The Broken Eye(336)

Akensis Azmith had selected his stone while Karris looked. Croesos Ptolos took longer, hesitating a long time before one, praying, and then taking another. Then Ismene Crassos went. She looked at each of the three remaining for a long time. Went back to one three times, and finally picked it up.

That left Karris, and two stones.

Listen to the will of Orholam, huh?

She walked up to the first stone. White, round, small enough to fit comfortably in her palm—for whatever reason, it didn’t feel right.

Now that was odd. She approached the second, studying it closely, and felt a strong urge to take it in her hand immediately.

She crossed her arms. She’d claimed to the White that she wanted Orholam to speak to her in a way that was obvious, but here it was, and it was obvious, and she didn’t like it. If Orholam’s voice was a slap in the face, then of what value were Karris’s ears? It somehow seemed to devalue her intellect, the intellect Orholam himself had given her. She should be a participant in Orholam using her.

Shouldn’t she? Or was she being arrogant?

The fiery green/red drafter she had been not so very long ago would have made a decision and to hell with it. Orholam could do his part or not. If this was his big plan, he’d have to do it. It was all probably pointless anyway, the correct stone already taken.

But Karris wasn’t that girl anymore. She had been foolish. She had done things for which she hated herself still. She’d tried to burn herself to ash, and been too excellent to die. She’d tried to blot out the weakness with borrowed purpose as a Blackguard. And now the ache and the disappointment were as much a part of her as her passion and her wildness. She was not a creature of isolated extremes, that disjunctive bichrome, not anymore; she was a whole cloth in the making, integrated.

Ignoring the waiting nobles at the window and the waiting candidates around the disk, Karris turned toward the morning sun. The perfect fiery orb was losing its red tone as it rose, becoming gold.

Karris spread bare arms, saluting the sun, soaking up its full-spectrum light, accepting it and reveling in it.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all.

When you ask for bread, Karris, would I give you a stone?

And as she raised her arms, glorying in the light, she heard the sound of something huge giving way and an enormous stone crenellation plunged right in front of her.

With the sound of a whip unfurling, a line attached to that great stone spooled out. The other end strained over a pulley at the top of the Prism’s Tower, and this stone plunged down, and down. It hit the ground and plunged through it as if the ground been designed to let it through, and it fell into the great underground yard, under vast tension. At the same time, the steel cable unspooled out, away from the tower. It sprang free of the water between Big Jasper and Little Jasper; it tore right out of the top of the walls ringing Big Jasper’s east side and then stood, straining, tight, making a straight line from the top of the Chromeria almost to the docks.

‘Would I give you a stone?’ Karris burst out laughing. And then, as she turned—everyone was watching the great cable—she saw a flash of green at the corner of her eye. What? She looked at the horizon, but she knew—she knew—that the green flash only came at sunset. And then it hit her again. She looked toward Big Jasper.

The star towers were spinning their mirrors, lighting up the crowds, festive, playful. One had caught the green tower and reflected it briefly to Karris.

Karris laughed. She shook her head at Orholam—and then watched, stunned, as a young man went flying down the cable from the top of the tower. She thought she recognized him, but he was moving too fast. Cruxer?

She went back to the stones. Her choice mattered. She knew now. Orholam had not led her to a place where her choice was pointless. She looked at each in turn, and again, felt drawn to one and repelled by the other. But she didn’t touch either. Instead, she knelt by the pedestal on which one of them sat. She couldn’t see anything there. She scratched a fingernail across it—and the tiniest shell of solid orange luxin cracked and dissolved.

And just like that, her feeling of desire to pick up this ball was gone. A hex. Magic forbidden with the sentence of death by Orholam’s Glare. But then, interfering with the choice of the White carried the same sentence, so there wasn’t much added deterrent there.

Andross—if it were Andross—had found an immensely talented orange drafter trained in forbidden arts, and had somehow defeated whatever security the luxiats had, and whatever checks were in place to make sure hexes were never placed here.

But that was a problem for another day.