The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,117

cairns on a climb with precipices on every side. He squinted until the lights blurred, new lights appearing and old fading away as the reports aged and the map advanced time. It was like clouds passing over a night sky, blotting out the stars and revealing others. But some places stayed ever-black, little bits of the evernight, of eternal ignorance and blindness.

If you screened out a few reports, which could well be there to distract, then . . . the darkness had a shape.

There was an area of coastline almost entirely dark.

“What were those four reports? Here?” he asked Tisis.

She went back to the very beginning of one of her folders and told him some names. They had no meaning to him.

He pursed his lips.

She said, “But that was when I was just getting my networks set up. I didn’t have many sources yet.”

“Whose lands are those?” he asked.

She hadn’t written that down, but she knew this satrapy well. She searched her memory for a few moments. “These ones are Red Leaf lands, a forest and farmland. This is Conal Briar Wood’s estate, and this is old Aoife Bracken’s grazing land, if she’s still alive and it hasn’t shifted to her stepson’s family, uh, they’re . . . Petrakoi? Alexandros Petrakis. Yeah.”

“Shit,” he said. He’d been hoping there was some connection with something, anything.

“Kip, they’re both retainers to the Red Leafs.”

“Shiiit,” Kip said.

He darkened those four lights on the map, and now there was a blank area, east of Ox Ford. “What’s this town near the coast?”

“Azuria, or maybe Apple Grove. Azuria Bay used to be a port until the harbor silted in. The moorage was a bit of a way up the river, can’t remember the name. But it didn’t generate enough revenue for the locals to be able to afford dredging it, and there are a lot of rocks farther out that made captains leery of it in the first place, so it slowly shriveled up and died. Apple Grove is the next village over, maybe a league away?”

Kip chortled.

“Oh ho. Master Danavis would be so disappointed in me. Cruxer, what do you do when your enemy is making a mistake?”

“Don’t interrupt them,” Cruxer said. “You taught us that a long time ago.”

“Tisis, show me the language you’ve worked out with Ambassador Red Leaf.”

He looked it over and clapped his hands. Good play, enemy mine! It almost worked.

“Well, you were wrong, Commander,” Kip said.

“How so?”

“The White King did send his emissary. Ambassador Red Leaf is a traitor.”

“What?!” Tisis asked. “But he gave us everything!”

“Everything to snare us,” Kip said. “Commander, what message do you think those assassins were sending when they failed on purpose?”

Cruxer’s brow furrowed. He still didn’t buy that they had.

“Look,” Kip said. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they intended to fail . . . but didn’t intend to die. What would you take from that?”

“Uh . . . ‘Don’t mess with the Order, or we’ll get you next time’?”

“Right. So where’s the last place you’d go if you didn’t want to run afoul of the Order?”

“Braxos?” Cruxer asked.

“Well, yes, yes . . . But you know, maybe a living city that someone might actually go to.”

Cruxer shrugged. “I dunno. It’s not like the Order publicly lets anyone know where their headquarters are.”

“You’re not really helping me here,” Kip said. “How about if I said I wanted to go to the Chromeria? Would you be more or less afraid of the Order than if we stay here?”

“More, definitely.”

“Thank you!” Kip looked at the treaty. “And this treaty commits me to take all our troops to lift the siege of Green Haven—and go with them personally.”

“But that’s where we want to go,” Cruxer said.

“Right. Or we could stay here. There’s a million reasons to stay here. A million problems to solve. A bandit army, for one. And what were they trying to do—before Daragh the Coward so kindly betrayed Koios and handed them over to us?”

Cruxer said, “Trying to trap us in the city so we couldn’t go help lift the siege?”

“No,” Kip said. “They don’t care if we tried to lift the siege or if we fought here. They’re armor, see?”

“ ‘Armor’?”

“But not just any armor! We thought they were blocking the Great River to keep out new threats from without—reinforcements and supplies and everything else. Now, it does do that, but that’s not the main purpose. The White King hasn’t thrown his whole might at Green Haven. Why not? He split his forces rather