The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  The dread sat heavier and heavier in Teia’s stomach.

  Ben-hadad shrugged, deciding no one was coming, and jammed the blob of open blue luxin he’d drafted into the lock, solidified it, and turned. “I’m not really sure why the Chromeria even bothers to have locks,” he said.

  “Hold on,” Teia said, feeling ill. “I’ve just made a terrible mistake.”

  She fled down the hall after the girl.

  She was lucky. The girl had reached the slaves’ stairs and realized she’d left her mop and bucket. She’d be in big trouble if she lost them. But the girl was still shocked when Teia approached on silent feet. She held her hands up in front of her face defensively, like Teia was going to hurt her.

  “What’s your name?” Teia asked quietly. She started working instantly to unravel what she’d done. Orholam have mercy, she’d gotten good at laying death traps, but not so good at removing them.

  “Clara.”

  “What do they have you mopping for?” Teia asked.

  Clara gulped. “Atarah called me a slatte—ahem, a name. So I tried to slap her, but I sort of missed? and I broke her nose instead. Two months I’ve been mopping after lectures every day.”

  “Ha,” Teia said. “In the Blackguard, you’d not be mopping for that slap.”

  “I know! Why are the magisters so—”

  “You’d be mopping for the miss,” Teia said.

  The girl’s brow wrinkled and her mouth pursed.

  “Look,” Teia said. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

  “I wasn’t scared!”

  “Truth is, Clara, you scared me.”

  Clara looked incredulous.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” Teia said. “Well, I sort of am. It’s complicated.”

  Orholam, I can’t kill her. You’re the god who spares the innocent. Can You keep this girl’s mouth shut? Because I can’t do this anymore. I can’t kill the innocent anymore, not to justify a hundred other murders. Not to justify saving a thousand lives someday, maybe.

  “I’m working for the White,” Teia said very quietly. “It’s a secret mission. I’m not supposed to be on the Jaspers at all. If you tell anyone you saw me, people will die. Me among them. Can you… can you not tell anyone you saw me for one week? I’ll probably be dead by then anyway. It’ll be a juicier story if I turn up dead, and then you can tell everyone. But if you tell anyone now—even your friends—Clara, I can’t even tell you how bad it could go. A lot of people will die. Good people.”

  Clara shrugged, offended. “I can keep a secret!”

  Right, and how many fourteen-year-olds will admit they can’t? “One week,” Teia said. “Two if you can. Unless I turn up dead, then tell whoever you want.”

  Her duty had become like that old little flask of olive oil that she’d gripped so hard in her fist that her fingers cramped. Holding on to it had meant everything, everything. Now she prised her fingers open one by one.

  Orholam, this is Your war. If You want us to win, You’re going to have to handle this little girl. I’m done killing innocents.

  “You’re serious,” Clara said. “I thought you were just going to make love with that boy and were looking for an empty room.”

  “Ben?” Teia said. Oh hells. Now she’d said Ben’s name.

  “He’s cute!” Clara said.

  “Cute?” Teia asked. “No! I mean, sure, he’s fine. But he’s like my brother—look, I’m not talking about this!”

  “Will you show me paryl tricks?” Clara said. “I think it’s what I want to study. I’m a yellow myself, but I love research, and no one’s done credible research on paryl since Aldib Muazon.”

  This was turning all sorts of directions Teia hadn’t expected. But maybe this was salvation. “If…” Teia said. “If you show me you can keep one secret, I’ll tell you more.”

  I am screwing the future me.

  But I’m totally fine with screwing the future me. If I’m alive to be screwed, that’s a win.

  “It’s a deal. Can I… can I get my mop?” Clara asked.

  I almost killed this girl, Teia thought. “Of course.”

  In five minutes, the girl was gone, happily humming.

  Teia didn’t know if she’d just signed a hundred death warrants, but somehow the worry that she had sat side by side with a specter of faith that it was all going to work out.

  She was afraid to examine that specter for fear it would fall apart at a touch, but it sat there, quietly, at the corner of her eye. And when she took a breath, it was a little less tight than her breaths had been for a year.

  The room, as it turned out, did have a secret door, hidden behind a hinged bureau. The magister who lived here was using it to store her extra clothing and books and a couple skins of good brandy.

  Of course some of the secrets would have been found over the centuries by others.

  The next hidden room they found had been converted to a private drug den, with narcotic plants growing everywhere next to an access to the tower’s lightwell and pornographic texts on the shelves. The next, on another floor, hidden among the married couples’ apartments, appeared to have been found but then lost again for decades, with a heavy coating of dust, a desiccated rat on the floor, and a single pair of wadded-up men’s underclothes that looked brittle with age.

  There was a story there that Teia wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  As they found each, Ben-hadad seemed to home in more easily on the next, as if not just the architecture but the architecture of the builder’s own mind was opening up to him. “Last one,” he said, “it’s on the way. Then I’ll take you to the place I think it really is now.”

  The access room to that one was occupied, but Ben-hadad came up with some breezy lie and the old magister toddled her way off to lunch.

  In the hidden room behind her apartments, they found a corpse, nearly skeletal, facedown, with the back of his head caved in.

  “Dead many years, I’d guess,” Ben-hadad said.

  “But when he was fresh, how could they not smell him?” Teia asked. “These rooms aren’t airtight.”

  “The infirmary occupies the entire floor below us. I’d imagine many unpleasant aromas escape. Or perhaps the occupant was herself the murderer, and had stayed long enough that the odors disappeared. A mystery.”

  “But not our mystery,” Teia said.

  “Agreed,” Ben-hadad said. “If we make it through all this, we’ll dig deeper and see if we can get him justice.”

  They left that room undisturbed, and with as little evidence of their passing as possible, in case the current occupant was the murderer herself, as unlikely as that seemed. Regardless, they wouldn’t want to spook her.

  But they didn’t head back to the slaves’ stairs.

  “This last one…” Ben-hadad said. “This last one’s special. We can’t use the stairs. It’s accessed from the lift.”

  “From the lift?” Teia asked. “But the lifts have got to be the most frequented areas in the towers.”

  “Not at the top levels they’re not.”

  The idea that the Old Man of the Desert might have access to the top levels of the Chromeria shot a chill through Teia. But it wasn’t like it was a new idea to her. She’d figured the Old Man had to be a high-level diplomat or noble or even Blackguard. Of course he’d be rich, and he’d have access to all sorts of disguises. But knowing that his lair was within spitting distance of the Blackguard barracks—an assassin lord, right under the noses of those whose main purpose was to stop assassins?—sickened her. It made it real. Ironfist wasn’t just a one-off. They were everywhere.

  “It would have to be quick to access,” Teia said.

  “It’s between floors. You get to it from the back of the lift. A quick pause, set the brake, reset the weight to an empty lift, and the lift returns to the top floor automatically.”

  “So the Old Man has to be someone who gets on the lift alone often,” Teia said. It narrowed her list a little. A Blackguard captain? “N
o, never mind. That isn’t true,” she said. “I was assuming the Old Man would have to visit his lair often. But he might only visit fortnightly, or even monthly. Anyone who takes these lifts regularly would have many chances to be alone briefly enough to get into such a room.”

  She wasn’t going to find out who he was in time. She was going to fail again.

  Teia went invisible, and they all got on the lift.

  It was surprisingly easy to find, when they knew where to look. It was two and a half floors down from the top of the Prism’s Tower. Just below where security started.

  They pushed against the wall, and a narrow section simply sank in and swung open on hidden hinges, the seam invisible in all but bright light.

  There was a small vestibule on the other side with a brake so that an empty lift could be halted on its passage up or down.

  Teia carefully checked the vestibule for traps, then they released their brake on the lift and soon watched it go, summoned by someone far below.

  After parting a curtain and stepping into the darkness beyond the vestibule, they found a stone letterpad with the entire Old Parian alphabet on it.

  Her heart sank.

  When Quentin moved forward to examine it more closely, she said, “Careful. It’ll be trapped, somehow. The wrong code could wash the whole room with fire, for all we know. Maybe this one, maybe the one beyond.”

  Quentin stepped away gingerly.

  With paryl, it was obvious that five of the letters had been smeared with finger oils more often than any of the others. Some of the letters looked like they hadn’t been touched in years, and some had maybe been touched irregularly.

  Teia relayed everything to Ben-hadad, who wrote down the letters in groups according to how much they appeared to have been touched.

  “Well, there’s good news,” he said.

  “You’ve taken up code breaking in the last year?” she asked.

  “Not that good.”

  Of course not. She hadn’t thought she’d be so lucky.

  “It’s long,” he said, “and people are lazy, so it’ll probably be a word, or a phrase. Unfortunately, that means there’ll be repeats of letters, which makes breaking the code harder. And we don’t know how long the phrase is. And I don’t know Old Parian well enough to guess at letter frequencies. And it’s possible that if we make any errors, something bad will happen.”

  “I’m still waiting for that good news,” Teia said, as Ben watched the lift shaft to time an approaching lift.

  Weights plunged past them, and a moment later, a group of discipulae chatting with each other zipped by, none of them noticing the three in the darkness.

  “Ah,” Ben-hadad said, “that’s what this drawing is. Correct number of weights on the line to tell you the lift is empty. Nice engineering all around. Here’s an empty one now.”

  Weights plunged past their faces; the desired number, apparently, because Ben applied the brake, and stopped the empty lift in front of them perfectly.

  “You were saying?” Teia prompted.

  “I was? Oh, oh, right. Well, if there’s one great thing about being brilliant, it’s that other brilliant people like talking to you. I know someone who might help.”

  “Might?”

  “She didn’t like me that much. Back in the day. That was a long time ago, though.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Magister Kadah.”

  “Kadah! You’ve got to be joking. The woman’s a bitter little tyrant!” Teia had strong memories of her being the worst of their magisters.

  “Yeah, but she’s also the only magister I know with an interest in cryptology. Six hours.”

  “Six hours?” Teia asked. “To figure this out? How—”

  “Actually, I have no idea,” he said. “I was just picking a number. Quentin, you memorized which magisters are lecturing where, right? Of course you did. You can point me in the right direction. Now, let’s get out of here before someone notices how long this lift has been stalled.”

  Chapter 85

  The world had not stopped moving simply because Kip was spending hours gambling its fate with his grandfather. Andross had handed Kip a few things and then hustled out of his apartments to take care of a dozen tasks for the defense of the Jaspers. As soon as he himself stepped out of the old man’s apartments with Corvan Danavis, he was met by no fewer than five messengers, not only updating him on the state of the defenses and the disposition of his forces but also asking that he request horses or oxen and wagons and various other things the Foresters needed permission for.

  Kip directed those to report to the new high general, Corvan Danavis, who took it all in hand easily and promised to take care of it.

  Winsen and Big Leo were there to guard Kip. Kip sent one of the messengers to find Ben-hadad—he was going to be figuring out mechanical things, so he needed the man’s engineering brilliance. Then he sent Winsen to go find Cruxer to summon him urgently.

  “You tell him anything you have to to get him to come to me, you understand?” Kip said.

  “Your wife said not to leave you for any reason,” Win said.

  “And I’m telling you to move your ass to save Cruxer from doing something stupid. Come back with him.”

  Winsen, nonplussed about being pitted against Tisis, looked over at Big Leo for help, but the big man shrugged. “As soon as you get back, there’ll be three of us with the boss.”

  “You say that like Breaker’s the real boss,” Winsen said, but he left.

  Corvan was scanning documents that had been brought to him by the numerous messengers that were also waiting for him—he’d learned it was faster and more accurate, he said, than listening through an entire report.

  Not much seemed to surprise him about what he heard and read, though at one point, he said, “The Chromeria’s stockpiled that much black powder? The books never tell such things, but if we win, Karris will be the reason. Brilliant. Go on.”

  His messengers were soon given orders in a clipped shorthand that they scribbled on parchment as he spoke. He’d checked his own outgoing messages, approved them, and sent them out before Kip was finished hearing the second of his.

  They spoke together as they made their way to the lift.

  “You brought how many war hounds?!” Corvan asked. “Cwn y Wawr–trained?”

  “I’d more say they are the Cwn y Wawr,” Kip said, triggering the summon plate for a lift.

  “Great, great, great. A hound’s speed and slipperiness will make them perfect message carriers. It’ll help with a real problem of communication. The battlefront is going to be the entire circle of the walls if we’ve got seven floating bane to deal with.”

  “Uh… maybe you can rotate them through messenger duty?” Kip said. “They’ll serve where ordered, but you ever try to get a terrier to ignore a rat? Believe me, once you see them in their armor, you’re going to want them fighting on the front lines. Or as a reserve.”

  Corvan nodded, and explained his strategies in broad strokes. He knew the Jaspers like the back of his hand, and had clearly been thinking about this for weeks, if not months. Bonus of being married to a Seer—who had also told him not to tell everyone at the Chromeria exactly what he was preparing for, for some reasons that she refused to explain—a drawback of being married to a Seer.

  “I wish we had hours and hours,” Kip said as they got on the lift. He decided to take it down with Corvan, though he needed to go up to the roof.

  “There are hard things we need to talk about, son,” Corvan said. “I’ve… got a lot of explaining to do to you. And forgiveness to ask.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Kip said. “You cared for me more than anyone. And I, the son of your enemy. The man who cost you everything.”

  “That’s… not… It’s far more complicated than that. And not at all clean. I’m afraid I shall lose whatever respect you have for me.”

  “Never,” Kip said. “Master Danavis… I mean, High General Satrap D
anavis, I’ve been in impossible positions now myself. Sometimes men do things in the heat of a moment, but I judge men by what they do day after day.”

  The cloud didn’t move from Corvan’s visage, though, only darkened.

  “We need to talk about your daughter, too,” Kip said. “But not here. Someplace absolutely secure.”

  Corvan shook his head as if it weren’t necessary. “I met with her briefly some time ago. I know what’s she’s decided. I can guess where she’ll be tomorrow.” Corvan’s jaw tightened, and his brow furrowed against his grief.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kip said.

  “Me, too,” Corvan said, his face not moving a whit.

  The lift had taken forever, but finally a free one came and they got on.

  “We’ll talk more,” Kip said. “But you… you think your soldiers are going to make it to join in the defense?”

  “Yes,” Corvan said.

  “Which means you agree with me that Ironfist is going to relent. Your wife tell you that? I knew in my heart he couldn’t be a traitor. Not really.”

  “Kip, she didn’t tell me that. She said… she said someone’s going to die before Ironfist’s people join us. Someone who could avoid it, but almost certainly won’t. Someone who doesn’t deserve to die.”

  Kip blinked. “Could be a training accident, then. Someone disembarking from the ships, slipping or something.”

  “Could be,” Corvan said, but his eyes were pained.

  The lift stopped, but he didn’t open the doors.

  Corvan looked down at his feet. “In the Prisms’ War, I found purpose and friendship and status, and at its end, I lost all those, and my best friend, and my wife, and I… I did things. I got lost for a long time, Kip. I wish I’d been better to you. A lot better. You deserved more.”

  “We’ve work to do,” Kip said. “We’ll talk later. Oh, one last thing!” He leaned close to Corvan and whispered in his ear, even then cupping his hand over his mouth so his lips couldn’t be read, even though they were alone in the lift. “As satrap, you’re entitled to Blackguard protection. Refuse it. You understand?”