“No, no, no,” a young sailor piped up suddenly after they’d all agreed on their answer. “You’re doing it all wrong. I can get that horse to the top of the wall in half that time. We gotta think about this like our brothers the longshoremen here. We got these standard-size boxes, right?” He held his hands out to show how big they were.
“We already talked about that,” one of the longshoreman interjected. “No matter how you lash ’em together, you can’t make a platform or a sling with ’em. Ain’t gonna be strong enough for—”
“So first thing you do is,” the young man continued, his hands still held out to box size, “you cut the horse into pieces this big—”
Both the sailors and the longshoremen busted up laughing, though the longshoremen followed it with cursing at him for his cheek.
“Watch out, boys,” Kip said, standing to go. “With that kind of approach to problem solving, you might have yourselves a future officer there.”
They laughed again, and he moved on, but not before he took the boy’s name. A quick wit’s the flower of a keen mind. The boy might be an officer yet.
After some hours, he gave in to exhaustion. He couldn’t see everyone, and dawn was coming.
But as he made his excuses and said his goodbyes, he was careful not to tell anyone that he’d see them later. With where they were going, he couldn’t guarantee that he would; with where he was going, he could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn’t.
Chapter 43
“Some of you have felt it,” Karris said. “Your leaders in the Magisterium seem, curiously, to lack confidence.” She was addressing a hundred young luxiats in a regular lecture hall. She’d told the magisters she wanted to offer them encouragement in a difficult time.
Instead, what she was telling them might get them all killed, and her with them.
‘I’ve left you a mess. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have failed,’ Orea had told her.
Well. This was where the rot began, so this is where Karris would begin, too. At some point, the shining, idealistic faces of the young luxiats before her would become old and powerful . . . and compromised, and even corrupt.
She didn’t have a master plan yet, but she knew that what Orholam had for her to do began here.
“It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s as if they almost think that the life-giving Lord in whom we believe is not, perhaps, so superior to the pagans’ ancestor worship and ritual orgies, and their elevation of drafters as innately more valuable than other men and women. Why are our leaders so tentative? Is it merely because they are old? What is so wrong with us? Has one day passed since High Luxiat Tawleb’s execution on Orholam’s Glare that you haven’t asked yourself, ‘How could the High Magisterium itself shelter such a person?’ A murderer in league with Nabiros himself? And then we saw Pheronike—not simply serving the immortal but somehow hosting him. How can such things be? Why is our faith spineless? Have we nothing to offer a dark world desperate for light?”
There was still time to bail out, to offer some anodyne exhortation to be faithful and do good.
Karris hadn’t brought the red folio, but everything she did now was informed by it, and by the fact that Orholam had armed her with it. Why would Orea choose Karris to succeed her? Why, out of all those smarter, holier, and more impressive in a hundred ways, would Orholam choose her to be His White now?
It could only be because Karris was a warrior. So she sometimes needed direction? Orea’s letter was that much: clean up the mess, whatever the cost. Fight. Die if necessary. Inspire others to join you in that, through your example. Karris could do that.
The red volume was, damnably, missing large chunks of its text. Apparently at least one of the later recipients of the work had ignored their pledge, or considered themselves not bound by an oath they hadn’t consented to.
A later pen claimed that at one point, the folio had been sealed with some sort of a will-crafting magic so that it wouldn’t even open until a new White had signed her name and assented with her will to the oath. Now oath-binding was another magic forbidden, and mercifully lost.
But despite what had been erased, what remained was enough. Karris wasn’t the first of the Whites after the folio had been altered, and her predecessors had been brilliant and curious and indefatigable in restoring what they could. While some had written circumspectly, others were bruisingly blunt.
Careful to use the past tense, Karris said, “My own husband, the Lord Prism, the Highest Luxiat, himself did not believe in Orholam.”
Gasps went up. They looked at her as if she were sullying the dead, and her own husband, no less. These young luxiats liked her a lot, she could tell, so they were doubly aghast.
“You’re shocked,” she said. “So it will grieve you to learn that none of the High Magisters were shocked at all by his disbelief. In fact, I’d be surprised if his atheism wasn’t shared by some of them. They cared little. So long as Gavin kept up the pretense of faith, they were content. He did his duty faithfully, except that he had not the faith that undergirds those duties.”
If they had dared to shout her down, they would have then. It was why she had excluded the High Luxiats and their staff, not by barring them from the meeting but by pretending it was yet another informal exhortation of the kind she’d done many times before.
Indeed, she’d met with three other classes recently and given them each an uninspiring lecture. Giving the same stultifying lecture, three times, had been enough to bore the important luxiats and magisters away.
All that in order to set this up.
The sole person of any standing in the room, a Magister Jens Galden, looked ill to the point of fainting. He stood at the back, and suddenly looked as if he were uncertain if he should bolt and go summon his superiors, or if he had better stay so he could keep a record of what outrage she spoke next.
She and Quentin had not chosen these young luxiats at random. Among their number was the order of the auditarae—a group dedicated to the preservation of contemporary and ancient history. The auditarae’s discipline involved training their memories with various tricks and a great deal of practice to a point where they could listen to a speech of half an hour and replicate it point for point, if not word for word. Others of their order were trained in a traditional shorthand, and partnered with an auditarae, so that together they could compare their recollections and notes to form an accurate representation of the speech. This was not primarily for an accurate text of the speech—skilled shorthand was more than adequate for that—instead, the auditarae wrote annotated copy akin to a musical text, noting accents, rising or falling volume, pitch, speed, obvious sarcasm, physical movements, and other verbal flourishes or delivery idiosyncrasies. These, requiring judgment calls, were more art than science, and the auditarae worked first in isolation with their partner and then often compared their results with other auditarae.
Sometimes, the close examination revealed much more than the speaker had actually intended. Some auditarae became famous for their insight, and some of these (Karris had learned from Orea Pullawr) were recruited as spies.
“There are magics deeper than chromaturgy, and truths dangerous to tell. There are truths about the Chromeria and about the world that we have held from you. But hard truths buried in the soil of a lust for power become poisonous secrets. We’ve enforced ignorance, and allowed conjecture. We—your leaders, the Spectrum, and the High Magisterium—have nodded along, as incorrect suppositions hardened into tradition and tradition aged into doctrine. We told ourselves that the risk was too great. We asked: what was worse, a small body of lies, or letting dangerous powers free into the hands of any madman who might use them to harm the most vulnerable, or to harm us? If people learned the truth and rejected what we had done, we would surely lose power—and we thought that none could use power so well as we could. We told ourselves the lie that we were indispensable, that Orholam couldn’t work without us, and thus we couldn’t possibly let ourselves look bad.