The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Or would it be more suspicious if Ravi told the leadership how she’d disappeared before she even got to ask?

  Well, there’d be no suspicion at all if Teia killed both of them now. After all, she had all she needed from them.

  This is how life gets cheap. Someone teaches you how easy it is to kill. Someone gives you permission. The next moment it simply seems like the thing to do. You’re stopping an unwanted flow of information, not sending immortal souls to their maker for judgment.

  It was a hell of a thing, war. And yet part of her loved it.

  Regardless of how she felt, though, this was still the thing to do. They had chosen treason. Teia was simply the satrapies’ shield coming down on their necks.

  There was nothing more to think about it.

  The meeting ended soon after, and Teia followed Ravi Satish. Finding Aglaia again would be easy. Ravi was the more pressing.

  Lord Ravi had come from one of the families dispossessed and bankrupted during the False Prism’s War. He had little more than the clothes on his back, and no morals whatsoever. He supported his delusions about a return to power on illegal slave trading—mostly from drugging and enslaving sailors with the help of unscrupulous tavern owners.

  He was the kind of man who would have lots of enemies—but not subtle ones.

  Blunt force, Teia thought, as she followed him through the streets. She didn’t want any inexplicable (and therefore possibly caused by paryl) deaths to pique the Order’s interest. A knife? A knife would work, too, but knifings were almost never clean. An assassin might kill with a single well-placed thrust, but usually a knife murder involved dozens of stabs and slashes, lots of mess and noise, and more danger. If she wanted a stabbing to look like the result of a drunken brawl or a sudden passion, she’d have to be willing to dice him up.

  She’d done enough grappling recently, thanks. She’d rather not.

  Blunt force it was. A single, furious smash over the head could result in death, and look almost accidental. Someone might hit a man he hated over the head, see what he’d done, and then flee. It could be almost soundless, too, where a knife fight would be more notable if it weren’t heard than if it were.

  At one point as she followed him, Lord Satish walked right along the edge of a quay he’d cut through as a shortcut. Teia had a sap, a leather casing covering a pouch of lead balls.

  Hit him, grab his purse, and roll his body into the water! Quick!

  But she hesitated, looking around to see if anyone might witness it, and when she was sure that there was no one looking, Lord Satish was already past the place where it would have been a good option.

  She should’ve been more aware. She should always be thinking about what to do if an option presented itself. Dammit!

  He led her to a boardinghouse. It didn’t exactly have an inn on the first floor, more just a single hogshead barrel of wine, an old door propped on sawhorses to make a counter, and one currently occupied stool. Lord Ravi paid the wine pourer, was given a full tankard of wine, and told which room he could sleep in. Then the barman went back to chatting with the two women who were sharing the lone stool.

  Teia noted which stairs creaked, then followed Ravi up, her lesser weight silent. She hadn’t been close enough to hear which room he was in. She could only hope that the slaving business had been going well enough for him that he could afford to have the room to himself.

  Which was kind of twisted, if she thought about it.

  He opened the door, and Teia peeked over his shoulder. Empty. Perfect.

  She didn’t follow him in. Instead, she went downstairs and found the boardinghouse’s utility closet. Boardinghouses always had things to fix, even if, like here, they didn’t actually fix them all that often.

  Nonetheless, she was able to find a hammer with an iron head. Good enough.

  She ghosted back up the stairs. No sense in delaying things.

  But she paused at the door.

  One breath, T. You get one deep breath to panic. Then you move.

  She took her long deep breath, and savored her paralysis like a warm bed on a cold morning. Then she exhaled slowly, shimmering into visibility and removing her hood.

  She opened the door and stepped into the room like she owned the place. It was small, nondescript, not very clean, with fresh rushes thrown down on the bed on top of months of dirty ones. Ravi Satish was halfway into pulling his tunic over his head.

  At the sound of the door opening and closing, he said, “What the hell? Arun told me I’d have this room to myself to—oh.”

  He finished shucking his tunic off and stopped speaking as he saw her.

  “Dammit, that’s what he told me,” Teia said. “Did one of us get the wrong room?”

  “Uh, second room on the right?” Ravi said.

  “That’s what he told me,” Teia said, giving him a bold look.

  “Arun’s always been a joker. I’m going to have to thank him for this one, though.”

  “No,” Teia said quietly. “No you’re not.” She took off the master cloak and hung it on a hook by the door.

  Ravi picked up his tankard, still standing bare-chested. “I’m, uh, not sure I take your meaning.”

  “Would you be willing to share?”

  “Share? The bed?” he asked.

  “The wine. I’m parched.” But she smirked as if the bed might be a possibility, later.

  “Oh, the wine. Of course. Of course.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She took the tankard and pretended to drink. She coughed. “Oooh,” she said, “that is really bad.”

  “Does the trick, though,” he said with a chuckle. He looked her up and down.

  She set down the tankard on the lone table. Out of the way.

  Then she turned back to him.

  His eyes went round as he saw her hellstone stare. She pinched the nerves in his spine hard, and caught him as he fell.

  She guided him to his knees, then released the nerves. “I know you’re in the Order. If you believe in repentance,” she whispered in his ear, “now’s the time.”

  She would have a few seconds until he regained feeling. Should, anyway. She grabbed the hammer from the master cloak’s pocket, stepped up to him, and swung with all her might.

  Teia had never killed a man this way. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but hadn’t expected the hammer to stick. It crushed through his temple in a splatter of blood and bone and brain, and stopped.

  Ravi crumpled to the ground, his skull clinging to the hammer harder than her fingers did.

  He tumbled to the floor, but somehow, he wasn’t dead.

  “My teeth. You broke my teeth!” he moaned into the ground.

  Teeth? What the hell?! But Teia was already moving, reaching out with paryl to squeeze his spine and grab his heart.

  Make it stop. Dear Orholam, would you please just die?

  He went limp as she found the right grip, but his heart kept stubbornly pumping on.

  Then she saw them, glistening pearly beside his head. He’d broken his teeth against the floor as he fell.

  But whinging about his teeth? When there was a hammer in his head?

  Gradually, Teia found the nerves she needed, and Lord Ravi Satish died at her feet, sphincters relaxing, burbling, befouling his clothes and the air.

  She rifled through his pockets to find his coin sticks and a knife, then stepped back quickly before the blood pool spreading from his head could reach her feet. The last thing she wanted to leave here was her small footprints.

  She tore off his sleeve and looked at herself in the room’s small polished bronze mirror. She blotted off the blood spatter on her face and neck and hand—there wasn’t much, thank Orholam, and none at all she could see against her blacks.

  She dipped his blade into the pool of blood, then flicked her wrist to distribute blood drops on the linens. Ravi’s body had no cuts on it, so they’d guess that he’d cut his attacker before he himself was killed.

  Then she tos
sed the knife across the room.

  It clanged loudly, but no one was going to look into such a small sound in a place like this.

  She left, invisible. Several blocks later, she stopped at the dock where she’d almost simply pushed him into the water, where she’d missed her chance at murder without drama, or blood, or pain. Without broken teeth and blood spatter.

  She’d told herself this wasn’t murder. It was sanctioned killing.

  Granted: sanctioned without trial, commissioned in secret, committed in secret, and she would be prosecuted by the very state she served if she were caught, lest the Order find out how close the Chromeria had gotten to them. It had been murder in every sense except for a few words of permission spoken to the ephemeral air.

  Teia hadn’t done anything but work in months. She’d never gambled or drank or listened to the minstrels or watched the puppets or the light shows. She’d needed to train. She’d needed to hunt. She’d needed to train some more. There was always more to do that might later mean the difference between life and death.

  She’d passed her name day, and even she hadn’t noticed. She was becoming all warrior, all the bits of little girl and woman scraped away to leave only muscles and magic and blades.

  If she were tough enough, and cold enough, and strong enough, she would go back to Aglaia Crassos’s estate right now. Murder the woman, or kill her, if there was any difference anymore, and be done with this before anything else could go wrong.

  You keep moving before your enemy can recover and counter. You don’t stop until they can’t recover, until they can never counter again.

  But she wasn’t tough, or strong, or cold in any way except physically right now.

  It was time to find Quentin, and report, and then though she knew he didn’t really like to be touched, he was going to hug her while she cried for five minutes, then she would go out again. And she was only going to cry about killing people, not about the whole damned world and her loneliness and her stupid sisters and Kip and, and, and.

  Maybe ten good hard minutes. No more than ten. She’d have to make sure she ordered Quentin to be silent. He was good at that at least, orders. Not hugging. He’d probably be a terrible hugger, actually. Too little and bony and fragile and awkward to make you feel safe and warm and enveloped like Kip could…

  Okay! None of that!

  A woman makes do.

  Ten minutes, scrawny Quentin, and I don’t start crying until I’m where no one can see me.

  Head high, she dropped her bloody cloth into the water, and the sea swallowed her sins, as it had swallowed so many before.

  Chapter 59

  “You want to know what’s the worst?” Kip asked, staring at the plinth.

  “Rhetorical questions?” Ben-hadad asked.

  “Swamp ass,” Big Leo said.

  “A booger you can’t reach,” Ferkudi said. “Or mosquitoes. If you were trapped with mosquitoes and had a booger you couldn’t reach, that’d be really bad.”

  “When you’re two pumps shy of drawing the happy water up from your well and the woman’s husband walks in?” Winsen asked.

  “Insubordination?” Cruxer suggested. “Cluelessness? Obscenity?”

  “No. Wiseasses,” Kip said. “But after that? When someone tells you the solution to a problem is obvious, and then you can’t figure it out.”

  “Huh,” Ben-hadad said. “Never had that happen to me.”

  “I hate you guys,” Kip said. “I know we’ve all got things to do, but what am I missing here?”

  “The answer,” Winsen said.

  “Win, shut it,” they all said.

  Big Leo said, “Commander, were you lumping me with Ben’s insubordination or Ferkudi’s cluelessness?”

  Cruxer ignored him, though, saying, “Liv Danavis—or whatever she is now—said she’d activated the Great Mirror here. But… there’s no Great Mirror here. Right? I mean, is it hidden somewhere else in Apple Grove?”

  They shook their heads. It was a small town, and their people had searched all of it. Even if the Mirror were half the size of the one housed in Ru or Dúnbheo, it would still be impossible to hide.

  “And saying it’s been ‘activated’ makes it sound like it’s functional, so it’s not lying in some barn or something; there has to be the whole frame system, right?” Kip asked. He looked at the plinth. Was it supposed to be the base of the frame, or where you’d set the frame?

  “Well, then, it’s obvious, especially given that,” Ben-hadad said, pointing to the plinth. “The mirror’s buried right under us.”

  “Well, yeah, obviously,” Kip said. He looked over at the cracked earth at the base of the plinth. “The crack made that impossible to miss, right?”

  He’d missed it. Apparently so had some of the others. They were looking down uneasily.

  Kip said, “I meant, uh, since it’s there, how do we raise it?”

  “Sure you did, boss,” Ben-hadad said. “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m a genius.”

  “We don’t. We hate you for all sorts of reasons,” Winsen said easily.

  Kip walked over to the plinth. There were no superviolet panels on it. It felt like it was just a marker. And maybe it had been, the ancient equivalent of ‘Dig here.’

  Ferkudi said, “Please don’t tell me we have to dig it up.”

  “We?” Ben-hadad said. “I’m gonna be overseeing the drafters building our skimmers down at the coast. Actually, I should really be on my way.”

  But he didn’t leave. Ben couldn’t leave an unsolved puzzle.

  Kip shielded his eyes against most of the light and looked into the chi, though it pained his eyes to compress them so far. He’d gone blind for three days the last time he’d used a lot of chi, and he couldn’t afford that now.

  He shot a pulse down into the earth, and it seemed to burn his skin in a line from his eyes, down his shoulders, along his entire arm. He tensed, but no one seemed to notice.

  With its tremendous energy, the chi penetrated the earth easily, and he saw that Ben-hadad was right. Under a thin layer of grasses, the soil yielded from the native loam to a vast bowl of sand, and within that sand was a frame system, and lower still was a vast quantity of luxin. Green probably, considering the history of this satrapy. A temple? A shrine of some sort? It felt strange, though, as if being underground so long had changed it from solid luxin to a liquid. Or maybe it was just that he’d reached the limits of his tiny chi burst.

  But that was all he could see in the tiny burst he’d shot out.

  “It’s a moot point,” Cruxer said. “The Blood Robe army’s gone. It’d be like building a siege engine when there’s no siege… Unless…” Cruxer cleared his throat. “Our Lightbringer needs to tinker?”

  They all looked at him.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben-hadad said, “and I keep coming up short. I mean, I get why the mirror towers would have been tremendously useful to the ancients. The kingdoms were broken into single colors, right? All the red drafters would go to Atash, greens here, and so on. They didn’t have colored lenses, so simply fighting in bad light or at the wrong time of day or without decent sources would have been the death of many of them. So before lenses were developed, a king could gather thousands of precious or semiprecious stones—anything in their color—and use the Great Mirrors to beam their color out to their drafters. And when colored lenses were first invented, the Mirrors would still be useful—because they were so, so expensive and difficult to make. But, Breaker, I don’t understand how the Mirrors are going to help us now: every drafter at the Chromeria has spectacles in their own color, and all the buildings are white by design. Sourcing isn’t a problem for us. The real problem is how the bane paralyze us. Are you certain that the Great Mirrors even do anything about that? Like, you bombard a drafter—or even the bane—with a complementary color, or what?”

  They all looked at Kip. It wasn’t exactly a problem he hadn’t thought about in the long days on the trail.

  “Han
d me your water skin, would you?” Kip asked Cruxer, who gave it to him immediately.

  He shot a quick flash again, this time down the plinth.

  It showed a dark panel on the structure, two paces below.

  “Aha!” he said, gladly dropping the chi. He poured water over the blisters rising on his burning hand, handing the skin back absentmindedly. “I wonder.”

  He wasn’t going to be able to worm superviolet all the way down into the soil by itself, but what if…

  Connecting superviolet to chi, like foot soldiers following charging cavalry, Kip shot chi into the soil, clearing the way for the superviolet to reach the panel. It’d be way faster than digging.

  He’d only have an instant. Unless he wanted to hold on to this hot coal that was chi for longer.

  “Kip, do you think maybe it would be a good idea to take it slow with—” Tisis said.

  And there, in the panel, he felt an obvious trigger, as if recently repaired, just waiting for his touch.

  Thanks, Liv. It was only as the trigger clicked that he thought, What if this is a trap?

  “Oops,” he said.

  With a muffled grinding of massive gears, the earth suddenly shifted under their feet.

  “Run!” Kip shouted.

  Only Tisis froze. She had no idea what was happening.

  A two-paces-wide section of earth simply dropped into the ground beside them, tearing the grass free, exposing a chasm below and a glimpse of stone workings.

  Kip stopped, grabbed Tisis, and threw her over his shoulder, sprinting for the trees. More ground gave way to the other side, the sand undergirding the grass sliding into oblivion, the sound of pouring sand and rumbling machinery filling his ears.

  As always, he went to green first. The morning was bright, and the grass was emerald, the trees vibrant with dark-green leaves. The green rushed to him like a long-absent friend to an embrace.

  But he wasn’t going to make it to the safety of the trees. The Mighty had all seen that he was sprinting, and had bolted themselves. Only Cruxer looked back now, horror and guilt etching his features: he’d run away without his wards.