The Burning White (71 page)

“Ferk,” Cruxer said. “Ferk.”

“It’s one of the things for the Box, isn’t it?” Ferkudi asked.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

For Ferkudi, the Box of Things That Don’t Make Sense But Make Sense to Other People Don’t Worry About It It’s Not Important was filled with many things: why people go back to lovers who treat them badly, why people like cats (pretty much the same thing), metaphors involving cutting cheese, why one would eat intestine, why women don’t spend all their time looking at themselves naked, why the number system was based on ten but the time system wasn’t, why it’s normal for dogs to lick their balls in public but Blackguards aren’t even allowed to clear their underwear from cleaving the moon, and why he got that question so often about being dropped on his head. As long as he had Cruxer’s assurance that it wasn’t important for him to figure out, he was perfectly content to put things in that box and put it away in a dark mental corner.

“Anyone feel it yet?” Kip asked.

Head shakes all around.

“How stupid is Caul Azmith?” Winsen said. “It’s the same trap as last time. How can one man lose two fleets to the same trap?”

It was a good question. Not that the man wasn’t dumb enough to do exactly that, but surely someone would have said something.

But it was finally obvious to Kip, unbelievable as the answer seemed. He said, “We killed a bane at Ru. They think that means it’s gone forever. They don’t believe us that the White King has any other bane at all. They must have gotten word that a lightly defended fleet was coming, and they rushed out to sink it. Not a bad strategy.”

“If we were lying to them,” Einin muttered.

“Why would they think we were lying to them?!” Ben-hadad demanded.

“They knew we were in a bad spot. We were asking for men and money. In the same kind of situation, Dúnbheo lied to us to get our help, why wouldn’t we do the same?” Kip said.

They shared curses.

“What’s the battle plan?” Big Leo asked.

“That depends on . . . Are those sails?” Kip said.

“There it is,” Cruxer said.

It was exactly as Izemrasen had described, except now the two fleets had almost closed within cannon range. The White King’s ships were bundled in a knot so tight it was impossible to see how many of them there were from Kip’s vantage, but the Chromeria fleet was enveloping them with rank upon rank of ships.

The front ranks broke apart, every other ship slowly, slowly turning broadside. Then flashes of light blinked across the waves, followed by billows of black smoke floating up toward their sails—curiously silent from this far away. Those ships had turned forward again, as ahead of them those ships that had kept going now took their chance to turn broadside.

It was only then that the sound of the first cannons arrived, a distant thunder from that slow storm now covering most of the horizon.

No fire was returned from the White King’s ships, and Kip couldn’t see any result from the shelling, though scores must have died in the moments he’d been watching.

After the speed and chaos and dexterity required for ground combat, this naval positioning seemed graceless, ponderous. Give a man a sword and tell him to chase down another man, and the contest was decided within minutes; one ship chasing another could easily last all day.

And yet that apparent gracelessness was deceiving, Kip knew. There was a reason why famous admirals were famous. When you had to turn a ship weighing tens of thousands of sevens with only wind, and waves, and muscle, and had to judge exactly the rates at which your enemies could do the same, so that you could arrive at some future position where you could release a broadside at them before they could release one at you, it required a special brilliance to be successful. Add in needing to adjust any of your figures due to your slaves’ exhaustion, injuries to crew, the weight of your ship and of your opponent’s, timing to reload, then with possible damage to sails, rigging, oars, decks, or rudder, and you had to be brilliant to maneuver a single ship. Commanding a fleet must require another order of thinking altogether—especially when also having to deal with the egos of your subcommanders, like the idiot Caul Azmith, who’d broken ranks.

The single maneuver of interspersed fire, correctly executed, told Kip that whoever was admiral of the Chromeria’s fleet now, he or she was probably a genius.

A genius who was about to suffer a crushing defeat.

“Too late to get the Chromeria to pull back,” Kip said. “So we’re looking for the White King’s superviolet drafters, maybe in separate small boats. It seems the superviolets have to do something to trigger the bane to rise—so if we can kill them before they do that, we’ve got a chance.”

“I don’t see any boats out alone,” Cruxer said.

“Winsen, you’ve got the best eyes,” Kip said.

“Nothing. None alone,” the young man said.

“If they’re trying to get encircled,” Cruxer said, “and they have more than one bane, then maybe they’re planning to raise all the bane, all around them at once.”

Kip caught where he was going. The bane would rise in a giant ring, matching the encircling Chromeria fleet—and destroying all of it simultaneously. “So the superviolets who are raising the bane have to be in the middle of the formation. The command skimmer’s too big to penetrate between those ships. We’ll have to split. Ben, I know you said you were working on making the
Blue Falcon IX
submersible, how’s it going?”

“This is
Blue Falcon XIII
,” Ben-hadad said quickly.

“I know how you work. I see the core ideas already here. This honeycomb structure here? You told me once in some other application that that’s super strong.”

Ben-hadad expelled a breath. “Last resort, understand? And no more than maybe half speed, at
most
. Slower for you and Big Leo. Even with the wind shield reinforced to be a wave shield, either the water will sweep you off or it’ll disintegrate if you go too fast. But this generation was never meant—”

As he was speaking, an enormous cloud of ravens burst from the White King’s fleet. But there was nothing random or independent about their flight.

“Razor wings,” Einin said.

Winsen cursed aloud. The birds were will-cast to seek out rigging or crewmen and slice through them.

One of them exploded in midair.

“And they’ve figured out how to rig them to be bombs,” Winsen said. “Bomb wings. Great.”

“They can’t carry much explosive,” Kip said. “What are they doing? Ben?”

“They used pigeons before. But pigeons probably aren’t smart enough to be taught to seek out the powder kegs,” he said. “These are ravens. I’d guess they’ve will-cast them to seek out the gun decks.”

Damn. A single crazed raven flapping and cawing and threatening to explode at any moment could delay an entire gun deck from firing, and that was if it
didn’t
make it to the barrels of black powder.

“What else have they will-cast?” Ferkudi said. “Are those shark fins?”

Ben-hadad looked over at Cruxer. “Commander,” he said. “You’ve got to stop us. This is suicide.”

But Cruxer had his eyes closed. And when he opened them, a smile curled his lips and light lit his eyes. “Shh,” he said, and his voice was a whisper under the storm. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The wind behind us is greater than the wind against us.”

Ben-hadad looked back and forth at the rest of them, their faces eager and fierce. The rattle of swivel guns and muskets and the taunting shouts of both sides rolled across the waves, and only seemed to inflame the Mighty further. “Why am I the only one bothered by that being
demonstrably fucking false
?!”

Kip gave a few more instructions: where they should meet afterward, what their sign would be that they had to retreat, and a quick check that they all had their flares and hullwreckers.

“Ready to separate on your mark,” Big Leo said to Kip.

Kip knew he should be afraid. Or he should be worried that he was leading his friends to their deaths.

They might die. But he had a suspicion that they wouldn’t.

They were only a few hundred paces out now.

“Remember,” Kip said. “Nothing matters except stopping them from raising the bane. The Chromeria’s fleet can lose even if the bane stay underwater, but it will
definitely
lose if the bane rise.”

Big Leo said, “And we’ll probably die, too.”

They looked at him.

“You know, just in case anyone was lacking motivation,” the big man said.

“Be Mighty and of courage,” Kip told his friends. “Einin, stay with Cruxer. Winsen, you’re with me this time; live or die. Together.”

Winsen took his meaning, and his trust, and nodded. “Together . . . my lord.”

Kip said, “And three, two, one, mark!”

“There’s a man here to see you, High Lord Promachos.” The vice chamberlain cleared his throat as he stepped just inside Andross’s door. “A Parian. He, uh, wouldn’t give his name.”

Grinwoody was off doing Orholam knew what again. As the slave aged, he was absent more and more often, and he always pretended it was on some business for Andross and not that he was lazy and due for replacement. But in his defense, Grinwoody would never let this happen.

Andross peered at his vice chamberlain. “Do I look like a village magistrate whom strangers may approach at will on the green?”

“No, High Excellency.”

“Then
what do you mean
he wouldn’t give his name?”

“He was very convincing, milord,” one of the Blackguards at the door said, seeming intent to rescue the poor man. A new girl, Mina.

Andross sneered at her. “And this is why they used to only elevate Blackguards who could make it through the night without wetting the bed.”

She withered.

But neither moved.

“He was very compelling, my lord, and he gave proofs enough to satisfy at each station,” the other Blackguard, Presser, said.

Andross barked, “Not at this one. I’m busy. And you, Presser, you’re old enough to shave by now, aren’t you? You should know better. And keep your pup in line or I’ll kick her down to a scrub.”

“My lord, many pardons,” the vice chamberlain said. “He said if you put him off, to remind you of what a young woman said of you, forty years ago now, ‘A man of Parnassian storms and no wonder, for in you is joined a volcanic wit . . .’ ”

It was a crash of thunder heard when the sky is blue.

“What? He said no more?” Andross demanded.

“I asked. He knew no more of it, dangling as it is.”

It took Andross so long he felt embarrassed. His memory—No! It had not failed him. Not yet. He was not so old. The scroll of years was merely so long, so densely packed with incident, and not filed in a library year by year. The man being a Parian had thrown him.

For she had been Atashian.

His first love.
Ninharissi
. He smiled despite himself.

No one had been on that balcony with them that day. No one else would dare send a messenger with such a ‘proof,’ either, that mixture of a challenge—could Andross remember so far back with such a small prompt?—but also respect, believing that of course Andross would remember back so far with such a small prompt.

The phrase had not even come at the climax of their relationship, though it had come on the night that had changed the entire course of both their lives, and of history itself.

“Shall I send him away?” Presser asked, shifting from foot to foot, rubbing circles awkwardly on one of his buttocks.

It was impossible that she should send him a message. No. Not exactly impossible. And it
was
impossible that it could have been sent by anyone else.

“Bring him in.”

Andross had entertained a hope that he might recognize the old man. He didn’t. Dark skin faded by the years, clothing fine and well maintained but showing wear. Thus, middling nobility or a rich merchant dressing a bit above his station. There were probably a dozen of the former sort that Andross could call to mind, and several hundred of the latter that he hadn’t bothered to memorize.

“High Excellency,” the man said after the longest possible pause and with the bare minimum tilt of his head.

A lordling, then. A merchant wouldn’t dare so little respect.

“Do you know how the rest of that sentence goes?” Andross asked.

“No.”

The old man added no honorific. Very odd. There was something familiar about those eyes, as blue as the morning sky, but Andross was certain he’d never met the man before. Perhaps he’d known a relation?

That didn’t limit the circle much. Andross met thousands of people each year. One of the things that had most pained him about his long confinement had been not meeting people, not seeing others overawed at his presence, or having occasion to prove that their awe was justified.

It niggled more than a little that this old man seemed . . . what was it? Not exactly hostile. Disgusted, maybe.

Contemptuous?

Oho, now, that tempted Andross toward violence.

The old man shook his head. “Disappointing. Here I’ve forgiven you a thousand times for all the ruin you brought to my house. No, ten thousand. Every day three times with my prayers for every one of these long years, at least when I could bear it. And yet still my heart longs to hate you.”

“Excuse me?” Andross asked. Blankly curious.

“I was told not to tell you my name, and that how long it took for you to guess it would tell us both something.”

Oh please. “How tiresome,” Andross said. “Do you have something for me, or not?
You
asked to see
me
, after all.”

“No, I didn’t ask for this at all. I was sent to see you. You are to finish the quote. She insisted you could.” He clearly had his doubts.

Andross sighed. Better to get this over with, he supposed. “Ninharissi called me ‘A man of Parnassian storms and no wonder, for in you are joined a volcanic wit and glacial emotions. When they mix, it is a cataclysm of fire and rain and lightning and molten rock, flames and floods, lava flows and mudslides, laying waste to everything and everyone in a thousand leagues.’ ”