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"They were ood, soious proscriptions that made no sense--like a deep suspicion that the use of spectacles was sinful, unnatural But then some sects were happy to sacrifice their firstborn to bribe the gods to give thehts Others drove thehts--for they claiods"

"I don’t understand how this connects," Kip said

"Just because ahe believes is wrong"

Kip raised his eyebrows So…"The suspense is torture, sir"

"Soift Our teaching has been that light splitting is the sole gift of the Pris for hundreds of years" Commander Ironfist waved the Shihtsplitter…’ Whichis possible Even if people denied what happened to you, these cards are true They can’t be denied This one card wouldn’t destroy the faith, but it wouldlook like a fool It will be like when Pevarc proved once and for all that the world is round two hundred years ago A few scholars had been whispering the sas for five hundred years before hi fools of the luxiats The navigational corrections that his better calculations allowed all came about years after he was lynched"

"Lynched?" Kip asked, eyebrows cliht was an absence of darkness, rather than the inverse" Seeing the befuddled look on Kip’s face, he said, "Don’t worry about that Point is, light splitting is real Souard has always recruited drafters like Adrasteia Not just because she can see concealed weapons, but because she could see an assassin who is invisible"

"But how does it work?" Kip asked "I didn’t think such things were possible"

"You’re a diround to understand--"

"And if I did, I’d only knorong things So you don’t have to unteach s I think I know"

A dip of the head and a rin conceded the point Ironfist took a breath "Light is power The power always goes soht hits a cherrywood floor We know that the sunlight is full-spectruh superviolet, but the floor reflects only reddish brown Where does the rest of the light go? It’s absorbed And years later, compare that wood floor with a section of the sa, or a shadow The sun-exposed part is bleached The light very slowly changed the nature of the wood itself--broke it down Just like light darkens a htens a woman’s hair Just like a color does to a drafter’s body Prisht because they’re able to release all the light that hits them The rest of us are less efficient, ht hitting a surface can’t be changed unless you can put a lens over the sun The energy is constant It uessed at, a lightsplitter acts like a wedge in the strea the shorter, so that all the visible light hitting her is released above and below the visible spectruht as a torch in the superviolet and the sub-red I’ve heard tales of lightsplitters burning up if there’s too ht day--because they’re turning so ht into heat, they can burn out These cloaks make what they do easier Like lenses make it easier for a drafter to draft her color"

Kip had seen soit "So you’re tellingus?"

"Not hordes Splitting light well enough to be invisible is probably close to iht, which is a big if--twelve of these cloaks, created for the original Order of the Broken Eye, if not before Some have surely been lost or destroyed, andhave two of them So at most there are five more teams of assassins out there Maybe only two or three Maybe none"

"At least we have these cloaks now"

"Which is better than our ene denied their existence, I don’t think the Chrohtsplitters Even if so, could they be convinced to share it when the very idea verges on heresy? The Atashian luxors suppressed so uncomfortably sio now"

"And that’s one card," Kip said