The Burning White (67 page)

“You . . . you
cunt
!”

“Get out,” she said, ignoring her bonds, ignoring that he was on top of her and she was helpless. “And never speak to me again.”

“I know how to break a woman,” he hissed, spit flying in her face. “I’ve done it before. It’s not so hard.”

“You’ll break nothing here,” Karris said. “You’ll walk out that door with your tail between your legs like the cur you are.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. He lifted the hand with the dagger. “You stupid bitch, I’ ll—”

He cut off as two spear blades slid into view. One sharp blade slipped beneath his wrist, so the dagger couldn’t descend without him slicing off his own hand. The other blade pressed along the side of Zymun’s neck.

Gill Greyling stood behind Zymun, spears trembling in his grip, not with fear but with rage.

Karris had never been happier to see anyone in her life.

“Give me the excuse,” Gill said. His voice was raspy. The man had been on edge perpetually since his brother died.

Zymun eased up, carefully dropping the dagger on the carpet, far out, raising his hands slowly and releasing the luxin to dust. “Could have sworn I barred that door,” he said, good-naturedly, as if it had all been a joke. He rocked back on his heels and stood slowly.

Derisively, Karris laughed at him as if he were the stupidest man she’d ever met. “As if the Blackguard doesn’t have ways to open the doors here?”

His face dropped, and the mask slipped to show the depth of the ugliness within him. He couldn’t stand disrespect.

She only hoped he’d attack.

Gill would kill him—he wouldn’t try to wound or incapacitate him, she knew. She knew her Blackguards.

She stood up and brushed the luxin dust off.

Now she was free, though, and this was all out in the open. She was honestly relieved. No more pretenses.

“Zymun,” she said. “Until tonight, I didn’t scheme against you. Not ever. But now I will. Thank you for bringing your true nature to light. History will judge me for giving birth to a monster. But at least I have the decency to hate him.”

But his dead eyes betrayed nothing even of rage now. He walked out the door, then stopped and turned. “Oh, may I have my dagger, please? It was a gift from my grandfather.”

“Try to take it,” Gill said dangerously. “See what happens.”

Zymun didn’t move.

“What’s your name again, Blackguard?” Zymun demanded.

“You don’t remember?” Gill asked, looking at him contemptuously. “A true Guile would.”

“I have news about our hunt,” Quentin said. He furrowed his thick brows. “Good news, barely good news, and definitely not good news.”

Teia had managed to pull her shit together, somewhat, and hadn’t asked Quentin for a hug the other day, despite having told him the outlines of how she’d killed Ravi and what she’d learned. She’d fled then to her solitude, only giving him the name ‘Atevia Zelorn.’

She still wanted that hug, actually, but . . . Quentin was so damned
awkward
, and he didn’t like to be touched. It would be selfish. And probably not satisfying. Right? “Go ahead,” she said.

She’d asked to hear about his project first; it gave her time to gather her wits.

“Easy one first,” he said. “Zelorn is indeed a wine merchant. Very successful one, too. Well-known among the nobility. Karris didn’t have her people dig too deeply, though, lest it alarm anyone.” He described where to find Zelorn’s house, and his profile: physical description, style of clothing, three kids, six slaves, various servants between home and business, two long-term mistresses, and a pretty young wife who spent a lot of time crying about his many affairs, the pursuit of which seemed to be his main pastime.

Other than being a pagan priest, Teia thought.

“That was the
shallow
digging?” Teia asked.

“That’s exactly how I reacted,” Quentin said. “High Lady Guile said, ‘Of course. Anyone in the upper nobility would dig that much into anyone they were considering doing even casual business with.’ ”

“Sometimes I think the nobles are just like the rest of us, and then other times . . .” Teia said.

“Also exactly my reaction,” Quentin said.

“But that was the good news, though, wasn’t it?” Teia asked. Though that was all helpful, she could’ve learned it herself—though any time she went out in public was a time she was risking Sharp finding her.

“Afraid so. Now, about the other project,” he said. He opened a folio on his desk. “These are copies of all the final plans for each of the Chromeria’s seven towers. Builders’ notes, allotments of slaves, materials requests, stockpiles, and overages. Everything I could find. No budgets, irritatingly, which is what keyed me in—but I’m getting ahead of myself. If there’s a hidden room in the Chromeria anywhere, it should show up here.”

One of the jobs Teia had given Quentin was to search the Chromeria for the Old Man of the Desert’s secret room. She knew he had one, if not more. She herself had lost caches of clothing and money and weapons simply to servants or strangers stumbling across them; there was no way the Old Man was going to risk the same happening to his code books; there was no way he’d risk someone interrupting him as he penned or decoded his secret messages. Secrecy required privacy, and the bigger the secret the more privacy required.

“That sounds pretty good . . . can you not read them? Are they in code or something?” Teia asked.

“No, I can read them. Now. I had to study up on construction techniques and terminology. Took me a while,” the slender young man said.

“So . . . the bad news is . . . ?”

“The plans show no space for any hidden rooms at all,” Quentin said. “Everything is clear and public.”

“Okay . . .”

“But I found an exterminator’s report of a rat’s nest . . . right here under the young discipuli’s barracks.”

Teia looked at the plans, but for her they might as well have been written in Old Tyrean. “Explain?”

“See, in the diagram here, there’s no space at all. This is supposed to be hardwood planking directly over stone. But the rat catcher’s report mentions finding a rat king . . . Do you know what that is?” He looked ill just speaking about it.

“No.”

“You don’t want to. Regardless, he said the rat king was two paces high. According to the plans, that’s impossible. There’s no space for it. So the plans are wrong. So I went outside, and using some trigonometry and an astrolabe, I was able to calculate the heights of the towers.”

“And the Prism’s Tower was taller than these plans say,” Teia guessed.

“No.
All
of the towers are taller than these plans say. Four paces taller! And these are the most recent plans. So that means there isn’t just one secret room, there’s the equivalent of one secret
floor. In every tower
.”

“How do you hide an entire secret floor?”

“Cleverly, I guess. Maybe not all in one place? People look at the towers from the outside all the time, and point out their rooms and the rooms of their friends. I don’t even know how you do it, honestly. I’m no master builder, but whoever did this certainly was. Of course, I am pretty sure that they must have the true plans
somewhere
. For the inevitable repairs, or to keep later workmen and servants away from them, if nothing else. So I’d guess the Black would have those, or the promachos.”

“My money’s on Andross Guile. The man’s a maelstrom of secrets.”

“I concur,” Quentin said.

“Quen,” Teia said. “No one says, ‘I concur.’ ”

“I know, but it bothers you,” he said with a quick grin.

She forced a smile, but then returned to the task. “It’s not like we can ask Carver Black,” she said. She sighed. Should she break into his rooms? His office? How long would it take her to find a book he’d hidden? Could she spare the time from hunting the Order itself to surveil him? What reason would Carver Black have to check the old tower plans? He might have those documents, not ever check them.

And who was to say Carver Black even knew? Would the Old Man of the Desert hide in a place Carver Black knew? Was Carver Black himself in the Order?

She sighed. It all made her head hurt. She would need years to untangle all this fully. And it wasn’t like she could kill Carver Black without anyone noticing. No, her best bet wasn’t to go after individuals to find if they were in the Order; it was to let the Order come to her. She rubbed her jaw gingerly.

She had to figure out some way to mark every person who attended their Feast of the Dying Light, the night before Sun Day. Maybe in the changing room? Could she mark their clothing?

Then Karris’s soldiers could sweep down on the traitors on Sun Day morning and wipe them out in one fell swoop.

They could celebrate Sun Day by putting the Old Man of the Desert up on Orholam’s Glare.

There
was one man Teia would happily watch cook, screaming in agony as he died.

If she could survive so long. She rubbed her jaw again.

“Tooth still hurting?” Quentin asked. “I thought you were going to go see the White’s barber about that before all this even started.”

“I did. Not that I can tell, but he said it’s better now than it would have been if I hadn’t come to see him.”

“A nonfalsifiable statement. Clever.”

“I’m supposed to chew some herbs to help, but I always forget,” she said. “I don’t know what irritates me more: that he may be a charlatan or that this may be my fault because I don’t follow instructions.” She heard the whinging in her voice, and shut up.

Quentin looked at her, and didn’t fill the sudden silence.

“It’s killing me,” she said.

“Your tooth? Not your tooth.”

She sat on Quentin’s bed. “Quentin, you’re on a first-name basis with the guy: how can Orholam allow this?”

“This?” Quentin asked uncertainly.

“I’m a butcher, Quen. I’ve taken to scoring a notch on my knife for each kill.”

He said nothing, but he wasn’t fast enough to hide the brief flash of distaste on his lips.

“Not to brag about the number. To remind myself. Because I was forgetting. They all run together until I dream: Oh, the way that one slave gurgled on his blood because he bit his tongue so hard in his fear of me before I even touched him. How that other girl wept from the moment the door opened and never even got a word out because she was crying so hard. I remember how I despised her, how I wished she would die as bravely as some of the others had. Do you know, they gave me a break? The Order. Said that too many slaves had disappeared, and they needed to hold off until some more refugees came to the island so no one would get suspicious—and I felt
disappointed
because it would interrupt my studies. Disappointed. For only a moment, yes. But what the hell is that? I don’t want to be this person I’m becoming, Quentin. Why would Orholam allow this?”

“ ‘If Orholam can do something, and if He cares about us, why doesn’t He?’ ”

She nodded. “So what’s the answer?”

“The answer’s simple for the mind, but impossible for the heart. And the question, honestly asked, always comes from a wound.” He said no more.

She waited, then understood. “So you’re not going to tell me.”

“Not when you’re hurting and angry. You’ll reject the answer, and then later you’ll think of it as an answer you already found lacking and perhaps you’ll neglect to consider it again. Having found a door’s handle bristling with needles, you’ll tell yourself it’s probably locked anyway. When you come to the big questions, before you can get a true answer, you need to know whether you’re approaching them rationally or emotionally.”

A Blackguard guards his emotions, Teia thought. “So you’re not going to tell me the rational answer until I can approach the question rationally,” she said.

“It’s not that it’s a big Magisterium secret. You could go ask any luxiat and get the same answer today that I’ll give you when you’re ready—though some will phrase it more or less eloquently. But in my estimation, you’ll profit more from it later. If you disagree, you’re free to ask them.”

“You’re asking me to trust you when I don’t understand something hard for me,” she said. “That’s supposed to parallel something, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean it to, but perhaps it does. Thanks for thinking I’m smarter than I am.”

She pursed her lips to keep from smiling, though the hollow in her chest still ached.

“Now,” he said, “you were abrupt last time. Seemed on edge. You killed this slaver, Ravi Satish. Easy kill?”

Sticking a hammer in his head? Easier than I thought. Fooling him? Pathetically easy. The rest? “Won’t trouble my sleep,” she said.

“And you’re going out to hunt your old mistress presently. You’re going to kill her?”

She nodded once, sharp as a falling guillotine.

“This is your first job that isn’t purely professional.”

“It’s necessary,” she said, quick and defensive. “If she contacts Murder Sharp, it brings him to her, and that puts him way too close to me. Plus she intends to contract a hit on a Guile. Not Andross, I’m sure. Sharp
probably
wouldn’t take the job, but how could I explain that to Karris?”

“Those are all good reasons. Sufficient reasons,” Quentin said. He let it hang there.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to cover it over.

“Yeah?”

Teia felt stricken. He knew she wasn’t being honest, and yet his eyes were filled with compassion. “She’s low-level, Quen. I mean, she’s a noble, so she’d rise quickly in their ranks . . . but she told Ravi she only joined them to try to get revenge on the Guiles for . . . something. Which, come to think of it, she ranted to me about a long time ago. Her brother was the governor of Garriston, and Gavin Guile killed him as a traitor or something? I don’t know exactly. But it means she’s not a true believer. And I know where the Order’s meeting now. She doesn’t
need
to die, not exactly. I mean, she’s committed capital offenses, and she’s covered under my writ, but if she were anyone else, and she got away? It wouldn’t trouble me. She wouldn’t be forming a new Order ten years from now. But I want to kill her almost as much as I want the Old Man.”