The Burning White (26 page)

At the last veil, she bowed her head and reached up to the base of her skull. Her fingers worked at the knot where the band around her forehead was tied.

The Mighty vibrated with tension like a bowstring drawn full to the lips, and held . . .
held
.

Slowly, she lifted not just the veil, not just the band around her forehead, but what seemed at first to be her entire scalp.

No, it was a cap, a wig into which the red hair was woven.

Revealed under the wig, her natural brown hair was patchy, her scalp mottled by open sores. She set aside the veil and wig and lifted her face.

And suddenly, even as he heard the sharp intake of breath through teeth beside him as Tisis saw and stifled a gasp, Kip’s heart was moved not to disgust or fear but to pity.

Though she was not yet thirty years old, the Keeper’s face was covered with weeping sores and distended by tumors. No wonder she kept herself wrapped like a corpse for the pyre—she would surely go to one soon. Everywhere, even where it was swollen by tumors, her skin gleamed. Little points of gritty golden light burned within her distressed skin everywhere, as if an exploding shell had pierced her with a hundred thousand fragments of ever-burning shrapnel.

It had a fatal beauty to it, pulsing brightly in time with her every heartbeat.

The Keeper held herself defiantly, though, apparently impervious to her wounds and to Kip’s scrutiny as much as to her assured demise.

It was a resolve Kip knew well.

She wasn’t horrified at her own ugliness nor dismayed by the warm death humming glee in her bones. She was stalwart despite what must be constant pain: she was like a runner who’d be damned if she would falter this close to the finish line.

And Kip knew with his heart: This wasn’t a dying woman who happened to hold an important position. This was a woman dying
because
of her position. This was the warrior who’d volunteered for a fatal mission; this was a high priestess who’d offered herself for the sacrifice, approaching the altar and the knife. But she wasn’t going to go quietly.

She unbuckled the fabric-covered plates from her forearms and then her broad, heavy skirts, and stood in her simple tunic and trousers, creased from her overgarments.

“Chi,” Kip blurted. “You’re a chi drafter, aren’t you?”

Puzzlement flickered in her angry eyes. “Why would you say that? You haven’t even touched chi since you got here. I’ve been watching your eyes and your soulbrand from the moment you arrived. I heard about the lightstorm out on the waters. They say you pulled apart paryl and chi twisted into waterspouts, drafting both at the same time. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. Or is that a lie meant to pass to legend?”

Soulbrand?

“Do you know a lot about lies . . . Priestess?” Kip asked instead.

She blinked as if struck.

“I’m not here to give answers, but to hear them,” Kip said.

“Not lies,” she said, defensive, bitter. “Secrets. Secrets we must keep lest the Chromeria put us on Orholam’s Glare.”

Kip had no idea what a masterful drafter of chi could do, but it would be invisible to the Mighty, and to Kip—unless he acted immediately. The danger hadn’t passed. Indeed, stripping a secret truth naked risked shame, and shame could spur violence.

What he did next was exactly the wrong thing to do. It was exactly the opposite of what Andross or Gavin would have done, but Kip waved the Mighty off.

Though the Mighty barely shifted their positions, the air changed immediately.

The Keeper noticed. The golden burning of her skin dimmed; her pulse slowed. But her shoulders slumped. “We only want to use the gift Orholam gave us,” she said. “Drafting kills
every
drafter. But our color makes us ugly first, so ours is forbidden? Ours kills us faster, yes—in five or ten years rather than ten or twenty—but if we studied chi as every other color is studied, could we not learn what is safe? Why can we not bring our gifts in offering to the Lord of Lights, too? Why can we not serve mankind openly, as other drafters do? You, Lord Guile, have a wealth of colors. If you never draft chi again, you can serve with eight other colors. I have only the one. Are we chi drafters so monstrous that Orholam would have us destroyed? Or can God see beauty where the Magisterium sees only shame?”

“Tell me,” Kip said. He looked down at his hands. He’d known, somehow. That ugly heat in his joints when he’d drafted chi—it had felt like he was cooking, like something was deeply wrong, deeply unsafe about the outer-spectrum color. With a sudden shot of hot fear like whiskey in his belly, he wondered if the same death taking this woman was growing in his own bones at this very moment.

Gently, he said again, “Please. Tell me.”

The gathering storm of her righteous indignation frayed and scattered. Her lifted chin descended. The pulsing gold light slowed to a normal pace. A sigh released the last of her resistance.

“Our ancestors thought our cancers were a sign of a god’s displeasure at some sin they’d committed. The priests said they bore the tumors as punishment on the people’s behalf. They used their own suffering to control the people—even as they desperately searched for cures. Over many generations of careful notes, they figured out that chi kills everyone, even our families, if we have them. The more chi we use, the faster we die. Generally. Not always. This is my tenth year. It’s quite long, as we reckon such things. I’m lucky, most say.”

“You use chi for the Great Mirror?” Kip asked. “I thought the mirrors were controlled with superviolet.”

She inclined her head, and Kip couldn’t help but glance at features shaped as if by an angry child mashing clay. “May I put my raiments back on?” she asked. “For your protection . . . but for my vanity, too.”

For my protection? What the hell does that mean?

“Of course,” he said instead.

“I’ll take you to the Great Mirror. It’ll answer your questions better than I can.”

The warm, compassionate light of orange dawn had thawed Teia’s iced fury. A little. Karris was unworthy of Teia’s service, but Teia’d given too much to earn her position to serve poorly just because her commander was shit. She was better than that.

And to be fair, unlike Karris, Teia hadn’t had to kill any of
her
friends to do her job. That had to take some getting used to, she guessed.

So before coming back to the Blackguard barracks, she’d dropped off a coded note for Karris in one of their dead drops. Teia couldn’t bear actually speaking to the woman right now, but Karris deserved to know her husband was alive.

She was going to be furious that Teia hadn’t told her right away. But Teia would deal with that later. Or never.

For now, she needed to find a safe place, if only to sleep. She would need to prepare, to hide whatever money and materials she stole—and she’d
need
to steal, which she hated. She’d need a place to eat, and sew disguises, and wash laundry. She’d scouted extra places before, but none of those that she’d already used would work. She had to start from zero.

Disappearing completely was the only way to be safe. To be a ghost.

Anything less could get her father killed.

Sleep, though. Sleeping sounded better than, better than . . . she didn’t know what. She was exhausted and it was coloring her every thought with a gray stupidity and every movement with black-and-blue clumsiness. She’d been up since before dawn yesterday, and not five minutes of that time had been the pink, pleasant kind of wakefulness, where you could drift in an unfocused haze.

The first and most hazardous step of her preparations was stopping at the Blackguard barracks and her old bunk. Yesterday morning, she hadn’t grabbed the extra coin stick and pistol and tailor’s kit she’d hidden under her bunk. She wouldn’t have needed them if she’d gone on the ship as the Old Man ordered. Now the danger of going back to the barracks was outweighed by all the dangers she would be able to avoid later if she had the coins and pistol.

Simply by selling the pistol, she could get enough coin to rent a room for months in Overhill.

And hell, she was already
here
.

Despite the early-morning hour, Gill Greyling was seated on the side of his bunk. He blinked slowly, unseeing, staring at his dead brother’s empty bunk. Stubble darkened his cheeks, and his uniform was wrinkled. He’d obviously been up all night.

Her breath froze inside her. So it was true.

Not that there had been much question, but it still seemed impossible. Gavin Greyling? Dead?
Gav?

Teia’s earlier black rage was washing out with the dawn, and she was afraid what weaknesses the new day’s light would reveal.

Coming here was a terrible mistake.

She swallowed. Checked her paryl drafting, her invisibility, everything. It was all still in place.

All right. Breathe. Breathe.

There was nothing for her to do here. She couldn’t give Gill any comfort. Even if anything she said could make a difference—and it wouldn’t! it wouldn’t!—she had to make everyone think she was just
gone
.

Everyone. No exceptions.

Though it felt like a betrayal of her Blackguard brothers and sisters to trust them so little, it wasn’t distrust . . . exactly. It was just that anyone could slip up, and any slip-up meant failure of her mission, and her father’s death.

T? That’s pretty much the definition of distrust.

Fine. So I’m the asshole. But there are traitors loyal only to the Order of the Broken Eye who sleep in this very room.

Teia just didn’t know who they were yet.

But she would. She swore it. That was coming. And it would start with whoever had that limp.

She crept invisibly into the women’s section of the barracks, carefully inspected the underside of her bunk, and silently slid open the little box she’d nailed there.

Coin stick, pistol, tailor’s kit.

Though there was no one in here, she stood quietly, carefully. It said something about how thin the Blackguard was stretched, even with all the rapid promotions of barely deserving scrubs into their ranks, that now, half an hour after dawn, the barracks were empty. All those who’d been on night shift should be coming in to sleep now. Instead, with Blackguards training all the Chromeria’s other drafters to fight, double shifts were more common than ever. That work wasn’t as strenuous as the constant vigilance required of a Blackguard when guarding a Color or the promachos, but it wasn’t rest, either.

In the main barracks, she gazed once more upon Gill Greyling, looking haunted on his bunk. There was no one with him. No one at all in the barracks except the two of them.

He was too well liked for this. Maybe he’d demanded to be alone.

Teia didn’t want to think that no one had thought to stay with him, or that Commander Fisk hadn’t given anyone leave to do so.

War doesn’t strip dignity only from the dead.

Red morning sun poured through windows, bloody light limning his solitary, hunched figure. She turned sharply, a sudden urge to weep strangling her. She stepped away.

The wood floor creaked under her shoe, and she froze in place. Heart pounding, she looked over her shoulder.

Gill had tightened.

He sat up straight, looked around the barracks, eyes searching. There was no one here.

Teia was suddenly acutely aware that Gill wasn’t only a bereaved brother. He was a fully trained Blackguard, relentlessly molded to be attuned to hidden threats. And armed. And now alert. If he charged her—even in her general direction—what was she going to do?

Fight him?

Impossible! A single touch would be confirmation that she was
here
! A single glimpse of her would jeopardize everything she was trying to do against the Order. A single telling sound would reveal the existence of an
invisible
intruder. He would report it, or at least tell someone, and anyone who heard such a wild thing would tell others, and the Order would hear.

And the Order would know who it had to be.

Could she speak? Tell him? Trust him?

No. She trusted him. She did. She could trust Gill Greyling. But she had no idea how the man would behave in his grief. It might be one shock too many. Talk of shimmercloaks? The Order? Traitors in the Blackguard itself? That was at least three shocks too many.

Besides, she had no idea how long they’d be alone, even if she dared to try to brief him on secrets she’d been commanded to keep secret from everyone. She trusted him, she just couldn’t . . . trust how he’d respond.

Ugh. That felt ugly and false.

She had to get out of here.

She began lifting her soft shoe slowly, heart pounding. She could feel the tension in the wood. There was no question: when she lifted that foot, the floor would creak again.

“Gav?” Gill whispered.

Teia’s heart tumbled to the floor.

“Gavin? Is that you?” Gill asked plaintively.

Oh no. No, no, no.

“I can feel your presence. I know you’re here. It’s you, isn’t it? Little brother . . .” His voice trailed off, and Teia saw him gulping convulsively against the threatening tears, joy and hope taking up arms against a tide of grief.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

“Can you . . . can you give me another sign?” Gill asked.

She
had
to lift her foot. Gill was staring straight at her. She couldn’t wait him out. Anyone might come in at any moment. Anyone who came in would surely go straight to Gill to offer some comfort—and Teia was blocking the aisle, rooted to the floor.

Teeth gritted, tears swimming in her eyes, she lifted her foot. The floor squeaked a protest. She retreated. From the barracks door, she looked back.

It was as if a great weight had been lifted from Gill’s shoulders. He was standing, his face radiant. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me . . .” His face twisted suddenly, a cavalry charge of tears of grief smashing against the shields of a smile, and his last word was a whisper. “. . . alone.”

He wept then, and spoke to his dead little brother, and Teia couldn’t stay, and she couldn’t leave. Like a monster, she eavesdropped, and she knew it was a profound betrayal of those brothers she’d loved.