The Burning White (84 page)

“. . . Yeah . . . I was . . .”

“And holy shit, little Teia, look at you,” Ben-hadad said. “Bet no one calls you ‘little Teia.’ ”

No one talks to me at all.

“No,” she said. “You’re back. You’re back?”

“We’re all back. Come to save the day.”

Was he joking? It wasn’t funny. “I’ll put on my damsel hat. Whaddaya call it?”

“A wimple?” Quentin asked. “Sorry. Don’t mind me. Not even here.”

“No, not to save
you
, Teia. Shit. We needed you to save
us
. Can’t think how many times we bitched about you being gone.”

“Yeah?” she asked. There was suddenly something raw in her throat. They were standing close, but neither had moved to embrace. She suddenly thought she was going to cry. “ ‘All of us,’ you said?”

“Yeah, Kip’s back too.”

“No, no, I meant, you’re
all
back? Everyone? Everyone made it?”

“Oh, oh yeah. We’re all right. Well, except Winsen, but then, he wasn’t all right when we started. In fact, we’ve been trying to arrange for him to take a few good blows to the head to see if it might straighten him out a bit.”

Teia smiled wanly.

“Nah,” Ben said. “Actually, even Win is less of a dick than he used to be. A little bit less. Most of the time.”

“Sometimes?”

“Yeah, only sometimes,” Ben-hadad admitted.

“But you’re okay? Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, I, I took the worst of it since we left.” He gestured to his knee with the contraption, hidden under those baggy pants. “Actually, I guess you saw me get this injury. But I can walk now. Even run when I can’t avoid it. Well, usually—just kind of broke my brace, but it’ll be good in no time.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“You been through the shit, huh?” Ben-hadad said, looking at her closely.

“Did Quentin tell . . . ?”

“No, no,” Ben-hadad said. And Teia saw that Ben wasn’t only more self-assured and more grown-up-looking than when he’d left, his brash intelligence had also been tempered by suffering.

“You been through it, too,” Teia said.

“A bit,” he said with a quick, sad smile. “But I had the Mighty. Even if one of them is Winsen.”

“Ha! I’d rather be alone,” Teia said. But the word ‘alone’ bounced off the walls, ricocheting into her chest.

Ben-hadad’s nose wrinkled. “No, you wouldn’t. Would you?”

“No,” Teia said, looking away. She couldn’t break down. Ben didn’t know what she’d done. Ben couldn’t offer her absolution. “So how is everyone?”

“Kip’s good,” Ben-hadad said.

“That’s not what I asked,” she said. “But since you brought him up, sure, let’s start there. How is he?” She thought her voice was admirably level. No hint that her heart was in her throat.

“Happily married.”

“I, I didn’ t—! I wasn’t asking—C’mon, Ben! Don’t be like that.”

“Teia, I know you. It’s fine. It’s what you wanted to know and I’m happy to tell you. You want to know about her?”

“No! No, not really, no.” She cursed. “Maybe a bit?”

“She’s one of the Mighty now. Has been for quite a while, I guess.”

“Oh.” She really did take my place in everything I loved, didn’t she?

“She can’t fight for shit. But she’s saved our lives probably more than any of us. That’s why we’re Mighty, right? Different strengths, all pulling to the same purpose.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s great.” For you. Thanks for reminding me what I don’t have, you clueless dick.

“We didn’t know you were supposedly gone or whatever, so Tisis thought I might see you on duty. She gave me something for you.”

“Why didn’t she bring it herself?” Teia asked, suspicious.

“The Order sent a team to kill Kip back in Blood Forest, so with them and all our other enemies, we decided our leaders shouldn’t all be in the same place. She’s staying as far from the Chromeria as she can while still being on Big Jasper.”

“They—what?!”

“Yeah, right, we’ve got a lot to catch up on. Can I just do this thing so Quentin can get back to telling you just how damned smart I am?”

“Language, please . . . ?” Quentin said, wincing.

Ben-hadad looked at him quizzically.

“He’s fine with any words except whatever dishonors Orholam or disrespects a listener,” Teia explained. “Or something like that.”

“It’s a bit more nuanced than—” Quentin started.

“Let it go,” Teia said. “Both of you. Ben? What are you talking about? What ‘thing’?”

“Here,” he said, digging into his pack. He pulled out a folded little cloth. “It was Tisis’s idea, but . . .” He unfolded it. It was a patch of the Mighty. “We all wanted you to know. You didn’t come with us, but no one stopped thinking of you as one of the Mighty, Teia. You’re one of us. Cruxer says you’ve been absent without leave for way too long. He’s said he’s gonna make you run until you piss blood or something? I dunno, some saying he got from his father. And he said ‘urinate,’ of course, not ‘piss.’ ”

She took the patch in trembling hands, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“Now, Quentin, tell her I’m brilliant!”

“None was gainsaying the claim,” Quentin said. “Though none were yet queuing to support it, either.”

Teia knew Quentin well enough now that she could tell he was teasing. But the flash of humor helped her push back the tears.

Maybe Quentin knew her a little bit, too.

“This is relevant, right?” she growled.

“A little,” Quentin said.

“A little?!” Ben-hadad protested.

Quentin said, “Our old monopodal friend here, it turns out, is rather adept at reading schematics, and knows a fair bit more of engineering history than I do, as well. It’s embarrassing really. I think I read straight past references to this very thing. It turns out that at the time of the Chromeria’s construction, there were several different units of measure in use, with certain professions preferring one and others another. There were conversion tables, but always with a margin of error.”

Teia had no idea what he was talking about, but sometimes it was faster to just listen, so she nodded along as Quentin continued. He was ridiculously excited about seeing someone else be smart in a realm he himself was ignorant of. Almost enough so that Teia found it contagious. Almost.

He went on. “It was a known problem, so there were corrections used on large-scale projects like this, but the head engineer made the teams work level by level and purposefully
didn’t
correct for the conversion errors, and at each level, he brought in his own master carpenters and masons to ‘fix things up’ and conceal the errors.”

“But,” Ben-hadad said, finally breaking in on his own story, “there are certain things that really do have to be where the plans say they are: flues for the kitchen’s fires, openings for the lightwells into classrooms and the signal crystals, and so forth, so by guessing which those might be, and knowing how much the total errors would be, then you see that the hidden rooms will be clustered high in the towers where the errors could accumulate, with maybe a few more in the depths of the bedrock of the basements.”

“Not the basements,” Teia said. Her heart was in her throat. “This’d be up high. Quickly accessible.”

“That’s what Quentin said you were looking for. So let’s go.”

“Go?” Teia asked.

“Yeah,” Ben-hadad said, pointing to the pages of notes and equations he’d scribbled. “I’ve got ten or eleven possibilities for what I assume are four to nine spaces, depending on the size. I can either spend about four hours honing my equations to figure out which guesses are most likely . . . or we can just go look.”

Teia felt like a huge weight she’d been carrying had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders. The Mighty were back. Her boys were home, and her total and abject failure to find the Old Man’s office was about to be magically mended with a wave of Ben-hadad’s brilliant equations.

For the first time in so long that it felt like the first time ever, she felt fluttering in her breast, a stretching out of the delicate wings of hope.

Kip walked to Promachos Andross Guile’s apartments clad for silken war. Under Tisis’s direction, he’d been shaved and scrubbed and oiled, nails trimmed, hair cut, muscles pounded, joints stretched, measurements taken, complexion and eyes compared to various charts, clothing of various coloring and texture held up for her approval. Then she made him do push-ups and sit-ups and pull-ups. Washed him again, and made him do push-ups while she sat on his back before examining him critically one last time, nodding, and pulling on his tunic, strapping on his spectacles holster, checking his hair one last time, and pushing him out the door.

It felt ridiculous. He’d seen Andross just yesterday with none of this artifice. But he trusted Tisis, even if his entire upper body felt so swollen that he was going to have to twist sideways to get his shoulders through the door.

Cruxer knocked for him and was greeted by Grinwoody, who ushered them in with his typical greasy smile.

Andross’s apartments were no longer the dingy dark they had been when Kip first came. Now they sparkled, window shades open wide to the light.

“Grandson, welcome! So good of you to accept my invitation,” Andross said as if they were a normal family. He came over and took Kip by the shoulders, and there was a little flicker of surprise at how firm they were.

“I see you were right. I did choose well for you,” Andross said.

“My lord?” Kip asked.

“Your bride. This is her doing, I can tell. When you left here . . . you were not, shall we say, who you are now?”

Kip wasn’t sure if his grandfather somehow knew about his push-ups or meant something else entirely. “Sir?”

“Slimmed you down. Made you happy. Showed you how to dress appropriately. Before, you were a Guile in spirit, but only in spirit. You couldn’t truly be a Guile until you looked like one. We’re a handsome family, and it matters. I’d hoped that by giving you a beautiful wife I might inspire you to make something of yourself. I see it worked. And from what I hear, you’d not have fared nearly so well as you did if she were
only
a nice body. Can’t tell you how pleased I am with that. It seemed terribly unjust that Eirene Malargos’s sister had a reputation for being deeply stupid. I hoped and gambled that it wasn’t true.”

What am I really doing here? How had Kip forgotten what it was like to bear the full brunt of Andross Guile’s abrasive personality? “As above, so below, huh?” Kip said.

“How’s that?” Andross asked. He gestured. “Please, sit, sit.”

“Like Orholam, you set the course before me. I merely ran it.” Were they really going to pretend Andross had meant Kip well? That all the blessings Kip had enjoyed from his marriage were the point of what Andross had done? Taking a seat in a chair that probably cost more than a house in Rekton, Kip said, “I’m just so glad that the marriage also cemented the Malargos family to us, and kept Ruthgar from making a separate peace with Koios.”

“Well, not everyone can start marriage with love, certainly not poor fat boys from the farthest reaches of the empire.”

“Actually, poor fat boys from Tyrea have a pretty good chance of marrying for love. It’s everything else they don’t get.”

Andross paused. “I’ll yield to your greater experience on that. Regardless, good work making what I gave you your own.”

And suddenly Kip wanted to bury his fist in his grandfather’s pleasant, patronizing face.

“She’s been a joy to me. Thank you,” Kip said instead, smiling as if the old man were in his dotage and needed to be humored.

Andross caught it, and the jovial superiority drained from his face. But then he recovered. He wagged a finger and turned away. Grinwoody rolled a table over to them, covered with labeled decks and scores of cards spread faceup for modifying any of the decks.

“Have you had any chance to play?” Andross asked.

“None,” Kip said. “But I feel I have a different perspective on some of the cards now. Not sure if that’ll help me in the game, but it’s been quite valuable in life.”

“They’re not so different,” Andross said, “life and the game.”

“Here I thought we were working to prevent that,” Kip said.

“How so?” Andross asked. It was actually a bit of a relief that he wasn’t tracking exactly with Kip’s thoughts today. The old man was unnerving.

“We’re trying to prevent there being nine kings again?” Kip said.

“Ha! Well. True,” Andross said.

“Promachos Guile, we both know you’re better at Nine Kings than I am. You’re also the promachos. You can ask or order almost anything of me, and I’ll simply have to give it to you. I’d love to play you sometime—without stakes other than perhaps my bruised ego. But not today. Maybe you’ve done everything you need to do to prepare for the coming battle, but I haven’t. Every game I play against you is for stakes I can’t afford, and with the decks stacked against me. I won’t play.”

Andross looked amused. “A good play itself.”

“Thank you.”

“Which is why I preemptively took it away from you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Kip, do you think you’re the first young man to see that the games of his elders are stacked against him? Do you think you’re the first to rage against the game upon finding out that you’re not much of a player?”

“Look, old man—”

“Yes, I am old, and how old are you now? Even out of your teens yet?”

That caught Kip up short. But he didn’t bother to answer.

“Even in our world, where drafters, and the children of noble families, and most of all those who are both, must mature early, you are still very, very young.”

“My uncle Dazen set the world on fire by the time he was my age,” Kip countered. “And my—”

“You consider that an achievement?” Andross interrupted before Kip could start on his father’s deeds.

“He moved the world by his will.”

“No, he didn’t. He didn’t even set the world afire. He provided a spark to one powder keg among hundreds. He invited other fire throwers to his banners because he was so desperate for support, and they came because the old grievances were so strong.”

“You backed him into a corner,” Kip said. “And you did nothing to disperse all that powder, though you were in a position to do so. It was
your
failure.”