The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Kip was breaking that tradition, so there was no need for him to stomp on their feelings any more than necessary.

  “Why aren’t you telling them the real reason?” Tisis asked him quietly.

  “Those were real reasons,” Kip said, but it came out as defensive.

  His wife said nothing.

  “Because I’ve got a feeling it won’t work. It can’t be as simple as I think, or they’d have done a better job with their defenses already. And…”

  “And you don’t want to fail in front of the nunks,” Tisis said.

  He pursed his lips and turned to admire the view. It was breathtaking. He’d never imagined a city so filled with trees and flowers and greenery of every shade, and here as they climbed, they were able to see over the great living wood-and-leaf curtain that was Greenwall. Beyond on one side lay many leagues of undulating forest canopy and crops, and on the other was the sparkling sapphire of Loch Lána.

  “They’re signing up for a job that might cost them their lives. To protect me,” Kip said. “I don’t want their first impression to be that they’ve made a huge mistake. That I’m not worth it.”

  He glanced over at her a few moments later. She had that perfectly serene look on her face that told him she was definitely mad at him.

  Finally, after one last steep section, the white walkway deposited them before an ornate gatehouse on the roof that blocked their view of most of the giant white oak.

  A woman stood before the building, blocking their way.

  “Please, stay back,” the brown-veiled woman said. She sounded kind, but Kip’s heart was gripped by sudden fear. Something about the Keeper of the Flame struck him as wrong.

  Her voice was more full of gravel than an old haze smoker’s, but her erect carriage and lean figure spoke of a much younger woman. Her veils were bound tight against the contours of her face, with a choker high on her neck.

  His own unbounded throat cut off his breath.

  Luxurious braids of fire-copper hair woven and shaped with platinum thread and opals reached down her back like tongues of flame reaching down for hell instead of seeking its natural level with the æthereal fires.

  Though no one used the title for her, everything about this woman shouted priestess to him. The pagan kind.

  She raised black-gloved hands in amused surrender. “I’m happy to cooperate, but I’m not safe.”

  Not being able to see the woman’s face bothered him. A condescending sneer would give those words different meaning than a patient smile.

  She sighed, though he’d said nothing. She asked, “Do you trust these people to hold the fate of our satrapy and the entire war in their hands? Do you trust each of them not to loose secrets that might start a future war? If so, follow me.”

  Kip looked over at Cruxer. The man understood instantly.

  “Nunks,” the Commander said, “Gemel-six. Forget the hinge like last time, and you’ll be doing froggers till sunset. Mighty, Aleph-eight. Everyone else, out.”

  Some high-level lord who’d somehow tagged along didn’t move.

  Cruxer turned a heavy gaze on the man.

  “Surely you don’t mean me,” the man said innocently. “As the palace’s—”

  “I haven’t killed a man in four days,” Cruxer said without inflection.

  The apple of the lord’s throat bobbed. He seemed in sudden need of a chamber pot. He disappeared down the great ramp, nearly running.

  The prospective new members Cruxer had selected for the Mighty followed, propping the door ajar at its foot and jamming a wedge into its hinges, lest it be closed and barred against them in an ambush. It left Kip and Tisis and the Mighty alone in what he now could only think of as less a gatehouse and more a temple. This wide building, whitewashed under thick branches of purple-blossoming wisteria, covered and controlled the entire approach to the enormous heart tree. The circuitous path up here now seemed less a gentle climb and more like a pilgrimage route.

  The Mighty had already fanned out. Tisis stayed close to Kip, giving him room to take a wide stance himself, but near enough that Big Leo could interpose his considerable bulk between her and Kip and any threat. Ferkudi was the roamer, so no sudden assault might plan for exactly where he’d be. Ben-hadad was diagonally behind the Keeper of the Flame, where he could watch her and keep an eye on the two doors at the rear and side of the chamber. His crossbow was loaded, but pointed at the floor. Alone of the Mighty, Ben-hadad was able to maintain an amiable air despite total vigilance.

  With hand signals, Cruxer put the Mighty on high alert.

  This time, Kip wasn’t sure why. Was Cruxer just that attuned to Kip’s own tension, or had he noticed something explicitly that Kip was only feeling?

  Winsen, who’d been scouting the back of the room, kicked a shim under one of the doors. The other swung out and had no easy way to bar it. Hand on his belt, Win opened that door and poked his head through.

  “My appearance will be shocking, but I can see this will be necessary,” the Keeper said.

  As had been the tradition with other ancient titles, such as the Third Eye being known only by her title and never her name, the Keeper had also sacrificed her personal name in taking up her position. It was a tradition at least as old as the Tyrean Empire, and it still saw wan reflections in modern governance—Andross was sometimes referred to simply as the Red. The difference was that he was also known as Andross Guile.

  “Forgive me if I move slowly,” she said, “but I have no wish to provoke alarm.”

  Kip didn’t know why his heart was gripped with fear. She’d banished all her attendants as soon as Kip arrived with his entourage, hot on the heels of Lord Appleton’s message that the Keeper was to assist Kip in every way.

  So only Kip could hear what Cruxer whispered: “She’s wearing plate.” Louder, he said, “Win, bookcase.”

  Plate? Under her clothes? Why?

  Kip looked for it as she moved, though, and even then he could barely tell. Cruxer really was damn good at his work, and the plate was only partial. To make it less obvious that it was there, perhaps? Because surely anyone who knew you were wearing an armored tunic would simply stab you in the neck.

  Assassinations weren’t so common here. Or at least, not that outsiders heard.

  Maybe trading in your name made it impossible for anyone to know who wore the veil?

  For that matter, how sure was Kip that this woman was the real Keeper of the Flame?

  Winsen climbed up a bookcase, as if it were something people did, and then stood atop it, strung bow and spare arrows in one hand, nocked arrow and string in the other, though pointed down.

  The woman took a deep breath, bracing herself. She loosened the choker that held tight the layers of veils from her brow around her face and head. The outermost veil covered even her eyes, but the inner, tighter veils had small jeweled cutouts for her eyelashes—which told Kip that she wore the veils even while with her inner circle.

  Slowly, she removed her veils one at a time, doffing and folding each with careful and identical motions. She’d done this many times. So if she was an impostor, she was one regularly.

  At the last veil, she bowed her head and reached up to the base of her skull. Her fingers worked at the knot where the band around her forehead was tied.

  The Mighty vibrated with tension like a bowstring drawn full to the lips, and held… held.

  Slowly, she lifted not just the veil, not just the band around her forehead, but what seemed at first to be her entire scalp.

  No, it was a cap, a wig into which the red hair was woven.

  Revealed under the wig, her natural brown hair was patchy, her scalp mottled by open sores. She set aside the veil and wig and lifted her face.

  And suddenly, even as he heard the sharp intake of breath through teeth beside him as Tisis saw and stifled a gasp, Kip’s heart was moved not to disgust or fear but to pity.

  Though she was not yet thirty years old, the Keeper’s face was covered with weepin
g sores and distended by tumors. No wonder she kept herself wrapped like a corpse for the pyre—she would surely go to one soon. Everywhere, even where it was swollen by tumors, her skin gleamed. Little points of gritty golden light burned within her distressed skin everywhere, as if an exploding shell had pierced her with a hundred thousand fragments of ever-burning shrapnel.

  It had a fatal beauty to it, pulsing brightly in time with her every heartbeat.

  The Keeper held herself defiantly, though, apparently impervious to her wounds and to Kip’s scrutiny as much as to her assured demise.

  It was a resolve Kip knew well.

  She wasn’t horrified at her own ugliness nor dismayed by the warm death humming glee in her bones. She was stalwart despite what must be constant pain: she was like a runner who’d be damned if she would falter this close to the finish line.

  And Kip knew with his heart: This wasn’t a dying woman who happened to hold an important position. This was a woman dying because of her position. This was the warrior who’d volunteered for a fatal mission; this was a high priestess who’d offered herself for the sacrifice, approaching the altar and the knife. But she wasn’t going to go quietly.

  She unbuckled the fabric-covered plates from her forearms and then her broad, heavy skirts, and stood in her simple tunic and trousers, creased from her overgarments.

  “Chi,” Kip blurted. “You’re a chi drafter, aren’t you?”

  Puzzlement flickered in her angry eyes. “Why would you say that? You haven’t even touched chi since you got here. I’ve been watching your eyes and your soulbrand from the moment you arrived. I heard about the lightstorm out on the waters. They say you pulled apart paryl and chi twisted into waterspouts, drafting both at the same time. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. Or is that a lie meant to pass to legend?”

  Soulbrand?

  “Do you know a lot about lies… Priestess?” Kip asked instead.

  She blinked as if struck.

  “I’m not here to give answers, but to hear them,” Kip said.

  “Not lies,” she said, defensive, bitter. “Secrets. Secrets we must keep lest the Chromeria put us on Orholam’s Glare.”

  Kip had no idea what a masterful drafter of chi could do, but it would be invisible to the Mighty, and to Kip—unless he acted immediately. The danger hadn’t passed. Indeed, stripping a secret truth naked risked shame, and shame could spur violence.

  What he did next was exactly the wrong thing to do. It was exactly the opposite of what Andross or Gavin would have done, but Kip waved the Mighty off.

  Though the Mighty barely shifted their positions, the air changed immediately.

  The Keeper noticed. The golden burning of her skin dimmed; her pulse slowed. But her shoulders slumped. “We only want to use the gift Orholam gave us,” she said. “Drafting kills every drafter. But our color makes us ugly first, so ours is forbidden? Ours kills us faster, yes—in five or ten years rather than ten or twenty—but if we studied chi as every other color is studied, could we not learn what is safe? Why can we not bring our gifts in offering to the Lord of Lights, too? Why can we not serve mankind openly, as other drafters do? You, Lord Guile, have a wealth of colors. If you never draft chi again, you can serve with eight other colors. I have only the one. Are we chi drafters so monstrous that Orholam would have us destroyed? Or can God see beauty where the Magisterium sees only shame?”

  “Tell me,” Kip said. He looked down at his hands. He’d known, somehow. That ugly heat in his joints when he’d drafted chi—it had felt like he was cooking, like something was deeply wrong, deeply unsafe about the outer-spectrum color. With a sudden shot of hot fear like whiskey in his belly, he wondered if the same death taking this woman was growing in his own bones at this very moment.

  Gently, he said again, “Please. Tell me.”

  The gathering storm of her righteous indignation frayed and scattered. Her lifted chin descended. The pulsing gold light slowed to a normal pace. A sigh released the last of her resistance.

  “Our ancestors thought our cancers were a sign of a god’s displeasure at some sin they’d committed. The priests said they bore the tumors as punishment on the people’s behalf. They used their own suffering to control the people—even as they desperately searched for cures. Over many generations of careful notes, they figured out that chi kills everyone, even our families, if we have them. The more chi we use, the faster we die. Generally. Not always. This is my tenth year. It’s quite long, as we reckon such things. I’m lucky, most say.”

  “You use chi for the Great Mirror?” Kip asked. “I thought the mirrors were controlled with superviolet.”

  She inclined her head, and Kip couldn’t help but glance at features shaped as if by an angry child mashing clay. “May I put my raiments back on?” she asked. “For your protection… but for my vanity, too.”

  For my protection? What the hell does that mean?

  “Of course,” he said instead.

  “I’ll take you to the Great Mirror. It’ll answer your questions better than I can.”

  Chapter 21

  The warm, compassionate light of orange dawn had thawed Teia’s iced fury. A little. Karris was unworthy of Teia’s service, but Teia’d given too much to earn her position to serve poorly just because her commander was shit. She was better than that.

  And to be fair, unlike Karris, Teia hadn’t had to kill any of her friends to do her job. That had to take some getting used to, she guessed.

  So before coming back to the Blackguard barracks, she’d dropped off a coded note for Karris in one of their dead drops. Teia couldn’t bear actually speaking to the woman right now, but Karris deserved to know her husband was alive.

  She was going to be furious that Teia hadn’t told her right away. But Teia would deal with that later. Or never.

  For now, she needed to find a safe place, if only to sleep. She would need to prepare, to hide whatever money and materials she stole—and she’d need to steal, which she hated. She’d need a place to eat, and sew disguises, and wash laundry. She’d scouted extra places before, but none of those that she’d already used would work. She had to start from zero.

  Disappearing completely was the only way to be safe. To be a ghost.

  Anything less could get her father killed.

  Sleep, though. Sleeping sounded better than, better than… she didn’t know what. She was exhausted and it was coloring her every thought with a gray stupidity and every movement with black-and-blue clumsiness. She’d been up since before dawn yesterday, and not five minutes of that time had been the pink, pleasant kind of wakefulness, where you could drift in an unfocused haze.

  The first and most hazardous step of her preparations was stopping at the Blackguard barracks and her old bunk. Yesterday morning, she hadn’t grabbed the extra coin stick and pistol and tailor’s kit she’d hidden under her bunk. She wouldn’t have needed them if she’d gone on the ship as the Old Man ordered. Now the danger of going back to the barracks was outweighed by all the dangers she would be able to avoid later if she had the coins and pistol.

  Simply by selling the pistol, she could get enough coin to rent a room for months in Overhill.

  And hell, she was already here.

  Despite the early-morning hour, Gill Greyling was seated on the side of his bunk. He blinked slowly, unseeing, staring at his dead brother’s empty bunk. Stubble darkened his cheeks, and his uniform was wrinkled. He’d obviously been up all night.

  Her breath froze inside her. So it was true.

  Not that there had been much question, but it still seemed impossible. Gavin Greyling? Dead? Gav?

  Teia’s earlier black rage was washing out with the dawn, and she was afraid what weaknesses the new day’s light would reveal.

  Coming here was a terrible mistake.

  She swallowed. Checked her paryl drafting, her invisibility, everything. It was all still in place.

  All right. Breathe. Breathe.

  There was nothing for h
er to do here. She couldn’t give Gill any comfort. Even if anything she said could make a difference—and it wouldn’t! it wouldn’t!—she had to make everyone think she was just gone.

  Everyone. No exceptions.

  Though it felt like a betrayal of her Blackguard brothers and sisters to trust them so little, it wasn’t distrust… exactly. It was just that anyone could slip up, and any slip-up meant failure of her mission, and her father’s death.

  T? That’s pretty much the definition of distrust.

  Fine. So I’m the asshole. But there are traitors loyal only to the Order of the Broken Eye who sleep in this very room.

  Teia just didn’t know who they were yet.

  But she would. She swore it. That was coming. And it would start with whoever had that limp.

  She crept invisibly into the women’s section of the barracks, carefully inspected the underside of her bunk, and silently slid open the little box she’d nailed there.

  Coin stick, pistol, tailor’s kit.

  Though there was no one in here, she stood quietly, carefully. It said something about how thin the Blackguard was stretched, even with all the rapid promotions of barely deserving scrubs into their ranks, that now, half an hour after dawn, the barracks were empty. All those who’d been on night shift should be coming in to sleep now. Instead, with Blackguards training all the Chromeria’s other drafters to fight, double shifts were more common than ever. That work wasn’t as strenuous as the constant vigilance required of a Blackguard when guarding a Color or the promachos, but it wasn’t rest, either.

  In the main barracks, she gazed once more upon Gill Greyling, looking haunted on his bunk. There was no one with him. No one at all in the barracks except the two of them.

  He was too well liked for this. Maybe he’d demanded to be alone.