The Blinding Knife

Chapter 24

“Skill, Will, Source, and Movement. These are the necessaries for the creation of luxin,” Magister Kadah was saying. She had a gift. A great gift. She could make even magic seem boring.

Kip sat in the back of the lecture hall today, stomach growling, but absolutely determined not to open his big yapper. Adrasteia sat in the seat next to his, paying attention, and Ben-hadad was next to her, one yellow lens of his glasses continually swinging down in front of his eye, no matter how he tried to keep it up.

Together, they took up one of the little wooden tables. Sitting together, almost like friends.

It wasn’t real, not yet. They didn’t know Kip. They let him sit with them. It was different. But it was closer than Kip had felt to friendship in a long time.

He looked over at Teia. She saw him looking and glanced over at him, a question in her eyes.

And at exactly that moment, Magister Kadah looked up and caught them. Rotten luck. “Kip, do you have something to share with the class?” she asked.

Don’t do it, Kip. No smart remarks.

Problem was, he had no idea what the magister had been talking about, and his mind had drifted. “I was thinking about the instability of imperfectly crafted luxin,” Kip said. Magister Kadah had been talking about Skill, Kip thought, so it seemed like it might be close to a real question.

“Hmm,” Magister Kadah said, as if disappointed she hadn’t caught Kip napping. “Very well.” She ran long fingers along the edge of her stick, flipped it over. On the back side, there was a color spectrum. She considered it for a moment, rejected it, walked over to the wall.

She opened a panel on the wall. It was dazzlingly bright. The lightwell, Kip realized. There was a slide with a mirror mounted on it, and she pushed that into the light stream. A pure beam of white radiance shot across the room onto a bare white wall behind the students.

“This is light as it is. It is the keystone, the base on which all else is born. And this is how we imagine light is-” She held up a screen over the light stream. Brilliant colors were cast upon the wall, cerulean blue immediately next to jade green abutting on vibrant yellow next to an orange to make fruit jealous next to a clear red.

“These are the colors we draft-minus sub-red and superviolet, of course, which most of you can’t see. We’ll talk about them later. This is how the colors are in a rainbow, right, discipulae?”

There were some mutters. The colors were in the right order.

“Right, discipulae?” she repeated, irritated.

“Yes, Magister,” most of the class answered.

“Morons,” she said.

“ This is light in our world-” She held a prism in front of the stream, and it sheared the light into the whole visible spectrum. Unlike the screen, which had the most vibrant colors immediately next to each other, the colors of the natural spectrum were broken into a continuum-but the continuum wasn’t even. Some colors took up more space than others.

“In some ways, drafting is like anything else. If you sit in a poorly crafted chair, it breaks and you fall. It fails its purpose. Poorly crafted luxin is the same. On the color line, there are resonance points. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. This is as Orholam has willed. At these resonance points”-she pointed to the places on the color line that corresponded to the bright colors she had put on the screen earlier-“at these places, luxin takes on a stable form. Becomes itself. Becomes useful.” She pointed to places on the color line, in order. “Why, smarter auditors might ask, why those colors?” Magister Kadah smiled unpleasantly. She did that a lot.

Likes making people feel stupid, doesn’t she?

Kip had noticed that the distances between the colors weren’t even. Some colors were wide bands-blue stretched over a huge area, and red, too, but yellow and orange were tiny.

“Why does blue cover so much area? We might point to this”-she pointed deeper in blue-“in our humanness, and call it violet. Why can’t we draft violet? Anyone?”

No one said anything. Not even Kip.

“It’s simple, and it’s a mystery. Because luxin doesn’t resonate there. You can’t make a stable luxin from violet. It doesn’t work. Seven is the holy number. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. Instead of demanding that the mystery surrender itself to the hammer blows of our intellects, we align ourselves with the mystery, and when we find perfect alignment with the piece of his creation that Orholam has given us, we draft perfectly. This is what we strive for. When you’re not exactly in the center of his will, your blue will fall to dust, your red will fade, your yellow will shimmer away to nothingness. Those points, that perfection, that alignment with Orholam himself is what we seek, every time we draft. And when we do it perfectly, we become conduits of his will. This is what makes us better than the dullards out there, the munds, the norms, the non-drafters who only absorb light rather than reflect it. This is why bichromes-those who can draft two colors-are honored more highly than those who can draft only one. Bichromes are closer to Orholam, they partake of more of his holy creation. Each color has lessons to teach us, lessons about what it is to be human, and lessons on what it is to be like Orholam.

“And this, of course, is what makes the Prism so special. He is the only man on earth to commune perfectly with Orholam. He alone sees the world as it is. He alone is pure.” She stared directly at Kip, walked toward him. “And this is why we oppose any who would taint the Holy Prism’s light, or any who would dim his glory and bring shame upon him.”

It took Kip’s breath away. She hated him because she revered his father and Kip brought shame upon him?

The worst part of it was that it made sense. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t chosen to be a bastard, but it did make sense.

“Remember, Kip,” Magister Kadah said quietly, “you’re not untouchable now.”

What?

Ben-hadad raised his hand, rescuing Kip, and Magister Kadah called on him.

“Isn’t that a bit dogmatic?” Ben-hadad asked. “With the whole color spectrum being so wonderfully not even, not regular, not arrayed right around the seven colors, doesn’t that suggest that there’s room for ever greater understanding? I mean, what about the other resonances?”

Other resonances?

“I already said we’ll talk about sub-red and superviolet later.” The brief, ugly look that passed across her face told him that she had hate enough in her for Ben-hadad as well. Here Kip had thought he was special.

“Your pardon, Magister, but I didn’t mean those. I meant the secret colors,” Ben-hadad said.

Teia buried her face in her hands.

“Friend of Kip’s, are you?” Magister Kadah asked.

“What? No. I mean, not really.” Ben-hadad scowled as if that came out harsher than he meant. “I mean, I barely met him.”

“Uh-huh,” Magister Kadah said. “This is one of the early lectures. It’s to cover basic topics. Yes, there are other, weaker resonances. Some believe, as I do, that the use of those resonances are examples of man forcing nature to do things Orholam never intended. Some even call those who use the unnatural colors heretics.”

Kip couldn’t help but glance at Teia. She was pale, but her jaw was set.

Magister Kadah said, “The seven colors are in Orholam’s will. The seven are strong. This we know. If you want to have fifth-year debates, you can wait until fifth year.”