Chapter 65
Skirting the Issue
Tap. Superviolet-blue. Tap. Green. Tap. Yellow. Tap. Red, sub-red.
The young Blackguard steps back from the precipice. The smell of burning homes, burning livestock, and burning human flesh wafts up from the valley floor.
“I can make the jump, Commander,” he says. Skinny, long-legged, hair perpetually askew, Finer is the young man I hope will succeed me as commander one day. If this kind of mission doesn’t kill him. The boy says, “It’ll take us twenty minutes if we go down the trail.”
Normally so decisive, I hesitate.
“It’s not incarnitive, sir.”
“It’s real damn close.”
“Yes, sir.”
What Finer has discovered is that if he stabs points of green luxin from the braces into his knees, it allows him to keep the luxin open, fluid. This itself is no great discovery, of course. As long as luxin is touching blood, it can be held open. But external, attached luxin with direct control? That’s perilously close to what wights do.
With the seals held directly at his knees, Finer can run with the braces on and have them not encumber his motion, but when he falls, he can close the weave. The stiff springiness of the green luxin will keep him from destroying his knees. It also seems that with the luxin inserted at his knees it reacts faster, instinctively opening or closing for what the body knows it needs.
This is exactly what leads otherwise good men and women to become wights: the realization that luxin is better than flesh. At certain things. But the more you experiment with it, the greater a hold it gets on you. There’s always a good reason to use more.
And yet.
Orholam hates war, and yet he allows war in certain exigencies. So.
“Do it,” I breathe.
Finer pulls up the leg of his trousers and begins drafting green. He drafts braces of green luxin around his knees, stabs the points in, drafts a thick sheen around his thighs. Then more.
Orholam’s balls, he’s coating his entire body. Going green golem.
“Son,” I say, “you let it go once you get down.”
Finer turns to me and grins a wild grin. “Yes…” he struggles, “… sir.” He grins again, gives a jaunty salute, and leaps off the precipice.
The glorious sonuvabitch. He does a somersault on the way down.