The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  He seemed utterly unaware that of the ten people sharing the lift, eight were slaves. Seemed unaware—and probably even was. He’d been so powerful and rich for so long that Karris could believe that. Andross remembered everything—but only everything he thought important. He was sly, but not omniscient, and he didn’t think of others who didn’t rise to the level of being players for his games.

  Karris was the ninth person in the lift. Technically, as a Blackguard, she’d been a slave herself. She didn’t believe Andross was unaware of that in the slightest. “I suppose it’s a good thing, then,” she said.

  “Hmm?” he asked.

  “That I was a slave myself,” she said. “You expect me to believe you’d forgotten?” The second part slipped out of the corral before she could shut the gate. Sarcasm was not the appropriate mode for a White. Not a good one.

  Act in a manner commensurate with my office’s dignity.

  Dammit.

  “Oh my,” he said, putting a hand to his chest. “What a horrific gaffe.” He made no effort to sound authentic.

  “Do you know the thing about slights?” she asked. Thank Orholam she hadn’t drafted red in a long time.

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “They’re slight.”

  “So is a bee sting,” he said. Damn he was quick!

  “What’s a bee sting to an iron bull?” she said, just as quickly. She’d learned from long practice: never let a Guile keep talking. “Let it go. It’s beneath you, father.” If she let him talk, he’d make some crack about how she’d just compared herself to an iron bull. There was an Iron White joke in there somewhere, too, so she had to strike faster.

  Thus, calling him ‘father.’

  He grimaced at the word. Then quirked his eyebrows as if accepting he’d deserved that for calling her ‘dear.’

  Karris had learned that she had to watch for the most fleeting expression on the promachos’s face.

  Those didn’t lie. But everything else about him?

  “Good thing—” she resumed. “I mean, if have your permission to finish my earlier thought?”

  “Not so bad at slights yourself when you put your mind to it… or is withering scorn a bit different?” he asked, amused like a father whose toddler wishes to wrestle and actually thinks she’ll win. “But please. Do finish.”

  She copied his eyebrow quirk, accepting the withering scorn in return for her own. But it pissed her off, deeply. It took her a moment to collect herself. “If there are certain things that free people won’t do, then it’s a good thing I was a slave.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because there’s nothing I won’t do to keep my people safe.”

  What was that twitch at the corners of his mouth with the rise of his eyebrows? A victory?

  No. No? Maybe surprise melting into amusement.

  “Funny. I said the same thing when I was a young man,” Andross said. He smiled widely now. “I believe you mean it just as much as I did.”

  Which of course could be interpreted several ways.

  But he was moving on. He said, “We’ll see if that holds when the bill comes due, won’t we? Because I’m sorry to say we may get to see what you’re really willing to do for your people sooner than we’d like.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Needlessly confrontational, Karris. A more dignified White would’ve assumed an innocent air and said, ‘Whatever do you mean? Are you going to bring me up to speed about the Parians now?’

  Dealing with Andross Guile was exhausting. Karris was already mentally out of breath, and he didn’t seem to be breaking a sweat.

  “The sea chariots haven’t verified it yet,” Andross said. The lift had come to a stop, and the Blackguards opened the door, but he made no move to exit. “It’s a large sea after all, but our spies in Azûlay agree: Your King Ironfist is sailing. Here. He’ll likely arrive a week before or after Sun Day, depending on the weather. He’s coming to negotiate.”

  The Blackguards in the lift and those outside it couldn’t help but exchange looks, but Karris couldn’t read their thoughts. She couldn’t even untangle her own. Ironfist was coming back?

  “If he wants to negotiate, why wouldn’t he take a sea chariot?” she asked. “He knows how to build them.”

  “A secret it would have been nice for you not to put in the hands of a traitor,” Andross muttered. “But you misunderstand.” He glanced briefly at the slaves. All of them were cleared to serve at the highest levels, which meant they were trusted fully, but Andross trusted no one fully, except maybe Grinwoody. “They say he’s furious. They say he’s bringing an army. They say he wishes to negotiate our surrender.”

  It was a punch in the guts when you haven’t had time to tense your belly. Fighting Ironfist? He was the kind of gentle warrior who got quiet and somber before he went into a battle. You never wanted to see him furious. In sparring, he’d bested his brother Tremblefist—the man whose battle rage had earned him a Name: the Butcher of Aghbalu.

  Karris did not want to see Ironfist furious.

  But forget fighting Ironfist himself. The people of the Chromeria, fighting against Parians? Their brothers? More than half of the Blackguards were Parians, and though she’d never question their loyalty, she also never wanted to put it to the test.

  Especially not with a real enemy at the door. Even a victory over Ironfist would only guarantee losing to the White King, and the dissolution of the empire.

  “Oh, but I left out the best part,” Andross said, motioning that he was going to remain in the lift. “You’ll pardon me. I’ve other urgent matters to attend to, given this news.”

  “What? What is it? Tell me the rest.”

  “King Ironfist trusts no one. Has no close advisers. Seems to think anyone at all could be a traitor.” He opened his palm toward Grinwoody, but the wrinkled old slave didn’t notice, seemed frozen. “Grinwoody,” Andross said, exasperated.

  The old man started and fumbled a scroll into Andross’s outstretched hand.

  Karris didn’t like Grinwoody.

  No, no, if a White is to be without stain—as a White must be—then she must be honest, with herself first of all.

  Karris hated Grinwoody’s guts. Not only because he was an extension of Andross’s malevolent will, a spiked gauntlet on Andross’s steel fist of command, but because he’d taken the Blackguard training—at far too advanced an age to usually get a chance. Then, when he’d passed all of it, on the eve of his final vows, he’d accepted a buyout of his contract to serve Andross. Karris, like every Blackguard, despised those who stole their expensive training and went elsewhere for the sake of more money. It spat on everything the Blackguard was. You bond with a fellow elite warrior-drafter, thinking they’ll be your brother for life, and then he turns his back on you.

  Regardless of his many years of faithful service to Andross, the Blackguards still thought of Grinwoody as a traitor. Which made it worse for everyone that as he was Andross’s secretary and slave overseer, they had to deal with him constantly.

  Him getting old and mentally missing a step sent an unkind (and unholy) thrill through her.

  Andross was frowning, frustrated at having to take time from his real problems to manage a slave. That was a duty Grinwoody was supposed to handle for him.

  “Five lashes, milord?” Grinwoody knew, even when he himself was the problem, to keep the interruption to his lord’s day quick and quietly efficient.

  “You’re too damn old, you fool. Five would break you.”

  “Privilege suspension. One month,” Grinwoody said.

  Andross waved it off. “Where was I? No advisers. So there’s no solid intelligence on his plans. Smart of him. He knows how we work. But. The suspicion among Paria’s nobles is that this talk of our surrendering to him may be a feint.”

  “A ‘feint’?” Karris asked.

  “The Parian nobility believe there’s something else Ironfist wants.”

  “Yes, thank you, I know what a fei
nt is. I meant a feint to what end?” Karris snapped. Not the way the White should act at all.

  “There were certain questions he’s asked with ‘uncommon intensity,’ is how my spy put it.”

  Oh yes. Ironfist had stood at the elbow of the world’s most powerful and devious personalities, seeing how they excelled and how they failed, and when, and often why. But it was one thing to study how the best people in the world do a thing; perhaps Ironfist was learning it was quite another to actually do it. Karris had been learning it herself for a year now.

  It was like analyzing a fight versus taking the blows yourself.

  Finding out exactly what you needed to know to act boldly and notifying all the people who needed to know, because they were the ones who would actually make it happen, while keeping spies in the dark about what you intended? That was not as easy as you’d think, even after years of watching it. A master worked art a mere spectator couldn’t even see.

  Karris herself still didn’t know how the hell Andross did half the things he did.

  “What kind of questions?” Karris asked, impatient. They were still holding up the lift.

  Now she was getting paranoid, wondering if Andross was somehow using even that silence against her.

  Important to remember: there isn’t always a secret plan to make you look a fool. Andross was her ally, after all. At least against Ironfist.

  “About the Prism-elect, naturally,” Andross said. “But also about you, his old friend. People there can’t believe he’ll actually side with the White King. But for some odd reason he blames me for his sister’s unfortunate accidental death. It comes out now that she had quite a penchant for riotous living. She used all manner of intoxicants, mixed together no less.”

  “That is odd,” she said. “But at least the part about Ironfist not wanting to side against us is good… right?”

  “In declaring himself king, he’s committed treason. He believes I ordered his sister’s murder—who, despite her flaws, was at least a legitimate Nuqaba. So him sending an army here is not good news in any fashion whatsoever.”

  “I didn’t say it was good news. I said—”

  Andross ran right over her words. “So what’s his play? He paralyzes us from hostile action with an offer to ally with us, but then, once he’s here with his army…”

  Karris said, “He gives us some kind of ultimatum? He’ll only join us if… what?”

  What Andross didn’t say aloud was that the Chromeria would lose the war if Paria sided against them. Without question, it would be the end of the empire. Full stop.

  They would likely lose the war even if Paria simply decided on neutrality.

  Andross said, “I don’t know, and he’s not telling anyone, but if he gives us such a choice, how outrageous would his demands have to be before we would say no?”

  Short of asking them to abandon Orholam and worship the old gods instead? Short of that, Ironfist could likely ask anything at all. The Chromeria would have to agree.

  Andross could obviously tell by the look on her face that she’d grasped the crux of it. She felt dread growing in the pit of her stomach. It was one thing to think, ‘I am so dead.’ It was quite another for a cowled man to escort you to the executioner’s ax-bitten, bloodstained block.

  “He seemed quite intent about… about you,” Andross said, watching her carefully.

  “You said that. But why?”

  “He’s declared himself king. Even if he wanted to, even if he’s discovered that being a king isn’t quite the prize everyone thinks, he can’t submit to us now and hope to go back to the way things were before. Or so he must surely believe, with me as promachos. What guarantee could I give him that would make him trust me? He thinks I am a man of such low moral character that I have truck with assassins!”

  Of course, Andross had—but he wasn’t going to admit to it, not even only in front of slaves. Andross was no fool. (Though perhaps he believed Karris was.)

  “Believing me so low,” Andross said, “how could he trust any oath I gave him? If he believes I murdered his sister—who was guilty only of being slow to answer the Chromeria’s call for help—he must doubtless believe I would murder him, an outright traitor.”

  Gee, old man, maybe if you didn’t assassinate people, maybe people won’t think you assassinate people.

  But as soon as Karris had the thought, she realized how hypocritical it was. She was the one who’d made that job vastly more difficult by ordering Teia to assassinate the Parian satrapah as well. She was the one who’d knowingly sent a young woman—hardly more than a child—to do a job that even a master assassin might’ve botched. It was her fault in sending Teia at all that Teia had been unmasked by Ironfist. If the Nuqaba (and no one else) had simply died that night, Ironfist might never have known it was an assassination at all. He might have guessed it was some aggrieved local.

  It was Karris, not just Andross, who’d turned Ironfist into an enemy.

  “Thus,” Andross said as if it were merely an interesting tidbit, “as far as I can presume, the only way Ironfist thinks he can keep himself safe from me—”

  “You’re really gifted at this, aren’t you?” she said.

  “What?” he asked, distracted.

  “Putting yourself into other people’s minds, figuring out how they think, figuring out what they know, and what they must be planning given what they know, and then using it to destroy them.”

  “Gifted! Gifted? I’m skilled. People call others ‘gifted’ when they don’t want to believe they’re worse at something because they’re not willing to put in the work excellence requires. Regardless—I mean, if I have your permission to finish my thought?”

  That. That was gratuitous. “By all means, please do,” she said, nearly politely.

  “Actually, let me qualify that. I spoke too soon. The rest stands, but the destroying them part? You’re right. That’s my gift.” He flashed his eyebrows, as if it were all interesting, but tangential. “Now, where was I? Oh yes. If I guess correctly, given what he thinks he knows, Ironfist believes that the only way he can be safe from me…” Andross smiled, savoring the moment, “… is if he marries you.”

  “What?!” Surely Karris hadn’t heard that right.

  “How long has he been in love with you?”

  “What, what? Never!”

  “Well,” Andross said with a shrug. “Perhaps it’s solely political, then. We’ll hope it doesn’t come to it regardless. We’ll hope he shows up with fewer soldiers and ships and drafters than rumored. These numbers often do get exaggerated. And he’s a political novice, after all. We might yet outmaneuver him.”

  But Karris knew Ironfist, and Ironfist knew both her and Andross.

  Ironfist wouldn’t come here unless he was certain he could win. And implacable, righteous rage tends to make up for a lot of limitations.

  “But if all goes poorly,” Andross said, stepping off the lift. “I guess it’s good news that you’ve accepted that Gavin’s dead. You’re a widow; your time of mourning is finished, and you’re free to remarry.”

  Her mouth made an O, but no sound came out.

  “After all,” Andross said, “you just told me: you’re willing to do whatever it takes to save your people, aren’t you?”

  He’d set her up. Somehow.

  She’d never seen it coming.

  It was like that time he’d hired those men to ambush and beat her. This time he was doing it with nothing more than his words, and this time, he got to watch her take the beating.

  She couldn’t muster any defense. She only looked at him, stricken as if she were down on the paving stones of that street again, taking kicks.

  “You know, there’s one good thing about my son dying,” Andross said, timing his words perfectly with the closing of the lift’s doors. “He didn’t live to see you give up on him.”

  Chapter 20

  “So, boss, remind me why we’re going up here?” Winsen said as they ascended a bone-white spiral ram
p to the roof of the Palace of the Divines.

  “Two reasons,” Kip said. “Ben really wanted to see the mechanism, and the Divines really, really didn’t want him to.”

  “Good enough for me,” Big Leo said. “Why so many of us? Are we expecting a hostile reception, or you just giving the nunks a chance to fail?”

  Chagrined after the assassination attempt, Cruxer had been screening prospective new members for the Mighty. Fifteen of them followed the Mighty today. Kip shrugged and said quietly, “Every day’s a new chance to fail.”

  Cruxer gave him a disapproving glance.

  “What I meant is,” Kip said more loudly, “if I had any idea what’s so secret about their big secret, I might have an answer to that question.”

  “But you don’t, because it’s secret,” Ferkudi said, nodding.

  “It’s just a big mirror, right?” Winsen asked.

  “Like the Blue Falcon is just a boat,” Ben-hadad said.

  “Well… it is,” Winsen said flatly.

  Ben-hadad said, “You did not just say that my masterpiece, the finest skimmer ever created, is ‘just a boat.’”

  “No, actually you said that,” Winsen said.

  Ben-hadad paused in his limping up the stairs. He dropped his head in defeat.

  “He’s got you there,” Ferkudi said loudly. “You did actually say that.”

  “Helluva view, huh?” Kip said, to forestall more sniping. The Palace of the Divines was topped by its heart tree, a massive white oak whose roots were artfully (and, he assumed, magically) woven through the walls of the palace below it. To the north and south of that great tree was a narrow band of old-growth forest with smaller white oaks descending down the sides of the palace as if it were simply a steep hill. That band of forest looped back into the palace’s rear gardens.

  The ramp was a white ribbon that circled the entirety of the palace, at two points of each revolution passing through that band of trees and moss and rocks, but suspended above the ground and never close enough to any of the trees to touch them.

  There were interior stairs that would have taken them to the roof faster, but this looping, outside way was the more formal route, and he wanted to give the Foresters as much of his respect as possible. He didn’t know why, but only the Divines, a conn, and the Keeper of the Flame and her people were supposed ‘by ancient tradition’ to approach the heart tree atop the Palace of the Divines.