The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  That these wights had such weapons told her that the White King had been experimenting with his black seed crystal. She wondered if he understood that he was playing with the most dangerous magic in all the world, and something tightened uneasily in her stomach.

  An emotion, perhaps.

  She could dredge up a name for it from her memory, if she tried, but she simply didn’t care to.

  “That’s far enough!” the White King boomed.

  And then everyone could see her, her will-crafting broken as if it were a spell. The people fell away from her, some literally so, tumbling over their neighbors in their astonishment and fear.

  Weapons came to wights’ hands, but not even the reds or sub-reds moved to attack without the White King’s command.

  A superviolet will-crafting compels only one’s reason, as an orange hex-crafting compels only one’s emotions, so anyone at all could have broken her webs with a shouted word.

  But instead of noticing the artistry of her drafting that had allowed her to shift the vision of six hundred twenty-seven people and seventy-three wights, the people seemed impressed with their king instead. As if he had commanded her to be visible and she had no choice but to comply. As if it were proof that his magic was greater.

  Her rage needed no help finding its name. It was quite well fixed to the condescending, pompous polychrome wight who now stood before an ivory throne.

  Born Koios White Oak before a fire at his family’s mansion on Big Jasper had robbed him of his good looks and humanity and illusions, the White King was an imposing figure, she could admit. To his burn-scarred flesh, he added luxin and hexes. He’d refined his control of both in the time she’d been gone. He wore gold-edged white silk trousers of some flowing design that reminded her of something from an ancient woodcut, a fashion from the time of the nine kingdoms. He wore a matching tunic laced tight over his thin body with gold cords, with knots at ritual intervals. Rather than looking ruddy or pallid or freckled from his Forester heritage, his skin was now white as the noonday sun. His many and grotesque lumpy burn scars were somehow invisible, whether by the arts of cosmetics or will-crafting. She doubted he’d actually been healed; the White King was all about appearances, not changing underlying realities. His eyelids were kohled black so as to accentuate their many colors, and his ivory skin was studded with glued-on jewels and protruding luxin.

  “You look well, Koios,” Aliviana said. “It seems I’m not the only one who’s changed since you sent me away with an assassin whom you ordered to either murder me or chain me up like your other pet djinn.”

  “Daughter! Our new Ferrilux!” the White King said. “You speak like one who has become the goddess of pride indeed! You have blossomed into all I had hoped you might be, with a little additional cheek thrown in for good measure.”

  He chuckled, and his people seemed to take that as a sign that it was safe to laugh, and they did.

  It was an odd sound, laughter; one she had neither made nor heard for a year, twelve days and twenty hours, seven seconds. Only after it was gone did Aliviana think that she should have been listening to the messages that laughter carried. Was it the laughter of a people afraid of their king, or of people in awe of and in love with him?

  Too late.

  The unfamiliar emotional freight had gone unweighed, and her memory could no more call it back to take its measure than one could call back an insult carelessly offered.

  “May I have a word? In private?” she asked.

  Her jaw strained suddenly against her effort to open it. Don’t grovel, Beliol hissed.

  No one else could hear him. Careful not to let her irritation show on her face, she slammed the thought down and even triggered her zygomatic major muscle. From this distance, the White King might take it for a pleasant smile. “Please,” she added.

  Chapter 5

  “Another nightmare?” Tisis asked. “You think the assassination attempt…?”

  “No. The other thing again.” Kip scooted to the edge of their bed. He’d left his side sweat-damp.

  “I’d kind of hoped…” Tisis’s sigh echoed his own. He could tell she’d been up for a while, meeting with her spies or something. She’d even selected clothes for him. She thought he slept too little, and tried to protect him.

  “How’d I ever find you?” he asked her.

  “The first time, I was sabotaging your initiation. I think the second was when I was jerking off your grandfather.”

  “Honey, I didn’t mean—”

  “Just so you know, in case you ever thought I might make comparisons, you are—”

  “No, let’s not!” Kip said.

  Tisis was not a disinterested party when it came to discussing these particular dreams. Dreams of Andross Guile.

  “Should I summon the attendants?” Tisis already had the small bell in hand, a sign that he was already late.

  He held out a staying hand. “Can I tell you something? Something bizarre?”

  Of course he could, but she didn’t put down the bell.

  “I dreamed of him as a young man. He’s going to woo a bride and trying to save the Guile family as he does so, and he doesn’t even realize—for all his smarts—that he’s broken, utterly broken by his own brother’s recent death.” He paused.

  “So far… not that bizarre,” Tisis said. Her own lack of sleep was making her shorter with him than usual.

  Kip looked down at the Turtle-Bear tattoo on the inside of his wrist. The inks or luxins that made the colors were all still vibrant from the Battle of Greenwall a few days before; it would fade, in time. He’d been using every color of luxin recently. The wick of his life was burning fast. Maybe that had something to do with the dreams.

  “They’re not dreams, exactly,” Kip said. “I think they’re dreams of a card.”

  “But you forget most of what you see when you wake. Exactly like a dream.”

  “Well, yes. I didn’t say it wasn’t a dream at all. Just that it’s a dream of a card.”

  “You said you’d never touched the full Andross Guile card. That he was too clever to allow all of his experiences to be captured.”

  He had said that. Janus Borig had convinced Kip’s grandfather to let her do two very partial cards, stubs, that showed only particular scenes, similar to what an untalented Mirror could make, or what a good Mirror would make of an item. The card needn’t show the maker of that item’s entire life story; the card’s focus would be limited to the item itself. Kip had only touched a stub card. So he thought. “And I believed it fully to be true,” Kip said. “But these dreams…”

  “Nightmares,” she said. “And, as they’re of that creature, it’s fitting that your dreams are twisted. This is the man who hired an assassin to murder you—his own grandson—before you’d even met, who forced you to play literal games for Teia’s life and freedom, who has killed Orholam only knows how many innocents in his life, and not incidentally arranged for my future husband to walk in on the most humiliating moment of my life, after he’d convinced me to whore myself. Thinking you’re living that disgusting thing’s life? That’s a nightmare. And you never touched his card, so it’s also a delusion. And considering everything you need to do—yesterday—it’s a distraction, too.” Tisis rang the bell to summon the servants more loudly than necessary. “You’re going to be late,” she said.

  And then she was gone.

  She wasn’t really mad at him, he knew. She’d apologize for this tonight. They were all of them adjusting to the burdens of their new, magnified positions and the quagmire they’d stepped into. Tisis was trying to take care of Kip as well as everything else—first, even—and it must seem to her that he wasn’t even trying to help her help him. He was spending precious minutes talking about dreams while he was late to a council of war?

  But he hadn’t even told her the worst part, the thing out of all the landscape of impossibilities that had actually struck him as bizarre before he even woke. The young Andross Guile that Kip had seen from
the inside during his dream? Kip had sort of liked him.

  “No need to cry, Your High and Mighty, I’m here,” Winsen said.

  Kip looked up, surprised. He hadn’t even heard the door open.

  Winsen. Why did it have to be Winsen?

  Kip wasn’t crying, anyway. Just feeling morose. Not that he expected Winsen to understand fine gradations of emotions.

  “Where are the servants?” Kip asked.

  “I asked them to step out so I could assassinate you,” Winsen said.

  “You’re not gonna let that go, are you?” Kip thought he only thought it, but it slipped out. Damn, just when he thought he was getting better at governing his tongue, Kip the Lip showed up again.

  “Let it go?” Winsen said. “You all looked at me like I was really gonna kill you. Except Ferk. But that’s only because he’s too dumb. I think he was just running over to give me a lecture on weapon safety.”

  “You know,” Kip said, rubbing his eyes, “I kind of hate you sometimes.”

  “Yeah, but you hate me less than anyone else does.”

  For a moment, Kip was stunned to silence by the near compliment.

  “And the feeling’s mutual!” Win said, as if to save them from having a moment. “You all done with your beauty rest, princess? Can we go now—you know, to that meeting you ordered us all to be at a half hour ago? Cruxer’s been shittin’ cobbles.”

  “Thank you for that,” Kip said.

  Winsen grunted, as if straining to pass a cobblestone.

  Kip was a stone.

  Kip didn’t give him the pleasure of a reproof or any sign of amusement. Winsen didn’t stop grunting.

  Kip cracked a grin. “Dammit, Winsen!”

  Winsen waggled his eyebrows.

  Kip wanted nothing more than to grab yesterday’s tunic and head out. “I’d love to just charge down there, but I do actually need to get dressed properly. Tisis and I had a long conversation on why I do actually need to dress like… you know, the rich and careful way I’ve been dressing—so as to encourage people not to see me as overly young or sloppy or a barbarian.”

  Too late, Kip realized that Winsen was not the person Kip wanted to recount any more of that conversation with.

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Winsen said. “I totally understand why you spend a Blackguard’s yearly wages on a single set of clothes. I’d do it myself if I’d been paid in the last six months. Or, you know, ever.”

  Kip rang the summons bell again, louder.

  “I understand your need to project yourself at a certain standard,” Winsen said, as if offended. He lowered his voice momentarily. “And how much work it takes to try to make you look good. And I know Cruxer’s irritated at waiting, so I sent your servants on ahead of us.”

  “Oh gods,” Kip said. “You’re not gonna have the servants primp me in front of the Mighty!” Being naked in front of the Mighty was nothing. But being bathed (by strangers!), and tweezed, and picked at, and salved, and massaged, and having strangers chatter things like, ‘Should we emphasize or de-emphasize the surprising and obvious power of his buttocks?’

  Torture.

  Winsen said, “Me? And embarrass you like that? Your Grace, I am shocked!”

  Chapter 6

  Hope leaped in Teia like a gazelle from a lion’s grip.

  Gavin Guile is alive! And he’s here!

  That had to mean that the man with the Hellfang blade was the Old Man of the Desert himself—for who else would the Old Man trust with such a weapon or such a prisoner?

  And if that was the Old Man, Teia could follow him from here now and find his lair and his real identity and report to Karris and maybe even find word of where her father was—

  But lose Gavin. The former Prism had already boarded the Golden Mean with Captain Gunner. Sailors were preparing the ship to leave immediately.

  Teia had made it halfway up the quay, following the Old Man back to the Chromeria, when she saw the Blackguards standing at their posts out back. They either hadn’t been there when she came down or they’d been hidden. Friends! Comrades! She could tell them and—

  They saluted the Old Man as he approached.

  Not a Blackguard salute. A Braxian salute.

  Teia skidded to a stop. They were his.

  And the Old Man had known she was coming down here. He’d ordered her to board the ship, after all. That meant those Blackguards were here not for him but for her.

  They were here in case she decided to disobey and not board the ship.

  Which meant they must be sub-reds. The Old Man trusted no one, especially not his well-nigh-invisible assassins. He was not a man—or woman perhaps, Teia still couldn’t assume—who would hone a blade to razor sharpness and then let it cut his own throat.

  Teia’s heart sank like a panting gazelle into the lion’s patient paws.

  The Order didn’t know it, but she could defeat sub-red with a sufficiently dense cloud of paryl now. But it was a blustery morning, and a gust of wind would be the death of her.

  It would be a huge gamble to try to make it past the traitor Blackguards without being seen.

  And Gavin would be lost to the wide sea and whatever desperate mission the Old Man was sending him on. If Teia did make it past these Blackguards, how long would it take her to reach Karris? How long to get her alone so Teia could report the truth?

  How could Karris mobilize skimmers without breaking Teia’s cover? There were other Blackguard traitors than these two, Teia knew.

  What contingency plans did the Old Man have ready, just in case Gavin were rescued?

  He wouldn’t let him be taken alive, would he? No. Gavin had seen him, heard his voice.

  There had to be a course here where Teia did everything right and somehow averted disaster, but she was paralyzed. If Gavin left on that ship without her, her father was dead.

  I’m seriously considering obeying them again. Her belly filled with sick horror.

  She walked back to the ship as in a trance and climbed the gangplank with lead in her shoes.

  There was no way out. Her thoughts of defiance had lasted less than two minutes.

  Gavin Guile was amidships. The captain was removing his chains.

  Teia shuddered with a slave’s visceral revulsion at the fetters. She eyed his wrists, looking for sores as instinctively as another woman might check a man’s fingers for a wedding band. There were none.

  Wherever Gavin Guile had been held, he hadn’t been chained. The other possibility—that he might not have fought his chains—was unthinkable. Everyone fights the chains. Most, like Teia, gave up after a few cuts. When your own mother puts you in chains, you think maybe you deserve them.

  To her shame, Teia didn’t even have scars on her wrists.

  But thinking of that called to mind Ironfist in that terrible room, over the pooled blood of his sister, whom Teia’d just killed. Ironfist, tearing his chains out of the wall in his rage and agony. But even he hadn’t broken his chains, had he?

  No one breaks the chains, T. You can only ask to be let out nicely. After you do what they demand.

  She didn’t know what she was doing. She should go belowdecks. Hide like she was supposed to do until they were far out to sea. Obey. It was a strain to stay invisible for so long, to be so open and sensitive to the light, which was only swelling by the minute as the sun fingered the horizon. But she couldn’t pull herself away.

  The Prism had always been the height of majesty, of virility, potency. She’d heard other Blackguards say in hushed tones, ‘Whatever else we do, whatever happens, we were Blackguards in the time of Gavin Guile.’ Here was a man who was emperor who actually deserved it.

  Seeing Zymun get ready to step into his place had made Teia sharply aware of how rare that was. Gavin made you believe in the Great Chain of Being; that some humans really were one step below Orholam, that they were surely made of fundamentally different stuff than you were.

  The man before her threatened to give the lie to all that. Ha
ggard, pathetic, ill, in sloppy clothes over a body with dirt so caked on that it seemed a washing would foul the water without cleansing the man. He must have lost as much weight as Kip had in Kip’s time at the Chromeria, but Gavin hadn’t had the weight to lose.

  But she saw a glimpse of the old Gavin Guile charisma like a glint of sunlight off a distant lighthouse as he shook his head at some comment Captain Gunner had just made and gave a lopsided grin. “‘Good furred muffins’? Orholam’s saggy nipples, man, never change,” Gavin said to Gunner.

  The grin—that quintessential Guile grin that Teia knew so well from his son—exposed a missing dogtooth. That hadn’t been gone before his imprisonment. It made Teia touch her own, still sore even after Karris’s own chirurgeon’s ministrations.

  Nor had his eye been missing before. Gavin now wore a patch on his left eye with an unsettling black jewel in it. Gunner was just relieving him of the black sword, carefully wrapping it in cloths and handing it off to a nervous sailor to take below.

  “Speaking of change, you need to,” Gunner said. “No, no, you know I hain’t religious. I mean, I give my ’spects to the Nine Ladies and the sea witches and keep my friendly spat with Ceres”—he spat into the water—“ya shriveled, sandy old cunt—and naturally, I tip a bowl for Borealis and Arcturus and the Bitch o’ Storms, but that’s just salt sense for a man of my avocation. I weren’t talkin’ meta—meta… metanoumenistically. I meant your bestments. Vestments? See? I trya talk to you god-botherers and it gets me kerfaffled. Change your clothes, man. You stink to low heaven. Soap and a rag and a bucket o’ clean until you shine like you’re polished as frequent as your mama’s nethers. Only thing worse ’n a stanky sailor’s a stanky prince.”

  “Technically, I’m an emperor,” Gavin said.

  “So two things worse. Anyhoo, as our mutual fiend there in the wrappings wants this pale little gold beauty back on the waves two bells past. But there’s a way to do things when gettin’ a ship shipshape, things to check. Crew to kick in the pucker. So get yourself clean afore you come belowdecks. My new girl deserves the best. I’ll have a man bring you fresh clothes.”