The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  It also wasn’t quite the whole truth. Tonight felt like a little death; tonight was goodbye—though he couldn’t tell them that. Every hour of surprise that he gained on the White King and separately on his generals at Green Haven was an hour that might mean the difference between victory and defeat. So Kip had to endure this goodbye alone, even while in the company of those he’d come to love.

  He joined the fire of some river sailors and longshoremen and asked a question about some intricate knot a man was using. When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything.

  Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.

  When he understood and asked if that meant you would use that particular knot with these cotton ropes in this kind of application, but only use it with a hemp rope in these other ones, they seemed to think he was a genius.

  For a noble anyway, one offered, testing to see how prickly he was.

  He laughed, though. “I see I’m not the only bastard here!”

  They lit up. It was almost too easy, with men who wanted to like you.

  Then he indulged his curiosity and threw a problem at them. “So let’s say I’ve got a stallion. Fully barded. Sixteen hands. Weighs, what, probably nineteen and a half or twenty sevens? Got a wall fifteen paces high, but straight up, sheer. We can get right to the base. What ropes and knots do I use to lift him as quickly as possible to the top of the wall? And how long does it take? Let’s say I’ve got access to hemp ropes and cotton, much as I need. Manpower’s no problem, but time is.”

  They peppered him with a few other questions about what other supplies they had available. Pulleys? Nets? In a minute, they’d devised and refined a plan. Their pleasure in demonstrating their mastery told Kip he was on to something he should repeat at the other fires.

  “No, no, no,” a young sailor piped up suddenly after they’d all agreed on their answer. “You’re doing it all wrong. I can get that horse to the top of the wall in half that time. We gotta think about this like our brothers the longshoremen here. We got these standard-size boxes, right?” He held his hands out to show how big they were.

  “We already talked about that,” one of the longshoreman interjected. “No matter how you lash ’em together, you can’t make a platform or a sling with ’em. Ain’t gonna be strong enough for—”

  “So first thing you do is,” the young man continued, his hands still held out to box size, “you cut the horse into pieces this big—”

  Both the sailors and the longshoremen busted up laughing, though the longshoremen followed it with cursing at him for his cheek.

  “Watch out, boys,” Kip said, standing to go. “With that kind of approach to problem solving, you might have yourselves a future officer there.”

  They laughed again, and he moved on, but not before he took the boy’s name. A quick wit’s the flower of a keen mind. The boy might be an officer yet.

  After some hours, he gave in to exhaustion. He couldn’t see everyone, and dawn was coming.

  But as he made his excuses and said his goodbyes, he was careful not to tell anyone that he’d see them later. With where they were going, he couldn’t guarantee that he would; with where he was going, he could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn’t.

  Chapter 43

  “Some of you have felt it,” Karris said. “Your leaders in the Magisterium seem, curiously, to lack confidence.” She was addressing a hundred young luxiats in a regular lecture hall. She’d told the magisters she wanted to offer them encouragement in a difficult time.

  Instead, what she was telling them might get them all killed, and her with them.

  ‘I’ve left you a mess. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have failed,’ Orea had told her.

  Well. This was where the rot began, so this is where Karris would begin, too. At some point, the shining, idealistic faces of the young luxiats before her would become old and powerful… and compromised, and even corrupt.

  She didn’t have a master plan yet, but she knew that what Orholam had for her to do began here.

  “It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s as if they almost think that the life-giving Lord in whom we believe is not, perhaps, so superior to the pagans’ ancestor worship and ritual orgies, and their elevation of drafters as innately more valuable than other men and women. Why are our leaders so tentative? Is it merely because they are old? What is so wrong with us? Has one day passed since High Luxiat Tawleb’s execution on Orholam’s Glare that you haven’t asked yourself, ‘How could the High Magisterium itself shelter such a person?’ A murderer in league with Nabiros himself? And then we saw Pheronike—not simply serving the immortal but somehow hosting him. How can such things be? Why is our faith spineless? Have we nothing to offer a dark world desperate for light?”

  There was still time to bail out, to offer some anodyne exhortation to be faithful and do good.

  Karris hadn’t brought the red folio, but everything she did now was informed by it, and by the fact that Orholam had armed her with it. Why would Orea choose Karris to succeed her? Why, out of all those smarter, holier, and more impressive in a hundred ways, would Orholam choose her to be His White now?

  It could only be because Karris was a warrior. So she sometimes needed direction? Orea’s letter was that much: clean up the mess, whatever the cost. Fight. Die if necessary. Inspire others to join you in that, through your example. Karris could do that.

  The red volume was, damnably, missing large chunks of its text. Apparently at least one of the later recipients of the work had ignored their pledge, or considered themselves not bound by an oath they hadn’t consented to.

  A later pen claimed that at one point, the folio had been sealed with some sort of a will-crafting magic so that it wouldn’t even open until a new White had signed her name and assented with her will to the oath. Now oath-binding was another magic forbidden, and mercifully lost.

  But despite what had been erased, what remained was enough. Karris wasn’t the first of the Whites after the folio had been altered, and her predecessors had been brilliant and curious and indefatigable in restoring what they could. While some had written circumspectly, others were bruisingly blunt.

  Careful to use the past tense, Karris said, “My own husband, the Lord Prism, the Highest Luxiat, himself did not believe in Orholam.”

  Gasps went up. They looked at her as if she were sullying the dead, and her own husband, no less. These young luxiats liked her a lot, she could tell, so they were doubly aghast.

  “You’re shocked,” she said. “So it will grieve you to learn that none of the High Magisters were shocked at all by his disbelief. In fact, I’d be surprised if his atheism wasn’t shared by some of them. They cared little. So long as Gavin kept up the pretense of faith, they were content. He did his duty faithfully, except that he had not the faith that undergirds those duties.”

  If they had dared to shout her down, they would have then. It was why she had excluded the High Luxiats and their staff, not by barring them from the meeting but by pretending it was yet another informal exhortation of the kind she’d done many times before.

  Indeed, she’d met with three other classes recently and given them each an uninspiring lecture. Giving the same stultifying lecture, three times, had been enough to bore the important luxiats and magisters away.

  All that in order to set this up.

  The sole person of any standing in the room, a Magister Jens Galden, looked ill to the point of fainting. He stood at the back, and suddenly looked as if he were uncertain if he should bolt and go summon his superiors, or if he had better stay so he could keep a record of what outrage she spoke next.

  She and Quentin had not chosen t
hese young luxiats at random. Among their number was the order of the auditarae—a group dedicated to the preservation of contemporary and ancient history. The auditarae’s discipline involved training their memories with various tricks and a great deal of practice to a point where they could listen to a speech of half an hour and replicate it point for point, if not word for word. Others of their order were trained in a traditional shorthand, and partnered with an auditarae, so that together they could compare their recollections and notes to form an accurate representation of the speech. This was not primarily for an accurate text of the speech—skilled shorthand was more than adequate for that—instead, the auditarae wrote annotated copy akin to a musical text, noting accents, rising or falling volume, pitch, speed, obvious sarcasm, physical movements, and other verbal flourishes or delivery idiosyncrasies. These, requiring judgment calls, were more art than science, and the auditarae worked first in isolation with their partner and then often compared their results with other auditarae.

  Sometimes, the close examination revealed much more than the speaker had actually intended. Some auditarae became famous for their insight, and some of these (Karris had learned from Orea Pullawr) were recruited as spies.

  “There are magics deeper than chromaturgy, and truths dangerous to tell. There are truths about the Chromeria and about the world that we have held from you. But hard truths buried in the soil of a lust for power become poisonous secrets. We’ve enforced ignorance, and allowed conjecture. We—your leaders, the Spectrum, and the High Magisterium—have nodded along, as incorrect suppositions hardened into tradition and tradition aged into doctrine. We told ourselves that the risk was too great. We asked: what was worse, a small body of lies, or letting dangerous powers free into the hands of any madman who might use them to harm the most vulnerable, or to harm us? If people learned the truth and rejected what we had done, we would surely lose power—and we thought that none could use power so well as we could. We told ourselves the lie that we were indispensable, that Orholam couldn’t work without us, and thus we couldn’t possibly let ourselves look bad.

  “So we lied. Tell me, when has Orholam been a liar? Then how dare we lie for Him? How dare we say we do His work when we deceive our friends, and disciples, and flocks?” She laid a folio open flat on the podium. “This comes from the pen of the White Justinia Brook, two hundred and twelve years ago, in an address solely to the Whites who would follow her, like me: ‘We have successfully, it seems, destroyed all knowledge of how to craft black luxin. This is a victory so profound that it cannot be overstated, nor likely ever understood, simply because of the nature of the victory. In the coming years it will be your duty, my fellow Whites, to relegate black luxin to myth. Of course, we’ve not stamped out the knowledge from the oral storytelling cultures, but even those sources may be attacked and marginalized, even carefully corrupted. Let no books be written anew from their memories, and knowledge of the black may die out entirely. This, perforce, also means knowledge of white luxin will shrink. We have crafted as many of the Knives of Surrender as has been practical. I need not tell you how you must value each of these! If we lose them all, we will no longer be able to make Prisms, nor indeed, fight the elohim when they return.’”

  The lecture hall had gone dead quiet. Everyone knew what they were hearing was dangerous. Everyone expected some adult to come along and stop it. But not a one of these young scholars wanted to leave. Prayerfully handpicked by Quentin, these were the intellectual cream of the luxiats. They lived to learn, and longed to teach.

  She went on. “Then this comes from the White Orea Pullawr, my dear mentor, writing not quite two decades ago: ‘Orholam save us. Black luxin has been rediscovered. Dazen Guile has drafted so much of it he nearly split the world at the Tyrean battlefield called Sundered Rock. I’d known black luxin could have some effect on memory. This drafting obliterated everything that happened in the entire battle from the memories of men within many leagues. All of them are, even now, reconstructing their own versions of the battle to explain the gaps in their memory, believing they’ve lost nothing. I’ve spread official accounts already, but with the loss of the Blinding Knife—the last of the old Knives of Surrender—I fear an apocalypse is upon us. I fear that the old gods are loosed upon us in judgment of our many sins. We know black luxin once more. We cannot survive unless we also rediscover white.’”

  The hall was deathly silent. Some even of the young auditarae had forgotten to write down her words, mouths hanging open. Jens Galden was rooted to place. Even from this distance, the whites of his eyes showed round against his deep-olive skin.

  “I am your White,” Karris said. “And though you are not entitled to every truth from me, I will not lie to you. In white there is no room for darkness. White may become tainted—I shall fail—but when I do, I shall not hide the stain. I shall expose the truth, no matter how painful, and pay the penalty. This is what I pledge to do, because this is what the Chromeria should do. We are not called to perfection; we are called to correction. When we slip from the path, we will return to it. When we offend, we beg pardon and pay restitution. We do not call the crooked straight. Our courage is the courage to stand in the light, and to learn to love it.

  “In this room, with this company, you may ask me any question you wish without fear of reprisal—and, auditarae, without attribution of the name of the questioner, thank you?”

  The auditarae shared looks, and nodded, some vigorously, immediately, while others seemed more torn, but finally assented. She waited until they all agreed.

  She said, “Now ask, and I will answer you.”

  No one spoke for a few moments. She saw some of them glancing at the older luxiat, who looked like he was halfway to wanting to know all the answers himself, but was more scandalized by Karris’s betrayal of tradition.

  “The gods!” someone yelled, not standing up, not asking to be recognized by her first, and not wanting to be recognized by Jens Galden. “Tell us about the elohim!”

  Among the luxiats, there was a lot of debate about the gods. If they were purely fictitious or real; and if real, what was their nature, their connection to luxins, and to the old worship. Despite the pagans’ rebellion, it was still a taboo subject, for the Magisterium feared even speaking of the gods might seduce the simpleminded to worship them once more.

  Fertility cults? Orgies? Surely the simple would rush to their damnation at the mere rumor.

  Of course, the appearance of Nabiros during Pheronike’s execution on Orholam’s Glare had made many luxiats ignore the old taboo. What were they to make of that? Had it been mass hysteria? An orange hex delusion? Could it have been real?

  “The old gods are real,” Karris said bluntly. “At least two hundred immortal powers are spread out amid the Thousand Worlds, though maybe that number refers only to the greatly powerful among them. Whatever their number, they are united in wishing nothing more than to kill and destroy and corrupt what Orholam has made, for He was their king, and they hate Him. In these last years of peace, our world has been either temporarily overlooked or barred from their direct influence. As we’ve seen, that peace has come to an end. I believe we may see more of these elohim, ere the end of this war.”

  “Stop!” Jens Galden shouted. “What are you doing? Why! You’ll ruin us!”

  And there you’ve done it, she thought. You probably didn’t even know half of this yourself, and yet in the minds of these young luxiats, you’ve just confirmed it all.

  Karris didn’t raise her voice. She spoke as she would have spoken to the Blackguards at a mission briefing. “We are at war. We need unity if we’re to fight. If the Magisterium cannot be united in light and in truth, how can the Seven Satrapies have any hope? The light of Orholam’s Glare revealed the truth to us. Go now, and quickly,” she told him. “I’m sure you have reports to make.”

  And so he rushed from the hall, nearly weeping.

  But the door had barely clanged shut when a young woman asked, “Is there no hope, t
hen? We stand against gods.”

  “Hope? Of course there is hope!” Karris said, “For know this—these gods can be banished from our world. The Whites of old believe that the nature of the old ‘gods’—Anat, Dagnu, Molokh, Belphegor, Atirat, Mot, and Ferrilux—has confused us because it’s always meant two different things. The ancients would have easily picked up what was meant by context. As powers of the air and sky, the elohim can make themselves physical only for short times. Perhaps only minutes or hours, but certainly not months or years. So when they hunger for the pleasures of the flesh—as we sons and daughters of the earth hunger to fly—they must partner with mortals to do it: usually a drafter of great ability, often a high priest or priestess of their religion. Thus, both the mortal and immortal would get the power and adoration they crave, and the limitations of embodiment wouldn’t be so irksome for the immortal.

  “Together, mortal and immortal could live for ages, though it was always the immortal who ruled. But in this union, they are made vulnerable—as Nabiros was. These fell immortals enter the body through the eyes, and so do they leave through them, if they may, as their host dies or is killed. This is why our ancestors blinded enemy priests and drafters, not through cruelty—or not through cruelty alone—but to trap the immortals in a form where they could then be banished from our world forever. We can even, the Whites of old believed, banish an immortal from all the Thousand Worlds, if we kill one with a Blinding Knife. This, I believe, is why we’ve had our long peace. Lucidonius gave us a gift of drafting colors more freely than ever, but he or his circle also gave us the ability to threaten the very elohim. The foul elohim who’d so long ruled here as gods decided to hunt less dangerous quarry on other worlds—until the time was ripe, until the Knives and the knowledge of their making could be lost. No doubt they had a hand in such losses, coming here and briefly risking embodiment in order to someday win their long war. But regardless of what they orchestrated beyond our knowing, we can know this: they believe that the time for their vengeance is now.”