The Burning White
Page 15
“We set upon him. Started beating him. It got out of hand. All the years of White Oaks being humiliated and outmaneuvered. Those smiling, beautiful, adored and entitled and deified fucking Guile brothers. There was this moment when Rodin tried to stop us, and my brothers and I looked at each other… and without a word, the rest of us decided to kill Dazen. And in that split second where we hesitated? That son of a bitch split light. He was a natural Prism, as the world hadn’t seen since Vician’s Sin. Four hundred years—and we stumble upon a true Prism. I remember the look in his eyes as it happened. I think he was as surprised as we were.
“Rodin threw up a shield—trying to help the Guile, against his own brothers. That’s what Guiles do, Aliviana. They turn brother against brother. Rodin went down first in the crossfire.”
You mean you killed him. Or one of your brothers did. Otherwise you’d blame Dazen for that murder, too.
“But it was still one bloodied man against all the rest of us, and we were drafters all. And he had no light! Around corners so he couldn’t draft off them, we popped mag torches, and then we came at him. And you want to know what this lightsplitter does next?”
“What?”
“He absorbs everything we throw at him. Luxin missiles and streams of fire. Darts. Spears. Blades and waves. Projectiles and pure heat. Everything.”
“What?! That’s not how lightsplitting works—” Liv started.
“Black luxin. As if he didn’t have enough tricks. He soaked up everything we threw at him, and he threw it all back at us. Killed us all. Only I made it to the courtyard fountain. Others of our household tried to take refuge with me there from the smoke and heat and flames, but I fought them off lest we all die. The water heated, unbearably. I burned, boiling like a crab in a kettle. And only that night’s breeze kept the smoke from killing me as it did so many others. Some mercy. The pain is with me daily, still.”
“I’m sorry,” Liv said. It didn’t seem at all adequate, but what could be?
“It’s no matter. Dazen Guile destroyed the old Koios White Oak that I had been that night, but he showed me the key to what I could become. He showed me that black luxin is possible. And soon, I learned to draft it. I’m no lightsplitter, but with black luxin, I can do everything I need in order to destroy the Guiles. All of them.”
“Even your sister?” Liv asked.
His eyes flashed. “She’s a White Oak in my eyes, unless she chooses to be a Guile. I wouldn’t choose Rodin’s fate for her, but if she chooses to stand with the Guiles…?”
“She’ll deserve it,” Liv said. She guessed then, from the hardness in his eyes, that it had been Koios himself who’d killed his brother that day. Koios had seen the vulnerability Rodin opened. The rest of the White Oak brothers would be reluctant to attack for fear of harming Rodin, and Koios couldn’t let that stand.
He’d killed his own brother, and blamed Dazen.
He was crazy, but only in the implacable I-don’t-care-what-my-victory-costs-you sense. And he’d been that way before the fire.
He said, “So now, tell me, Aliviana Danavis, my new Ferrilux, do you think that I—of all people—will underestimate a Guile?”
“I see that you have very good reasons not to.”
“But you have no faith in me? You really do have the arrogance of Ferrilux, don’t you?”
That didn’t merit a response.
“Kip is easily handled,” he said. “Kip is like his father, not his grandfather. He reacts to the needs in front of him. He sees people, not numbers, not cards to play. To him, no one is disposable. He is brilliant, else I would have destroyed him already—and you’re right, I’ve tried. But the way to beat Kip remains simple: I’ll beat him with present needs and battles and victories far away from where they might matter. In terms of that game his grandfather likes so much, it doesn’t matter what card Kip pulls. He’s playing at the wrong table. And I’ll keep him there until the real game is decided.”
She hesitated, but again, she was getting worse about not speaking her mind. “That… eases my mind a great deal, but you’ve only established that if he stays in Dúnbheo a few more days, he can’t get here with his full army.”
“Do you want to know how delicious I find this?” the king said.
“What?” Was he even listening to her?
“We are the old gods reborn, Aliviana. We are the nightmare that has kept luxiats and magisters awake at night for a thousand years. Do you not see the irony? I tried to kill Dazen Guile—and I couldn’t! Orholam sent the Chromeria the only man who could possibly save them from me. And I couldn’t kill him, but they did.”
“Your Highness,” Liv said, “what if Kip comes at speed, with only his elite drafters?”
The White King’s eyes lit with the cold blue of crackling luxin. “Oh, I hope he does. Come, my dear—” He stopped, seeming to note her fury at being called his ‘dear.’ “Pardon,” the White King said. “I meant, come with me, my fierce young partner. Let me show you the real reason our temples were known as the ‘bane.’”
Chapter 16
So that’s where we’re gonna die.
For the entire trip, a vast, swirling bank of clouds on the horizon had cloaked White Mist Reef like an anonymous assassin, but today Gavin’s doom stood stripped of outer garments.
In ages past, it had been said that the heavens were held from falling down onto the earth by one pillar alone, as the Prism alone held up the Chromeria.
In times past, before the swirling storms, before the mist itself, it had been said that the tent of the sky itself was upheld by one tent pole. As they now came to the Chromeria, the faithful from all over the world had once made pilgrimage to climb it. The luxiats said that only after Vician’s Sin had Orholam hidden the tower and the island, raising a reef to bar any entry to such holy ground, and raising the mist itself to hide His own connection to the earth. In grief at their disobedience and rejection of him, He’d covered His face from the world.
So the luxiats said.
Others said an isle of glass lay there, and the reef and the mist had risen after an earthquake had plunged the isle into the sea.
Even as a child, Gavin had wondered how much of either tale was true. He’d longed to come here one day to see for himself.
As a young Prism, he’d wanted to come here to confront Orholam, but he’d always wanted to live more.
He’d always assumed the descriptions he’d read of White Mist Tower must be either fanciful or poetic, describing the feelings evoked by seeing a tragically formerly holy place, rather than literal descriptions of the thing itself. The ancients were an emotional tribe, after all, as much given to hyperbole as were sailors.
White Mist Tower wasn’t literally a tower, but it did look eerily like a tower carved from blocks of white mist. Gavin squinted against the distance. As if imprisoned inside a glass shell, the clouds of the ‘tower’ spiraled in a dense circle, swirling constantly but not in accord with the prevailing wind. The outlines of that ephemeral tower were unmoved by the nautical winds, and sprawled wider than the entire island they obscured. White Mist Tower wasn’t like a tornado or waterspout. Those were diffuse, mutable, and mobile. This tower was of equal thickness from where its foot rested atop the reef itself to where its head was lost in the heavens.
Though it was still at least a day’s travel away, even from here and even on a bright sunlit day like today, the mixture of the natural and unnatural about the form was stomach-twisting. Gavin could only imagine the effect on sailors on more foreboding days, seeing a natural mist suddenly yield to that monstrosity without warning.
“Big lux storm last night,” Gunner said, coming up to Gavin at the railing. “And you, sleeping through all the rough action like my last port-girlie done, trustin’ daddy Gunner to take you safe through the storm.”
Yuck. “Lux storm?” Gavin asked instead.
“Common roun’ here.”
“They are?!” Gavin asked. “I’ve never read anything about
that.”
“You Chromeriacs. If it ain’t writ down, it don’t exist for ya,” Gunner said, shaking his head. “Takes a big storm to get this good a view’a the mist tower. Purty, uh? Hope it stays this nice when we trya shoot the gap inna reef.”
But Gavin had suddenly lost interest in the enormous tower of mist far before them, or their navigational choices. “A lux storm? Really?”
“Nornj ’un. Queerest thing ya ever seen. Sheets, orange sheets. You know how folks call lots a rain ‘sheets a rain’?”
“Sure.”
“Not like that. This uz like a ribbon unfurlin’ from the skies to the depths. Gorgeous. Gorgeous, ’cept for the vijuns.”
“Visions?” Gavin asked. Gunner hadn’t woken him for that?
“Some says a man sees what’s in his heart out there.”
“That’s not how orange works.”
“Innit?” Gunner asked sharply. “Lots of experience with lorange ux storms, eh?”
Orange lux storms.
“No,” Gavin admitted.
“Pro’lem of rewardin’ men o’ will, like your Chromeria do. You all impose whatcha think oughta be, ignoring what is when it ain’t convenient.” Gunner twisted a bit of his beard and poked it between his teeth. Then sucked on it. “One little plop as the sheet first dropped, like a hard turd hittin’ a full chamber pot, then nothing except a rush. Solid connection from the seas to the heavens. Afterward, some the men swore they saw a whale.” He shrugged. “Like I said. Vijuns.”
“A whale?”
“Black whale. Immense. O’ course, I’m not sure what other color a whale would look like at night, and no one ever says, ‘Oh, take a looksie at that relatively small whale.’” Gunner twisted his lips. “Heard plenty of sailor stories, even when men weren’t in a hallucino-jammy—halloosina—halluxination storm. But a whale? I near whipped a man this mornin’ what wouldn’t stop goin’ on with his lies, swearin’ a black whale nudged the port quarterdeck, like a little kiss.”
What the hell? There hadn’t been whales in the Cerulean Sea in centuries. Scholars said the closing of the Everdark Gates had choked off some essential migration route, either sealing them out while they were gone or keeping them in to die.
“That’s where you sleep, innit?” Gunner asked. His cunning eyes glittered.
“Eh?” Gavin asked. He could tell the question held some kind of danger, but he had no idea why.
“Port quarterdeck’s where you fold your hands, aye?”
“What’s it matter? It didn’t happen,” Gavin said. “You said so yourself.”
“I know it di’n’t happen. You know it. But when men who oughta fookin’ hate a Guile start believin’ mythical beasties o’ the deep are paying homage to ’im, I gotta ask who they think you are. I esk that, and then I gotta esk myself who you think you are. Mebbe you been plyin’ some o’ that Guile grease, pullin the world ’round the tackle o’ yer desires, eh? Liftin’ men with the halyard o’ yer will, all tricksy like ya be. Mebbe I gotta clap ya back in chains to reminder everyone what you is?”
“I’ve said nothing to them,” Gavin said. It was almost literally true. Going on a mission like this, they were all dead men already. No need to bond with his enemies.
“Who is ya, Guile? Yestiddy you’d said you’d fight, afore your end. Whaddaya see when you look in the mirror? A fighter?”
What kind of question was that? Of course Gavin was a fighter.
“You fightin’ me, Guile? After all what I done for ya?”
Gunner gripped Gavin’s face suddenly, his hands sharp and hard with callus and sinew. He wrenched Gavin’s chin toward himself and bored his eyes into Gavin’s.
Gavin accepted it. Maybe he only had been a fighter. Maybe his talk of fighting at the end yesterday wasn’t a wry boast; maybe it was an empty boast.
“O Dazen Guile,” Gunner mocked. His eyes were glittering mirrors as dark and sharp and dangerous as living black luxin. “O Master of Land Ways and Sea Ways, Man of Low Cunning and High Artifice, what are ye now?”
What. Not who.
Gunner released his chin, abruptly dismissive.
He who had flown, literally flown, in the peerless machina he’d dubbed his condor, tasting a freedom no one ever had before; he, a genius whose field of play had encompassed the sky itself—he himself was being dragged where he didn’t want to go, blackmailed, afraid, passive. He couldn’t even blame actual chains now, as he might have when he’d been a slave—
—Enslaved! It’s different!
He was crippled. Half-blind. Enslaved, yes. But enslaved, not a slave. His bondage had been a temporary condition, not an identity. Emperor Gavin Guile had setbacks, not losses. He was Gavin Guile, victor. Never Gavin Guile, victim.
But really.
Seriously now.
How long has it been since that was true?
“You really t’ink you’re gonna fight the suckin’ sand? Then why’d you wander into this bog in the first place?” Gunner said.
Suddenly another piece of this dangerous little man snapped into focus for Gavin. Gunner was the soul of tenacity. That was what had made him the best cannoneer in the world. When a mystery or even a whim took Gunner in its teeth, he would follow it to the bitter end. If a shot wobbled, another man might fire another ten rounds from his cannons to figure out why before abandoning it as fruitless; Gunner would empty a treasury to fire a thousand rounds until he understood exactly why one shot deviated a hand’s breadth from the last.
“That’s a shit question,” Gavin said, forgetting for a moment who he wasn’t. “The whole world’s a bog. Some stay on a safe path, some step off it unwittingly, some are led off it, and some are pushed. All that matters is that once caught in the bog, some fight, some ask for help, and some lie down.”
Gunner picked his teeth. “You been lyin’ down lots.”
That stung. When he wasn’t sunning himself, ostensibly to accustom his eyes to the brightness of the sun, but really hoping to reawaken his magic and his color vision, Gavin had been sleeping like the dead. He woke late and went to his rack early, not to plot but to sleep. He was actually starting to feel human again after his imprisonment, no longer so easily tired—but before this past year had demolished him so thoroughly, he’d been one of the most highly energetic men he’d ever known. Gunner’s barb was a reminder that he was not now what once he had been.
“A metaphor’s a gun. You gotta know its range,” Gavin said, with less defiance than he’d intended.
“Aye. But even a man firin’ at greatest random hits the mark sometimes,” Gunner said. “Like what your man Commander Ironfist done at Ru. Snatched your bacon from the coals, eh? But I guess you were speakin’ o’ metty-force. Metal farcically…?”
“They trip up the best of us,” Gavin said, smirking.
Sudden as a summer squall races over the horizon, Gunner’s face went murder dark. “And how ’bout the worst of us? You got a bone to prick with me, Guile?”
Gavin blinked. “It’s, uh, it’s only an expression. I meant it could happen to any of us.”
“You di’n’t say that. And a Guile never misspeaks. And when a Guile says ‘the best of us,’ he means hisself. You meant yourself, didn’t you?”
“In this, uh, particular instance, I—You know something, Gunner? Captain Gunner, I mean. Sir.”
“Something?! Do I know something?!” The little man drew himself to his full height and grabbed his wild beard in a defiant fist. He slapped his chest. “Cap’n Gunner knows half the mysteries of the sea and sky, and all lissome lies and winsome ways of a woman’s wink, and more of the conundra of the cannonade than other cunts kin count!” He frowned at a sudden thought. “Also not bad with a fiddle.”
Gavin took a deep breath. “You know why we’re doing this?” Gavin asked.
Gunner ignored him. “Also a fair hand with a fiddle. Also a fine… Aha! A fair fine fiddler, too!”
“Do you know why we’re doing this?” Gavin repeated.
“That ain’t the why for me,” Gavin said.
Gunner made his voice small, whiny, mocking: “‘We’re already legends!’ says you. I know. So why for you? You really think you’ll save your lady’s skin? From the master o’ them?” Gunner threw his chin toward his Order crew, meaning Grinwoody.
“You ever wonder if you’re a good man, Gunner?”
“Eh?” Gunner scrunched his face like he was trying to pick some jerked meat out between his teeth with his tongue. “I’m tops at most things what I put my hand to. But being a man? Ain’t really something you gotta try at if you’re in our perfessions, aye? Not sure what kinda pirate worries ’bout how manly he is.” Gunner stopped, looked at his first mate. “Pansy!”
The woman, with her hair glued in hard, spiky points, resembled a flower in zero respects; she was at the ship’s wheel on the sterncastle, twenty paces away. Her body was as hard as a terebinth tree clinging to a wind-torn cliff, and her face was harder still. “Aye, Cap’n?” she shouted, even her voice harsh.
“Pansy, you ever worry ’bout how manly you are?”
She answered immediately. “Daily, Cap’n!”
“Didn’t think so!” Gunner said. He scowled at Gavin.
Gavin couldn’t tell if the pirate was taking the piss.
He tried another tack. “Captain, I got a head full o’ books, enough to know a few things. For good and ill, history’s written with a blood-dipped quill. Good men died, fighting against me, under the banners of bad men, held there perhaps by old loyalties or law. But that never bothered me. We who gamble in taking up arms with the intent to kill know that our own lives are our ante,” Gavin said. “But I get this dream. Not every night, but often enough to dread sleep. In it, I’m manacled to a kneeler, and buckets of blameless blood march into a darkened room and pour themselves over my hands while I fight to get away, and all the time, they shriek at me. You ken?”