The Burning White (44 page)

Now
Teia
was going to be the person who snatched and mutilated a child, like a bloodthirsty ghost in the night.

“Eight to ten years old,” Sharp said. He pushed her out the door. “After you read the folio, you’ll know why.”

“I suppose it should sound ungrateful to say that I was rather looking forward to being dead,” Orholam said.

“You didn’t look like you were looking forward to it out there,” Gavin said, cracking one eye open. His shade had moved away from him, and it was miserably hot on the beach. He could only imagine he was already on his way to a fierce sunburn. And the damned sand fleas . . .

“Oh, I’m terrified of
dying
. Being dead, though? That’s the thing.” Orholam was sitting cross-legged on the sand, heedless of the bugs, dirt, and his own nudity.

Gavin stood up slowly, his body afire with aches. He still had the damned gun-sword strapped to him. Neither blade nor straps had made for easy rest. He began brushing off the worst of the dirt and bugs. “You’re right,” he said.

“I am?” Orholam asked.

“You do sound ungrateful.”

“I meant to be the opposite,” Orholam said. “Thank you. I was wrong about you.”

“Well, I only did it for one reason,” Gavin said. He gestured for them to move off the beach.

Orholam stood and then started walking. “And what’s that?”

“Lots of men claim Orholam saved them from drowning,” Gavin said.

“But what man can say he saved Orholam from drowning?” Orholam said. He chuckled.

Gavin grunted, irritated the man had taken his punchline.

“Guess we should both be grateful there’s an island here at all, huh? If the story had been true about the isle sinking when the reef rose, we’d be shark supper.”

“There’s looking on the bright side!” the old man said.

Gavin grunted again. “How bad’s my back? It cut me.”

“Not terrible. Need to wash it, though, if you want to live.”

Gavin examined the rest of himself for injuries. Arm had rope burn, but not bad. His head ached, tongue was dry, left leg hurt, but that was just a lightly pulled muscle. A few calluses torn off his hands. They’d gotten soft in his prison.

His left eye pit hurt like hell. The patch had stayed on, but saltwater had gotten into the hole, and sand was all around it. If he got sand into the empty orb of his eyeball, he’d be in such agony he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything.

Fantastic. Washing that was going to be just great.

Assuming, of course, they could find clean water at all.

“I already searched everything that washed up,” Orholam said. “Only a little luck.” He rapped on a little barrel small enough to fit under his arm.

“Black powder? That’s enormous luck! With this musket, we can hunt!”

“Not powder. Salt fish,” Orholam said apologetically. “Keep us for a few days if we can find some water. But nothing else. Maybe more’ll wash in later, but I’d say we head inland and see if we can find the pilgrims’ waystations. Whether they’ll hold anything useful after a few centuries is another question, though.”

“You couldn’t find anything good?” Gavin asked, looking out to the lagoon. Fish was great, but water was more important, and tools to hunt with would’ve been the best.

He’d been so concerned about the beach and his own injuries that this was the first time he’d looked around. They were inside the great circular wall of mist that made the White Mist Tower; it was utterly clear here, with blue sky high above. The island was large enough that it would have streams if not a river, but that wall, maybe five hundred paces high, made Gavin claustrophobic. The outside world didn’t exist here.

Halfway through alien cloud, part of their ship was visible perched on the reef crest. The stern, waist, and sails were completely gone, battered into flotsam, spread throughout the lagoon with the floating dead. Only the forecastle survived, with The Compelling Argument pointed at a jaunty angle into the sky. There appeared to be a figure moving there, but it might have been Gavin’s imagination.

“Is that . . . ?” he asked.

“Uluch Assan. Yes,” Orholam said.

Gunner. “Hard man to kill,” Gavin said.

“Not the only one,” Orholam said.

“Don’t suppose there’s much we can do to help him,” Gavin said. Though, come to think of it, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to help the crazy pirate.

“He’s fishing,” Orholam said, shielding his eyes against the sun.

Gavin couldn’t see that well. But he chuckled. If only he could be like that madman, taking the day with equanimity, unperturbed by sea demons and reefs and shipwrecks and brushes with death.

“Huh!” Orholam said. “It was actually true!”

“What? What was?”

“I told him if he didn’t want that cannon to fall into the sea, he’d have to keep his feet close. I thought I meant just nearby.”

Gavin squinted and shaded his eyes. Gunner was moving, testing the deck, trying to step off it for some insane reason, perhaps thinking he could walk around the reef to some easier point to swim? But as soon as he lifted his foot, the entire deck began to shift, the end lifting, as the weight of The Compelling Argument threatened to tip it into the gap in the reef. The captain had to stay on the deck counterbalancing the big gun or it would tip into the sea.

Gunner sat back down on the deck railing and picked up his fishing pole again.

“Man doesn’t know it’s already lost,” Gavin said.

“What you love isn’t lost while you still have a mind to save it,” Orholam said. “Sometimes.”

He saw them looking at him, waved, and saluted with the skin of brandy. He seemed entirely unworried.

Gavin spread his arms helplessly like, ‘We can’t come save you.’

Gunner waved them off, happily. He stood on his right leg and pointed to his left foot, as if to show that the sharks hadn’t gotten it. As if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Poor bastard,” Gavin said. “Why do I have the feeling he’ll outlive us all?”

“Not a risky bet if we don’t find some water,” Orholam said.

They moved inland. It was hard to tell how large the island was from the beach, with thick jungle obscuring their view. Judging from the gentle curve, maybe a couple leagues across? From the size of the outside of the reef as they’d sailed around it, though, it could have been ten leagues across.

They followed game trails until they came to a wide area where no trees were growing, though the ground was covered with low vegetation. The wide area continued in a broken line inland, uphill. It didn’t look natural.

Gavin grabbed a shrub and pulled it up. The roots were only a hand’s breadth deep, and below that were flat stones, interlocking.

An ancient road, not yet fully claimed by the jungle.

Gavin’s heart leapt in his breast. Streets meant cities. Cities meant the possibility of shelter and access to clean water, which his thick tongue wanted more than anything.

They walked, slowly.

In less than an hour, they passed the first ruins. Nothing spectacular, just a few stone walls with no roof, all of it covered by moss and vines. But nearby, there was running water.

“Orholam!” Gavin said. “Can you go ahead and prophesy whether I’m going to get sick from this?”

“I have no idea. But I’m gonna drink.”

And so they both did. They had nothing to use as a skin, so they drank until they nearly burst. Then Gavin carefully, slowly washed around his eye patch, careful not to let the black jewel lose contact with his eye—that would be his death, if Grinwoody’s threat wasn’t bluster. For one clumsy moment, he bobbled his grip, but luckily the eye patch held in place in his eye socket.

They headed on.

Within two hours of heading uphill, they rounded a turn and found more ruins. Lots more.

Amid the palm trees was an ancient, abandoned temple compound, all ancient stone arches and broad avenues with flagstones and great mosaics rent asunder with scrub grasses, and towering atasifusta trees, now extinct everywhere else in the Seven Satrapies. This was an entire ancient city, empty, if not old Tyrean itself then built in the style of the old Tyrean Empire, with horseshoe arches and stone carved like delicate lattices, once painted to look like climbing roses and ivy but now faded and chipped. The entire city was built around one central avenue, two blocks away from Gavin. He made his way to that street.

Stepping into the broad, open area—an ancient market?—Gavin had an unobstructed view toward the center of the island for the first time.

His heart stopped. All day, Gavin had expected to see the famed Tower of Heaven at any moment, but the jungle’s canopy and the body of the rising mountain they’d been climbing had hidden it. Until now.

“This . . . this is not what I saw,” Orholam said.

Overwhelming all the terrestrial wonders of this lost city was a great tower, surely as wide as all seven towers of the Chromeria put together, including all the grounds, and much, much taller.

Perfectly symmetrical, and bafflingly, blindingly black, the untapering cylinder was stabbed in the heart of the island. A crater ridge rose around it, as if some angry god had impaled the world here and only the black haft of his spear jutted from the wound.

Nothing relieved the unearthly emptiness of that black except a thin, pearlescent ribbon, a trail, spiraling around the outside of the great megalith.

And if its base would have covered half of the entire island of Little Jasper, its height was something else entirely. It had to be taller than Ruic Head or any of the Red Cliffs.

Gavin said, “Orholam’s beard, pilgrims
climbed
that?”

Orholam had already recovered, and he just smiled at him like a fool.

“
I
have to climb that, don’t I?” Gavin asked.

“We,” Orholam said cheerily. “We
get
to climb that.”

Karris twitched in her sleep. She couldn’t breathe.

She tried to snort. Nothing happened. No air entered her lungs.

Her eyes flew open. The room was pitch-black. There was nothing over her face, but as her tongue convulsed, no air flowed in.

She couldn’t swallow.

Her body was paralyzed from the neck down.

“Shhh,” a woman said. Soothing. “Shhh.”

The woman stepped closer. Teia. Karris jerked at the recognition.

“I’m letting go,” Teia whispered. “Be quiet now. You’ll feel tingling, and then you’ll be able to speak in a moment.”

Speak?! She couldn’t
breathe
!

Then her fingers tingled. Toes tingled. And rapidly, feeling returned to her body.

She gasped, then sat upright, her chest heaving.

“I brought you something,” Teia said.

Karris’s hair fell over her eyes, and she considered punching Teia in the throat. The goddam child, strangling her?! Who did she think she was? Was that paryl?

Teia pulled out a red leather-bound folio. She flipped the leather back for Karris to read the title page: ‘Being the Secret History of the Chromeria: Written for and by the Whites.’

By the Whites?

And then Karris saw that there were dozens of signatures below the title. The last one was Orea Pullawr’s, albeit a more florid hand than she’d had when she was young. The folio had been penned by Karris’s predecessors in office. All of them.

A note on the next page said, “Entrusted to your care on the understanding that you will add no untrue or deceptive word, nor bring the black to excise any words written herein. We trust you here with the unvarnished history of our empire. For Orholam loves the truth, and will bring all things to light in time, but not all things should be known by all people.”

A sheaf of loose papers was tucked in the back. Karris flipped to them.

They weren’t histories, but instead names, contacts, accounts with bankers: all the things Orea Pullawr had wanted Karris to have, and to know.

“Where did you get this?” Karris asked. Her heart was pounding, and she wasn’t sure now whether it was still from her fright or from excitement.

“From my master, who killed its previous owner and stole it.” This was one of the ways Teia tried to minimize the dangers of eavesdroppers: no names to prick ears.

“How did you get this away from him? Did you kill him?”

“He gave it to me.”

“Orholam Himself must have blinded him to its value.”

Teia snorted and shook her head as if Karris were a hopelessly clueless mom and she her teenage daughter.

“What is your problem?” Karris asked. Even her excitement about the folio couldn’t erase all her pique at the girl
paralyzing
her.

“Quiet!” Teia hissed. “My problem? First is that you’re gonna get me killed if you can’t even remember to whisper for five fucking minutes.”

Karris gritted her teeth. She hadn’t been
that
loud. Whispering now, she said, “You come and give me a gift like this, and then act like a spoiled child while you do it?”

Teia scoffed. “A child? A child?!” Now
she
wasn’t remembering to whisper.

“I have questions,” Karris said. Teia was a goddam child, but Karris wasn’t. It was on her to forgive and compensate for the shortcomings of those she’d demanded serve in such hard positions. She wasn’t being fair. “Please.” She offered this last genuinely apologetically.

Teia calmed, but still said, “I don’t have time for questions.”

Firmly but with all the restraint she could muster, quashing the red rising in her at the fact the girl had used paryl on her spine—on her spine!—Karris said, “You have time.”

“I am literally being hunted by
their
best assassin. He saw through me. He said he had a previous Prism pull the same trick with him as you did with me. Same big talk. Same assignment. But then he died, leaving him twisting in the breeze. No one knew who he was. What he’d done for him. He ended up joining
them
in truth. He captured me. And just let me go so he could have a little hunt. A contest. See who’s really the best between us—as if I’ve got a chance.”

“Orholam have mercy. How can I help?”

Teia shook her head like Karris was being a fool. “Help? You can’t. You can only make things worse.”