The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,189

her the job now. She knew she should.

But with all she’d passed off to other hands, the control of information was one thing she couldn’t bear to give to anyone. Not now, not when the Order had people everywhere.

In peacetime, you might worry about a spy enriching a family unjustly or using their illicit knowledge to claim estates or negotiate or end trade agreements or even marriages. In wartime, though, a well-placed spy meant death for thousands. It could mean the death of the Seven Satrapies.

There was a knock at the door. Ugh, another meeting.

All this is what you were preparing me for, Orea, Karris thought, by putting me in charge of the spies. After my long tutelage everywhere else, you taught me to handle secrets and those who keep them. You taught me to judge whom to trust and how to trust someone halfway or three-quarters, rather than trusting fully or not at all, like I used to.

Thank you, Orea. Thank you.

Another knock.

“Send them in,” Karris told her Blackguards.

One more meeting, she promised herself, then I’m getting the hell out of here to go to that little kopi shop myself.

Chapter 53

“YOU . . .”

The sound rose from a pitch so low Teia felt it first in her chest, but maybe that was only her anxious dreams. She rolled over. The closet was so small, no one could open it without the door pushing into her hip. This was as safe a place to sleep as anything got for her.

“HAVE.” The voice had risen now, like a sea demon emerging from thalassic depths. Monstrous and raw, it was basso profundo deep, as if it had taken until now to find a cadence intelligible to her.

“MY CLOAK!”

The voice was a volcano rending the earth beneath her and vomiting fire past her face, the heat alone pummeling her into mute submission, agog, falling backward to tremble on uncertain ground.

“You cannot hide for long, thief. I will find you and take what is mine, and I will teach you what eternity means. I will snatch you from this time to a place where we can be uninterrupted for decades of torture, and then I’ll bring you back, to your own family, your own home. You will betray your own father for one hour’s cessation of pain, and then I will take you again, until you have broken yourself, and you beg to torture by your own hand them whom once you loved. I will flay you, I will tear off your fingernails, I will grind your bones to spike shards and make you dance as they pierce your skin. I will impale you from anus to broken teeth on the axle of my war chariot before I ride into battle. But no matter what pain you come to know, you will heal every time I allow you nightmarish sleep. You will not die. I, who am the Lord of Flies, will never let you more than glimpse that bourne.”

This was not a nightmare. From any nightmare Teia had ever known when asleep, she would have woken by now, sheets drenched, cheeks wet with tears. But she could not wake.

This was not her psyche pawing through the jagged detritus of what had unsettled her in the day and sorting her fears. This wasn’t a twisted confusion of things she knew. This was stark clarity. And he used terms she’d never heard.

This was not Teia speaking to herself.

At her sudden certainty, her throat clenched, at war with a stomach rebelling to empty itself.

Nor did he stop speaking.

“You shall be the asymptote of suffering incarnate, beyond whose limit is insanity, a land whose surcease of sorrow you shall never know. Eventually, you will choose me over freedom, me over love, me over every good. I, Abaddon, will be your god.”

His voice had risen through the stones beneath her like grasping vines, and now they wrapped around her, imprisoning her, prodding into every gap, sliding sibilant across her skin.

“But whatever you say”—his voice had gone quieter, soothing, full of anticipation of pleasure—“however you praise me through your shattered nubs of teeth, no matter what you do or don’t do, you will never know an end to suffering. Never. Not when you have served me for ten thousand faithful years. Not when your very sun expels its last exhausted breath of light and collapses into cold, dark dirt. You will suffer until you beg for your suffering not to end, for I will give you such uncertain respite