Kip said, “I meant, uh, since it’s there, how do we raise it?”
“Sure you did, boss,” Ben-hadad said. “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m a genius.”
“We don’t. We hate you for all sorts of reasons,” Winsen said easily.
Kip walked over to the plinth. There were no superviolet panels on it. It felt like it was just a marker. And maybe it had been, the ancient equivalent of ‘Dig here.’
Ferkudi said, “Please don’t tell me we have to dig it up.”
“We?” Ben-hadad said. “I’m gonna be overseeing the drafters building our skimmers down at the coast. Actually, I should really be on my way.”
But he didn’t leave. Ben couldn’t leave an unsolved puzzle.
Kip shielded his eyes against most of the light and looked into the chi, though it pained his eyes to compress them so far. He’d gone blind for three days the last time he’d used a lot of chi, and he couldn’t afford that now.
He shot a pulse down into the earth, and it seemed to burn his skin in a line from his eyes, down his shoulders, along his entire arm. He tensed, but no one seemed to notice.
With its tremendous energy, the chi penetrated the earth easily, and he saw that Ben-hadad was right. Under a thin layer of grasses, the soil yielded from the native loam to a vast bowl of sand, and within that sand was a frame system, and lower still was a vast quantity of luxin. Green probably, considering the history of this satrapy. A temple? A shrine of some sort? It felt strange, though, as if being underground so long had changed it from solid luxin to a liquid. Or maybe it was just that he’d reached the limits of his tiny chi burst.
But that was all he could see in the tiny burst he’d shot out.
“It’s a moot point,” Cruxer said. “The Blood Robe army’s gone. It’d be like building a siege engine when there’s no siege . . . Unless . . .” Cruxer cleared his throat. “Our Lightbringer needs to tinker?”
They all looked at him.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben-hadad said, “and I keep coming up short. I mean, I get why the mirror towers would have been tremendously useful to the ancients. The kingdoms were broken into single colors, right? All the red drafters would go to Atash, greens here, and so on. They didn’t have colored lenses, so simply fighting in bad light or at the wrong time of day or without decent sources would have been the death of many of them. So before lenses were developed, a king could gather thousands of precious or semiprecious stones—anything in their color—and use the Great Mirrors to beam their color out to their drafters. And when colored lenses were first invented, the Mirrors would still be useful—because they were so, so expensive and difficult to make. But, Breaker, I don’t understand how the Mirrors are going to help us now: every drafter at the Chromeria has spectacles in their own color, and all the buildings are white by design. Sourcing isn’t a problem for us. The real problem is how the bane paralyze us. Are you certain that the Great Mirrors even do anything about that? Like, you bombard a drafter—or even the bane—with a complementary color, or what?”
They all looked at Kip. It wasn’t exactly a problem he hadn’t thought about in the long days on the trail.
“Hand me your water skin, would you?” Kip asked Cruxer, who gave it to him immediately.
He shot a quick flash again, this time down the plinth.
It showed a dark panel on the structure, two paces below.
“Aha!” he said, gladly dropping the chi. He poured water over the blisters rising on his burning hand, handing the skin back absentmindedly. “I wonder.”
He wasn’t going to be able to worm superviolet all the way down into the soil by itself, but what if . . .
Connecting superviolet to chi, like foot soldiers following charging cavalry, Kip shot chi into the soil, clearing the way for the superviolet to reach the panel. It’d be way faster than digging.
He’d only have an instant. Unless he wanted to hold on to this hot coal that was chi for longer.
“Kip, do you think maybe it would be a good idea to take it slow with—” Tisis said.
And there, in the panel, he felt an obvious trigger, as if recently repaired, just waiting for his touch.
Thanks, Liv. It was only as the trigger clicked that he thought, What if this is a trap?
“Oops,” he said.
With a muffled grinding of massive gears, the earth suddenly shifted under their feet.
“Run!” Kip shouted.
Only Tisis froze. She had no idea what was happening.
A two-paces-wide section of earth simply dropped into the ground beside them, tearing the grass free, exposing a chasm below and a glimpse of stone workings.
Kip stopped, grabbed Tisis, and threw her over his shoulder, sprinting for the trees. More ground gave way to the other side, the sand undergirding the grass sliding into oblivion, the sound of pouring sand and rumbling machinery filling his ears.
As always, he went to green first. The morning was bright, and the grass was emerald, the trees vibrant with dark-green leaves. The green rushed to him like a long-absent friend to an embrace.
But he wasn’t going to make it to the safety of the trees. The Mighty had all seen that he was sprinting, and had bolted themselves. Only Cruxer looked back now, horror and guilt etching his features: he’d run away without his wards.
The ground heaved upward for one moment and staggered him. Cruxer, looking over his shoulder, already slowing, was thrown headlong.
The bucking earth demolished Kip’s chance to jump. He felt the ground go soft under his left foot and saw it disappear from where he was going to plant his right.
He blasted green luxin down as hard as he could, but carrying Tisis, it was too little to compensate; they were too heavy together.
Left hand under her ribs, he heaved her to safety, and plunged toward the depths.
He hit the wall of the abyss gracelessly and caught the edge, lost it, and grabbed some roots overhanging the blank wall. He slipped, slid down, and then caught a double handful.
He didn’t even think to draft. The wind had been knocked from him when he hit the wall, and all he could do was clamp his eyes shut and hold on as tight as a kid fighting his big brother for a sweet.
The roots were tearing up his hands.
“Kip, let go!” Tisis shouted from above. She sounded in pain.
She must have said, ‘Don’t let go,’ and he’d missed it. “I won’t!” he shouted.
“No, Breaker. Let go,” Cruxer said, suddenly there with her, looking over the edge of the abyss at him.
Kip looked down. His feet were almost touching the sunken ground.
Oh.
He dropped onto the churned grass and sand.
Kip turned. The first thing he noticed was that there was a platform right where they’d all been standing moments before. It was untouched by the seismic chaos, its grass still undisturbed. Ah, because whoever had hidden the mirror hadn’t meant it to be a death trap for whoever triggered it.
If he’d listened to his wife and looked a bit longer before messing with the control panel to a massive subterranean structure, he would have certainly seen it.
He glanced over at her. She was rubbing her ribs as if he’d bruised her when he’d thrown her to safety. Safety. What a hero.
But finally, his eye was drawn to the most obvious part of the gigantic machinery that had emerged from the soil. Perhaps working on the same principles as the mighty escape lines running from the Prism’s Tower down into the city, massive counterweights must have dropped into hidden caverns in the earth in order to lever a great disk and a frame into the air, thirty paces high, with a huge pitted silver disk barely smaller than that held vertically in the frame.