The Burning White (75 page)

Someone had cleared out a path through the various petitioners and nobles in the great hall at ground level, and everyone turned to watch them walk through. Kip saw hostile faces from the white-clad Lightguards, but he and his entourage entered the lifts without being impeded.

No one asked where they were going. Their escorting soldiers set the plates and took them to the audience-hall level.

“Just, uh, in case I don’t get another chance to say it,” Ferkudi said. He cleared his throat. “Uh, it’s been an honor to serve you, my lord.”

Big Leo grunted an affirmation. Ben-hadad cleared his throat in agreement.

“More than that, for me,” Cruxer said quietly, not turning his head, his shoulders back. “This work saved my life after, after Lucia passed. It’s been purpose and a pursuit worthy of my whole heart.”

The rest rumbled agreement, and Kip’s heart swelled for these men who—

“Ah shit, you’re all makin’ me weepy,” Winsen deadpanned. He dabbed at a dry eye.

Big Leo smacked the side of Winsen’s head.

“Dammit, Leo!” Winsen said. “I keep telling you, don’ t—”

“You deserved that one,” Big Leo said.

“Commander?” Winsen said.

“You deserved that one,” Cruxer said.

“Fine,” Winsen said. “Maybe a little. I just get cranky when I put my life in the hands of a man with a pucker like a paper press.”

“What does that even mean?” Ferkudi asked. “And which man?”

Kip closed his eyes, a smile stealing over his face at their banter, at their inability to stay serious for more than a ten count. These men would face death for him—and they believed they were facing it for him now, in these serene halls. He’d brought them here, and they had no illusions that this place was safe.

“He’s talking about the promachos,” Cruxer told Ferkudi.

“Yeah, but still,” Ferkudi said, “what does that mean?” He looked around. “Does this one go in the Box?”

“We killed Lightguards when we left,” Cruxer said. “And those men’s comrades surely gave their side of that story, and only their side of the story, while we were gone.”

“I’m not stupid,” Ferkudi said. “I know all that. What’s that got to do with a promachos’s pucker?”

Ben-hadad snorted. “I really hope that we live long enough for ‘What’s that got to do with a promachos’s pucker?’ to become a saying for us.”

Big Leo said, “Our lives are . . . contiguous on the promachos’s mood, Ferk, so Win’s hoping that—that can’t be right. ‘Continuous’? No, not that, either.”

“I really didn’t think I was the subtle one,” Winsen said.

“ ‘Contingent’?” Ben-hadad suggested.

“Ah, that’s it,” Big Leo said.

“I still don’ t—” Ferkudi said.

Kip felt a sudden surge of love for these big apes. They were nervous. Chatty. Nettlesome. And yet they were
here
. With him.

They could’ve had a secure kingdom in Blood Forest, for a while at least. Fame, for a while at least. And yet they were here, for him.

With the honor guard there with them, a mature man would never crack a joke. Kip was a fugitive, and honor guards could turn to actual guards all too easily.

Exactly how far being a Guile would benefit Kip depended completely on Andross Guile’s whim.

“It means we hope the old man’s been eating his prunes,” Kip said as the lift doors opened.

“I still don’ t—”

“Orholam’s scabby left nut, Ferk!” Ben-hadad said, turning, not noticing the doors were now fully open and dozens of nobles and retainers and men-at-arms lining the hallway were looking at them. “He means that if that batshit-crazy old man is cranky because he’s constipated, we’re fucked!”

Ben looked at the faces of his friends, and then followed those to the aghast faces in the hall behind him. “Oops.”

Kip let him twist in the wind. Anything Kip did would merely make it seem like Ben-hadad was repeating an attitude Kip had modeled before. But give Ben-hadad this: his brain only stayed in panicked paralysis for a single heartbeat.

Ben-hadad limped out of the lift first, leaning heavily on his cane, exaggerating the limp. “War wound,” he said, too loudly, rubbing his ear as if he were part deaf. “The wights knocked me a bit senseless.”

Having seen that Andross Guile himself wasn’t in the hallway, Kip let himself take a breath.

After all, if his grandfather decided to kill him, it wouldn’t be over something like this. “Commander,” Kip said. “See that your man is appropriately disciplined later. For the moment, we’ve things to do.”

“Yes, my lord.”

They strode forward past the whispers, and surrendered their weapons to the Blackguards standing at the audience-hall door.

Out of the side of his mouth, Ben-hadad muttered, “I said, ‘Oops.’ ”

Kip recognized one—and only one—of the Blackguards at the door. Jin Holvar had recovered from her wounds, but looked older and grim as she extended her hands for their weapons.

“You know,” Cruxer said to Kip, unbuckling his sword belt and handing it over, “it stings not to be able to go armed in front of the White and the promachos, especially given that you’re family, and I’m a legacy, and all of us were so close to being Blackguards. I mean, I understand it. And it wouldn’t be so bad if the Lightguards didn’t get to go armed here while we don’t. But they do.”

Jin Holvar grimaced as if she agreed, but she maintained her Blackguard professionalism.

“No need to salt the wound,” Kip said. “The Blackguards here already have to share duties with the men who murdered Goss—and he
was
a Blackguard nunk at the time, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, definitely, it’s true. He was,” Big Leo said, looking hard at Holvar but pretending to speak to Kip. “Even if a Blackguard wanted to forgive everything that happened to your old friends who had to flee afterward, that’s still a huge offense, completely unprovoked as it was.”

“Huge?” Ben-hadad said. “More than that. Unforgivable.”

“It’s all right,” Cruxer said, leveling a hellstone stare right at the Lightguards flanking the Blackguards at the door. “Jin was in the infirmary that day with us. She knows the truth of what happened. When men without honor attack you, there’s little you can do to stop the first treacherous blow. All you can do is make them pay later. The Blackguard being the august, honorable company that it is, I’m sure they’ve made those cowards pay since then.
Sure
of it.”

The faces of the Lightguards reddened and their knuckles went white, and the Blackguards nearby didn’t look much better.

“We are much diminished,” Jin Holvar said, stiff-spined. “A state not helped by our commander and then our best trainees abandoning us when we needed them most.”

“Maybe you should have gone with us,” Big Leo shot back.

“Maybe some would’ve if you’d given us the chance,” Jin said. Before they could answer—or apologize, Kip suddenly felt like an ass—she pushed open the door.

Another gauntlet of expectant faces filled the audience chamber, but to Kip they were an undifferentiated blur. As war-blindness narrows your vision into a tiny cone, so was Kip’s peripheral vision obliterated by his dread at what he was going to see on the dais at the front of the room.

He walked forward, hearing only his blood whooshing in his ears as he was announced. He should have been paying attention to which honorifics they added to glean clues about what kind of reception he was going to receive, but all he could see was Karris and Andross, standing together, one all in white, the other in red.

His half brother wasn’t here. Thank Orholam for that.

The cares of war had had the opposite effects on Karris and Andross. Karris had lost weight, none of it muscle. She had never carried excess softness, but now she appeared to have buried her sorrows in relentless training. Her face was harsh and placid to gauntness. Her dress left her granite shoulders bare, and her hair was bleached to a platinum white. Everything she wore was either white leather, or shimmering white silk pulled taut, or steel. Even her cosmetics were cold, her cheekbones heightened to make her look angular and icy.

And then Kip saw her eyes. She was stunned at him.

And then he knew this was all her court dress. It was her war face. She was the Iron White. This wasn’t a mask or a disguise: it wasn’t
not
her, but it wasn’t all of her, either.

He wasn’t sure what she was seeing in him, but he turned his eyes to Promachos Andross Guile, from whom he would receive his doom.

Andross seemed to have thrived on war. He looked hale, vigorous. His skin was bronzed from the sun now, and he had an energy and assurance that made him a lodestone to the eyes. The misanthrope’s bitterness had melted away into stern purpose. For the first time, Kip saw a bit of the Andross Guile his grandmother had fallen in love with.

“He looks like Gavin,” Karris said beneath her breath. Kip didn’t think he was supposed to hear it.

“No,” Andross said. “He looks like Gavin’s brother.”

“Dazen? How so?” Karris asked, not looking away.

“Not Dazen,” Andross said. “Sevastian.”

Standing now before them, Kip made a low court bow. “High Lady White. High Lord Promachos.”

As his eyes rose to their impassive faces, he felt a rage as sudden as the old earthquakes in Rekton. How dare they sit here doing nothing while his men fought and died? While slaves had fed them peeled grapes and dormouse pie, Conn Arthur had gutted his own brother, both brothers’ lives burnt out defending satrapies that should have been far more united.

Other men’s blood. Other men’s sweat. Other men’s tears and bile.

And they had denied him even the Blackguard. They played their games while satrapies burned. He had thought them giants, speaking from the heights. They weren’t giants. They were dwarfs on a tower, shouting down with tinny voices at those who labored in the mud, hiding their puny legs under great fields of cloth as if large pretenses would make them larger than life.

Suddenly, Andross Guile broke the long silence, as if he had just seen something that pleased him.

“Grandson!” he said. “Welcome back!”

It was meant to shock Kip, to throw him off balance. But Kip was a child no longer. He wasn’t about to lose the initiative.

“I come with dire news, and I come with help,” Kip announced. “The Wight King is coming. He’s destroyed your fleet. We tried to help, but it was a rout.”

Gasps and little cries of denial from the audience.

“Koios is coming here?” Karris asked, a dry fury in the gaze she shot Andross. “Who could’ve guessed?”

The old man’s face hardened. “And our fleet, which was supposed to be spread out in every direction protecting Sun Day pilgrims from pirates, just
happened
upon this fleet? And concentrated their forces?”

“They had sea chariots for scouting. If they saw an invasion fleet coming what do you expect they’d do?”

Andross Guile opened his mouth, but Kip cut him off, saying, “There’s more.”

“Out with it,” Andross Guile said.

“Koios is floating the bane here. Six or seven of them. The bane paralyze drafters. It’s why we couldn’t help the fleet more than we did. He also has forty or fifty thousand soldiers. All this we’ve seen with our own eyes.”

Throughout the hall, denial turned to horror. How was the Chromeria to fight fifty thousand soldiers and untold numbers of wights without its drafters?

“But there’s good news,” Kip said, raising his voice.

“Pray tell,” Andross Guile said, eyes flashing.

Kip said, “I can stop them.”

“This is like one of those festival games, isn’t it?” Gavin said, coming up to the gap. “The promise of an amazing prize if only you do something that looks simple . . . but is actually impossible.” He looked into the abyss before his toes and tried to still the turning of his stomach.

“Many have made the jump with greater infirmities than your own.”

“I’m
infirm
now, huh?”

They had climbed every circle, and Gavin had just tucked away the last boon stone into his constricting and now heavy pilgrim’s garment. The crown of this great tower couldn’t be more than a half circle away. But here, rather than sitting right in front of the next gate, the pilgrims’ rest area sat right next to an enormous gap in the trail.

Orholam came up to stand beside Gavin at the precipice. “It’s not so far.”

“Not so far?” Gavin asked, incredulous. It had to be seven paces.

Gavin had endured a lifetime’s worth of trials to get this far, and he’d kept his pilgrimage mind-set as well as he could. But this was impossible. Ludicrous. It was suicide.

He leaned forward over the abyss. Wind buffeted him, and he staggered back, heart seizing up in his chest.

He rubbed the black eye, but even that did nothing to soothe him.

“I can’t make that kind of jump,” Gavin said. “There’s no way in hell
you
can make it.”

“Nope. But like I said, this isn’t my pilgrimage.”

Gavin turned on the old man. “You’re not going with me?”

“My task was to get you here,” Orholam said. He smiled a toothy smile and patted himself on the back. “ ‘Good job, old boy. Well done!’ ‘Oh, Master, you’re too kind. I was pretty good, though, wasn’t I? Especially considering the load I had to carry up this tower!’ ” Plopping down his pack, Orholam sat and dangled his legs over the drop.

“Load?!” Gavin said. “I oughta kick you off this damned tower!”

“Meh. How do you think I plan to get down? Walk?”

“Huh?” Gavin asked.

“Below here, it’s a . . . what do you call it? The entrance to the, uh, the thing you slide down.”

“What? The chute?”

“
Chute
, that’s it! Yeah, I mean, after the initial plunge, which is apparently quite bracing. You saw where it spits you out at the bottom of the tower. Safely, too, albeit likely with damp undergarments. This is a pilgrimage to the Father of Mercy. Failure doesn’t mean death here. If you fall, you slide down the chute and start over. Or give up, I suppose.”

“Start over?”

Gavin looked across the gap, despair welling up in him. How was he supposed to leap seven paces? Maybe at his strongest he might have leapt so far, but now?