The Burning White (33 page)

Nothing happened. Like a runner tripping within steps of the finish line, she wondered what might have betrayed her—a faulty flint? a broken cockjaw?

Blackness triumphing, her hands began pulling at his forearm like she was some moron who’d never trained against such things. Her knees sagged. It was too late to do all the right things. She was too weak for the chin turn, too . . .

Her last thought swam through the gathering wet darkness like some unseen loathsome sea creature sliding against her bare toes on a midnight swim: There’d been no mechanical failure. Teia had failed.

She hadn’t cocked the pistol.

There was no way to try again. She was out of time and strength. There were no second chances here.

She slumped into the wages of that mortal sin: losing.

Gavin knifed into the waves—tumbled, spun deeper. Black spots swam in his vision. He stabbed his hands forward and racked water back, back. It was several long strokes before he realized he was pulling himself deeper, like a disoriented eagle trying to swim, as if its pinions could beat the waves rather than the air.

He turned toward the greater light, and pulled for the sky.

His progress slowed. His chest convulsed. Vision darkened.

And then his hand pulled weakly on the air, and he bobbed to the surface. He gasped in a great breath, caught some wave with the air he inhaled, and coughed. He floundered, slapping at the water, gulping in air, trying to see.

The lagoon was calmer than the afternoon chop of the waves outside the reef. First he saw the remains of the ship, torn to pieces, part of the forecastle still perched on the reef it had been dropped on, the rest shearing away into a flotsam of broken wood and broken men and women.

Flung from the highest height, Gavin was the closest in toward land, but he saw others, their heads dotting the waves, yet alive. Some screamed with fear or injury, some clung to bits of crates or decking. Others danced to the sea’s cruel, silent song, bobbing without a word, drowning: for the drowning haven’t the breath to spare for screams.

Ceres hated anyone to interrupt her dancers, so in his terror, a drowning man would often force his rescuer under the waves himself, and Ceres would claim two victims rather than one. Fully half of the distance back to the ship from where he was now, Gavin saw Orholam, wet hair streaming over his face, hands plunging down and down, frenetic—dancing to that tune.

It took a strong and healthy swimmer to dare pull a man away from Ceres’s fatal song. Gavin felt neither. He looked at the shore calling him.

Then he saw the fins cutting through the water.

Then he felt the stinging on his back. He was still wearing the gun-sword, and in the fall, it had cut him. He was bleeding into the water; he had no idea how badly.

But he knew how blood called sharks.

Orholam bobbed up, up, up arrhythmically. He’d known he was going to die. Had accepted it as far as he could. Come to peace with it.
You’re not that man, Gavin Guile.

Gavin kicked off toward the old man.

He cursed himself with every stroke. What the hell am I doing? I don’t even want to save him! I need to get my ass on that island so I can save Karris! I am more important than this old shit-brained—

A sailor clinging to a broken spar nearby screamed and kicked at the waves. Something slashed through the waters, and he screamed louder, lifting a bloody stump of a knee from the waves. He scrambled to climb fully onto his bit of spar, overbalanced, and fell into the water.

But Gavin was close now. He was committed. And—

Of course the old prophet went down before Gavin reached him.

Gavin dove and snatched at the disappearing form under the waves, caught something, and hauled him up by his beard.

The old man spit water into the air as they broke the surface. Alive.

Damn!

But if it had been bad luck to reach the old man as he was on the verge of losing consciousness, now it was good—he didn’t fight as Gavin pulled him into a weak grip with his left hand and kicked for shore.

By the time they made it to the shallows, all the screams had stopped, though in two places the sharks still churned the waves white in their frenzy.

Gavin stood, though his legs were wobbly and even the gentle sloshing of water that came up to his chest nearly knocked him down. “Stand. Come on,” he told Orholam.

Behind them, still halfway out to the wreckage, Gavin saw a swimmer coming in, cutting strong and fast past dead bodies floating in the waves and heedless of the sharks.

Orholam stood, wheezing and spitting, and Gavin began hauling him toward the shore.

The figure resolved into the form of Pansy, the first mate, her hair still stuck in those iron-hard glued points. She was such a fast swimmer, Gavin could only wonder where must she have fallen to have not made it to shore before them.

They made it to water that only came up to their thighs, and Orholam said, “Please, please, let me rest.” He leaned over, but Gavin pulled him on.

Coming up behind them, Pansy stood at last. She cleared the water from her eyes and heaved great, deep breaths. She leaned over, hands braced on her thighs, face barely clear of the waves.

In between breaths she said, “I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to be a sailor anymore.”

“Let me
rest
!” Orholam said, slapping at Gavin’s hand.

“I mean, not that I have any choice in the matter,” she said, turning to gaze at the wreckage. “Seeing how a trip home is pretty much—”

She cut off abruptly, and Gavin heard a sharp intake of breath.

He saw the shadow streaking through the shallow water a moment after she did. Pansy spun and tried to leap forward through the waves, half jumping out of the waves and half swimming, clawing at the water, but the shark hit her hard and she crashed sideways through the water.

This time, Gavin didn’t even think to save anyone else. He plunged toward the shore, wild with fear, lifting his feet free of the treacherous waters with strength he didn’t even know he had.

And then he collapsed onto the dry sand.

From his hands and knees, he saw a dark stain spreading in the water, then a glimpse of torn flesh as another shark appeared and ripped at what had been Pansy only moments ago.

Moments later, Orholam trudged up next to him and dropped heavily onto the sand.

Turning from the sight of the sharks at their feast, Gavin crawled to shade, curled into a ball, and closed his eyes.

“Karris Shadowblinder.”

Nothing. Maybe it had been written the other way.

“Karris Atiriel,” Kip whispered, watching the cookfires flicker in the darkness far below. “Anselm Malleus. Eva Ultafa.”

With only Big Leo as bodyguard, Kip had climbed to the top of Greenwall. There, atop the massive living wall, on a magically grown walkway of well-nigh immortal branches and foliage that was evergreen, he surveyed those who had become his people, both inside the city of Dúnbheo and in a crescent on the shore of Loch Lána around it.

He was missing something, and his failure was going to get them all killed.

The city was eerily dark, not because of the privations of the Blood Robe siege Kip had so recently lifted but rather from the cultural Forester deference to nature and the community: the awesome beauty of the stars was Orholam’s gift to everyone, whereas a torch in the city was a selfish tool for one or two. One should weigh carefully whether the work you did by that light benefited the community more than the beauty you stole from them to do it.

With the urgent preparations to march, tonight there were more lights visible than usual, but with a cloudless sky, the scarce few lanterns of the city still barely dimmed the glory of the stars.

“Gaspar Estratega. Helane Troas. Viv Grayskin,” Kip murmured. The stars, those æthereal fires above, called to the terrestrial fires below, like to like, and mirrored the thaumaturgical lights of Kip’s war map. The vast beyond comprehension and the small beneath notice existed at once, in one city, one room, one mind.

“Zee Oakenshield. Telemachos the Bold.”

All this, all the people below, would move at Kip’s word. Though without mastery of all he should have mastered to deserve such obedience, he was their master. Where he said to go, they would go. They would live and fight and die by his will—and despite his desire, for there was no path Kip could see by which none would die, no matter what he did.

At most, he might make there be fewer deaths. At best, he might make the deaths purposeful. At the end, he
might
make their deaths buy victory and peace and some meager measure of justice, some semblance of stability, for a time.

Three years ago, Kip wouldn’t have believed anyone would ever follow him. A year ago, he wouldn’t have believed so many would. Now he only prayed that he would lead them well enough.

Hell, three years ago Kip never would have believed any woman would ever want him, much less one remotely like Tisis.

So why was he here, walking in the cold, trying to solve a gift as if it were a problem?

“Garibaldi Phlegethon. Euterpe Tamazight. The Chartopaíchtis.”

Was that it? Had it seemed too easy to become satrap? Like a gift rather than an adroitly seized reward?

In hardly more than a day they’d have the big signing ceremony, and the army would march. People standing around while he signed a bit of paper? Kip hated that sort of thing. He’d insisted it be a small ceremony.

Tisis had suggested perhaps a large ceremony would be preferable, given that becoming a satrap was kind of a big deal, and many witnesses would be better than few.

But knowing that he had to assert his independence and indomitable will or lose the respect of his men, Kip had defiantly insisted on a large ceremony.

That showed
her
who wore the claws around here.

He called the war map to mind again, its lights overlaying the lights of the stars and the campfires, one reality atop another, like glassine immortals. Powerless here. Watchers, not helpers.

Kip felt like a mere observer himself now. He ran the lights forward and back as the White King’s army invaded. In the night and the darkness, its moving colors became a universe entire. The whole map showed less than one-half of one satrapy, and he was a single splinter aflame among this constellation of torches against the darkness.

“Corvan Danavis.” Ah, he’d said that name half a dozen times. “Darayaus Khurvash.”

And that was the end of it. He couldn’t think of anyone else. He’d named every single great tactician or strategist, every famous general or admiral, every warlord and great rogue, every scoundrel, every leader who came to mind who might, maybe, possibly, have some insight that would help him now and whose Nine Kings card he might have Viewed in that chaotic, compressed rush that had taken him to the Great Library.

Surely, surely in all the cards he’d Viewed of the most important people in history, surely he’d seen at least one person whose experiences could help him. Surely, somewhere in his fat skull was some bit of borrowed genius he could trigger that could set him at ease, that would have sharper insight than his own blunt wit.

But nothing happened.

Soon—maybe too soon—he’d take possession of more than he’d ever wanted, and instead of feeling elation, for some reason it irked him. It felt like failure, and he couldn’t tell
why
.

Come on, Orholam, I’m fighting on Your side here. Gimme a break.

“The Master. Andross the Red,” he said, unthinking.

His scalp tingled. He sucked in a breath.

Nothing happened. Or nothing more happened. That little tingling had been just him, right? That had been a shot of fear setting fire to his brain like straight brandy would set fire to his belly. That was just his dread of the old man, right?

Right.

He expelled a slow breath as nothing happened.

Oh, thank Orholam. Dodged a bullet there. He did
not
want to live that old dragon’s life.

Not even if it saves you?

He turned that thought around in his hand as if it were a jagged hellstone that might lacerate him if his grip slipped even the slightest.

No, actually, not even then. To hell with him.

Andross had given Kip no help at all in the past year. He demanded reports, which Kip had sent. He’d sent none in return.

So I’m on my own, then. No magic will save me here. Nor a remembered life or borrowed experience. Nor man. Nor Orholam Himself, though we march in His cause.

He stood alone at one of the crenellations of Greenwall, next to some empty iron frame, perhaps for pots of hot oil or maybe for mounting a scorpion with which to shoot bolts as long as a spear into an enemy army.

No, it didn’t look strong enough for either of those. Something else, then. Whatever.

Big Leo loomed behind Kip, so large and immobile that he didn’t blend into the background, he became the background. The young warrior must have sensed Kip wanted to think and had barred the approach of any of the soldiers who otherwise constantly sidled close to the famous Kip Guile.

Famous. How strange.

The isolation was no favor. Kip looked out at all the lights above and below once more, and felt a crushing tightness in his chest as if it were all falling on him. Luíseach? Lightbringer?
Kip Almost
was supposed to be the axis around which all the satrapies turned? Kip, the louse-up from Rekton? Kip, who’d started this whole cataclysm by killing King Rask Garadul and allowing the White King to take power unopposed?

People believed in
Kip
.

But maybe they believed because they had to. He’d fooled them, and they clung desperately to him as the drowning do, ’cumbering his arms and legs, pulling him down.

What had his father Gavin said?

‘Kip, you’re not the Lightbringer, because there
is
no Lightbringer. That figure’s a myth that’s destroyed a thousand boys, and led a hundred thousand men to cynicism and disillusionment. It’s a lie. A lie more tempting the more powerful you are. Like all lies, it destroys those who long entertain it.’