The black prism l-1

by Brent Weeks

  The nuances of the rotating rule of Garriston were lost on them. They didn't differentiate between the better and worse occupiers. They hated them all. One had lost his daughter a number of years before when a patrol had passed through their village and an officer had simply taken her. He'd gone to Garriston afterward to try to find her, but never did. The others had come partly for their friend, partly because they had nothing else to do and taking a city might drop a few coins into their hands, and partly because they hated the outlanders.

  And so men will die and kill for an offense ten years old, committed by some other country.

  There was no point reasoning with them, even if Liv had cared to. Fools who could be our friends at some other time, her father had said. After she finished eating, she put on her yellow spectacles, drafted a few luxin torches that would last for a few days to thank them for the soup and the fruit, asked directions to where the drafters were camped, and then headed out.

  No one bothered her on her way. Once a man called out to her as she passed, but the comment dried up on his lips as he saw her colored spectacles-even now, in the darkness, they respected drafters.

  The drafters' tents were separate from everyone else's-not because they were guarded or staked off, but evidently no one wanted to camp too close to them. Liv slipped her spectacles off, but kept them in hand, in case someone challenged her.

  She moved past a wagon surrounded by Mirrormen and painted all violet-odd, but she didn't slow, she moved with purpose, as if she had orders. It was a trick she'd learned in the Chromeria. If you stood around, some full drafter would find something for you to do. If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.

  She passed a number of fires with drafters being served a lavish dinner by cooks and wine or ales by a large number of slaves. The drafters all wore their colors on their wrists in either cloth or metal vambraces or in large bracelets for some of the women. The hem of their cloaks or dresses also echoed the color. Other than that, everyone wore his own style. In general, though, these drafters were much more interested in loudly proclaiming their colors in broad swathes across their clothes than was common at the Chromeria, where a woman might have a single green hairpin to let others know she was a green.

  They were a raucous, privileged group, but as Liv watched from the shadows, she saw that the men and women here often glanced to the south-not to the huge pavilion guarded by drafters and Mirrormen alike that Liv assumed was King Garadul's residence, but to another set of bonfires. She grabbed a pitcher of wine from one of the slaves' tables and headed over. In the dark, her own apparel didn't look too different from the slaves'.

  What she saw, beyond the forms of the slaves, took her breath away. People-or monsters shaped like people-were talking, drinking, cavorting, drafting.

  Nearest to Liv, a circle of blue drafters, half of them wearing blue spectacles, and all filled with blue luxin, tinting their skin in the firelight, were talking with a woman who seemed made of crystal.

  For long moments, Liv had no idea what she was seeing. They were drafters, though, obviously, and there was luxin everywhere. Oathbreakers. The mad. The broken. Color wights. Liv could barely take it in.

  These were people who'd violated everything Liv had been taught. She caught only fractured details. A broken-haloed eye. The crystalline woman drafting a matrix in the air as the other blues listened. Greens laughing, dancing around one fire, bouncing on unnaturally springy legs, jumping higher than any man Liv had ever seen, doing flips and backflips over each other. A man and a woman, skin permanently green but not yet transformed, were standing, holding each other, grinding their hips together, dancing in a manner so lascivious that-wait, no, the woman's skirt was bunched around her waist. In full view of everyone, including some cheering drafters, they were actually-

  Liv tore her eyes away, her cheeks suddenly hot. A yellow was tossing little luxin balls into the air while a blue shot blue bullets at them, each little target exploding in a flash of light when he connected.

  But Liv's eyes were drawn to the full color wights. Even here, there weren't many. She'd only heard rumors about such things at the Chromeria. They said almost everyone who broke their halo simply went mad and died-or went mad and killed others, more often. That danger was what made the Pact necessary. Orholam made magic to serve men, and a drafter swore to serve her community. Oathbreakers served only themselves, and they endangered everyone.

  But there were always the legends of those who remade themselves. Now, here, Liv was seeing that they weren't wild tales. Now, here, these drafters were teaching each other how to do it. Liv looked at the crystal blue woman. She was oddly beautiful. Crystal hair, and diamond-shaped eye caps close over her eyes, flawed crystal skin, broken into a thousand facets, covering every natural curve of her body. She'd conquered the problem of how to deal with drafting hard, unbending blue luxin onto a body that had to be able to move and to bend by making thousands-tens of thousands-of small crystals. Her body glimmered, shimmered, coruscated in the firelight as she shifted her upper body like a dancer to show her disciples what she'd done. She laughed, showing strangely white teeth against those gleaming blue lips. Then she shifted suddenly into a fighting stance, spiky guards springing up along the edges of her forearms, and plates of blue luxin congealing over her skin to make armor.

  Shit!

  "Hey, caleen! I said wine!" a voice said.

  Liv turned and found herself face-to-face with a man with hideous burn scars all over his body. A sub-red, with the odd shimmering of fire crystal broken through his halos. He held out a glass to Liv, and she filled it with wine, trembling, averting her own eyes until he looked away. The man held a haze pipe in one hand, and there were fresh burns all along his skin. As Liv looked, she realized the burns were deliberate. He was trying to scar all of his skin deeply enough to lose feeling in it. Until then, he was deadening himself to the pain any way he could.

  It had to be incredibly dangerous to even be in close proximity to a mad fire drafter. He couldn't control himself normally, and now he was drunk and high on haze.

  The man had barely left when Liv saw a gout of flame blast into the night sky a few hundred yards away. She stopped, and so did a few of the color wights, nudging those around them and pointing.

  Whatever it had been, the drafter who'd done it had been powerful. That was a lot of fire to throw into the night. Where had he gotten the light to do that? From one of the bonfires?

  Then it happened again, fire painting the sky for several seconds. Liv felt her throat tighten with fear. Kip! No, that was ridiculous. Kip was green/blue. Fire, sub-red, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. It couldn't be Kip. The color wights just laughed, as if it were one of their own out there, having fun.

  Orholam, Kip could be getting killed out there in the night. Liv needed to go.

  She turned and headed out of camp. She almost ran into a dozen Mirrormen who were escorting a woman clad in a gorgeous black dress and wearing violet eye caps out of the king's pavilion. Liv stopped. Karris.

  They hustled past, but Liv had no doubt where they were going. Karris was being held in that odd violet wagon she'd seen, held captive. Liv should have figured it out earlier.

  Still, any elation Liv had felt about finding Karris-actually finding her, on the first day, in a camp of maybe a hundred thousand souls if not more-was quashed by her fear for Kip.

  When she got out of the drafters' area, she put on her yellow spectacles. No one bothered her. She arrived at the place she and Kip had agreed to meet just in time, but he wasn't there. He never came.

  The next day, she learned a heavy boy with Tyrean skin and blue eyes had been attacked and had killed five men-or ten or twenty, or five women too, depending on the rumor-and then thrown fire into the air. He'd been taken away by drafters and Mirrormen. Despite the impossibilities-Kip couldn't draft sub-red-her intuition confirmed it. It had been Kip. She was sure. Someone had drafted fire, someone else had killed those people,
and Kip had been taken.

  She searched for him for two days. She found nothing.

  Chapter 72

  As the sun dragged its feet toward the horizon, Gavin gave the signal, and the teamsters' whips cracked. The draft horses surged forward. Their leads drew taut, and the ropes connected to the great yellow luxin supports strained for a moment. Then the supports fell, the great straining mass of the horses snatching them away from the dropping wall.

  The final layer of yellow luxin hit the ground with a boom, shaking the earth. Gavin quickly moved to inspect that everything had gone according to plan.

  "One league out!" Corvan called. He was standing on top of the wall, looking out toward King Garadul's vast army.

  "Shit!"

  "Here, Lord Prism!" one of the engineers called.

  Gavin hurried over. The last of many big problems he'd run into in crafting a wall almost entirely of yellow luxin was that all the luxin had to be sealed. The seal was always the weakest point. If you could melt through that one area-no mean feat, but still-the whole structure would unravel. That his wall was made in sections just meant that each section had multiple seals. If any section failed, it would be catastrophic-an entire section of wall, fifty paces across, would splash into liquid light in moments.

  It was probably the reason no one before Gavin had been idiot enough to make an entire wall of yellow luxin.

  The solution had been simplicity itself: two layers of luxin, each protecting the other, the seals to the inside. That part was common enough among drafters, but the seal was always the last thing you touched. So you couldn't really tuck it inside, not on something as big as a wall. You could protect one seal by covering it with more luxin and sealing that, but one seal would always be external. Most drafters would have covered the seal and covered that seal and covered that one and left it at that.

  It wasn't good enough for Gavin. He'd built the entire second layer of the wall up on supports. Then he'd built each side, sealing them on the inside. When the draft horses pulled out the supports and the second layer of wall fell into place, it left a structure where the seals-for the first time that Gavin had ever heard of-were truly protected, not just by yellow luxin, but by the vast weight of the wall itself. And as each section locked to the next, it became more and more difficult for anyone to ever lift the wall to access the seals.

  Gavin was building something monumental, something pure, and it felt great. This edifice would stand long after he was dead. There weren't many men who could claim the same. The locals were already calling it Brightwater Wall.

  Hurrying over to the engineer who'd called out, Gavin found that one of the supports hadn't been pulled all the way free. The wall had dropped on it, pounding the two-pace-wide support almost halfway into the earth, and keeping the wall from fitting the next section perfectly.

  "Three minutes until our artillery will be in place!" Corvan called down.

  Sonuvabitch! Gavin dropped on his knees next to the broad yellow support and brushed dirt away hurriedly. The support, unlike the wall sections, was sealed right at the surface for just this eventuality. Right… there! Gavin sent some sub-red into the seal and the entire support dissolved, the yellow luxin abruptly liquid. The wall settled with a deep rumble.

  Gavin had made the tolerances too tight. He should have made those joints able to hook together even if they weren't so well aligned. The tight joints gave the wall more strength and would keep soldiers inside dry even during rainstorms, but still.

  Taking his attention off the wall for the first time in hours-it felt like days, though it was only early evening-he looked to the people assembled, looking for who he needed.

  There were thousands assembled. Most of the people of Garriston wanted to see the wall being built. Vendors had set up their wagons and stalls. Minstrels wandered through, playing and prodding people for coins. Soldiers kept avenues clear and began ferrying gear and powder and ropes and shot for cannons and firewood for furnaces and additional armor and arrows and muskets. Others operated the cranes as soon as the second layer settled in place. Drafters were pouring through the inside of the wall, sealing any cracks, looking for flaws that they could fix, or larger ones that needed Gavin's hand. The Blackguards-nearly a hundred of them-also stood nearby.

  They'd told everyone to leave already, but they didn't have the men to spare to enforce the order. The people were too curious; they knew they'd never see anything like this again in their lives. Gavin couldn't worry about them right now. He was already feeling the tightness of impossibility squeezing his chest.

  "Captain!" Gavin called. "You've seen the process. Get the teamsters moving as fast as they can. We've got sixteen more sections. Send half the teams all the way to the east side, and have half work from here out. Take six drafters. You four, you, and you. You've seen what I've done. Go do it.

  "General Danavis, talk to me!" Gavin shouted. Less than a league now. It should be enough.

  Gavin moved to the inside of the great arch that would hold the gate. There were open holes, tubes running down the great curving length of the wall. Gavin filled himself with light and blasted green luxin down each tube. It would give the wall some flex, but also strength to recoil from any battering ram blow. He sealed each green luxin tube at the end.

  "Lord Prism," Corvan called, holding a fresh-drafted telescope up to one eye. "It looks like they have teams pushing their artillery out in front of the army. They know we don't have the skirmishers to go out and smash them. Damn spies! I can't see the culverins, but we know they have half a dozen. If they fire from greatest random-" He paused, doing mental calculations. Greatest random was literally the greatest distance gunners could reach, but at almost two thousand paces for the biggest culverins, there was no such thing as aiming. "They could begin their bombardment anytime now if their crews are practiced. Within minutes, even if they're not."

  It wasn't the culverins Gavin was worried about. Because of the trajectory of those big guns, their shots would hit the front of the wall. Brightwater Wall could take as many direct hits as they wanted to give it. They would have to come substantially closer for the higher-trajectory howitzers and closer still for the mortars that would absolutely wreak havoc on the stubborn crowds behind the wall. Garriston's cannons would have to knock out those guns before they could be placed, bagged, and loaded.

  "Damn it, find someone who's not doing something more important and get these damn people back," Gavin ordered. "This isn't a Sun Day outing! Shells are going to be landing where they sit in ten minutes!" Gavin turned back to General Danavis. "Start firing as soon as you can. Buy me time, General!"

  Gavin felt more than heard the next section of wall fall into place. People were rushing everywhere, but he pushed it out of his mind and confronted the new biggest problem of all, now that the wall was actually taking shape.

  He hadn't built the gate.

  He ran over to one of the cranes hoisting supplies to the top of the wall. It was already lifting off the ground as he approached, rising fast. Gavin jumped, throwing out two hooks of blue and green luxin, snagging the sides of the load. He rose fast and pulled himself up. He jumped off as soon as the load settled on top of the wall, startling the soldiers operating the crane. They froze.

  "To work!" he roared. They jumped, and then jumped to it.

  Gavin ran across the top of the wall, dodging men to get back to the arch above the gap where he needed to draft the gate.

  Tremblefist was barking orders, sending up a small number of Blackguards to stand with Gavin-as if they could do anything to protect him from incoming shells-but not so many that they would get in the way of the defenders trying to set up the wall for any of a hundred tasks. The rest of the Blackguards took up positions in front of the empty gate.

  As in all battles, there was simply too much to see, too much happening all at the same time to put everything together. Gavin looked toward the sun, poised above the horizon.

  Two hours. All I need is two h
ours. Protecting these people is one great purpose I have that you must approve of. So if you're up there, would you please get off your holy ass and help me?

  General Danavis had been organizing, training, promoting, firing, and training Garriston's defenders for the past week. Twenty hours a day, sometimes twenty-two. It was inhuman, and yet it wasn't enough. Gavin was accustomed to the discipline and ease of working with veterans. By the end of the Prisms' War, his men had worked together fluidly. Stocking this wall with supplies would have taken his veterans literally one-third of the time it was taking these men. His veteran cannoneers would already be sighted in, with distances marked off. These men barely knew each other, much less trusted each other. It made everything painfully slow, and Gavin was slow to adjust to how slow they were.

  We're doomed.

  But then he drafted a quick platform to walk out on in front of the open arch-necessary to gather some of his open threads of luxin-and he caught his first sight of the wall as his enemies would see it.

  That damned boy artist had made his masterpiece.

  Gavin had been the one who filled the forms, but he'd always been hovering above them, and while he was getting the sections to fit together he'd always been on the other side of the wall. Now he saw the whole.

  The entire wall-the entire great curving league of it-glowed the color of the sun when it first shows its face. That glow came from the liquid yellow-a hair's breadth from being perfect, hard yellow-that floated behind the first layer of perfect yellow. The liquid yellow would mend any damage that did scar the outer wall. But then, within that thin layer, Gavin saw that his old drafters, doubtless under the direction of Aheyyad, had added their own touches. As an enemy approached, he would see that the entire wall was swarming with loathsome things. Spiders the size of a man's head appeared to be crawling across the wall, stopping, little jaws clacking. Small dragons appeared to swoop and spin. Disapproving faces swirled up out of the gloom. A woman ran from some many-fanged thing and was torn to pieces and devoured alive, her face painted with despair. A man who appeared to be walking along the base of the wall was seized by hands that swirled out of the mist and yanked him in. Beautiful women turned into monsters with forked tongues and huge claws. Blood seeped and pooled on the ground. And those were just the things Gavin could see in a cursory glance. It was as if the drafters had gotten together and taken every nightmare any of them had ever had and put it into the wall. They were illusions, all of them mere images within the wall, but an enemy wouldn't know that at first, and even if they did know it, it was scary as the evernight itself. Better, it would certainly distract enemy archers and musketeers from making accurate shots at the murder holes hidden by those images.