Teia wanted to see how this turned out. What the satrapah did, what she said afterward, and what she would do when the dinner was over. Would the Nuqaba apologize when she was sober? Would she take some vengeance? For Orholam’s sake! The satrapah was the Nuqaba’s spymaster! If there’s one person you don’t threaten, it’s got to be your spymaster, right?
But it was all irrelevant. Satrapah Azmith was flushed with rage, and that was all Teia needed. What she might do or might say, or that she seemed like a nice woman, that all meant nothing.
The warm, red light of the fire in the great hearth and the many torches suffused Teia and gave her all the passion she needed.
She was become death, and she would collect her due.
She’d already scanned the satrapah’s body. The blood vessels around her heart were already narrowed, as Teia would expect in one who’d had so much stress and so many years and a rich diet to boot.
One by one, Teia brought paryl crystals into the woman’s bloodstream, making many little crystals of it in the vessels leading to her heart. One for each slave she’d had to kill for these bastards.
The satrapah’s own body attacked those invaders immediately, forming clots. Teia merely nudged the clots closer toward each other, helping them glom together. One passed through the narrow opening and whooshed right through.
Then another, as Teia had to dodge a servant carrying the next course of the meal.
But Teia had made half a dozen clots, and one caught. Then another, on another ventricle of the heart. She started moving to get out, and barely heard the woman grunt.
How dare you act decent and kind? How dare you merely do your duty while you served this monster? A thousand slaves might die at your word, and a hundred thousand if you nudged the Nuqaba one way rather than the other. And you didn’t care. All you cared for was yourself.
How dare you? How dare you show a face to me that seemed kind and good?
There is nothing kind and good.
Teia slid as far as a slaves’ door before she turned around. Tilleli Azmith was grabbing her left arm and grimacing.
It was over. Teia had claimed some small vengeance. She didn’t even need to see her work.
As she turned away, Teia heard a crash as the woman fell.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba said. “Satrapah! Damn you! What’s wrong?!”
Teia felt only a warm satisfaction, the lambent radiation into her soul of a big fuck you to all of them.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba shouted, as everyone else went quiet in waves—music cutting out, awkward laughs hanging in the air from people who hadn’t seen yet, and gasps from those who had. “Tilleli, don’t you do this to me!”
Teia looked at the Nuqaba’s puffy, stupid face, and thought, One down.
The night wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 59
“The question is why the White King changed his strategy so drastically. All these months of raiding, and we haven’t answered that damned basic question!” Kip said.
Weeks after the attempted assassination in the woods, the Mighty were seated around yet another fire at yet another camp, having yet another talk. It was not the first, nor indeed the fifteenth time Kip had asked the question aloud.
“I know we need to talk about the battle tomorrow, but this first,” he said. He had grown more comfortable with giving commands, even ones nobody liked. And they’d grown more comfortable accepting them, too. Not even Winsen complained that it was late and they probably weren’t going to solve what he saw as a nonproblem.
They knew he’d get to the battle plan, and that they’d need to be sharp when he did, in case he had in-depth questions about their positions.
“Why does there have to be a grand answer?” Cruxer asked. “The White King felt he was getting overextended, so he paused. The break does him more good than it does us. He has secured and fortified his supply lines between Atash and the siege at Green Haven. Not even we could get to those unless we wanted to give up Dúnbheo and the lake.”
Dúnbheo—the nonfloating Floating City—was the Forester name of the city the Nightbringers were going to try to save tomorrow. It controlled access to the Great River and the immense lake by which Green Haven was getting what little supplies it still was.
“He’s also had to deal with us,” Ben-hadad pointed out. “Isn’t it possible that we actually stopped him?”
“But he was advancing steadily,” Big Leo said. “Just as he has everywhere. Why stop halfway through Blood Forest? Why not at least push to the Great River everywhere and then consolidate?”
“Too much guerrilla warfare that way?” Winsen suggested. “He could capture the cities, but if he doesn’t deal with us first, supply lines get long and vulnerable.”
That could be it, but he’d advanced so fast elsewhere, leaving small forces to mop up any continuing resistance. Was Blood Forest simply different because of its huge population of hunters and hard terrain for supply lines?
“All the fights we’ve had have kept us from linking up with the satrap’s forces,” Tisis said. “If he pushed us to the river, it’s the only place we’d have to go.”
“We don’t want to link up with the satrap’s forces,” Kip said. Satrap Briun Willow Bough wanted Kip’s army—and Kip, if he could get him. What he didn’t want was another person running around his satrapy with an army he didn’t control.
Which was understandable, and the man was a decent sort. Unfortunately, he was also a moron who had no idea what to do with the army he already had. There was no way Kip was going to take orders from him about how to use his own very peculiar forces.
“We all know that,” Tisis said. “But the White King doesn’t. Joining forces is what most defenders would do.”
“You think he’s allowed us our victories?” Kip asked.
“Not the first one at Deora Neamh,” Tisis said. “Maybe not the skirmishes around the Ironflower Marsh or the Deep Forest Ambush. But we’ve sometimes traveled pretty far to get disappointing quantities of food or muskets. And you yourself said the black powder wagons were an assassination attempt.”
It had been a hollower victory than Kip had hoped. They had done everything right, wiping out the enemy and seizing everything with minimal losses. They even successfully disarmed the booby-trapped wagon. But then they found that of the five wagons, it was the only one loaded with powder. The others’ barrels were loaded with a layer of black powder, then sawdust.
The men of the wagon train hadn’t even known they were bait.
It was small comfort that the war dogs had hunted down the scouts sent to watch the outcome. It was small comfort that Kip had been right and there had been two scouts.
“We haven’t fought many drafters, either,” Kip said. “We’re missing something here.”
“Maybe we are,” Cruxer said, “but then the question is whether the White King has some grand design or whether it’s just an error. He’s already spent many lives to keep us away from a place we never intended to go. Just at the wagons he lost several hundred men, half a dozen wights, and five wagons trying to kill you. He’s a good orator, an inspiring leader by all accounts. But maybe he’s simply a poor strategist.”
“Poor enough to take two satrapies,” Winsen said dryly.
If anything, Kip thought, he himself was the one who was a poor strategist. Good tactician. Loved by his people… but he still couldn’t resolve the big picture. Damn, how he’d love to take some lectures with Corvan Danavis now. When he was a boy he’d wanted stories of battlefield heroics. Given the chance now, he’d say, ‘Talk to me about rations for cavalry when moving through forested river valleys.’ ‘What’s the breakdown of your command staff per soldier?’
“That was when the Chromeria didn’t know what we were up against,” Cruxer said.
Cruxer still said ‘we’ when he talked about the Chromeria. Kip loved him for that idealism, but he didn’t share it anymore.