The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Or so the old ones said, as they kept the money and the vices both for themselves.

  After some words about how she’d hoped he would stay all night this time, and whispered promises Teia couldn’t overhear, Halfcock pulled away.

  Teia had made the right choice. This wasn’t—thank Orholam—a meeting of Halfcock’s cell of the Order, with this dingy house a front for a secret temple.

  Well, unless that woman was in on it.

  No, as far as Teia had been able to learn, members of the Order were not supposed to know one another’s identities or fraternize in any special way. Far simpler that she was his mistress, and he was supporting her himself, and she was innocent of his Order ties. Or she might be cheating on a husband, if this was just somewhere they met to make love, but she was still innocent of Halfcock’s Order ties.

  Either way, not someone Teia could kill.

  The conversation dragged on, and Teia sidled closer to eavesdrop.

  “… understand… retire,” she said. She was turned more away, so Teia couldn’t hear her as well.

  “We’re not doing this again,” Halfcock said.

  Dammit. That would have been handy.

  “Come inside,” the woman said. “It’s practically morning anyway, and I’m freezing. I’ll make you breakfast.”

  “Does this place even have a stove?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I, uh, couldn’t get the flue open.”

  “Oh, using me for my muscles, I see,” he said.

  Please don’t go back inside.

  “I thought we agreed you were going to leave right after I did,” Halfcock continued.

  “Eliazar is gonna be out all night with his friends regardless, and probably not come home until I can’t smell the liquor on him.”

  “But you need to be home before he is,” Halfcock insisted. “Just in case.”

  “I don’t know that I need—”

  “We agreed to certain rules,” Halfcock said sharply. “That’s all that keeps us safe.”

  Aha! So it was a love nest. And she was a married woman, it seemed.

  Halfcock, you naughty, naughty boy.

  Well, his punishment is coming.

  “Safe,” she scoffed. “You act like there are spies in every alley!”

  He cursed. “Promise me,” he said. “You wait two minutes after I leave, then you go.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m tired. I’m sleeping here tonight.” Then she lowered her voice and said something else Teia couldn’t catch.

  “No,” he said, and then said something else Teia couldn’t hear, but he was obviously getting mad.

  The mistress tugged on Halfcock’s nipple through his dark tunic. “Oh? How you gonna make me… big man?”

  He looked at the sky like a man out of all patience. “You have got to be shitting me. I asked you twenty minutes ago if you wanted to go another—and you said no!”

  “You were supposed to ask again.”

  “You do this to me every—” He trailed off, sighing at the sky again, but this time his gaze was like one gauging the time. “I am gonna bang you like an open storm door in a tempest, woman.”

  She wet her lower lip, a look of erotic triumph in her sudden smirk. “Oops, look at that. I left the storm door unlatched,” she said, hiking her shift up.

  He rushed up the steps, and she jumped up on his hips, embracing him, kissing him. He swept her inside, neither of them shutting the door in their haste.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake!

  Yes, I think it’s exactly for that, T.

  She sat down, sighing. Everyone’s got a love life but me. Is everyone getting that much action, or am I just unlucky enough to go out exactly when everyone else is getting lucky?

  She stood. Not even a pity party was going to keep her awake if she kept resting.

  Instead, she went to the door. Glanced inside.

  Halfcock had his lover standing pinned against a wall, her legs around his waist, bouncing her against him as if she weren’t nearly as big as he was. Impressive.

  The look of rapture and the delighted gasps from the woman took Teia aback. For some reason she couldn’t have articulated, she’d imagined that really amazing sex was reserved for the young and good-looking. Neither partner here was either.

  Huh. Well, go to it, you two. Good for you.

  I guess.

  She looked beyond them. There wasn’t much to the space. There was only a single room. A feather bed made neatly after the night’s diversions (admirable Blackguard discipline there), towels, chamber pot, a stove with a bit of kindling and firewood stacked beside it. A thick lock and a bar on the front door, and presumably on the back as well, though Teia couldn’t see that. The bed was the closest thing to a luxury; apparently Halfcock saved up for what he really valued.

  Love nest indeed.

  With loud primal grunts and a sudden alarming squeal, Halfcock finished.

  His lover buried her face in his neck, clinging to his shoulders, urging him on. “Don’t you dare, uh, stop. Don’t you—”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t, and in half a minute, she cried out, spasming and pushing off the wall. With his trousers around his ankles, he staggered and stumbled, barely making it to the bed before they fell.

  He dissolved laughing, and a few moments later, after she regained her breath, she joined him. She kissed his sweaty forehead over and over.

  They’re so goddam happy.

  Great sex? That was one thing. Like, yeah, good for them. One last blast before dying. Let the man have his pleasures.

  But joyous companionship?

  Teia felt a purple bruise of bitterness that she hadn’t even been aware of, like they’d just kicked it. It was ugly, ugly of her to hate them, but she did. Suddenly, intensely.

  She wanted to hurt him.

  This is no good, T. You need to expel this poison.

  I chose this path. Dumbass that I am, I chose this.

  Halfcock rolled off his lover, and Teia saw the reason the slattern had been gasping. The Blackguard’s flag was only flying at half mast now, and Teia saw the full extent of the sarcasm behind his name.

  Sure, a woman’s body can stretch. We give birth, after all. But I can’t imagine that even a woman who spoke with the fuzzy nostalgia of the ‘ultimate feminine beauty’ of pushing a baby into the light would want that kind of experience every time she made love.

  And yet, hierovagus over there lay basking in juicy cetacean satiety.

  She gazed at Halfcock with unabashed adoration.

  “I don’t want to keep hiding us,” she said. “My son should know—”

  He froze, trousers half-laced. Then he finished angrily. “Get the hell out. We’re not talking about this again. I’m gonna be late for duty as is.”

  “Don’t be angry with—”

  “The hell I won’t!” he said. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Next week?” she asked, not moving from the bed.

  “Up!” he said. “You’re leaving first. You cannot sleep here. You gotta get back. Gimme your key. Eliazar can’t—”

  “You’ll be here, though? Next week?” she asked.

  He sighed. “Yes. Now, would you hurry?”

  “And we’ll talk?” she asked, getting up and pulling her dress over her head.

  “Yes, yes!” he said.

  She got dressed and pulled on a cloak as he dressed, too. He glanced toward the open back door, which they had never taken notice of all this time, and slammed it in Teia’s face.

  It scared her, though she knew she was invisible.

  She heard no more raised voices, and two minutes later, the door opened again. She saw that the lanterns were extinguished in the room behind Halfcock, the front door barred, the folded blankets stacked, and the bedcovers pristine once more. He’d made his lover leave first, then cleaned up. The man might be in a hurry, but he simply couldn’t leave a mess.

  Too long living in a barracks does things to you.

  The paryl
was ready. Teia was ready. Through the velvet pistol bag at Halfcock’s right hip, her paryl revealed the exact forward tilt of its grip. A scabbarded short sword was on his left hip.

  She’d have to be quick.

  Halfcock turned to close and lock the door, key in hand.

  Before the door swung shut, she launched herself at the big Blackguard. With fingers of paryl, she enervated both of his knees just before she slammed a shoulder into the small of his back.

  She drove his face and body into the door, her hands snatching at the pistol and the short sword.

  Her timing was flawless.

  Halfcock slammed through the door, smacking his face against the rough wood and careening to the ground inside.

  His falling made the pistol bag and the scabbard both pull hard in her grasp, but Teia held on to both of them. She flicked them out behind her into the street. No time to examine the workings or check the load of an unfamiliar pistol, and her shoulder and face were throbbing from where she’d hit the big man. What was he, made of solid rock?

  She kept her feet, though, which kept her clear of him. That and disarming him made it a victory, despite the fact that the collision had stunned her, too.

  Halfcock’s reflexes were better than she’d hoped, though. A lesser man would have been immobilized. Instead, he tried to launch himself up to his feet a moment before Teia could get a paryl grip on his spine.

  His legs below the knee didn’t obey him, and he fell again, farther into his house.

  She flicked a kick at his neck.

  It caught him mostly across his jaw instead. He rolled with the blow, his legs jamming against the doorframe, and the motion broke the paryl crystals paralyzing his knees.

  Teia hesitated. On the long list of things she didn’t want right now, getting stuck in an enclosed space with a bigger and stronger fighter was pretty high up. But she couldn’t get the angle to get at his spine from here.

  The advantages of being inside the little house—where they wouldn’t be heard or interrupted—were only advantages if he was paralyzed. Her invisibility was far less helpful in a tight space, where she could be trapped.

  But she had to attack or he’d escape and regroup.

  She dodged in, kicking, just as he rolled head over heels farther into the house. She was aiming to stab the point of her boot into his kidney, but only half caught him.

  He rolled, and rolled again—holy hells, he was fast!

  In an instant, he was up on his feet, guarding his pained kidney, gasping, grunting.

  He looked around, saw nothing. Maybe he didn’t realize she was invisible yet. He circled quickly, hands up in a guard, trying to get a view out the door, where he assumed his attacker was.

  The unexpected motions of his guard broke the reaching tendrils of Teia’s solidifying paryl once again.

  Chills shot down her back. She was good at fighting now. She was good at using paryl. She was getting good at using invisibility with the master cloak and even maintaining the fragile paryl cloud around it. But doing them all at the same time?

  She was like a marksman also skilled at fencing and grappling, to whom someone had just handed two swords, a musket, and a brace of pistols and plopped her ten paces from a charging spearman. She had so many options to take down the threat, she was going to stand there with her hands full, choosing, until she got skewered.

  Halfcock leapt, diving, rolling for the door.

  She slashed with the knife she didn’t even realize she’d drawn. It caught something as he went past, but he popped to his feet. He swept the door closed with a bang, flipped the bar down across it with one hand, and grabbed a blade mounted above it in quick succession.

  With the closing of the door, it was suddenly pitch-black inside the single-room house.

  It wasn’t the boon it usually would be. Halfcock was a sub-red. Which meant—

  Teia checked her paryl cloud, throwing back up the edges that had dissipated in the violence. She didn’t make a shell anymore. She’d gotten better than that. A shell was easier, but fragile; anything could break it, and when it went, she lost all the paryl inside it too.

  With one eye dilated to paryl and one merely to sub-red, she could see Halfcock’s puzzlement. His eyes were dilated to sub-red, but he couldn’t see her.

  But Halfcock wasn’t a thinker. He was already moving, circling, back against the wall, only out far enough to give his blade space. He spun his blade in an ascending flower.

  Flowers looked impressive, but were terrible moves if you were actually fighting. Terrible, that is, unless you were fighting against someone you couldn’t see and you hoped to hit their body by simply covering as much space as possible with your blade in the least time possible.

  Intentional or not, that blurring steel, white in her paryl vision, was also a perfect shield against her paryl attacks.

  She circled opposite him, keeping low and quiet. He was bleeding from her earlier slash, warmth throbbing bright in the sub-red spectrum down his back. It didn’t look like enough to make him faint soon, though.

  His jaw was tight. He was pretty sure that she was still in the room with him, but who could hide from sub-red?

  Frustrated, he brought down a descending flower. Spinning a blade in a flower put his hands momentarily in predictable places, and Teia was ready. She grabbed hard for the nerves in his wrists.

  The blade escaped from his enervated grip, but by terrible luck it flew right at Teia. It was twisting, sideways, impossible to judge exactly—she blocked with her own short blade, intercepting the blade, but the twisting hilt slapped around into her shoulder.

  Harmless. Not even a cut. Flat of the blade.

  It didn’t hurt her at all—but it destroyed the paryl cloud, and cost her a full precious second—and her paryl grip on his wrists.

  Halfcock lost the blade and as his eyes naturally followed it, he saw heat bloom, the whisper of a figure.

  He charged, instantly.

  One moment Teia was disengaging from a flying blade, stepping aside, up onto the stuffed feather mattress she’d been avoiding, trying to recover her stance, and the next her entire view was blotted out by a charging warrior three times her size.

  Her foot slipped, but she didn’t fall.

  Luckier if she had.

  She was crushed against the wall.

  It drove the wind from her and smacked her neck against a wooden beam in the wall.

  They dropped to the bed together. She had only mind to grope for her dagger. But it was gone.

  Halfcock had driven his shoulder into her guts, but his face had met the wall with almost as much force.

  She looked, hoping to see her dagger sticking out of him somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. She tried to roll free, but his hip was on top of her shin, trapping her.

  Levering her other foot against him, and arching her back to press against the wall, she tried to push his weight off her leg.

  He rolled with it suddenly, surprising her and snatching her leg with a hand. It sent her flipping over him. She was obviously lighter than he’d expected.

  He threw a punch at her leg, but missed. Catching a glimpse of his face, she saw the collision with the wall had made him tighten his eyes from sub-red back to the visible spectra. In the dark, he was momentarily blind.

  But vision wasn’t nearly as important when grappling.

  She threw a knee into his face, and teeth and blood exploded everywhere.

  He roared, falling back on the bed, but the motherfucker did not let go of her leg.

  Using her trapped foot to brace herself as if she were doing a great sit-up, Teia levered herself upright. She kicked at his kidney, once, twice. He blocked, blocked, trapped her right foot hard against his side, under his arm against his ribs again, and rolled to fling her over him.

  But she’d been expecting it.

  As he rolled, it freed her foot from the ground, allowing her to spin. She pulled herself down toward him with her trapped left leg, and
jump-stomped on his head with her right.

  He lost his grip, and she tumbled across the room away from him.

  This time she rolled to her feet first.

  He shook his head like an enraged bull, snot and sweat and blood and bits of broken teeth streaming from him. He reached one hand out toward the wall, perhaps to steady himself, even as his eyes flared back to sub-red.

  Where was all the paryl she’d packed? Had she lost it all?

  Then Halfcock plucked Teia’s dagger from where it had been buried in the wall, unseen by her, and his face filled with grim triumph as he saw the warm glow of her small figure against the dark cold.

  He crouched to pounce—and dropped like a sack of slops before the pigs as Teia’s last paryl pinched his spine.

  She sealed the crystal—important to hold the paryl open while the target dropped, so they don’t break the crystal with their fall. Then she turned her back and limped to the door. She opened it, trying to appear careless, but attuned to any sound in case she’d screwed up anything else.

  Fresh, cold, alien paryl filled her lungs. It was power. It was life.

  Life was good. Better than the alternative, today. She filled herself full of her monochrome power, then closed the door again. Barred it.

  “So, Halfcock,” she said, “let’s talk about the Order.”

  Chapter 47

  “We’re missing something,” Karris said as Andross approached her at her morning forms, and the sweat dripped from her trembling shoulders. But she kept her voice level. The exercise was making her mind sharp once more. “Something that may cost us the war.”

  “It’s so nice to see you taking a break from our labors, daughter,” Andross said, as if the Blackguard training yard were his home, not hers. “Grinwoody was just worrying for your health, wondering if you were pregnant. The weight gain, you understand.”

  That shot a bolt of fury through her. She almost lost her balance.