The Burning White (60 page)

“He still hopes to surprise the White King,” Karris said. “It’s worth a try.” She knew her brother surely had many spies on both Big and Little Jasper, and one of them at least would
try
to sail to tell him about the arrival of unexpected forces.

But with her small fleet of skimmers, her people could overtake and stop any ship of spies. Surprising the White King was actually quite possible.

Apologizing again for her earlier gaffe, Karris dismissed the woman, and ushered in the next senior diplomat. This one to report the Ruthgari situation: Eirene Malargos was playing her cards close, stalling real action, but Karris’s spies had learned that her allies—and allies they seemed, still—had discovered the secret of how to make their own skimmers, albeit of a seemingly more rudimentary design than the Chromeria’s own.

Of course they had. It was easier for friends to spy on you than enemies, she supposed. Eirene had ships staffed and provisioned, ready to sail, but was still summoning troops. She could delay Karris’s call to serve for as long as she wanted with that excuse. You can always wait for more troops, if you’re as rich as a Malargos.

If Eirene were being honest with Karris, then she’d had no word from Kip’s forces up the river since about the last time Karris herself had heard from them. Eirene suspected bandits were seizing supplies going up the river and had intercepted messengers, so she had long since dispatched messengers overland to Kip. But she’d had no word back yet. Dammit.

The scouts searching the seas for King Ironfist had found nothing. Dammit again.

On Karris’s hunch, the Chromeria’s small fleet was patrolling between the Jaspers and the Ruthgari coast, but the next messenger reported nothing new from their scouts—which could actually be good news.

The next reported a similar blank for those searching for the pirates who yearly preyed on the pilgrims who sailed for the Chromeria to celebrate Sun Day.

Karris had hoped to sink every last pirate with her skimmers, though it was early yet for the pirates to hunt so close to the Chromeria. Usually they started their piracy at the farther ports as pilgrims embarked. The Blackguards had gone to those coastal cities, sending their own personnel to hunt pirates as well as they were able to, because they didn’t trust anyone else with the skimmers except Karris’s and Andross’s messengers.

Maybe Karris could send the Blackguards out en masse when the pirates came closer, and deal them a blow they’d never forget.

Maybe the pirate kings’ and queen’s fleets had tangled with Iron-fist’s, and they’d done one another such damage that none of them would come this year!

Right, Karris, and maybe the heavens will open up and shower down warriors to save the day! And chocolate. That’d be nice. Maybe a hot cup of kopi?

What Karris really needed was someone to serve her as she and Marissia had served the old White. She needed someone to recruit and manage her spies. She
should
choose Anjali Gates for the job: the woman was eminently capable, sharp, diligent, and exact, and willing to do excellent work without getting public recognition.

The last was a rarity on the Jaspers.

But Karris had delegated off so many duties already, only to add dozens more in taking over the drafters’ war training and in quietly bolstering the islands’ defenses, from refortifying walls that had had stones stolen from them for other construction over the years, to drilling the cannon crews of all the towers on overlapping fire and their supply chains for shot and powder if they ran out, to hiring the smiths to cast weapons and armor, to drilling free militias, even spurring on their training by offering prizes in archery competitions and melees.

None of it had been as cheap as she’d promised Andross, but he hadn’t stopped her. Without ever saying a word of why, he acquiesced often now. It was almost as if he respected her a little, now. Almost.

He hadn’t even demanded she stop meeting with her pet luxiats (as he called them). He seemed more amused that it had so infuriated some of the High Luxiats—and, she guessed, kept them busy being angry at her rather than at him.

She should summon Ambassador Gates and give her the job now. She knew she should.

But with all she’d passed off to other hands, the control of information was one thing she couldn’t bear to give to anyone. Not now, not when the Order had people everywhere.

In peacetime, you might worry about a spy enriching a family unjustly or using their illicit knowledge to claim estates or negotiate or end trade agreements or even marriages. In wartime, though, a well-placed spy meant death for thousands. It could mean the death of the Seven Satrapies.

There was a knock at the door. Ugh, another meeting.

All this is what you were preparing me for, Orea, Karris thought, by putting me in charge of the spies. After my long tutelage everywhere else, you taught me to handle secrets and those who keep them. You taught me to judge whom to trust and how to trust someone halfway or three-quarters, rather than trusting fully or not at all, like I used to.

Thank you, Orea. Thank you.

Another knock.

“Send them in,” Karris told her Blackguards.

One more meeting, she promised herself, then I’m getting the hell out of here to go to that little kopi shop myself.

“YOU . . .”

The sound rose from a pitch so low Teia felt it first in her chest, but maybe that was only her anxious dreams. She rolled over. The closet was so small, no one could open it without the door pushing into her hip. This was as safe a place to sleep as anything got for her.

“HAVE.” The voice had risen now, like a sea demon emerging from thalassic depths. Monstrous and raw, it was
basso profundo
deep, as if it had taken until now to find a cadence intelligible to her.

“MY CLOAK!”

The voice was a volcano rending the earth beneath her and vomiting fire past her face, the heat alone pummeling her into mute submission, agog, falling backward to tremble on uncertain ground.

“You cannot hide for long, thief. I will find you and take what is mine, and I will teach you what eternity means. I will snatch you from this time to a place where we can be uninterrupted for decades of torture, and then I’ll bring you back, to your own family, your own home. You will betray your own father for one hour’s cessation of pain, and then I will take you again, until you have broken yourself, and you beg to torture by your own hand them whom once you loved. I will flay you, I will tear off your fingernails, I will grind your bones to spike shards and make you dance as they pierce your skin. I will impale you from anus to broken teeth on the axle of my war chariot before I ride into battle. But no matter what pain you come to know, you will heal every time I allow you nightmarish sleep. You will not die. I, who am the Lord of Flies, will never let you more than glimpse that bourne.”

This was not a nightmare. From any nightmare Teia had ever known when asleep, she would have woken by now, sheets drenched, cheeks wet with tears. But she could not wake.

This was not her psyche pawing through the jagged detritus of what had unsettled her in the day and sorting her fears. This wasn’t a twisted confusion of things she knew. This was stark clarity. And he used terms she’d never heard.

This was not Teia speaking to herself.

At her sudden certainty, her throat clenched, at war with a stomach rebelling to empty itself.

Nor did he stop speaking.

“You shall be the asymptote of suffering incarnate, beyond whose limit is insanity, a land whose surcease of sorrow you shall never know. Eventually, you will choose me over freedom, me over love,
me
over every good. I, Abaddon, will be your god.”

His voice had risen through the stones beneath her like grasping vines, and now they wrapped around her, imprisoning her, prodding into every gap, sliding sibilant across her skin.

“But whatever you say”—his voice had gone quieter, soothing, full of anticipation of pleasure—“however you praise me through your shattered nubs of teeth, no matter what you do or don’t do, you will never know an end to suffering. Never. Not when you have served me for ten thousand faithful years. Not when your very sun expels its last exhausted breath of light and collapses into cold, dark dirt. You will suffer until you beg for your suffering not to end, for I will give you such uncertain respite from pain that each beat of rest is counted only in anticipation of the entire orchestra of pain reaching a new crescendo for which you are unprepared, and your nerves will have healed and regained old capacity for feeling. You will beg, for the pain renewed will be pain redoubled.

“Perhaps you hope I brag, perhaps you dare to disbelieve such suffering is possible, or you hope that you could not be so special to one such as I. And it’s true. You’re not special. For I have been offended before, and more grievously. But eternity is long, and the worlds are many, and time is vast when you may move about it at will. I am punishing a million such as you, even now. Would you like to see?”

For one moment, as her emotions skittered uncontrollably like a drop of water on a steaming-hot pan, Teia felt a flash of queer gratitude. For one heartbeat, Breaker broke her free of quicksand fear with memories of his quicksilver humor at all the wrong times. Though not in so many words, Kip the Lip had taught her this:

If you think you’re helpless, if you think you’re powerless; as long as you can speak, you’re not helpless, and you’re not powerless until you’re too afraid to. If you’re trapped in the darkness all alone, how do you know you’re alone and not actually surrounded by an army of friends, also silent, also afraid in the dark, merely waiting for the sound of one voice to rouse them from fear, to fight for freedom?

Silence is isolation chosen. Silence is darkness, and every evil loves the dark.

Kip, Kip the Lip? You marvelous wrong-girl-marrying turd, you gave me this cloak that’s gotten me out of and into every kind of mess, including this one. Kip, you tried to tell me about this guy, didn’t you? I thought you were crazy. Maybe I was right, and crazy’s contagious. But forget that. Kip, this one’s for you, buddy.

“Eternity?” Teia interrupted, impressed. “That
is
a long time. And you’re going to talk for all of it, aren’t you? You’re wrong about me not dying, though. I’ll die of
boredom
.”

It took Abaddon off guard. There was sudden quiet, and Teia felt those twisting tendrils of fear shrivel back.

“Mortal, you have no—”

“What, now you’re mad so you’re going to torture me worse? Longer? How’s that work?” Teia asked as if he were unbelievably stupid. “You play music? Me neither, but even I know that you never start at a
fortissimo
. There’s just no way you can go up. Raging along at a monotone as loud as possible? You’re like an eight-year-old boy, screaming every word, from a total lack of either control or awareness. So get out of here, kid. You bother me.”

But the presence wasn’t gone. She hoped he was aghast at her audacity, that he would give up before her courage did.

“Oh please, do go on with the insults and the terribly convincing defiance,” he said. “Because every word you speak helps me in my hunt for you. A young woman—that much is very helpful to know. Parian-born? Abornean perhaps? Lower-class, certainly, from the accent, with an urban muddle to it. Maybe raised in several cities? And uneducated, which usually goes with lower class, but not always. You claim not to play an instrument and then prove the truth of it by misusing terms. So, young—well, I won’t say ‘lady’—is there anything else you wish to say?”

Oh, shit.

“Yeah, one last thing,” Teia said. “Thanks for the cloak, you little bitch.”

If Teia had thought that Abaddon had been shouting at her in a fortissimo, the sudden draconic roar of a hatred that stretched to the very bounds of infinity quibbled that perhaps the immortal’s former threats had been spoken
sotto voce
: her mortal ears simply weren’t capable of hearing more than the minutest modulations in the volume of his mammoth voice.

The pressure of his scream clapped cupped hands on the ears of her mind, blowing blood from her every orifice at a pressure her psyche couldn’t contain.

After she wandered a trackless season of dizzied pain, his voice descended to words that she could slowly begin to understand, now bated with acid malice. “You are an ant on the finger of a curious giant, daring to bite him. My amusement is at an end. You will soon know the—”

And then he was gone. Like a soap bubble popped on a blade of grass. Just. Gone. Leaving only a stretchy film of horror over her.

He knew her gender, her voice. Could guess she was on the Jaspers. And who else was close enough to Kip that he would entrust with such a treasure?

Abaddon was gone. For the moment. But he hunted, and where could she go that he would not find her?

But where had he gone?

A sense of peace came over her. A fathomless well of quiet, somehow qualitatively different from the silence that had come before. Peace.

And Teia slept once more.

But this she heard, first, before the soporific waves closed over her consciousness.

“Can we not save her?” a man asked mournfully, but his voice was layered as with his own echo. It was like no human voice.

“Too close. She might hear,” a woman said, her quietly resounding voice soothing as a summer rain, warm as blankets by the fire.

“She’ll think she dreams,” he protested.

“Even dreams may move a mortal.”

“I have time left there. I could protect her myself—” he started.

“Not while she has the cloak,” the woman insisted. “If he knew we’d already found it, you know what that would mean for this world. He could rally many to his cause. Our only hope is in her stealth.”

“And she has no hope at all? We demand that of her, without even asking?”

“She holds the most precious possession of—and willfully insulted—the former angel of death himself. We’re not demanding anything of her she hasn’t chosen already.”

“This is our war. We owe it to—”