The Burning White Page 4

  The danger past, Kip released chi, and was immediately reminded why he hated chi. Drafting chi was like riding a horse that kicked you every time you got on, and every time you got off. In the face.

  Kip fell to his knees, his eyes burning, lightning stabbing back into his head, tears blinding him. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, but when he opened them, they were still locked in chi vision, people around the room showing up only as dim shadows and skeletons and metal-bearers.

  Chi was the worst.

  Kip willed his eyes to open to their normal apertures, and mercifully, they did. This time, thank Orholam, chi hadn’t stricken him blind.

  Big Leo materialized, standing over Kip, as Ferkudi went over to make sure the Shadow was dead. Ben-hadad and Cruxer limped over, leaning on each other, Cruxer looking better by the step.

  Only Winsen hadn’t moved. He still perched on his table in the corner of the room, an arrow still nocked, never having shot. He wasn’t usually shy about shooting in questionable circumstances.

  Ferkudi stood back up. The Shadow was, indeed, dead. Very dead. Gory, don’t-look-at-that-mess-if-you-want-to-sleep-tonight dead.

  It was a mistake.

  Not killing the man, but that he’d obliterated him: Kip had destroyed a shimmercloak.

  No one reproved him. No one said he should have done better, as Andross Guile or Gavin Guile would have. Maybe they didn’t even think it.

  But he did. He’d been out of control.

  It was a reminder that he’d been drafting a lot. In its unfettered strength, green had taken him further than he wanted to go. If nothing else killed him first, it would be green that got him in the end. Indeed, he hadn’t looked at his own eyes in a mirror in a while, fearing what the bloody glass would tell him.

  “What the hell, Win?!” Big Leo demanded. “Where were you?”

  But the lefty still stood silent, a bundle of arrows held with the bow in his right hand for quick drawing, as if he didn’t even hear them.

  Big Leo blew out an exasperated breath, dismissing him. “And what the hell’s with you, Ferk? You say you smell cloves—and then shout Nine Kill Naught?”

  “My goof,” Ferkudi said as if he’d said he wanted wine with dinner but then decided he’d really wanted beer. “Saffron. Not cloves. I meant I smelled saffron. Paryl smells like saffron. Superviolet is cloves. Always get those two mixed up.”

  “You confused saffron and cloves? They don’t smell anything alike!”

  “They’re both yummy.”

  Big Leo rubbed his face with a big hand. “Ferk, you are the dumbest smart guy I know.”

  “No I’m not!” Ferkudi said, a big grin spreading over his face. “I’m the smartest dumb guy you know.”

  “Yeah,” Ben-hadad said, “I’m the dumbest smart guy you know. I smelled saffron half an hour ago, out by the palace’s front doors. Didn’t even think about it. Breaker, my apologies.” He knuckled his forehead. “I think it’s customary to offer my resignation?”

  “None of that,” Cruxer said. “This is none of your faults. It’s mine. You’ve all been right. The Mighty’s too small. We’re spread too thin. And that’s on me.” Kip had kept it secret that Teia was infiltrating the Order of the Broken Eye, but he had mentioned that Karris was afraid the Order had people even in the Blackguard itself, which had made Cruxer stop any talk of adding to the Mighty, fearing that whoever they welcomed in might be a traitor.

  ‘How can you be certain one of us isn’t with the Order already?’ Winsen had asked. ‘I say we add people. Might as well get a few shifts’ rest while we wait to get stabbed in the back.’

  As if they weren’t already sometimes nervous about Winsen, what with his alien gaze, total disregard for danger, and overeagerness to shoot.

  “You all did your part,” Cruxer continued. “And you all did your parts brilliantly. I mean, except Winsen, who I think might be angling for a Blackguard name. What do you think of Dead Weight?”

  The Mighty were all just starting to laugh, delighted, turning toward Winsen, when Kip saw something go cruel and hungry in the little man’s eyes. Win had never taken mockery well.

  Win’s obsidian arrow point swept left as the archer drew the nocked arrow fully, pointing straight at Cruxer, who was standing tall, flat-footed.

  There was no time for him to evade. Win’s move was as fast as a man stepping in a hole while expecting solid ground. The bowstring came back to his lips in the swift kiss of a departing parent and then leapt away.

  He couldn’t miss—

  —but he did.

  He loosed another arrow and was drawing a third before the Mighty dove left and right. Kip was throwing a green shield in front of himself—I always knew it would be Win. That saurian calm. That unnatural detachment.

  Big Leo crushed Kip to the ground, disrupting his drafting and blotting out all vision as he offered his own body as a shield.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Winsen shouted. “Easy, Ferk! Ben! Easy, Ben!”

  Kip unearthed himself from the living mountain that was Big Leo and saw Winsen with bow lifted high in surrender.

  Ben-hadad had his crossbow leveled at the archer, his fingers heavy on the trigger plate. Ferkudi was slowing down, already having charged over most of the distance, closing off Winsen’s view of Kip—and therefore angle of fire—with his own bulk. Cruxer had his arm drawn back, blue luxin boiling, hardening into a lance.

  “I know one thing about the Shadows,” Winsen said loudly. He dropped the arrows from his right hand to show he was no threat. “They often work in pairs.”

  There was a clatter behind the Mighty. Metal hitting stone—not three paces behind them.

  War-blinded by the threat in front of them, not one of them had looked back. But they did now.

  A cloaked figure was shimmering back into visibility, Winsen’s two arrows protruding from his chest. A Shadow. He pitched facedown.

  None of them said a word as the Shadow twitched in death.

  The Mighty fanned out, securing Kip, checking that the dead assassin was really dead.

  Then Commander Cruxer cleared his throat. “Did I say Dead Weight? I meant, uh, Dead Eye.”

  They chuckled. It was an apology.

  Except Ferkudi. “You can’t call him Dead Eye. There’s already an Archer from a year behind us called that. Beat Win’s score at the three hundred paces by four p—”

  “Ferk!” Cruxer said, not looking at him, his smile cracking. “Dead Shot it is.”

  “Oh, definitely not, Commander,” Ferkudi said. “That’s been used like seven times. Most recent one’s retired now, but still alive. Very disrespectful to take a living Blackguard’s n—”

  “Ferk,” Cruxer said, his smile tightening.

  “I’d settle for you calling me ‘Your Holiness,’” Win offered.

  “No,” Cruxer said.

  “‘Commander Winsen’?” Winsen suggested.

  Cruxer sighed.

  Chapter 3

  Maybe it isn’t treason.

  Teia ghosted through the barracks after her meeting with the Old Man of the Desert and Murder Sharp, wondering if it would be the last time she ever set foot here. As she packed in early-morning darkness, her brothers and sisters of the Blackguard slept.

  Brothers and sisters, she thought. Huh. What would that make Commander Ironfist? Their father? It sure had felt like it.

  What kind of person would kill her own father?

  No. No! This is to save my father. My real father.

  She hoisted her pack to her shoulders and looked around the barracks as if hoping someone would see her, stop her.

  What am I doing? Saying goodbye?

  Pathetic. This is all gone. This is all already gone.

  Besides, her closest remaining friends weren’t even here: Gav and Gill Greyling and Essel and Tlatig were all out on one of the semiclandestine Gavin Guile search expeditions that so many of the Blackguards had been doing for the last year. The trips weren’t exactly allowed—r
esponsibility for seeking the lost Prism had passed to other hands—but they weren’t exactly forbidden, either.

  Even if Gavin Guile had only been the Blackguards’ professional patron, not their Promachos who had fought for them on the fields of battle and bled for them in the halls of power, earning himself a Blackguard name and all the Blackguards’ devotion; even then, even if it had only been an affront to their pride and not an assault on their love, losing a Prism was an unbearable blot on the Blackguards’ honor.

  Their chief purpose was to protect him, and he’d been kidnapped right under their noses.

  They would do anything to get him back. It’s what a family does.

  The day they’d lost him had been the day everything went north for Teia. Karris had become the White. Zymun became Prism-elect. Commander Ironfist had been fired. Kip and the Mighty had nearly been killed escaping, and Tremblefist had died silencing the cannons to save them.

  Teia had stupidly decided to stay behind. She’d told herself she could do more good here.

  Do good?! Mostly she’d learned to use her magic to murder slaves.

  She wasn’t even good at her bad work.

  She’d botched the assassination of Ironfist’s sister so badly that he’d immediately figured out who’d sent her and who she was—Teia was the reason Ironfist had declared himself a king rather than a satrap.

  And now, in his revenge, the Chromeria had lost Paria.

  Out of the original seven satrapies, that left them with only two and a half: Abornea, Ruthgar, and half of Blood Forest.

  The empire had been a seven-legged feast table; now it was a top-heavy end table teetering on two golden legs. The only question was which way it would fall.

  Best for Teia to side with the Order, then. Kingdoms rise and empires fall, but the cockroaches survive.

  And that’s what this next kill for the Old Man meant, when Teia stripped away all her pretenses. It meant siding once and for all with the Order. Not pretending anymore. No longer a double agent, an agent.

  She arrived at Little Jasper’s back docks in the last minutes before dawn, feeling as sere and barren inside as the wind-scoured Red Cliffs.

  Her father wouldn’t want her to buy his life at such a price, but Teia had worried for far too long what other people wanted.

  Though the Old Man hadn’t come right out and said it, Teia’s next kill was Ironfist.

  To guarantee her obedience, the Order held her father hostage. He would leave their company a rich man or not at all.

  ‘This is the pain that will transform you into Teia Sharp,’ the Old Man had said.

  May Orholam—absent or blind or uncaring as He was—send that vile man and all the Order with him to the ninth hell.

  Teia didn’t know how or why, but Ironfist was either on that odd bone-white ship she spied coming into the dock now, or he waited wherever it was sailing next.

  It wasn’t ‘betrayal,’ technically. He’d declared himself a king. That made him the traitor.

  And killing a traitor wasn’t wrong… Right?

  Ironfist had been like a father to her, but in infiltrating the Blackguard for the Order, he’d betrayed the man who was like a father to them all: savant and savior, paterfamilias and Promachos, godlike Gavin Guile.

  Ironfist had sworn loyalty to Gavin! He’d administered those very oaths to half the rest of the Blackguard! Before the blades come out, you have to decide where you stand. King Ironfist had decided to stand for himself. He’d thrown off his loyalty to Gavin, and now he must be trying to do the same with the Order.

  Why else would they be sending Teia to assassinate him? He was one of their own.

  Had been, anyway.

  Now Teia would be the shield that came down on his neck. Hers would be the hand that brought his head to her masters.

  It would hurt to kill Ironfist. But it wouldn’t break her. She was beyond that now.

  Invisible in the master cloak, Teia made her way out onto the lonely dock. Cheerless dawn was threatening the horizon as sailors prepared the ship in hushed tones. There was no harbormaster present, nor any of the usual dockhands or slaves or attendants Teia would have expected. It was a ghost ship—fitting for the departing condemned.

  Three figures stood on the quay. One was hunched and swaddled as if ill, or perhaps to hide his height. The second was a broadly gesticulating man with a wild, woolly beard with match cords woven into it and a gold-brocaded jacket worn open over his bare chest, despite the chill of the morning. The third figure had his back to Teia. There was something in his carriage that spoke of being human freight, a slave about to be passed from one man to another. Teia had seen that broken shuffle before; in truth, she’d walked like that herself.

  So she dismissed that one, flaring her eyes to paryl to look at the others just as the heavily cloaked man presented a sword.

  Its appearance hit her like a rapid blow to the nose, leaving her blinking: that blade should have shone white in her paryl vision. Metal always did, with minute variations of tone for different metals. This thing was invisible.

  No, the shimmercloaks made things invisible—when you looked at an active shimmercloak, you saw whatever lay beyond it. This was a bar of black, heavy nothingness. Usually, darkness is a hole, an absence, as death is the absence of life.

  This was a piece of hungry night, of darkness breathing.

  This was more than Death, hammered and folded into killing shape. This was not made by the hand of man. Perhaps in the youth of Old Man Time, some dead demigod, after his descent to the all-devouring depths of the ninth hell, had rallied instead of despaired at his imprisonment there. He’d charged hell’s gates from the inside. Then, confronting the three-headed hound who guarded that way, terrifying all lesser souls, he smashed its faces on the gates, using its snarling snouts as battering rams, snapping lupine teeth and bones, one, two, and three, throwing the mighty gates from their hinges.

  Then the demigod had gone his way, triumphant to the heavens, heedless of the hellhound he left behind.

  If such might be true, then this blade was one of hell’s jagged, broken fangs.

  The cloaked man laid it across his gloved palms and offered it up.

  But not to the flamboyant captain.

  And there was another blow. A paryl marker, visible only to her, the sign that this man was her target, hung in the air above the wretch she’d dismissed as a slave.

  He couldn’t be—he wasn’t Ironfist.

  He wasn’t Ironfist.

  Even from the back it was clear this man was too small. Broad across his hunched shoulders, square-jawed, but light-skinned and not tall enough. Hair covered with a grubby hat. He was just some broken old warrior.

  All the cold courage she’d been knotting tight loosed its tension from her limbs and she could suddenly breathe.

  She didn’t have to kill Ironfist.

  Something like a prayer of thanks made its way to her teeth. But there it stopped.

  Why would the Old Man think I’d have a hard time killing some stranger?

  The man a sailor had referred to as Captain Gunner whistled a melodious little trill. “C’mon!” he said, waggling his bushy eyebrows at the slave. He had a winsome, goofy grin, but he struck Teia as not very stable, and very, very dangerous. “What’ll it be? Death or glory?”

  Apparently, the poor bastard was being offered some kind of choice. Not much of one, though, since no matter what he did Teia was going to be killing him afterward.

  “Let’s sail,” the slave said, straightening his stooped shoulders and taking up the blade. Some spirit came back into him, and recognition clobbered Teia like a left hook to the neck. “Death and glory, Cap’n Gunner,” said none other than Gavin Guile.

  The Prism himself, Gavin Guile. The price for saving Teia’s father was that she assassinate Emperor Gavin Fucking Guile.

  Chapter 4

  The young goddess strode barefoot through the hidden shipyards in a dress mostly faded to blue from the o
riginal bright murex purple it had been when the White King had given it to her. That had been before he tried to kill her. Invisible to most, tornadoes of the airy spidersilk luxin billowed from her, spiraling out in orderly whorls, the patterns repeating themselves on every scale. Tendrils stuck to those in her path and wormed their way into them. And tradesmen and shipbuilders and the unpaid laborers whom no one here called slaves found reasons to move aside, most without even noticing her.

  The dirty warehouse she approached made a tawdry throne room for a man who would be a king of the gods, but it had kept its secrets safe.

  As she passed through the crowds that magically parted for her, she heard the cadences of their speeches warble, disparate words from a hundred conversations suddenly aligning, the pitches rising and falling in perfect uniformity with every other—and then falling simultaneously to silence, as everyone noticed.

  Most were baffled, some alarmed. The words had been their own; the speakers hadn’t intended such conformity. Surely here, among the new pagans, odd magic was the norm. Wights of every color walked the streets. Six of the bane had been gathered in closer proximity than perhaps ever before in history. But this magic was different.

  Aliviana, born Aliviana Danavis, now the goddess Ferrilux, passed the wights guarding the doors. The superviolet wights were the easiest of all: they could belong to her in an instant, if she willed it. The dull, animalistic sub-reds were the most challenging for her; they goggled bestial eyes at all those around them, as if everyone else had heard a tone to which they were deaf. One of the burned freaks even stared at her, but couldn’t comprehend why Aliviana might be important.

  The cadences and then the silence rippled through the petitioners in two slow waves before her, only to burst at the circle of the White King’s nine bodyguards, all formerly elite drafter-warriors who had made the leap halfway to godhood and were now polychrome wights with black-luxin-edged vechevorals and ataghans and scorpions and flyssas and man catchers, even in their weapons preferring the old and provincial to the modern and universal.

  Liv’s superviolet luxin died where she touched those spears, as all magic died when it touched living black luxin.