The conn shook his head. He didn’t know where it was from.
“It’s from the conclusion in the sixth scroll, actually,” Kip said. “You pass. I’m glad to see you’re not a man who pretends to know what he doesn’t. At least in some things.”
“You’re testing me now?” Conn Arthur said.
“Have you heard the quote from Veliki Eden: ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it’? Do you think he was kidding?”
“I’ve heard it,” the conn said. “I’ve always taken that to mean that to their sorrow, men are fools, ever rushing to arms.”
“I take it different: war is hell, but hell’s where all my friends are.”
Conn Arthur looked pensive. “Time will tell which of us is right. Perhaps both. I only hope for us all that your knowledge becomes wisdom painlessly. Your pardon, Lord Guile.”
Kip nodded, surprised that the man would ask to be dismissed. But before he had gone far, the conn stopped and turned back.
“One last thing. As I said, my people aren’t shy about matters of the root and cave… but a little consideration for those trying to sleep nearby does go a long way.”
“Right,” Kip said. Root and cave? Oh. “Right!”
When the hour and a half had passed, Ben-hadad hadn’t yet fixed the first skimmer, and he’d also found other potentially catastrophic cracks on three of the other skimmers.
Kip elected to leave them behind, and headed out with only four skimmers loaded with the best fighters. Tisis stayed behind. She said, “I’m more use to you as an ear and tongue than as another gun.” She looked momentarily perplexed. “Not that that was supposed to rhyme.”
“Such things occur from time to time.”
“Very funny, you’re such a tease,” she said.
“You know I always aim to please.” He frowned. What the hell? “I know that’s the kind of silly thing I’d do,” Kip said, “but I swear I didn’t intend… to.”
He blinked. “That also wasn’t my intent—”
“It’s fine, my dear, I know what you…” She seemed to struggle to form a different word. Then in defeat, she said, “… meant. Kip, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but the effect is strong. Let—”
“Superviolet!” she said.
It seemed the first line could be anything, but as if in some inescapable chain of cause to effect, it was impossible not to follow it with a rhyming couplet. Slant rhymes worked. How about if you ended a line with a word that didn’t have a rhyme? Oh… superviolet! She hadn’t simply meant to rhyme with let; she meant he needed to look at superviolet!
He narrowed his eyes to the superviolet spectrum and saw the color storm whipping past them in ordered violence. Like a mechanical octopus, every arm articulated with a million hinges, the storm swept the camp, but each segment of the arm moved only in right angles.
Kip handed his superviolet lenses to Tisis so she could see it, too.
A few people were looking up around the camp, quizzical looks on their faces. Of those who were moving about, they too were moving only in the same straight lines.
The superviolet was everywhere.
And then, before he could even say anything, it was gone.
“Are you okay?” Tisis asked.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it all swirled around you in a weird funnel cloud before it disappeared.”
“It did?” He’d thought it was everywhere, but then, if he had been in the middle of a cloud of it, he would have.
“It was like it was looking for you.”
And it found me.
Chapter 43
It was one part practicality. A pinch of indecision. A dash of kindness. And four parts cowardice.
Teia flicked on only the blue and superviolet lights as she came into the Prism’s practice room again. She’d taken to training more and more here while she marshaled her courage to talk to Gav Greyling.
Fine, while she avoided talking to Gav Greyling.
She tried not to come here too much, but the practice room had become her haven. There were good memories here, and light controls, and mirrors, and privacy—all the necessary ingredients to practice light splitting.
She tried not to come here too much, but she didn’t try very hard.
With the master cloak, invisibility had become stunningly simple. She put it on, opened herself to paryl, and it did the rest, flawlessly.
Ah, blessed, blessed invisibility.
There were still things to be aware of. She was invisible, not silenced. She still left footprints. If she pulled the cloak over her eyes, she was blind herself, so in well-lit areas, she had to stare down at her feet and only steal glimpses up, knowing her disembodied eyes might appear to anyone who happened to be looking in just the right place. The cloak was long enough to cover her feet, but any movement that displaced it, such as running or descending stairs, could expose her legs. Also, its length meant that it brushed the ground. Any dirt it picked up from the ground, it carried, visibly.
Similarly, if she didn’t launder it regularly, the dust it picked up from the air slowly made it less effective. Of course, slaves did all the laundry in the Chromeria, and of course, Teia wasn’t going to let the master cloak out of her sight, so she had to figure out ways to launder it herself. Sometimes in this very room.
She’d even prepared her lies: the washboard was good for hand strength, those incompetents had torn her cloak the last time, she kind of enjoyed a simple task like this…
Weak lies, and she’d not had to use them yet.
But after much practice, the cloak had become simply another tool. It enabled things impossible without it, and it had limitations, but it quickly became a known quantity. It wasn’t a sword or spear that required years of study to master, it was more like a pair of boots: you figured out what grip they gave you, you broke them in, and then you forgot about them.
What was more interesting for Teia than learning how to use it was trying to learn how it worked. She’d put on a single red light in the practice room, and use the cloak, then extend her will into the cloak to discern how it was splitting that red light. Then she’d repeat with orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, for hours.
It had yielded interesting discoveries over the months of practice since Kip left, if not the ones she was looking for. First, with a cloud of paryl gas surrounding her, Teia became the next best thing to a superchromat. The gas itself was a filter like polarized glass. It filtered blues into the perfect blue for making blue luxin, filtered reds into the perfect red for making red luxin, and so forth. If she held a bubble of paryl gas perfectly so that it covered one eye, she could look at any luxin and tell how well it had been drafted: if it looked and felt exactly the same to each eye, it had been drafted perfectly, and therefore probably by a superchromat.
She was sure there were handy applications for her discoveries, but she wasn’t sure what they were, and there was no one she could really ask. The only one she’d really come up with was that, if she remembered to draft a paryl cloud, she could now differentiate red and green. She still couldn’t see them as different, though, so it was a cold comfort.
One day she was sitting on the floor of the practice room. Always fearful of interruptions, she’d run through the obstacle course a few times first to work up a sweat, and now she sat as if winded, wearing her skimpiest workout attire. The point was to have as much skin exposed as possible. She had to feel the colors, and dammit if that wasn’t taking a lot of practice. So she sat on the floor, nearly naked but sweaty, so that if anyone came in she could pass for someone just cooling from her exertions.
This new life of hers was always lies and preparations for lies.
She had her eyes closed and a headband functioning as a blindfold, every sense attuned to the blue (perhaps?) light, when she heard a hiss as of escaping gas. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed the headband back up her into unruly hair. She grabbed her tunic and looked toward the door.