The Burning White (70 page)

But this was no time for thoughts or second thoughts.

This isn’t payback. I am merely predator, you are merely prey. No torture. No final words.

Teia squeezed the nerves in each of Aglaia’s shoulders and watched her arms fall unfeeling to her sides. As the woman looked down, wondering why her arms had dropped, Teia grabbed that sensible bun with one hand and rammed the dagger into the back of Aglaia’s neck. With paryl illuminating the gap between skull and spine, Teia’s blade slid in as easily as if Aglaia had lubed herself up for the unwanted penetration with olive oil, and penetrated to the hilt.

Aglaia’s body went limp instantly, but Teia held her in place by her hair, that beautiful blonde hair that provided such a nice grip, and guided her back into her seat.

Teia wrenched the blade back and forth to ensure she’d fully severed the spine, then left it in Aglaia’s neck as she grabbed a rag from a pocket.

She barely got the rag in place around the blade to blot up the blood before it leaked onto the fine chair’s back.

Teia rolled Aglaia out of the chair and onto the bare floor, face-down, dagger up.

Then Teia left her prey and locked the door.

When she came back, she waited a few more heartbeats, and then used paryl to feel for life. You could punch a hole in a man’s heart and he might yet move as you made a full count to ten. The body could be stubborn. It was faster with the spine, but it never hurt to be sure.

Aglaia Crassos was dead. Easy.

A bit of blood and spinal fluid seeped out around the dagger’s blade and into the rag, but with the wound elevated and the heart stopped, there was no more bleeding than that. Teia had picked a short dagger deliberately so it wouldn’t pierce all the way through the woman’s neck. By design, but also by luck, she’d severed the spine without also slicing the big arteries in the neck.

The dead woman had pissed herself, but only a little, and her petticoats had held most of it. A few dribbles had escaped onto the wood floor and none onto the upholstered seat of the chair. Excellent.

Lest it get stained, Teia removed the master cloak and got to work. She untied the two bags she’d tied tight around her waist. The first held half a sev of rocks. The second was larger and made of waxed canvas.

Unhurried, Teia laid out that bag next to Aglaia’s body and opened it. Then, carefully, she put the body onto the bag: lifting and moving feet, then knees, then hips, shoulders, and arms, keeping the dead woman’s face down and wound up always. She slowly stuffed the body inside the bag, buttoning the buttons as she was able.

Then she left off buttoning the bag and cleaned the floor fastidiously. Last, she slid the dagger out of Aglaia’s spine and cleaned the blade, and tucked the rag into the bag as well.

From here it got dicey.

She tested dragging the body, being carefully to keep the wound elevated.

Easy . . . on stone. Teia’s disposal site was a latrine at the end of a long hallway—a long hallway with one of those runner carpets that’s easier to kick out of the way than to keep in place. And Teia was going to be dragging a body down that. Dammit.

There was no way she could add the weight of all those rocks and do that.

That meant she was going to have to drag the body down the hall, then come back, get the rocks, take them down the hall, open the bag, put the rocks in, then lever the body somehow into the latrine.

If she were caught, would she kill the servant who saw her? How about a slave?

Yes, she thought. She’d already decided that. Why did she keep revisiting the choice? In this war, if innocents had to die, innocents had to die.

More
innocents, she thought, seeing the faces again.

She pulled Aglaia’s body out into the hall, rolling it until she got to the edge of the damned carpet runner. No blood seeped out, though on this patterned red carpet it wouldn’t have been disastrous.

Hugging the corpse against herself to be able to pull it down the hall without leaking blood was somehow less repulsive to Teia than it would have been to hug Aglaia in life. This was simply meat. The vile part of it had departed, her spirit had been a putrescence worse than the merely physical odors of urine and decay.

Teia made it to the latrines. No problems. There was no blood. It was all clean. Professional.

Teia jogged back and grabbed her rocks. Made it back, put the rocks into the waxed bag with the body, and closed it again. The latrine opening wasn’t overly wide, but mercifully Lady Crassos had been a big believer in girdles and the bag was cinched tight.

“One last thing, Lady,” Teia said. She drew the short dagger again and stabbed it low in the corpse’s stomach to pierce the intestines. She almost gagged at the gases it released as she withdrew the knife, but those were smells not out of place in a latrine.

She pierced the bag in several other places. The stones at Aglaia’s feet would pull those lowest, so Teia made the holes near her head.

Then she began stuffing the body down the latrine. Bit by bit, each grunt and heave a labor pang, Teia squeezed Aglaia’s body through the death canal and out of this life.

Shit you were, my lady, and to shit you return.

But the body only dropped a few feet. With a muffled clang, the rocks inside hit metal. Teia froze for a moment, then remembered. This mansion’s indoor latrines had a metal plate below that swung open to drop waste and then swung closed again to keep the odors below from being blown constantly back up into the house.

Teia found the handle, and with effort because of the weight of the body on the plate, was able to slide it aside.

Lady Aglaia plopped like an especially large turd into the effluvia below. Teia slid the plate closed, went invisible, and waited in the hall.

With every corpse she left, Teia was inviting the Order to suspect her existence, so every kill had to account for the body somehow. Here, Teia had already scouted the mansion for disposal areas, going as far as directing paryl gas between the walls and eventually down the latrines. Here there was a holding area for the sewage—a septic pit?—Teia hadn’t known anything about sewage.

But with what she’d learned from Quentin, she’d made her bag. Enough murdered bodies washed ashore every week on the Jaspers that Teia knew they bloated with gases and floated to the surface, white ghastly things. So she needed the rocks to keep Aglaia’s body down. She’d pierced the stomach to allow the release of accumulating gases and pierced the bag to make sure it didn’t inflate and buoy the body to the surface.

Their hope—they hadn’t done this before—was that the body would decay naturally in the sewage but that the bag would slow the rate of decay. They didn’t want the body to bob to the surface, where it had a chance of being seen. They also didn’t want it to decay so quickly that anyone using the latrine would smell death.

Instead—they hoped—the air that blew through the sewage ducting would have a chance to take the smell of decay a little bit at a time.

Teia almost left before she remembered the hat box. As she slipped back into Lady Aglaia’s chambers, she saw a slave on her way back up the steps to clean out the room.

Teia grabbed the hat box with its Order mask and robes and walked to the closet.

Damn. Me.

Aglaia had gotten the box down from the highest shelf she could reach. Unfortunately, Aglaia had been significantly taller than Teia was. The shelf was too high for Teia.

Teia hopped and tried to shove the box into its spot.

Not even close to high enough.

Oh, for Orholam’s sake, a stupid hat box!

But any wrong detail could give her away—even stupid ones. She had to be a ghost, and ghosts don’t leave evidence. She looked at the door. She had only one shot at this.

If she missed, it was going to be a disaster. This closet was a mess. Hat boxes were piled upon each other in huge piles. Even putting one on top of the pile with too much force might make the whole collection collapse.

Teia backed up and took a running leap and stabbed the costume box toward its spot with a little toss at the end.

She landed on her toes, in the closet, a hair’s breadth away from colliding with the entire stack. She tipped forward. She couldn’t see anything to balance herself against that wouldn’t knock down everything.

But just as the door slid open, she regained her balance and threw the master cloak closed about her. But she stepped on the hem of the cloak as she stepped backward and fell—

Gracefully. She spun, taking the fall on her hip and tucking her knees so the cloak spun around her, covering them.

A servant walked in, yawning. She saw Aglaia’s half-full tray of food.

She sat and ate with gusto. She didn’t even look around. She hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

Teia took a few deep breaths to steady herself and regain her grip of paryl. She’d come this close to losing it. And that would have meant another dead innocent, another body to dispose of.

While the girl was distracted, Teia stood. Then she got her first look at the hat box. She had left the closet door open, of course, and the hat box was perched at the top of its tower. Precariously.

The air billowing gently into the room from the open door was enough to set the whole stack swaying.

If Teia jumped and missed, it would all come down—and having just jumped, her cloak would be swirling around chaotically at the very moment the servant girl looked toward the sound.

There was nothing Teia could do but pray she didn’t have to kill this pimply sixteen-year-old kitchen girl.

So she did nothing. The girl finished eating in no time and stood. She glanced toward the closet and walked over.

Oh, Orholam dammit, what had she seen?

But the girl just walked to the closet, stood on tiptoe and pushed the hat box back into place, and closed the closet. Then she grabbed the tray and left without a look back.

Teia breathed easily for the first time in many minutes.

She left quietly: out onto the balcony, a quick climb down to the street, and she was on her way to the Order’s meeting to find the priest. It wasn’t until she was halfway there that she realized that with this kill, she didn’t feel damned, she didn’t feel disgusted, she didn’t feel satisfied. She hadn’t felt anything at all.

“Can someone explain to me again why we drafters are charging toward an enemy that can paralyze drafters?” Winsen deadpanned. “I’m so confused. We
are
all drafters, right?”

“We’ll get there before they raise the bane,” Kip said.

Of course he and Cruxer hadn’t gone alone. The Mighty had all come. ‘Oh, so if I’m going to be in egregious danger, we all are?’ Kip had asked. ‘We didn’t make it that far in the training,’ Cruxer had said.

Actually, not all of the Mighty had come. Though the new one, Einin, had joined them, Tisis hadn’t. She’d been on a skimmer farther away, already formulating plans for Big Jasper with her own command. Kip hadn’t waited to consult with her, much less asked her to come—but time was of the essence, and she was no good in this kind of fight.

Not that that was why she’d be furious.

Now the Mighty sped across the waves together. Their skimmers were able to interlock together, and with all of them working the reeds, they moved as fast as Izemrasen had.

“And you’re so sure of that why?” Winsen asked.

“Because the White King is greedy,” Kip said. “He likes a big spectacle. At Ru, he triggered the ambush when the bulk of our fleet was centered right over his trap. It destroyed the most ships possible with one stroke, but he’d have been better served if he’d waited until most of the ships were past the trap. He would have sunk fewer in the first strike, but he’d have trapped everyone else in the bay where he could kill them at his leisure.”

“So what’s that mean for us now?” Cruxer asked.

“It means he’ll hold off until the last moment to spring his trap.”

“Isn’t the last moment sort of . . . now?” Winsen asked.

Kip turned on him. “What do you want, Winsen? You want to let all our friends die? I didn’t get the scout’s report until I got it. You want to live forever? Get out. I’m sick and tired of wondering if I can count on you.”

“Bugger off,” Winsen said. “You’re the boss. Fine. Some accident of birth put you one notch above the rest of us. Fine. It’s one notch, not twenty. You’re the boss. I’ll follow you. That’s what we do. I’ll follow you to my death today, or some other day if we get lucky, but don’t expect me to enjoy it or kiss your ass on the way.”

“Your bitching hurts morale,” Kip said. “It weakens us.”

The craft slowed perceptibly as Winsen stopped drafting, irate. “
I
weaken us?! Me?”

“You can be a whiny little shit sometimes,” Ben-hadad said.

Winsen looked around to the others, and seemed baffled at their agreement.

Big Leo said, “This one time after I shit myself as we were escaping the Chromeria, I was cleaning my trousers and the stain . . . I was like, what! Winsen, what are you doing in my pants?”

Winsen’s rage evaporated as they all laughed. “Dammit, Big Leo.”

“Wait, you shit yourself in battle, too?” Ferkudi asked.

“Just the once,” Big Leo said defensively. “It was my first fight!” Then he side-eyed Ferk. “Too?”

Everyone looked at Ferkudi.

“It was just a little pellet!” Ferkudi protested.

They laughed, and the blowing wind took their strife for the moment.

Kip looked over at Winsen, who met his gaze.

“I’m in,” Winsen said. “I’ll try, all right? I just don’t want . . .” He wanted to say more, but he stopped himself.

It brought their present circumstances back into focus, though, even without him saying it. The Mighty looked at one another. That look was worse than scoffing. It was resignation.

“Good day for it,” Ben-hadad said, looking at the beautiful blue sky.

“Good day for what?” Ferkudi asked.

Kip sighed. “He means it’s a good day to die. Thank you very much, Ben.”

“I never understood why people say that,” Ferkudi said. “I don’t really want to die any day, and most other people don’t, either, I mean, except for suicides, right? So isn’t
every
day a bad day to die? Ben-hadad, why
did
you say that?”