The Black Prism

Chapter 26

By noon the next day, Kip had fully swallowed his teasing about a fast boat. They were flying across the waves at mind-boggling speed, and Gavin had enclosed the boat, muttering something about that woman and her ideas, so now, despite the speed, they could speak.

“So you’ve used green,” Gavin said, as if it were normal for him to be leaning hard forward, skin entirely red, feet strapped in, hands gripping two translucent blue posts, throwing great plugs of red luxin down into the water, sweating profusely, muscles knotted. “That’s a good color. Everyone needs green drafters.”

“I think I can see heat, too. And Master Danavis said I’m a superchromat.”

“What?”

“Master Danavis was the dyer in town. Sometimes I’d help him. He had trouble matching the reds as well as the alcaldesa’s husband liked.”

“Corvan Danavis? Corvan Danavis lived in Rekton?”

“Y-yes.”

“Slender, about forty, beaded mustache, couple freckles, and some red in his hair?”

“No mustache,” Kip said. “But, otherwise.”

Gavin swore quietly.

“You know our dyer?” Kip asked, incredulous.

“You could say that. He fought against me in the war. I’m more curious about you seeing heat. Tell me what you do.”

“Master Danavis taught me to look at the edges of my vision. Sometimes when I do, people glow, especially their bare skin, armpits, and… you know.”

“Groin?”

“Right.” Kip cleared his throat.

“Blind me,” Gavin said. He chuckled.

“What? What’s that mean?”

“We’ll see later.”

“Later? Like what, a year or two? Why do all adults talk to me like I’m stupid?”

“Fair enough. Unless you’re truly freakish, you’re likely a discontiguous bichrome.”

Kip blinked. A what what? “I said I’m not stupid; ignorant’s different.”

“And I meant later today,” Gavin said.

“Oh.”

“There are two special cases in drafting—well, there are lots of special cases. Orholam’s great bloody—I’ve never tried to teach the early stuff. Have you ever wondered if you were the only real person in the world, and everything and everyone else was just your imagination?”

Kip blushed. Back home, he’d even tried to stop imagining Ram, hoping the boy would simply cease to exist. “I guess so.”

“Right, it’s one of a puerile mind’s first flirtations with egoism. No offense.”

“None taken.” Since I have no idea what you just said.

“It’s attractive because it validates your own importance, allows you to do whatever the hell you want, and it can’t be disproven. Teaching drafting runs into the same problem. I’m going to assume here that you do accept that other people exist.”

“Sure. I’m not much for lecturing myself,” Kip said. He grinned.

Gavin squinted at the horizon. He’d rigged up two lenses separated by an arm’s length and mounted on the luxin canopy so he could scan the seas. He must have seen something, because he banked the skimmer hard left—port! Hard to port.

When he turned back, he’d apparently missed Kip’s quip.

“Anyway, where were we? Ah. The problem with teaching drafting is that color exists—it’s separate from us—but we only know it through our experience of it. We don’t know why, but some men—subchromats—can’t differentiate between red and green. Other subchromats can’t differentiate between blue and yellow. Obviously, when you tell a man that he can’t see a color he’s never seen, he might not believe you. Everyone else who tells him red and green are different colors could be just playing a cruel joke on him. Or he must accept the existence of something he’ll never see. There are theological implications, but I’ll spare you. To make it simple, if there are color-deficient men—incidentally, it is almost always men—why could there not also be those who are extremely color-sensitive, superchromats? And it turns out there are. But they’re almost always women. In fact, about half of women can differentiate between colors at an extreme level. For men, it’s one in tens of thousands.”

“Wait, so men lose both ways? Blind to colors more often and really good at seeing them less often? That’s not fair.”

“But we can lift heavy things.”

Kip grumbled. “And pee standing up, right?”

“Very useful around poison ivy. I was on a mission with Karris this one time…” Gavin whistled.

“She didn’t,” Kip said, horrified.

“You thought she was mad at me back on the river? Somehow, it was my fault that time, too.” Gavin grinned. “Anyway, to wend my way back to my point, most of us can see the normal range of colors. Hmm, tautology there.”

“What?” Kip asked.

“That’s a digression too far. Just because you can see a color doesn’t mean you can draft it. But if you can’t see a color, you’ll draft it poorly. So men aren’t as accurate when drafting certain colors as superchromat women, which is half of them. Will can cover a lot of mistakes, but it’s better if there aren’t mistakes to begin with. This becomes vital if you’re trying to build a luxin building that won’t fall down.”

“They make luxin buildings?”

Gavin ignored him. “The special cases that I started all this to tell you about are sub-red and superviolet. If you can see heat, Kip, there’s a good chance you can draft it.”

“You mean I can start a fire like whoosh?!” Kip made a grand sweeping gesture.

“Only if you say ‘whoosh!’ when you do it.” Gavin laughed.

Kip blushed again, but Gavin’s laughter wasn’t mocking. It didn’t make him feel stupid, just silly. There was plenty scary about the man, like Master Danavis was scary sometimes. But neither seemed mean. Neither seemed bad.

“And that would be very strange,” Gavin said, “because you’ve drafted green.” He looked like he was trying to figure out how to teach something. “Have you ever seen a rainbow?”

“A rain-what?” Kip asked, doe-eyed.

“It was a rhetorical question, smarty. The order of colors is superviolet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, sub-red. Usually, a bichrome simply spans a broader arc. So they draft superviolet and blue, or blue and green, or green and yellow. A polychrome—much rarer—might draft green, yellow, and orange. A drafter who drafts colors that don’t border each other is rare. Karris is one. She drafts green, but not yellow, not orange, and then she drafts most of red and into sub-red.”

“So she’s a polychrome.”

“Close. Karris can’t quite draft sustainable sub-red—what they call a fire crystal. Fire crystals don’t last long regardless because they react to air, but—never mind that. Point is, she’s just short of being a polychrome, and that matters.”

“I bet that made her happy,” Kip said.

“On the bright side, they wouldn’t have let her become a Blackguard if she was a polychrome—polychromes are too valuable—and the pressure on her to bear children would have increased. Regardless, it’s rare, and it’s called being a discontiguous bichrome. Discontiguous because the arcs aren’t touching. Bichrome because there are two. See? Everything in drafting is logical. Except what isn’t. Like so: seeing sub-red is seeing heat, so seeing superviolet should be seeing cold, right?”

“Right.”

“But it isn’t.”

“Oh,” Kip said. “Well, that makes sense, I guess.” Except that it doesn’t.

“I have the strongest urge to ruffle your hair,” Gavin said.

Kip grunted. “So how is this going to work?”

“There’s a small island we use as an artillery station. There’s a tunnel between there and the Chromeria, which is a secret so important that if you tell anyone, the Chromeria will hunt you down and execute you.” He said it cheerfully, but Kip had no doubt that he was serious.

“Then why did you just tell me?” Kip asked. “I could let it slip.”

“Because I’ve already shared a secret that I think is more important—the existence of this skimmer. But if you betray that secret to our enemies, the Chromeria might do nothing. But if you do betray us deliberately, you’d also tell them about the escape tunnel. So now if you betray me, you’ll betray the whole Chromeria too. And they’ll come after you and they’ll kill you.”

Kip felt a chill. This man was warm, personable. Kip had no doubt that Gavin liked him, but in Gavin’s circles, you could like someone and still have to kill him. The casual way that Gavin prepared for Kip’s possible betrayal told Kip he’d been betrayed before and been caught unaware by it. And Gavin wasn’t the kind of man who had to learn a hard lesson twice.

“I’m going to dock on the island and put you on a boat to the main island. I’ll send a Blackguard with you to take you to the Thresher. In a few days, you’ll leave with me wherever I decide we have to go and I’ll start teaching you to draft.”

Kip hardly heard the last part, though. “The Thresher?”