The Burning White (58 page)

Tisis put a hand on Big Leo’s arm, and he put the man down, but he continued to breathe heavily, as if on the very point of murderous rage.

It was an act—the warm, kindly Tisis and the murderous brute—but it was surprisingly effective.

“When were you sent?” Tisis asked gently.

“My lady sent me more than a month ago. I, uh, got caught behind enemy lines.”

“Which
enemy
? Us?” Cruxer demanded.

“Yes?” the man said, pained. But then his eyes became haunted. “There were these huge dogs, but not dogs. Dogs that were more and less than dogs, more and less than men. Dogs like hounds straight from hell. They gave signals to each other like men, searched in grids like disciplined soldiers, and then—I saw them run a man down with speed and tear him apart with a fury and savagery that no snarling dog has ever matched. I saw it from afar, and I ran, and I couldn’ t—I couldn’t . . .”

He could say no more.

He didn’t have to.

It was sometimes easy to lose perspective on what Kip’s army had become. His will-casters called themselves Night Mares. A joke, if a grim one.

But it was no joke to the men and women who fought an armored war dog the size of a horse.

“She messed up,” Tisis said. “She tells us exactly what she means to do? But also without worrying we might take offense at it. Who does that? She doesn’t try to mislead us into hoping she’s still your friend, Kip? Why? Because she thinks the deal itself is clearly good enough. This is the hyperrationality of a superviolet wight lost deep in her color. She’s still there, but she’s not in control anymore. Because if you weighed them on a scale, the power of a dog is nothing compared to the power of a god; she sends a man without considering that phobias are irrational.”

“I dunno that I’d call war-dog-o-phobia irrational,” Ferkudi said. “I’ve seen what those dogs can do.”

“I’d side with Ferk on this—pray to Orholam that never happens again,” Ben-hadad said. “The dog was here, she’s not. A man afraid of both is going to react to his fear of the one that’s closest.”

“Is a goddess ever really absent?” Tisis asked. “You remember that superviolet lux storm last year that was, like,
looking
for you? She sent that from Orholam alone knows how far away. What might she do now when she’s so much closer?”

“Well,” Ferk said, “so much for that.”

“So much for what?” Kip asked. You never knew what brilliant insight Ferkudi might offer.

“Looks like I’m going to have to change underwear. Again. Third time today.”

Or not offer.

“
Third
time?” Winsen asked.

“Eh, I’ve been timing exactly how fast I can empty my bladder when it’s totally full. You know, to make marching more efficient—”

“Forget I asked,” Winsen said.

But Ferkudi went on. “See, you scratch a trench parallel to the line of march and have the men relieve themselves in ranks as they reached it. Eliminate bathroom breaks or soiled clothing altogether. I had it down to a count of twelve this morning . . . I thought.”

Tisis was rubbing her face.

“Yeah,” he said to her, “more like a fourteen count.”

“What do we do with this one?” Big Leo asked, rattling his thick fighting chain that was looped around the messenger’s thin neck.

“Bad form to kill a messenger,” Cruxer said.

“He didn’t come as a messenger,” Big Leo said. “We captured him. He didn’t come under a flag of truce, nor openly, nor unarmed. Why should he get covered by those rules? I think he’s more like a spy.”

“I suppose it all depends on how we frame the problem, huh?” Cruxer asked, pensive.

“Liv is gone,” Kip said, mostly to himself.

“In more than one way,” Ben-hadad muttered.

“She’s sailed,” Kip said to the messenger, but mostly thinking aloud. “So we have no mistress to send you back to. And I can’t let you go without risking it costing me lives. You’re a Blood Robe, albeit one the White King would hang as a traitor with that message you’ve told us. Maybe you’d try to bring him back some intelligence valuable enough that you’d hope would make him spare you.”

The man said, “No, I wouldn’t. I swear—”

He stopped as soon as Kip started talking, though. Power means never having to shout to be heard. Kip said, “You’re a man alone with no friends and many enemies, a soldier of a pagan rebel you betrayed, the servant of an absent goddess you failed. And now you’re a problem for me.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Winsen said emotionlessly.

Kip took a deep breath, thinking.

“Wait, wait, wait—” the man said, sinking to his knees, staring at Winsen with horror.

“You don’t get a voice in this,” Big Leo said, his voice a low rumble.

“One last part of the message!” the man said. “Look! This is valuable!”

“Get on with it,” Big Leo said.

Desperate, the messenger talked, tripping over himself. “She said—she said if you could draw them into a fight at, at, at Paedrig’s Field near Apple Grove that you could win. Demolish them. She said she’d activated the Great Mirror there for you. And she said if you made it by . . . hold on, I can remember this. She said you needed to provoke the battle by um, two hundred twelve days after the Festival of Ambrose Ultano.”

Kip squinted. “What the hell, Liv?” It was a minor local festival in Rekton celebrated by little more than the cooking of fruit pies. Obviously, she’d picked the date in order to obscure it from anyone who might get the messenger to talk. Worse, it was a floating date based on the lunar calendar.

“Well, that doesn’t sound like a trap at all,” Winsen said.

“Shut up, Win,” Cruxer said.

“Is that an order, sir?”

“Just shut up.”

After doing the arithmetic in his head, twice, Kip called Ferkudi over and whispered to him for a bit.

“Yep, yep,” Ferkudi said too loudly—the man was utterly guileless. “That’s either tomorrow, or more likely yesterday, depending on how you calculate it. And if we push, and the river is passable all the way—unlikely, right?—but we could get to Apple Grove in . . . two days. More likely three or four.”

“So there’s no way we can get there by tomorrow?” Kip asked.

Ferkudi laughed. “No. Unless you can steal Orholam’s own chariot like Phaethon or make a machina like a skimmer for the skies.”

He’d meant them both as similar impossibilities, but it made Kip think of his father and the condor he’d made. Too bad he’d never told Kip how to construct one. Nor did Kip have his father’s mind of how to invent things. Besides, the condor had needed a vast body of water to build up the requisite speed to glide. Kip didn’t have that, either.

Low curses were muttered all around. No one trusted Aliviana Danavis, but if she was on their side, she’d just told them it was too late for them to win.

The messenger saw the black looks directed toward him. If the man had delivered his message when he was supposed to, they would have had a chance.

“You may have killed us all by dodging your duty,” Cruxer snarled at the man. “Your cowardice. You knew what you had to do, and you couldn’t simply do it, could you?
Could you!
” There was a depth of rage there that put the Mighty to glancing at each other.

“W-w-wait! She said, she said, she said for when you were done listening to her offer and were dismissing me, she said to tell you, ‘This man is as much a treasure to me as Ramir’s esteem was, back in Rekton. Please lavish commensurate honors upon him.’ ”

The man breathed again. He wet dry lips with his tongue. His eyes lit with hope as everyone turned to Kip.

“Oh, you have got to be joking,” Big Leo said. “We have to let him go? Give him stuff? He’s a spy!”

“That isn’t what she said,” Ben-hadad said, adjusting his spectacles. “Not necessarily. Breaker?”

It was an odd dislocation into memory. All his best friends were here, but they hadn’t known the old Kip, when he’d lived in Rekton. They didn’t share that life, those friends, those allegiances, fears, hatreds, and loathing.

The momentary reverie had apparently stretched beyond momentary, because Cruxer cleared his throat. “Since no one else is, I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious: Lord Guile? How much did Aliviana Danavis value this Ramir’s esteem?”

But Kip didn’t answer. He had a vivid memory of being wildly infatuated with Liv and talking with her when she’d been back from the Chromeria once. As he was nervously trying to make conversation with the older, pretty girl, Kip had said Ram thinks this, Ram thinks that, maybe three or four times. Ramir had opinions about everything. And Liv had suddenly started berating Kip. ‘Ramir’s a small-town bully. He’s trash. And you’re licking his boots. What does that make you, Kip? You’re
already
better than he’ll ever be. Grow up!’

It had been highly confusing to him, being called a bootlicker and a baby but being praised at the same time.

Orholam’s stones, it was embarrassing even to recall it.

She’d been right, too. Not that it mattered to the present situation, except that it verified the message was from her, and that it was going to be a bad day for her messenger.

“He’s not having one of his trances again, is he?” Ferkudi asked.

“No,” Tisis answered quietly. But she didn’t prod him for an answer.

Resigned that they were going to have to give Kip some time to think it over, Ben-hadad looked over at Ferkudi. “What if a guy gets a shy bladder?”

“Huh? What’s that?” Ferkudi asked.

Ben said, “You know, needs to pee, gets up to the trench, feels like people are watching, can’t pee. Too much pressure.”

“That’s a thing?” Ferkudi asked, thunderstruck.

“It’s a thing,” Winsen said.

“That is
not
a thing,” Ferkudi protested. “You gotta pee, you gotta pee.”

“It’s a thing,” Big Leo rumbled. “I’m kind of a shy-bladder gentleman myself.”

“Really?” Ben-hadad asked him. “Never noticed that about you.”

“Huh,” Ferkudi said. “I did not know that’s a thing. That would explain some things that happened at the latrines when I was gathering data.”

“And what were the women supposed to do, pee in the same trench? At the same speed?” Ben-hadad asked with a grin. “Were you going to run drills until they got up to snuff?”

“Of course. All those problems were next,” Ferk said soberly. “But . . . well, I hung out by the privies and approached a lot of women to help me with my experiments, but I had real trouble finding volunteers. Not a single woman would help.”

“You’ll find those women in a different part of the camp,” Winsen said dryly. “And they’ll expect to be paid.”

The rest of them laughed. Even Cruxer cracked a grin.

Orholam help him, even the poor messenger smiled.

“I don’t get it,” Ferkudi said. “You mean the tanners?”

But Kip turned toward the messenger. “Liv hated Ramir with a passion. She said his opinion was dung I should throw in a fire.”

Everyone fell silent. The man froze, wide-eyed. Throw in a fire?

Kip continued, “So your goddess is letting me know I can kill you without offending her. She framed the words to deceive you, thinking your greed would drive you here.”

“What a
bitch
,” Tisis whispered.

“Not even loyal to her own,” Winsen said.

“She didn’t understand loyalty even before she went wight,” Kip said. “So maybe it’s just as well she’s in the enemy’s camp and not ours.” He turned to the man. “I don’t want to murder you. But you’re a problem. So you solve it for me: Winsen’s solution, or you choose to live a slave. We brand the date of next Sun Day on your arm. After that you go free. A year and a couple weeks of servitude, and your oath not to return to the fight.”

“Only a year?” the man asked, suddenly hopeful again. Funny how fast our hopes can shrink.

“Anyone holding you past that date will face death.” If our laws matter at all a year from now.

Kip pursed his lips as the man walked willingly to the blacksmith to be branded.

And
that
is how I justify becoming a slaver.

Tisis came to his side. “So we’re headed to Apple Grove now? Even though it’s either too late or a trap?”

Kip looked at her, pained.

The door swung open silently, revealing the profile of a scrawny young scholar scratching a parchment with sure, fluid strokes while he studied a parchment whose fat, twin rolls dominated his desk.

“Are you here to kill me?” Quentin asked, not looking up to see who’d come into his recently locked room.

“No,” Teia grunted, tucking away her picks.

“Then, one moment, please.” He finished the long sentence he’d been writing. Then he used a boar’s-hair brush and soapy water to clean the gold nib of his quill, shook a bit of fine sand on the damp ink, opened a case, and put away all his accoutrements. He grabbed a folded parchment from the box before closing it away.

There was some essential rightness to seeing Quentin with his scrolls and quills. His was a quieter excellence than Kip’s drafting or Cruxer’s flowing through the fighting forms, or Tlatig with her bow, but Teia knew that his mind was doing things that hers could never grasp.

When he looked up and saw Teia, his face showed no surprise.

“Of course it’s you,” he said. “Orholam wants us to be whole, does He not?”

Teia didn’t really want a sermon from a traitor. She tossed her orders on the table. In Karris’s hand they read, ‘Quentin will be your handler, and will serve you in all ways. Trust him absolutely. Don’t get him killed. I have plans for him.’

“What were your orders?” she asked.

“Karris told me the one who came would be my master and maybe even my friend. She said I needed to learn how to have both.”

Teia was suddenly embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Maybe . . . maybe for a lot of things.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Just for the one thing. Nothing else.”

“ ‘The one thing’? What do you mean?” she asked.

He looked at her, clear-eyed and steady. “Murdering Lucia, of course. But I’m glad I got caught, glad I had to face up to what I’d done and what I’d become. I’m broken now, Teia, but I’ve never been so free. I know for the first time what it is to walk in the light. But never mind me. How may I serve you?”