The Blinding Knife

Chapter 20

Kip finished his breakfast, still feeling hungry. Teia got up and went over to the lists on the wall. She left her bowl and spoon and glass on the table, as it seemed that most everyone did.

Ben-hadad and Tiziri got up and left, too, heading in different directions. Only Kip and Aras were still sitting at the table. The gangly boy was a slow eater. The apple of his throat was distractingly large, making him look like a large, kind vulture.

“Are we supposed to do anything with our bowls?” Kip asked.

“Huh?” Aras had been looking over at some girls. Pretty, in the same plain uniforms as everyone else, but with jewelry at their wrists and throats. Rich girls. Out of reach, but not out of the reach of dreams, from Aras’s distant look. “Bowls? What?”

“Are we supposed to put away our bowls?” Kip asked. Back home, no one would tolerate a fifteen-year-old shirking washing up.

“Slaves do it. You should go. First shift starts soon.” Aras went back to staring at the girls.

Leaving the table felt like abandoning safety to go back and play in the fields of the wolves. But there was no putting it off. Kip stood and headed toward the wall of lists. He passed by some older discipulae just coming to eat. A boy and a girl walked by, their arms down at their sides, eyes intent with concentration, their food held on blue trays that they each were drafting. Each raised their hands slowly as they walked, trying to adjust the open luxin without spilling their food and drink. Then they sealed their trays, almost simultaneously.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” the boy was repeating. He’d sealed the luxin badly, and even as he reached the table, his tray disintegrated, dropping his bowl and glass, both of which shattered.

“One for the girls!” his opponent said, setting down her perfect tray easily.

The boy swore under his breath as some other boys, clearly his friends, groaned. A magister piped up, “You’re cleaning that yourself, Gerrad. No slaves.”

Teia intercepted Kip before he got to the lists. “We’ve got mirror duty, blue tower.”

“What?” Kip asked.

“You weren’t here for bearings week when they show us how things work. You don’t know anything,” Teia said. “So I switched chores with someone. I’ll be on your crew all week.”

“Really?” Kip said. It was a ray of normal piercing his black clouds of utter cluelessness.

He was about to thank her when she said, “No. Don’t.”

“I was going to-”

“I’m not doing it for you. Partners often have to share each other’s punishments. The punishments usually mean you miss class. So if you botch things, it hurts my chances to make it into the Blackguard.”

Great, something else to feel guilty about.

Teia walked him to one of the lifts, where they joined about fifty other students waiting. Teia’s hair wasn’t tied back today and now Kip felt foolish for mistaking her for a boy in the first place. Moron.

He wondered what Liv was doing now. He wondered if she was even still alive. Stupid worry. She was probably murdering people by now. Kip had stood there, on the eve of the Battle of Garriston. He’d heard all of the Color Prince’s lies and known them for what they were: smears and half-truths. High-minded talk used to cloak cowardice.

Magic was hard. It made you a master of the world for a decade or two, and then it mastered you. Drafters went crazy. When vastly powerful people go crazy, they endanger everyone. Killing them wasn’t nice, but it was necessary.

The Color Prince said, “We won’t murder our parents who have served for years!” He meant, “I don’t want to die when it’s my turn. I want all the privileges we’re afforded because of our gifts, but I don’t want to pay the price.” Kip could see that, and Kip was a moron. Why hadn’t Liv?

After a few minutes, Kip and Teia were able to get on the lift with twenty other students.

“We’re lucky,” Teia said. “The mirrors are boring, but when you have to spend all morning on the counterweights and then you go to Blackguard tryouts and you can barely lift your arms? That’s awful.”

“Thanks, tell me about it,” another student said. Kip thought he recognized the boy from the Blackguard class. His name was Ferkudi, maybe? “I’ve got the counterweights all week!”

“We’ll trade you,” Teia said.

“You will?!”

“No,” Teia said. The students laughed.

The lift stopped about halfway up the tower, and almost all the students spilled out to cross the walkways. Kip and Teia went with them. The six outer towers of the Chromeria were connected to the central tower by a series of spindly walkways hanging high up in the air. Kip had crossed one of these bridges before. He knew that they were safe.

After all, the Chromeria wouldn’t put drafters at risk, right?

Kip swallowed and followed. The blue tower was finished with blue luxin cut into facets so that the whole surface gleamed in the sun like a million sapphires. It would have been breathtaking, if Kip had any breath.

“Don’t like heights, huh?” Teia asked after they got across.

“Not my favorite,” Kip admitted.

“This might not be that much fun, then.”

Kip forced a weak smile.

“You have a bad experience or something?” Teia asked. “With heights?”

“Fat assassin lady tried to throw me off the yellow tower,” Kip said.

She looked at him, dubious. “Look, if you don’t like heights, that’s fine. You don’t have to make fun. I was just making conversation.”

Kip opened his mouth. No, he wasn’t going to win this one.

Had they ever figured out who wanted him dead?

If so, no one had ever told him. Which reminded him of his Blackguard escort-there still wasn’t one. It gave Kip the feeling-again-of being tangentially involved in Big Things. Someone tried to kill him; no one explained why. He got a Blackguard escort; the Blackguard escort got taken away, and no one figured to clue Kip in.

Go play in the corner and don’t bother the adults, Kip.

Teia led half a dozen students to the blue tower’s lift and they took that up to the top. There was a big, sturdy door and a nice hallway.

“Other half of the top floor is for satrapahs and nobles and religious festivals,” Teia said. “On Sun Day, this whole floor rotates so that their half faces the sun, rather than ours.”

Beyond the sturdy door was a room full of gears and pulleys and ropes and sand clocks and bells, with enormous windows. It was so bright that Kip was momentarily blinded. Teia handed him a pair of large round spectacles with darkened lenses. Once he put them on, he was able to see again.

Weary students who’d pulled the dawn shift got up from their chairs and handed off thick coats to the next shift. Some of them muttered instructions about the states of certain gears or ropes. A few traded jokes. Kip was lost.

Eventually, they got sorted. Kip and Teia took their coats and both took a chair. There were six stations, two students per station, two chairs, four sand clocks, four bells, one giant mirror per station that was bigger across than Kip was tall, and three smaller mirrors.

“The whole Chromeria rotates over the course of the day so that it’s always facing the sun more or less directly,” Teia said. “So mostly we only have to move the mirrors up and down as the sun rises. First rule, never touch the mirrors with your hands. If there’s a problem, we summon the lens grinders. They’re the best in the world, and they get furious if they find handprints on their mirrors.”

But as impressive as the mirrors and pulleys were, they weren’t what seized Kip’s attention. There were half a dozen massive holes in the floor: one huge central hole, with six mirrors above it, and then numerous smaller ones.

“Lightwells,” Teia said. “So that drafters in the tower below us will always have enough light available, no matter if they’re on the dark side of the tower, or if it’s early or late in the day. Take a peek over the side.”

So every team used their big mirror to send light to another big mirror over the central hole, where other mirrors shot the light downward.

Kip poked his head over the side. The walls of the hole were perfectly sheer, covered in silver polished to a mirror sheen, and it plunged on forever. In the glare of the gathered sunlight, he couldn’t even see the bottom.

As he was watching, about four floors down, a section of the wall opened and a mirror three feet across popped out into the light stream. Kip saw that farther down, other mirrors were similarly gathering light, offset from each other by careful degrees so that mirrors above wouldn’t block light to the mirrors below.

Kip stepped back, swallowing. It was mind-blowing, genius-and there was no railing to keep the mirror-tenders from falling straight down.

A tiny bell rang, startling him. Teia turned over the sand timer connected to the bell and grabbed a rope over one of the smaller side mirrors. She pulled a ratcheting lever, which moved the mirror by some tiny degree.

The smaller mirrors fed light to smaller holes. “Special laboratories, or polychromes’ or Colors’ chambers,” Teia answered Kip’s unspoken question. “There’s only so many private lightwells in each tower, so you have to be pretty important to get your own. But our work is pretty mindless. Once you get used to it, anyway. We don’t calibrate anything. Mirror slaves do that, setting things every dawn, and then we just move the ropes so much every time a bell goes off. Teams of two so we stay awake, and in case we have to open the windows, and for the zenith switchover.”

“Sure. Zenith switchover,” Kip said, having no idea what she was talking about.

The work seemed complicated at first, but pretty soon Teia was letting Kip pull the levers and turn the sand timers.

“Anyone ever fall down the holes?” Kip asked.

“A boy fell down one of the smaller lightwells last year. It was four floors down to the Blue’s mirror. Broke his back. Lived for six months. A few years ago, it’s said some boys fought up here, and one pushed the other one into the great well. Died instantly. The killer swore it was on accident. They didn’t believe him.”

“What’d they do?” Kip asked.

“Orholam’s Glare.”

Kip’s face apparently said it for him: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Again.

“There’s a pillar at the base of the bridge on Big Jasper. You know the Thousand Stars?”

The mirror towers all over the city. “Sure.”

“Right, all those mirrors, plus all the mirrors on Chromeria towers, are all focused on that one point. They put the condemned at the focal point at noon. Drafter’s got a choice then. You can cook to death like an ant under a glass, or you can draft. If you draft, it’s like pushing too much water through a straw. You burst.”

“That sounds… unspeakably awful,” Kip said.

“It’s not supposed to be fun. Come on, it’s time for lecture. You think you can get through it today without causing an incident?”

Kip’s brow wrinkled, not ready to let it go. “But I thought that they slaved the Thousand Stars onto the Prism every Sun Day.”

“Yes?”

“Well, how does he not die?” Kip asked.

“He’s the Prism. He can do anything.”