The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “You can’t—no!” the Keeper said. She moved her body between Big Leo and the black globe.

  Kip lifted a hand, and Big Leo stopped. “Keeper,” Kip said, “I couldn’t help but notice the band of trees all the way up and down the sides of the palace, all the way up to this one at the crown. Tell me about that. Seems like a lot of work. Why not just have the tree alone up here?”

  He knew the answer. The locals said that beneath the surface, the roots of every tree in the city were connected with those of every other.

  It might not be literally true, but it was a metaphor important enough to the old Foresters that they’d built an earthen ramp up and down their entire palace. The ancient kings and queens of this realm had wanted to proclaim that they were connected with all their people.

  She seemed thrown off balance by his abrupt change in topic. “It’s, it’s… Trees are communal, Lord Guile,” she said. “The roots interlace, passing along needed nutrients and even physical support to one another, and especially to the tallest specimens. With the high winds up here, a white oak alone wouldn’t stand for a year.”

  “Huh,” Kip said. “Helping each other, passing along what’s needed, even at some cost to themselves, so they all might thrive. United against the storm. It’s almost as if there’s a lesson we could learn from that.”

  “The trees support one another, Lord Guile. The largest don’t only take, they also give.”

  “And you don’t trust me to protect you. I don’t blame you. You’ve given your life to be the Keeper of the Flame, and you’ll do anything not to become the Loser of the Flame.”

  She folded her arms. “You already know, don’t you?”

  He said nothing.

  “How?” she asked.

  He drew in some superviolet and drew a line hanging in the air between the black orb set in the tree trunk just over a natural boulder and to the wall of the gatehouse. The color difference was barely perceptible to the naked eye. “Chi shadows,” Kip said. “A lot more than you can draft unaided. And they’re more intense off to the side, as if they hadn’t been diffused by passing through the Keeper’s body in the same way.”

  Her chin lifted, as if to offer another lie, but then descended. She suddenly had the air of one watching her life’s work die, her legacy tainted, her order headed for genocide.

  “They form all the time, you know,” she said. “I don’t think there’s ever just one, despite what the Chromeria says. They’re like lightning strikes, little discharge points for magic. And then they dissipate, usually. Unless someone with the right knowledge can get there first. Then she can stabilize it, build it if she wants. It calls to drafters, even over enormous distances if you grow it large enough. It’s how the kings and queens of old summoned their drafter armies in the first place. They’re dangerous, of course, especially these—”

  “These? You have more than one?”

  She sighed surrender. “There’s another in Green Haven. But you have to understand… they’re dangerous—very, very dangerous—but they’re not evil. Some of us even believe the Chromeria secretly has seven of their own, if not nine. How else have they gathered drafters for so long? But my lord, the Chromeria will kill us all if they find out we have it. Call us blasphemers, heretics, apostates, pagans. Blindfold and burn us, or put out our eyes, or put us on the Glare. All we’ve wanted is to be accepted back into the fold.”

  “No. You wanted to keep power, too.”

  “We save lives with our training!” she protested.

  And yet here she was dying, and dying young.

  But she went on. “We’ll be anathema. No one will be allowed to draft chi ever again, on pain of death. That’s what it means, if you tell them.”

  She sighed again, but something about her seemed relieved. An honest woman indeed. But then, chi was ever so good at exposing secrets; Kip shouldn’t have expected a chi drafter would love keeping them.

  The Keeper walked to the globe. She touched it, and it opened like a flower. She reached a gloved hand inside and pulled out something smaller than her thumb. The air around her hand shimmered as if she held an invisible fire, but as she moved it, it spat out sparks of liquid-gold fire. The thing itself was hard to see at all from this distance, but it was much smaller than he’d expected. Kip had seen larger stones set in women’s rings.

  “Is that…” Cruxer started. “Is that solid chi? I didn’t think such a thing existed! Chi luxin?!”

  She shook her head. “Lord Guile,” the Keeper said, her voice taking on a formal tone, “Luíseach, you have come to bring light, which means bringing shameful secrets to the light. Here is both our light and our shameful secret. Behold that which slays us, and that without which this city and my order is nothing. Behold the chi bane.”

  “Excellent,” Kip said. “I’ll take it.”

  Chapter 24

  Gavin had charged toward a likely death several dozen times. This was different.

  In the early part of the Prisms’ War, the hours before every battle had been exhausting: the anxious mental rehearsals and the fears of cowardice and shaming himself publicly, the fears of death, and worse—in the mind of the young man he had been—the fear of living maimed or broken, which he’d thought were the same thing. There had been the righting of relationships: Just, you know, in case. There had been the writing of wills. There had been the selfish prayers; it was the closest he’d ever come to real piety.

  For all the damnable emotional and mental sweat of it, it had served one purpose at least: the heightened state of fear and exhilaration had come effortlessly, giving incredible energy and even strength, allowing him to shrug off pain and fatigue, though at the cost of tunnel vision.

  Over time, most of that had fallen away. It felt oddly like a loss.

  Fear and excitement were gone, replaced with a butcher’s efficiency. Today’s fight was today’s work. I know what to do. I know what I control and what I don’t.

  And while he always knew the possible costs, he’d had little time or energy to get worked up about it. There were things to do, things that would keep him alive.

  Today was different. This was different.

  He had nothing to do. He could only listen to the call of the overseer below his feet, keeping the slaves’ rowing tempo. Eighteen months ago, that insistent beat would have meant terror and torn calluses and burning legs and lungs and new manacle cuts and blood. It now meant only the passage of time.

  He had none of the old careful mental cataloging of his arsenal of luxin weapons to decide what best would match this much available light, this enemy, this battlefield, this likely enemy tactic. He had no generals to consult, no messengers to hear out or to send out, no scouts’ reports, no orders to give, nor anyone who would listen to them if he tried.

  As their galleon, the Golden Mean, shot across the waves, driven by both oar and wind, Gavin had no one to pick out of the enemy line and say, ‘That one shall be mine first.’

  All there was to do was wait, powerless.

  Gavin’s chest went tight as the rowers’ drums, pounding, pounding.

  There should have been some kind of towering storm. There wasn’t. Today was the kind of day that makes landsmen romanticize the lives of sailors. The sun blazing overhead, the sea light and bright and clear and shallow. Blinding azure and turquoise and sapphire, Gavin guessed. And many other jewel colors denied him now.

  He wished he could see them just one last time.

  Under Captain Gunner’s direction, the ship was circling in toward White Mist Reef, following the sea demons following the great black whale.

  The sea demons hunting the whale hadn’t noticed the little ship behind them yet, so it was a race against time to see if Gunner remembered correctly.

  He was trying to remember the placement of a gap, Gavin never said aloud, from two decades ago. Gunner hadn’t been the navigator back then, nor the navigator’s boy. He’d been belowdecks, swabbing the cannons clean of burning embers that could i
gnite the next shot while it was being loaded.

  Even if he remembered where the gap had been, there was no guarantee that in all those years the reef hadn’t closed.

  Gunner swore that White Mist Reef was a barrier reef with several gaps in its great circle. But if they didn’t find one wide enough for the Golden Mean before one of the sea demons noticed them, they were dead. And the great tower of cloud hovering no more than a pace above the waves made it nearly impossible to see the gaps, if they were even there.

  The great black whale breached fully again, avoiding another sea demon strike and coming down on its body instead, with a huge strike of its tail. There weren’t three or four sea demons now. There were more like six. Hard to tell from five hundred paces.

  “Is that the gap?” Gunner shouted up to the lookout in the crow’s nest.

  “No, sir!”

  Gunner swore. He had good eyes, but White Mist Reef defied man’s vision. The barrier reef itself rose from the sea floor to within a few hands’-breadths of the surface of the water. Stubborn coral had tried to grow higher, and their bleached skeletons were sometimes visible in the troughs between waves, white tips on the great claws that would tear a ship’s soft belly open.

  Driven by the cold currents blasting through the Everdark Gates into the warmer waters of the Cerulean Sea, the trade routes and currents and storm systems of the Seven Satrapies had always traveled clockwise around the coasts of the Seven Satrapies like a great wheel—or perhaps, having been created later than the currents, clocks moved storm-wise. So if the entire sea were an irregular wheel, here was the axle.

  Gunner’s teeth were bared. He shouted every command, even to those close by. A chase at sea is a slow chase, and their boat, fast as it was, was no match for the sea demons and the whale. They only kept them in sight because the massive creatures were fighting.

  There wasn’t much for Gunner to do. If he fired his guns now, he’d bring the sea demons’ attention, but if he left the gun crews to steer the ship himself, the sea demons might be upon them before he could return. So he dodged from one station to the next, checking and rechecking wicks and ordering adjustments to the trim and the wheel through hand gestures to his first mate, and then flying up to the forecastle to check The Compelling Argument again and again.

  Orholam had disappeared not long ago, but now he was suddenly at Gavin’s shoulder, with a powder horn. “Nabbed it from the captain’s quarters,” he said. He pulled a musket ball pouch off the strap, though. “This, however, you won’t be needing.”

  That’s right. The baffling musket of the Blinding Knife didn’t need to be loaded. It magically made its own shaped shells, turning light into luxin as if it were a drafter itself, only requiring a flint piece for the snap-cock jaws and black powder for every shot.

  Gunner had blown an apple out of Gavin’s mouth at forty paces with this rifled-barrel musket.

  “What about you?” Gavin asked. “What are you doing?”

  For some reason, Orholam was stripping off his tunic, but he had no rations or water. “Terrible swimmer,” Orholam explained.

  “Thought you said you were going to die. Are you trying to defy your own prophecy?”

  “I told you the most likely thing. I’m just trying to do my part to make the less likely thing happen. But it ain’t really on me.”

  “No, I imagine the sea demons have something to say about it.”

  “Them, neither,” Orholam said. “My fate’s up to you. And my own poor swimming. You’ll have a chance to save me. But you won’t. I don’t blame you. You’re just not that man. Still, I don’t want to die, so you can’t blame me for trying.”

  Gavin had no idea what to say to that.

  “You know who they are, don’t you?” Orholam asked, as if they hadn’t been discussing his death.

  “‘They’?”

  “The sea demons. They’re you. Or what you would be if you only knew how.”

  “They’re me? Well, fuck me, then.” He began checking the action of the musket. Twist here and pull? “Can you tell me how to kill them, or not?”

  “You know, I thought your problem was a lack of honesty. But your lack of compassion is worse.”

  “Compassion? For monsters?”

  “They suffer, Dazen. For their broken oaths and cowardice, they have reaped unending centuries of isolation and madness and pain.”

  “Glad to see you’re back to being cryptic. Kind of missed it,” Gavin said with a little shake of his head. “But what the hell are you on about?”

  Karris, I’m spending my last day with fools and madmen and traitors, and I’m afraid I fit right in.

  Orholam said, “They’re what happens when immensely talented and immoral drafters find an animal that’s trusting and easy to soul-cast.”

  “They’re what? What?”

  “The sea giants were gentle creatures, so deeply attuned to luxin that their very bones react to it, intelligent, and nearly immortal. And they’re now extinct, thanks to your predecessors. What’s a Prism to do to escape his own Blackguards and his mortality itself?”

  “Throw himself into a whale? Come on.” Through curiosity or desperation or madness, drafters had will-cast almost every kind of animal—but soul-casting was another level entirely.

  “No, no. Whales are far too willful, and too smart to trust men.”

  “Nobody’s ever successfully soul-cast themselves,” Gavin said dismissively.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘success.’”

  Thinking you could do magic better than anyone else had ever done it before? That attitude wasn’t exactly uncommon among drafters; it must be nearly ubiquitous among Prisms.

  Good thing I’m not like that.

  “This can’t be true,” Gavin said. “Of all people, I would know if it were.”

  “You? You don’t even know how a Prism is made!”

  “Made? You mean ‘chosen.’”

  “Time’s up,” Orholam said, his eyes perhaps sensing some change in the sea demons that Gavin’s did not. “It was a pleasure to pull the same oar for a time, Man of Guile.”

  The old prophet stepped over and spoke to Gunner in hushed tones.

  Gunner nodded. “Guile! You sees in lightsies and darksies, yes?”

  Black and white? “Yes, Captain,” Gavin said.

  “Up ya go. To the next.” He moistened his lips, peeved. “To the next. The nest. Fawk! Maybe you kin see what others cain’t.”

  So Gavin slung the gun-sword over his back and began climbing the rigging. He’d regained enough strength for this, anyway.

  But he wasn’t even all the way up to the crow’s nest when he saw something alarming.

  “The whale!” he cried. “The whale’s turned. It’s headed straight this way!”

  Gavin hauled himself into the crow’s nest and flopped in awkwardly.

  “Ten points a-port!” Gavin shouted. “Twelve hundred paces out!” He was pretty good at distances, but it was a guess.

  Almost as soon as he’d called it, Gunner cut to starboard. It was nice that a whale had been distracting the sea demons. But in the old tales, whales themselves had been the death of many a crew.

  On the sea, no stranger is your friend.

  And then Gavin saw it. “Gap!” he shouted. “Four hundred paces!”

  But it was as if the sea demons themselves could hear his puny cry.

  “They’re turning!” Gavin shouted. “A thousand paces out now!”

  Below him, Gunner was standing on the barrel of The Compelling Argument again, looking forward, though this time he had the fore skysail stay in his hand to keep his balance. He hopped down, and his hands became a blur on the whirling gears and pulleys. But Gavin could see that the great cannon was aimed wide of any of the sea demons.

  “Captain—” he began.

  But the roar of The Compelling Argument obliterated all else. The concussion made its own ring on the waves below it, and the sound and pressure knocked even Gavin backward, luc
kily into the crow’s nest.

  He pulled himself to a seated position in time to see a great explosive shell hit the water hundreds of paces to port from the sea demons. Water geysered around the impact.

  Most impressive. Gavin would have applauded the sheer power of the thing if there weren’t seven monstrous leviathans bearing down on them at this very—

  Four. Four leviathans bearing down on them. What?

  “Three of ’em peeled off, Captain!” Gavin shouted. “Headed for where the shell hit!”

  That was it. Sea demons felt vibrations in the water. A distant cannon blast above the water was certainly felt, but an explosion in the water must have doubled or trebled its volume to those creatures.

  “They’re steaming hot!” Gavin shouted. “Four hundred paces. Our gap’s in a hundred!”

  “Whale ta port!” someone shouted below.

  And so it was.

  Like some kind of damned sheepdog loping easily alongside them, the whale was boxing them in, holding them tight to the reef. The open sea out beyond it was no option now.

  “Cap’n!” the mate Pansy shouted. “We gotta swing wide!”

  “No!” Gunner shouted, not even looking up as he cranked The Compelling Argument low to port.

  “We’ll not make that tight of a turn!” Pansy shouted.

  “No!”

  Orholam’s balls. Gunner was gonna shoot the whale. Why was he going to shoot the whale?

  As the big gun finished coming around, Gunner hopped up on its barrel.

  “You’re right!” he shouted to the whale as if they’d been conversing. “Fine! Damned if you ain’t right!”

  Swinging the boat wide was the only way they could make the right-angle turn to shoot the narrow gap in the reef. But the great black beast wasn’t allowing that.

  Gunner shouted, “Eight points port, on my mark, then full starboard on my mark. Got it, mate?!”

  “Aye, Cap’n! Eight points port on mark, then full starboard on mark.”

  But Gunner had already disappeared below, bellowing orders to his gun crews.

  Gavin threw a curse at the whale. This great, stupid fish might as well have been Andross Guile, hemming them in, denying them any real choice, making it look to any observer like they’d willfully rammed their own ship into the reef.