The Burning White (21 page)

Grinwoody thought that would change the world. He thought that was enough.

Grinwoody was wrong.

Throwing luxin around was merely a personal power. The genius of the Chromeria as an organization was that through education first and coercion later, they’d turned that power into communal power, then traditional power, first subservient to political power, then enmeshed with it, and finally indistinguishable from it. They had ensconced themselves in the world’s politics and culture and religion and trade. But even if a sconce is originally placed high so that it may cast its light far, if the fire it held dies, the sconce remains, and it remains in its high place. So, too, the Chromeria’s social and political and commercial and ceremonial power would falter if magic were lost, but it wouldn’t necessarily be broken.

Destroying magic wasn’t enough.

Fearing the lash, even freed of his chains, the slave will still pull at his oar, but men of unfettered soul, who though chained are still whole, will smash it like trash on the floor.

Magic was one major tool by which Orholam and Orholam’s Chosen worked His will in the world, but they had others. People didn’t send their daughters to be living and dying sacrifices to the Chromeria because of magic, but because they believed it was what Orholam demanded.

Gavin—High Lord Gavin Guile, Emperor, Promachos, and mighty Prism, Orholam’s Chosen, the Highest Luxiat, the Defender of the Faith—Gavin the Liar Prince, the High Deceiver, was the only one who might be able to kill the religion itself. Down to its rotten root.

If that fell, everything built on it would, too.

He who’d been ‘blessed’ with the gift of black luxin could kill the Lord of Light and watch tumble all the horrors built on men’s fear of Him. Half-blind and chained and toothless as he was, Gavin might stagger to the pillars that upheld the roof of the empire. He might find strength had come once more to his old muscular will—strength enough to lever apart the pillars upholding the very heavens and bring it all down. Gavin the Liar, who’d murdered innocents to uphold others’ lies, could destroy the greatest lie of all.

Gavin would bring down the rebels, not in order to save the empire but in order to make it fall correctly.

Fuck the old way. Fuck the new way. As he had always been, he himself would be the third way. He would be himself, and he would be terrible. He would come back from death, come back from this journey to heaven and hell, and Gavin would invert all they had hoped. Gavin, the Son of the Morning, the Bright Hope of the World, had been cast down into a ninefold hell. But he hadn’t stayed down. He’d broken through and escaped from one color of hell to another and another—until his own father had shut him into the inner darkness. The blackest heart of Chromeria, its very foundation.

From those depths, a nameless wretch had been sent to scale the heavens and kill God Himself. Who could return from such an impossible journey?

Only one man. Only one man might have been born for such a thing. Only one who could make and remake himself, who refused to die, who defied the schemes of those who held every advantage over him—and won.

Triumphant, with a cloak of fire and a crown of blood, Dazen the Black would return. He would bring down heaven and he would raze hell.

But.

Gavin could only triumph if he did what no one had ever done: he must make it through White Mist Reef, scale the Tower of Heaven, kill Orholam, and then make it back home to escape, outwit, and destroy the Order—he’d need to do all that by Sun Day if he were to save Karris.

Then he could live happily ever after.

Easy.

Of course, he could say nothing of all this. Not among these doomed servants of the Order.

But he wasn’t one of the doomed anymore. Not in his own mind.

Looking over at Gunner, Gavin felt the old, reckless, confident Guile grin spread over his face for the first time in eons. “Gunner? Captain? Let’s go find God. I’ll bring the sword, just in case He’s a dick.”

Gunner’s mercurial mood abruptly stilled. All the guns of his attention drew broadside. His eyes weighed Gavin, judging velocity, pitch, charge, spin. Eyes tightening, he calculated windage, current, the target’s distance, speed, and parallax.

Gavin welcomed the judgment, fatal as it might be. The end began here. This was Gunner’s destiny. He
would
join Gavin; he simply didn’t know it yet.

Frankly, but fearlessly, his demeanor void of forced jollity or feigned madness, Gunner said, “You must know that’s impossible.”

“Impossible is what I do.”

By his own count, Daragh the Coward had four hundred seventeen scars—none of them on his back. It might not have been an exaggeration. The bandit lord had bragged that there was one scar for each kill. It was said that if the killed man hadn’t possessed the skill to cut Daragh as they fought, Daragh cut himself. He bore one scar for each man. Deeper or longer for the men he respected.

He didn’t kill women or children. Or, if one believed the darker rumors, he simply didn’t think they counted enough to deserve their own scars when he did kill them.

Kip was the son of an emperor. He didn’t want to be impressed at the sight of the man who’d strolled into the audience chamber this morning as if he owned it, but there was no denying that Daragh was impressive. Daragh the Coward didn’t just have four hundred seventeen scars covering his arms and cheeks and forehead and fists: every one of his scars was hypertrophic. Hypertrophic scars didn’t spread beyond the original wound like keloid scars did, but they did puff up, thick and red against Daragh’s olive skin, cartilaginous and angry.

Apparently such scars often itched terribly.

Which made the bandit lord’s skin a striped shrine not only to human mortality past, but to one man’s misery past and present.

Kip regarded the bandit with lidded eyes. This wasn’t going to be easy. He knew what he had to do.

Daragh the Coward wore his dark, curly hair in long dreadlocks piled into a tail on top of his head. He tucked his tight breeches into rich knee-high boots. Doubtless in order to better display his mutilated pelt, he wore no tunic, only a leather weapons harness, currently with many empty sheaths and pistol hooks, as the Mighty had resolutely refused his demands to come into Kip’s presence armed.

Kip had been tired of being the center of attention all the time, so he’d expected to feel relieved as the smiling bandit king drew every eye.

Instead, Kip was surprised by how it irked him.

“Your
Highness
,” Daragh said, making an elegant bow. He was flanked by two muscular men and followed by three more. Kip presumed they were all warrior-drafters.

“ ‘My lord’ will do,” Kip said.

“Ah, but you’re not that, are you?” Daragh said pleasantly.

Really? You’re going to play the shame-me-with-my-past card? Instead of saying anything, though, Kip merely stared at the man, as if monumentally bored by the stupid games this bandit was trying to play.

The moment stretched uncomfortably, and Kip the Lip somehow managed to hold his words like a disciplined line of infantry holding its fire while enemy cavalry charged into range.

Daragh broke first. He was, after all, the one who had requested this meeting. “Not
my
lord, that is. Not yet, anyway.” He gave a gap-toothed grin, backing off from the other possible implication of his words: that Kip was a bastard.

“You fled from your owner seventeen years ago now,” Kip said. “That’s long enough to learn correct terms of address, even if one were possessed merely of low cunning and not much intelligence.”

With some tightness around his eyes, Daragh the Coward smiled again, and Kip could well imagine him holding that same smile while he slid a dagger into your ribs. “We learn different things in the forests and firths than do the soft-handed boys that weaker men call lords.”

Kip let the jab hit only air. “I should hope you’ve learned quite a lot, or we’re both wasting our time. You see, Daragh . . . or, I’m sorry, my own education was geared more toward drafting and war than rhetoric and finer points of alionymics: do you prefer Master the Coward, or is it always Daragh the Coward . . . ? Seems too long for ordinary daily usage. Just Daragh, perhaps? Dar-Dar?”

It had taken Tisis no small amount of prying to find that old nickname, and that Daragh hated it.

The bandit let it roll past, but wet his lips. “Daragh is fine for my friends.”

Don’t say, ‘You can call me Daragh the Coward.’

“You can call me Daragh the Coward. Or Lord Daragh, if you prefer.”

Kip sighed.

Grandfather, is this how you feel all the time? Playing against stupid people? “Lord? Baron of the Bayou, I suppose? The Earl of the Estuary? The Count Who Can’t?” Kip didn’t give him the time to reply. “Enough pleasantries. I would rather be serving this people, and for your part,
Lord
Daragh, you would doubtless rather be raping and murdering them, as you do, but we’ve things to discuss, don’t we? The growth of my power has come at the expense of yours, yet you’ve been careful to avoid attacking me directly.

“That avoidance doubtless cost you both in money and in the respect of your people, but you’re cunning: you wanted to keep an option open, just in case there was a time to jump onto my side. But now things have changed.”

Surprisingly, Daragh kept quiet. He wanted to see how accurate Kip’s read of him and his situation was.

That suited Kip. He would set the ground rules of this game, and skip past some of the introductory positioning. Except that he had to be careful not to go too far too fast: one of the things he needed not to do was to reach the crisis of this meeting too quickly.

“You’ve been at this a long time. You know exactly what it costs to keep your men fed. Everyone you’d ordinarily prey upon has fled,
and
you’ve still not attacked the easy pickings under my protection? Even as, in recent days, your forces have swelled far beyond what you can support through banditry in the best of times. That means you’re making your big move. Perhaps you’ve realized there’s not much security in retirement for a bandit. Or perhaps you’re not thinking about the growing stiffness in your joints each morning or the pain in your aging back. You want to come back in from the cold, you want lands, you want to stop running, stop watching your back and become a lord—for him or for us. Maybe you don’t even care. So you’ve taken the Wight King’s coin and brought as many men here as you can afford to try to extract as much from us as you can.

“It’s an obvious ploy,” Kip said, though he’d thought himself pretty clever when he figured it out. “But regardless, you bring a not-inconsiderable number of men here, tested in killing if not actually in fighting against those who fight back. So come, let’s make like horse traders. What do you want? I’ve much else to do today.”

If Daragh the Coward was aghast at Kip’s open assertion that he served the White King, he didn’t show it. “My dear b—Lord Guile,” he said as if catching himself. “I’m surprised. I come to a room full of people like you all, gracious lords and ladies that you are. But we’re all Foresters, are we not? We’re not so removed from the earth beneath our toes and the wind in our hair. I see the curiosity in every eye, and yet we’ve not even taken the time for proper introductions.”

“How’s that?” Kip said. The man was stalling, trying to reframe the discussion.

“You haven’t asked me about my scars,” Daragh said. “ I—”

“No! No! Of course not!” Kip interrupted as if aghast at the idea.

“So you do know—”

“No, why would I? And I don’t need to know. I was taught better than to draw attention to the disabilities of my guests. I’d never! It’s uncouth to comment on things a man can’t fix: say, a cleft lip, or a lame foot, or even a . . . a regrettable clumsiness at shaving.”

The room erupted in shocked laughter.

The laughter hit Daragh the Coward so hard that Kip felt momentarily sorry for him. No one likes to be mocked, but mock a noble and he’s still a noble. Mock a shopkeeper, she still owns her shop. But a bandit leader lives on his reputation. Turning this man’s fearsome scars into an object of ridicule?

That could be fatal.

“But might I suggest”—Kip paused, as if he’d bumbled into rudeness and wanted to extricate himself—“perhaps . . . just let the beard grow out?”

Murder shot through Daragh the Coward’s eyes. He shot a glance at stony Cruxer and then Big Leo, whose expressions said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Clearly in the camps he’d lived in for nearly two decades, when one mocked another man, the possibility of personal violence was always on the table. He was unaccustomed to dealing with insults when that was gone.

“I bring five thousand men and you—” Daragh said, raising his voice.

“Five thousand?! Five?!” Kip interrupted. And here was where, if Tisis or Antonius was wrong, he was going to get his ass handed to him. “You have three thousand four hundred men; three hundred more who are casualties, well enough to walk but not to fight; and a thousand more camp followers. And that’s counting the cavalry you were hoping to conceal twelve leagues from here in Little Wash. What kind of counting is this? The Count Who Can’t Count indeed! Did you really never progress beyond using your fingers and toes?” Kip ticked off numbers on his fingers. “ ‘Three, four, five . . . oh fuck it,
many
!’? Or do you expect to negotiate with me while you lie?”

“I assure you our strength is felt far beyond our numbers,” Daragh said. “Three hundred fifty drafters ride with us—three hundred forty-eight, for those of you who hold an abacus in one hand while you jerk your cock with the other.”

The room went quiet again.

“Well, then, finally. Now we can begin,” Kip said quietly, suddenly deathly calm. “Would you rather have a sign-up bonus of twenty denarii per soldier and fifty per cavalryman who brings his own horse and one hundred for every drafter, or would you like one-seventh of all our eventual loot, which will include anything we seize that was formerly the satrap’s?”

Daragh the Coward blinked, blinked. Then the weasel came to the fore. “The sign-up, paid up front.”