The Burning White (61 page)

“And it
is
war! Or have you forgotten whose skins Abaddon used to make that abomination?!” The woman’s voice had risen to thunder and lightning looking for a place to strike. “And now I’ve stirred her, and she will remember.” She sighed. “Nor was that an accident, was it? Sometimes I wonder how
I
was assigned to the Guile and you to this woman.”

“I think it was your love of spectacle, wasn’t it?” the man answered, amused.

“You win this round, Nuri, but don’t forget, we are on the same side.”

There was a sudden rush as of something departing at great speed.

But Teia wasn’t alone. The man spoke once more. “I am a watcher and a messenger, not a warrior, and the farthest thing from a rebel, no matter how that just sounded. I cannot fight for you except in words. Cannot stand for you except in prayer, Adrasteia, though that is stronger than you know. But this I promise you: If you fall and Abaddon seizes you, before he can take you away to his realms to do all he has promised, I will do everything in my power to kill you. That much I promise. But no more.”

And then the immortal was gone.

“Wow.
Thanks
,” Teia said. She meant it to come out as sarcasm. But she’d believed every threat Abaddon had uttered, and she found, to her horror, that her gratitude was sincere.

She woke fully into the darkness of her little closet, and slept no more.

~Andross the Red~

25 years ago. (Age 41.)

“You know why it must be done,” I say.

“No, we can’t. We can’t.”

“Do you think I
want
to do this?” I ask. This is not what I need from my bride now. I need her to be the strong one. She won’t even have to be there when it’s done. She won’t be the one who has to speak to Gavin and convince him to do the deed.

“What if we’re wrong?” Felia breathes.

She is a fierce intellect, my Felia, though she hides it under soft smiles and a warm demeanor. Others see her as always just smart enough to understand their troubles, and they see not her perceptive questions. She is patient where I have never been, and when fools explain things to her that are not, she doesn’t correct them. She plays a different game than I. Always has. It was part of my calculus when marrying her. Her strengths, plus mine, would make us unstoppable.

But only if our strengths are added, because our weaknesses subtract, too. We are both deep feelers.

Curse you, Ulbear Rathcore, for laying this trap at my feet. Curse you, Orea Pullawr, for all your pretenses at piety, while you go along with
this
. I will have my revenge. On both of you.

“Felia, how many languages do you know?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“How many?”

“Nine, depending how one counts. Four of those more or less fluently, albeit with muddled accents. Three dexterously enough to pass as a native, given a bit of time to brush up.”

“Did you get the translations wrong?”

She sighed. “I was certain of them at the time.”

“Felia. In a scribe’s serif stroke you see as if she laid bare all the secrets of her soul. You checked it a hundred times. We visited half the libraries of the world. You spoke with Janus Borig a dozen times. There was no mistake.”

Her hands lay in her lap like dead birds. “My love,” she says. “I was young and so, so full of myself. So proud. What if we’re wrong?”

“If we’re wrong, it will be terrible. Pointless sacrifices, meaningless deaths, talent wasted, and fortunes burned for nothing, as happens every day in these satrapies. But if we’re right . . . If we’re right but we blink—if we’re right but we’re not strong enough to do what must be done—all the world will pay. You will see
all
your sons die. You will bury me. You will see the Chromeria burn and the Jaspers awash in blood. You will live to see the beginning of the Blinder’s thousand-year reign. Felia, it is because you are a great heart coupled with a great mind that Orholam has trusted you with this yoke beside me. A lesser soul would break.”

“I
am
breaking!” she says. And tears explode.

A slave peeks in at the door, but I wave her away.

I can’t go to Felia. I barely can stand myself. This was to be the burden we would carry together, but if she is fallen, I can’t let her drag me down.

“For Orholam’s sake, stand,” I say. “My love, please.”

For long moments, she is incapable of speech. She tries to weep quietly, but can’t. “But . . . our sons!” she chokes out.

The words are barely discernible through her weeping, and part of me despises her for being weak. I need her now, and she thinks of the impossible.

I know better than to say, ‘We can have more sons.’ She will never share my bed again if I appear so callous. Nay, she will never so much as look at me again.

‘
Of red cunning, the youngest son cleaves father and father and father and son.’

How I loathe prophecy. It could mean anything or nothing. Which fathers, which son or sons? Which generation? It’s worthless, meaningless. So why does it occur to me now?

I know why.

Sevastian
. Curse you, Ulbear, curse you, Orea—and curse You, too, Orholam. How can I give You my son?

Kip didn’t know why it was that when you think someone is trying to kill you, it should be mildly disappointing to find out that they aren’t.

They’d prepared for an enemy trap as they approached this little town. They’d arranged signals, scouted twice, set backup plans and rally points. Mostly they’d just thought they knew what was going to happen. And they’d been wrong. Which made Kip worry they’d fallen into another trap.

They’d wasted time, and they’d arrived at Apple Grove too late.

“Breaker, you need to come see this,” Winsen said. His blue-and-yellow-stained eyes looked uneasy. Kip had never seen Winsen look uneasy.

“Just tell me it’s not more of the dead,” Kip said. He was in a black mood.

They’d arrived too late to stop the White King’s armada before it launched from the next town over, and too late to stop a massacre here. They’d expected to be too late for the armada, but the massacre didn’t make any sense.

“Not dead,” Winsen said, “though I thought he was at first.”

Kip mounted up and followed him, swinging Tisis into the saddle behind him. Cruxer, Ben-hadad, and Ferkudi fell in immediately.

The town hadn’t been burned. It hadn’t been disturbed in any way, merely left neglected, as if everyone had decided to leave while unaccountably abandoning their every worldly possession. The town was empty except for children between the ages of maybe one and three years old.

Everyone old enough to speak had been killed.

No massacre felt right, but this one felt very wrong.
Strange
wrong. Men inflamed with Atirat’s lust for destruction don’t leave buildings standing that they could burn. Those who massacre entire villages don’t usually spare the young. Nor, afterward, do they pile up the bodies and burn them in an orderly manner until the ashes obscure what had happened, obviously staying to feed the bodies back into the hottest flames until every part is consumed.

It was careful, and massacres aren’t careful work.

They’d done a decent job of hiding what they’d done, but Kip’s war hounds could smell the tale.

Kip’s first hope was that all the missing had been kidnapped by slavers, even as he wondered at what a world it was where one could
hope
such a thing. But the hounds smelled no departing tracks for those adults and older children. The people of Apple Grove had been rounded up, forced to give up valuables and jewelry, moved into a field, and slaughtered there. Maybe three hundred of them.

One of Kip’s men found the stolen jewelry, all of it arrayed neatly on a table in one of the houses, as if asking to be taken by whoever came along.

The young children who had been allowed to live had been left with plenty of water and food.

But still. From everything they could tell—the war hounds had trouble with abstracts like units of time, but their handlers could make certain estimates that were confirmed by other trackers and evidence—the massacre had happened three or four weeks ago. These remaining children shouldn’t have still been alive.

Not that all of them were. The war hounds led them to fresh graves. Small ones.

“Someone’s been taking care of them,” Tisis said. “They’re too young to have survived this long by themselves.”

Men and women from Kip’s retinue were trying to comfort the children now, trying to engage them in play. It worked with a few. Others were still too traumatized to do anything more than mechanically chew the food offered them.

“What I’m taking you to see may be the answer to who’s been taking care of the kids,” Winsen said. “Or maybe he was part of the murdering. Hell, maybe both.”

They rode up the main track away from the empty village for a few minutes, and then cut over into farmland, passing through apple orchards that had been tended until recently.

They rode up a hillside orchard to where the top flattened out.

Who massacres a village, doesn’t take any loot, doesn’t burn anything, and kills everyone except the kids too young to speak? Why would the White King hide what he’d done here? He’d massacred other cities and deliberately left people alive to spread the tale.

And why did the name of the town seem familiar? Kip was certain he’d heard it before, but he must not have thought it was important at the time, because he hadn’t locked it in his memory.

“How’d you even think to come way out here?” Kip asked Winsen.

“Big Leo said something about this place from his parents’ traveling days with their troupe. I wanted to get away from the brats’ crying and thought I’d find some quiet out at these ruins. Didn’t expect
this
.”

They emerged from the orderly rows of trees into a wide clearing. It was almost a perfect circle. Even the great limbs of the old apple trees had been trimmed long, long ago to not intrude into the circle. Younger limbs did intrude, though, telling a tale of uneven husbandry or failing respect for old tradition.

In the center of the grassy circle stood a stone plinth, a few feet across and only as tall as a man. It was no great monument. Oddly, the earth around the base of the plinth was freshly cracked, as if something restless lay beneath it.

On top of the small plinth an adolescent sat cross-legged, hands draped over his knees. He was olive-skinned, with his raven hair in a short ponytail, naked to the waist, stringy rather than merely skinny, a leather band tied around one bicep, and wearing the deerskin trousers of a Blood Forest hunter. But in one relaxed hand he held a hell-stone dagger that was surely worth more than two fistfuls of rubies.

It appeared he’d been using the dagger on himself, for his body was encrusted with blood old and new in shades of scarlet and crimson and brown. He’d striped himself, perhaps in ritual mourning, lines down his forearms, lines on his face. Cuts deep enough to scar but not to maim, with older wounds poulticed but the blood not washed from his skin nor from his cruor-encrusted trousers.

Fresh blood coursed down his forehead into his left eye. The boy didn’t look up as Kip dismounted and came forward. Kip gestured for the others to stay back.

They ignored him; everything about this young hunter spoke death.

Some intuition held Kip back from speaking. He came before the young man and sat on the ground, legs akimbo in deliberate imitation, as if he were a disciple at the foot of his master.

I thought he was young. I was wrong.

The boy had eyes as old as a great oak that has seen the leaves brown and fall a thousand times, blossoming from green to grave, from bower to bier, leafy souls soaking the soil and feeding the tree again, like a cannibal hungry for the fruit of his own body.

Kip sat still, staring up at him. The old young man looked at him with the patience of the zephyrs chewing a mountain down, a quick form with a slow intent. The blood obscuring his left eye reminded Kip of the Parian tradition of the eye of mercy and the eye of justice, the good eye and the evil.

With the shedding of blood comes blindness.

And slowly, Kip’s mimicry became imitation, and imitation became communion. Communion not with each other, but each settling into the cold embrace of time and their mortality, separate souls in the night, but the same night, different journeys to the same end.

And then, as the blood dried on the young man’s obsidian blade and on his face, he became slowly familiar.

A swirl of the wind brought the young ancient’s wild scent to Kip’s nose, and suddenly Kip was gripped by blank, black fear. He was sitting before one of the most dangerous men in history.

Voice raw, Kip said, “Greetings,
Sealgaire na Scian
, Daimhin Web.”

Daimhin’s chest stopped in midbreath. Then, in a rocky voice like a man waking from a too-long slumber, “She said you would know me, Guile.”

Like a rusty lock cracking open at the key that was Daimhin’s name spoken aloud, Kip remembered the man’s card, all of it: touching the white stag with his very hand, the village braggart who disbelieved him, the unrequited love, the hunt, then coming home to the village burned to the ground by the White King’s outriders.

After that came the memories in blood: the hunting of men, dressing them like wild game, hung upside down, skinned and drained of blood to be found by their comrades outside their very tents. He remembered a dozen cruel games invented to terrorize the invading Blood Robes.

Who was the woman who’d told him of Kip coming?

“The Third Eye,” Kip said.

“She sent her message with this. It’s some leather I’ve never encountered.” Daimhin gestured to the armband he wore above his bicep. “It intrigued me more than her words. Arrogant, I thought her. She claimed to see the future. But how dare she tell
me
what to do? I have become a god of vengeance, a spirit of the forest. She bade me come here. To stop this. Then she begged. Words as wind to twist my will.”