Ulbear Rathcore? Gavin had barely known the older man, only that he resigned from the Spectrum and left the Chromeria around the time when his wife, Orea Pullawr, had become the White. That was decades ago. Orea had only spoken of him with fondness, which had seemed odd, given that they’d lived apart for as long as Gavin could remember. Rathcore had never even visited the Chromeria again, and as the White, Orea couldn’t leave it.
“Wait. What? What? The Prism what?”
“Centuries ago now, Vician was the last true Prism. Born, not made. But when it came time to step down and surrender his powers, he murdered his successor instead. And then he murdered all those he could find with the gift, renewing his own powers—for a time—with theirs. He cowed and bought off the Magisterium and the Spectrum, and they helped him, rather than fighting him. But true Prisms stopped being born, even after Vician was gone. Some say those with the gift were still being born, but that a faithful luxiat had used black luxin to destroy the knowledge of how to find them. Others said it was Orholam’s own punishment for the Magisterium’s faithlessness.
“But by repeating Vician’s murders, the Magisterium found they could make a Prism, and instead of an outsider upending their power every generation, they could choose one of their own to be the new Prism, which they liked very much indeed. Unfortunately, unlike a true Prism’s powers, this made-Prism’s powers would fade over the course of at most seven years. They knew what they made was a fraud, but some thought if Orholam wouldn’t save the world from the luxin storms and warring gods, they would do it themselves. So they renamed their murders sacrifices. They found when they sacrificed adults, it might take dozens to fill a single jewel of the Blinding Knife with a color. It was as if days of life and power were being transferred. Then one had the diabolical idea to sacrifice a child, one whose gift for drafting had just awakened. And to the world’s sorrow, it worked. Perhaps it was yet another test for the High Magisters: would they stoop so low?
“Of course they did. With a child, they’d get a full color from one murder, sometimes two. And it was so much easier to hide the death of one child, separated from her parents for tutelage at the Chromeria. A sudden illness, the High Luxiats would claim. With all the influx of pilgrims around Sun Day—often bringing the ill, hoping to be cured—who would notice the deaths of seven or ten children every seven years? The High Magisters never chose their victims from important families. Like predators, they hunted the weak and outcast children, the friendless ones. As if Orholam, who commands the exalted to bring succor to the lowly, would have them bring death instead.”
The pieces were snapping together for Gavin. He remembered some of his mother’s last words now. She had told him, with a peculiar intensity, ‘You are a true Prism.’ He’d thought she meant he was a good Prism, that he served well, despite the fraud of replacing his brother.
She would’ve known he thought that; she would’ve intended it. She’d given him a piece, knowing he would remember it, believing that he would put it in place when the time came.
And it fit. Perfectly.
His chest felt banded with iron. He couldn’t get enough air.
He remembered bafflement among the older High Luxiats and the High Magisters as his seven-year anniversary of being Prism had approached. He could tell they expected something from him, and fearing to give them the wrong response, he’d given them none. Was he supposed to have been buying their allegiance, so that he could renew his reign? Was he supposed to react with dread?
Gavin’s ignorance must have seemed feigned to them.
Meanwhile, Andross Guile had been removing or buying the silence of everyone who knew. And if the High Magisters and High Luxiats figured it out, what were they to do? Move against the first True Prism in centuries? Orholam’s own blessed? His coming saved them from another round of murders—and to open the secret would be to reveal their own guilt.
And doubtless Felia had been working her own magic, too, to protect her last living son. She’d had men killed for him, she’d confessed to him. Felia, who was never fierce, except for when she was defending Gavin.
Their power was built on the murder of children, every seven years? No wonder so many Prisms had only lasted through one term, or been driven by shame into drunkenness and self-destruction.
It had been a cancer in the very heart of the Chromeria.
Children?
“But the Freeing,” Gavin said. “Surely a sip of power a hundred times over would equal the full gulp? Surely they could have used all those . . .”
“Sometimes. For certain colors, as long as they had the Blinding Knife. But those drafters who come to be Freed have almost nothing left of their power. They have none to give. The children selected for the sacrifice—one lightsplitter, and one or two for each color—were always confined in a special ward in the infirmary just before Sun Day. They were drugged so that they would feel ill. When a particular child’s color wasn’t required, she would simply recover from her ‘illness,’ and never know how close she had come to death.”
So that was why father needed the Blinding Knife. It was what transferred the power. And this was why they’d always tried to select Prisms who were already polychromes—fewer colors needing transfer meant fewer murdered children. But the Chromeria cared about installing men or women from the right families more. They’d told themselves they killed the innocent to save the innocent of all the Seven Satrapies . . . but they’d killed the innocent to serve their ambitions, too.
“Who knew all this?” Gavin asked.
“Those at the very top. The circle was kept very tight. Any luxiat who didn’t show enough moral flexibility to ignore matters of doctrine for matters of political necessity was derailed long before he could rise high enough to endanger them all. And the Spectrum has always been made up of political creatures. Most of them didn’t even see it as an existential hypocrisy: to keep themselves and everyone else safe, they were happy to trade the lives of a few poor slaves, or commoners’ children; whom they saw as hardly better. Most of them kept the secret simply because they thought its discovery would at worst make them look a bit heartless.”
Gavin had thought himself the worst man in leadership at the Chromeria, an unparalleled deceiver. But they were all liars, black hearts in colored robes.
Perhaps that revelation should have been a relief. It was quite the opposite.
“You said . . . you said father got outflanked. What was the rule? What was the change?”
Behind the creature that called itself Sevastian, the spiderweb of cracks from Gavin’s fist had spread up the mirror like sin. Cracks now reached nearly to the top of the Great Mirror and to every edge.
“The new rule was that no one could serve on the Spectrum while an immediate family member also served, in any capacity, whether as Color or Prism or promachos or the White or the Black. Everyone liked that, because Orea’s name had been put forth several times to become the White, and people feared what she and Ulbear might do together. By tradition, such rule changes are required to have contingencies, in case an unforeseen emergency requires it, so Ulbear proposed a contingency that simply seemed outrageous. If two family members wished to sit in such high offices simultaneously—which at the time only applied to Ulbear and Orea—they had to supply one of their own children for the Prism sacrifice.”