There was nothing wholly untouched, nothing pure, nothing innocent. His heart fell to pieces, putrescent, rotten stinking meat in his hands.
He rolled from his knees onto his back, limp. His arms stretched out as they had so long ago under the rising sun, and he stared at that crackling colossal fist of judgment as it came sweeping down. And he accepted it.
Chapter 58
“This is a terrible idea!” Former Satrapah Tilleli Azmith whispered. “The Chromeria’s messenger is in a room not fifty paces from here! If she steps outside her room at the wrong moment…”
Apparently Teia had come in at a good time.
She dodged another servant in full regalia and white gloves, carrying wine.
“They have no claim on him,” the Nuqaba said. “It doesn’t matter. And how dare you speak to me that way? You’re not even a satrapah anymore.”
She might have been teasing. Teia couldn’t see the Nuqaba’s facial expressions in the few brief upward glimpses she afforded herself.
Teia was, of course, invisible, but coming into the feast in the great hall had not been one of her better ideas. It was called a great hall, and indeed, it was huge, but it was also filled with nearly a thousand people. They weren’t quietly sitting at their tables and talking and eating, either. They were milling about, grabbing wine jugs and food from beleaguered kitchen slaves, gambling, singing along to musicians, grabbing the asses of the slave dancers, kissing, gambling, and Teia didn’t even know what else. A yellow show drafter appeared to have eaten a large quantity of hallucinogenic mushrooms and was sketching wonders in the air and blathering incoherently.
It was still a good five hours until midnight.
“This what happens when the first four courses consist of beer, wine, brandy, and arak,” a nobleman said to Teia. He started when he looked toward her and saw nothing. “Oh, Nwella, I thought you were standing right here,” he said to a woman a few paces away.
He must have sensed Teia’s presence. Her breathing? Had she made a sound? How could he have heard that in this cacophony?
She hadn’t come directly to the high table on purpose. Instead she’d been driven here as she’d dodged into what gaps she could see. She’d thought it would be safe to come in here, that anyone who ran into her would likely be drunk and not even notice it. Instead, because whenever she wanted to see she had to uncover her own eyes, it meant she was giving hundreds of people a chance to discover her, over and over again.
Satrapah Azmith looked baffled. “You’re not really considering…”
The Nuqaba picked up a narrow sausage and looked at her. She took a bite and chewed, apparently in no hurry to answer her.
“So tell me again why you think I shouldn’t unveil him here. Would it not be a demonstration of my power? To have plucked such a prize from the Chromeria itself?”
“Fuck that. I’m not even talking about that idiotic idea now,” Satrapah Azmith said. “Are you really considering letting them demote me?”
“Oh, I’m considering doing it even if we reject their proposal. You seem to be forgetting your place in our partnership.”
It hit the satrapah like a punch in the face. “Are you…” She looked as if she were struggling to contain herself, and failing. “Are you fucking insane?”
The Nuqaba sucked the juices off long, gold-lacquered fingernails. “Careful, old woman. Addressing me with such language flies perilously close to blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy? Who do you think…” But the satrapah regained control of herself, and stopped speaking, though she did set her cup down with a bang.
Teia wanted to see how this turned out. What the satrapah did, what she said afterward, and what she would do when the dinner was over. Would the Nuqaba apologize when she was sober? Would she take some vengeance? For Orholam’s sake! The satrapah was the Nuqaba’s spymaster! If there’s one person you don’t threaten, it’s got to be your spymaster, right?
But it was all irrelevant. Satrapah Azmith was flushed with rage, and that was all Teia needed. What she might do or might say, or that she seemed like a nice woman, that all meant nothing.
The warm, red light of the fire in the great hearth and the many torches suffused Teia and gave her all the passion she needed.
She was become death, and she would collect her due.
She’d already scanned the satrapah’s body. The blood vessels around her heart were already narrowed, as Teia would expect in one who’d had so much stress and so many years and a rich diet to boot.
One by one, Teia brought paryl crystals into the woman’s bloodstream, making many little crystals of it in the vessels leading to her heart. One for each slave she’d had to kill for these bastards.
The satrapah’s own body attacked those invaders immediately, forming clots. Teia merely nudged the clots closer toward each other, helping them glom together. One passed through the narrow opening and whooshed right through.
Then another, as Teia had to dodge a servant carrying the next course of the meal.
But Teia had made half a dozen clots, and one caught. Then another, on another ventricle of the heart. She started moving to get out, and barely heard the woman grunt.
How dare you act decent and kind? How dare you merely do your duty while you served this monster? A thousand slaves might die at your word, and a hundred thousand if you nudged the Nuqaba one way rather than the other. And you didn’t care. All you cared for was yourself.
How dare you? How dare you show a face to me that seemed kind and good?
There is nothing kind and good.
Teia slid as far as a slaves’ door before she turned around. Tilleli Azmith was grabbing her left arm and grimacing.
It was over. Teia had claimed some small vengeance. She didn’t even need to see her work.
As she turned away, Teia heard a crash as the woman fell.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba said. “Satrapah! Damn you! What’s wrong?!”
Teia felt only a warm satisfaction, the lambent radiation into her soul of a big fuck you to all of them.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba shouted, as everyone else went quiet in waves—music cutting out, awkward laughs hanging in the air from people who hadn’t seen yet, and gasps from those who had. “Tilleli, don’t you do this to me!”
Teia looked at the Nuqaba’s puffy, stupid face, and thought, One down.
The night wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 59
“The question is why the White King changed his strategy so drastically. All these months of raiding, and we haven’t answered that damned basic question!” Kip said.
Weeks after the attempted assassination in the woods, the Mighty were seated around yet another fire at yet another camp, having yet another talk. It was not the first, nor indeed the fifteenth time Kip had asked the question aloud.
“I know we need to talk about the battle tomorrow, but this first,” he said. He had grown more comfortable with giving commands, even ones nobody liked. And they’d grown more comfortable accepting them, too. Not even Winsen complained that it was late and they probably weren’t going to solve what he saw as a nonproblem.
They knew he’d get to the battle plan, and that they’d need to be sharp when he did, in case he had in-depth questions about their positions.
“Why does there have to be a grand answer?” Cruxer asked. “The White King felt he was getting overextended, so he paused. The break does him more good than it does us. He has secured and fortified his supply lines between Atash and the siege at Green Haven. Not even we could get to those unless we wanted to give up Dúnbheo and the lake.”
Dúnbheo—the nonfloating Floating City—was the Forester name of the city the Nightbringers were going to try to save tomorrow. It controlled access to the Great River and the immense lake by which Green Haven was getting what little supplies it still was.
“He’s also had to deal with us,” Ben-hadad pointed out. “Isn’t it possible that we actually stopped him?”
“But he was advancing steadily,” Big Leo said. “Just as he has everywhere. Why stop halfway through Blood Forest? Why not at least push to the Great River everywhere and then consolidate?”
“Too much guerrilla warfare that way?” Winsen suggested. “He could capture the cities, but if he doesn’t deal with us first, supply lines get long and vulnerable.”
That could be it, but he’d advanced so fast elsewhere, leaving small forces to mop up any continuing resistance. Was Blood Forest simply different because of its huge population of hunters and hard terrain for supply lines?
“All the fights we’ve had have kept us from linking up with the satrap’s forces,” Tisis said. “If he pushed us to the river, it’s the only place we’d have to go.”
“We don’t want to link up with the satrap’s forces,” Kip said. Satrap Briun Willow Bough wanted Kip’s army—and Kip, if he could get him. What he didn’t want was another person running around his satrapy with an army he didn’t control.
Which was understandable, and the man was a decent sort. Unfortunately, he was also a moron who had no idea what to do with the army he already had. There was no way Kip was going to take orders from him about how to use his own very peculiar forces.
“We all know that,” Tisis said. “But the White King doesn’t. Joining forces is what most defenders would do.”
“You think he’s allowed us our victories?” Kip asked.
“Not the first one at Deora Neamh,” Tisis said. “Maybe not the skirmishes around the Ironflower Marsh or the Deep Forest Ambush. But we’ve sometimes traveled pretty far to get disappointing quantities of food or muskets. And you yourself said the black powder wagons were an assassination attempt.”
It had been a hollower victory than Kip had hoped. They had done everything right, wiping out the enemy and seizing everything with minimal losses. They even successfully disarmed the booby-trapped wagon. But then they found that of the five wagons, it was the only one loaded with powder. The others’ barrels were loaded with a layer of black powder, then sawdust.
The men of the wagon train hadn’t even known they were bait.
It was small comfort that the war dogs had hunted down the scouts sent to watch the outcome. It was small comfort that Kip had been right and there had been two scouts.
“We haven’t fought many drafters, either,” Kip said. “We’re missing something here.”
“Maybe we are,” Cruxer said, “but then the question is whether the White King has some grand design or whether it’s just an error. He’s already spent many lives to keep us away from a place we never intended to go. Just at the wagons he lost several hundred men, half a dozen wights, and five wagons trying to kill you. He’s a good orator, an inspiring leader by all accounts. But maybe he’s simply a poor strategist.”
“Poor enough to take two satrapies,” Winsen said dryly.
If anything, Kip thought, he himself was the one who was a poor strategist. Good tactician. Loved by his people… but he still couldn’t resolve the big picture. Damn, how he’d love to take some lectures with Corvan Danavis now. When he was a boy he’d wanted stories of battlefield heroics. Given the chance now, he’d say, ‘Talk to me about rations for cavalry when moving through forested river valleys.’ ‘What’s the breakdown of your command staff per soldier?’
“That was when the Chromeria didn’t know what we were up against,” Cruxer said.
Cruxer still said ‘we’ when he talked about the Chromeria. Kip loved him for that idealism, but he didn’t share it anymore.
“He’s successfully stalled reinforcements, though,” Tisis said. “We know from the White’s letters that he’s been trying to turn the other satrapies to his side or at least keep them out of the war. That’s not the work of a poor strategist.”
That Karris had written to the Nightbringers at all was the biggest shock for Kip. Without shaming anyone, she’d laid out the numbers—Tyrea and Atash were lost, the Ilytians didn’t care who won, the Nuqaba’s Paria had pulled back all its soldiers after Ox Ford and had never sent reinforcements, and other than the several hundred men Eirene Malargos had sent under Antonius, and her continuing supplies, Ruthgar had pulled back to its side of the Great River, busily fortifying a border too long and too porous to be fortified well.
Kip might have been at fault for part of that. Eirene could be forgiven for not wanting to send more soldiers when Kip simply took them. And if Kip’s co-opting of Antonius and his men was the reason Ruthgar wasn’t sending reinforcements to Green Haven, Kip could well become the reason the Chromeria lost this war.
With all those satrapies out, only Abornea and the small army directly under the Chromeria’s control were left. Karris had said nothing about that, and Kip wondered if that meant they were coming but coming late, or coming as part of a stratagem to sweep in at the last moment, or if Andross Guile had decided to cut his losses and let Blood Forest die.
Karris had also written about her insight that the White King wouldn’t mind a slaughter of both sides, and in fact might prefer it so he could remake the entire culture of the Seven Satrapies. It had seemed an odd, paranoid thought at first, but Kip didn’t think so anymore.
The White King hadn’t sent one man or one squad on a suicide mission: he’d sent hundreds to die, just to kill Kip and Tallach. And from how the camp had fallen, except for a couple of the wights, those people hadn’t volunteered.
That was some coldhearted butchery there.
“So he’s successfully tying up our reinforcements from coming,” Kip said. “But he’s not pressing his advantage. Why? Why why why?!”
Ben-hadad chimed in for the first time. “I don’t mean to distract us from this highly profitable colloquy that is still not answering a question we haven’t been able to answer for many months, but maybe we should talk about the battle that’s going to shape our entire future that we are going to fight tomorrow?”
Big Leo looked down at him. “You take that crazy talk and get out of here.”
“What’s a colloquy?” Ferkudi asked.
No one answered him.
Kip acquiesced even though he felt he was close to figuring it out. Another almost. Kip Almost.
“Enough,” Kip said. “Let’s go inside.”
They moved to the map in the command tent. By this point, Kip had trained others in how to create the things, which was fortunate given that they needed new maps constantly as they moved.
“Let me lay this out plainly,” Kip said. “Tomorrow’s battle at Dúnbheo will either be the crowning achievement of all our work to keep our strength secret, or it will be the end of our hopes to save Blood Forest.”
There were grim faces all around, and a few muttered curses. Handsome General Antonius Malargos cursed quietly. He was perhaps the only one who hadn’t guessed.
“It’s for this that I’ve tried so hard to paint us as raiders by force allocation and by strategic disposition. Tomorrow we fight our first pitched battle. They shouldn’t expect us to be prepared for this kind of fight. I’ll be blunt, we might not be. Before now, retreat has always been part of our plans. If things went poorly in a raid, we ran. I hope we haven’t engrained that into our troops.”
“We won’t run, my lord,” Antonius said. It was his supreme confidence in Kip that made him a useful battlefield commander. It spread to his men. Kip could only hope it spread enough.
“Here are the stakes,” Kip said. “Hiding behind its Greenwall, Dúnbheo has always been a defensive redoubt. They never projected force into the forests beyond them. But perched as they are at the mouth of the river, they have kept the river open to the lake. Besieged, it’s been nothing to the war. Freed, it can become a gateway to a huge number of supplies. Lost, it becomes a stranglehold.”
“We free it, we can save Green Haven,” Cruxer said. “We lose it, we lose Green Haven.”
“Right,” Kip said. “And we don’t know how bad things are inside the city, except to know they’re bad. They’ve been able to brin
g in some supplies from the river, but the capital’s mostly needed those supplies for themselves. We can’t expect any help from the city. The Council of Divines is made up of old cowards. At best, if we’re already winning decisively, they might send some small force to help. I doubt it.”
“That’s just fantastic,” Winsen grumbled. No one upbraided him.
“But if we win,” Kip said. “If we win, with the skimmers we can land anywhere on the lake. We’ll own the lake. With resupply readily available to us and to Green Haven, and with our forces able to strike anywhere we choose, lifting the siege of Green Haven will be only a matter of time.”
“Save the city, save the satrapy,” Cruxer said.
Cruxer was right, and Kip was maybe telling too much, but he always wanted his inner circle to know the full strategy. If he was killed, someone else would need to take the torch. A lot of lives depended on it.
Not that he said the last part aloud. That would only devolve into protestations that he couldn’t die.
Dúnbheo was a strange city. It had once been the religious center of one of the nine kingdoms. Dúnbheo had been deliberately shunned since the establishment of the Seven Satrapies, but never destroyed. Apparently it was a beautiful place, and Lucidonius had believed that every beautiful thing man creates points to how the creative spirit of Orholam himself lives in all people.
So instead of being destroyed, the city had been starved of influence. No one born in the city or who had spent more than ten years there total could hold any position of power in Blood Forest, the Chromeria, or the Magisterium. Thus, as soon as any family native to the city rose high enough to entertain ambitions of being greater, it left. It bore and raised its children elsewhere, and those children generally didn’t want to come back, lest they spend more than their decade there.
It meant, oddly, that there were a lot of nobles dispersed throughout Blood Forest and Ruthgar who had ties to the place—because the smart, the ambitious, and the strong were exported instead of killing each other off. The Malargos family had first risen from Dúnbheo, which was one reason Tisis had so many ties to Blood Forest while her family was technically Ruthgari.