The Black Prism(190)

Nearest to Liv, a circle of blue drafters, half of them wearing blue spectacles, and all filled with blue luxin, tinting their skin in the firelight, were talking with a woman who seemed made of crystal.

For long moments, Liv had no idea what she was seeing. They were drafters, though, obviously, and there was luxin everywhere. Oathbreakers. The mad. The broken. Color wights. Liv could barely take it in.

These were people who’d violated everything Liv had been taught. She caught only fractured details. A broken-haloed eye. The crystalline woman drafting a matrix in the air as the other blues listened. Greens laughing, dancing around one fire, bouncing on unnaturally springy legs, jumping higher than any man Liv had ever seen, doing flips and backflips over each other. A man and a woman, skin permanently green but not yet transformed, were standing, holding each other, grinding their hips together, dancing in a manner so lascivious that—wait, no, the woman’s skirt was bunched around her waist. In full view of everyone, including some cheering drafters, they were actually—

Liv tore her eyes away, her cheeks suddenly hot. A yellow was tossing little luxin balls into the air while a blue shot blue bullets at them, each little target exploding in a flash of light when he connected.

But Liv’s eyes were drawn to the full color wights. Even here, there weren’t many. She’d only heard rumors about such things at the Chromeria. They said almost everyone who broke their halo simply went mad and died—or went mad and killed others, more often. That danger was what made the Pact necessary. Orholam made magic to serve men, and a drafter swore to serve her community. Oathbreakers served only themselves, and they endangered everyone.

But there were always the legends of those who remade themselves. Now, here, Liv was seeing that they weren’t wild tales. Now, here, these drafters were teaching each other how to do it. Liv looked at the crystal blue woman. She was oddly beautiful. Crystal hair, and diamond-shaped eye caps close over her eyes, flawed crystal skin, broken into a thousand facets, covering every natural curve of her body. She’d conquered the problem of how to deal with drafting hard, unbending blue luxin onto a body that had to be able to move and to bend by making thousands—tens of thousands—of small crystals. Her body glimmered, shimmered, coruscated in the firelight as she shifted her upper body like a dancer to show her disciples what she’d done. She laughed, showing strangely white teeth against those gleaming blue lips. Then she shifted suddenly into a fighting stance, spiky guards springing up along the edges of her forearms, and plates of blue luxin congealing over her skin to make armor.

Shit!

“Hey, caleen! I said wine!” a voice said.

Liv turned and found herself face-to-face with a man with hideous burn scars all over his body. A sub-red, with the odd shimmering of fire crystal broken through his halos. He held out a glass to Liv, and she filled it with wine, trembling, averting her own eyes until he looked away. The man held a haze pipe in one hand, and there were fresh burns all along his skin. As Liv looked, she realized the burns were deliberate. He was trying to scar all of his skin deeply enough to lose feeling in it. Until then, he was deadening himself to the pain any way he could.

It had to be incredibly dangerous to even be in close proximity to a mad fire drafter. He couldn’t control himself normally, and now he was drunk and high on haze.

The man had barely left when Liv saw a gout of flame blast into the night sky a few hundred yards away. She stopped, and so did a few of the color wights, nudging those around them and pointing.

Whatever it had been, the drafter who’d done it had been powerful. That was a lot of fire to throw into the night. Where had he gotten the light to do that? From one of the bonfires?

Then it happened again, fire painting the sky for several seconds. Liv felt her throat tighten with fear. Kip! No, that was ridiculous. Kip was green/blue. Fire, sub-red, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. It couldn’t be Kip. The color wights just laughed, as if it were one of their own out there, having fun.

Orholam, Kip could be getting killed out there in the night. Liv needed to go.

She turned and headed out of camp. She almost ran into a dozen Mirrormen who were escorting a woman clad in a gorgeous black dress and wearing violet eye caps out of the king’s pavilion. Liv stopped. Karris.

They hustled past, but Liv had no doubt where they were going. Karris was being held in that odd violet wagon she’d seen, held captive. Liv should have figured it out earlier.

Still, any elation Liv had felt about finding Karris—actually finding her, on the first day, in a camp of maybe a hundred thousand souls if not more—was quashed by her fear for Kip.