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There was a long pause between shots.

"What's going on?" Kip asked.

"Maybe they're tired of wasting powder?" Liv asked hopefully.

Ten seconds later, they had their answer as twin columns of smoke erupted from the cannons.

"Port!" Gavin shouted.

He'd guessed right. Water erupted both where they would have been if they'd gone straight and where they would have been if they'd turned to starboard. Though it was longer between volleys, now the pirates could make two guesses of where the scull was headed instead of one.

"Clever bastard!" Gavin said. "Time to cheat! Kip, switch me." He clambered off the oars, and Kip jumped in.

"Straight," Gavin said. Blue flooded his skin and he drafted a propulsion tube into the water. As before, they leapt forward. Kip and Ironfist almost fell as Gavin cut their oars smooth. But if he hadn't, Kip realized, they'd have been ripped apart by the inexorable turning of the gears.

Gavin's teeth gritted under the strain of pushing the entire boat by himself, muscles knotting, veins standing out on his neck, but after a moment as they gained speed and it became easier, he said, "Ironfist, put fire grenadoes in all the cannon holes and the sails. Liv, cut the rigging. Kip, you…" He paused like he couldn't think of anything for Kip the Inept to do. "You call out anything you think I don't see. Take my pistols." Gavin pulled his hand from one of the tubes and drafted a basin and filled it with red luxin in moments. Ironfist instantly began drafting blue projectiles and filling them with the flammable goo.

They traversed the last five hundred paces before the men scrambling on deck could reload the front cannons. Only one man seemed unfazed by their impossible speed.

"Musketeer!" Kip shouted. One of the gunners, whether or not it was their cannoneer with the preternatural aim Kip didn't know, stood at the bow, calmly tamping powder down his musket with a ramrod. With smooth, fast motions, he drew a square of cloth, reached into another pocket for a bullet, and then tamped those. He held a smoking slow match in his teeth.

As they got closer, Kip saw that the gunner was Ilytian, with skin as black as gunpowder, aboriginal features, a scattered dark beard, short loose trousers cut off below the knees, and an incongruously fine royal blue jacket over his lean frame with no shirt. His wiry black hair was bound in a thick ponytail. His knees were bent, compensating for the rolling motion of the deck as naturally as breathing. He fixed the burning fuse into place.

"I said, musketeer!" Kip shouted. They cut the water right beside the corvette as the cannon portholes opened and the ship turned hard away from them.

Gavin just turned with the bigger vessel. No one was going to do anything. Kip cocked the hammers of Gavin's dagger-pistols, trying not to skewer himself on the long blades.

The musketeer pivoted smoothly, aiming at Gavin. Kip raised both pistols.

The musketeer shot first. His gun exploded in his hands, knocking him off his feet. Kip pulled both triggers. The pistol in his right hand scraped the flint against the frizzen, but didn't throw a spark. Nothing happened. The pistol in his left hand roared. It kicked back at Kip with far more force than he'd expected.

Kip spun, tripped, and slid toward the back of the skimmer, rolling, scrambling. He saw Liv flinging both of her hands forward, then turning, her pupils tiny pinpricks as she drafted superviolet. Then she dove for him.

Tumbling facedown, Kip lost sight of Liv, the ship, the drafters, and the battle. All he saw was the slick blue of the skimmer's deck, sliding away below him. His face slid over the edge. His forehead skipped off the water blurring past them, making his whole head bounce up, just about tearing his head off his neck. On the second bounce, he wasn't so lucky. His nose went under, and positioned off the back of the skimmer as he was, his nostrils acted as twin scoops, jetting water up into his sinuses at great speed.

Liv must have grabbed him, because there was no third bounce, but Kip could see nothing, think of nothing. He was coughing, retching, crying, blind, spitting up salt water.

By the time he propped himself up, the Ilytian corvette was two hundred paces behind them. Its sails sagged, cut and burning. Smoke billowed out of all the cannon portholes on the starboard side, and fire was visible on the decks. And the whole ship was sitting low in the water. Men were leaping off the decks on every side.

Commander Ironfist, who'd barely said two words the entire time, said, "Men jumping off that fast means the fire must be headed for the-" The middle of the corvette exploded, sending wood and ropes and barrels and men flying every direction. "-powder magazine," Ironfist finished. "Sorry bastards."

"Men like those kill and rape and steal and enslave. They don't deserve our pity," Gavin said, slowing the skimmer. He was talking to Liv and Kip, who both sat almost equally wide-eyed. "But Ironfist's right. It's no easy thing to be the hand of justice." He dropped the tube into the water. "We'll row the rest of the way. By the by, nice shot, Kip."

"I hit him?"

"Blew the captain right off his wheel."

"The wheel's at the… uh, back, right?" The musketeer had been at the front.

"Stern?" Liv suggested.

A dubious look. "You weren't aiming at the captain, were you?" Gavin asked.

"Aiming?" Kip asked, grinning.

"Orholam have mercy, the nut doesn't fall far from the tree," Ironfist said. "However, luck is a-"

" 'Luck' is not dropping your father's priceless, one-of-a-kind pistols in the sea," Gavin said.

"I dropped your pistols?" Kip asked, heart dropping.

"Whereas 'slick' is catching said pistols at the last moment," Gavin said, producing the weapons from behind his back. He grinned.

"Oh, thank Orholam," Kip breathed.

"You still almost lost my pistols," Gavin said. "And for that, you get to row. Liv, you too."

"What?!"

"You're his tutor. He's your responsibility. Everything he does wrong is on you."

"Oh, perfect," she said.

Chapter 57

"It looks so… dirty," Kip said. After seeing the wealth of Big Jasper and the magical edifices of the Chromeria, Garriston looked decidedly unimpressive.

"Dirt is the least of it," Gavin said.

Kip wasn't sure what that meant, but he was sorry that he'd been unconscious when he'd floated through the city the first time with Gavin. If he had seen Garriston then, it would have doubtless been impressive. It would have been the largest gathering of humanity he'd seen in his life, at least, if not the cleanest. Rekton's alcaldesa would never have tolerated the heaps of trash Kip could see pushed into the alleys just off the docks, sitting right next to crates often holding food. Disgusting.

The docks had perhaps forty ships, half-protected by a seawall with great gaps in it. Liv saw Kip looking at the holes, wondering if there was some purpose for them. "The occupiers never really want to break their backs helping out us backward Tyreans," she said. "The moorages opposite the gaps in the seawall are given to locals. You should see the captains scurry when a winter storm comes. The soldiers gather up in the towers and take bets on whether individual ships will break up."

The scull, powered by Liv and a hard-breathing Kip, cruised past galleys, galleasses, corvettes, and fishing dories full of locals mending their nets. The men and women stopped their work at the sight of a scull, much less a scull with such an exotic crew. It warmed Kip just to see Tyrean faces again. It made him feel at home. Only as they went past did he see the hostility on those faces.

Ah, not much for foreign drafters. Guess that makes sense.

"Where are we going?" Kip asked.

Commander Ironfist pointed to the most magnificent, tallest building in the city. From here, all Kip could see was the perfect egg-shaped tower with a spike pointing to heaven. A wide stripe around the widest part of the tower was inlaid with tiny round mirrors, none bigger than Kip's thumb. In the afternoon sun, the tower seemed to be on fire. Above and below that stripe of mirrors, similar stripes of other colors of glass were inlaid as well.

"I sorta figured," Kip said. "What I meant was, where should we dock the scull?"

"Right there," Gavin said, pointing to a blank wall at the point nearest a gate. It wasn't a docking spot, and the level of the streets was a good four paces above the level of the water.

Nonetheless, Kip and Liv steered-fairly expertly, Kip thought-toward the wall. The scull's nose dipped lower in the water as blue luxin bloomed on the front of the boat and snaked out. It solidified as soon as it touched the wall and became steps, locking the scull in place and giving them easy egress.

"I'm still not used to this whole magic thing," Kip said.

"I'm thirty-eight years old," Commander Ironfist said, "and I'm not used to it. Just a little quicker to react. Grab your packs."

They did, and climbed the stairs to street level while locals looked at them curiously. After they were all off, Gavin touched a corner of the stairs. All the luxin in the scull lost coherence and dissolved, falling into the water as dust, grit, and goo depending on its color. The yellow even flashed a little, much of its mass translated back into light, and the water popped up a little, suddenly freed of the weight of the scull. Gavin, of course, paid it all no heed.

This is normal for him. What kind of world have I stepped into? If Gavin were at dinner and misplaced his knife, he'd draft one rather than get up and look. If his cup were dirty, he'd draft a new one rather than clean the old. That gave Kip a thought.

"Gavin-er, Lord Prism, why don't drafters wear luxin?" Kip asked.

Gavin grinned. "They do, sometimes. Obviously, yellow breastplates and such are highly valued in battle, but I'm guessing you mean as clothes."

"You use magic for everything," Kip said.

"That's me," Gavin said. "A normal drafter isn't going to shorten her life just so she doesn't have to dock her scull another fifty paces out. Well, some would, of course. The truth is, there was a fashion of wearing luxin clothing once, when I was a boy. With the application of enough will, even some kinds of sealed luxin can become fairly flexible. Soon, there were drafter-tailors who specialized in the clothing. But most people couldn't afford them, and if you make your own, there are any number of mistakes you can make. Some are fairly harmless, like making your pant legs too stiff. But if you made a mistake in the drafting, your shirt might dissolve into dust in the middle of a day. Or"-Gavin cleared his throat-"certain mischievous boys might learn how to unseal the luxin that the tailor-drafters had woven. These boys might have caused some chaos at a memorable party, where the ladies who'd gone to the expense of even having luxin undergarments found themselves in particular distress." His mouth tightened, hiding a grin at a memory. "Sadly, the fashion ended rather abruptly after that."

"That was you? I heard about that party," Liv said.

"I'm sure whatever you heard was much exaggerated," Gavin said.

"No," Ironfist said. "It wasn't."

Gavin shrugged. "I was a bad child. Fortunately, I've come a long way since then. Now I'm a bad man." He smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes. "Here we go," he said as three Ruthgari men approached.

The three all wore what looked to Kip like wool sheets with a hole cut for the head, carefully folded so there were pleats at their wide leather belts. The garment-a tunic?-then fell to the men's knees. Though their legs were bare, the wool seemed entirely inappropriate for Tyrea's climate, and all three were sweating freely. All wore leather sandals, though the guards' laced up into shin armor. The guards each carried a pilum, and a gladius and a crude pistol at their belts. The man in the lead, apparently in charge, had his tunic embroidered at the hem and on each breast. He carried a scroll, a large bag slung over one shoulder, and a heavy purse at his belt. He wore a pair of clear spectacles low on his nose.

Clear spectacles? What kind of drafter would want clear spectacles?

But as the men came close, Kip realized the man wasn't a drafter at all. His eyes were clear brown. The men were also all pale, a common Ruthgari trait, Kip guessed. With their skin barely bronzed, they weren't pale or freckled like Blood Foresters, but they still seemed pretty ghostly. Their hair was a normal dark hue from brown to black, but straight, and fine. They walked with either authority or hauteur. Kip glanced at Liv. She was definitely taking their attitude as the latter. She practically sneered at them. Kip thought she might spit at their feet.

"I am the assistant portmaster," the man said. "Where's your vessel? The tax is levied according to size and term of stay."

"I'm afraid the size of our vessel is negligible at the moment," Gavin said.

"I'll be the judge of that, thank you. Where'd you dock?"

"Right about there," Gavin said, pointing.

The assistant portmaster looked, then glanced up and down the wall, squinting. There were no ships within fifty paces. He folded his arms, his jaw setting as if Gavin were making fun of him. "The tax isn't heavy, but let me assure you, the penalty for attempting to evade taxation is."

One of the guards tapped the assistant portmaster's shoulder, but the man ignored him.

"As it should be," Gavin said, still polite. He handed over a letter.

The man held the letter low, so he was looking through his spectacles, like he was going to draft the letters right into words. "Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, oh!"

The man's head snapped up, and he peered at Gavin's eyes through his spectacles. "Oh! My Lord Prism! A thousand pardons! Please, my lord, let us accompany you to the fortress. It would be a great honor to us."

Gavin inclined his head.

"I sort of thought you'd pick them all up with magic and shake them or something," Kip said, once they all fell in behind the guards and the assistant portmaster.

"There's a time to toss idiots around," Gavin said. "But this man's just doing his job." They walked into the shadow of the fortress, whose northern wall nearly overhung the harbor. Both of them looked up. There were archers walking along the top of the wall, looking down at them. "Besides," Gavin said, "you start throwing luxin around, you never know who's going to answer with gunfire."

The assistant talked to the men guarding the gate. Lots of furtive glances at Gavin followed. Kip was busy looking at the fortress. The gate, and the entire fortress, was carved travertine. Mellow green, incised with a crosshatched pattern to make the stone look woven rather than carved. There were a number of murder holes cut in the gate. As the soldiers opened the gate, Kip saw that it led to a short killing ground, entirely enclosed, with murder holes everywhere, then another gate. The guards at the second gate, which was open, carried muskets with almost bell-shaped muzzles. These guns were also shorter than the muskets the guards at the Chromeria carried.

Kip was next to Ironfist now, so he asked, "Why are their muskets so short?"

"Blunderbusses," Ironfist said. "Instead of a ball, they load them with cobblers' nails or chain. At short range you can hit four or five men. Or blow a good hole in one. Good for rioters. A man cut in half isn't any less dead than one with a small hole in his heart, but he's a much greater deterrent to everyone else in the crowd."

"Nice," Kip said, swallowing.

After a few more checkpoints, at which they accrued a few more senior guards, they climbed several floors. When they were on the third floor, they passed an open door to chambers overlooking the sea. Gavin stopped abruptly. Their escorts didn't notice immediately. Ignoring them, Gavin walked into the room.

Ironfist, Kip, and Liv followed him. The room was a suite of apartments, filled with paintings, pillows, screens with ornate paintings of hunts, fireplaces, several chandeliers, and great long-handled fans for room slaves to waft their masters. Everywhere Kip looked, things sparkled, shined, and gleamed.

"This," Gavin announced as his escorts hurried in, "will be sufficient…"

"Yes, Lord Prism, of course, this is the guest of honor's suite. We'll get-"

"For my servants," Gavin finished. "Kip, Liv, I trust you can stay out of trouble while I get our accommodations arranged?"

"Yes, of course, my Lord Prism," Liv said, a formality and maturity in her voice that Kip wasn't familiar with.

"Start Kip's drafting lessons. I'll check up on you after I'm finished with a few things."

"Of course," Liv said, curtseying. Kip half-bowed, and instantly felt deeply foolish. He didn't know how to bow. No one bowed where he grew up.

"Ironfist?" Gavin said.

Ironfist raised an eyebrow-oh, now you want me to go with you?

"Best chance you'll have to see a pompous Ruthgari governor get kicked out of his rooms. More if you're lucky. Might even be someone you know."

The corner of Ironfist's mouth twitched. "It's the simple pleasures that make life beautiful, isn't it?"

Chapter 58

The door closed behind them, and abruptly Kip and Liv were alone, away from the important people and the matters of state. Children once more.

Liv looked at Kip for a long time.

"What?" Kip asked.

"Sometimes it's really strange to me that you are who you are. A week ago I would have blushed just at seeing Commander Ironfist. Now I'm sitting in the finest rooms in the Travertine Palace-and they're mine?"

"I've given up trying to understand it all," Kip said. "I think if I stop and think too much-" I'll become a blubbering baby. "Things will just fall apart."

In a moment, Liv's face changed. Her eyes softened, compassion etched on every feature. "You were there. In the village. When it happened."

"At Green Bridge with Isa and Sanson. And Ram, of course." He still wanted to sneer at the very thought of Ram, but that seemed cruel and small now. "Ram and Isa were killed. Sanson and I got away. But eventually they killed him too." Kip's voice was wooden and distant even in his own ears. He couldn't even look at Liv. If he saw her compassion, he'd break. He already looked weak and foolish and young and fat in her eyes, a boy to be pitied. He didn't need to make it worse by crying. "My mother made it out but her skull was smashed. I was with her when she…"

"Oh, Kip, I'm so sorry."

He pushed that down, pushed it aside. "Anyway, I really do hope your father got out. He was always good to me. In fact, if he hadn't made me leave when he did, I'd be dead."

Liv said nothing for a time. Kip couldn't decide if it was an awkward silence or not. "Kip," she said finally, "I've been trying to work up the nerve to… Things can be really complicated now. With who your father is, and the way things are at the Chromeria… Sometimes things don't really go the way we want, and we-"

"Am I supposed to have some idea what you're talking about?" Kip asked. " 'Cause…"

She opened her mouth and looked at him again. Then he saw the gates come down. "I'm just really glad you made it out, Kip."

"Thanks," he said. Thanks for not trusting me enough to say whatever you just wanted to say. "Should we get started?"

She smiled wanly, like she wanted to say more but didn't know how. "Sure. Come out to the balcony."

They walked out onto the balcony, which hung literally over the sea. From above, they could hear the muffled voices of men speaking on top of the Travertine Palace. Kip stood looking out at the sea, trying to put himself in a frame of mind to concentrate, and said, "What do I do?"

"To draft you need four things," Liv said. "Skill, Will-"

"Source, and Still," Kip said. "Er, sorry, I have picked up a thing or two."

"Right. So there's basically modifications and nuances to each of the big four, but that's where it all starts. Let's start with source."

Kip thought that he'd picked up a lot of what she was going to say, but one doesn't interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny. Liv rummaged through her pack and pulled out a rolled-up green cloth and then a white one.

"We'll hold off on the color theory as much as we can," she said. "We know you've drafted green. So your source can either be something reflecting green light in the world or you can take something that has green as a component color and look at it through a lens."

"Huh?" Kip said. So much for this all being a repeat. "What do you mean reflecting green? You mean something green?"

"Something you'll learn the further you go in the Chromeria is that your experience of a thing and the nature of the thing itself are often different things."

"Sounds… uh, metaphysical," Kip said. Hadn't Gavin said something like that?

"Some take it that way, too, but I'm speaking strictly physically. Look at this." Liv pulled out another cloth. It was a red spectrum, but instead of flowing smoothly from the deepest to the lightest red, there were parts that took steps back. "When you look at this, Kip, you can tell that it's off. It generally goes right, but there are subcolors out of sequence. Most men can't see that. They think it's right. They can differentiate these four spectral blocks here, but not these blocks inside. It doesn't matter how hard they try, or how long they study it. Their experience of it is less nuanced than yours or mine. Now, quite honestly, we don't know if what you and I see is the totality of what is actually there, or if some people from beyond the Great Desert might think we're as blind as we think the men are who can't tell this from this."

"That's weird."

"I know. In class, the magisters usually have every boy come to the front and attempt the test, just because so many of the girls who can see the differences can't believe that everyone else can't see them too. It's pretty humiliating. Actually, I think it's worse for the girls who can't see it either. The boys aren't expected to pass. The girls who can't see it feel awful." She shook herself. "Tangent. The point to remember, even if you don't believe it now, is that color doesn't inhere in a thing. Things reflect or absorb colors from light. You think this cloth is green. It's not. Really it's a cloth that absorbs all colors except green."

"This is us saving color theory for later?" Kip asked lightly.

She paused, then she saw he was teasing and she smiled. "No you don't, I'm not going to get drawn into more tangents. The point is, light is primary. This cloth, in a dark room, is worthless to you. Obviously, you can take the religious significances pretty deep, but you and I are only going to talk about the physical, not the metaphysical. You can draft green light. There are only a couple of ways for you to do that. The best is to have green things around you. Especially if you have lots of them. Especially if you have lots of different hues and tones available."

"So, like a forest."

"Exactly. That's why before the Unification, the green goddess Atirat was worshipped in Ruthgar and the Blood Forest more than anywhere else. Green drafters flocked to the forests and the Verdant Plains because they were more powerful there than anywhere else. In turn, those lands were dominated by the green virtues and the green vices, either simply because of the sheer amount of green being drafted there or because Atirat was real. Take your pick."

"That I don't understand."

"We'll worry about all that later. The second-best way to draft is to have spectacles. Like these." She reached into her pack and pulled out a little cotton pouch. Loosening the drawstring, she withdrew a pair of green spectacles.

"You don't draft green," Kip said.

"No, I don't," Liv said, smiling.

"They're for me?" Kip asked. Tingles shot down his spine.

Liv smiled broadly. "Usually there's a little ceremony, but it amounts to a congratulations."

Kip took the spectacles gingerly. They had perfectly round lenses set in a thin iron frame. He put them on his face. Liv stepped close and measured where the arms of the spectacles passed over his ears. Kip could smell her. Somehow, after a full day skimming across the entire sea and fighting pirates and then baking in the sun, she smelled wonderful. Of course, Kip hadn't been this close to a woman very often-except his mother, usually covered with sweat or vomit on the nights he was unlucky and had to carry her home. Isa had smelled good too, but different than Liv.

Isa had barely crossed Kip's mind in the last days. He'd thought about her, but there was something hollow there. He'd let himself daydream about kissing Isa someday, but maybe that had been more because she was there than that she was perfect for him. Or because she was there and Liv wasn't, and Kip needed something to distract him from thinking about Liv.

And now here she was. She'd measured both sides, and she took his spectacles off and was carefully bending the arms to fit behind his ears.

"Hmm," she said. "Your right ear's higher than the left."

"My ears are lopsided?" Kip said. As if I didn't have enough to be self-conscious about.

"Don't worry, mine are too! Really, most people's are off a little bit." She paused. "Just not quite so much." She shook her head in disbelief.

"I've got freakish ears?"

Liv grinned wickedly. "Gotcha."

"Orholam's ba-Ahem, beard." Kip scowled. Every time. Every stinkin' time.

She smiled, self-satisfied, and gave the nose pieces a final bend, then propped the spectacles on his face. "There. You might have to play with them to make them more comfortable, but they aren't really meant to be on your face all day long anyway."

He looked around, and was not terribly surprised to see that most everything had a greenish tinge through the green glass.

"What you're seeing is white light from the sun reflected off of surfaces, then filtered through your lenses. So if you're surrounded by white marble walls or something, you'll be able to draft almost as much as if you were in a forest. The lenses aren't as good as drafting from natural greens, but it's better than nothing. You can't just look at anything, though. Look around. You see how some things really look green, and others don't? Like if you look at this cloth, what color does it appear to be?" She drew another cloth out of her bag.

"Uh, red." Kip thought he could hear Gavin's voice from the floor above them, getting louder, angry.

"It is red."

Refocusing his attention on Liv, Kip looked over his glasses, and though the cloth's tone was changed a little, it was indeed red. "So how does that work?" he asked.

"The spectacles will only help if there are surfaces that are reflecting green to you. White surfaces work best because white is all the colors together. Much less good, but sometimes possible, will be drafting through your lenses when looking at yellow or blue surfaces, since green is a secondary color."

"Lost me there."

"So now you want the color theory?" She grinned, joking. "For your purposes, if you need to draft, the spectacles will help most if you can find things that are either white or light-colored. Ripe wheat would work, a spruce tree won't," Liv said.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16