The Burning White (86 page)

Andross took Delayed Destruction, leaving Kip with Nine Mirrors. “Pick that for the name?” he asked.

“Not re . . . er, of course. I was hoping you’d ramble on about the Great Mirrors as a conversation piece,” Kip said. “Have to confess, learning about them would probably be a lot more useful to my immediate future than learning about moldy old sea demons.”

It actually would’ve been a clever plan, if Kip had been quick enough to think of it.

“Really?” Andross said.

“Not really. But I found a Great Mirror in Blood Forest. Triggered it. Huge thing, still pristine. Had been underground for centuries, it looked like. I don’t suppose there’s actually . . . nine of them?”

Andross gestured to Grinwoody to pour them some drinks while he shuffled his own cards, his liver-spotted hands moving as deftly as a cardsharp’s. “The Nine Kings cards are a repository of ancient knowledge, some of it very unpopular with the censors of their eras, some of it unpopular with later ones.” He flipped half his deck from one hand to another in a move that seemed to defy physical laws. “It’s also just a game. How many Mirror cards in that deck?”

“Three?” Kip said. He hated that it came out as a question.

“But three doesn’t sound scary. Three Mirrors? In a game called Nine Kings? Nine Mirrors, much better.”

“Is that why you called us ‘the Mighty’?” Kip asked. “For the name?”

“If I hadn’t given you a Name, what would you have been? Six scared adolescents who’d dropped out of the Chromeria, who’d washed out of Blackguard training and been chased off the Jaspers by a half-trained band of thugs.”

“Those thugs are your Lightguards. Who you also gave a pretty awesome name, much as we hate you for it. Hated.” Kip cleared his throat.

“ ‘The Lightguard’ is a name that either calls ironic attention to itself or, maybe one time in twenty, might have encouraged those thugs to make something of themselves. The latter is a gamble I lost, but I still win. They know everyone hates them, and they depend utterly on me, so they’re fiercely loyal to me.”

“Except for that incident where Zymun sent them to kill me and the Mighty.”

“Well, yes, except for that. But they only obeyed him because he told them that they would actually be fulfilling my will by fulfilling his. He, too, is a Guile.”

“I can’t believe you’re keeping him close,” Kip said. “He’s poison.”

“He says the same about you. Shuffle?”

They shuffled for each other, and Kip kept his eyes tight on Andross’s hands. One last cut of the decks, and they handed them back to each other.

Andross chose the setting as Big Jasper and set the sun-counter at noon. Kip went first.

He drew his cards: a tough polychrome named Katalina Galden, Red Spectacles, a musket, a good sword, Blue Spectacles, a green-drafting Blackguard with a musket proficiency, and a red-drafting Blackguard. It would have been a great hand for the normal game, good for offense and defense early. In a normal game, it would have put him in an early lead that Andross might never have recovered from.

But at full noon, and with two draws? Every card Kip kept in his hand was one less card he could draw, one less chance to get the powerful cards he needed. He flopped them all down.

“The discard pile is faceup in this variant,” Andross said.

Kip hadn’t recalled that. Great.

The old man studied Kip’s overturned cards. “A tough call. But the right play.”

“A compliment?” Kip asked.

“Doled out in heaping measure, when deserved,” Andross said. He discarded three. They didn’t help Kip at all. They were three cards you’d toss regardless of what you were pursuing.

“I knew her, you know.”

“Katalina Galden?” Kip asked. “Any relation to that asshole Magister Jens Galden?”

Kip looked at the cards he’d drawn. Nothing. A big, heaping, steaming-on-a-cold-winter’s-day pile-of-stinky nothing. He’d drawn most of the equipment in his deck, but no direct attacks and no one good enough to put the equipment on. If he’d kept Katalina Galden, he would have had a chance.

“Same family, though not likely by blood. I was actually speaking of Janus Borig,” Andross said, drawing his own cards, imperturbable. “The woman who drew the new cards.”

It was whiplash for Kip. He’d been walking down another mental path completely. And then he remembered. This was how Andross Guile operated: overload your opponent with too many things to think about, and then drop a bomb with a burning fuse in his lap and see what he did.

“How many people in history do you think were smarter than you are?” Kip asked.

But the counter didn’t work.

“She was a dear friend of your grandmother’s,” Andross said. “For a long time. She, more than anyone, I think, is responsible for our family’s troubles. She lied to me. She lied to us.” She? Oh, she Janus Borig.

Kip got to go first, so he laid out nearly all of his cards. “How so?” Kip asked, suspicious.

“I was going to say, ‘So beware of trusting anything she told you.’ But instead you’re surprised,” Andross said. “So you think she’s a truth teller? Because she’s a Mirror? Because ‘Mirror’ implies a passivity?”

After his talk about mirrors with his wife not two hours ago, Kip felt like either history was bringing something together for him to understand or this was just one of those times where you learn a new word or concept and suddenly you’re seeing it everywhere.

“I know this much,” Kip said, trying not to show how troubled he was. “
She
didn’t try to kill me before even meeting me.”

“No, she was more interested in using you to kill someone else,” Andross said. He played three coccas; they were smaller ships, but each capable of decent damage. If Kip got the direct attacks his deck depended on, he would have to waste valuable turns taking them out.

Kip was screwed. The game had barely started, and they both already knew he was going to lose. He looked at the card he’d drawn: Yellow Spectacles. Garbage.

Yeah, Luck, go bugger yourself.

“I’m sure anyone who has a message you can’t control must be untrustworthy,” Kip said, more furious at his cards than at his opponent. “From today forward I will get all my intelligence from you alone, grandfather.”

A muscle in Andross’s jaw twitched, but he took a slow breath. “Do you know, it’s so frustrating. I’m making all the same mistakes with you I made with Dazen. I’m a better player than this. Fine.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care, and Kip had to hide his astonishment that he’d thrown his grandfather off his own planned path for once.

“She told me,” Andross said, “when I first ascended to the Red seat on the Spectrum, that she wanted to paint my portrait for her cards. It was meant to be hugely flattering, of course, a known Mirror telling me that I was worthy of a card. If one excludes the procedure and discovery and weapon and monster cards, that fact alone would acknowledge me as one of the four hundred fifty-seven most important people throughout history to that point. Slightly more, actually, but I didn’t have an accurate count of the Black Cards then, and of course, there were many important people who never sat for their portrait, but they’re the less famous for it. What the originals of these cards did, though, was known to very few.”

Andross played Amir Bazak on one of the coccas, and Red Spectacles, and equipped them on him. Amir had turned himself into a human bomb, penetrating the enemy lines during a battle through subterfuge and then drafting so much red it killed him in an explosion that took out thousands and opened a gap in the line. It was a weak card, easily killed—if you had something to kill it with.

“But you knew,” Kip said. It was hard to imagine Andross Guile not knowing any secret. “You knew what the cards did.”

“I married well, into a family that knew . . . most of it,” Andross said. “But Borig was clever. I think she’d already seen more than I guessed. She led me to believe that a card could only cover the time period up until its creation. Seems logical, right? And I believed that each person could only have one card. She lied. So tell me, my cleverer grandson, why would that be a problem?”

It wasn’t the flattery of being told he was historically important, Kip realized. Though he imagined that flattery had meant quite a lot to Andross Guile, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

But Andross would have pushed past the flattery.

Commemorating a mere Red? Andross had set his sights so much higher, and would soon achieve so much more. If Andross had believed that he was destined for much greater heights than merely being the youngest Red in history, then . . .

“Ah,” Kip said. “You had plans. You knew that you were going to be promachos someday. Or maybe Prism? The White?”

“Something like that,” Andross said. “Regardless, I should have known better. I was a young man, with a young man’s weaknesses. I thought
potential
meant something. I thought I was so very devious in having her paint my card before I had done most of the things I’d planned. See, I was worried about what my enemies might do with such a card after it was completed. I knew I deserved a card. So if I could get her to do my card early, then even if my enemies got it, the information they learned about me, being solely retrospective, would be of limited use to them.

“But the truth was I hadn’t done anything up to that point to deserve a card. Seizing control of my family, winning my bride from the pool of suitors and against a father who initially opposed me, becoming the Red? These are but the foundation stones of a legend, not a legend itself. But she was clever to come to me then, when I was overwhelmed with other concerns and susceptible to flattery. I couldn’t take the time then to properly investigate the cards.”

“They weren’t only retrospective?” Kip asked. He played his garbage, and drew a Great Mirror. Too late.

Andross sipped his whiskey. He motioned that both ships and Amir Bazak would attack.

Kip couldn’t stop the attack. The ships hurt him a little, and then Amir Bazak exploded and took out one of them, and badly damaged the other, but also took out almost all of Kip’s life.

Andross said, “There are scholars’ papers that say things like ‘operating outside of time,’ which sounds profound, until you think about it and realize it’s nonsense. No, her lie was different. She told me—or I assumed—that it was only possible to have one card. After all, no one else has ever had more than one, and though I’m a proud man, I hadn’t considered myself quite
that
special. Reflecting on it later, I realized that I didn’t know that others
hadn’t
had multiple cards made of them, with only one kept for later use. I only knew the cards that had entered the registers. It’s possible the Mirrors have pulled this trick before. Lucidonius has no card, so far as we know, but there is an account of there being a Mirror during his era who met an early end. It was attributed to the Order, but they are a convenient scapegoat, aren’t they?”

“You think Janus Borig made another card of you?”

“That’s the question I think you will answer. Right. About. Now.” Andross played Sea Demon.

Kip couldn’t kill it in one turn, and the cocca alone could kill him next round, so it was now impossible for him to win.

He’d been focused during the game, focused on winning, on Andross’s words, and that tight focus had allowed his mother to blur into insignificance in the background. But now she came back into his vision, only for him to see her retreating into the distance. Andross wouldn’t give Kip her story; he never gave anyone anything, especially not something of great value to them.

Kip hadn’t thought it would affect him, but suddenly it felt like losing his mother all over again—and even worse now. Andross wasn’t going to let Kip find his grandfather, either, for his grandfather Asafa would likely tell Kip the story himself, and Andross wasn’t about to give up a prize for nothing.

It was a moot point. Kip was going to die in this battle. It shouldn’t hurt.

He didn’t have time to prattle on with some old stranger anyway.

“Looks like a small man on a little ship wins it for you,” Kip said. “An unlikely hero, what with sea demons and Great Mirrors about.”

“But a hero nonetheless . . . because I was willing to lose him.”

Kip folded his cards, conceding. “So Zymun and I are your little ships?” he asked.

Andross sipped his whiskey. “It’s a game, not a metaphor, and you’re the one who chose these decks. Not that I’m opposed to learning lessons from mere games or other unlikely places. Speaking of which, there’s the matter of our first wager. I believe you have a story to tell me about what happened to Janus Borig’s cards.”

Even as Gavin ran up the steps to the Tower of Heaven’s roof, he noticed a change from the hewn conformity of all the stairs he’d climbed in the entire hike up until now.

The steps became irregular, a more natural shape, with uncut stone, albeit worn by the passage of many thousands of feet over untold years. Coming out on the top of White Mist Tower felt not like reaching the top of one of the Chromeria’s seven towers but instead like summiting the stone crown of a mountain. The top wasn’t carved flat, but gently curved.

It reminded him, quite suddenly, of the crest of Sundered Rock before he and his brother had shattered it.

So long lost in darkness, that memory surfaced as sharply as did the black stone beneath his feet. For the entire climb, the black stone of the tower had been an oddity. Was it meant to evoke the black humility of a luxiat’s robes? The imagery had never gelled for Gavin. Luxiats showed they had no light of their own, but surely this pilgrimage should be toward light. Maybe a tower black at the base, but lighter as one climbed? That could make sense.

Instead, White Mist Tower was unrelieved black.

A part of Gavin knew he should move fast. He should grab the blade before anything else. He’d circled halfway around the tower with the last stair, which put the sword at the far side. But running before he knew what was here might be rushing heedless into danger—rather than running to safety. And a sight here struck him like Orholam’s own raised fist.