The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “I think once people saw him for what he was, they may well have all hated him,” Cruxer said. “He’s certainly capable of hating all of them.”

  “The massacre was to cover up whatever he came here to accomplish,” Kip said.

  “You think he met with the White King?” Tisis asked.

  “Definitely possible. Maybe he was seen, and decided—” Kip started.

  “No tracks that way,” Daimhin said. “They might have taken their boats, I suppose, but there’s a good road straight to the old city. He would have known about it if he grew up here. I don’t think he came to meet with the wights.”

  “And they hid from the Blood Robe patrol,” Ben-hadad said. “I don’t think he was making an alliance with the White King, as convenient as that would be for us to expose.”

  Kip said, “Whatever he did here, he killed everyone in this village in such a way that we would think the White King ordered it, if we found out about it at all. By leaving the houses standing, refugees from elsewhere can move right in, and squatters don’t often dig too deeply into why the houses they’ve moved into are empty.”

  “Nor do they appreciate when others ask where the original owners are,” Big Leo said. “So they do the covering up for you.”

  “That’s why he didn’t let his men steal any jewelry,” Kip said. “He didn’t want them to keep any evidence of their crimes.”

  It was all… pretty clever, actually. Zymun was stupidly impulsive at times, but he was smart enough to realize he could disappear for three or four days and turn up saying he’d been in brothels, and everyone would believe it. A massacre, this far away? No one would even think to connect him to it. A year or two ago, it would have been impossible. It still would be, except that he had access to skimmers.

  “But why not kill the children?” Winsen asked. “Why add the risk of letting them live?”

  “Some of the men must’ve balked at it,” Tisis said. “Many men will barter with evil, when they must. ‘We’ll kill the men, sure, but not the women. Fine, the women too, but not the kids. They can’t even speak. They’re no danger to us.’ The Lightguard’s rife with thugs and criminals, but they’re not all… Zymun.”

  “That’s the Lightguard for ya,” Ben-hadad said, “willing to butcher helpless men, women, and children, but they draw the line at toddlers. Moral fucking paragons.”

  “We should kill all of them,” Cruxer said. Fair as Cruxer was, there was nothing soft in him toward evil.

  Kip had known Zymun was a snake, but his wanting to kill Kip so he could be assured of his own position had at least seemed understandable, if cruelly calculating and cold. Their grandfather was cruelly calculating and cold, too.

  Murdering several hundred people… for what?… was a different thing entirely.

  Kip couldn’t imagine Andross Guile doing that.

  “The babies died,” Daimhin said with a voice like a swimmer in the great ocean seeing no land in sight, no ships, breath short, one last confession on his lips.

  It brought Kip back to the present.

  “Fourteen babies they didn’t kill, but I couldn’t save them. Not one. I couldn’t find milk. No cow nor horse nor pig nor goat in the time I dared to be away. I went in to the camp followers who haven’t yet left Azuria, tried to hire a wet nurse. They’d heard of me, though, from the Blood Robes. They feared me. They raised the hue and cry, said I was there to steal their women, tried to kill me.

  “I came back. I could never go far again. I cut up food. The babies couldn’t take it. I chewed up food, gave them little bits. They spat it up. They didn’t even all die in my arms. There were too many dying for me to even give them that. I thought of giving them the black mercy, but I held out hope that someone would come at the last minute. The Third Eye had sent me to stop the massacre, but I’d failed. I hoped maybe she’d sent someone else to save the children.” He took a deep breath. “But maybe I was the last hope. Or maybe the others failed, too.”

  His voice rolled across a vast distance, a messenger telling the facts, but tears rolled, blood and water mixing on his cheek.

  “I was so happy when the crying stopped. Not relieved, mind you. Happy. I wept with joy. What kind of a horror could be ‘happy’—”

  “That’s not joy,” Kip interrupted. “That’s a breakdown.” The words kind of slipped out, but he also let them.

  “Bugger off. You don’t know me,” Daimhin said, eyes coming to hard focus.

  “Yes I do,” Kip said. “The day you took your first stag, your hands were shaking so hard that when you cleaned it, your knife punctured its intestines. Your father never told anyone. He didn’t want to shame you in front of the village. But you were ashamed, and your secret shame spurred you to become a better hunter. You expect perfection of yourself, and it’s always been your shame that makes you redouble your efforts. It’s brought you to heights unimaginable to other men… but it broke you here.”

  Kip could feel his Mighty getting tense even before he saw the white-knuckled grip Daimhin had on his obsidian knife.

  Shame is a gorgon. Before you grab her serpentine hair to drag her into the light, remember what her hair is.

  “Forgive me,” Kip said. “I know you, but you don’t know me. I shouldn’t have spoken so.” Except it had been on purpose, and the truth lay wriggling in the light like a rainbow trout thumping about the bottom of the boat, gasping in the air when it so wanted to breathe safe water. “The cutting. Tell me about it.”

  He knew it was an old pagan ritual way of mourning the dead, but Daragh the Coward had cut himself as bravado and as a mask. The same action might mean something very different in Daimhin Web.

  The young man was on a jagged edge, looking as if he wasn’t sure if he should attack Kip or throw himself at his feet or bolt into the forest. Instead, defeated, he sulked. “One for each one dead.”

  “But not too deep,” Kip said. The hunter knew exactly how deeply to cut to cause a scar without impeding function.

  “I have promises to keep,” Daimhin said, as if it were simple.

  “To the other children,” Kip said, understanding him. “You’ve been taking care of them.”

  “Not well,” Daimhin spat.

  “You’ve made a vow that you’ll take care of them forever.” Kip had thought that the murderers had left the food. It had been Daimhin. “A penance?”

  “I made them orphans,” Daimhin said.

  Came too late to stop them being made orphans by others. It was very different.

  There had to be thirty children here. And this boy—maybe twenty years old? maybe years short of that—hunter and legend though he was, this boy was going to be their mother and father? It was insane.

  And yet, war makes insanity a necessity.

  “One might suggest…” Kip said. Then he wasn’t sure if he should go on. But he bulled ahead. Drag it all into the light. Let the light sort it out, the evil and the good, and the good that had made its concessions to weakness and fallibility and human foibles. “If the Third Eye could see the future, wouldn’t she have known you wouldn’t make it in time to help, even if she asked? Maybe this wasn’t your fault at all.”

  “She did ask,” Daimhin Web said. As if it were simple.

  “If she asked knowing you’d say no, is it really your fault?”

  “She did ask,” Daimhin said.

  “Why would she ask if she knew he wouldn’t get here in time?” Cruxer asked quietly, aggrieved. As if the Third Eye had piled guilt atop a boy too sensitive to hold its weight. Hard as he was, and as starkly as he liked to see the world separated into sheep and goats, at times Cruxer could show deep compassion. He could see that Daimhin the Hunter would never be only a hunter any longer. Cruxer, who’d been catapulted from an old life by his guilt over a death he couldn’t stop, Cruxer understood.

  If they made it through this damned war, Kip hoped to see that understanding, compassionate side of his dear friend flourish.

  Tisis said quietly, �
�I think sometimes we can all see the future coming, and we can’t help but act, even when we know it’s too little or too late, too feeble. Sometimes we act even though we know it will mean our death,” she said, locking her jade-green eyes with Kip’s. “I don’t think that makes us fools. I think it makes us great.”

  And you’re staying with me, Kip thought. Does that make you a fool, or great, or both?

  But Kip tore his eyes away from his remarkable bride, who was as undeserved as sunshine on a winter morning.

  He saw perhaps the real reason for the Third Eye to send Daimhin: if she’d told him there were orphans for him to care for, he wouldn’t have come. What were orphans to a hunter? But by lying, by telling him there was a massacre he could stop, she could save these orphans as Daimhin revealed a mettle he himself hadn’t known he possessed.

  After all, like everyone else, prophets can lie.

  “Tell me about this, this clearing, that plinth,” Kip said instead. “You came here for a reason. Or was it merely for the quiet?”

  “Ha!” Daimhin said. But he breathed and looked at the sun for a time, and spun his hellstone knife and sheathed it, and jumped off the plinth with the grace of an artist whose body is his brush.

  He turned and bowed to the plinth with a gravity that might have been mockery. He was a broken man indeed, teetering at the edge of madness.

  “Seven groves, in seven lands,” he said. “Apple, pear, fig, pomegranate, olive, orange, and atasifusta. Blood Forest, Ruthgar, Paria, Abornea, Ilyta, Tyrea, and Atash. Seven cities, seven mirrors, seven colored lenses. They were first meant to be a perfect circle, but compromises were made, so they became a circle as lopsided as our politics. This one had to be this close to the coast because treaties with the pygmies forbade the Tyrean Empire deeper access to the woods.”

  A prohibition that obviously hadn’t stuck. Not that that was the point right now.

  Daimhin said, “My forefathers were the keepers of this sacred grove, once upon a time. My father brought me here to visit once. Kind of a pilgrimage in our family, though we haven’t lived here for generations. I came here hoping… for their understanding? Their forgiveness? Their wisdom? Ha. They failed, too, after all, and let us all be scattered into the deep forest. I hoped…” He snorted. “Maybe it was just for the quiet, after all.”

  “There was a city here, then?” Kip asked.

  “Apple Grove was always small. I think most of the grove cities were. All were close or within a direct line of sight to great cities—Azuria, here, for one. They were intended to be isolated from the city’s politics. As if such a thing is possible. But at least it is harder to capture two fortified positions than just one. It didn’t work as intended, of course. The fort on Ruic Head was constructed solely to house Ru’s Great Mirror, but Satrapah Naveen later moved the Great Mirror into Ru itself to show her power.”

  Kip hadn’t been thinking in terms of the ancients when he’d been there, but it was true, the fort of Ruic Head was far too large for what the Chromeria thought it had been. The fort had thick timber walls, but it had been built on stone foundations. Before the relatively recent advent of cannons that could shoot great distances into the bay, there was no function for a fort there. A simple lookout tower would have sufficed. Maybe a lighthouse. There hadn’t been need for an entire fort.

  Which was interesting history and all, but if there were big mirrors in all these groves, where was the mirror that had been here?

  But Tisis was already going in another direction. “Azuria?” she asked. “I’ve never even heard of a city called that.”

  “The pygmies didn’t lose all their wars to the Tyrean Empire,” Daimhin said. “They wiped out the city while it was still being built. Razed it. Crucified everyone in it or fed them to their tygre wolves. My people fled without a fight after that. The ruins of Azuria are over beyond the new wall now, where the White King was. There’s little there now except access to a good harbor.”

  “How do you know all this?” Kip asked.

  “We deep Foresters keep our traditions alive in our songs, not on corruptible parchments or skins that can be changed.” Daimhin’s face clouded. “Or we did. I wasn’t a singer of the songs and I don’t know all the stories. They’ll die now, I suppose. Already have, maybe, with my village.”

  And that’s why you put the stories in books, Kip thought but didn’t say. Books don’t tend to get killed.

  But that wasn’t helpful. Nor kind. Nor the point.

  Daimhin said, “I thought it was a coincidence that this Seer should contact me and want me to come here. It’s been centuries since my people were here. I feel no connection to this land. I love my forests wild. I am no tender of domesticated trees.”

  “Arborist,” Kip supplied. Also not helpful, but his mind was far away. “Did you say something about an orange grove? In Tyrea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where that was?” Kip asked.

  “I can’t recall the name. Near the Great Dome.”

  “‘Great Dome’?” Tisis asked.

  Kip felt like he’d plucked an invisible spiderweb, or perhaps a tripwire. He remembered the old ruin in the orange grove where he’d gone so often. He said, “There were stories that Sundered Rock was once a great stone dome. Maybe it was, back when these groves were established.” He turned back to Daimhin. “What happened here? What cracked the ground?”

  “I assume something happened to make the Great Mirror move recently. But you’re the drafter. You tell me,” Daimhin said.

  What mirror? Liv Danavis had directed them here saying she’d activated a mirror… but there was no mirror here, just a big empty field in the middle of an apple orchard.

  But Daimhin was close enough now that the light caught on his leather armband. It shimmered a bit, like it was made of many tiny scales.

  And that lute string of memory thrummed once more.

  This moment was the kind of thing a Seer might see: Daimhin standing with his armband in the sun, talking to Kip, who was suddenly intensely interested in it, rather than the blood all over the young hunter or the blade in his hand or the cracked earth at his feet.

  “Daimhin, do me a favor,” Kip said. “Close your eyes, and think that you’re in the blackest night, and that you want desperately to hide. Will yourself to disappear into the blackness.”

  After a moment of staring at him inscrutably, Daimhin closed his eyes. The armband shimmered and went a smoky, mottled black.

  The others muttered imprecations, and when Daimhin opened his eyes and saw it, he seemed stunned.

  “What does that mean?” Tisis asked.

  “How did you know to do that?” Ben-hadad asked Kip.

  “Because I’ve seen that kind of skin before,” Kip said.

  It was the same skin as what made the master cloak he’d given Teia. Kip had thought that cloak had been made of human skin—a light skin and a dark one stitched together—but he’d been wrong.

  That shimmer reminded him of a being who changed his appearance at will, in far more complex ways than simple camouflage, who appeared beautiful when in reality he was ugly and burnt: Abaddon.

  And then it reminded Kip of another immortal, whose glory had shimmered like the sun, but who had shifted herself effortlessly to walk among mortals: Rea Siluz.

  “It’s an immortal’s skin,” Kip said. “One of those from whose ranks came the old gods. Not men dressed in luxin and power to fool the gullible, the real gods. The Two Hundred. The Fallen. The djinn.”

  “I don’t suppose they shed their skin?” Cruxer asked.

  “I, I don’t think so.”

  “So someone skinned one?” Cruxer asked.

  “Who could do that?” Ben-hadad asked.

  “Maybe we can,” Winsen said flatly.

  “Shut up, Win. Not funny,” Cruxer said.

  “No,” Kip said. “I think Winsen’s kind of right. We’re fighting the gods. The Third Eye wants us to know… we can do it.
They can be killed.”

  Chapter 56

  Teia was running out of time. She leaned against the wall of a cooper’s stall, half-shaded in the afternoon sun, nearly invisible not because of paryl magic but because she wore the hooded cloak low over her face and its stripes matched the tones of the wall and the shadows perfectly. She couldn’t maintain her paryl cloud for hours, and hours it had been.

  Sun Day was only ten days away. Whatever the Order was planning, it would spring then. Tens of thousands of pilgrims had swollen Big Jasper’s streets. It seemed that for every person who sensibly kept away from making a pilgrimage because of the war, someone else came in their place, desperate because of the war.

  She couldn’t have let Halfcock live with what he knew of her, but by killing him, she’d given up her one certain lead to where the Braxians would meet the night before Sun Day. Halfcock hadn’t known where their rituals would be held beforehand, and claimed he always would find a note in his pocket with directions when the time was close. So he couldn’t tell her where it would be, but she could’ve followed him.

  Now this safe house was her only lead.

  A safe house no one had visited in three days.

  It could be a trap, of course.

  Worse, the longer she waited, the more likely it was that Murder Sharp would get wind of Halfcock’s disappearance. Would that lead him here?

  She gathered her paryl around her, going invisible, and moved through the street. She’d mastered it now, moving with her head down, shooting the quickest glances this way and that to see what she must, moving with the understanding that others didn’t see her at all. It was a busy street, but the little house had a recessed doorway.

  Teia slipped into it and started to work with the picks and anchors.

  Through Quentin, Karris had made sure she had the best gear, but truth be told, Teia still wasn’t much good with lockpicks.

  The mechanism was neither new nor tight nor complicated, and it still took her almost ten sweating minutes and one ruined anchor to open the lock.

  Opening the door a crack, Teia streamed a cloud of paryl vapor through the gap and into the room beyond. She felt nothing moving.