The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,302

an eye on them the same way Karris would keep her eye on those hounds, but when such men attacked, it was usually with more ferocity than skill.

For her entire tenure in the Blackguard, Karris had also known dangerous men. Such men would use force when necessary, coolly, passionlessly, and with great skill.

But when a dangerous man got angry, you could be in for something else altogether.

Ironfist’s quiet brother, Tremblefist, had gone into a battle rage once, and thereby earned himself a Name. It had taken the blood of five hundred to quench the Butcher of Aghbalu’s rage. Ironfist was his brother’s equal with a blade, and far more experienced than that young man had been.

Karris had never wanted to see Ironfist truly angry. She had prayed she never would.

Today, her prayer had been denied.

“High Lady!” Ironfist boomed, coming forward on quick steps. Two warriors flanked him, draped in bold colors, a man with a bocote-wood lion helm with lion’s teeth and a woman with claw scars on her face and wearing a baboon helm. Each was as tall and lean as the hellstone-tipped spears they carried. Drafters, and if Ironfist had deemed them fit to accompany him before his old command, they were surely formidable warriors indeed.

Not one of the twelve Blackguards attending Karris wasn’t sweating.

Ironfist motioned to his Tafok Amagez to stay back—right at the point where the Blackguard were about to challenge them to stop. He knew. He knew everything about the Blackguard’s defenses, every seam, every weakness. If anyone could take apart the Blackguard, it was Ironfist.

He said, “How you’ve changed since you came under my tutelage when I was a new trainer, and you that scrawny noble girl hoping to find a purpose in the Blackguard.”

She said nothing. Let him set the landscape of this discussion. She owed him that much.

Besides, if she didn’t hear him out, she wouldn’t know where to put pressure and where to yield so fast his weight carried him off his feet.

“ ‘The Iron White’ they call you now,” he said, sweeping a quick hand at the gathered nobles and courtiers and Colors and every maid and servant important enough to finagle their way into this meeting. He moved it so sharply, not a few of them flinched. “And that, not so long after you dropped Karris White Oak to become Karris Guile, then Karris the White. It seems you’ve gone through many names in a short time.”

“And you, many masters,” Karris said. The retort hit like a whip-crack.

He blinked as if slapped, but he didn’t even slow his walk. Two steps silent, three, before he paused, just outside where the Blackguard would stop a man—but still too close for this man to get.

Then he said, “Yet now you’ve lost your name altogether, and I my masters.”

“Have you?” she asked, but she said it gently, quietly. “Have you, my old friend?”

Something in his mien wavered like a blossom struggling to open on a day of jumbled sunshine and rain.

Then it closed tight again.

He put his hands down to his sides and patted the heads of the great war hounds. It was, of course, forbidden to bring war hounds into the audience chamber. A war hound was either a heresy or a target: either an animal that had already been will-cast, or an innocent beast that might be will-cast under your nose by malevolent forces.

Karris had allowed them in without complaint. What else could she do? She’d allowed Kip to keep his, albeit not in the audience chamber itself.

At Ironfist’s tap, the smaller white hound with its pink eyes sat. Ironfist reached up and pulled down his eye patch over the Mercy tattoo, leaving only Justice.

Damn, damn, damn.

“Perhaps we could move to a more private setting?” she asked now. Ironfist was a reasonable man. Had been, anyway. Perhaps she could find that man again, if only she could get him away from all the eyes that demanded he act like a king instead.

But there was little or nothing of the old Ironfist here. This man looked indeed like the kings of old: harsh and terrible and primal. He said, “The Chromeria’s secrecy and lies are what have brought us here. You need my fleet. You need Seers Island’s army. The White King’s armada will arrive tomorrow, and attack then or the next day. You have no time. ”

“You need us as much as we need you,” Andross Guile called out from the side entrance of the audience chamber. He walked in