The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,6

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 powerful.

And the black powder of history roared in reply.

Chapter 2

Kip Guile had become a thousand hands holding two thousand cords, each one twisting in his fists, tearing away in every direction, each believing their own petty happiness was more important than the survival of them all. He smiled at mousy Lady Proud Hart, finding a measure of real joy in her excited jabbering about his repairs of the ceiling art Túsaíonn Domhan, ‘A World Begins.’ He wondered if what he was doing now was easier or harder than that repair, weaving the myriad magics together into one yoke and then pulling the whole from extinction into new life.

Except here the two thousand cords were conns and banconns, merchant princes, gentleman pirates, emissaries, slavers, spies, confidence women, and deserters, and exiles and refugees in their tens of thousands—and even one shy and fabulously wealthy art collector. Some cords turned to shape without complaint, adding weight but