The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Suddenly, he grinned despite himself. Then he laughed. “I think I missed you, Liv.”

  She didn’t like being called Liv anymore. But she held her tongue.

  “No one speaks to me that way. Not anymore. Not that I like it, mind you,” he said. “But it seems that when one bans certain kinds of talk, it doesn’t just stop that one thing; it radiates out and silences so much. I hold a humorless court, I’m afraid, and I’m probably somewhat to blame for that.”

  Probably? Somewhat?

  But again, she held her tongue.

  “We can skip the displays of power,” he said, “but… it’s the ‘God of Gods,’ if you will.”

  “‘Gods’ plural? You got two of them to worship you? Which ones?” she asked.

  His bodyguards went wide-eyed. That was helpful to her new study. It told her they still had some will of their own.

  “All of them,” the White King said flatly.

  “Surely not dry old Samila Sayeh.”

  “They all worship me,” the White King said.

  “If you define ‘worship’ as bowing at the right times, lighting incense, and mumbling prayers, I’m sure that’s true.”

  “I am their god,” the White King said.

  “That, however, I’m certain is not true. What’s the point in being a god if you have to worship another god? No. They don’t really worship you; they fear you. Which is excellent, as far as it goes. Fear is a powerful motivator, though one that may fade in time. They remember what you were, and they do or will hope to transform themselves as you have transformed yourself. You are not categorically other to them. One can revere what one wishes to emulate. One can’t revere what one wishes to replace. I’m sure each one will serve you for a time, and then you can kill them and replace them. The replacements will serve much longer, never having known you as merely a man. The new gods, if not corrupted by the old ones, may then revere you indeed, and then your reign will be secure. Or more secure. But it will take a few purges.”

  The pique faded, and she watched his mouth quirk backward momentarily as his lower eyelids tensed.

  “You’re asking yourself,” she said, “‘Is she the first to guess my plan, or only the first to do so to my face?’”

  “You don’t fear me,” he said. “That makes you more dangerous than any of them.”

  “Not true on the first part, and for the second, it really depends what you mean by dangerous,” she said. “I do fear you, still. My mortal nature hasn’t faded so much yet. But fear has lost much of its motivating power. I don’t wear your chain, and I tell the truth. That may make me dangerous. It also can make me helpful, especially when one is surrounded by those who constantly lie.”

  “Then tell me about Kip… truthfully,” he said.

  “Kip?”

  “Your threat.”

  “Oh, that. Well. I could work with him. Very easily. He’s never tried to kill me or make me his slave. I can trust him. All things I can’t say of you.”

  “And yet here you are,” Koios said. “Ready to make a deal to kill him and all his friends. How terribly ungrateful of you.”

  She blinked. She’d not thought of gratitude in a long while. No matter. “I know I could trust Kip forever. But ‘forever’ is such a short span for mortals. Kip will die soon. He’s burning too hot, rising too fast, and loved by too many. He has something of greatness in him, and that makes small, powerful men feel small and powerless, and there’s nothing they hate more.”

  “Says the girl goddess,” Koios said wryly.

  “Says the small, powerful man,” she said.

  He was actually so shocked that he didn’t move at all for a long moment. It must have indeed been long and long since he had felt genuinely offended.

  “The point is that you’re exactly right,” she said. “Kip and I have certain similarities in rising fast and high by our wits. What I—”

  “Did you know that an earthquake made the Red Cliffs? It thrust the seabed into the very sky. Those who climb still see the imprints of fishes a thousand paces above the sea. You see, in a great upheaval like that, or like the coming of the God of Gods, mountains are plunged into the sea, and low places are flung up to the heavens,” the White King said. “So when we find fish on a mountaintop, let us not praise them too quickly for making the climb.”

  Liv saw several of the bodyguards grinning, as if he’d really put her back in her place.

  “The point is,” Liv said, “Kip will die. I don’t intend to, ever, and I can’t trust whomever comes after him to keep whatever deal we make, no matter what oaths we swear. If I align myself with the Chromeria, they’ll come after me eventually. They’ll have to. By my very nature I’m an abomination to them. I’d forever be a compromise they made, and their… What was your word again? Their ‘gratitude’ toward me would eventually die. Worse, so would their fear. You, however, won’t.”

  “Won’t… what? Betray you?”

  “Die. Or forget. I understand you. You and I have reached the same conclusion. Everything you’ve done has been predicated on your understanding coupled with intelligence and patience.”

  “Compliments?” the White King said. “That must have been painful for you.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “Statements of fact are almost never painful to me.” That was true, of course. And they were becoming less so as she grew into her full nature.

  She had also nearly forgotten how painfully inefficient most conversations were. “May I continue?”

  “Please,” he said, and the symmetry of him saying ‘please’ to her in return for her earlier ‘please’ and thus closing the loop made her feel inordinately better.

  “You and I understand that the nine kingdoms were doomed to fall, not because of who won the Deimachia, but by the very fact of it. Once the War of the Gods began, all of them were doomed, and their kingdoms, too. The very physics of this world are set against any one color dominating for long. Any can reign for a time, but with every additional year of the colors being out of balance, it takes more and more effort even to draft the dominant color, and less and less for one’s enemies to draft theirs. It’s a fool’s game, and you’re not that kind of fool. This is why you haven’t become a god yourself. Inside the system, you would be entrapped by the system. You wouldn’t be able to help attempting to dominate the colors. It is in the nature of the inner-spectrum colors to do so.”

  “But not of your color?” he said.

  She scowled. Did he not know? “Do you not know?” she asked.

  “Enlighten me,” he said.

  She scowled harder. If she lectured him on superviolet, she would want to tell him about chi, and whatever else he clearly didn’t understand. It was very hard for her not to finish a thing once begun. It was one of the weaknesses of her color that she had noticed, and she wished to keep those from him for as long as possible. Still, if she wished to live through today, she had to portray herself as just enough of a threat, and not too much, and a wellspring of useful information—enough so as to get him to swear the oath with her.

  “Superviolet stands far apart, is rational, and strictly abides oaths,” she said, introducing the idea. “Only chi is safer to you, but it’s so far from human concerns as to be useless. Plus they get cancers and die within a few years. Blue is safe so long as the hierarchies above and below it are stable. Green can be corralled if given enough freedom. Yellow believes itself to be perfectly positioned to stand atop that hierarchy, and is most dangerous. Orange is wily, but hates direct conflict. Red and sub-red must be manipulated but are too chaotic to be threatening and are easily read and therefore misled. Paryl is profoundly influenced by any color at all, and therefore any magic. It can easily be made a puppet. But a paryl god could be as dangerous as a yellow, given a century or two. If her mind and will weren’t destroyed by a long tutelage of being controlled by every magic, one such might invert her weakness and attempt to control every magic instead.

  “A less i
ntelligent full-spectrum polychrome would have made himself the yellow god, hoping to balance all the others. Instead, you seek something harder, to take power over all the gods at once, because once held, that’s a power you could actually keep. You will become a king of djinn. Or, apologies, a god of gods.”

  “Thank you,” the White King said.

  She nodded.

  “And you, you hardly fear me at all?”

  “You’ll have better than my fear: you’ll know you can trust me.”

  “Really? You bear me no ill feeling for when that rash fool Phyros Seaborn tried to chain you with the black luxin?”

  She shook her head, baffled. If Phyros Seaborn had put the living black-luxin necklace on her neck, it would have plunged through her very spine if she’d tried to remove it or if she’d disobeyed the White King. She’d killed Phyros for trying to make her a slave. “Yours was a logical effort. Exactly what you should’ve attempted at the time. In truth, I resent you implying Phyros did it without your orders more than I resent the attempt.”

  “A mistake,” the White King said. “I was curious to see how far you’d embraced your godhood. A mortal would be furious with me.”

  It struck her oddly. “I remember a peculiar joy in being carried along at times by fury. It made me feel powerful.” She shrugged. “That’s no longer necessary. Nor is you chaining me.”

  “Oh?”

  “The power of order for one of my metaphysical nature is proportional to my power absolutely.”

  It took him a moment to understand. “Ah. Ferrilux doesn’t lie.”

  “I suppose that’s close enough,” she said. If one disdains nuance.

  But apparently she’d not kept her face blank.

  His lip curled.

  She remembered again that though she had left most emotion behind, he had most certainly not. Her statements of fact could be taken as insufferable arrogance. How tiresome. She sighed. “What it means is that if I take an oath, I could break it, in my current state. But doing so would set me back two to three centuries. During all that time I would be vulnerable.”

  “And in two or three centuries?” he asked with a smile that showed no contraction of the orbicularis oculi. It was not the part of his face that had been burned; thus the tell was true.

  “In two or three centuries I hope I shall never be in such a vulnerable position that I shall need to take an oath.”

  He gave a thin smile, as if she were a particularly dense child. “What I’m asking is, will you be able to break an oath you make, then?”

  “An oath bonds one’s will and one’s nature in a temporalized and external rubric,” she said.

  He was nodding, but he had a blank look.

  “That’s the whole point of an oath,” she said. How could a man of intelligence not see this immediately? “All liars weaken themselves, but breaking an oath would break me. Besides,” she said, “we’ll give each other plenty of space.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “When you win, King Koios, because of the way”—‘the stupid way,’ she didn’t say; she had to speak truth, but she didn’t have to speak all the truth all the time—“you’ve chosen to wipe out most of your warriors and all the Chromeria’s, you’ll be very, very weak for a decade or two. Stronger than everyone else, however, so your weakness won’t matter. Unless…”

  “Unless?” His eyebrows knit.

  “You’ve heard the Everdark Gates are open? It’s true. And I can tell you that the Angari wave-tamers have been truly fascinated this past year by what’s happening in their seas, and by what’s happening here. They’re hungry for new lands to conquer, and they believe that the Gates’ failure is a sign of favor from their gods.”

  “I’ll happily fight their gods with my own.”

  “Then you’ll die happily. The first wave they’re amassing is three times the size of all your armies together, I should say. And I mean your armies now, before all the losses you’ll take with this island siege you have planned. Nor are they lacking for magic of their own. I’m no Gaspar Estratega, but I believe they would defeat you even if your forces and the Chromeria’s fought united against them. However, you needn’t fight at all. I can close the Everdark Gates again. And the Angari are seafaring people, whose gods are sea gods. They have tamed creatures that are much like our own sea demons. But because they love only the sea, if the Gates are shut, they will not attempt an attack through the mountains and the deserts that have kept them from our lands for so long.”

  “You’ll save me from a threat that isn’t even real?” The condescending smile crept back onto his face.

  “Send your people, then,” she said. “Confirm it for yourself. Time draws short, but perhaps you have time if you’ve duplicated the skimmers by now? No? Sad. But I assure you, if we don’t have an agreement before you invade the Jaspers, I’ll fight for Kip. I’ll have to. Because afterward you won’t need me, and I won’t be able to challenge you.”

  “How rational of you,” he said.

  “Was that supposed to be an insult?”

  “I hope you’ve also come up with some good reasons why I shouldn’t kill you now, bringing a threat like that here. Or have you forgotten so much about fury?”

  She was bored of this conversation. He treated her like a moron while acting like one himself half the time.

  “Do you need a list of my threats?” she asked. “Backup plans? Dead man’s switches? I have such things. But if I do list them, you’ll be fretting on them for the next hundred years. Me putting such things into words gives them substance, turns them into worries—worms that will chew into the bulwarks of our peace, weakening them with every passing year. It’s a poor option. Instead, I would like today to be the last time we think of each other as adversaries. Let us instead become distant allies, brought together for a short period to sort out our mutual concerns and then happily parting to do what we will with our own distant lands.”

  “So let’s run this hypothetical,” he said. “We make an alliance. A partnership, as you said. I need you now not to join Kip, and perhaps even to shut the Everdark Gates. And let’s say I accept that because of your nature, I can trust you forever. But I will grow in power far more than you will, and I will close my vulnerabilities in time. Why would you trust me to keep my oaths?”

  “Because I bring you a gift. Will-crafting. We’ve both done it in this room this very day. Do you know why the Chromeria forbids will-crafting in all but the most rudimentary forms?”

  “They have an especial delight in forbidding things. I’ve given up caring why.”

  “You shouldn’t have. An oath binds one’s will to a word, but a drafter can bind her will to something more permanent.”

  She saw his eyes light up. He was a smart man. If an oath could be magically binding, and anchored to something permanent, any drafter he could force to take an oath of fealty to him would be unable to break that oath—ever.

  “This works with gods?” he asked.

  “You won’t be as good at doing it as I am,” she said honestly. “And your gods will have a very long time to work against it. You’ll still have to kill them, after a time. Yes, of course I know you plan to do that. Mortals, however? I wouldn’t say it’s permanent, but if it takes them a hundred years to unwind a spell and most of them don’t live half so long, that’s a distinction without a difference, isn’t it? That is why the Chromeria abandoned an entire branch of magical study. It was one of the first pieces of lore the Chromeria erased. True slavery to the gods, for life.”

  “That is a handsome gift,” he said. “And now that you’ve given me the lead, perhaps that’s all I require of you.”

  A threat. Again. “It will likely take you a hundred years to find a superviolet who can do what I’ve already done, though maybe you’ll get very lucky and it will only take you ten. But these next ten years are when you’ll be most vulnerable. If you can live ten years, you’ll likely live forever. So I know you might kill me out of pique today
, but I’m gambling that you’ll take the deal where we both win, both in the short term and in the long.”

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “You can have all the lands of the Seven Satrapies. The nine kingdoms, whatever you wish to call them. You may also have all of the Cerulean Sea. The Everdark Gates, however, will belong to neither of us. A no-man’s-land. Everything within them is yours; everything outside them is mine. No people, no magic, not so much as a rowboat or letter or child is to be sent from one realm to the other. We’ll have mirrors set up on either side to message each other in case of emergencies. Otherwise, nothing. If you wish, have your wars among your humans. Let there be peace between the gods.”

  Chapter 12

  Kip had just done the most brilliant and cynical thing of his entire political career: he’d listened to his wife.

  Yesterday, in the privy council chamber, they’d met with the six remaining Divines. With many, many words, the Divines communicated their chagrin at the assassination attempt and commitment to find those responsible. They wished—they said—to help Kip and his marvelous companions in any way possible; therefore, he must understand that this particular refusal wasn’t personal and this particular request was in fact impossible and this small change Kip requested was one they were quite willing to accommodate but would mortally offend some other important group (and that group’s support was necessary for the following list of reasons).

  Yesterday, for many long minutes, Kip had actually listened to them. They knew what they were talking about, after all. They had run this city for generations. He’d adjourned the meeting with the thought that it was, frankly, just damned hard to govern a city.

  “… which sadly has, from time immemorial, been the prerogative of the Keeper herself.”

  ‘Prerogative.’ The word had stuck to Kip for some reason. Not because it was that odd of a word but because of the landscape of other words used by these old men (never an old woman on the Council of Divines, at least not that survived into the records). ‘Prerogative’ joined ‘tradition’ and ‘customs’ and even ‘demesne,’ the violation of any of which would either ‘needlessly cause terrible offense’ or ‘deeply alienate’ or ‘create antipathy’ or ‘endanger all you’ve accomplished.’