The Burning White (42 page)

“What are you . . .” Kip started.

“The ancients weren’t stupid,” Ben-hadad said. “But the Chromeria has been, in wiping out as much of the knowledge about the old gods as they could. The ancients would have known all about the bane. They would’ve known they were vulnerable to them—and they would’ve guarded against it. The Thousand Stars all over Big and Little Jasper? The Great Mirrors in the Chromeria’s towers? They weren’t meant just to give drafters a few extra minutes of light every day. The Chromeria is bristling with cannons built exactly for the kind of attack that’s coming their way. But no one knows it. They don’t even know an attack is coming, so there’s no way any of them are going to figure it out once the bane are coming over the horizon. And even if they do, I think it’d take a full-spectrum polychrome of incredible power and concentration to use the mirrors all together.”

Everyone had turned to look at Kip. He felt his face flushing.

“Breaker,” Ben-hadad said, “Kip. They need the Lightbringer.”

“I’ve never—I’ve never said I’m that,” Kip said. It was like they were trying to foist an enormous burden onto his shoulders.

“It would explain the biggest conundrum of all,” Cruxer said.

“What’s that?” Ben asked.

“It’d explain why the White King has done so much to keep Breaker here.”

“No,” Kip said. He wasn’t sure which part he was denying. “Anyway, the other reasons for him tying me up here are plenty.”

“No, it makes sense,” Big Leo said. “He’s afraid of you.”

“No, this is ridiculous. You guys, we’ve talked about this!” Kip said. “I’m not . . .” He lowered his voice, though they appeared to be completely alone up here.

“Wait, wait. What if—what if—forget all the extra stuff,” Ben-hadad said. “All the religious garbage. All the myths and prophecies. Let ’em go. The core of what made Lucidonius Lucidonius was that he gave people light. He was the light-giver. Yeah, there was all the religious stuff he did and how he became a conqueror, but how did he give people light? He was a lens crafter. He discovered how to make colored lenses, and that technological leap changed drafters’ lives forever. What if the Lightbringer is just as simple: you bring light. You
physically
bring light at the moment the Seven Satrapies need it most. What if that’s it?”

“The Lightbringer’s a lot more than that,” Cruxer said.

“Shut up with that right now,” Ben-hadad said. “Uh, with all due respect, commander.” He turned. “Breaker, let other people call you whatever they want. You can figure out how to counteract the bane. You can send colored light to every corner of the Jaspers as quickly and precisely as a battle demands.”

“What if it doesn’t work that way? What if counteracting the bane isn’t just a matter of directing the mirrors?”

“You’d figure it out,” Ferkudi said, as if it were that simple.

They all nodded.

“And that’s a monumental amount of drafting, even if I could figure it out.”

“So we make you Prism first,” Winsen said.

Kip threw his hands up. Oh, like that’s no big deal. But a phrase rattled around inside of his head: ‘You won’t be the next Prism,’ Janus Borig had said.

“Breaker, focus on the problem, not the title,” Ben-hadad said. “It’s our best chance—not just to save the Chromeria but to stop the White King once and for all, to save the empire, and Blood Forest, and hundreds of thousands of people, and even ourselves. If we stay, I don’t know if this Great Mirror could stop a bane by itself. And I don’t know why he’d bring all of them here, or even if he could. He wouldn’t need to. This is our last chance. We’ve seen you tear apart a lux storm. You drafted a hundred different threads when you sank Pash Vecchio’s great ship. No one else could do that. So, directing the Thousand Stars with speed and accuracy that no one else could equal? Figuring out a tough problem? You’re the Turtle-Bear. Taking those on isn’t arrogance; those are just things you can do.”

Teia heard the chair creak sharply as Murder Sharp popped to his feet.

He figured it out. Here’s where it ends.

She couldn’t see anything. She’d thought that might make it easier—if she didn’t see his eyes go paryl-black to tell her that her death was coming.

It didn’t.

“Ben-Kaleb,” he said. “ Ben-Zoheth! Dammit! Is that what she meant? Goddam soothsayers. The hell can’t they talk straight? I should’a made it hurt.”

What?

He cursed some more, and she could hear his footfalls as he paced.

“I want you to know this,” he said, getting right in her face. “You ain’t
good
, and us
bad
. Your Chromeria’s as bad as we are. Near enough anyway.”

“So I don’t get to choose between good and bad?”

“Choose, yeah. I didn’t get to choose, anyway.” He started mumbling. “Separation, that’s it. That’s what separates me.” He cursed the Chromeria then.

But Teia had a sudden revelation. She was an idiot. How had she not thought of this before?

Well, I’ve never been blindfolded since becoming proficient with paryl.

Paryl could be cast through clothes. It could be sent out through flesh. If it could go out, surely it come
in
.

There was no reason she couldn’t gather paryl through a blindfold and her closed eyelids.

Half to keep him talking, she said deadpan, “I’m stunned. All this time I’ve been so sure of our righteousness as I was murdering innocents. But . . . but maybe there’s some subtlety to this that, uh, you could explain?”

“Maybe so,” he growled. He was puzzled. He wasn’t good at detecting sarcasm.

Which was probably much better for her continued health. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Dammit, T! Are you trying to get yourself killed?

Her eyes relaxed to sub-red, and then those odd drafter’s muscles pried them wider, wider. And there it was, sweet tenebrous paryl. A bare hint of it, though, between being indoors and the fact that whatever bounced around here wasn’t focused.

The first wash of it slid into her, down her gullet like brandy going down hot.

She tilted her head, blackly amused, a hint of condescending amusement leaking through, “If I have to choose between ‘sometimes not great’ and ‘always fucking evil,’ is that supposed to be tough for me?”

The
skritch
of a foot pivoting on the gritty floor was her warning. He’d snatched something up from the table, and—
skritch
—something smashed into her face.

Her head felt like her skull had become a gambler’s dice cup with a furious loser rattling her brain around, hoping by rage alone he might shake good luck out from bad.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. There was a thought, a plan that was trying to form. Blood filled her mouth. Her left dogtooth had smashed through her lip, and she felt a surge of terror. Is this what death tastes like?

Her head lolled on her chest. She’d lost the little paryl she’d already gathered.

She felt him grab a fistful of her hair at the forehead. He pushed back, banging her head against the wall, tearing hair from her scalp.

He shoved whatever he’d hit her with between her bloody teeth. It was leather and parchment? Oh, the pages he’d stolen from Marissia, bound in a folio.

“You take this,” he said. “You take it and read it, and
you
decide if what they’ve done counts as ‘not great.’ You decide if all the blood on their hands demands vengeance.”

Bound, helpless, bleeding, and having trouble focusing, with a butcher holding a fistful of her hair, Teia suddenly felt what she least expected:

Hope, is that you? Hey! Been a while! Don’t make yourself such a stranger.

She made to speak, letting out a small grunt, but there was still the folio wedged between her teeth. She was careful not to resist Sharp in the slightest. She didn’t even push at the folio with her tongue. His will was supreme.

“Take and read it?” Teia asked around the folio. So you’re not going to kill me right now?

He grunted and then suddenly tore off her blindfold. Dammit!

Something about how her lips had flared to speak had caught his attention. He dropped the folio, unheeded, and held her chin with his left hand. He was fixated. She opened her mouth, docile, and he slid a finger around her teeth, one at a time, his thumb testing each one’s edge.

The thought of biting him barely even flickered at the periphery of her mind, and then guttered out in the wind of fear.

He was transfixed. Lost, like a ratweed addict suffering withdrawals who catches a whiff of that poison he calls his love and salvation.

Murder Sharp never so much as glanced at her eyes. Teia should have drafted then and struck him down, but she didn’t dare.

He leaned close, drawing out his own handkerchief and wiping away the blood carefully.

She should headbutt him in the face. Smash his nose and blind him. No one leaned forward after you broke their nose. He’d throw himself back, and she’d have a few moments to . . .

But she couldn’t. Teia’s nerve failed, and she was just a small girl, weak, utterly in the power of a larger man who was dripping with malice.

The expression on Sharp’s face shifted, though, to the rapt concentration of a professional, intent yet dispassionately weighing the merits and demerits of her teeth against some Form of perfection he carried in his mind.

But his hunger wasn’t gone. It merely stood patient, like a dog salivating at the door, tail wagging, knowing it would soon be fed.

Having somehow rejected her upper teeth as unworthy of further examination, he leaned over her to inspect the inner faces of her lower teeth.

He’d done this before, for Orholam’s sake. Did he not remember?

She couldn’t forget.

A stream of drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She flinched hard, blinking, near gagging.

Murder released her jaw. He stepped back, and dabbed at the slobber on his chin. He seemed suddenly embarrassed, like a man caught with an erection straining his trousers at an inopportune moment.

“What’d you say?” he asked. He was fully in control of himself now. Any opportunity she’d had, she’d squandered.

For a moment, to her shame, she couldn’t even remember. Here was her chance to get some initiative back, and she couldn’ t—“You want me to read it?” she blurted.

“Read?”

“The folio,” she said.

When he spoke again, his voice was old, as if regret had lifted a shovelful of the barren earth of his life, revealing a thick, gritty gray layer in the clay that betrayed an anger vast but long extinguished, as if its fires had consumed a forest of beliefs, trees roaring into red flight with sparks flung from their wingtips until every living thing traded green for red as Teia did, and lost all color as Teia’s life had, and then embers fell from the sky like defiled gray snow, and even that cooled to ashes, and the ash had aged to soil.

“You’re like me, Adrasteia, me in a shitty tin mirror anyway,” he said, grim, lifeless. “Not as strong, not as fast, not as good a drafter. But we’re both paryl drafters, sent as spies, as infiltrators to uproot the Broken Eye once and for all—that’s what my Prism told me. Sayid Talim said my gift made me the only person who could do what had to be done. That I could end centuries of trouble. Surely saving untold numbers of lives was worth everything bad I had to do to get to where I could do what had to be done, right? Whenever I was troubled by the people I had to kill, he said I should think that I was saving a hundred in the long run for each one I killed now. He said it was war. Said we’ve been at war with them since the beginning. He said in war, if you can trade one life for a hundred, you have to take that choice every time.

“He was convincing himself more than me, I think.

“I didn’t want to do it. I was too scared, too certain my nerve would fail me when it came time to kill some innocent. He said to let the blood be on his head, not mine. And then this man who pretended to be such a hard cold bastard, while he secretly fretted and drank himself to death, he told me he wasn’t giving me a choice. He said it was war, and this was an order.”

It was different, a little, but too much of it was eerily familiar.

Karris had given Teia that speech. And Karris had trembled in her chambers like a hypocrite—afterward—but before the crowds, she strutted with her back straight, as if she were Confidence made flesh.

“He told me that no one must know, because
anyone
could be a spy,” Sharp said. His voice was tinged with bitter amusement. “He would tell no one and I couldn’t, either. He said that if I were caught or even too close to getting caught, I should kill myself before the Order could find out too much, or trace my infiltration to him. He said in that event, he would personally beseech Orholam for forgiveness for my suicide, and for any . . . you know, lingering guilt I might
so wrongly
feel for all the murders.” He sneered the last line, finally finding his anger’s heat once more.

“What happened?” Teia asked softly.

“His nerves failed, or someone got to him, but the Blackguard imprisoned him quietly, saying he was ill. Everyone used to know what that meant. He was quietly wheeled from his chambers to the top of his tower to do the balancing every month. The Blackguard was a much larger force then, and it was impossible for me to get to him. I didn’t have my own cloak yet, of course. So what happened? I guess
nothing
happened. He died. No one from the Chromeria ever said a word to me. I had no friends, because how can you have friends when you have a secret like that? How do you keep it secret if anyone’s close enough to you to wonder where you spend so much of your time? Prism Talim had set me to sail in a sea of blood, and I’d lost sight of shore. He was my only anchor, and . . . with that cut loose . . . ? What was I going to do?”

“Join the people you sold your soul to destroy,” Teia said.
Obviously
.

Murder Sharp scanned her face.

T, you moron! Are you
trying
to die?

“But I guess,” he said, “the real question is what are
you
going to do?”

“Huh?” she asked.