-what they call a fire crystal. Fire crystals don't last long regardless because they react to air, but-never mind that. Point is, she's just short of being a polychrome, and that matters."

  "I bet that made her happy," Kip said.

  "On the bright side, they wouldn't have let her become a Blackguard if she was a polychrome-polychromes are too valuable-and the pressure on her to bear children would have increased. Regardless, it's rare, and it's called being a discontiguous bichrome. Discontiguous because the arcs aren't touching. Bichrome because there are two. See? Everything in drafting is logical. Except what isn't. Like so: seeing sub-red is seeing heat, so seeing superviolet should be seeing cold, right?"

  "Right."

  "But it isn't."

  "Oh," Kip said. "Well, that makes sense, I guess." Except that it doesn't.

  "I have the strongest urge to ruffle your hair," Gavin said.

  Kip grunted. "So how is this going to work?"

  "There's a small island we use as an artillery station. There's a tunnel between there and the Chromeria, which is a secret so important that if you tell anyone, the Chromeria will hunt you down and execute you." He said it cheerfully, but Kip had no doubt that he was serious.

  "Then why did you just tell me?" Kip asked. "I could let it slip."

  "Because I've already shared a secret that I think is more important-the existence of this skimmer. But if you betray that secret to our enemies, the Chromeria might do nothing. But if you do betray us deliberately, you'd also tell them about the escape tunnel. So now if you betray me, you'll betray the whole Chromeria too. And they'll come after you and they'll kill you."

  Kip felt a chill. This man was warm, personable. Kip had no doubt that Gavin liked him, but in Gavin's circles, you could like someone and still have to kill him. The casual way that Gavin prepared for Kip's possible betrayal told Kip he'd been betrayed before and been caught unaware by it. And Gavin wasn't the kind of man who had to learn a hard lesson twice.

  "I'm going to dock on the island and put you on a boat to the main island. I'll send a Blackguard with you to take you to the Thresher. In a few days, you'll leave with me wherever I decide we have to go and I'll start teaching you to draft."

  Kip hardly heard the last part, though. "The Thresher?"

  Chapter 27

  Karris only fell a few feet through the floor before she hit something soft. Her left foot sank to the knee while the rest of her body continued falling into the basement. The sticky whatever-it-was held her leg as she fell, so she swung upside down and the rest of her slapped into the side of something like a great red egg-a thin crust over gooey innards. She smacked into it, broke the side, and splatted into red luxin. Then her fall pulled her free and she fell onto a stone floor.

  As she'd been trained, she flung her right hand down hard, the shock of slapping the floor hurt her hand-it always hurt-but that slap took the pressure off more vulnerable areas of her body and allowed her to guide the last part of her fall. She rolled instead of landing on her head.

  In a moment, she popped up to her feet, and pulled the thin-hilted ataghan from her pack. There was no light in the chamber except what spilled down through the hole she'd made in the ceiling. Chunks of wood were still falling into the hole. The great red egg shone in the sudden light. Settling smoke, stirred by Karris's fall, climbed the shaft of light surrounding the egg. The entire room, perhaps twenty paces by thirty, stank of smoke and burnt red luxin, which was odd, because red luxin usually burned perfectly cleanly. For that matter, every surface illuminated in the weak light appeared to be blackened luxin as well.

  But the great egg took all of Karris's attention. At least seven feet tall, it was seared perfectly black except where Karris had broken it. Red luxin now oozed out of that wound like tar. A half dozen tubes snaked away from the egg in every direction, disappearing into the ceiling, each also blackened. The seared corpses of a dozen of King Garadul's soldiers lay about the room.

  "What in the hell?" Karris murmured. She lifted her sword to crack the egg open.

  The egg exploded before she could touch it. A great section of the front flew into her, the blackened shell shattering over her barely raised left arm, her chest, stomach, and legs. Caught in midstep, she was thrown off balance. She stumbled and felt more than saw a form shooting backward out of the egg even as the shell splattered over her.

  Instead of trying to catch herself, Karris flung herself into the fall. She rolled forward, tucking her ataghan in so she didn't skewer herself, and attacked. There was no hesitation. Ironfist had pounded that lesson into Karris for years: when attacked, you counterattack instantly. The speed of that strike was often the only advantage you had. Especially if you were small. Especially if you were a woman. Especially if you weren't wearing your spectacles and the other drafter was.

  Karris's attacker had backed all the way up to the wall. He stood with living coils of red luxin like giant knots around his hands. Karris knew that construction. If you knew what you were doing, you could hold extra open luxin outside your body. Those knots of open luxin could be formed into anything you wanted and, held on your hands, you could actually fling them however you needed. The man stood like a trained fighter, too: left side toward Karris, left hand up to block but still with some springiness to throw out an attack, right hand higher and pulled back, right knee bent deeply, holding most of his weight. Even with Karris's speed with drafting and the amount of red luxin here to reflect red light to her eyes, it still took some time to ready an attack, and he had the drop on her. Her only hope was to close the distance between them before he killed her.

  His left hand flicked out, right to left, low. Red luxin glom
med on the floor to slow her. She was expecting it, and she stutter-stepped over the sticky patches. His right hand snapped forward in three sharp jerks. Three balls, each the size of a fist, whipped out right to left. Karris dodged the first and second, but the third caught her as she had to stutter-step again to miss another sticky patch on the floor. It thumped hard into the ribs on her left side, then splattered. She rolled with it, spun into range, and slashed with the ataghan.

  The red drafter met her descending sword with layer after layer of red luxin. Held luxin, even red luxin, could gain a certain degree of rigidity from the drafter's will, and more from being woven, but red luxin could never stop steel. It was like pitting water against a sword.

  But this wasn't just a bit of held red luxin. It wasn't like slapping a sword into still water. It was like standing below a dam when they opened the floodgates. It was only water, but the speed and volume of it would blow a man off his feet. Likewise, the red luxin hitting Karris slowed her, slowed her more, and finally brought her to a complete halt.

  The red drafter's face paled as the luxin drained out of him. Next, his neck and chest went back to their natural hue as the torrent continued. Then his muscular shoulders, the luxin being bleached out of his body from eyes to extremities. They both realized he was running out of luxin at the same time.

  Karris broke off her attack at the same time he did. She feinted to his right, expecting to meet more red luxin, and set up a killing blow. Instead, her sword clanged against something hard, but she didn't see any sword. He couldn't have drawn one without her seeing it, not even in this darkness.

  Not hesitating, she lifted the ataghan and brought it down toward his head. It clanged and stopped as he lifted his hands in a V.

  He shoved her hard backward and followed, keeping close. The shaft of light piercing the gloom of the room illuminated his hands and what he was holding as he shouted, "Enough! Damn you, stop for one second."

  The drafter held a pistol in each hand, crossed, their barrels holding Karris's ataghan prisoner between them. His right pistol stared at her right eye, his left at her left eye. Karris had her other knives and the bich'hwa, of course, but there was no way she could draw any of them before he could pull a trigger.