The Burning White (69 page)

Cruxer looked at him, shadows of Ironfist in his gaze. “You’ve pretty much summed up my thoughts exactly—”

“Glad we’re agreed—”

“About you.”

“Oh.”

Cruxer shrugged. “Granted, you’re a
bit
better in a fight. Maybe. Having two good legs and all.” But the hint of a smile crept onto his face. He couldn’t deadpan quite like Ironfist, not yet.

“Trouble is,” Kip said, eyes staring at the morning’s beauty but no longer seeing it, “a man isn’t just the one thing he does best. Even if he’s the best at that one thing that the world has ever seen.”

Cruxer turned his palms up. “I haven’t tried to keep you from fights, have I?”

“No,” Kip admitted, coming back to focus.

“But lay off green. You go golem one more time, and you may break the halo yourself.”

“Yeah. I’ve got other options.”

“I know you do. Use them. It’s always green with you.”

“Yes, mother,” Kip said. But they both knew Cruxer was right.

The Mighty didn’t want to fight on the seas, but Ben had refused to let them go unarmed, in case a fight was necessary—maybe the White King had discovered how to make skimmers by now. Also, they’d heard wild rumors about will-cast sharks and other beasts. (Kip’s Night Mares didn’t think it could be done, though. Or not for long. Or not without them also attacking one’s own people. Or . . . )

So the Nightbringers had muskets, a few swivel guns, and a pile of the sticky bombs they called hullwreckers now. The skimmers wouldn’t be defenseless, but they wouldn’t go looking for a slugfest with a galleon, either—a single cannonball strike anywhere would cause a catastrophic failure of the luxin. Ben-hadad said he already had plans to address that in the next generation of skimmers—if he lived so long.

He said it as if he’d started saying the sentence aloud intending to wink or grin, but changed his mind halfway through, like there was so much he would never discover in this life if he died, and that death felt more real now than it had in more than a year filled with fighting.

Cruxer had one of General Derwyn’s drafters taking point a hundred paces out in front of them. A nautical equivalent of outriders protected him on either flank, but the main body traveled in cohorts of twenty craft each, with everything from two-to six-person craft.

Kip was trying to be patient, though he wanted to get to the Chromeria today—and could have, moving with only the Mighty. Moving even a small army at speed was an impressive feat of logistical acumen and leadership. Moving that army over water made it a feat wherein if you loused up, people drowned.

Kip supposed that he should be trying to enjoy the little remaining life he had. It was pretty much impossible to get any work done. Despite the wind blocker, he had to lean close to Cruxer to have a conversation, and it was just Cruxer, Kip, and two young drafters with fresh halos on reeds. Kip had tried talking to them, but that had put a panicked expression in their eyes. They couldn’t concentrate on two things at once.

Funny he thought of them as kids. One of them had to be nearly his own age.

“Lord Commander!” one of them said, laboring to speak and still keep in time with her partner. “Scout returning!”

No sooner had she said the words than Kip saw the scout streaking toward them on a type of craft they’d come to call a flying pulpit. The scouts’ special skimmers were made to be as light and fast as possible, so they’d dispensed with nearly everything: it consisted of a single chair mounted between two propulsion reeds with wings extending from the sides beneath the water. Each scout-drafter (all were small men with excellent upper-body strength) was strapped to his chair and carried a long-lens to see even farther. The craft were ludicrously fast, but they had to be launched at speed and couldn’t stop moving or they’d sink.

The tenth scout was Izemrasen, who was approaching now. Forty years old, he was a ghotra-wearing Parian who’d been training to be a Blackguard when he fell during a wall climb and broke his back. His legs had turned useless and numb. A couple of unnoticed sores on them had gotten infected, and they’d had to be amputated. He’d lived through the operation, but his Chromeria sponsor had abandoned him (illegally), despite his strength as a green drafter.

Izemrasen hadn’t had the coin or connections to bring the matter before a magistrate, and he ended up performing on the streets for food, doing acrobatics for coins. How he’d even made the trek through Blood Forest in the hopes that Kip’s army would have some place for him, Kip didn’t know, but the man was bursting with life and purpose now. Kip had never seen anyone more proud to don the uniform.

The scout turned in behind Kip’s skimmer and docked in a slot made especially for it. Kip and Cruxer attached the hooks that bound the small skimmer to their larger one while he took a few deep breaths. Izemrasen’s massive shoulders shone with sweat—he’d come back at the greatest possible speed.

“Two fleets, my lord,” Izemrasen said. “Closing for battle, as far as I can tell. Definitely the Blood Robes on one side and the Chromeria on the other. Maybe a hundred fifty galleons on the Blood Robe side, but a lot of those seem to be trade ships with only a few cannons each. Chromeria’s only got fifty-three galleons, but they’re well-armed. They’re flying banners of all seven satrapies.”

“How far from here?” Cruxer asked.

“Three leagues? Four? I could be off.”

Kip couldn’t blame him. Distances were tricky at sea at the best of times, even with special tools. The scouts had trained to measure distances by their own speed over time, which they were supposed to keep constant—but Izemrasen had come back as quickly as possible.

“And how far from each other?”

“A bit more than a league? I’d guess the fight will start within half an hour, an hour? I don’t really—I don’t know anything about naval battles, my lords. My apologies. I’m still learning my work.”

“As are we all,” Kip said.

“There was something strange, though,” Izemrasen said. “I mean, I don’t know anything about naval warfare firsthand, but I have seen tapestries and paintings and such, and . . .” He tugged his ghotra forward from where the wind had pushed it back despite the hairpins. “The Chromeria’s ships were out in big wings left and right, with multiple ranks and such—like the paintings. But the left wing was leading, a lot. Too much, it seemed to me. Unless there’s some strategy . . . ?”

“That’s . . .” Kip said. “Who’s on the left wing?”

Izemrasen said, “Uh . . . they were too far away for me to pick out their banners for sure, but given the style of ships and the colors, Ruthgar—and . . .” He scrunched his eyes closed, trying to remember. “A snake below it?”

“Coiled or striking?”

“Striking.”

Kip turned. “Commander, please tell me that moron Caul Azmith isn’t in charge of Ruthgar’s fleet.”

Cruxer shrugged. “Last we heard he’d been demoted because of his disastrous leadership at Ox Ford.” Azmith had been commander of the armies—but his family was rich and powerful. Kip knew how those families worked now: he bet they’d bought his way onto a small command with the fleet, where they thought he couldn’t do any harm.

“Orholam’s balls. He broke ranks,” Kip said. “He’s charging, hoping to reclaim his lost glory.”

“May Orholam save those men from their leader,” Cruxer said, brow darkening, making the sign of the three and the four.

“But that wasn’t all,” Izemrasen said. “The White King’s ships were all huddled together, real tight, almost in a ball. Not at all like any tapestry I’ve seen. I mean, I know artists exaggerate and try to make things look pretty, but isn’t being encircled as bad in naval battles as it is in land ones?”

Messengers on small skimmers had pulled in beside Kip’s craft, waiting for orders to relay.

“No bane visible?” Kip asked.

“No, sir. Didn’t even feel anything, and I was paying attention like you said to.”

“Ah, shit,” Kip said. “They’re doing the same damned thing they did at Ru!” Sinking a bane so the drafters don’t feel it, raising it at the last moment—except this time it wasn’t one color; it was all of them. “What kind of idiot falls into the same trap they’ve used on us before?!”

“Caul Azmith,” Cruxer said with quiet fury.

“We have to warn them,” Kip said.

“We’re all
drafters
,” Cruxer said.

“But we’re the only ones who can get to them in time.”

“We
can’t
go.”

Kip looked at him. “They’ll all die if we don’t.”

“Breaker, when a man who can’t swim jumps into the sea to save a drowning friend, you end up with two dead men, not zero.”

Kip turned to the messengers. “I’ve new orders. Redistribute the supply ships. Take the empties to circle behind the White King’s fleet after the battle and pick up survivors from the waves. Don’t come in too fast or too close or they’ll be sunk, too, but save as many as they can. I don’t think the White King will double back. Izemrasen, you go get rest. You’re gonna be lightsick as it is. You two on the reeds, go with the messengers. Commander Cruxer and I have it from here.”

The young drafters stepped off the still-moving skimmer onto messengers’ vessels. To another messenger, Kip said, “Tell our fleet to continue on. We’ll catch up by nightfall.”

Cruxer snorted.

“Or, you know, not at all,” Kip said.

“Tisis is going to be pissed,” Cruxer said. She was off checking on something on the other side of the fleet.

“Yep.”

“Because this is a bad idea,” Cruxer said.

“I know,” Kip said.

Cruxer made the sign of the seven again and then took a reed. “You know, Blackguard training has very specific rules about keeping one’s ward from putting himself in mortal peril unnecessarily.” He looked at Kip’s open, expectant face, and sighed. “So I guess it’s a good thing we quit before we got to that part.”

Turning people into meat sacks was the easy part. The problem was disposing of the bodies. For all that Teia now knew dozens of ways to kill, she wasn’t superhuman. Even in her blacks, holding a spear, and soaking wet, she weighed less than two sevs. She’d done tens of thousands of push-ups and curl ups. She’d run thousands of leagues. She’d swum until her shoulders were small blocks of granite. She’d lifted salt bags until veins bulged from her forearms even at rest, and she’d run relays with the Blackguard trainees until she could run down a gazelle on the open plains.

She could climb and jump and balance and fight and shoot a bow and fire a musket and draft—dear Orholam, at the insistence of her Archer sisters, she could even
dance
tolerably well now—but when it came to lifting a corpse that was more than double her weight, she was hopeless.

The good news was that she wouldn’t need to drag Aglaia’s body far.

In quick glances, Teia watched the noblewoman have her cosmetics applied by a severe old slave woman who was, despite her age and her own plain features, obviously an artist. It was evening, but Aglaia had come fresh-faced from a steam bath at an unmarked private club in the Embassies District. The old slave applied delicate layers of powders and creams with a sure and speedy hand. Teia used the time to scout the estate again.

It was a meeting night for the Order of the Broken Eye. That meant Aglaia had taken dinner in her room, as she apparently always did on the nights when she attended the Order’s meetings, and she’d ‘dismissed’ the slaves except for this handmaid.

Of course, what a woman like Aglaia thought dismissing the slaves meant and what it really meant were very different. She would be angry if she came home and her dishes and food weren’t cleared from her room and her bed wasn’t turned down, a warming plate put between the sheets to prepare them for her.

As if these things happened by magic. As if she were giving her slaves a break rather than complicating their lives. For them, the dismissal meant, ‘Get all the usual work done without me seeing you, and pretend not to see me leave, and never ask about where I’m going or where I’ve been, and there will be extra laundry in the morning.’

At long last, the slave finished her duties. As far as Teia could tell, the slave woman had done magic of a sort Gavin Guile himself would envy. Old Horse Face actually looked attractive, though Teia had no idea why Aglaia was putting on cosmetics. The woman would be donning a cloak and mask, which were required to stay on for the rest of the night.

Well, she thought so, anyway.

Aglaia looked at herself in her mirrors. She seemed dissatisfied with what she saw—for all the wrong reasons, Teia thought. But after a few exasperated sighs, Aglaia dismissed the slave woman.

Teia waited with the patience of a coiled serpent.

The door closed and Aglaia moved to a closet. She pulled a hat box off the highest shelf she could reach. She carried the box to a bed but didn’t open it.

Teia crept forward invisibly on her rubber-sap-soled shoes, moving behind her prey.

Aglaia turned so abruptly, she almost collided with Teia.

Teia shrank bank, eyes downcast.

Aglaia moved forward quickly, but then stopped just as Teia was preparing to lash out with paryl.

Aglaia sat, grabbed a hair tie, and scowling at her reflection, rapidly bound up her long blonde hair into a sensible bun.

This was the moment Teia had been waiting for. She touched her chest where the vial of olive oil had once rested: it had been Aglaia’s threat of sending her to be a brothel slave at the mines.

The blade came free of its leather sheath noiselessly.

“You are not afraid, Aglaia Indomita Crassos!” Aglaia told her reflection. “You think of Marcus. You think of what the Guiles did to him, and you make them pay.”

It should have stirred something in Teia. Some human emotion. If not an emotion, a question at least. Paryl was supposed to make you more susceptible to feeling, but even handling paryl didn’t do more than make Teia aware of the spot that was numb, like tapping frostbitten fingers against a stranger’s flesh. There was pressure registering farther up your fingers, and you could see the touch. You remembered what feeling was like, but that spot had been pushed so far past pain it wasn’t capable of anything at all.