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.
When she got out of the drafters’ area, she put on her yellow spectacles. No one bothered her. She arrived at the place she and Kip had agreed to meet just in time, but he wasn’t there. He never came.
The next day, she learned a heavy boy with Tyrean skin and blue eyes had been attacked and had killed five men—or ten or twenty, or five women too, depending on the rumor—and then thrown fire into the air. He’d been taken away by drafters and Mirrormen. Despite the impossibilities—Kip couldn’t draft sub-red—her intuition confirmed it. It had been Kip. She was sure. Someone had drafted fire, someone else had killed those people, and Kip had been taken.
She searched for him for two days. She found nothing.
Chapter 72
As the sun dragged its feet toward the horizon, Gavin gave the signal, and the teamsters’ whips cracked. The draft horses surged forward. Their leads drew taut, and the ropes connected to the great yellow luxin supports strained for a moment. Then the supports fell, the great straining mass of the horses snatching them away from the dropping wall.
The final layer of yellow luxin hit the ground with a boom, shaking the earth. Gavin quickly moved to inspect that everything had gone according to plan.
“One league out!” Corvan called. He was standing on top of the wall, looking out toward King Garadul’s vast army.