The Burning White (30 page)

“Are you mocking me, my lord?”

Oh, she was angry. Right on the edge. Or she was terrified.

“Actually,” Kip said, “I was using this tricky rhetorical device we learn in the hinterlands of far Tyrea where I was born. We call it a ‘compliment.’ ”

She didn’t seem to know how to take that.

“So . . .” Kip said, “since you’re that person. I can only figure that you’ve decided that deceiving me is the right thing for you to do. Can you help me understand why?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Answering a question with a question is a classic telltale of a lie.”

“I haven’t lied!” she said. “What do you want of us, Guile?”

“Your secret is no secret,” Kip said. “You use the Great Mirror to pass messages to Green Haven. That’s a stunning distance for a simple beam of light, so you can’t be doing it directly. You’ve got to be using other smaller mirrors in between. Relay stations, like bonfires on hilltops. That’s the only reason you’d need three axes for this mirror, so you could move the beam elsewhere in case one of those hilltop mirror stations is taken or needs repairs. But then it occurred to me that if you have mirror stations already, there’s no reason you’d only communicate with Green Haven. With a few dozen stations, you could reach the entire satrapy. A message could be relayed from one end of the satrapy to the other in the course of a night. This is what I want from you—I want to use your network. I have people far afield. If I can reach them, I can coordinate this satrapy’s defenses in ways the Wight King couldn’t hope to counter. He’s blockaded the Great River. Do you know that? With your mirrors, I could find out where, and I could speak with our allies. Even if I could only get a message halfway across the satrapy but on the other side of the blockade, we could—”

“It’s gone,” she said.

“What?”

“There was such a network, long ago, before the Blood Wars. It was a huge defensive advantage—but the Ruthgari realized it, too. They murdered any chi drafters they could find and destroyed the mirror holds. Chi drafters have always been short-lived, and many of those few people who can learn to draft chi choose not to, given the costs. So we were always rare. The network fell centuries ago. A few mirrors still remain, some buried, hidden by their old keepers for the day when all could be restored, but they’ve no one tending them now. Where they’re known at all, they’re mere curiosities. Messages are only possible between here and Green Haven now, the old capital and the new.”

“Why is it a secret, then?”

“We’re not supposed to have it at all. The Chromeria wanted us to shut down all our defenses. They required it, but with the Ruthgari raiding, our ancestors broke that part of the treaty immediately. All this was centuries ago, mind you. The Chromeria didn’t care, as long as we kept our defiance discreet. That need for discretion and their long revulsion for chi drafters has enforced us keeping a low profile. An overly zealous Magisterium or a hostile Prism could mean our deaths.”

There was still something she wasn’t telling him. “You use chi to adjust the mirror’s positioning?” A yes-or-no question.

“We can use it for all sorts of things. Sending the beam of the signal, of course, being the most important,” she said.

Not a direct answer. “You use chi to adjust the mirror’s position?” he insisted.

She hesitated.

That was the problem with an unpracticed liar. She hoped to mislead Kip without lying outright. She hadn’t considered exactly how far she was willing to go to hide her secrets, or what Kip was likely to already know.

“I thought it went without saying,” she said.

“Odd thing to lie about,” Kip mused.

“Are you quite dense?” she asked.

“Again a question in reply to a question,” Kip said, as if commenting on the weather.

It was strange. What was it that allowed him to react so differently to her than to the Divines? She was lying to him. She’d just called him stupid. But he was able to see that this wasn’t about him at all, so he didn’t need to win here.

Stranger still, without him pushing back, she had nothing to push against, and she was falling over.

She said, “The Mirror has to be adjusted for weather conditions—some of which we understand and others we don’t,” she said. “For example, the light will travel differently after or during a rain or on a very humid day. Other times, it seems some quality of the sunlight itself changes how clearly the beams travel over these great distances. So minute movements are necessary even with our well-known target of Green Haven. Using even small amounts of chi repeatedly is, as you’ve seen, quite hazardous.”

“Still hiding. Still deflecting,” Kip said.

A perfect black globe broader across than Kip’s shoulders rested in the trunk of the vast white oak itself, sunk into the wood—but leaving no rupture in the living wood, nor any oozing sap from a wound, nor any sign of the bark curling around it the way a natural tree might grow around a fence post. It looked as unnatural as if an image of a sphere had been superimposed on the tree trunk.

Inset around it were a number of similar black, featureless plates, only the oils of past fingers proving they weren’t illusory.

But Kip wasn’t drawn to those. Instead, he set his hands directly on the globe, and extended his will into it.

“What are you doing?” the Keeper of the Flame asked. “
Don’t touch that!
”

He ignored her.

“You could die!” she said. She turned to Cruxer. “He could die! You have to stop him!”

None of the Mighty moved.

“We could
all
die if he does the wrong thing!” she said.

She reached a hand out to grab Kip, but suddenly found her arm held immobile.

“Then whatever he’s doing,” Cruxer said, his voice calmly professional but his grip on her arm unyielding, “I suggest you don’t louse it up.”

A touch of superviolet, and suddenly, above them, the vast shining disk that was the Great Mirror
wobbled
.

“Like I thought,” Kip said. “You don’t use chi to move the mirror. So what do you use it for?”

The mask hid all but a bit of her shaking her head. “Chi is more energetic than any other color. It can go farther, with less diffusion. The messages themselves are beams of chi.”

Now, that was new. Kip had assumed they were reflecting the sun or a bonfire. “You reach Green Haven directly? All the way from here?!”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

“I can’t.”

“You didn’t get cancers doing nothing.”

“There’s . . . procedures.”

“There’s something in here, inside this globe. I can feel a hollow. Open it for me, would you?” Kip asked.

“I can’t do that.”

“Won’t,” Kip corrected. “No matter. Big Leo, you think you can smash this thing open with your chain?”

Big Leo grunted and slid the heavy fighting chain off his shoulders. His voice low and emotionless, he said, “Happy to try.”

Winsen turned to Big Leo. “You know, if you do break it, they’re gonna give him the credit, right? We should
never
have named him Breaker.”

“Eh. I’m all right with that,” Big Leo said. “Long as I get to use my chain.”

O’s beard, but he played the big dumb thug beautifully when he wanted to.

“You can’t—no!” the Keeper said. She moved her body between Big Leo and the black globe.

Kip lifted a hand, and Big Leo stopped. “Keeper,” Kip said, “I couldn’t help but notice the band of trees all the way up and down the sides of the palace, all the way up to this one at the crown. Tell me about that. Seems like a lot of work. Why not just have the tree alone up here?”

He knew the answer. The locals said that beneath the surface, the roots of every tree in the city were connected with those of every other.

It might not be literally true, but it was a metaphor important enough to the old Foresters that they’d built an earthen ramp up and down their entire palace. The ancient kings and queens of this realm had wanted to proclaim that they were connected with all their people.

She seemed thrown off balance by his abrupt change in topic. “It’s, it’s . . . Trees are communal, Lord Guile,” she said. “The roots interlace, passing along needed nutrients and even physical support to one another, and especially to the tallest specimens. With the high winds up here, a white oak alone wouldn’t stand for a year.”

“Huh,” Kip said. “Helping each other, passing along what’s needed, even at some cost to themselves, so they all might thrive. United against the storm. It’s almost as if there’s a lesson we could learn from that.”

“The trees support one another, Lord Guile. The largest don’t only take, they also give.”

“And you don’t trust me to protect you. I don’t blame you. You’ve given your life to be the Keeper of the Flame, and you’ll do anything not to become the Loser of the Flame.”

She folded her arms. “You already know, don’t you?”

He said nothing.

“How?” she asked.

He drew in some superviolet and drew a line hanging in the air between the black orb set in the tree trunk just over a natural boulder and to the wall of the gatehouse. The color difference was barely perceptible to the naked eye. “Chi shadows,” Kip said. “A lot more than you can draft unaided. And they’re more intense off to the side, as if they hadn’t been diffused by passing through the Keeper’s body in the same way.”

Her chin lifted, as if to offer another lie, but then descended. She suddenly had the air of one watching her life’s work die, her legacy tainted, her order headed for genocide.

“They form all the time, you know,” she said. “I don’t think there’s ever just one, despite what the Chromeria says. They’re like lightning strikes, little discharge points for magic. And then they dissipate, usually. Unless someone with the right knowledge can get there first. Then she can stabilize it, build it if she wants. It calls to drafters, even over enormous distances if you grow it large enough. It’s how the kings and queens of old summoned their drafter armies in the first place. They’re dangerous, of course, especially these—”

“
These
? You have more than one?”

She sighed surrender. “There’s another in Green Haven. But you have to understand . . . they’re dangerous—very, very dangerous—but they’re not
evil
. Some of us even believe the Chromeria secretly has seven of their own, if not nine. How else have they gathered drafters for so long? But my lord, the Chromeria will kill us all if they find out we have it. Call us blasphemers, heretics, apostates, pagans. Blindfold and burn us, or put out our eyes, or put us on the Glare. All we’ve wanted is to be accepted back into the fold.”

“No. You wanted to keep power, too.”

“We save lives with our training!” she protested.

And yet here she was dying, and dying young.

But she went on. “We’ll be anathema. No one will be allowed to draft chi ever again, on pain of death. That’s what it means, if you tell them.”

She sighed again, but something about her seemed relieved. An honest woman indeed. But then, chi was ever so good at exposing secrets; Kip shouldn’t have expected a chi drafter would love keeping them.

The Keeper walked to the globe. She touched it, and it opened like a flower. She reached a gloved hand inside and pulled out something smaller than her thumb. The air around her hand shimmered as if she held an invisible fire, but as she moved it, it spat out sparks of liquid-gold fire. The thing itself was hard to see at all from this distance, but it was much smaller than he’d expected. Kip had seen larger stones set in women’s rings.

“Is that . . .” Cruxer started. “Is that solid chi? I didn’t think such a thing existed! Chi luxin?!”

She shook her head. “Lord Guile,” the Keeper said, her voice taking on a formal tone, “Luíseach, you have come to bring light, which means bringing shameful secrets to the light. Here is both our light and our shameful secret. Behold that which slays us, and that without which this city and my order is nothing. Behold the chi bane.”

“Excellent,” Kip said. “I’ll take it.”

Gavin had charged toward a likely death several dozen times. This was different.

In the early part of the Prisms’ War, the hours before every battle had been exhausting: the anxious mental rehearsals and the fears of cowardice and shaming himself publicly, the fears of death, and worse—in the mind of the young man he had been—the fear of living maimed or broken, which he’d thought were the same thing. There had been the righting of relationships:
Just, you know, in case
. There had been the writing of wills. There had been the selfish prayers; it was the closest he’d ever come to real piety.

For all the damnable emotional and mental sweat of it, it had served one purpose at least: the heightened state of fear and exhilaration had come effortlessly, giving incredible energy and even strength, allowing him to shrug off pain and fatigue, though at the cost of tunnel vision.

Over time, most of that had fallen away. It felt oddly like a loss.

Fear and excitement were gone, replaced with a butcher’s efficiency. Today’s fight was today’s work. I know what to do. I know what I control and what I don’t.

And while he always knew the possible costs, he’d had little time or energy to get worked up about it. There were things to do, things that would keep him alive.

Today was different. This was different.

He had nothing to do. He could only listen to the call of the overseer below his feet, keeping the slaves’ rowing tempo. Eighteen months ago, that insistent beat would have meant terror and torn calluses and burning legs and lungs and new manacle cuts and blood. It now meant only the passage of time.

He had none of the old careful mental cataloging of his arsenal of luxin weapons to decide what best would match this much available light, this enemy, this battlefield, this likely enemy tactic. He had no generals to consult, no messengers to hear out or to send out, no scouts’ reports, no orders to give, nor anyone who would listen to them if he tried.

As their galleon, the
Golden Mean
, shot across the waves, driven by both oar and wind, Gavin had no one to pick out of the enemy line and say, ‘That one shall be mine first.’