The Black Prism

Kip swallowed. Sometimes looking at Gavin, he felt like he was staring through trees, getting glimpses of a giant striding through a forest, crushing everything in his path.

Gavin turned his eyes back to Kip. His face softened. “Which mostly involves boring meetings to convince cowards to spend money on things other than parties and pretty clothes.” He grinned. “I’m afraid you’ve probably seen more magic out of me already than most of my soldiers ever did.” His eyes clouded. “Well, not quite. You look confused.”

“It’s not really about what you just said, but—” Kip stopped. It seemed like a pretty offensive question, now that it was halfway out of his mouth. “What do you do?”

“As Prism?”

“Yes. Um, sir. I mean, I know you’re the emperor, but it doesn’t seem like…”

“Like anyone listens to me?” Gavin laughed. “Seems like it to me too. The bald truth of it is that Prisms come and go. Usually every seven years. Prisms have all the foibles of lesser men, and huge shifts of power every seven years can be devastating. If one Prism sets up his family members to govern every satrapy, and the next Prism tries to set up his own in their places, things get bloody fast. The Colors, on the other hand, the seven members of the Spectrum, are often around for decades. And they’re usually pretty smart, so Prisms have been managed more and more over time, given religious duties to fill their days. The Spectrum and the satraps rule together. Each satrapy has one Color on the Spectrum, and each Color is supposed to obey the orders of his or her satrap. In practice, the Colors often become co-satraps in all but name. The jockeying between Color and satrap, and all the Colors and the White, and all the Colors and the White against the Prism, pretty much keeps order. Each satrapy can do what it wants at home as long as it doesn’t rile up any other satrapy and trade keeps flowing, so everyone has an interest in keeping everyone else in check. It’s not quite that simple, of course, but that’s the gist.”

It sounded plenty complicated enough. “But during the war…?”

“I was appointed promachos. Absolute rule during wartime. Makes everyone nervous, in case the promachos decides that the ‘war’ lasts forever.”

“But you gave it up?” It was a dumb question, Kip realized.

But Gavin smiled. “And wonder of wonders, I haven’t been assassinated. The Blackguard doesn’t only protect Prisms, Kip. They protect the world from us.”

Orholam. Gavin’s world sounded more dangerous than what Kip had just left. “So you’ll teach me to draft?” he asked. It was the best of all worlds. He would learn what he needed to learn, without being set on a strange island alone. And who could teach drafting better than the Prism himself?

“Of course. But first there’s some things we have to do.”

Kip looked longingly at the sausage rope Gavin still held. “Like eat more?”

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.”