The Burning White Read Online Free

to consider them a threat.
    But that only worked when the Blackguards could identify every guest by sight. Maybe Ferkudi could do that on the Mighty’s second night in Dúnbheo, but Big Leo certainly couldn’t. A flare of white-knuckled rage shot through him. The five of them, being asked to protect the Lightbringer himself? Impossible!
    Damn you, Cruxer, it’s been a year. You should have recruited fifty of us by now.
    But everything still looked fine.
    “Ferk?” he said.
    “I talked with the cooks,” the big round-shouldered young man said, sniffing again. “There were no dishes with cloves.”
    Cloves. Superviolet luxin smelled something like cloves. Big Leo felt a frisson down his spine.
    “Breaker’s the only declared superviolet in the room,” Big Leo said. Kip sat at the head table, where he was chatting amicably with an older woman who was some kind of authority on cultural antiquities.
    He was much too far away for the scent to be coming from him.
    “A secret message?” Big Leo said. Superviolet was often used for diplomatic messages. This was precisely the kind of crowd that would carry those, and even a noble could get jostled, breaking some fragile superviolet luxin scrawled on a parchment.
    Or the cooks could have added cloves to one of the dishes at the last moment. Right?
    Hell, for all Big Leo knew, maybe some lady walking past had clove-scented perfume.
    ‘Falsely declaring an assassination attempt is the worst thing you can do . . .’ Blackguard Commander Ironfist had once lectured them, ‘. . . except stand over the body of your ward. Announcing an assassination attempt means throwing a burning torch into the powder magazine of history.
You
are the people trusted with guns and spears and drafting while the most powerful and paranoid people in the world sleep and sup and talk and f . . . fornicate.’ They’d laughed, but the point was serious: several Prisms had been murdered by cuckolded spouses and scorned lovers. ‘When powerful paranoid people see you burst into a room shouting, armed and drafting, you
will
see pistols somehow appear on people who you know have been searched and cleared. You will see munds somehow turn out to be able to draft. You will see people innocent of everything except stupidity give you reasons to believe they need killing.
    ‘In a false alarm, you may see people die for no reason other than that you yelled. You may kill them yourself.
    ‘Given all that, some say calling a false alarm is shameful,’ Commander Ironfist had said. ‘But I say a Blackguard who doesn’t shout a Nine Kill once in their life isn’t working on edge. We protect the most important people in the world. Work on edge.’
    The code was shorthand for the number of attackers, the suspected intent, and capabilities. A normal shout might be One Kill Five (a solo attacker, attempting assassination, likely a red drafter) or Two Grab Ten (two attackers attempting kidnapping, armed with muskets). Nine was ‘unspecified’ and the most likely to be wrong.
    Big Leo looked over at Ferkudi, praying he’d say he’d been mistaken.
    Ferkudi was glowering at the room, his brain grinding forward as slowly as a millstone and just as implacably.
    Behind their smiles, not a few of the Blood Forest conns might
want
Kip dead, but none would dare to move against him openly, certainly not with his army deployed inside their city. But someone else had good reason to want Kip dead. Someone who would stop at nothing. The White King.
    He shouldn’t have anyone serving him, not in this city. But he might.
    Big Leo’s eyes met Ferkudi’s. There was no hesitation there.
    “Nine Kill Seven!” Big Leo bellowed—
    Just as Ferkudi yelled, “Nine Kill Naught!”
    What?! ‘Naught’ wasn’t superviolet. ‘Naught’ meant a
paryl
-using assassin.
    But their voices had already flown like torches from their hands to land amid friends and foes and fools, the nervous and naïve, all of them paranoid and