“These are the colors we draft—minus sub-red and superviolet, of course, which most of you can’t see. We’ll talk about them later. This is how the colors are in a rainbow, right, discipulae?”
There were some mutters. The colors were in the right order.
“Right, discipulae?” she repeated, irritated.
“Yes, Magister,” most of the class answered.
“Morons,” she said.
“This is light in our world—” She held a prism in front of the stream, and it sheared the light into the whole visible spectrum. Unlike the screen, which had the most vibrant colors immediately next to each other, the colors of the natural spectrum were broken into a continuum—but the continuum wasn’t even. Some colors took up more space than others.
“In some ways, drafting is like anything else. If you sit in a poorly crafted chair, it breaks and you fall. It fails its purpose. Poorly crafted luxin is the same. On the color line, there are resonance points. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. This is as Orholam has willed. At these resonance points”—she pointed to the places on the color line that corresponded to the bright colors she had put on the screen earlier—“at these places, luxin takes on a stable form. Becomes itself. Becomes useful.” She pointed to places on the color line, in order. “Why, smarter auditors might ask, why those colors?” Magister Kadah smiled unpleasantly. She did that a lot.
Likes making people feel stupid, doesn’t she?
Kip had noticed that the distances between the colors weren’t even. Some colors were wide bands—blue stretched over a huge area, and red, too, but yellow and orange were tiny.
“Why does blue cover so much area? We might point to this”—she pointed deeper in blue—“in our humanness, and call it violet. Why can’t we draft violet? Anyone?”
No one said anything. Not even Kip.
“It’s simple, and it’s a mystery. Because luxin doesn’t resonate there. You can’t make a stable luxin from violet. It doesn’t work. Seven is the holy number. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. Instead of demanding that the mystery surrender itself to the hammer blows of our intellects, we align ourselves with the mystery, and when we find perfect alignment with the piece of his creation that Orholam has given us, we draft perfectly. This is what we strive for. When you’re not exactly in the center of his will, your blue will fall to dust, your red will fade, your yellow will shimmer away to nothingness. Those points, that perfection, that alignment with Orholam himself is what we seek, every time we draft. And when we do it perfectly, we become conduits of his will. This is what makes us better than the dullards out there, the munds, the norms, the non-drafters who only absorb light rather than reflect it. This is why bichromes—those who can draft two colors—are honored more highly than those who can draft only one. Bichromes are closer to Orholam, they partake of more of his holy creation. Each color has lessons to teach us, lessons about what it is to be human, and lessons on what it is to be like Orholam.
“And this, of course, is what makes the Prism so special. He is the only man on earth to commune perfectly with Orholam. He alone sees the world as it is. He alone is pure.” She stared directly at Kip, walked toward him. “And this is why we oppose any who would taint the Holy Prism’s light, or any who would dim his glory and bring shame upon him.”
It took Kip’s breath away. She hated him because she revered his father and Kip brought shame upon him?
The worst part of it was that it made sense. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t chosen to be a bastard, but it did make sense.
“Remember, Kip,” Magister Kadah said quietly, “you’re not untouchable now.”
What?
Ben-hadad raised his hand, rescuing Kip, and Magister Kadah called on him.
“Isn’t that a bit dogmatic?” Ben-hadad asked. “With the whole color spectrum being so wonderfully not even, not regular, not arrayed right around the seven colors, doesn’t that suggest that there’s room for ever greater understanding? I mean, what about the other resonances?”
Other resonances?
“I already said we’ll talk about sub-red and superviolet later.” The brief, ugly look that passed across her face told him that she had hate enough in her for Ben-hadad as well. Here Kip had thought he was special.
“Your pardon, Magister, but I didn’t mean those. I meant the secret colors,” Ben-hadad said.
Teia buried her face in her hands.
“Friend of Kip’s, are you?” Magister Kadah asked.
“What? No. I mean, not really.” Ben-hadad scowled as if that came out harsher than he meant. “I mean, I barely met him.”