The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Is that an order, sir?”

  “Just shut up.”

  After doing the arithmetic in his head, twice, Kip called Ferkudi over and whispered to him for a bit.

  “Yep, yep,” Ferkudi said too loudly—the man was utterly guileless. “That’s either tomorrow, or more likely yesterday, depending on how you calculate it. And if we push, and the river is passable all the way—unlikely, right?—but we could get to Apple Grove in… two days. More likely three or four.”

  “So there’s no way we can get there by tomorrow?” Kip asked.

  Ferkudi laughed. “No. Unless you can steal Orholam’s own chariot like Phaethon or make a machina like a skimmer for the skies.”

  He’d meant them both as similar impossibilities, but it made Kip think of his father and the condor he’d made. Too bad he’d never told Kip how to construct one. Nor did Kip have his father’s mind of how to invent things. Besides, the condor had needed a vast body of water to build up the requisite speed to glide. Kip didn’t have that, either.

  Low curses were muttered all around. No one trusted Aliviana Danavis, but if she was on their side, she’d just told them it was too late for them to win.

  The messenger saw the black looks directed toward him. If the man had delivered his message when he was supposed to, they would have had a chance.

  “You may have killed us all by dodging your duty,” Cruxer snarled at the man. “Your cowardice. You knew what you had to do, and you couldn’t simply do it, could you? Could you!” There was a depth of rage there that put the Mighty to glancing at each other.

  “W-w-wait! She said, she said, she said for when you were done listening to her offer and were dismissing me, she said to tell you, ‘This man is as much a treasure to me as Ramir’s esteem was, back in Rekton. Please lavish commensurate honors upon him.’”

  The man breathed again. He wet dry lips with his tongue. His eyes lit with hope as everyone turned to Kip.

  “Oh, you have got to be joking,” Big Leo said. “We have to let him go? Give him stuff? He’s a spy!”

  “That isn’t what she said,” Ben-hadad said, adjusting his spectacles. “Not necessarily. Breaker?”

  It was an odd dislocation into memory. All his best friends were here, but they hadn’t known the old Kip, when he’d lived in Rekton. They didn’t share that life, those friends, those allegiances, fears, hatreds, and loathing.

  The momentary reverie had apparently stretched beyond momentary, because Cruxer cleared his throat. “Since no one else is, I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious: Lord Guile? How much did Aliviana Danavis value this Ramir’s esteem?”

  But Kip didn’t answer. He had a vivid memory of being wildly infatuated with Liv and talking with her when she’d been back from the Chromeria once. As he was nervously trying to make conversation with the older, pretty girl, Kip had said Ram thinks this, Ram thinks that, maybe three or four times. Ramir had opinions about everything. And Liv had suddenly started berating Kip. ‘Ramir’s a small-town bully. He’s trash. And you’re licking his boots. What does that make you, Kip? You’re already better than he’ll ever be. Grow up!’

  It had been highly confusing to him, being called a bootlicker and a baby but being praised at the same time.

  Orholam’s stones, it was embarrassing even to recall it.

  She’d been right, too. Not that it mattered to the present situation, except that it verified the message was from her, and that it was going to be a bad day for her messenger.

  “He’s not having one of his trances again, is he?” Ferkudi asked.

  “No,” Tisis answered quietly. But she didn’t prod him for an answer.

  Resigned that they were going to have to give Kip some time to think it over, Ben-hadad looked over at Ferkudi. “What if a guy gets a shy bladder?”

  “Huh? What’s that?” Ferkudi asked.

  Ben said, “You know, needs to pee, gets up to the trench, feels like people are watching, can’t pee. Too much pressure.”

  “That’s a thing?” Ferkudi asked, thunderstruck.

  “It’s a thing,” Winsen said.

  “That is not a thing,” Ferkudi protested. “You gotta pee, you gotta pee.”

  “It’s a thing,” Big Leo rumbled. “I’m kind of a shy-bladder gentleman myself.”

  “Really?” Ben-hadad asked him. “Never noticed that about you.”

  “Huh,” Ferkudi said. “I did not know that’s a thing. That would explain some things that happened at the latrines when I was gathering data.”

  “And what were the women supposed to do, pee in the same trench? At the same speed?” Ben-hadad asked with a grin. “Were you going to run drills until they got up to snuff?”

  “Of course. All those problems were next,” Ferk said soberly. “But… well, I hung out by the privies and approached a lot of women to help me with my experiments, but I had real trouble finding volunteers. Not a single woman would help.”

  “You’ll find those women in a different part of the camp,” Winsen said dryly. “And they’ll expect to be paid.”

  The rest of them laughed. Even Cruxer cracked a grin.

  Orholam help him, even the poor messenger smiled.

  “I don’t get it,” Ferkudi said. “You mean the tanners?”

  But Kip turned toward the messenger. “Liv hated Ramir with a passion. She said his opinion was dung I should throw in a fire.”

  Everyone fell silent. The man froze, wide-eyed. Throw in a fire?

  Kip continued, “So your goddess is letting me know I can kill you without offending her. She framed the words to deceive you, thinking your greed would drive you here.”

  “What a bitch,” Tisis whispered.

  “Not even loyal to her own,” Winsen said.

  “She didn’t understand loyalty even before she went wight,” Kip said. “So maybe it’s just as well she’s in the enemy’s camp and not ours.” He turned to the man. “I don’t want to murder you. But you’re a problem. So you solve it for me: Winsen’s solution, or you choose to live a slave. We brand the date of next Sun Day on your arm. After that you go free. A year and a couple weeks of servitude, and your oath not to return to the fight.”

  “Only a year?” the man asked, suddenly hopeful again. Funny how fast our hopes can shrink.

  “Anyone holding you past that date will face death.” If our laws matter at all a year from now.

  Kip pursed his lips as the man walked willingly to the blacksmith to be branded.

  And that is how I justify becoming a slaver.

  Tisis came to his side. “So we’re headed to Apple Grove now? Even though it’s either too late or a trap?”

  Kip looked at her, pained.

  Chapter 51

  The door swung open silently, revealing the profile of a scrawny young scholar scratching a parchment with sure, fluid strokes while he studied a parchment whose fat, twin rolls dominated his desk.

  “Are you here to kill me?” Quentin asked, not looking up to see who’d come into his recently locked room.

  “No,” Teia grunted, tucking away her picks.

  “Then, one moment, please.” He finished the long sentence he’d been writing. Then he used a boar’s-hair brush and soapy water to clean the gold nib of his quill, shook a bit of fine sand on the damp ink, opened a case, and put away all his accoutrements. He grabbed a folded parchment from the box before closing it away.

  There was some essential rightness to seeing Quentin with his scrolls and quills. His was a quieter excellence than Kip’s drafting or Cruxer’s flowing through the fighting forms, or Tlatig with her bow, but Teia knew that his mind was doing things that hers could never grasp.

  When he looked up and saw Teia, his face showed no surprise.

  “Of course it’s you,” he said. “Orholam wants us to be whole, does He not?”

  Teia didn’t really want a sermon from a traitor. She tossed her orders on the table. In Karris’s hand they read, ‘Quentin will be your handler, and will serve yo
u in all ways. Trust him absolutely. Don’t get him killed. I have plans for him.’

  “What were your orders?” she asked.

  “Karris told me the one who came would be my master and maybe even my friend. She said I needed to learn how to have both.”

  Teia was suddenly embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Maybe… maybe for a lot of things.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Just for the one thing. Nothing else.”

  “‘The one thing’? What do you mean?” she asked.

  He looked at her, clear-eyed and steady. “Murdering Lucia, of course. But I’m glad I got caught, glad I had to face up to what I’d done and what I’d become. I’m broken now, Teia, but I’ve never been so free. I know for the first time what it is to walk in the light. But never mind me. How may I serve you?”

  “I—I have no idea.”

  “Then may I offer a suggestion?”

  She nodded.

  “When I saw my orders, I guessed it would be you, so I already got started.”

  “‘Started’? On what?”

  He smiled, and scooted his papers toward her. She sat, and her blood went cold at the heading of his notes: ‘Mist Walking: Myths/Speculation, Ancient/Modern, & Educated Guesses.’

  Her heart stopped. “Did she tell you I…?”

  He shook his head. “Paryl. I think early on you must’ve believed it was useless, didn’t you? Otherwise, you’d never have told anyone that you could use it. Hard to explain why you would qualify for Blackguard training if you were a mund, though, one supposes. Anyway, I found that a number of the books with the best information about Mist Walkers weren’t even in the restricted libraries. You have to know which authors to trust, of course, but this hasn’t been the hardest research I’ve done, by any means. Now, with you to tell me which information is true and which is exaggerated, I can winnow out which authors were fabulists or given to exaggeration among those I don’t already know.”

  Only then did he seem to notice the stricken look on her face.

  “Teia, what’s wrong? I thought you would be excited.”

  “Quentin, do you have any idea what I’m involved in?”

  “I thought that would be obvious,” he said.

  She gestured: ‘Go on.’

  “You’re trying to discover how the most-likely-mythical Order of the Broken Eye was able to achieve whatever small measure of light diffraction they were, to the extent that latter storytellers would so grandiosely call it ‘invisibility,’ but which, according to the eminent leader of the Eighth Stoa, Ulgwar Pen, was more akin to good camoufla… What are you doing with that hood?”

  Teia went invisible. Karris had said to trust him absolutely, right?

  She held Quentin’s gaze for a moment, knowing that her eyes would be visible while receiving light. Then she dipped her head to disappear completely.

  His mouth dropped open, and Teia couldn’t suppress a giggle.

  That seemed to completely flip his apple cart.

  Teia dropped the invisibility just as Quentin went wild-eyed.

  “That—that… Ulgwar Pen had no idea what he was talking about!” Quentin said. “That liar! Everyone trusted—he made his reputation on that paper! There goes half my report!” He rubbed his temples. “That prompts the question: Was he deceived, or just wrong? Or, Orholam forbid, deliberately misleading? Surely a man of his standing wouldn’t—well then, what does that say about his paper on the Two Hundred?” He stopped himself. “But I’m thinking like a scholastic. I’m on all the wrong questions, aren’t I? Tell me.”

  Teia removed her hood. “The Order is real. They’re assassinating people to this day. Not far away, either. They’ve been at work in the Chromeria itself. Karris assigned me to infiltrate their ranks and destroy them utterly, at any cost. You understand? I’m to do anything at all. Everything,” Teia said. “I’ve had to kill innocents to prove myself, and even that hasn’t been enough. Some of them trust me, but… one of their best assassins is hunting me. If I’m lucky, he alone suspects me. I can’t run away, because I still have a chance to stop them—and if I run, they’ll kill my father.”

  It was hilarious to see Quentin’s brain explode twelve ways with bafflement. Under the strain of all she’d been through in the past year, Teia’s sense of humor had gone so dark she couldn’t see a dead-baby joke in front of her face. But the surprising part was how much of a relief it was simply to share—with Quentin! The last person in the world she would have thought would understand her new terrible life.

  But the awful weight of her secret was halved instantly.

  They talked, they planned, they shared what had happened in their lives—each holding back at least some parts, Teia could tell. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Quentin about all the awful shit she’d done. But strangely, with how he reacted to the merely bad shit she did share, and the elliptical references to worse, she could imagine eventually telling him more. Maybe everything.

  She’d expected him to radiate condemnation, but without pretending he knew exactly what she’d experienced, instead he radiated sorrow at what she’d been through, and acceptance of her, without accepting all she’d done.

  She didn’t know how he did that, but the tight knot in Teia’s chest eased a little. She still felt like she was growing old too fast, like her youth was draining away like water through sand. But for an afternoon, she didn’t feel like she was dying.

  “I made up a joke,” Teia said suddenly, as their time was winding down.

  “Oh yeah? How’s it go?” Quentin asked.

  She suddenly realized her joke was not one to share with a holy man.

  True, some of the Blood Forest luxiats were known to be a bit earthy from time to time, but on the whole, luxiats were not known for their ribald senses of humor. And Quentin, who didn’t even like to hug, wasn’t someone Teia could imagine ever being called ‘earthy.’

  She grimaced. “Nah, sorry. Forget I said anything. It’s crude.”

  “I’ve never heard a crude joke before,” Quentin said.

  “You haven’t?” she asked. She didn’t think the luxiats were quite so far removed from—“Oh. You’re kidding.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  “It’s not… it’s not even very funny.” She sank into herself.

  “I’m not expecting Aethelfric Yfargwvyn levels of wit here,” Quentin said. “C’mon. It’ll brighten a dark moment, even if it flops. Maybe especially then.”

  Aethel-who? “Now we’ve built it up,” Teia protested, “it’s about as funny as a fart joke. And less mature.”

  “I love flatus quips,” Quentin protested.

  “Yeah, see?!” she said. “Flatus? I mean, even that was dignified! Is that actually the proper name for—”

  “It was actually a joke,” he said.

  She stopped. “Oh.”

  “Pretty bad, huh? Now you owe me a bad joke. C’mon, I even made it be a fart joke,” he said. “Meet me halfway here.”

  “Okay. Fine.” She tried to think of a different joke quickly. Something less gross. Some actual fart joke she’d heard. There had been off-color jokes in the barracks every day. But of course now she couldn’t think of a single one.

  She covered her face with her hands. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “So I was out following a bad guy, and he’d gone inside this hovel with what I thought was his mistress and I had to wait for them to finish fu… meeting.” She grimaced. “Anyway, when I first started doing this, I thought I was going to be like an avenging ghost, and all of a sudden I thought I was more like a fox, like my old shimmercloak—it had a fox on it?” This is awful. “Like I’m this fierce, keen, silent hunter who stalks unseen at night to kill, you know?”

  “Uh-huh?” Quentin said.

  “But then I thought, well, I don’t only work at night, so I’m not entirely nocturnal. More like nocturnal-y.” The worst joke ever. “But I am really focused on my missions. So, you know, I’m really worried about
my nocturnal-y missions. So I thought, I’m not a fox. I’m a teenage boy!”

  Quentin stared at her blankly.

  “You know, a, a…”

  Nothing. Total blank.

  “What’s a nocturnal emission?” Quentin asked.

  The blood drained out of her face. No, no. Hell, no. She was not going to explain that!

  “I think I’ve heard the term before,” Quentin said, “but when I looked it up, it wasn’t in any of the luxiats’ dictionaries. Is it a specialized term? From what field? I’m so sorry, the whole joke hinges on that, and I’ve failed you. Maybe you could define it for me and then tell me the whole joke again?”

  But then she noticed a tiny twitch of his lips.

  “You asshole!” she said.

  He burst out laughing. “Ah! the look on your face!”

  “Goddammit, Quentin!”

  “Easy, easy with the blasphemy!” he said, still laughing.

  Oh, that was right. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. Swearing and jokes about wet dreams were fair game, but saying ‘God’ was out of bounds. Or was it the ‘damn’ part? Her mouth twisted. “We are really different from each other, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “But… also very much alike. I mean, you could say I’m like a fox and you’re like a teenage—”

  “Quentin!”

  They both laughed, and Teia realized that for a precious hour, she hadn’t felt alone.

  And when she left to go do more terrible, necessary things, she banked that memory like a little glowing ember in her heart. She would take it out later, and breathe on it, and bask in that little warm glow.

  That, that right there, is what it feels like to be human. That’s what it feels like to have a friend.

  She didn’t know what her future held, but she knew she would need it.

  Chapter 52

  “Satrap Corvan Danavis is bringing his fleet here. To celebrate Sun Day with the Chromeria, he says,” the diplomat Anjali Gates said.

  Karris’s breath caught. “‘Fleet’? So our spies were right? But how’d he get a fleet? How could he afford that? The new Tyreans have nothing. Do you have any guesses on the number of drafters? Soldiers?”