They seared him instantly.
Kip was already exhausted from his ordeal directing the mirrors. But fat kids know how to take punishment.
Zymun didn’t keep Kip covered until all the mirrors were brought into line. He didn’t care how executions on the Glare were usually done, or about minimizing the condemned’s suffering. He wanted the opposite. As soon as the city’s mirrors could be turned, Kip was pummeled with hot light in every color.
Green hit Kip first, tearing his eyes open like a too-large swallow of water—except that the swallowing just wouldn’t end. He felt a crack as deep as his bones, taking his breath, stabbing his eyes, and sending shivers down every limb as his halos blew out.
Slivers of luxin exploded out of the white of his eyes, blinding him momentarily. Blood trickled down his face.
Then sub-red burrowed into him like hot coals pressed sizzling through his eyeballs.
It was pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced. When he’d fallen in the fire and burned his left hand, he’d squeezed it convulsively into a fist—but here the fist was his mind itself, crackling, cooking, splitting in the heat like an overcooked sausage.
Breaking the halo shattered the boundaries of his self. He was suddenly connected to all the green around him. The green drafters on the Jaspers felt like beacons; the bane felt like a star come to earth. It was dazzling, it was beautiful, it was insanity itself, and it called to him.
And then he was connected to the sub-reds, and to the red bane.
And then orange hit him.
Yellow.
Superviolet. Each like the blows of a spiked mace cracking his skull, again, again, again. Crushing him.
It was like someone was gagging him, forcing impossibly too much light into his eyes at the same time that someone else brought a sledge down on his fingers, on his wrists, on his knees, his ankles, his groin.
For a drafter, there was only one choice on Orholam’s Glare: to not draft and explode from the buildup of luxin, or to draft and be forced to draft more than any human possibly could. Every conversion generated heat.
Converting so much meant burning up.
‘Did you cast sub-red, or fire?’ Janus Borig had asked him once, oddly intense.
Writhing against his steel bonds, Kip vented fire now in the only safe direction he could, waves of it bursting from the outer edges of his arms and forearms like wings reaching out wide and up into the sky.
But he couldn’t vent it all. He was only prolonging things.
“Why is this taking so long?” he heard a distant voice demand.
As he felt his heart convulse in an irregular, belabored beat, too late he figured it out. Puzzles and prophecies. Remember blubber. What is it about blubber?
Blubber bounces back.
He was the Turtle-Bear. He was a dragon. He was sitting passive before all these mirrors, acting as if they had no will, acting as if he didn’t either, when instead the mirrors were pressing one message in upon him with great force from every direction—one word, one command: die.
He didn’t have to be passive. He could fight.
He didn’t have the mirror array, but Kip had seen how it worked, and he could draft all the colors it could. He could surely not equal its power, but with the superviolet bane broken, he could mimic its function.
He left alone the mirrors nearest him—the Great Mirrors focused on him—so that Zymun wouldn’t think he was attacking, and then Kip shot his will up through the mirrors reflecting killing light into him, and found the mirror array on the Prism’s Tower roof, still connected to all the mirrors through superviolet. Manipulating it was like trying to use a spoon to eat, if the spoon’s handle were a pace long, but—clumsily—he began to press his will on it, and he began to turn distant mirrors.
The blue bane and the superviolet were defeated, and Kip knew the drafters of each were on Big Jasper—he could feel them.
Kip couldn’t attack Zymun without risking the man simply shooting him. But he could help the islands’ defenders.
So Kip, flawed mirror that he was, burned for his friends, shooting blue and superviolet light to every corner of Big Jasper, spotlighting friendly drafters so they’d have a source, helping them repel the attacks at the walls. He slaved mirror towers nearest to superviolets to them, arming them for their fight.
And then he had an idea about paryl, the bane the Wight King didn’t have.
If he were fast enough, before he died, he could use the master color on the very—
He felt the mirror array snatched away from him, and his will locked with one who stood at the top of the Prism’s Tower, and they communicated at the speed of thought, mind to mind.
‘You attacked me,’ Aliviana Danavis said. But she wasn’t Liv now. She was the Ferrilux.
‘You attacked me first,’ Kip told her.
‘I did not! And I am Ferrilux; I cannot lie.’
‘Your immortal attacked me through you,’ Kip told her.
She hesitated. But it would change nothing, he could see. He’d insulted the goddess of Pride in the worst way possible: he’d handled her. Humiliated her.
‘You failed,’ she said. ‘I left a door open for you to win here, but you missed it. You lose. I won’t join you in a loss. Can’t. Goodbye, Kip.’
And then she tore away the control of all the mirrors from him, easily.
He threw his will against her, but hers was the will of a goddess now. Superviolet controlled the mirrors, and the superviolet goddess would not let anyone be her master. A Ferrilux does not yield.
Maybe he could have beaten her had he been fresh. Maybe if he’d thought of it instantly. On a good day, his will might be second to no one’s. But today wasn’t a good day.
He knew Aliviana’s will now, felt the sheer scale of it. He couldn’t beat her. She had faded far from the young woman who’d half hoped Kip might rise; she’d changed even since she’d made a plan involving the Great Mirrors and repaired and activated them for him. She’d lost interest in that plan now.
He saw then the outlines of it, barely. Superviolet is orderly, and concerned with divining order where others couldn’t see it. She had hunted down, visited, and repaired the ancient Great Mirrors in every arc of the Seven Satrapies.
They were the answer to a question Kip hadn’t known enough to ask. What were the Great Mirrors for? Communication. Defense. Artillery. Source. But they were also lightwells. Not figuratively, the way the term had come to be used now, meaning ‘where the buildings were kept wide apart so the sun could still reach the ground,’ but literally: vast repositories of light against the night.
‘Give them to me,’ Kip pleaded. ‘It’s not too late.’
‘No,’ she said. Stern. Simple. Like an experienced mother to a child pleading to stay up far too late. Her mind was made up. Kip simply needed to die so she could get on with other things she needed to do. The less he fought, the better it would be for everyone.
His strength was fading fast, and hers was implacable. It was like trying to scale a sheer wall that got taller by the moment.
Kip had promised himself he wouldn’t scream. A turtle-bear might scream plaintively, wheezing in pain like some pathetic, persecuted fatty.
Dragons don’t scream. Dragons don’t beg or grovel. Dragons roar.
“MORE LIGHT!” he shouted. He shouted as if all his soul were carried in the sound.