The Burning White by Brent Weeks

stayed, the more time he gave the White King to learn what Kip had accomplished and move to counter what he would do next.
    He was going to go full Andross Guile on those old bastards.
    He looked at the papers stacked on his desk. A year’s worth of commitments and decisions.
    Two more days. I can give it two days. What can I accomplish in two more days? Enough?
    “Breaker,” Cruxer said beside Tisis at the window, “
there’s a crowd
.”
    “So? There was a crowd yesterday.” Kip started sorting the stacks into what he could possibly hope to do in two days.
    “I went out there this morning again,” Cruxer said. “I recognized some of them. Same people. They’re not leaving after they see the ceiling.”
    “They want to wait in the queue to see it again, that’s their business,” Kip said.
    “They aren’t in the queue,” Cruxer said, troubled. “Yesterday they came curious. They left exultant. Today they’re . . . expectant?”
    “I think they’re hoping to make you king,” Tisis said quietly.
    “Uh-huh,” Kip said, not looking up. “Too much to do today, sorry,” he said.
    He would meet with the merchant in the next two days. Definitely. His question was, how much of a fight did he put up over these shortages? Of course the discrepancies were never ‘surpluses,’ but he couldn’t be certain
whose
fingers had lightened the shipments. Men on his side, or on the merchant’s, or the merchant himself, swindling Kip? Contracts with ‘neutral’ traders were the worst, especially this asshole Marco Vellera.
    Kip was pretty sure Marco Vellera was actually Benetto-Bastien Bonbiolo, one of the four Ilytian pirate kings. Or three kings and a queen at the moment, technically—there was a rumor that a king had been on the
Gargantua
when Gavin and Kip sank it. They still called them kings, though; apparently ‘the Ilytian pirate monarchs’ didn’t have the same ring to it. Kip’s problem was that Vellera was undoubtedly not selling supplies only to him but also to Koios, and to Satrap Briun Willow Bough as well.
    He hated that, but there was no recourse for it. If you started seizing merchants’ caravans, you bankrupted the merchants. Bankrupt more than one, and the reasonable ones stop coming, leaving you to deal with the greedy who’ll gouge you, or the desperate who might steal from you outright; you end up paying with one kind of coin or another.
    So far, Kip thought his own performance as a leader was decidedly lacking. He couldn’t win every game like Andross Guile, and he couldn’t break every game like Gavin Guile, so he was forced to do his best to rebound a loss from one game (the financial war) into a win in another (the shooting war).
    Blubber bounces back, boys.
    Kip was first on Marco Vellera’s trade route, so he was surreptitiously buying up the supplies he guessed the White King needed most.
    Finding the coin to do all these things was what half the stacks of papers on the tables were all about. It involved a lot of bending the truth to a lot of very concerned bankers.
    “Breaker, she’s
serious
,” Cruxer said.
    Kip didn’t even look up. “Uh-huh. Happens to everyone who dabbles in the art-restoration business. Hazard of the trade, getting offered a crown.”
    “Art?” Ferkudi asked.
    “Fixing the ceiling?” Ben-hadad prompted.
    “Oh, right! Right.” Ferkudi looked up. “What’s wrong with the ceiling?”
    “Crowd’s not that big. Oh, they’ve seen us,” Winsen said, now beside Cruxer. “Crux? How does a High Magister wave? Like so?” He waved a devil-may-care wave, and Kip could hear the crowd go mad with excitement.
    “ ‘Not that big’?” Kip said, suddenly rooted to the desk, papers forgotten.
    “Nor that small,” Tisis said.
    “How not small is ‘not small’?” Kip asked.
    “I dunno,” Winsen said. “Maybe twenty thousand?”
    “What?!” Kip shot to his feet.
    “He’s joking,” Tisis said. “Maybe a thousand?”
    “Nine hundred