A touch of superviolet, and suddenly, above them, the vast shining disk that was the Great Mirror wobbled.
“Like I thought,” Kip said. “You don’t use chi to move the mirror. So what do you use it for?”
The mask hid all but a bit of her shaking her head. “Chi is more energetic than any other color. It can go farther, with less diffusion. The messages themselves are beams of chi.”
Now, that was new. Kip had assumed they were reflecting the sun or a bonfire. “You reach Green Haven directly? All the way from here?!”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t.”
“You didn’t get cancers doing nothing.”
“There’s . . . procedures.”
“There’s something in here, inside this globe. I can feel a hollow. Open it for me, would you?” Kip asked.
“I can’t do that.”
“Won’t,” Kip corrected. “No matter. Big Leo, you think you can smash this thing open with your chain?”
Big Leo grunted and slid the heavy fighting chain off his shoulders. His voice low and emotionless, he said, “Happy to try.”
Winsen turned to Big Leo. “You know, if you do break it, they’re gonna give him the credit, right? We should never have named him Breaker.”
“Eh. I’m all right with that,” Big Leo said. “Long as I get to use my chain.”
O’s beard, but he played the big dumb thug beautifully when he wanted to.
“You can’t—no!” the Keeper said. She moved her body between Big Leo and the black globe.
Kip lifted a hand, and Big Leo stopped. “Keeper,” Kip said, “I couldn’t help but notice the band of trees all the way up and down the sides of the palace, all the way up to this one at the crown. Tell me about that. Seems like a lot of work. Why not just have the tree alone up here?”
He knew the answer. The locals said that beneath the surface, the roots of every tree in the city were connected with those of every other.
It might not be literally true, but it was a metaphor important enough to the old Foresters that they’d built an earthen ramp up and down their entire palace. The ancient kings and queens of this realm had wanted to proclaim that they were connected with all their people.
She seemed thrown off balance by his abrupt change in topic. “It’s, it’s . . . Trees are communal, Lord Guile,” she said. “The roots interlace, passing along needed nutrients and even physical support to one another, and especially to the tallest specimens. With the high winds up here, a white oak alone wouldn’t stand for a year.”
“Huh,” Kip said. “Helping each other, passing along what’s needed, even at some cost to themselves, so they all might thrive. United against the storm. It’s almost as if there’s a lesson we could learn from that.”
“The trees support one another, Lord Guile. The largest don’t only take, they also give.”
“And you don’t trust me to protect you. I don’t blame you. You’ve given your life to be the Keeper of the Flame, and you’ll do anything not to become the Loser of the Flame.”
She folded her arms. “You already know, don’t you?”
He said nothing.
“How?” she asked.
He drew in some superviolet and drew a line hanging in the air between the black orb set in the tree trunk just over a natural boulder and to the wall of the gatehouse. The color difference was barely perceptible to the naked eye. “Chi shadows,” Kip said. “A lot more than you can draft unaided. And they’re more intense off to the side, as if they hadn’t been diffused by passing through the Keeper’s body in the same way.”
Her chin lifted, as if to offer another lie, but then descended. She suddenly had the air of one watching her life’s work die, her legacy tainted, her order headed for genocide.
“They form all the time, you know,” she said. “I don’t think there’s ever just one, despite what the Chromeria says. They’re like lightning strikes, little discharge points for magic. And then they dissipate, usually. Unless someone with the right knowledge can get there first. Then she can stabilize it, build it if she wants. It calls to drafters, even over enormous distances if you grow it large enough. It’s how the kings and queens of old summoned their drafter armies in the first place. They’re dangerous, of course, especially these—”
“These? You have more than one?”
She sighed surrender. “There’s another in Green Haven. But you have to understand . . . they’re dangerous—very, very dangerous—but they’re not evil. Some of us even believe the Chromeria secretly has seven of their own, if not nine. How else have they gathered drafters for so long? But my lord, the Chromeria will kill us all if they find out we have it. Call us blasphemers, heretics, apostates, pagans. Blindfold and burn us, or put out our eyes, or put us on the Glare. All we’ve wanted is to be accepted back into the fold.”
“No. You wanted to keep power, too.”
“We save lives with our training!” she protested.
And yet here she was dying, and dying young.
But she went on. “We’ll be anathema. No one will be allowed to draft chi ever again, on pain of death. That’s what it means, if you tell them.”
She sighed again, but something about her seemed relieved. An honest woman indeed. But then, chi was ever so good at exposing secrets; Kip shouldn’t have expected a chi drafter would love keeping them.
The Keeper walked to the globe. She touched it, and it opened like a flower. She reached a gloved hand inside and pulled out something smaller than her thumb. The air around her hand shimmered as if she held an invisible fire, but as she moved it, it spat out sparks of liquid-gold fire. The thing itself was hard to see at all from this distance, but it was much smaller than he’d expected. Kip had seen larger stones set in women’s rings.
“Is that . . .” Cruxer started. “Is that solid chi? I didn’t think such a thing existed! Chi luxin?!”
She shook her head. “Lord Guile,” the Keeper said, her voice taking on a formal tone, “Luíseach, you have come to bring light, which means bringing shameful secrets to the light. Here is both our light and our shameful secret. Behold that which slays us, and that without which this city and my order is nothing. Behold the chi bane.”
“Excellent,” Kip said. “I’ll take it.”
Chapter 24
Gavin had charged toward a likely death several dozen times. This was different.
In the early part of the Prisms’ War, the hours before every battle had been exhausting: the anxious mental rehearsals and the fears of cowardice and shaming himself publicly, the fears of death, and worse—in the mind of the young man he had been—the fear of living maimed or broken, which he’d thought were the same thing. There had been the righting of relationships: Just, you know, in case. There had been the writing of wills. There had been the selfish prayers; it was the closest he’d ever come to real piety.
For all the damnable emotional and mental sweat of it, it had served one purpose at least: the heightened state of fear and exhilaration had come effortlessly, giving incredible energy and even strength, allowing him to shrug off pain and fatigue, though at the cost of tunnel vision.