Chapter 27
Liv had barely reached the docks with her entourage when a young woman with nose rings attached by chains to her earrings came forward. She wore a beautiful flowing dress in sea foam green, edged with crimson. Wealthy. “Lady, Lady Aliviana!” the woman said. “Your Eminence. Uh, Eikona.” She lay prostrate on the road, heedless of the dust.
It was foolishness. Putting such garments in the dirt, for what? To show respect? To Liv? It was insane … and pleasing.
“A moment of your time, Lady Aliviana, please,” the woman said.
Phyros looked to Liv. In his bearskins and bulging muscles, he looked like a frowning barbarian colossus. “Eikona?” In Liv’s case, earning that title had been almost embarrassingly easy. There were hundreds of green drafters, hundreds of blues, hundreds of reds. And ten superviolets. She knew she wasn’t as elite as the eikonos of green or blue or red, but the Color Prince treated them all the same, and made everyone else do likewise. She owed him for that.
Liv nodded. Phyros walked to the woman and picked her up by her neck. He was so big, he was somehow able to do it without strangling her, his big hand—one hand—wrapping completely around her throat. He lifted her to her feet and, ignoring all propriety, searched her for weapons quickly. The woman looked horrified, but she said nothing. Last, he clamped his big hand around her jaw and angled her face up. She instinctively tried to pull away, but he waited until she met his eyes, and gazed carefully at each eye in turn.
Satisfied she wasn’t a drafter or bearing any weapons, he still didn’t let her come directly to Liv. Phyros believed in picking your own battlefield, regardless of how inconvenient. He marched the woman up into the beached galley. Liv followed to her quarters.
Phyros drew back the skin hanging over the door and held it open for Liv. The woman followed her in, looking vexed. She pulled the skin to shut it behind her. Phyros held it firm, impassive. He looked at Liv. She nodded.
“Shout if,” Phyros said. Odd habit he had, not finishing common statements, accepting it for granted that you both knew how they ended, so there was no need to go through the effort of saying the whole thing.
The woman closed the skin tight, turned, and took a deep breath. “Eikona, thank you for meeting with me. My message is secret, and important. First, please see that I am no threat.” She knelt gracefully and spread her hands, palms up.
“Go on, and hurry, the ship casts off in minutes.”
“Yes, lady, of course. I come from the Order of the Broken Eye. We mean you no harm. Indeed, quite the opposite.”
An unwilling shiver went through Liv. She’d wanted to believe that Mistress Helel trying to assassinate Kip was an aberration, a woman ill in the head, delusional. She’d wanted to believe, as Gavin and Ironfist had said, that the Order was a loose collection of thugs taking on an old legendary name in order to raise their prices. But this woman seemed calm, professional, not a braggart. And the use of Mistress Helel as an assassin was nothing short of brilliant. Who would suspect a heavy, middle-aged woman of being an assassin?
So it was possible the Order was real. It was no wonder this woman was being so careful to show she posed no threat.
Seeing that Liv wasn’t going to speak, the woman hurried on. “The prince gave you a necklace; on it, there is a chunk of living black luxin. That jewel is a death sentence. It is the way he believes he can control you.”
“What? How does it work?”
She paused, painfully. “We don’t know, except that he believes he’s mastered it, and that it will compel obedience. He believes it enough that he’s willing to make gods.”
“You speak dangerous words.”
“Does he seem a man content with others having greater power than he does? He wishes to be a god of gods.”
“What do you wish of me?” Liv demanded. “You think to test my loyalty so easily?”
“The prince espouses freedom, does he not? How is a leash freedom?”
“Freedom doesn’t mean a lack of responsibilities. It means a choice between them. He is to make me a god.”
“Forgive me, Eikona, but you will make yourself a god, or fail. On your own. And black luxin is not so easily tamed as the prince believes.”
A shout from outside drifted in. “Casting off in two! Rowers to your places!”
“Black luxin,” Liv scoffed. “It’s merely obsidian.”
“How can you say so? You who have seen it?”
Liv turned away. The swirling jewel was in her pocket, ever in her pocket. And the prince’s instructions were clear: she must put it on before she claimed the bane. “It is … merely cunningly cut. Tricks of the light.”
“The stones are related, lady. The old stories aren’t lies, but they’ve been corrupted. Obsidian is black luxin, dead black luxin. It is said that all the obsidian in the world is the last remnant of a great war, thousands of years before Lucidonius. A holocaust that devoured light and life for millennia, from which we are still recovering. The living stuff … Eikona, it has will. It is insanity given form. It is a hole of nothingness that can never be filled. If you put it to your neck to feed and the prince’s control slips, it will kill you. It has will; it may have intellect, too. If it devours a goddess, who is to say what it would do next?”
So Liv had been right to be leery of having the thing next to her skin. If this girl was telling the truth. “What does the Order want?”
“Most of our knowledge has been lost to time and bloody purges. We are a weak, wan thing. A shadow of a shadow. And I the least of our folk, in case I was captured and tortured. We’re not your enemies, Eikona. Become Ferrilux. Serve the Color Prince. Do all that you wish, but do not put black luxin in the nexus of your power. Do not put it in the center of the bane. One slip, whether the prince’s or yours, and who is to say but that it would eat all the magic in the world?”