The Burning White (63 page)

But Tisis was already going in another direction. “Azuria?” she asked. “I’ve never even heard of a city called that.”

“The pygmies didn’t lose all their wars to the Tyrean Empire,” Daimhin said. “They wiped out the city while it was still being built. Razed it. Crucified everyone in it or fed them to their tygre wolves. My people fled without a fight after that. The ruins of Azuria are over beyond the new wall now, where the White King was. There’s little there now except access to a good harbor.”

“How do you know all this?” Kip asked.

“We deep Foresters keep our traditions alive in our songs, not on corruptible parchments or skins that can be changed.” Daimhin’s face clouded. “Or we did. I wasn’t a singer of the songs and I don’t know all the stories. They’ll die now, I suppose. Already have, maybe, with my village.”

And
that’s
why you put the stories in books, Kip thought but didn’t say. Books don’t tend to get killed.

But that wasn’t helpful. Nor kind. Nor the point.

Daimhin said, “I thought it was a coincidence that this Seer should contact me and want me to come here. It’s been centuries since my people were here. I feel no connection to this land. I love my forests wild. I am no tender of domesticated trees.”

“Arborist,” Kip supplied. Also not helpful, but his mind was far away. “Did you say something about an orange grove? In Tyrea?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you know where that was?” Kip asked.

“I can’t recall the name. Near the Great Dome.”

“ ‘Great Dome’?” Tisis asked.

Kip felt like he’d plucked an invisible spiderweb, or perhaps a tripwire. He remembered the old ruin in the orange grove where he’d gone so often. He said, “There were stories that Sundered Rock was once a great stone dome. Maybe it was, back when these groves were established.” He turned back to Daimhin. “What happened here? What cracked the ground?”

“I assume something happened to make the Great Mirror move recently. But you’re the drafter. You tell me,” Daimhin said.

What mirror? Liv Danavis had directed them here saying she’d activated a mirror . . . but there was no mirror here, just a big empty field in the middle of an apple orchard.

But Daimhin was close enough now that the light caught on his leather armband. It shimmered a bit, like it was made of many tiny scales.

And that lute string of memory thrummed once more.

This moment was the kind of thing a Seer might see: Daimhin standing with his armband in the sun, talking to Kip, who was suddenly intensely interested in it, rather than the blood all over the young hunter or the blade in his hand or the cracked earth at his feet.

“Daimhin, do me a favor,” Kip said. “Close your eyes, and think that you’re in the blackest night, and that you want desperately to hide. Will yourself to disappear into the blackness.”

After a moment of staring at him inscrutably, Daimhin closed his eyes. The armband shimmered and went a smoky, mottled black.

The others muttered imprecations, and when Daimhin opened his eyes and saw it, he seemed stunned.

“What does that mean?” Tisis asked.

“How did you know to do that?” Ben-hadad asked Kip.

“Because I’ve seen that kind of skin before,” Kip said.

It was the same skin as what made the master cloak he’d given Teia. Kip had thought that cloak had been made of human skin—a light skin and a dark one stitched together—but he’d been wrong.

That shimmer reminded him of a being who changed his appearance at will, in far more complex ways than simple camouflage, who appeared beautiful when in reality he was ugly and burnt: Abaddon.

And then it reminded Kip of another immortal, whose glory had shimmered like the sun, but who had shifted herself effortlessly to walk among mortals: Rea Siluz.

“It’s an immortal’s skin,” Kip said. “One of those from whose ranks came the old gods. Not men dressed in luxin and power to fool the gullible, the real gods. The Two Hundred. The Fallen. The djinn.”

“I don’t suppose they shed their skin?” Cruxer asked.

“I, I don’t think so.”

“So someone
skinned
one?” Cruxer asked.

“Who could do that?” Ben-hadad asked.

“Maybe we can,” Winsen said flatly.

“Shut up, Win. Not funny,” Cruxer said.

“No,” Kip said. “I think Winsen’s kind of right. We’re fighting the
gods
. The Third Eye wants us to know . . . we can do it. They can be killed.”

Teia was running out of time. She leaned against the wall of a cooper’s stall, half-shaded in the afternoon sun, nearly invisible not because of paryl magic but because she wore the hooded cloak low over her face and its stripes matched the tones of the wall and the shadows perfectly. She couldn’t maintain her paryl cloud for hours, and hours it had been.

Sun Day was only ten days away. Whatever the Order was planning, it would spring then. Tens of thousands of pilgrims had swollen Big Jasper’s streets. It seemed that for every person who sensibly kept away from making a pilgrimage because of the war, someone else came in their place, desperate because of the war.

She couldn’t have let Halfcock live with what he knew of her, but by killing him, she’d given up her one certain lead to where the Braxians would meet the night before Sun Day. Halfcock hadn’t known where their rituals would be held beforehand, and claimed he always would find a note in his pocket with directions when the time was close. So he couldn’t tell her where it would be, but she could’ve followed him.

Now this safe house was her only lead.

A safe house no one had visited in three days.

It could be a trap, of course.

Worse, the longer she waited, the more likely it was that Murder Sharp would get wind of Halfcock’s disappearance. Would that lead him here?

She gathered her paryl around her, going invisible, and moved through the street. She’d mastered it now, moving with her head down, shooting the quickest glances this way and that to see what she must, moving with the understanding that others didn’t see her at all. It was a busy street, but the little house had a recessed doorway.

Teia slipped into it and started to work with the picks and anchors.

Through Quentin, Karris had made sure she had the best gear, but truth be told, Teia still wasn’t much good with lockpicks.

The mechanism was neither new nor tight nor complicated, and it still took her almost ten sweating minutes and one ruined anchor to open the lock.

Opening the door a crack, Teia streamed a cloud of paryl vapor through the gap and into the room beyond. She felt nothing moving.

She looked back to the street and the bustle of carts, then opened the door—neither fast, which would draw the eye, nor too slow, which would make any who saw wonder why a door was swinging open by itself. Nope, this was just as if someone in the house had opened the door, changed their mind, and closed it again.

Her heart was in her throat as she stepped inside, hands baring daggers from sheaths, paryl readied for the attack. She pushed the door shut with one foot.

The trap would spring shut now, if there was one.

One breath passed with no attack.

Two.

She streamed out clouds of paryl again, moving from room to room quickly, not really noticing anything, merely feeling for life or empty places, trapdoors, hidden alcoves.

It was clear.

She breathed easy for the first time in half an hour.

Empty. Like she’d supposed it would be, after all her time watching the place.

Now to work.

There was a bed that was too rich for this neighborhood by half, a closet with various clothes rich and poor, and a woman’s white Braxian robes.

That was good. At least it told Teia Halfcock had been honest with her about that much. This was someone in the Order’s safe house.

Teia examined everything for some hint of who the woman was. The sheets were Ilytian cotton, but had no tailor’s mark on them. The nicer clothing came from a variety of tailors around Big Jasper, but not a piece was monogrammed.

So whoever owned this place wasn’t stupid, then.

Teia searched for two hours and found nothing.

She sat on the bed and sighed. What was she going to do? She could set Karris’s people on it—the White did have many other eyes and ears—but Karris had asked that Teia reserve that for an emergency. Anything to do with the Order should be held closer than close, lest they all get killed.

What were her other options? If she set Karris’s people on this, she could get back to hunting for her father, which almost certainly would be where Murder Sharp would have his best traps set. But some traps you have to risk.

It was hopeless. For months and months she’d been hunting the Order, and she had nothing. She was a total failure.

If she could just think. There had to be some way forward.

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she couldn’t tell how long they’d been closed. Had she fallen asleep? No, surely not.

The rattle of a key in the lock sent a jolt through her. Shit! She hadn’t even locked the door behind her.

But it bought her an extra couple of moments now, as whoever was on the other side had first locked the door, tried it, and now unlocked it.

She jumped to her feet, pulled the cloak shut, went invisible, and roughly smoothed the blankets from the depression her sitting on them had made.

The door cracked open, and a man poked his head in, a puzzled look on his face. When he saw no one was inside, he stepped in. He was fair-skinned, dressed in slaves’ garb, dark hair oiled back, clean shaven.

He checked the rooms, and straightened out the wrinkles in the bedspread with a disapproving look. Just a slave checking the house for his mistress—of course she wouldn’t clean a safe house herself.

Rich people. So helpless.

The slave busied himself, dusting the already clean surfaces, and Teia had to dodge him a few times, as silently as possible, regulating even her breath, and looking only at his feet. He was soon finished, but when he got to the door, he paused. “It’s madness, Micael. Don’t do it. It’s the whipping post and salt packed in the wounds unto death if she catches you.”

He reached his hand to the door, but instead of opening it, locked it.

He went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and took out the silver. He laid the silver-polishing kit next to it, but he didn’t polish the utensils, as if still momentarily at war with himself.

Then he held the front of his trousers away from his waist and scratched his pubic area with a fork.

He examined the tines carefully and then put it back away, glancing around guiltily.

Teia’s mouth dropped open. She almost lost hold on her invisibility. But he worked systematically through the silver, until every piece had been down his pants.

“ ‘Thank you, Mistress.’ ‘Your crop, Mistress?’ ‘With pleasure, Mistress.’ ” He repeated the phrases like they were a meditation prayer: he must have had to say them hundreds of times, but now he was reclaiming them. In the future, whenever he said those, he would think of this.

He was grinning like a maniac.

He moved to the bedroom, and he wiped his ass across every single one of the pillows, both sides. “ ‘How did you sleep, Mistress? Oh, a scent? Odd. I’ll have a stern word with the laundress. This old house
is
a little fusty, despite my best efforts. But I’ll try harder, Mistress.’ ”

Teia had heard rumors of others doing this kind of thing when she’d been a slave, of course. She’d fantasized about it herself when her owner, that cunt Aglaia Crassos, had dreamed up some new humiliation for her or her friends. Watching someone deathly ill be forced to lick up their own vomit, or seeing a boy ten years old beaten to death because he’d peeked in on the mistress noisily having sex with someone.

Later she’d heard the same kinds of stories among slave owners, albeit repeated with more horror than glee: stories of slaves drying the dishes with their poxy undergarments, of men putting their cocks in the cups, or urinating and worse in the soup. They were the kinds of stories that played on the fears of those served and the fantasies of those enslaved, so of course they were popular.

But she hadn’t thought anyone actually did it.

It was hatred to the point of suicide.

If she’d heard someone else tell this story, she’d laugh about it. But here, seeing this man do it, it was desperately unfunny. This Micael was risking torture and death merely to secretly dishonor a woman. He likely wouldn’t even be here to see her use the forks or pillows. He was right: it was madness.

Enough, Micael. Just say her name. I don’t need to see all this.

He finished doing everything he could think of, and went again to the door. “I should clean it all,” he said. “Vengeance defiles the hand that enacts it. Orholam will bring justice in its appointed hour.” He leaned his head on the doorframe, leaving a gap behind him.

He still blocked half the doorway, but Teia realized it was her best chance. She could easily leave after he left—but she had no way to relock the door, at least not in time to follow. Now or never!

She slipped out behind him, not even brushing his tunic.

She’d never been so happy to be petite in her life.

“No,” Micael said. “Fuck her.
Fuck
her.”

Say her name!

He left, and Teia followed him.

In several blocks he arrived at a small hovel, opened the door. It was apparently his own house. But there he stopped. Looking suddenly skyward, he said, “Orholam, You know she deserves it. If I stay my hand from vengeance, Orholam, You have to promise me . . .”

He stood there for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. Teia could tell he was walking back to his mistress’s safe house to clean it up.

She didn’t follow. She’d hoped that he would take her directly back to his mistress’s estate, but it looked like she wasn’t that lucky. Whoever the noblewoman was, she was too lazy to clean her own safe house, but she wasn’t completely stupid. Her slave had his own hovel.

The Order really did do a good job enforcing all the disciplines of secrecy.