The Burning White Read Online Free Page B

and drafting.
    The tall bodyguard whirled each hand in circles, building a blue luxin shield, swiping left and right, painting the air itself with crystalline protection.
    To not make a stationary target of himself, Kip dodged left and right within the space behind Cruxer, drafting as much off the lux torches as he could while trying to identify a threat.
    Ferkudi and Big Leo were barreling through the wide common hall to get to his side. The music of lyre and timbrel and psantria fell silent.
    Kip had asked for a small party—which meant (not counting those laboring in the kitchens and stockyards) a hundred lords and ladies and lackeys and lickspittles, thirty-some servants and slaves, fifty men-at-arms (who, on Cruxer’s insistence, were allowed no more armament than a table knife), and a dozen performers.
    All of them were shrinking back from the center of the room and the high table. Some of the men-at-arms were covering their charges with their own bodies or hauling them toward the doors. Other men-at-arms were still stupefied like blinking heifers, too dull to do the only work for which they’d been hired.
    A hundred people in the room, and not one whom Kip could see as a threat.
    In a far corner of the room, the petite Winsen had jumped up on a servant’s sideboard to get a view of the whole room, his bow already strung, arrow nocked but not drawn, its point sweeping left and right with Winsen’s gaze.
    Then Kip’s view was obscured as Cruxer finished the shield-bubble of blue luxin.
    It wasn’t elegant work. Despite being made of translucent blue luxin, it was nearly opaque, but Kip knew it was strong. Cruxer did nothing halfway.
    “More men,” Cruxer muttered. “We need more men.”
    It was only then that Kip finally processed the last bits: ‘Nine Kill Seven’ meant a possible assassination attempt by an unknown number of drafters, possibly involving a superviolet. With no one charging forward now, that sounded like a false alarm. Nine Kills were often false alarms.
    But ‘Nine Kill Naught’ meant a paryl drafter.
    An assassin from the Order of the Broken Eye. A Shadow.
    Which meant the assassin might be
invisible
, the kind of monster who could reach through clothes and flesh and luxin unseen and stop your very heart.
    With a pop like an impudent kid clicking his tongue, Cruxer’s solid shield-bubble of blue luxin burst and simply fell to dust.
    Aghast, Cruxer hesitated, baffled at how something he’d built to be impervious could simply
fail
, but Kip was suddenly loosed. Paryl was fragile. It could slide through luxin or flesh, into joints or hearts. But it couldn’t stretch, couldn’t cut, couldn’t survive violent motion.
    As some nerve was invisibly tweaked, Cruxer’s knee buckled under him even as Kip dove away.
    Kip rolled to his feet and ran straight for the high table. Last thing he wanted with a paryl assassin nearby was to trap himself against a wall. Shouting, “Paryl!” he leapfrogged over the head table between the great clay jugs of wine.
    In typically flamboyant Forester fashion, there was a tradition at big parties for the conn to line up all the wine he intended to serve his guests in great jugs on the head table as a sign of his largesse and wealth. The guests, for their part, were expected to drink all of it. Naturally, the jugs got bigger as the egos did.
    Here, for the man who had saved the city, some of the most brilliant examples of the big jugs ever crafted were lined up along the entire length of the high table like a rank of alcoholic soldiers.
    In all the majesty of his gracefulness, the Turtle-Bear clipped one of them as he cleared the table. He rolled into the open space in the center of the big U of all the tables.
    The priceless glazed clay jug painted with gold zoomorphic swirls and studded with precious stones tottered, teetered with the countervailing motion of the sloshing wine inside, tilted, toppled—and smashed.
    A fortune of wine and pottery sprayed in