The Broken Kingdoms
Page 69

I did. Dateh’s holes, or portals, or whatever he called them, were like my doorways. He created them at will, perhaps using his own method to invoke them as I used painting. But while his magic opened a dark, cold space devoid of—everything—my magic opened the way to existing spaces… or created new spaces out of nothingness.
While I mulled this, I found myself rubbing my eyes with my free hand. They ached, though not as badly as on the previous occasions I’d used my magic. I supposed I hadn’t overdone it this time.
“And your eyes,” Dateh said. I stopped rubbing them, annoyed. He missed nothing. “That’s even more unique. You saw Serymn’s blood sigil. Can you see other magic?”
I considered lying, but in spite of myself, I was intrigued. “Yes,” I said. “Any magic.”
He seemed to consider this. “Can you see me?”
“No. You don’t have any godwords, or you’re masking them.”
“What?”
I gestured vaguely with my hands, which gave me an excuse to pull away from him. “With most scriveners, I see godwords written on their skin, glowing. I can’t see the skin, but I can see the words, wrapped around their arms and so on.”
“Fascinating. Most scriveners do that, you know, when they’ve mastered a new sigil or word-script. It’s tradition. They write the sigils on their skin to symbolize their comprehension. The ink washes off, but I suppose there’s a magical residue.”
“You don’t see it?”
“No, Lady Oree. Your eyes are quite unique; I have nothing that compares. Although—”
All at once, Dateh became visible to me. I was too distracted by his looks at first to realize the significance of what I saw. I couldn’t help it, because he was not Amn. Or at least not completely, not with hair so straight and limp that it cupped his skull as if painted on. He wore it short, probably because the priests’ fashion of long hair worn in a queue would look ridiculous on him. His skin was paler than Madding’s, but there were other things about him that hinted at a less than pure Amn heritage. He was shorter than me, and his eyes were as dark as polished Darrwood. Those eyes would’ve been more at home among my own people or one of the High North races.
How in all the gods’ names had an Arameri—proudest members of the Amn race and notorious for their scorn of anyone not pure Amn—contrived to marry a non-Amn rebel scrivener?
But as my shock at this realization faded, a more important one finally struck me: I could see him.
Him, that was, and not the markings of his scrivener power. In fact, I saw no godwords on him at all. He was simply visible, all over, like a godling.
But the Lights hated godlings…
“What the hells are you?” I whispered.
“So you can see me,” he said. “I’d wondered. I suppose it works only when I use magic, though.”
“When you…?”
He pointed above us, off toward a corner of the room. I followed his finger, confused, but saw nothing.
Wait. I blinked, squinted, as if that would help. There was something else etched against the dark of my vision. Something small, no bigger than a ten-meri coin, or Serymn’s blood sigil. It hovered, glimmering with an impossible black radiance that shimmered faintly; that was the only way I’d been able to sift it from the darkness that I usually saw. It looked just like—
I swallowed. It was. A tiny, almost-unnoticeable version of the same holes that had attacked us at Madding’s house.
“I can enlarge it at will,” he said when I finally spotted it. “I often use portals at this size for surveillance.”
I understood then why he’d compared me to gold and himself to iron: my magic was prettier, but his made a better weapon.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said.
“What am I?” He looked amused. “I’m the same as you.”
“No,” I said. “You’re a scrivener. I might have a knack for magic, but lots of people have that—”
“You have far more than a ‘knack’ for magic, Lady Oree. This?” He gestured toward the floor, where my drawing was. “Is something that only a trained, first-rank scrivener of many years’ experience could attempt. And that scrivener would need hours of drawing time and half a dozen fail-safe scripts on hand in case the activation went wrong—neither of which you seem to need.” He smiled thinly. “Neither do I, I should note. I am considered something of a prodigy among scriveners because of it. I imagine you would be, too, if you had been found and trained early.”