The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “You’re not forbidden to marry,” Teia said. “Why the big secret?”

  “Not a secret from us, a secret from them.”

  “Us, Halfcock? It’s so hard to tell what a traitor means when he uses that word. Which ‘us’?”

  “Us, us! I’m not a traitor! I mean the Blackguard. Come on! I had to keep it secret from the Order.”

  “Now, why would you have to keep secrets from the Order?” Teia asked.

  “I never really followed them. I was waiting for the perfect moment to betray them. I could run away if it were just me. I don’t have family, but Aliyah does, and I knew the Order’s vengeance would be terrible. You have to believe me. I was going to redeem myself.”

  “Redeem yourself, huh? Now, what’d you do that requires redemption?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, I swear!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Please. I know you all hate me. I know I did stupid shit when I was a kid. Yeah, I was an asshole. But I was a kid. I’ve been paying for that for longer than you’ve been alive. You’re gonna kill me for that? You want to know why they gave me the name Halfcock?”

  “Not really,” Teia said.

  “Our trainer said I was so fast that if I were anyone else, he’d be warning them about going off half-cocked. It was a compliment. But they hated me. So they called me Halfcocked around the trainers and Halfcock everywhere else. They told every new season of recruits I had the smallest cock in the Blackguard. They shit on everything good in my life. Samite was the worst of ’em, fucking man-hating tribadist. You tell me, you think she’s fast enough to hit me in the jaw if she didn’t throw that punch out of the blue?”

  “I don’t care about any of this,” Teia said. “Are you stalling?” She double-checked her crystals.

  “Don’t kill me over an old lie,” Halfcock said.

  “I won’t kill you over anyone’s lies but yours,” Teia said. “You say you were just infiltrating the Order? Fine. Give me the names you’ve learned.”

  He blanched. “You know it’s not like that—”

  “I know it’s not supposed to be like that. Everyone’s supposed to keep things carefully separate. But it just doesn’t work, does it? Is Aliyah in the Order too? You’re not supposed to be dipping your quill in the Order’s ink. That’d be enough to get you both killed. Good reason to keep things secret. Hmm?”

  “No, no, no. She’s got nothing to do with them!”

  Teia believed him. She’d overheard the woman pressuring Halfcock to make their relationship public. If she were in the Order, she’d never have done that.

  “Names!” Teia hissed.

  “I’ve been trying for years. You have to believe me. Because I’m a Blackguard my handler made me skip all but the high holy days, so I didn’t have many chances. And then… Most people are so careful, even with me.”

  “Even with you?” Teia echoed.

  “You ever been on a high holy day? The parties afterward tend to get sexual before dawn. We’re supposed to keep our faces and any identifying characteristics covered—but, well, I got popular among a certain set of the women, on account of, you know, my endowments.”

  “I bet you stayed late for the orgy just on the hopes of being a better spy, right?”

  “That’s right!” he said.

  Not keen on picking up sarcasm, old Halfcock.

  “So you found someone,” Teia said.

  “Not a name, an address. A little love nest she keeps for her affairs. She’s newer, and careless, but I’m certain she’s from the nobility, and nobles tend to climb the Order’s ranks quickly. She wanted me to come meet her—”

  And here’s where you lay your trap for me, Teia thought.

  “—but I never dared,” Halfcock finished.

  “What?” Teia asked.

  “I went by the place once. That’s how I know it’s a safe house. No one lives there, but it’s well maintained. But there was no way I was going to go inside and openly disobey the Order. I wouldn’t cheat on Aliyah that way, either.”

  But an orgy is fair game?

  The hypocrisy of the statement actually made Teia believe him a little more, though.

  “You have nothing else?” Teia asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She wasn’t a skilled interrogator, but by the end of her talk with Halfcock, she learned one more thing: The Order had ‘something big’ planned for Sun Day. That was all he knew. Or maybe not on Sun Day. Maybe before. They would find out the specifics, he guessed, at their own ritual on Sun Day Eve, which the Braxians called the Feast of the Dying Light.

  She probed for more a dozen times, a dozen ways, trying to see if he knew something else, maybe without realizing it. She asked about how his handler contacted him, how he knew where the meetings were on the high holy days, and a dozen other things—but he gave her nothing that helped. The Order had morons in its ranks, but only at the bottom. Whoever was directing Halfcock had been very careful and very skillful, and Halfcock had been too stupid or afraid to notice any patterns or slipups.

  But still, he’d given Teia the next step up the Order’s ladder. It was just what she needed: a noblewoman who didn’t like to follow the rules that had kept the Order safe. Perfect.

  “If you were really going to spy on them, you’d have waited outside that safe house,” Teia said. “You’d have watched and seen who walked in.”

  “No, no, please. I thought of that, but only after I’d hurried away. I was afraid of them. Please!”

  “Oh, I know. Your fear is real enough. Even Murder Sharp is afraid of them. I’m afraid of them, too. That’s why you have to die, because every time it’s come down to it, you’ve done what they wanted. And that’s what you’d do again.”

  “Please, I’m a loyal Blackguard.”

  “You’re not even loyal to your wife—if you’re not lying about that, too. But just so you know, I’ll let her live.”

  “I was gonna change! Everything was gonna be different!”

  “I think you might even believe that,” Teia said. “But I don’t.”

  And then she killed him.

  But something went wrong. Either there was some idiosyncrasy of his spine or Teia’s control wasn’t as fine as she thought. Instead of paralysis, she hit some bundle of nerves that sent his entire body into racking convulsions, bucking and flailing and screaming at a pitch and intensity she’d never have guessed he would reach, or even that he could. His screams shrieked like claws jagged across the slate of your mind and lodged in some animal part that begged you to run away or huddle in a corner, rocking back and forth, face to knees, ears plugged, whimpering.

  It shook Teia’s cold calm a bit, to be honest.

  But there was worse to come. That old cliché she’d heard? The one she’d always figured men added to their war stories to make themselves sound tough, like they were better than weaker men or that the situation they’d been through was so, so hard? That thing about grown men crying for their mothers as they die? She’d always thought, Whatever, maybe that happens once in a while, maybe. Maybe with child soldiers or boys who can barely shave, but not with a grown man. Not with a warrior. Certainly, she thought, a man tougher than old saddle leather and more bitter than vinegared wine would never stop fighting. A hardened veteran weeping, tears and snot streaming unheeded down his face, gasping, “Mama help, mama help, mama, mama, mama…”?

  She’d been so sure that never happened.

  Huh.

  Chapter 49

  The dead savaged in the lagoon behind him didn’t matter. The prophet and his logorrhea had no meaning. The world beyond the mist curtain had ceased to exist. Even the city, this nameless city below the black tower, held nothing to pique his curiosity.

  This had been a waystation for pilgrims, once. The whole city had been organized around the physical and spiritual preparation of those who planned to attempt the climb. At its heyday, it must have hosted thousands every day.

  But Gavin paid none of it a
ny mind.

  On the central boulevard, he found great mosaics of legends and saints ancient even to the ancient peoples who had made them. The boulevard had been lined with shops, once. By the remains of their painted pictographic signs, there had been cobblers and tailors and makers of packs and torches and walking sticks and bandages and dried meats and fruits. Doubtless a street or two back had housed the whorehouses and taverns, for all those pilgrims who wished, one last time, to sample the favorite sins they’d come to leave behind. Now empty buildings stared out at him like skulls stripped of flesh and eyes.

  But as every secondary tone had darkened to the chromatic blindness in Gavin’s sole remaining eye, so every secondary voice in curiosity’s chorus had fallen quiet in his ears. The soloist rose before him. The answer to all things lay up there. And Karris’s salvation, too—if Gavin were strong enough.

  He came out from the shade of two mighty overarching atasifusta trees and saw a great gate, open, flanked by two large statues. All the work of human hands stopped at the gate. Not an outbuilding lay beyond, only the trail and jungle. The statues were warriors in identical scale armor and the spears common to the Tyrean era. But their faces were curious to Gavin: one a typical Tyrean with a prominent nose and brow, perhaps woolier hair than was common in Tyrea now, but the other one had flatter features, dark hair straight as wheat, and small eyes with a monolid like no one Gavin had ever seen.

  “Is this some race of the immortals? A people from beyond even the Angari?” Gavin asked. “Or is it some quirk of Tyrean art?”

  Orholam shrugged. “Look over here.”

  There were ceremonial baths by the road, fed by a lively stream.

  They drank and washed and thought of little else for a time. A mosaic wall behind the stone baths depicted men and women feasting and then washing in its waters. There were among them men with such eyes as the statue had, and other races and peoples Gavin had never seen in the Seven Satrapies. Men covered with tattoos and tall women and men half-sized, like Blood Forest’s pygmies, though perhaps that was simply the ancient Tyrean art’s way of depicting children.

  All the figures were dressed in simple robes, and looked somber as they washed.

  Apparently the old Tyrean Empire had been more cosmopolitan than the Seven Satrapies, or some races of men had simply passed from the earth.

  Gavin washed his body. Nothing like having salt water and sand between your butt cheeks as you started a hike that might take weeks.

  No, not weeks. They didn’t have that long. Karris needed him to make it before Sun Day.

  By the time Gavin was finished bathing, Orholam had washed himself, and had found water skins and clothing covered with odd pockets in airtight chests sealed with luxin. By their first good luck they’d had in a long time, the skins and clothing were actually functional. Four hundred years old and yet functional?

  Then again, it was hardly the most astonishing magic here, so Gavin put it out of his mind.

  That magic and their luck didn’t extend to finding any edible food, though. Even the food they found likewise sealed away from the damp was, after all this time, little more than dust.

  The water and the salt fish would be enough for a week, though. Gavin hoped it would be enough.

  It would have to be. He wasn’t going to take the time to fashion weapons, hunt animals, butcher and cure meat. He didn’t know if Karris had that much time. Sun Day was coming.

  They ate the fish, drank, filled the water skins, and then started. Old Parian text adorned the ground just under the gate, a line reference of some sort?

  Ah, a prayer. For the pilgrimage.

  Orholam spoke under his breath—saying the prayer, Gavin guessed, but he wasn’t curious enough to find out if the old man recognized it, or knew Old Parian at all, for that matter. This whole trip had to be like a holy wet dream for the old kook.

  The path was straight as an arrow’s flight through the jungle. Some sections had been displaced by roots and new growth, others washed out by mudslides. Elsewhere, entire trees had fallen over the path and melted into soil, from which had bloomed flowers. But the path was impossible to lose.

  Gavin kept an eye out for animals, but saw nothing larger than mice.

  They climbed the crater’s rim. The ridge here descended to a circular swamp before the queer black stone itself began. The straightness of the road had only aided its own erosion. Water from any rain cascaded fast down what had once been the road and had washed away all its stone.

  There was nothing for it but to try to cross the swamp while the sun was still high.

  It was muddy, mucky, brutal work, first sliding down the hill trying not to turn an ankle and then crossing the ooze, hoping not to plunge into some sinkhole or quicksand.

  Orholam insisted on going first, in thanks for Gavin saving his life. Gavin followed in his footsteps. They didn’t speak.

  Nor did they make it across the swamp before evening fell.

  Gavin said, “Mosquitoes are proof that God hates us and wants us to be miserable.”

  “I always thought of them as a strong hint to go inside and be with friends beside the fire, and be done with the day’s labors.”

  “You’re kind of a look-on-the-bright-side guy, aren’t you?” Gavin asked. “I don’t really remember that about you, back on the oar.” He’d always been set apart, but then he’d been quietly pious, and though kind, he’d been morose.

  “Life on the oar was its own life. Everything looks bright after that darkness.”

  The road was ruined on the other side by erosion, and the climb was misery. It was almost dark when they reached the first white gate, beyond which began the tower path itself.

  This was the first of eight such gates, Gavin thought, if there weren’t others on the other side of the tower. He’d been studying the black monstrosity all day. The tower was indeed a cylinder of equal thickness from foot to head, so the long path didn’t curl around the outside of the tower but rather was cut into the tower so pilgrims would have the black stone not only below them and to one side but also overhanging above them as well.

  And what black stone it was.

  With only one good eye, and the other only good for monochrome, Gavin had held on to a great deal of skepticism about what his initial impression of the black stone was. Surely it couldn’t be obsidian. Not an entire tower of it, glittering dangerously.

  Obsidian was precious beyond words. If the whole tower was actually made of it, the pilgrims of old would have made off with all of it, and obsidian would no longer be as precious as it was.

  But as they stood mere paces away from it now, it could be nothing else—unless there was some kind of hex here, fooling his eye.

  Orholam appeared unfazed and was washing himself at a great stone basin off to one side before the gate, again fed with fresh running water off the tower side. Either the ancients had been quite a thirsty lot or they’d been obsessed with ritual cleanliness.

  There was nothing ritual, though, about Gavin cleaning the muck from his legs and clothes. Again.

  As the sun set, they finally confronted the gate itself, with its own statue of an immortal beyond it. The gate was fully as wide as the trail (though he thought he might be able to climb around the outside of it). The drop here was only thirty feet. The gate was starkly white against all the light-sucking black of the tower, its pearlescence shining in the sunset (probably pink, Gavin guessed). There were three mighty locks on it, side by side. Each labeled.

  “My Old Parian vocabulary is limited,” Gavin said. “Any idea?”

  Orholam said, “The locks are Confession, Contrition, and Satisfaction.”

  “Not much good as locks, are they? The keys are still in them.”

  “Perhaps you should be grateful that the guardians who had to abandon this place decided that their own desire to save a relic of the place holiest to them should be suborned to the possible needs of strangers living long after them to make this climb.”

 
“Fine,” Gavin said, “I’m the asshole.” He turned Confession, and the lock turned as smoothly as Andross Guile pivoting to stab you in the back.

  “I’m sorry,” Gavin said.

  He turned Contrition.

  “I won’t do it again. Happy?”

  He turned Satisfaction, and gave his best old Gavin Guile grin—marred somewhat, no doubt, by his missing dogtooth.

  Orholam said, “There’s a difference between charming and winsome. You’re more the latter when you’re less the former, Man of Guile. Shoes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Leave your shoes. We walk now on holy ground.”

  “Are you serious? I haven’t got time for this.”

  “You’ve got all the time you need as long as your feet are touching the holy mountain.”

  Gavin sighed. The obsidian of the path was polished, so it wasn’t like he had that as an excuse, and the old man was going to keep harping on this.

  He took off his shoes and moved forward onto the path. It was wide enough here for ten abreast, and the overhanging ceiling high enough not to invoke his claustrophobia.

  The open gate revealed to the left an array of stones of varying sizes, and to the right, another statue, her paint worn thin by the elements. Her head was bowed, and at her bare feet, dropped from open hands, lay a scepter.

  “Behold the spirit of Humility,” Orholam said. “Here, you may expiate your Pride, the foundation of all sins. Here pilgrims select a stone to carry, symbolic of their own pride.”

  “Well, one would hate to offend local customs,” Gavin said. He started to reach for the smallest of the stones.

  “Hold,” Orholam said. “A word about the pilgrimage, before you make a mistake you’ll regret.”

  “There are booby traps?” Gavin asked.

  “No!” Orholam said as if it were the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Why would luxiats try to kill people who are seeking Orholam? You want to know what your whole problem is, Guile?”

  “Not really—”

  “You’ve always feared men where you should have feared God.”

  “That… is at least half true.”