Across the surface of the oceanic crowd, lights winked like the sun on the waves of Sapphire Bay as everyone from the lowest slave cook to the High Luxiats drew forth mirrors. Hand mirrors, cosmetics mirrors, signal mirrors; from expensive glass mirrors with tin-mercury backings crusted with rubies down to pieces of polished copper or bronze. Some Atashian nobles who’d lost lands and children in the war had bought hundreds of mirrors to hand out to those who couldn’t afford them: a voluntary war tax they paid to support the execution of traitors and heretics and murderers and spies.
Above and around the platform, mirrors unfolded like the petals of deadly flowers opening, answering the call of the sun above. In front of a number of the mirrors, white sheets unfurled, covering them, and in front of the condemned, a black sheet unrolled, blocking him from view.
Teia saw other Blackguards donning darkened spectacles. Things were going to get bright around here.
It wasn’t only the noonday sun, or the light reflected from ten thousand mirrors. In moments, the mirrors of each of the thousand star towers around Big Jasper would be focused here. The great banks of mirrors atop each of the seven towers would likewise be uncovered.
The only small mercy here was Orholam’s. It was a clear day. The noon sun blazed with white-hot fury. Tawleb would die far more quickly than on a cloudy day.
Not that burning to death was an option Teia would choose.
She turned, checking her area with paryl light one last time before she would have to narrow her eyes or be blinded. She caught sight of Quentin, still on his knees between tower guards.
He looked more terrified than she had ever seen anyone look in her life. It pierced her like a splinter in her soul.
Quentin had murdered one of the Blackguard’s own, but Teia had nothing of vengeance in her now.
Sadah Superviolet had come forward, and she gave the final invocation: “Orholam, you are not deceived. Darkness is no cover from your eyes. No stain is hidden from you. We follow your gaze, O Father of Lights. Let what has been hidden by man’s darkness be revealed by your light. We, your people, cast our eyes and our light upon this stain.”
Above Sadah, Tawleb was shrouded from the audience and their pinpricks of light by the heavy black cloth. As she finished speaking, she produced her own mirror, and with one hand she turned it toward the man suspended in the air above her.
Everyone else did the same, turning their mirrors either directly toward the figure hidden behind black cloth or—if they didn’t have a direct line of sight—toward one of the mirrors set up to collect their light.
Not everyone in the crowd had perfect aim, of course, so it was suddenly blindingly bright on the platform. But Teia saw Sadah Superviolet’s other hand extend downward.
Not being a superviolet, Teia didn’t know exactly how it worked, but there was a superviolet control node here that connected all the Thousand Stars and the Chromeria’s tower mirrors.
Suddenly all the hundreds of huge, perfectly polished mirrors around the island and the Chromeria flared as one, shooting beams of light in every direction before swiveling into place with a sound like heaven’s gates slamming shut. At the last moment, a blade sheared the blindfold over Tawleb’s eyes, though the black drop cloth was left in place.
Teia had thought the light was blinding before. It had been a candle next to the sun.
When she was a child, her parents had once taken her to the Eshed Notzetz, the tallest waterfall in the Seven Satrapies. Standing on the execution platform so near the focal point of every mirror here was like standing beside a very cataract of light. She’d never heard of light’s having a sound, but the intensity of it seemed to make her heart stop, ears stop, skin register nothing.
A small whoosh as of something catching fire, and then a scream, and all Teia’s senses came rushing back. It was unbearably hot, the instant sweat evaporating off her skin and leaving it hotter than before. Heat so hot she actually didn’t want to tear off her blacks, because she thought her skin would melt in the onslaught.
There was nothing but heat and screaming, and the screaming was worse as Tawleb roasted to death.
Teia peeked through one scrunched eye and saw the man in outline against white, dancing like an egg on a hot buttered skillet, skin popping open, juices hissing across the mirror he was bound to, turning to steam.
And then it was done.
It couldn’t have been ten seconds.
It had been the longest ten seconds of Teia’s life.
Sadah Superviolet stopped first, the great mirrors swinging out and away, and the intensity of the light falling off dramatically. Then the people, squinting, dazzled, turned their own mirrors away.
Above them, chained to his mirror, Tawleb had been turned into a blackened husk, half the size he had been before, burnt nearly beyond recognition even as a man.
For one moment, there was total silence.
Then, then the people—Orholam forgive them—the people suddenly cheered. Teia would have thought their horror would be greater. Not standing in the light’s path themselves, they would have been able to see the whole thing, if not hear it. They had watched a man cook in moments, skin splitting like that of a sausage accidentally dropped onto the coals.
And they cheered.
Karris White strode to the front of the stage. The new White held up her hands, quieting the crowd. The noon hour was slipping, and there was yet work to be done.
“Quentin Naheed,” Karris White called, “stand forth and face Orholam’s judgment.”
If she lived to be a hundred years old, Teia would never forget the nauseous terror in Quentin’s eyes. He looked at her, and she did nothing.
Chapter 29
Kip had been a very young man once.
That young fool had died in the fires of his wife’s wrath when he tried to deny her something. Specifically, he’d tried to forbid her from coming along to fight.
‘You don’t fight,’ he’d said, quite sensibly, he thought.
‘I don’t want to fight.’
That flashbomb of scintillating non sequitur had left him momentarily dazed. She’d thrown her things aboard the skimmer, along with another woman Kip didn’t recognize.
‘But… we’re going in order to fight. We are going so that we can fight. We’re going with the sole intention of fighting. Ergo, if one doesn’t want to fight, where we—the Mighty—are going, is not where you, who are not the Mighty, should go.’
That seemed to set a kettle of rage boiling. So he kept talking.
He’d been a young man.
‘You see,’ he said. ‘If I were not going specifically to fight, I would probably choose someplace safer to be than, you know, the middle of a battle. And since your place—’
‘My place? My place?!’ And a more rapid boil than Kip had expected. Here he’d kept his eye on the pot the whole time and everything. ‘First things first, Lord Guile! I am too a part of the Mighty. I’m one of you now, and don’t you dare take that away from me.’
‘The Mighty obey my orders. I’m their—’
‘You do not give orders to your wife!’
‘If they’re in the Mighty I do!’
He knew he shouldn’t have said that.
He’d said it. He’d been young.
Thing had gone downhill from there.
Tisis had come along. With a healer. As a noblewoman, Tisis had already had a basic education in battlefield medicine—or, as it was otherwise known, how to stop your child’s bleeding if no slaves are around to help.
She’d agreed to stay with Evie Cairn, the healer.
Kip counted it a win.
He was no longer a young man.
The skimmer cut up the broad river in the moist evening air. As they’d slowly gained elevation over the past days, the jungles had yielded to evergreen forests.
“Kip, you know, I can learn,” she said.
“Learn to what?” he asked.
“To fight.”
“Of course you can. And we’ll brush up on your shooting and some basic attacks with green. But you’ll never be a match for any of these guys. Even if you could, we don’t have ten years for you to train to get there. It doesn’t make sense to even try—”
Ben-hadad cleared his throat and said under his breath, “I think you’re missing the point, brother.”