“Order,” a man with a gruff voice said.

Order, as in come to order? or like, Hey, you all from the Order, come to order? Teia almost laughed again. Whoa, hold it together, T.

She tried to clear her throat, failed, and didn’t dare try clear it again for fear of disturbing the newborn silence.

Though he was short, the others clearly deferred to the gruff one—and he was the only one who had two veils on. The one he wore under the white cloth veil appeared to be made of some kind of finely woven metal mail.

“If the Chromeria or its people find you here, or hear of it henceforth, you will be taken by the Office of Doctrine. You will be tortured. Your lands and titles will be seized. Your families will be punished. Your animals and houses will be burned, as if heresy could be purged with fire.” He paused. “If you have not the courage to die in silence, go now, and be part of this company no more. The door stands there.”

The idea of being tortured by the very people she was serving was ice in Teia’s stomach. Would the White claim her, if she were captured?

Only if it served her ends. And in such a war, claiming Teia might not be the White’s best move. Every threat Teia heard was real. And that was if she were found by her friends. How much worse would it be if she were discovered by the Order? She looked at the door, and wondered if they meant it. Could she leave now?

“We’ve no cowards among us,” the man said. “Good.”

Teia wanted to shout, Wait! I think I might be a coward! Can I think on it a bit longer?

But it was too late.

The members made a circle around the room, broken only on the side where the forge burned hot. Odd, at night. In the center stood a simple table. Teia felt a chill as she recognized the items piled there. They were all the things she had stolen for Aglaia Crassos—perfect blackmail materials to expose and ruin her, had she not already confessed all of it to the White.

“Hear the sermon of the first circle.”

“Hear, ye deceived,” the figures rumbled, as if invoking prayer.

“Everything you know about the Chromeria is lies,” the gruff man said.

“Hear, ye deceived,” the figures rumbled.

“Gavin and Dazen Guile ruined the world for their lust and pride. But out of the conflagration, out of the hundreds of thousands dead, some good came. Those of us who sided with Dazen Guile saw our hopes die when Gavin Guile came stumbling out of the smoke at Sundered Rock. The wiser of us ran. Most hid. But some were pursued by the vengeful, by murderers seeking to use the cover of war to hide their crimes, by assassins sent to silence us for what we knew.”

He stopped, and said nothing for a long time, as if reliving a memory. None of the others interjected, so Teia didn’t move either.

“In our flight, many were lost. Good men, women who’d committed no crime but to lose. Others were dragged off into slavery, sold to the Ilytians in a trade the Chromeria condemned but did nothing to stop.”

“Hear, ye deceived.”

“But.” He raised a finger. “In every darkness, there is hope for light. For light cannot be chained.”

“Light cannot be chained,” they intoned with him.

“A small group of us fled into the Atashian desert, across the Cracked Lands, pursued for more than a month into the wastes, until our pursuers gave up and we found ourselves without enough water to make the trip back home. So we pressed on. We found the Great Rift the day after we’d drank the last of our water. We climbed down it, losing two more brothers in the hike. And at the bottom, we found an ancient, abandoned city, carved into the faces of the cliffs themselves. We found great cisterns of water, renewed by a small stream, and we found wild goats to eat, and we found luxin the likes of which we couldn’t believe, but most precious of all, we found truth.”

“Hear, ye deceived.”

“We were not the first wanderers to find this place. This was Braxos. A city thousands of years old. The pygmies of the darkest Blood Forest claim a common ancestry with the Braxians. We found the remains of a small, later community there—a scholar and his student, later his wife. They had come looking for the city, and had nearly died as we had, but two hundred years before. They stayed two years, tried to go home back to the Chromeria, and gave up and returned, certain the Cracked Lands were impassable. They stayed for the rest of their lives, had children. The community lasted three generations before it succumbed to the inbreeding that left them too feeble to survive those harsh lands.

“But what they did in those generations! They translated skins a thousand years old, and preserved them in script we could read. For the first time, we heard about the time before Lucidonius.” He looked at Teia, as if searching her soul. “It is time for you to hear the truth, and to decide.”

“Hear the truth, ye deceived.”

“The Braxians always lived a tenuous existence there, though the lands then were not yet the Cracked Lands. It was, still, a desert, and life was hard. In those times, it was believed that each color was a god or goddess, and men clung to one or another. Drafters could never serve two colors because each was at war with each, or at best antipathic. Drafters flowed to those parts of the world where their color could be found, and in so doing, made the differences more profound. The fertile plains of Ruthgar gave plentiful green, so the world’s greens left their own peoples and moved there, and the greens built their temple there, and fertilized the plains year after year, making them greener still. The Red Cliffs of Atash, likewise; the volcanoes of deep Tyrea, likewise. And so on.

“The Braxians had a different belief. To them, magic wasn’t primarily about light; light was a trigger, the conduit for allowing your will to flow into the world, and into your community. Nor did they believe—as the Chromeria later would—that Will is finite. They didn’t think they were using up their souls to make golems. They believed that Will is a muscle, and it is strengthened with every use, not depleted like sands from an hourglass.

“As gods rose and fell, all the nine kingdoms groaned under the weight of their struggles. When the reds gathered under Dagnu the Thirteenth’s banner and went to war and wiped out the blues to the last child, they threw off the balance. For a generation, with no blues drafting, red ran amok, deserts spread, the lands cracked, the seas choked. Droughts spread everywhere, and the Braxians among them all were most vulnerable. Their brother tribes in the desert perished. It was no better when the blues had their revenge, two generations later: the waters rose and flooded the floors of the canyons. So much water it flushed the good soil away. The Braxians decided they must come up with some power that would give them a say in events in a world that ignored them, and crushed them in their wars, all unknowing. For our part, may—”

“—we listen and believe,” the figures joined in with him.

Teia got the sense that the exact words of the stories varied, but there were trigger phrases for their responses. It made the flesh on her neck crawl.

“This was the birth of the Order. First, there was only one: Ora’lem, the Hidden, the first Shadow. He wore a cloak which had been infused with the entire will of a polychromatic lightsplitter, a woman who had the talent that the Chromeria deceitfully swears is only known to Prisms. But Ora’lem was killed when he faced a sub-red—for his cloak only hid him from the visible spectrum. After his death, his cloak was recovered only with great difficulty, and the Order decided that Shadows should always work in a team of man and woman, for there are places shut to men and places shut to women, and the strengths of each should cover the weaknesses of the other. Over the generations, the Order amassed fourteen cloaks, some finer than others. Two, now lost, which had been owned by the mist walkers of old, worked in all spectra.