that was used in Rekton. Interspersed with the stone, often on the same building, were mud bricks and date palm wood, all stuck together with gypsum mortar. Even the whitewash, helpful in cooling homes and preserving the mortar and mud bricks from the sun, was applied haphazardly. The buildings were, however, three and four stories tall. Only a few buildings in Rekton rose to three stories. People in the streets looked dirty, and there was garbage everywhere.
Gavin, Kip noticed, was wearing a worn, faded cloak with a single button holding it closed in front. Disguising his status? Indeed, Commander Ironfist was getting more stares than either Kip or Gavin.
“Hey, Ironfist, you think you could be a little less conspicu—” Gavin started, then traced his eyes from Ironfist’s feet up, until he had to tilt his head back to take in the huge, hugely muscled man. “Never mind.”
Kip smiled. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” Gavin said. “How are your studies?”
“I don’t know that anything I’ve done yet counts as studying,” Kip said. He scrunched his face. “Liv was barely beginning to explain how drafters’ dependence on will makes for a lot of dangerous men when her father came in.”
“What’d she say?”
“Well, nothing. I didn’t really understand it, and she didn’t get the chance to explain.”
Gavin turned into an alley to help them bypass the crowded streets surrounding the water market. “Very few men are superchromats, Kip. Even I’m not a superchromat, though Dazen was, so apparently it runs in the family. If you want to draft something that will endure, you have to draft the exact middle of the spectrum you’re working with. You want to make a blue sword that will last years after you draft it? It has to be perfect, and of course, you have to keep it out of light, but that’s a different topic. Because men, aside from the few exceptions, can’t do that—can’t draft in the exact middle of a color, not can’t keep it out of the light, obviously. Ahem, that is, if men want to make anything permanent, they have to add will. Makes it sound like it’s meat you add to a stew, doesn’t it? Hmm. I don’t teach much, obviously. Let me try this.” Gavin appeared perfectly heedless of the dark corners they were passing and the acquisitive eyes that followed them. But then, once any acquisitive eyes alit on Ironfist, they found other things to study in a hurry.
“Every time you draft, you use your will. You have to decide that something totally outlandish, weird, unnatural-seeming is going to happen, and you’re going to make it happen. In other words, you decide to do magic. Now, the more outlandish it is, the harder it is to believe you can really do it. Or to put it another way, the more will it takes. You with me?”
“Makes sense so far,” Kip said.
“Good. Now, blue sword.” Gavin lifted a hand from beneath his cloak. His hand was solid blue, and as Kip watched, blue luxin blossomed from it. Gelled, solidified, hardened into the form of a blue sword. Gavin handed it to Kip.
Kip took it, feeling self-conscious as they passed through an intersection with another alley and he was bearing the blade like he was following it to his destiny. “Uh,” he said, but then he felt the hilt go slippery. A moment later, the blade drooped, broke off the hilt of its own weight, and splatted on the dirty cobblestones of the alley. There was a light shimmer of blue, and then nothing but blue dust. The same happened moments later to the hilt in Kip’s hand, leaving only that gritty blue dust.
“What’s the dust?” Kip asked.
“A later lesson,” Gavin said. “I’m having trouble teaching the basics as it is. The point for you is to imagine I’d drafted you a plow instead of a sword. Great, it works while the drafter is at your farm, but ten minutes after he leaves, all you’ve got is dust, literally. Not helpful. This is why superchromats are heavily recruited by all satrapies.”
“So they can make plows?”
“Not all magic is for fun and dismemberment, Kip. In fact, most drafters spend their whole lives doing practical things like making plows. For every artist, there’s ten men who repair roofs with green luxin. Anyway, men—and the women who aren’t lucky enough to be superchromats—can cover their failings with will.”
“You mean just by trying harder.”
“Pretty much.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. So they try harder. Liv