The Black Prism
Page 95

“That I don’t understand.”
“We’ll worry about all that later. The second-best way to draft is to have spectacles. Like these.” She reached into her pack and pulled out a little cotton pouch. Loosening the drawstring, she withdrew a pair of green spectacles.
“You don’t draft green,” Kip said.
“No, I don’t,” Liv said, smiling.
“They’re for me?” Kip asked. Tingles shot down his spine.
Liv smiled broadly. “Usually there’s a little ceremony, but it amounts to a congratulations.”
Kip took the spectacles gingerly. They had perfectly round lenses set in a thin iron frame. He put them on his face. Liv stepped close and measured where the arms of the spectacles passed over his ears. Kip could smell her. Somehow, after a full day skimming across the entire sea and fighting pirates and then baking in the sun, she smelled wonderful. Of course, Kip hadn’t been this close to a woman very often—except his mother, usually covered with sweat or vomit on the nights he was unlucky and had to carry her home. Isa had smelled good too, but different than Liv.
Isa had barely crossed Kip’s mind in the last days. He’d thought about her, but there was something hollow there. He’d let himself daydream about kissing Isa someday, but maybe that had been more because she was there than that she was perfect for him. Or because she was there and Liv wasn’t, and Kip needed something to distract him from thinking about Liv.
And now here she was. She’d measured both sides, and she took his spectacles off and was carefully bending the arms to fit behind his ears.
“Hmm,” she said. “Your right ear’s higher than the left.”
“My ears are lopsided?” Kip said. As if I didn’t have enough to be self-conscious about.
“Don’t worry, mine are too! Really, most people’s are off a little bit.” She paused. “Just not quite so much.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“I’ve got freakish ears?”
Liv grinned wickedly. “Gotcha.”
“Orholam’s ba—Ahem, beard.” Kip scowled. Every time. Every stinkin’ time.
She smiled, self-satisfied, and gave the nose pieces a final bend, then propped the spectacles on his face. “There. You might have to play with them to make them more comfortable, but they aren’t really meant to be on your face all day long anyway.”
He looked around, and was not terribly surprised to see that most everything had a greenish tinge through the green glass.
“What you’re seeing is white light from the sun reflected off of surfaces, then filtered through your lenses. So if you’re surrounded by white marble walls or something, you’ll be able to draft almost as much as if you were in a forest. The lenses aren’t as good as drafting from natural greens, but it’s better than nothing. You can’t just look at anything, though. Look around. You see how some things really look green, and others don’t? Like if you look at this cloth, what color does it appear to be?” She drew another cloth out of her bag.
“Uh, red.” Kip thought he could hear Gavin’s voice from the floor above them, getting louder, angry.
“It is red.”
Refocusing his attention on Liv, Kip looked over his glasses, and though the cloth’s tone was changed a little, it was indeed red. “So how does that work?” he asked.
“The spectacles will only help if there are surfaces that are reflecting green to you. White surfaces work best because white is all the colors together. Much less good, but sometimes possible, will be drafting through your lenses when looking at yellow or blue surfaces, since green is a secondary color.”
“Lost me there.”
“So now you want the color theory?” She grinned, joking. “For your purposes, if you need to draft, the spectacles will help most if you can find things that are either white or light-colored. Ripe wheat would work, a spruce tree won’t,” Liv said.
“I think I can remember that,” Kip said. The whole things-aren’t-the-color-they-are thing really didn’t make sense, but he suspected he could wrestle with that later.
“Good, so that covers source. For the time being.”
You mean we still have to cover skill, will, and still?
Liv said, “I don’t want to beat this to death, and I’m sorry you don’t get to have the ceremony, because maybe that helps this sink in. Those spectacles are now your most important possession. Not only do most drafters have to save up for months or even a year to afford one pair of spectacles, but everyone then immediately saves for a spare pair. If you get rich, or if the Prism orders it, I suppose, you can have a custom pair made by the lens grinders. They can give you a darker or lighter green or adjust the frame for fit or looks. But without your spectacles, you’re close to powerless. I know you’ve been with the Prism, but he’s the exception. He doesn’t need spectacles. His eyes don’t halo. He can use as much magic as he wants. The rules don’t apply to him. Even the rules for Prisms don’t seem to apply to him. Can you imagine anyone else coming in here, alone, and simply taking over? From the Ruthgari? And the funny thing is, they’re going to take it. They won’t like it, but they’ll—”
A man’s voice from the roof interrupted her. “I don’t give a good god’s damn what your paper says, there’s no way you’re—” The man cut off with a yelp.
Kip looked up just as a man plunged past their balcony. He landed far below with a huge splash in the bay, and Kip saw him struggle to the surface, spluttering, his rich clothes billowing in the water. He started crying for help.
“This is outrage—!” someone started to shout, then Kip saw another man plunge past the balcony. He splashed in the bay, almost on top of the governor.
There was a gigantic burst of light. “So help me, the next one of you isn’t going to land in water,” Gavin said, his voice ringing.
Kip expected to hear gunshots—surely the governor had guards—but there was nothing. They took it.
That’s my father. That’s my father?
Gavin imposed his will, and the world took it.
“So,” Kip said, feeling very much like the men floundering in the bay beneath him, barely able to swim and desperate to be pulled out. “So. Will. That’s next, right?”
Chapter 59
Corvan Danavis approached Garriston as the sun set. The outer walls of Garriston, of course, had long ago been demolished. During the Prisms’ War—Corvan never thought of it as the False Prism’s War—he had set men to working on rebuilding them, but there just hadn’t been time. The outer walls had been built to shield a city of hundreds of thousands. At the time of the war, there had been perhaps ninety thousand. There had been no way to protect them all.
The irrigation canals that could have been watering all the land between the outer walls and the inner walls were broken, except for one or two. But the inner walls still stood, as did the Ladies.
The Ladies, mostly now stripped of associations with the goddess Anat, guarded each gate. Each was an enormous white statue, incorporated into the wall itself. Each had represented an aspect of Anat: the Guardian was the colossus standing astride the entrance to the bay; the Mother guarded the south gate, heavily pregnant, defiant, dagger bared; the Hag guarded the west gate, leaning heavily on a staff; the Lover lay across the river gate to the east. For reasons Corvan had never understood, the Lover was depicted perhaps in her thirties while the Mother was depicted as very young, perhaps still in her teens. Each was carved of the most expensive, faintly translucent white marble, such as was only available in Paria—Orholam alone knew how they’d shipped so much this far. The statues, luckily, had been coated in the finest sealed yellow luxin—all of one piece. Astounding work. The city had been invaded at least three times, and still the Ladies were unmarked, even after the fiery devastation of the great conflagration.