The Burning White (38 page)

The thoughts swirled: an ambassador sweats when he shouldn’t, and then doesn’t when he should. Assassins fail at a job that should have been easy. A drafter wears armor, not to protect herself from her enemies but to protect her friends from herself. A map doesn’t report what it should, and . . . maybe . . .

What if it also
did
show what it shouldn’t?

Kip walked over to the map table.

He blacked out half a dozen of the blooming lights behind them—refugees’ and scouts’ reports that had come from the Great River behind them, reporting about various events, but that altogether told them the river was open when it actually hadn’t been.

It had only taken
six
reports to lead them astray, because they didn’t expect more: bandits were enslaving everyone in that area they could grab.

Now he ran the map backward and forward without those six reports, and saw a dark area in the map, right behind them, a shadow that they might otherwise have feared.

Koios had done that.

“These are the bad reports,” Kip said. “These are the refugees who are spies.”

Tisis was standing at the map table with him. “Yeah, these three for sure, and I’m checking into these ones now.”

“They are,” Kip said.

“How do you . . . ?”

But he barely heard her. This darkness on the map had hid an enormous threat. What if there were another?

“Something’s missing,” Kip said. “Something . . . Cruxer, was there ever any emissary from the White King? Someone that the soldiers stopped? Any news of someone being waylaid by angry townspeople?”

“Uh-uh,” Cruxer said.

“Why would there be?” Ben-hadad asked. Kip hadn’t even noticed that Ben had come back into the room. “We just routed them. And then they tried to assassinate you.”

Kip said, “There should be an emissary here to distract and confuse us. To sow discord if any could be sown. Not least, to try to see what condition the city’s in.”

“Koios surely expected you to execute anyone he sent,” Cruxer said. “Lawless men expect lawless treatment.”

Kip shook his head. “He doesn’t mind sacrificing people. It’s something else.”

He looked at the map again. Advanced it. Rolled it all the way back to the battle of Ox Ford, nearly two years ago now. Advanced it again.

The reports lit up, beacons against a night of ignorance, cairns on a climb with precipices on every side. He squinted until the lights blurred, new lights appearing and old fading away as the reports aged and the map advanced time. It was like clouds passing over a night sky, blotting out the stars and revealing others. But some places stayed ever-black, little bits of the evernight, of eternal ignorance and blindness.

If you screened out a few reports, which could well be there to distract, then . . . the darkness had a shape.

There was an area of coastline almost entirely dark.

“What were those four reports? Here?” he asked Tisis.

She went back to the very beginning of one of her folders and told him some names. They had no meaning to him.

He pursed his lips.

She said, “But that was when I was just getting my networks set up. I didn’t have many sources yet.”

“Whose lands are those?” he asked.

She hadn’t written that down, but she knew this satrapy well. She searched her memory for a few moments. “These ones are Red Leaf lands, a forest and farmland. This is Conal Briar Wood’s estate, and this is old Aoife Bracken’s grazing land, if she’s still alive and it hasn’t shifted to her stepson’s family, uh, they’re . . . Petrakoi? Alexandros Petrakis. Yeah.”

“Shit,” he said. He’d been hoping there was some connection with something, anything.

“Kip, they’re both retainers to the Red Leafs.”

“
Shiiit
,” Kip said.

He darkened those four lights on the map, and now there was a blank area, east of Ox Ford. “What’s this town near the coast?”

“Azuria, or maybe Apple Grove. Azuria Bay used to be a port until the harbor silted in. The moorage was a bit of a way up the river, can’t remember the name. But it didn’t generate enough revenue for the locals to be able to afford dredging it, and there are a lot of rocks farther out that made captains leery of it in the first place, so it slowly shriveled up and died. Apple Grove is the next village over, maybe a league away?”

Kip chortled.

“Oh ho. Master Danavis would be so disappointed in me. Cruxer, what do you do when your enemy is making a mistake?”

“Don’t interrupt them,” Cruxer said. “You taught us that a long time ago.”

“Tisis, show me the language you’ve worked out with Ambassador Red Leaf.”

He looked it over and clapped his hands. Good play, enemy mine! It almost worked.

“Well, you were wrong, Commander,” Kip said.

“How so?”

“The White King did send his emissary. Ambassador Red Leaf is a traitor.”

“What?!” Tisis asked. “But he gave us everything!”

“Everything to snare us,” Kip said. “Commander, what message do you think those assassins were sending when they failed on purpose?”

Cruxer’s brow furrowed. He still didn’t buy that they had.

“Look,” Kip said. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they intended to fail . . . but didn’t intend to die. What would you take from that?”

“Uh . . . ‘Don’t mess with the Order, or we’ll get you next time’?”

“Right. So where’s the last place you’d go if you didn’t want to run afoul of the Order?”

“Braxos?” Cruxer asked.

“Well, yes, yes . . . But you know, maybe a living city that someone might actually go to.”

Cruxer shrugged. “I dunno. It’s not like the Order publicly lets anyone know where their headquarters are.”

“You’re not really helping me here,” Kip said. “How about if I said I wanted to go to the Chromeria? Would you be more or less afraid of the Order than if we stay here?”

“More, definitely.”

“Thank you!” Kip looked at the treaty. “And this treaty commits me to take all our troops to lift the siege of Green Haven—and go with them personally.”

“But that’s where we want to go,” Cruxer said.

“Right. Or we could stay here. There’s a million reasons to stay here. A million problems to solve. A bandit army, for one. And what were they trying to do—before Daragh the Coward so kindly betrayed Koios and handed them over to us?”

Cruxer said, “Trying to trap us in the city so we couldn’t go help lift the siege?”

“No,” Kip said. “They don’t care if we tried to lift the siege or if we fought here. They’re armor, see?”

“ ‘Armor’?”

“But not just any armor! We thought they were blocking the Great River to keep out new threats from without—reinforcements and supplies and everything else. Now, it does do that, but that’s not the main purpose. The White King hasn’t thrown his whole might at Green Haven. Why not? He split his forces rather than overwhelm the city. Why? Because if he took the city, we would know that we had no chance of taking it back. So we wouldn’t even try. See?

“He didn’t block the river to keep things from coming
in
. His blockade is to keep something dangerous from going
out
. Do you see it now? We’re trapped in a closet. Three walls, one door—and he knows what I’m going to do: either stay in here afraid, or rush out the door he shows us. He doesn’t care which!”

“What do you mean?” Cruxer said. “Of course he cares!”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t have preferences. He’d love for us to sit in this city and do nothing so his people can take Green Haven. But even if we save Green Haven—even if we push his forces out of Blood Forest entirely, how can we hold it if he holds the Great River and the rest of the Seven Satrapies?”

“Orholam’s hoary head,” Ben-hadad said. “That harbor. Cruxer, what do we know about the bane? I don’t mean religiously. I mean practically, for war.”

Cruxer scowled. “They lock down drafters of their color.”

“And one other thing,” Kip said.

Ben-hadad looked at him, horror dawning. “Oh no . . . They don’t need a navy, just some supply ships and barges. That’s why a little harbor could work.”

“What? What do you mean?” Tisis asked. “What’s the one other thing, Kip?”

“The bane
float
,” Kip said. “At least, the one at Ru did. So what if the other can as well?”

“Plenty of lumber around Azuria to help support the heavier ones, if need be,” Ben-hadad said.

“You’re telling me . . .” Cruxer said.

“They’re going to invade the Chromeria,” Ben-hadad said. “Barges for ten or twenty thousand men and drafters and wights and food, and they just . . . cross. The Chromeria is surely using skimmers to scout now, but any skimmers that get close enough to spot the bane would simply die in the water because the drafters powering them couldn’t draft. The Chromeria might only get a couple days’ warning.”

“And it wouldn’t matter anyway,” Kip said. “The Chromeria’s defensive plans rely on drafters to do most of the fighting. If none of the drafters can do anything because the bane neutralize them . . . they’ll panic. Everyone will. With drafters and wights and even five thousand warriors, the White King could take the Jaspers in a day.”

“Well, that’s fuckin’ terrifying,” Big Leo rumbled, coming in the door. “Doesn’t do us much good, though, does it?”

“Sure it does,” Kip said. “If we know what he’s doing, we have a chance to stop him.”

“How?” asked Big Leo.

“Gimme a break, man,” Kip said, “I just figured out
his
plan. Give me a second or two to come up with ours, maybe?”

“Maybe we go scuttle the bane before they can leave?” Big Leo asked.

“Yes! A surprise attack. Move fast through the forest, descend on him like the raiders we are.” Kip started to warm to the idea. He could stop the White King
and
not abandon Blood Forest. “We could send along the bulk of the army to relieve the siege at Green Haven, shoot down there by small rivers and streams, maybe reunite with the Night Mares and—”

“Breaker,” Cruxer said. He looked over at Big Leo. “If they have the bane . . . then they have the bane. We’re drafters. All of our elite warriors, all the Night Mares—we’re all drafters. The bane can immobilize drafters of their color. If they have all the bane, we’re the last people who could stop them.”

It hit them all like a punch in the gut.

“We haven’t lost. Not yet,” Kip said. “I won’t believe it.”

Tisis came beside him and took his hand.

His heart plunged.

“
We
haven’t,” Big Leo said. “But maybe the Chromeria has.”

“I guess that makes our decision for us,” Cruxer said. He looked ill. “We can send messengers. Maybe see if they get around this navy to go warn the Chromeria.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Big Leo said, “but we owe it to them to let them know what’s coming. Maybe they can flee.”

“You know damn well they won’t,” Tisis said. “Andross Guile won’t believe someone’s thought of something he hasn’t.”

At the Battle of Ru, everyone in the Seven Satrapies had seen what one bane could do—or could almost do. But they’d killed that one. Maybe that had lulled them all into a false complacency. No one could imagine that anyone could assemble seven bane together without anyone finding out about it. No one could imagine organizing large-scale warfare without drafters at the center of the strategy.

Kip said, “Fine, so let’s say we give up the Chromeria for lost, which means we’re giving up on the Seven Satrapies entirely. Then let’s say we go free Green Haven, and have total success. Then we have . . . what? until next spring at best for the White King to regroup and attack us? We have until next spring to figure out how to win a war against drafters and wights and the bane—without using drafters, not even ourselves?”

He looked from face to face, but they all looked as gray and hopeless as he felt.

“And if the Chromeria falls,” Cruxer said. “All the fleeing drafters are no help to us.
We
can’t even help us.”

“We’d have to retreat before every battle, leaving the munds to do all the fighting—against wights and drafters. They’ll be slaughtered. We could fight a guerrilla war, but we’d have to be willing to give up every city, every decent-size town, and every person not able to travel fast and live off the land. There’s no endgame there except hoping Koios simply decides it’s not worth it to kill us. Anyone here think Koios will give up before we’re all dead?”

Every face was grim.

Tisis said, “You’ve been awfully quiet, Ben. Any ideas?”

He fidgeted with his flip-up spectacles. He chewed on his lower lip. “Not for an attack, but maybe . . . maybe for a defense?”

Karris White Oak had never felt so alone. She didn’t know how long she could stand this.

She lifted her head from the prison of her folded arms at some sound from outside her rooms. She’d fallen asleep at her desk after another too-long night of studying and making plans and drinking too much kopi. Karris’s room slave, Aspasia, wasn’t confident enough in her position to make her go to bed. She had merely draped a blanket over her mistress’s shoulders. It had fallen off.

Constantly surrounded by the Blackguards, who had been her family for nearly two decades, now Karris couldn’t let herself trust any of them. She stood slowly, body aching, and wondered if it was only the night-sleeping at her desk, or if she was getting old. She moved toward her bed, not bothering to undress as she glanced at a water clock. It was still two hours until dawn. She could get an hour of real sleep, anyway. Then the day’s duties would accost her once more.

But she had barely slipped under the cold blankets when she heard a voice. The same voice that had wakened her, but now impossibly loud.

“Want to know your problem, Highness?” Samite said.

Let this just be a bad dream, Karris thought.

Highness wasn’t one of her titles. “Not enough sleep,” Karris said, not opening her eyes. “Please go away.”

“You’ve got tits again. Never thought I’d see it.”

“Excuse me?!” She opened her eyes. Samite was not alone. She closed them again. She was in no place to deal with people right now.