The Black Prism

Chapter 37

It seemed to Kip that the entire first floor of the Prism’s Tower was a jungle of benches, desks, signs, queues, and clerks. Obviously, the whole business of the Chromeria passed through this room. There were queues for traders seeking contracts for food, queues for traders delivering contracted food, the same for every other trade good Kip could imagine, queues for redress of grievances caused by Chromeria residents, queues for laborers seeking work, queues for adjudicating fee disputes on Big Jasper. There were even queues for nobles—although there were many more clerks staffing that one than any of the others. The room had a busy hum, but despite the crowd, it was obvious that the Chromeria ran like a well-oiled mill. The people were impatient but not angry, bored but not surly.

Commander Ironfist led Kip to a desk with a single clerk, and no queue at all. “All the rest of this year’s darks were admitted weeks ago.”

“Darks?” Kip asked.

“That’s what people like you are called. Unofficially. Supplicants, officially: you want to be part of the Chromeria, but you aren’t yet. So you’re a dark. Darks, dims, glims, gleams, beams. But you don’t need to remember any of that right now.”

Kip opened his mouth, shut it. Ironfist said nothing until they reached the desk. The clerk, obviously daydreaming, sat bolt upright when he noticed Commander Ironfist.

“Yes, Commander? How may I assist you?”

“I have a supplicant for immediate testing.”

“Immediate as in…”

“Now.”

The clerk’s throat bobbed. “Yes, Commander. Supplicant’s name?”

“Kip. Kip Guile,” Ironfist said.

The clerk grabbed his quill, began writing, got halfway, froze. “Guile as in…?”

“As in, no one needs to hear it from you. Is that a problem?” Ironfist asked.

“No, sir. I’ll just go talk to my superiors. You could go ahead up to the testing room. I’m sure the testers will be along presently.” With a quick bob of his head, the clerk got up and ran to a back office.

“I understand the rest, but what’s a glim?” Kip ask as they climbed the stairs together. He trod on his sagging pant leg, which had fallen lower as he climbed the stairs, and he almost pitched forward on his face. He cleared his throat and hiked up his pants. Life would be so much easier if he had a waist.

“A glimmer,” Ironfist said.

Ah, dark, dim, glimmer, gleam, beam. A light progression, then.

Ironfist said, “Now quiet. This is supposed to be solemn. You go into the room and don’t say anything until your testing is finished. Got it?”

Kip almost said yes, then nodded instead. This might be harder than he had thought. Ironfist gestured to the door, and Kip walked in. Ironfist closed the door behind him.

The room was utterly plain. One wall curved slightly inward, so Kip guessed that was the outer wall of the tower. Other than that irregularity, the room was a square, ten paces wide, all white stone with a single wood table and a single wood chair. The room was lit by a strange white crystal set into the wall, the same kind Kip had seen in all the halls and even, now that he thought of it, in the great room downstairs with all the queues. Kip flopped into the chair. It had been an exhausting week. Had it only been yesterday that he’d been skimming across the waves, that he’d tried to drown, tried to sail? Had it only been a few days since… No, Kip wasn’t going to think about that. Too jagged. Too heavy. He’d be blubbering again if he wasn’t careful.

He’d been waiting for several hours when he heard the muffled exchange of angry words from the hall. That was definitely Ironfist, laying into somebody. Kip swallowed hard. He wanted to get up and eavesdrop, but he knew that with his luck as soon as he got to the door it would open.

Whatever the argument had been about, it was over as quickly as it began. The door didn’t open. Kip waited. And waited. He was just starting to get tired, eyes drooping, when the door popped open.

A man of perhaps thirty, wearing red spectacles hung from a red cord around his neck, came in. He was clearly furious. Apparently not the winner of the argument, then. “Darks will stand!” he snarled.

Kip shot to his feet. His chair skittered back, caught its legs, and went crashing to the floor. Kip flinched, smiled weakly in apology, and picked up the chair.

The man continued staring at him, his mouth a tight white line. He had a large hooked nose and the deep olive skin of an Atashian, though he was beardless, but it was the eyes that captured Kip’s attention. The brown eyes were interrupted by a hard circle of royal red in the middle of the iris. Scarlet streaks like sunbeams pierced the rest of the brown irises. Kip put the chair back as he’d found it, looked back to the man, and got nothing, no hint of what he expected.

Kip moved away from the chair. The man stared liquid hatred at him. “Sorry,” Kip mumbled, defensive.

“Darks will not speak! Ignorant Tyrean trash.”

“Oh, kiss my blubbery butt cheeks,” Kip said. Oops.

He squeezed his eyes shut to curse himself, so he didn’t even see the blow coming. The fist cracked across his jaw, and the next thing he knew, he was on the ground, drooling blood.

Kip was slow to anger. Usually. But he popped up to his feet almost as fast as he’d fallen, and the rage was there, everywhere. Everyone he knew was dead. Everything he cared about was gone. He didn’t care if the drafter tore him apart.

But as he bounced to his feet, he saw the light in the drafter’s eyes. Do it! the man’s eyes said. Give me the excuse. I will bounce you out of the Chromeria before you know what hit you.

And like that, Kip’s anger dropped into a more familiar channel, and he had control again. There was a footstep in the hall. “Good,” Kip said. “We’ve got something to build on there. A little clumsy for a kiss, but I understand your eagerness. I’m sure with that ugly face you don’t get much practice. But I said kiss my butt cheeks. Butt cheeks. Butt cheeks, cheeks.” He gestured. “They’re different. Try again, this time with feeling.”

The drafter’s face went from incredulity to rage. He stepped forward and—just as the door opened—buried his fist in Kip’s stomach. The drafter was distracted by the opening door and didn’t put his full weight into the blow, but Kip doubled up as if it were the hardest blow he’d ever taken. He crumpled and coughed blood, retching.

“Magister Galden, what in Orholam’s name is going on here?”

The drafter who’d hit Kip said, “I—I—He defied me!”

“So you struck him? Like the benighted do? Get out. Get out now! I’ll deal with you later.”

Magister Galden turned and stood over Kip. “I’ll remember this, and I’ll find you someday when there’s—”

“So help me Orholam, if you threaten a student in my presence for your own malfeasance, Jens Galden, I will strip you of your colors and put you off Little Jasper this very hour. Test me. Please.”

Magister Galden looked absolutely stricken. Like his life was falling apart without warning.

That embarrassment and pain could be turned to rage, oh so easily.

Sometimes Kip frightened himself. Magister Jens Galden was standing between him and the man who’d come in the door. Kip couldn’t see the man, and that man couldn’t see Kip. All he had to do was give Jens Galden a big, triumphant smile and leave his stomach open. The magister would lose control—Kip knew all about losing control—and kick him. Kip would leave his stomach open, inviting it. Jens would kick him, and lose everything.

And for what, Kip? For having a temper and being an a*shole? Kip hesitated. The man had made him furious, but that was too much.

But if Kip didn’t smile, he’d have an enemy. An enemy he could destroy right now.

Wherever that thought was going, he didn’t get time to follow it. The moment passed. Jens Galden snarled and wheeled out of the room. Kip was left on the floor, the inside of his lips still lacerated, bleeding and painful. He’d done what was right; maybe he should have done what was smart.

He picked himself up. The man who’d saved him was just poking his head out the door after Magister Galden. He said, “Arien, I need you to conduct the testing.”

A woman said, “Luxlord, I’m not a tester.”

“And I don’t want to wait while a new one is summoned!” he said sharply. “I’m supposed to meet with the Prism in half an hour. We need to get started now.”

The luxlord came back into the room. He was a tall man, wearing Ilytian hose and doublet though his skin was olive like Jens Galden’s rather than deep black. He was balding; his fringe of dark, wavy hair was streaked with white and brushed out long, halfway down his back. He was somewhere in his fifties, fit, and wearing a heavy black woolen cloak embroidered with gold thread in intricate lattice. His fingers were burdened with wide gold rings and jewels of every color of the spectrum, oddly worn between the knuckles in the middle of his fingers rather than closest to his hand. But Kip was learning to look at people’s eyes—and the odd thing about the luxlord’s eyes was perhaps that they were normal. They were green; there was no foreign color shot through those eyes.

The luxlord smiled. “No,” he said, “I’m not a drafter. The Black usually isn’t. My name is Carver Black. Luxlord Black, for most purposes.” The name didn’t sound Atashian, so maybe he was Ilytian, but Kip guessed the man could just as easily have grown up here or anywhere. Obviously, there was a lot of trade and movement among certain nations. Just not Tyrea.

Kip moved to speak, stopped, pointed to his lips.

“Yes,” the luxlord said. “You can speak. We’ll begin momentarily, as soon as Arien is ready.”

“Um, nice to meet you, Luxlord Black. I’m Kip.”

“And you, Magister?” Luxlord Black asked. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Luxlord,” she said. She sat at the chair, and the Black stood beside the table. Kip came to stand in front of the table himself.

Magister Arien was short and skinny, nervous around the Black, but happy and cute. She looked up at Kip like she wanted him to succeed. He tried not to let her orange eyes disturb him. “Supplicant,” she said, “I’m going to lay out a series of colored tiles, from one tone to another. You will arrange the tiles in order.” She smiled suddenly. “We’ll start easy.”

With that, she opened a bag in her lap, rummaged through the tiles for a bit, and extracted a black tile and a white tile. These she laid at the edges of the table. Then she laid a dozen tiles in various shades of gray in between. Kip quickly moved them into place from lightest to darkest.

Arien said nothing, simply checked the backs of the tiles, made marks on a parchment, and swept the tiles off the table and back into the bag. Then she laid out brown tiles, from a tumbleweed to sepia. This was harder, but Kip swapped tiles quickly once more.

The test was repeated with blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. When Kip got the reds perfect, Arien pulled out a black bag, checked the backs of the tiles carefully—shielding them from Kip’s eyes with a hand as she did so—and lined up another series of reds, except this group had twice as many tiles, so the gradations of color were much much finer. Scarlets, vermilions, strawberry, raspberry, cerise. Kip lined them up and only had trouble with one. The color at the edge of that tile was slightly darker than the color on its face. Finally he put it in its spot by the color on its face.

She flipped the tiles over, and Kip saw that he’d put tile fourteen between tiles nine and ten. Arien winked at him apologetically, as if he’d done better than she expected, despite failing.

“That’s not right,” Kip said.

“Silence!” Luxlord Black said. “I know you don’t know our ways, supplicant, but you will not speak during the testing.”

“But it’s wrong,” Kip said.

“I’m warning you.”

Kip raised his hands in silent protest.

Luxlord Black sighed. “Magister?” he asked. “Usually protests have to be lodged after the test results are finalized, but apparently nothing is going to go according to custom today. A judgment, please?”

Arien flipped the tiles back over as Kip had had them lined up. She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Luxlord, I’m sorry, I’m not a superchromat. I tried to tell you. I can’t tell the difference myself. The key says that the—”

“The key is being challenged.” Luxlord Black scratched an eye with one finger. “Half of women superchromats, and I choose… Never you mind. Go get a superchromat, Magister.”

“Yes, Luxlord,” she said meekly.

She left and the luxlord turned his green eyes to Kip. “Who are you, really? Why are you testing today? Why the special treatment? Where are you from?”

“I’m from Tyrea, sir. King Garadul wiped out my—”

“King? What’s this about?”

The door opened and Magister Arien came in, followed by a woman who looked like a scarecrow. She was almost as tall as Luxlord Black, lean as a rail, with faded brown skin, bones sticking out at sharp angles, wrinkled, her kinky hair white and short with only a few wisps of something darker clinging to the tips, the natural mahogany of her eyes eclipsed by orange and red in jagged starbursts through her irises, reaching almost to the outer edge.

“Mistress Kerawon Varidos, I’m sorry to disturb you,” Luxlord Black said. He shot a look at Arien.

“She was just in the hall; she asked what I was doing,” Arien said defensively.

“Nearly bowled me over. What’s this challenge?” the old woman asked. The tiles were lying face up the way Kip had left them. “How did the supplicant order them?”

Silence. The mistress looked from Luxlord Black to Magister Arien. “That is the way he ordered them,” Arien said.

“So he’s a freak to his gender. Are we done?”

“The key says it should be like this,” Magister Arien said. She turned the tiles over and pointed to the numbers on the back.

“You come to me to differentiate the finest red chroma and you think I can’t read?” Mistress Varidos asked sharply.

Magister Arien looked horrified. Her mouth opened and shut.

The old scarecrow picked up tile fourteen in her bony claws. She turned it and looked at the edges. “Strip your tester of her position,” she said. “This tile has been left in the sunlight. It’s been bleached. It’s the wrong color. The boy’s a superchromat.” She turned to Kip. “Congratulations, freak.”

“Freak?” Kip said.

“Simple, is he? Too bad.”

“What?” Kip asked. He still hadn’t figured out what everyone’s titles meant, much less what he was supposed to do with all of this.

“Kip, you’re forbidden to speak!” Magister Arien said.

“That’s an injunction against cheating,” Luxlord Black said. “For when hundreds of supplicants are testing in the same room.”

“He just came today,” Magister Arien told Mistress Varidos. “The Prism himself ordered that he be tested immediately. He doesn’t know all the rules.”

“Continue the testing,” the mistress ordered.

Kip and Magister Arien glanced at Luxlord Black. Kip guessed that, technically, the luxlord was the highest-ranking person in the room, but the man gave the tiniest shrug, as if it wasn’t worth fighting over. Go on, he waved.

Magister Arien sat once more, pulled out a set of tongs, and used them to lay out another dozen tiles—except these were all the same deep red. Kip blinked. Magister Arien handed him the tongs. Um, thanks?

Kip reached a hand out for a tile, and then he understood. He could feel the heat radiating off them. He was supposed to see the differences in heat? He stared as if by sheer willpower he could tear the truth out of the tiles.

Time crawled past. Kip started to daydream. He wondered if Liv Danavis was here. Oh, no, he’d have to tell her.

Hi, Liv, great to see you. Your father’s dead.

Fantastic. Kip thought about the flames roaring through his town, about that drafter and his apprentice, throwing fireballs. Jumping over the waterfall, running down the waterfall path in the utter darkness, relaxing his eyes so he could actually see better than focusing directly. Oh, Orholam, I am simple.

“Okay, that’s long enough,” Luxlord Black said.

“No wait! Wait! I just—I just…” Kip stared at the tiles again. Relax, eyes, come on! He let his focus go soft, and abruptly it was clear. Using the tongs, he shuffled each tile into its correct place in moments from the hottest to the merely warm. This was what Master Danavis had been teaching him? The old dyer had never let on that what he was showing Kip wasn’t normal. Unbelievable.

The thought of the dyer left a hollow in Kip’s stomach. Master Danavis had been good to him. Inventing chores he probably could have done faster himself, just to give Kip a little money. And like everyone in Rekton, he’d been slaughtered.

Kip hoped Master Danavis had taken some of the bastards with him.

“Are we almost done?” he asked roughly. He wanted to be alone. He was too tired, his emotions erratic, the reality of what had happened in Rekton trying to rush in and overwhelm him now that he had a second where he wasn’t running from soldiers or bandits or having magic thrown at him.

“No,” the old scarecrow said. “Don’t bother, girl,” she told Arien, who’d only flipped over half of the tiles. “He got them all correct. Show him the superviolets.”

Magister Arien put away the hot tiles with a glance at Luxlord Black, who seemed unfazed. Then she pulled out the last tiles, which were all the same deep violet.

Relax my eyes to see one side of the spectrum, so… Kip tightened his eyes as hard as he could, and the colors leapt apart. Someone had written a letter on each tile. It read: “Nicely done!”

Kip laughed. He slapped them into place.

Magister Arien looked at Mistress Varidos. “Why are you looking at me, you fool girl?” the old woman asked. “I can’t see superviolets. I’m at the other end of the spectrum.”

The younger woman blushed and flipped over the tiles. They were in the correct order.

“Congratulations, boy,” Mistress Varidos said. “You can be some satrap’s gardener.”

“What?” Kip asked.

“It’s one use for excellent color matchers, and a step up for you, Tyrean.”

The door opened and Commander Ironfist stepped in. “What’s this?” he asked.

“We’ve just finished testing the supplicant,” Magister Arien said. “He’s a full-spectrum superchromat!”

“You’re wasting his time with tiles? I don’t care what colors he can see, I want to know what he can draft. Where’s that idiot tester I started with? I told him to put Kip through the Thresher.”

“You’re putting a raw supplicant through the Thresher?” Mistress Varidos asked.

“Wait, this wasn’t the Thresher?” Kip asked.

“Do you feel threshed?” Ironfist asked.

“You’re putting a raw supplicant through the Thresher?” the mistress asked again.

“He’s leaving in the morning. The Prism demands to know his capabilities before they go.”

“This is highly irregular,” the mistress said. “Who is this boy?”

“I’m right here,” Kip said, irritated.

“Regular or irregular is irrelevant,” Ironfist said. “Can you and this magister assist in the testing or not?”

“Me?” Magister Arien asked, alarmed. “I don’t think I—”

“We can do it—” the mistress began.

“Good, then—” Ironfist said.

“—but I demand to know who he is first.”

“I’m right here!” Kip said.

“Don’t you raise your voice to me, boy,” the mistress said, stabbing the air in front of his nose with one bony claw.

“Who are you, boy?” Luxlord Black asked quietly, even as the voices continued to rise.

“I think I’d really prefer not to help with the Thresh—” Arien was saying.

“You have no standing to make demands, Mistress—” Ironfist was saying to the old woman.

“I’m Kip Guile!” Kip shouted. “I’m Gavin Guile’s bastard, Kip.”

Silence.

Kip looked from one face to another. Luxlord Black merely looked shocked. Magister Arien looked stunned to the point of tears. Commander Ironfist looked peeved. Mistress Varidos looked oddly satisfied. “Ah,” she said. “Then we’ll start the Thresher immediately. Girl,” she ordered Arien, “go get the room ready. Summon the testers.” She looked at Kip. “So, maybe not a gardener after all.”

Go bend yourself over a fence, Kip said—but only to himself.