by Brent Weeks
By some accident, he turned on the lights on the bag. It lit up sections to tell him his next target: right kidney, gut, left jaw. With each punch, the bag reacted to how hard Kip hit it by blossoming in color from his punches. Light touches lit the bag blue. Kip’s hardest kicks reached up to orange.
It wasn’t long before he was wheezing at the effort of trying to get the bag to turn red.
He braced his gloved hands on his knees. He was hitting the damned thing as hard as he could.
No, he was hitting as hard as he could muscularly. Magically, he should be able to hit it harder.
But he didn’t want to shoot his little green bouncy balls of doom across the room. If he could add his will to his muscles with magical stuff he threw, why couldn’t he add his will to his muscles?
He remembered the wights in Garriston, leapfrogging from roof to roof, shooting luxin downward as they jumped, using the back kick to extend their jumps. It was the same concept that worked for Gavin’s skimmers and the sea chariots. But both of those interacted more externally. They didn’t have to, did they?
Kip drafted a shinguard, then kicked off his shoes. This next part was going to hurt. It always did. He began kicking the heavy bag to warm up for it. He’d been shown how to put power into kicks a dozen times, but it hadn’t settled into body knowledge until today somehow. Maybe losing some weight had helped. He swung both arms in a guard to the left, letting his body stretch, his left foot turning until it pointed backward, hips opening, then jerked his arms back in, the torsion providing power as his right leg came up and pounded the side of the bag and set it swinging. That bag weighed two sevens. Not bad. He repeated it, not quite as successfully, from the left.
Enough warm-up. He filled himself with green luxin, then stabbed a bit of it through the skin at the back of his right heel. He winced, cut it wider.
Here goes nothing. He stood with his right foot back, twisted, snapped, and as his right foot came up, he shot green luxin out of it.
The sudden transfer of weight from his body into the air, but this time not opposing his body but aiding it, threw Kip’s foot forward at tremendous speed. He kicked the bag so hard that he lost traction on his left foot and fell heavily on his side.
Laughter burst out from the door.
Kip popped to his feet in an instant, mortified. It was half a dozen members of his Blackguard class, led by Cruxer, who was grinning big. If it was possible, it seemed like the young inductees had changed in the weeks Kip hadn’t seen them. Cruxer was bulking up, his tall, lean frame looking more muscular by the day. His eyes, though, looked five years older, either from the death of the girl he’d loved, Lucia, or from being in the Battle of Ru. Affable Big Leo’s arms of banded iron looked even bigger. Gross Goss wasn’t picking his nose, but he was itching it with a big thumb. Tiny Daelos didn’t look any bigger, but he was beginning to look reedy and not just skinny and small. Ben-hadad still had spectacles with flip-down lenses, but he’d reworked them. These didn’t look thrown together with string and glue; they looked a masterwork, a perfect complement to the burning bright intelligence in his eyes. Only Ferkudi looked the same, the craggy-nosed dope. Actually, that was deeply reassuring.
“Good thing Breaker fights better than he… uh, kicks,” Ferkudi said. “Kicking is part of fighting, though, isn’t it? Ah, that’s a real flesh protuberance.”
The kids laughed.
“Shut up, you nunks,” Cruxer said good-naturedly. He led as naturally as the first-place Blackguard in the class should. He bowed his head to Kip. “Godslayer.” He delivered it flat, so it could have been teasing or not. Or knowing Cruxer, he meant those who wished to take it as teasing to be able to do so, but he really meant it.
Son of a… Kip thought that nickname had died when he nearly had on the ship. “Crux. Wh—what are you doing here?”
“In the Prism’s practice room, you mean? They got so many recruits for the war training out in the yards, we Blackguards have been pushed into storage rooms and side rooms everywhere half the time. Teia somehow got us permission to use this one when the yards are full. I was going to cut her from the squad before that. She’s not so good, but after she got us this place—”
“Hey,” Teia said. Somehow she’d lifted a blue luxin dagger from Ferkudi and was now pressing the point to Cruxer’s kidney, smiling sweetly.
Cruxer grinned. “The insubordination around here.”
“I thought you’d—I thought you’d think I was a traitor,” Kip said. That was it, that was why he hadn’t been able to bear going out to them. These were the only people in his life who had made him feel like he belonged, and he thought they would have looked at him as an outsider, a traitor.
“Breaker, you’re impulsive, but you aren’t stupid. We didn’t believe for a heartbeat that you’d try to kill the Red. It’s ridiculous! You’re trying to become a Blackguard! Protecting Colors is part of what we do. You wouldn’t throw all that away. But if your father fell overboard, you jumping in after him without a thought? That’s you. Completely.”
Ouch. “How’d you… how’d you hear so fast?”
“Teia. Big gossip.”
“Hey,” Teia said. For some reason, she’d been glowering at Daelos, but she said nothing more.
Cruxer grinned again. “Commander Ironfist thought you’d be here. Said sometimes those who’ve been in battle are a little reticent when they first come back.”
“You weren’t supposed to share that last part, you oaf,” Teia said. “What were you doing there, Kip? With your foot?”
She looked eager to talk about training. Well she might, he supposed. She and Kip were going to talk about her being all bloody in town. But not now.
“You’re bleeding,” Cruxer said.
“Just an experiment,” Kip said.
They gathered around him. “Go on,” Ben-hadad said. He’d seemed uncharacteristically nervous until now, when his eyes lit up at the possibility of a new discovery.
So Kip explained, and then he kicked the bag again, showing them. When you used luxin from one site repeatedly, the body eventually adjusted and there was little blood. But the first few times, it acted like any mundane cut. A cloud of unsealed luxin and blood both shot out of his heel like smoke out of a gun barrel, and this time he didn’t lose his footing. He did nearly wrench his knee, though. The power was incredible.
But the bag lit up. Red.
Everyone stopped and looked at Kip.
“You could, uh, use this lots of ways,” Kip said. “You’d have to, um, figure out your own center of weight and everything, but if you shot some from your shoulders when you ran, you’d run faster. Or when you jumped, you could shoot some—”
“From your ass! You’d be the fart flyer!” Ferkudi shouted. He reminded Kip of an excitable puppy.
They laughed, but only briefly. They were all captivated by the thought of it.
“I was going to say from your hips,” Kip said. “I mean, if you did it from your feet, you’d probably flip over and fall on your head.”
“But you could do it from your ass if you want to, Ferkudi,” Teia said. “Might as well have a wide platform.”
They laughed again, then quieted.
Big Leo turned to Cruxer. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this. Is it forbidden?”
Cruxer shook his head. “It isn’t incarnitive, so I don’t see why it would be. On the other hand, if you were doing it all the time, you might burn through your life in no time.”
“But that’s true of any drafting,” Teia said. “Used judiciously, think of it. We’d be faster, stronger, jump farther.”
“This can’t be the first time anyone’s thought of this,” Kip said, suddenly embarrassed.
“Every brilliant discovery is obvious after someone’s made it,” Ben-hadad said.
“Did you really just come up with this?” Cruxer asked. “No one suggested it to you?”
Kip shrugged.
“He shall be a genius of magic,”
Ben-hadad said quietly, as if quoting something. The rest of them stopped, looked at him, looked at each other. Kip could tell they’d talked about it among themselves before.
“Does this mean we’re going to have to fill ourselves full of holes?” Ferkudi asked.
Chapter 26
Aliviana Danavis stood high on the Great Pyramid of Ru, wrapping up teaching the women who would replace her. The four superviolet drafters who had been learning from Liv for the last four months were joined by Liv’s personal guards. That guard had been formed around the core of men who’d helped her seize this very structure during the liberation of Ru.
Phyros was Liv’s rock. Over six feet tall, wide as the sea. When they’d infiltrated the city, he hadn’t worn his lucky cape because it was too distinctive, but usually he didn’t go anywhere with it. It was the skin of a lion, the roaring mouth forming a cap for his head, the mane bunching around his shoulders. Over an alligator-leather vest with many straps, he wore a jade-and-turquoise belt that hooked with great, curving giant javelina tusks. The sheath for his belt knife was a hollowed-out sabre-cat’s fang. He claimed to have killed each of the beasts himself, armed only with that knife. He despised muskets and pistols, but otherwise didn’t have a favorite among weapons. He had two axes that looked like halberds with their hafts cut short in special slings on his back. Someday, he would craft a weapon from sea demon tooth, he said.
From anyone else, Liv would have thought it empty boasting, but Phyros she believed. She’d seen him without a tunic on, and he bore scars from claws and fangs like a man who had done everything he claimed.
The rest of her guard were less conspicuous, but perhaps no less dangerous. Tychos was an orange drafter, one of the best hex casters in the Blood Robes. He was a small man, violent, and strangely direct for an orange. Magic is no match for man, as an old saying went. There were crafty sub-reds and reckless blues. But here, it was probably one of the main reasons why he wasn’t in contention to become the prince’s candidate for Molokh. With one of Tychos’s hexes woven into her cloak, Liv could inspire awe in everyone who looked at it. Or dread. Simply being aware of the hex was usually enough to end the effect—it was an imposition of will and could be broken, but most people hadn’t fought hexes in hundreds of years. Tychos was a khat chewer, his teeth stained red from his constant use of the stimulant. With red teeth and orange eyes, the man would have looked a demon to Liv a few months ago.
But she’d come a long way since she’d left the Chromeria.
She finished up teaching the superviolet drafters how to manipulate the great mirror atop the pyramid, answering their questions, guiding their rough efforts to reach their drafting into the controls and shift the mirror to shoot light into any corner of the city, immediately empowering the drafters there, even late in the day when the shadows were long. Ru would never be as light as Big Jasper, with its Thousand Stars, but this mirror was a wonder. The light from it was as thick and potent as anything Liv had ever seen. It had helped birth a god—a god immediately slain by Gavin Guile, but still.
Unfortunately, turning the mirror this way and that to illuminate the city meant surveying the city itself. Unlike Garriston, Ru hadn’t accepted its liberation joyfully.
The Color Prince had bet it would. Ru had as many reasons to hate the Guiles as anyone: They mercilessly quashed rebellions that had been sponsored by the old royal family. The massacre of the Atashian nobility during the False Prism’s War. Even two short-lived and small uprisings since then. The streets of Ru had run with blood, blood the Chromeria had spilled. Freed of their satrap, they should have been natural allies.
Instead, its subjects had fought fiercely. The prince had been furious. He’d issued an ultimatum for several of the leaders of the resistance to be surrendered to him for immediate execution. When they hadn’t been, he’d gone insane with fury. He’d given his army leave to do whatever they wanted for three days to punish the city.
Liv’s guards had urged her not to go out in the city—even as they had taken turns going out themselves. The advice was simultaneously wise and patronizing. She hadn’t intended to go. But she wouldn’t be stopped from going out by any man. The Chromeria liked to cloak unpleasantness in soft ritual. Liv would have her truths served in hard light, thank you.
Phyros had tried to object one last time, as all of them shifted uneasily and armed themselves: “Eikona”—it was the term for the preeminent drafter of her color. The Blood Robes would have new titles. “Eikona, I understand you want to look. It’s natural. But you’re what? Seventeen years old? Pretty, and a woman.” He scowled. Like she hadn’t noticed her gender.
“Eighteen,” she said, even though she wouldn’t be eighteen for another ten days. “Thank you for your concern, and fuck you.”
Still, when they went, they’d prominently displayed their Blood Robes.
It had been a nightmare tour. The sights were etched on her eyes. It didn’t bear thinking about now, even though some of the many fires burning in the city below her now were funeral pyres. Huge pyramids of flame. And still it wasn’t finished. There were places the patrols couldn’t go to collect the bodies for burning. It was still too dangerous. So disease spread.
She couldn’t leave too soon. She fingered the black jewel in her pocket. Black luxin, the prince claimed. She didn’t really believe it. It was likely obsidian only, though threads of darkness seemed to swim in the jewel. She didn’t know how the Color Prince had gotten it. Regardless, he believed that it was a means of control. She’d first thought that perhaps he spied through it, but simply seeing wouldn’t be enough to stop a god, would it? Surely it was something more dangerous.
She didn’t like to think about it. Didn’t like to look at it. Didn’t like the feel of it on her skin. But he’d forbidden her to go anywhere without it.
“You have my things?” she asked Phyros.
“Packed and on the galley.” Phyros’s voice was a deep, satisfying rumble that practically made your lungs vibrate themselves, like a tuning fork rung. It was, for some reason, incredibly comforting. She’d heard him bellow in rage with that voice, and having it on her side soothed all sorts of fears. Not that she’d ever let him know it.
The Color Prince didn’t have nearly the number of ships he needed, so Liv and her guard would be traveling in a cheap, poorly constructed galley. Of course, there were villages for the supply of galleys around the entire rim of the sea. Traveling by ship wouldn’t be fast, especially not when they would have to find ports to wait out every winter storm, but it would be faster than walking or riding, and much less dangerous. Any pirates who waylaid them would be in for several unpleasant surprises—though usually, merely announcing the presence of a drafter was enough to convince pirates not to attack. A little blast of luxin into the sky would be enough to turn back all but the most foolhardy.
Most of the class left, including one middle-aged woman who hadn’t even discovered she could draft superviolet until after the death of her husband. One of the Blood Robe drafters had stayed at her boarding house and had administered the test to her on a whim. Middle-aged drafters. It was odd to Liv, but the Color Prince’s vision was for a day when drafting wasn’t a death sentence. Perhaps that day would even come soon enough to make a difference for Liv.
She stepped up to the great mirror one last time. It was easy now. Whoever had built this had meant it to be used. Some long-dead master craftsman. She stopped musing and turned the mirror toward the horizon. Navigators and natural philosophers had known about the curvature of the earth for at least a millennium, but it was the first time Liv had ever had to worry about it. It was also, so far as she could guess, why each of the great mirrors had been constructed on the top of a tall building.
That curvature was why when you watched a departing ship, its hull disappeared first, and it appeared to sink as it got farther away. The natural philosophers had figured out that the rate of that drop was two feet per league. If ‘drop’ made any sense, on a surface t
hat appeared to be flat. You’d think that the calculation of how tall a structure would have to be would be simple—just subtract the total curvature of the earth per league from the height of the structure. Easy. Given that the Great Pyramid was two hundred eighty cubits tall, or four hundred and eighty feet, you should be able to cast light from the beam to a distance of two hundred and forty leagues. If the receiving tower was equally tall, you should be able to double that, right?
Wrong, she’d found out. She’d struggled with her calculations, talking through them aloud with her guards. She’d had to explain to Phyros about the curvature of the earth twice, but then he’d been the one who grasped her model better than she did. She’d drawn on a parchment, then bent it, showing him how it worked. He’d pointed out that she was treating the mirror towers as if they were standing straight up in relation to each other. They stood straight in relation to the ground, but the ground was bent. It was like measuring the height of a man when he was standing straight up versus when he was leaning against a doorframe. The man might still be six feet tall, but the top of his head wasn’t going to be six feet from the ground.
She’d done more calculations, and finally figured it all out—and was still wrong. She had no idea why.
In the end, the Color Prince had sent Samila Sayeh to her. The blue drafter had fought in the Prisms’ War and made herself a legend. She’d fought against the Color Prince at Garriston, but had broken the halo, was captured, imprisoned, and, by his mercy, forgiven. She now fought with them. If the Color Prince’s armies could find the blue bane, the woman was one of the leading candidates to become the next Mot.
Samila Sayeh had begun the transition to full wight differently than any blue Liv knew. She was starting with her left hand only. She said if she could figure how to make hard, crystalline blue luxin work on a part of her body that required such dexterity and flexion first, the rest of her body would be simple. Given the woman’s status and fierce intellect, Liv shouldn’t have felt threatened by her. But something rankled. And Samila didn’t care, if she even noticed.
