Before Karris had climbed up onto the platform, Andross Guile had reminded her that this was no amphitheater. Whatever tricks they did to project her voice, those at the back wouldn’t hear a word she said. Naturally, her words were being transcribed and would be published all around the Seven Satrapies, but what could be seen should be considered separately from what could be heard. If she wasn’t careful, Karris would be seen doing nothing to a traitor. That would look like weakness. So Quentin’s enslavement had to be seen.
So Karris now walked over to the seated High Luxiat Amazzal. She pulled out a large ceremonial dagger and handed it to him.
“If you’ll do the honors of clipping his ear, High Luxiat?” she asked.
“I prefer we handle such discipline privately,” he said.
“Oh, I know what you prefer,” Karris said. “Orea Pullawr trusted you to handle your own affairs faithfully, and you rewarded her trust by raising at least one traitor to the High Magisterium itself. You have loved the darkness of your privacy. Now we banish darkness from the House of Light.”
He held her eye, jaw clenching.
“Don’t be a fool,” Andross said to High Luxiat Amazzal from his seat, pitching his voice low so no one beyond the platform would hear him. “Every moment you hesitate you show the people that you are reluctant to give either justice or mercy or both. Accept the loss, or change the game and fight.”
High Luxiat Amazzal flushed, but he took the knife. He took the steps toward the kneeling Quentin, and held a hand up in the sign of the three, moving it through the four quadrants in the circle of blessing, but he wasn’t praying. He said, “You will pay for this.”
He wasn’t speaking to Quentin.
“Happily,” Karris said. And she meant it. There was something refreshing about the kind of man who would tell you he was angry at you. Frontal attacks were so much easier to defend against.
But something changed in his posture, and Karris’s old Blackguard senses began tingling.
“By the power vested in me as High Luxiat—” Amazzal declared to the crowd.
“One moment, High Luxiat,” a voice interjected. Andross Guile’s. Faster than she would have expected he could move, Andross was already standing beside the furious old man. “Let us show that we are united in this, the promachos together with the White and the luxiats against the pagans and traitors. I will hold the boy.”
Andross put his hands on Quentin’s shoulders, but then whispered to Amazzal, “You have to move faster than that if you wish to change the game. Too late now.”
Too late for what? For a moment, Karris didn’t understand.
Then she did. The old man had intended to say Quentin had gone too far. He’d intended to kill him, to assert Magisterial privilege over its own, despite whatever the White wanted. He’d intended not to have the constant embarrassment of Karris’s slave’s being around, humiliating his luxiats.
And Andross Guile had figured it out before perhaps even the old man had. Certainly Karris would have been too late.
The vein in Amazzal’s forehead throbbed. “And if I—”
“I swear to God I’ll put you up on the Glare next,” Andross said.
Amazzal looked like a bully punched between the eyes, disbelieving. But then he saw the look in Andross’s eyes—and believed.
The rage went out of the old High Luxiat in a whoosh. He spoke loudly again. “By the power vest—vested in me… By the power vested in me, here is the Chromeria’s justice and mercy, Luxiat Quentin Naheed. You are hereby enslaved.”
He sliced Quentin’s ear, blood spitting out onto the High Luxiat’s hands and his lambent white robes.
Amazzal was not a bad man, nor a bad luxiat. But he was a bad leader, and that made him a bad High Luxiat. He looked perfectly the part with flowing white beard, dignified disposition, speaker’s voice, and gracious manners. He cared for others deeply, and offered mercy wherever he went.
But mercy ceases to be a virtue when it enables further injustice.
The tower guards dragged Quentin away, and Karris ghosted through the next speech, barely aware, condemning the traitor prophet to death on the Glare for fomenting rebellion, placing spies, and blasphemy.
Pheronike was the man who’d been confirmed to be a spy handler by the Mighty in one of their training missions. Karris had gotten a spy close to him through that operation, and just before she passed away, Orea Pullawr had had her people scoop up the lot of them. Of them, only this man was a drafter. He was a sub-red, but he’d not been Chromeria-educated, so he was probably little danger, but despite that, he was kept in the special garb for condemned drafters, which was woven with hellstones to disrupt any luxin he tried to gather; he was also blindfolded to forbid him light, and subjected to a litany’s worth of other traditions that Karris didn’t even know about, much less comprehend the reasons for.
But despite the strangeness of the black garb and blindfold, it was only as they lifted Pheronike onto the mirror that Karris snapped back into focus on the moment. She’d never seen a drafter executed on the Glare.
It was supposed to be the worst way for a drafter to die. Or the two worst ways, really, depending on whether you decided to draft or not. She’d heard it described as choosing whether to die of constipation or diarrhea.
On the other hand, how could it be worse than burning to death?
They moved into place, and Karris donned dark spectacles as he was lifted high. Again the people’s mirrors came out, and Sadah Superviolet came forward. Again, it was only as Sadah swung the mirrors into focus that a blade sliced the blindfold from the condemned’s face.
Though Karris was prepared for it this time, it was still like standing in a thunderstorm of light. It was like going from the snowy slopes of Atan’s Teeth to the hottest desert of the Cracked Lands in an instant. The heat alone was a hammer. The light itself had a physical presence—a thickness, a reality so heavy that it made all the material universe seem like a ghostly realm in comparison. A concussive force pressed out Karris’s breath. She wanted to drop to her knees. She wanted to hide.
In that moment, Karris believed those who swore that Orholam himself was within that beam of light, and she prayed only that he turn not his eye upon her.
The black drop cloth hiding the accused had already caught fire. The cloth was both symbolic and practical: intended to represent sin and attempting to hide from Orholam’s eye, and intended as a mercy, to keep the people’s mirrors from burning the condemned and torturing him before all the mirrors could come into place.