They moved into place, and Karris donned dark spectacles as he was lifted high. Again the people’s mirrors came out, and Sadah Superviolet came forward. Again, it was only as Sadah swung the mirrors into focus that a blade sliced the blindfold from the condemned’s face.
Though Karris was prepared for it this time, it was still like standing in a thunderstorm of light. It was like going from the snowy slopes of Atan’s Teeth to the hottest desert of the Cracked Lands in an instant. The heat alone was a hammer. The light itself had a physical presence—a thickness, a reality so heavy that it made all the material universe seem like a ghostly realm in comparison. A concussive force pressed out Karris’s breath. She wanted to drop to her knees. She wanted to hide.
In that moment, Karris believed those who swore that Orholam himself was within that beam of light, and she prayed only that he turn not his eye upon her.
The black drop cloth hiding the accused had already caught fire. The cloth was both symbolic and practical: intended to represent sin and attempting to hide from Orholam’s eye, and intended as a mercy, to keep the people’s mirrors from burning the condemned and torturing him before all the mirrors could come into place.
Orholam’s Glare was excruciating, but it was brief.
All the light in the world illumined the traitor, and he screamed. He soul-screamed a name.
But it was impossible to catch the disembodied syllables over the flame and the pain.
The air above Pheronike undulated as he let out a huge wave of sub-red—a beam into the sky. Unable to form luxin anywhere else because of the hellstone clothing pressing in on his skin, he tried to shed the excess heat from his face.
It was too much to handle, too much to draft artfully; it was a gush. It was also why the condemned’s face on Orholam’s Glare was angled skyward, so he couldn’t attack the crowd around him.
The geyser of heat crackled and cracked like a flag in the wind, even flickering into flames. And it kept going.
As did Pheronike’s howl, a lone, long ululation of agony as skin burnt and cartilage burnt and bone burst forth, blackening.
Then they stopped altogether, drafting and screaming both, cut off with a name: “Nabiros,” the prophet said, a soft life-sloughing sigh. A summons.
For one heartbeat, nothing happened. It was long enough that Karris realized Pheronike’s body wasn’t burning.
Then his skin burst apart in a spray of gore, his head tearing apart as his neck vomited out three dogs’ heads, black and red, growling and snapping. His shoulders bulged, and muscles knotted in his skinny legs, splitting the skin like a bursting boil. But his limbs stayed bound, and in the next heartbeat, he sagged, deflated, defeated, and died.
The dog’s heads sizzled in Orholam’s obliterating light, and his whole body burnt like any man’s—at least that of any man with three blackened dogs’ skulls attached to three necks.
For Karris, the moment stretched like a raindrop about to fall off a leaf, bulging, heavy with intent.
No one even breathed. The civilians had ducked back, cowering, and for this precious instant they still disbelieved. The Blackguards had weapons drawn—as did Karris herself, all unknowing, her other hand out to them, signaling no.
A collective gasp passed over the crowd in the next moment. It was disbelief. Literal incredulity: Did I actually see that? Did you see that?
But it was undeniable. The skeletal remains had three heads.
And then the collective question: What the hell was that?
What the hell is that?
Karris gave a signal, and finally the mirrors turned away.
When the light faded, there reigned a baffled quiet. The audience held mirrors in nerveless fingers, forgetting to turn them away. Still no one spoke.
And then children started weeping—and not only children, but men and women, too.
Karris had always been fast. Not being big or strong, she’d taken to heart early the lesson her trainer had given: it’s often not who hits hardest who wins, but who hits first. So she ignored the terror raging in her own stomach, the knee-weakening, bile-churning confusion.
“Orholam be praised!” she shouted, throwing her hands over her head. Don’t look shaken, look triumphant.
“Orholam invictus,” Andross Guile said quietly behind her. Of course he was the next fastest to move. Even he hadn’t expected this.
“Orholam invictus!” Karris shouted. Orholam the invincible, the unconquered.
“Orholam invictus!” the crowd roared.
What they’d seen wasn’t a monster, Karris proclaimed.
What they’d seen was a monster vanquished by Orholam’s light.
The crowd roared as Karris had never heard before, and the crisis was averted.
And though nothing she had done had been intended to aggrandize herself, she saw the truth of what Orea Pullawr had once told her: a small woman standing next to a great light casts a long shadow.
From that day forth, the people no longer referred to Karris as Karris White Oak or Karris Guile, and only rarely as Karris White. She wasn’t the new White, or the Blackguard’s White, or Gavin Guile’s widow, or the girl who had caused the False Prism’s War.
The people loved her.
They called her the Iron White.
Chapter 31
On the sixth day, at the fourth hour after dawn, exactly 558,032 seconds since she had first touched the superviolet seed crystal, Liv rose from the stones of the great promontory overlooking the Everdark Gates. She had once been Aliviana Danavis, daughter of General Corvan Danavis, child of Rekton in Tyrea, discipula of the Chromeria, later rebel and Blood Robe—na?f entangled in the schemes of powerful men. Who she was now, she wasn’t sure.
But she’d decided she was about to become something different. Something other.
Phyros lay dead and rotting still where she’d killed him. He’d given her the option of slavery or death. Do what I want or I’ll make you regret it, he’d said, as had so many men in her life.
She’d been attracted to him, before he’d betrayed her. Now she felt nothing. The insistent wind here on the mountain blew away all his stench, and she had neither time nor strength to bury him or even drag him away. Not while she had to think.
The superviolet that people thought so cold and brutally rational was to her a warm blanket. Not least literally. She was here to think and not to move until she decided which way of moving would be most efficient and which objectives would in turn attain at least a plurality of her desires, but she was still embodied. A woman could freeze to death up here in the cold wind, even on a summer night. A series of overlapping thin shells to trap a layer of air warmed by her own heat was enough for that.
Irritatingly, the body had other demands, and amid her deeper concerns, she kept forgetting about eating. She’d lost a fair amount of weight, and she’d now reached the end of the provisions she and Phyros had brought.
But she hadn’t been wasting her time. The Color Prince had wanted her to be a god and his slave. The slave part was simple to figure out.
The necklace Phyros had tried to force her to wear was a fragment of living black luxin, somehow controllable at a distance or imbued with will. At his command or at her removal of the necklace, the stone would cut through her neck. Presumably it would also work on gods—unless it was a very, very reckless bluff. She’d used a stick to put it in a bag, as if it were a serpent. She didn’t want it anywhere close to her until she understood it.
The god portion was harder to comprehend. She was, quite clearly, no god.
Holding the seed crystal helped her think more clearly, to notice when she was going in circles mentally, and it let her see the superviolet light around her at all times without having to constrict her eyes. But that was all.
That wasn’t enough.
Finally, she’d come to understand that the god portion was impossible for her to comprehend in her present state. The seed crystal was incarnitive; to harness its full powers, she needed to integrate it with her body.
To do that, she had to break the halo.