The Blood Mirror

“I meant the next one. And that skimmer was garbage!” Ben-hadad said.

“You designed it! You said it was the best skimmer ever built. And I helped build it. Probably drafted two years off my life,” Big Leo said, pointing to the red rising like floodwaters a quarter of the way up his dark irises. “I worked my ass off on that thing!”

“Still got a way to go before you’re assless,” Winsen said quietly, giving a significant glance at Big Leo’s haunches. Whereas Big Leo was by far the biggest of the elite athletes, Winsen was by far the smallest. Slight and unremarkable except for the bars of yellow luxin staining his cold blue eyes, he was the only member of the Mighty one might not be afraid of if one met him in a dark alley.

And that would be precisely the wrong reaction. Not only was Winsen the slipperiest killer of them all, Winsen simply didn’t care. With his longbow, he took shots that none of them could make, and he took shots that none of them would make, because they’d be worried about the consequences of hitting civilians or friends. Winsen seemed incapable of worrying about consequences.

“True! And I was right,” Ben-hadad said, soothing Big Leo. “But skimmers are a new invention. Gavin Guile just discovered them. That’s what makes them—look, trust me! Look. I’ll do all the drafting myself.”

“No, I forbid it,” Cruxer said, speaking up. He usually let them sort things out themselves, so when he intervened they instantly shut up. “We trust you, Ben-hadad. But you’re not drafting it alone. You can’t burn yourself out. We share the burden of making the new one. But next time, you ask me before you destroy what belongs to the squad, understood?”

“It was my design—”

“And the squad’s work,” Cruxer interrupted. “We all throw all of what we have into the pot. For some of us, that may be just muscle—”

“That would be me,” Ferkudi volunteered. Unnecessarily.

“—on a particular project, but we all give our all. Right?”

A brief moment passed, and Kip wanted to rush in and try to make things better. Cruxer and Ben-hadad butted heads constantly. Cruxer saw everything in black and white, and Ben-hadad saw relentless shades of gray possibility.

For Ben-hadad, his life and honor were the Mighty’s, but his creations were his own. He valued himself for his brilliant inventions, and that—that one thing—he didn’t want to share, and he didn’t see keeping that little bit as being too much to ask of a squad he gave everything else.

For Cruxer, you were either in or out.

But Kip didn’t try to fix it. Later, maybe, each would be more receptive to reason, more flexible. Not in front of everyone, though.

Ben-hadad was trying to keep his temper, saying tightly, “I’ll make the best skimmer I can so the squad can be safe—”

“Cap’n! Captain! Sir!” the lookout cried out from above.

At the alarm in his voice, the squad reacted immediately. Low stances, spectacles flipped on, team fanning out, looking for threats, hands to weapons. That most of the calamities that might come upon them at sea would be impossible to oppose didn’t matter; this was instinct.

The galley had no proper crow’s nest, so the lookout merely stood atop the main yard, balancing himself with one hand on the rigging. Above the full-bellied sails, the man was pointing north.

“Fore!” Kip said.

They turned and looked but saw nothing.

“Go,” Cruxer ordered.

So they ran toward the prow, sliding or jumping down the steep stair-ladder from the rear castle, dodging cursing sailors, and dashing up onto the low forecastle as the captain bellowed at his sailors. The captain might be an ass, but he seemed a capable one. When they reached the prow, the Mighty spread out, each of them having drawn in his color, except Kip, who was slower. Kip was still swapping spectacles in and out of his hip case, stealing glances at the dirty white sails to soak up each color in turn.

“What is that?” Cruxer asked.

“Ben?” Ferkudi said.

“Uh-huh?” Ben-hadad said.

“We’re looking north, right?”

“North-northwest, technically, but—”

“Why is the sun rising in the north?”

Within moments, all of them saw it. At first, it looked like the sun on the horizon, but blinding yellow like the risen sun, not red as the sun on the horizon ought to. And as it rose, the orb deformed, elongated, like the longest finger of a great hand, then simply the first burgeoning cloud of a vast cloud bank rolling into view.

“Storm!” the lookout bellowed.

The sailors sprang into action. A storm they knew how to handle. Only the Mighty were frozen. They knew this was no normal storm.

This was a luxin storm, ravager of cities, slayer of armies, Orholam’s wrath, the gods’ lash. And it was coming straight for them.

As the luminous cloud bank filled the horizon, the sea reflected the sky with an unnatural clarity. Tiny bright needles flashed between sea and sky, as if knitting them together with light.

This was the consequence of the Seven Satrapies’ not having a Prism to balance the colors. Drafters inevitably caused imbalances, and these storms broke out spontaneously. No one understood yet why they happened where they did, what exactly sparked them, or why they ended.

“Breaker, Winsen,” Cruxer said. “How tight is that yellow?”

Winsen licked his lips. “Hard to tell from this distance, but uh… I think it’s better than I can do.”

Kip flipped on his yellow spectacles. “It’s all over the yellow spectrum. But some of it, yes, some of it’s solid.”

“Is it raining? Anyone?” Cruxer asked, though he had the best eyes of the Mighty.

They’d heard stories of a crystal storm in a little village in Atash. Blue luxin crystals the size of fists and sharp as razors had fallen from the sky and shredded everything within a day’s walk, but no farther. No one had known whether the tale was true. Solid yellow would be worse.

An odd wind started blowing at their backs, blowing them toward the storm front. It was like no wind Kip had ever felt. It was utterly constant. No gusts, no variation in its strength at all, just a simple constant hard push.

The distant seas in front of the storm fell flat in an expanding circle. No chop, no whitecaps, no variation at all. The sea became a perfect mirror for the bright clouds above. The great luminous clouds running straight against the wind seemed to crash into it as if it were a wall, and then the clouds flipped over that wall in a mass like pancake batter spreading on a griddle in concentric rings.