The Burning White (98 page)

For the first time in a year or more, Karris was reminded that he was indeed an old man, ancient for a drafter.

“I didn’t even think it worth mentioning that he might demand the price in blood,” Andross said. Karris didn’t know if it was even meant for her ears, he said it so low. “He shouldn’t have been able to seize power at all. Satrapah Tilleli Azmith was there, ready to rule. Messages had been sent. She knew the danger Haruru was creating. She was going to return Paria to its loyal course. What are the odds she’d have a stroke the same night?”

“Zero,” Karris said.

“Excuse me?” Andross asked. Then, sharper, “What did you say?”

“I had her killed. She was the Nuqaba’s spymaster. I found out that you’d ordered the Nuqaba murdered, and I judged Azmith an even greater threat.”

He looked at her with those tired eyes, and she couldn’t tell if the brief flicker of life in them was surprise that she’d learned of his own contract, that she was capable of ordering a murder herself, or surprise that she would admit it.

Then Andross snorted. “Of course you did. And you used some goddam amateur to do the deed. My assassin does his job professionally—then yours comes along and bungles everything mine was accomplishing. Of course Azmith was the spymaster! That’s how I knew she was practical enough to deal with.”

Karris wasn’t about to tell him that his assassin not only wasn’t a man but was also the same assassin as hers.

But still, how could I have sent Teia into that?

I didn’t, though. She was already being sent. I was just trying to take advantage of a bad situation and turn it into an opportunity. I was trying to be someone other than who I am, and I’ve reaped . . . this.

Andross had murdered the Nuqaba; it was his fault that Ironfist was furious. But Karris had murdered Azmith; it was her fault that Ironfist had become king.

“There was a moment there,” Andross said, “when Ironfist demanded blood, and I swear I saw relief on your face.”

“Relief?” Karris said. “You think I’d choose blood over marriage? Especially this marriage? Ironfist has been my dear friend for many years, and in case you hadn’t noticed, is quite a handsome and powerful man. If I cannot have my Gavin, I could hardly hope for a better marriage.”

Andross narrowed his eyes at her for a long moment, then said grudgingly, “I suppose so.”

“It should be you,” she said, “who dies.”

He laughed. Waited. Then chuckled. “That’s all you’re going to say? You’re not even going to make a case for it? Tell me how old I am, maybe? How I’ve ‘lived my life already’? Surely you can dig deep and find some reason why the actual promachos is less important than a White.”

“You know all the reasons I could bring up, but there’s only one that matters.”

“Oh?” Genuine curiosity filled his face. He stood up straighter, and something of Gavin Guile appeared in him.

Karris said, “You should volunteer to die because you love Kip. I know you do. I know there’s something more than avarice and power in you.”

At that very moment, there was a crack of thunder and lightning, the faint sizzle from the antennae above the tower as it was hit.

Andross laughed immediately.
Immediately
he laughed. “Love? Kip?” He laughed again.

That goddam lightning. A surge of hatred at this old man had coursed through her as fast as the lightning strike, but it had also been illuminated by that lightning striking at exactly the wrong moment: she doubted her words for a moment even as she said them—and he saw it.

“You didn’t leave things so well with Kip, did you?” he asked.

She had no answer for him. But he caught the guilt in her eyes.

He said, “I’m the promachos. This is a matter of war. I could simply choose. I could make my life easier for once and choose that
you
die. But I won’t do that. That’d make things too easy for you. When you were young, your choices ruined my family, and you’ve pretended ever since then that they weren’t your choices at all. Now it’s your family on the line, your boy, and your choice. I choose this much: Ironfist won’t have my blood. So. You’re the hard-ass; you’re the
Iron
White. You choose who dies. This is your fault, so as I recall you telling me once with such great glee, ‘You shit the bed, you clean it up.’ ”

It was time. It was all for this.

Ironfist had demanded apartments in the Prism’s Tower befitting his high status and bullied an underchatelaine until he was moved to the one with the secret exit he’d discovered years ago.

The execution was scheduled for midnight. He guessed that tonight’s outing might take an hour. Maybe even two. But there was no way he was going to cut it too close, so he was giving himself four hours. A king didn’t have to explain himself to anyone, so he’d simply retired to his rooms early.

His own guards outside his door had been joined by a pair of Blackguards that he didn’t even recognize.

Things had changed a lot in his absence. After the loss of so many Blackguards at Brightwater Wall, he’d sped up the training of replacements himself, but he couldn’t imagine that two nunks who’d been made full Blackguards in a year’s time could possibly be up to the high standards he’d maintained for so many years.

It irked him to think of poorly trained men and women in his beloved ’guard, but that was outrage that belonged to another life. Besides, it had been under his leadership that a single cannon shell had taken out so much of the Blackguard.

One shell, one lucky shot, had obliterated several hundred years’ worth of training and magical excellence and more than a million danars in recruitment and training and contract costs.

Ironfist hated guns. Hated how they could render moot so many thousands of hours of training. But tonight he checked his own carefully. He carried a fine Parian flintlock, as excellent as any Ilytian work, or so the smith had insisted. Ironfist double-checked the black powder and frizzen plate, and twisted the cockjaw screw a bit on the flint so it was held tighter. He put the pistol carefully in its holster bag and drew his ataghan. He checked the forward-curving blade and that its fit in the scabbard wasn’t too sticky.

He’d already instructed his Tafok Amagez not to disturb him until it was time for the execution. They knew to obey. He was dressed in white and gold. He didn’t bother with a disguise. If he were seen, he was too recognizable for any disguise to be of much use.

The passage was too tight to bring everything he wanted to bring. As a big man, he’d always been tempted to carry too much for missions simply because he could. The line between wanting to be prepared and actual paranoia was slippery. Especially when the rumor he’d heard involved actual, literal immortals.

Taking a deep breath, he tucked the bit of lambent white luxin he’d kept for so long into the pistol bag. The orange seed crystal he draped around his neck, and tucked under the tight cloth against his skin. He might hate the thing, but he couldn’t deny it was useful sometimes.

Enough delaying.

He pulled on the bedpost, twisted a brazier, and pushed on the wall. It opened on not-quite-silent hinges. Perfect. That meant no one had been oiling them in the past year.

The secret passage was not so much a passage as a pit. There was a tiny ledge and then a ladder with many broken rungs rising and dropping into darkness. From the top, every prime-numbered rung had a trap built into it, either breaking off or triggering knives or something equally pleasant. The traps and the tightness could easily turn the whole shaft into a slaughterhouse, so Ironfist hadn’t told Kip and his Mighty about this exit on that day they’d needed to escape, the day Hanishu had died.

One of Kip’s friends had been killed and another crippled because of Ironfist’s decision. But that’s what commanders do.

And kings, he supposed.

Closing the panel behind him, he mounted the ladder in the secret passage.

The moist, cold wind licked at his face as he descended in utter darkness. Just beneath him, rung thirty-seven was already broken off. There had once been horizontal doors to shut out the humid breeze, but they’d been left open, and the hinges had rusted open in some time period when no one had known or taken care of this secret. That was what had exposed the secret to a young Watch Captain Ironfist: the sound of that damp wind, circulating air up and down the crooked shaft, and on some few nights
whistling
. It had driven Ironfist crazy until he found an entrance.

Someone else had known of the passage, and Ironfist had never found out whom. The whistling only happened rarely, and he’d later realized it had been when that other person exited one of the lower levels on a windy day.

Skip forty-one. Whoever had created the ladder had helpfully left Old Parian numbers inscribed in the ladder every twelfth rung, so one could enter at any entrance and not have to memorize which rung a particular one might be. The trouble with skipping rungs, however, was that you had to count with both your feet and your hands—and the numbers started at the top of Prism’s Tower, though Ironfist had never found an exit or even eavesdropping holes up that high.

Maybe some previous Prism or White had filled those in, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Ironfist could have asked anyone about.

Ironfist hadn’t done this climb often enough that he was comfortable doing it quickly. And before now, he’d always made his ascents and descents during the day, so that he could burn a lux torch without worrying that the light would shine through the cracks into all the rooms along the route and announce his presence.

Now the darkness whispered to him as he slithered through its fist. Small men probably think that being a big man only has advantages. The squeeze between rungs forty-three and forty-seven argued differently. Ironfist had to remove his sword belt and pistol bag and hold them above his head, and then he had to wedge one shoulder down into the vise. He got stuck.

He couldn’t breathe, and he almost forgot everything. His lowest foot was touching forty-seven, the next trap rung. He had to skip that one.

He was wedged in tight, taking little shallow breaths.

I’ve done this.

But never in this hellstone darkness.

He closed his eyes. They weren’t doing him any good anyway. He visualized what he knew to be true. Then he expelled all his breath and slid.

The forty-eighth rung was as jarring as ever. His shin pressed so hard against the forty-seventh rung that he was terrified it would trigger whatever trap lay there, as ever.

Funny how he never remembered that in time. Not ha-ha funny, rather ha-ha-I’m-glad-I-didn’t-wet-myself funny.

But he’d made it. And from there, he worked down to the bottom of the ladder without incident. He found the hinges by touch, and applied oil to them, using a boar-bristle brush to push the oil into all the cracks as well as he could. A little noise above had been comforting. Here, it could be catastrophic.

Then he listened at the hidden door for several minutes.

This door opened to the passage between the back docks and the Chromeria’s main hall. Large, serious gates covered both front and back. Ironfist had had one of his men surreptitiously check that his keys to the gates still worked. They did.

Thank Orholam for lazy or ignorant successors. Of course, usually a commander of the Blackguard trained his or her successor for a year or more. Ironfist had simply been deposed and banished. That still stung. He’d valued that office far more than he valued being a king.

After hearing only silence, he opened the door. The hinges were quiet, but not silent, and his heart thudded with tension.

Waiting was agony for any soldier, but Ironfist thought he hated it more than most. He was a frontal-assault man, not a skulker in shadows.

But then he was in the passage, and there was no one in sight. He closed the hidden door carefully, and headed toward the back docks.

It was a relief to see the gate, because there was light there—even the natural darkness of night was brighter than that terrible passage, and the moon was shedding considerable light.

In peacetime, only the front gate was guarded—after all, the gates guarded a tunnel with only one exit and one entrance, so why guard it front
and
back?

But this wasn’t peacetime. There were two Blackguards stationed at the back gate.

Ironfist didn’t know who these men or women were—men, judging by the silhouettes in the darkness—but he had to be willing to kill them. If necessary.

But it shouldn’t be necessary. Having found an escape tunnel, Iron-fist had figured no one would build an escape tunnel that would lead to a locked iron gate. It had taken him months, but he’d found it: a simple hidden room that had a crawl hole out the back.

It was open to the outside, and a skulk of foxes had taken up residence in this cozy cave. Which meant that even after Ironfist’s first, horrific encounter, it still—years later—stank of musk and fur. He’d liked foxes, before.

Responsible commander that he’d been, he’d collapsed the tunnel so that there were no secret entrances into the heart of the Prism’s Tower.

But he’d only collapsed the outermost few feet. He could dig through it if he must.

If the Blackguards stationed back here stayed exactly at their stations until they were relieved rather than walking back into the tunnel when they heard their replacements coming, it
would
be necessary.

He really, really didn’t want to deal with the stench of a fox den and the pains of digging underground. It would add an hour to his night. It was only going to take a few minutes for him to find out.

In a quarter of an hour, the shift changed. At a call from deep inside the passage, the Blackguards outside opened the gate, came inside, closed and locked it behind them—and then walked into the tunnel to meet their replacements, chatting in worried tones about the impending execution and the looming fight.

Good luck, at last!

Ironfist slipped out soon after they passed his hidden room, then slipped out through the gate, locking it behind him.