The Burning White (88 page)

Now, finally, Kip understood why Andross had said there was nothing more important for them to be doing than this. Preparations for battle? The people they each commanded could do most of those. Unfolding the past and the present itself? Only they could do this.

And it meant helping his father either way.

“Let’s play,” Kip said.

Andross chose conventional rules. Kip chose decks he was familiar with. He even added cards from the array Grinwoody brought in once more, based on what he guessed of how the Black Cards would affect the strategies.

It was close. Damn close.

He came to his last turn. His facedown deck held fourteen cards. He could only draw one, and any one of four cards left in that stack would give him the victory.

“Four,” Andross said aloud. “Four winners. Out of fourteen.”

“How do you know I don’t have it in my hand already?”

“A man doesn’t pray over his last draw when he has the winning card in hand.”

Of course Andross knew exactly what Kip was looking for. Kip couldn’t find it in himself to hate the old spider, not for this. Hating Andross Guile was like hating the weather. If the sun burns your head, you don’t shake your fist at the sun; you blame yourself for not wearing a hat.

The game had been fair. Kip had watched for any cheats, eagle-eyed.

“You want to back out?” Andross asked, amused. “The odds are against you. Failure might break your spirit . . .
Breaker
.” He said it with a light derision, as if Kip was trying on names like a child tries on his parents’ fancy clothes and big hats.

“Not ‘Breaker.’ I prefer ‘Diakoptês,’ ” Kip said. For some reason Grinwoody flinched at that. “My father told me once that the odds were against us, but that odds are for defying.”

Kip drew.

He lost.

“Grinwoody,” Kip said. “Go fetch a bucket for me. I may vomit. Also, get a physicker. One with experience starting stopped hearts. Or better yet, the Blackguard Adrasteia.”

“Teia’s disappeared,” Andross said. “Some time ago now. Absent without leave. I think they thought she might have gone to join you and your Mighty. No?”

Kip shook his head.

It was terrible, but the first thing Kip felt was relief. He wasn’t going to have to face her yet. Not that that was really in the top ten things he ought to worry about right now.

Then his chest tightened as Andross went to a combination safe and opened it. He brought out a tiny vellum book, barely larger than a card itself. With careful fingers, he unwound the string from the button holding it shut and lay the covers open. Without touching any part of the card, he offered it.

Kip took the card by the edges, careful not to touch its face. He lay it on the table before him. The card depicted a golden ship, glowing in the sun, sails full-bellied, cutting through easy seas. It was exquisite art, as all of Janus Borig’s had been, and obviously done by her hand.

“Some water, calun,” Kip said. After all this time, he’d finally learned not to say please to a slave. Not that Grinwoody was any normal slave. “But open the window first. I need full-spectrum light.” He turned to Andross. This card didn’t look threatening in the least. “The
Golden Mean
? Is that the name of the ship?”

“Made by a pair of Abornean brothers, a shipwright and a yellow drafter, since sadly deceased in an apparent robbery. Possibly an assassination to keep them from talking. No, not done by my orders. Really, Kip, must you suspect me of everything?”

“What? No, I wasn’ t—”

“I saw the look on your face. Anyway, it was sold to an Ilytian cannon maker from Smussato named Phineas, and from there it’s been seen in numerous ports, though of unknown ownership. Not least, it was here. On the Jaspers. Not five weeks ago.”

“How do you know it has anything to do with Gavin?” Kip asked.

“Because I tried to View it myself.”

“And?”

“Searching an item card for one person who’s touched it isn’t a matter of strength of will but of singularity of focus. I think you have that in a way I don’t. When I look for Gavin, my attention is bifurcated, and my intentions are muddied. I was able to establish only that he has been on that ship in the recent past. You’ll do better.”

Grinwoody set down Kip’s water, and there was an odd intensity about the man, a tension about him that touched those Blackguard senses that Kip had begun to develop, something that spoke of danger. Kip looked at the older man then, but Grinwoody was all placid subservience. Surely he’d merely been echoing the tension in his master, who was meeting with a man Grinwoody surely thought might be a threat to Andross. After all, Grinwoody had had Blackguard training himself.

Kip dismissed it. Why was he focusing on a mere slave rather than on the fiercest intellect he’d ever known?

“Open the windows,” Kip said.

But Grinwoody only looked to his master.

“The drapes are open,” Andross said.

“That gives me seven colors,” Kip said. “I have a feeling I’m going to need nine.”

Andross gestured, and Grinwoody went and opened the large windows, bathing Kip in unfiltered light.

There wasn’t need for much of any color, and Andross helpfully had blocks of every color large enough for Kip to draw source from, but as Kip finished with chi—his pupils squeezed down to nothing—he understood Andross’s fear of the cards for the first time. Kip’s gallium necklace felt heavy against his chest, concealing the chi bane within it, and Kip felt a twinge of fear as he thought for the first time, What if there’s a card of this necklace? What if Andross knows everything?

But unhurried, Kip stared at the Golden Mean card on the table and set his fingers down on it, one by one, concentrating on his father alone.

Kip was the eager face of the prow cutting through azure waves, his decks gliding frictionless through the upbearing seas. He was the strain of the mast against the wind, two old friends leaning against each other as they walked home tipsy. His gunports opened like gills opening so he might breathe, and exhaling black smoke and shot, with the hurried walking of the crews and the shouted orders of a familiar voice. Gunner. And from the lack of distress in those somehow-distant voices of his crew, these were mere practice volleys with the many cannons.

Father, where are you?

“I feel him lying on the deck of the forecastle,” Kip said, eyes closed. His senses were limited; it wasn’t like standing on the ship himself, but more an awareness of things within a certain bubble of the ship. “He’s skinny. Wearing an eye patch? Talking with someone, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Now he’s talking to Gunner. I recognize him, somehow. They’ve got a man strapped over the mouth of a cannon. A huge cannon mounted on the forecastle. Um . . . lost it.” As Gavin stood up, his body no longer touching the deck, but only his feet doing so, he became harder to hold.

“There was some kind of luxin storm,” Kip said. “But he slept through it, maybe?” Kip had sharpened his focus to his father at the wrong time, it seemed. He would have liked to know what an orange-luxin storm looked like—but he wasn’t going to try to go back now. “And now it’s a new day. We’re circling something for a while. An island and—whoa. There’s a battle now. Maybe, maybe a battle. Lots of men running. Gavin’s climbed up into the crow’s nest. He’s shouting.” His mouth moved as he shouted, and Kip tried to read his lips. “I think he just shouted, ‘Sea demon.’ There’s something terrible happening. They’re firing my guns. They dropped my starboard anchor.”

Kip grunted as the anchor tore free of his decks like someone tearing off a fingernail. Then the cannons boomed, his decks strained, the oars rattled out. “ Something—” And then Kip felt the bony hammer of the sea demon’s head crush him against the anvil of coral. Gavin was flung away. Decks tore like paper. Men were smashed, rigging tore, and bits of Kip’s consciousness were flung into the seas: a shotgun blast of wood and rope and blood and metal.

He tore his fingers away from the card and found himself in the room once more. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? Dead?”

“I think so. He was flung from the crow’s nest. The ship was crushed against a reef by a sea demon.”

“Go back. Be certain!”

Kip didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to give up on his father, not while there was still a chance.

He found the time again and replayed it once more—though it felt like rubbing an open wound. He went beyond it, tried to search the seas.

He could feel the presence of sharks before his awareness faded from those scattered, dead bits of himself. “The bay is full of sharks,” he heard himself saying. “With several sea demons outside it. But I can’t feel him anywhere now. There’s . . . there’s a bit of the forecastle left, perched on the coral.”

And that was it. Nothing for a time, and then the awareness of a single soul clambering up onto the forecastle.

But it wasn’t Gavin Guile. It was Gunner.

Kip stayed with him for days, but Gavin never came, and Gunner only seemed to get more and more desperate.

He pulled his hand away once more and told what he’d seen. “Maybe . . . maybe he made it ashore?”

“Several sea demons, you said?” Andross asked.

Kip nodded. He wished suddenly that he could have seen Andross’s face when he’d first given him the news that his last surviving son was now almost certainly dead. Maybe there would have been a flicker of humanity in it then, but now he spoke with the merciless focus of a captain steering his ship straight through a sandbar, scraping off the barnacles of wife and sons and grandsons and throwing into disarray everything in his life not bolted down, but always, always winning through the sand to victory and position and pride.

“He might have lived,” Kip said. “A reef means there’s an island close, right?” If he survived the initial collision. If he were flung into the bay rather than the open sea. If he weren’t knocked unconscious by the fall. If he made it past the sharks.

If, if, if.

“Was there a wall of mist? At the reef?”

“Not . . . not that I was aware of?” Kip said. “But . . . awareness isn’t so good in the cards. Why?”

Andross
hmph
ed. “There are stories that the sea demons circle White Mist Reef. If you saw several of them, he must have been there. I wonder why. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an island, you said. Even if he survived, even if he finds another ship, there are sea demons infesting the waters there. Very well. That tells me all I need to know. Gavin’s dead, or at least dead to us. He’s not coming back. Certainly not in time to help. Not in time to change anything. Which tells me that our last game is necessary.”

His father was dead. There would be no Gavin Guile swooping in to save him at the last moment. It had been one thing to hear he was gone, and another to admit it might be true but hold on to hope, but now? “I’m done,” Kip said, moving to stand. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

“You get out of that chair and I will pop your eyes out with my thumbs and fuck your skull until you bite off your swollen black tongue and drown in a bucket of your own blood.”

For a moment Kip was a terrified little boy again, his mother hurling the cooking pot and the fire poker at him, shrieking at him like a wounded animal. He dropped back into his seat, baffled.

“The gold box,” Andross said to Grinwoody, his voice abruptly cool once more, though he didn’t take his eyes off Kip. “And the Ilytians. And put the decanter on the table.”

Grinwoody brought a gold card box from the open safe. He put the crystal decanter of amber liquor on the playing table itself. Then he brought out the Ilytian bladed pistols Kip had last seen Gavin wearing. Andross checked them to confirm they were loaded and laid them across his lap, pointed toward Kip.

“Eighteen-year-old Crag Tooth,” Andross said. “Their very first batch. It’s worth a fortune. I opened it especially for you.” His former savagery had evaporated, but Kip would never forget it. Andross waved Grinwoody away.

“My lord . . .” Grinwoody said. “I must protest. This one has shown reckless disregard before. I worry for your safety.”

Kip was still blinking, trying to recover his breath and his wits.

Andross said, “Do you know, I paid more for this whiskey than I did for Grinwoody?”

Trying to repair his façade of calm detachment, Kip said, “The market price of slaves was a sadly overlooked part of my education.”

“ ‘Education’?” Grinwoody asked coolly.

Andross laughed. “His owner noted his intelligence and was training him as a legalist before his ability to draft manifested, and was putting him into Blackguard training. He wasn’t the only dual-use slave I bought, of course. The others were very interested in honor . . . prestige . . . making a difference. Grinwoody said only two things to me. Do you remember, Grinwoody?”

The old slave inclined his head but made no move to finish his master’s story.

“He asked, ‘Will you beat me if I don’t deserve it?’ I told him no, and I’ve kept my word. I’ve only beaten him twice. Both times for impertinence. Both times in the first year. After he understood the boundaries, we’ve gotten along quite well. And then when I asked if he would die for me if necessary, he said, let’s see, how’d he put it? ‘For you, yes. I’d prefer not to die for a lesser man.’ A lesser man, you understand, Kip? This slave, this nothing, he dared to judge his betters, but not so far that he wouldn’t do his duty. He didn’t really want to be in the Blackguard, because Blackguards have to guard whoever happens to be Prism or on the Spectrum or sits in the White’s High Seat or, horror of horrors, the Black’s Low Seat if necessary. He could tell that some of them were great, whilst some were merely born to a lucky station. He fulfills his duties to the utmost, but he doesn’t step beyond his station. You understand?”

“Oh, that’s a very subtle lesson, High Lord Promachos,” Kip said. “I won’t forget who’s who here. I guarantee it.”

Andross lifted the bottom of the box out and revealed two decks. “Look through these while I tell you the stakes.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Kip asked, accidentally saying it aloud.

“That depends,” Andross said. “How’s your marriage?”