The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  So Kip told him all about that, too.

  Andross ended up shaking his head. “Off saving one satrapy when you could have been uncovering the mysteries of the Thousand Worlds that could save us all.”

  “Perhaps,” Kip admitted, “but I’m not a man to sit idle while my people bleed.”

  It caught Andross up short. He marveled at it. “An honest statement of your limitations, but without apologies nor posturing that those limits somehow make you superior to other differently gifted men. Hmm. I know men twice your age who are less comfortable with themselves.”

  ‘Comfortable with myself’? Kip thought that was the first time anyone had ever said that about him. But he supposed he had made some progress on that front in the last few years.

  “You didn’t get all the new cards,” Andross said.

  “Excuse me?” Kip asked.

  “Gavin left the bulk of them where he hoped you would find them, but some he considered too sensitive for you.”

  A shock passed through Kip, tightening his throat and turning his bowels to water. “How would you even know he did such a thing?”

  “It’s what I would do. There are some things I wouldn’t want my own son to know.”

  “And?” Kip asked.

  “Naturally, I found them.”

  “He left them for Karris, didn’t he?” Kip guessed.

  Andross Guile only hesitated a moment. “Curious,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing Felia would have done. That much of an intuitive leap, so quickly.”

  “Does Karris know about them?” Kip asked.

  “Of course not. You don’t show the other players your hole cards, especially not literal ones.”

  He flicked his gaze up to Grinwoody, who he suddenly realized was hanging on every word, as if he knew none of this. “More whiskey, calun,” Kip said.

  Of course Grinwoody’s service was impeccable, silent, and swift, and emotionless. Maybe Kip should have called him by name to insult him.

  “Where’s this going?” Kip asked.

  Andross weighed him while Grinwoody served them both. Though he’d chosen a fast-game variant, he now gave no indication of hurry in his manner and seemed not to worry at all about the calamity bearing down upon them.

  “The truth?” Andross said.

  A smart-ass comment leapt to mind, but Kip the Lip clamped his jaw tight shut. Hectoring Andross wasn’t going to help anything.

  Andross waved Grinwoody away. “Go, now, for a bit. Some few things are too secret even for you.”

  Grinwoody retreated to stand with his back turned toward them, close enough to hear and return instantly if Andross called. Andross produced a long key, opened a locked drawer in the table, and withdrew a card box. He handed it to Kip.

  Nonchalantly, Kip flipped open the box. And his heart stopped.

  It was the deck he’d absorbed. The new deck Janus Borig had painted—the deck Kip had destroyed, erased.

  “Not originals,” Andross said. “These cards can’t be Viewed. They’re paint and gold and parchment and lacquer only. There is no magic in them.”

  “How did you…?”

  “Janus had enemies. She kept this deck far from her home in a place she thought was safe. She hoped that if she were killed, some future Mirror would might be able to use these to re-create her work.”

  “How’d you get them?”

  “Please,” Andross Guile scoffed.

  “You killed her? She was too dangerous to you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t destroy what I might better use. And I had many questions for her. Some other player did that, and not necessarily even a major one.”

  “Why have me describe them if you already have them all?” Kip asked.

  “For one reason above all: it tells me you’re honest, that you’ll make good on a wager, even to me. I had to establish that first. Now, with that done, I believe it’s time for our second game,” Andross said. “If you win, I’ll give you Gavin’s card. The original.”

  Kip’s heart seized. His father’s card?! The original? That meant he could View it.

  And if it truly wasn’t retrospective, and if he used it properly, he could find where his father was now.

  It was everything he’d hoped to do, simply offered by his grandfather.

  But that was if he won.

  If the reward for victory was so enormous, what would the cost of losing be?

  “Wait,” Kip said. “Why wouldn’t you want me to View that card regardless? Don’t you want him back? What did you see when you Viewed it yourself?” Andross wasn’t a full-spectrum polychrome, but surely he would have—

  “I’ve not tried.”

  “You don’t want to see yourself through his eyes,” Kip said.

  Andross’s eyes flashed. “My reasons are my own. Perhaps if you win, you’ll find out what they are. I don’t know. That’s what makes it such very, very good bait. I mean, such a very good wager.”

  “What’s the price of defeat?” Kip asked.

  A cat who’d stolen your dinner couldn’t have grinned with the mixture of malevolence and self-satisfaction that Andross showed. “You lose, and I’ll show you another card. You’ll View it for me and tell me everything you see.”

  “That… doesn’t sound that bad,” Kip said.

  “Well, then, you win, win or lose.” Andross voice was so blithely pleasant, it could have been honey and melted butter.

  Which was all the evidence Kip needed that it was covering the taste of arsenic.

  Andross Guile would never offer uneven stakes that were tilted toward his opponent.

  Kip wanted to think, How bad can it be?

  But he remembered the card The Butcher of Aghbalu. He remembered the months of nightmares he’d had from watching the massacre unfold—no, not just watching but partaking in it, over and over. What if the card was one of those cards?

  But it was his father against that.

  Did it matter now? Kip wasn’t going to be able to save him. But Karris deserved to know. The Blackguard deserved to know. Someone might help him, even if it wasn’t Kip.

  “Ah, one further stipulation,” Andross said. “Whichever way the game goes, you have to View whichever card you get, and you have to answer my questions about it.”

  “So you win, win or lose, too,” Kip said.

  “Yes, isn’t it nice that we can play a game so mutually beneficial?”

  “Why do you want me to do this?” Kip asked.

  “My son has a knack for showing up at the last moment and wrecking all sorts of plans. Usually the enemy’s, but not always. Either card you View might tell us my son’s location. Should he arrive quite suddenly in the next day or so, I should like very much to make sure that I enact the correct plan for this most important Sun Day.”

  Now, finally, Kip understood why Andross had said there was nothing more important for them to be doing than this. Preparations for battle? The people they each commanded could do most of those. Unfolding the past and the present itself? Only they could do this.

  And it meant helping his father either way.

  “Let’s play,” Kip said.

  Andross chose conventional rules. Kip chose decks he was familiar with. He even added cards from the array Grinwoody brought in once more, based on what he guessed of how the Black Cards would affect the strategies.

  It was close. Damn close.

  He came to his last turn. His facedown deck held fourteen cards. He could only draw one, and any one of four cards left in that stack would give him the victory.

  “Four,” Andross said aloud. “Four winners. Out of fourteen.”

  “How do you know I don’t have it in my hand already?”

  “A man doesn’t pray over his last draw when he has the winning card in hand.”

  Of course Andross knew exactly what Kip was looking for. Kip couldn’t find it in himself to hate the old spider, not for this. Hating Andross Guile was like hating the weather. If the sun burns your h
ead, you don’t shake your fist at the sun; you blame yourself for not wearing a hat.

  The game had been fair. Kip had watched for any cheats, eagle-eyed.

  “You want to back out?” Andross asked, amused. “The odds are against you. Failure might break your spirit… Breaker.” He said it with a light derision, as if Kip was trying on names like a child tries on his parents’ fancy clothes and big hats.

  “Not ‘Breaker.’ I prefer ‘Diakoptês,’” Kip said. For some reason Grinwoody flinched at that. “My father told me once that the odds were against us, but that odds are for defying.”

  Kip drew.

  He lost.

  Chapter 81

  “Grinwoody,” Kip said. “Go fetch a bucket for me. I may vomit. Also, get a physicker. One with experience starting stopped hearts. Or better yet, the Blackguard Adrasteia.”

  “Teia’s disappeared,” Andross said. “Some time ago now. Absent without leave. I think they thought she might have gone to join you and your Mighty. No?”

  Kip shook his head.

  It was terrible, but the first thing Kip felt was relief. He wasn’t going to have to face her yet. Not that that was really in the top ten things he ought to worry about right now.

  Then his chest tightened as Andross went to a combination safe and opened it. He brought out a tiny vellum book, barely larger than a card itself. With careful fingers, he unwound the string from the button holding it shut and lay the covers open. Without touching any part of the card, he offered it.

  Kip took the card by the edges, careful not to touch its face. He lay it on the table before him. The card depicted a golden ship, glowing in the sun, sails full-bellied, cutting through easy seas. It was exquisite art, as all of Janus Borig’s had been, and obviously done by her hand.

  “Some water, calun,” Kip said. After all this time, he’d finally learned not to say please to a slave. Not that Grinwoody was any normal slave. “But open the window first. I need full-spectrum light.” He turned to Andross. This card didn’t look threatening in the least. “The Golden Mean? Is that the name of the ship?”

  “Made by a pair of Abornean brothers, a shipwright and a yellow drafter, since sadly deceased in an apparent robbery. Possibly an assassination to keep them from talking. No, not done by my orders. Really, Kip, must you suspect me of everything?”

  “What? No, I wasn’t—”

  “I saw the look on your face. Anyway, it was sold to an Ilytian cannon maker from Smussato named Phineas, and from there it’s been seen in numerous ports, though of unknown ownership. Not least, it was here. On the Jaspers. Not five weeks ago.”

  “How do you know it has anything to do with Gavin?” Kip asked.

  “Because I tried to View it myself.”

  “And?”

  “Searching an item card for one person who’s touched it isn’t a matter of strength of will but of singularity of focus. I think you have that in a way I don’t. When I look for Gavin, my attention is bifurcated, and my intentions are muddied. I was able to establish only that he has been on that ship in the recent past. You’ll do better.”

  Grinwoody set down Kip’s water, and there was an odd intensity about the man, a tension about him that touched those Blackguard senses that Kip had begun to develop, something that spoke of danger. Kip looked at the older man then, but Grinwoody was all placid subservience. Surely he’d merely been echoing the tension in his master, who was meeting with a man Grinwoody surely thought might be a threat to Andross. After all, Grinwoody had had Blackguard training himself.

  Kip dismissed it. Why was he focusing on a mere slave rather than on the fiercest intellect he’d ever known?

  “Open the windows,” Kip said.

  But Grinwoody only looked to his master.

  “The drapes are open,” Andross said.

  “That gives me seven colors,” Kip said. “I have a feeling I’m going to need nine.”

  Andross gestured, and Grinwoody went and opened the large windows, bathing Kip in unfiltered light.

  There wasn’t need for much of any color, and Andross helpfully had blocks of every color large enough for Kip to draw source from, but as Kip finished with chi—his pupils squeezed down to nothing—he understood Andross’s fear of the cards for the first time. Kip’s gallium necklace felt heavy against his chest, concealing the chi bane within it, and Kip felt a twinge of fear as he thought for the first time, What if there’s a card of this necklace? What if Andross knows everything?

  But unhurried, Kip stared at the Golden Mean card on the table and set his fingers down on it, one by one, concentrating on his father alone.

  Kip was the eager face of the prow cutting through azure waves, his decks gliding frictionless through the upbearing seas. He was the strain of the mast against the wind, two old friends leaning against each other as they walked home tipsy. His gunports opened like gills opening so he might breathe, and exhaling black smoke and shot, with the hurried walking of the crews and the shouted orders of a familiar voice. Gunner. And from the lack of distress in those somehow-distant voices of his crew, these were mere practice volleys with the many cannons.

  Father, where are you?

  “I feel him lying on the deck of the forecastle,” Kip said, eyes closed. His senses were limited; it wasn’t like standing on the ship himself, but more an awareness of things within a certain bubble of the ship. “He’s skinny. Wearing an eye patch? Talking with someone, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Now he’s talking to Gunner. I recognize him, somehow. They’ve got a man strapped over the mouth of a cannon. A huge cannon mounted on the forecastle. Um… lost it.” As Gavin stood up, his body no longer touching the deck, but only his feet doing so, he became harder to hold.

  “There was some kind of luxin storm,” Kip said. “But he slept through it, maybe?” Kip had sharpened his focus to his father at the wrong time, it seemed. He would have liked to know what an orange-luxin storm looked like—but he wasn’t going to try to go back now. “And now it’s a new day. We’re circling something for a while. An island and—whoa. There’s a battle now. Maybe, maybe a battle. Lots of men running. Gavin’s climbed up into the crow’s nest. He’s shouting.” His mouth moved as he shouted, and Kip tried to read his lips. “I think he just shouted, ‘Sea demon.’ There’s something terrible happening. They’re firing my guns. They dropped my starboard anchor.”

  Kip grunted as the anchor tore free of his decks like someone tearing off a fingernail. Then the cannons boomed, his decks strained, the oars rattled out. “Something—” And then Kip felt the bony hammer of the sea demon’s head crush him against the anvil of coral. Gavin was flung away. Decks tore like paper. Men were smashed, rigging tore, and bits of Kip’s consciousness were flung into the seas: a shotgun blast of wood and rope and blood and metal.

  He tore his fingers away from the card and found himself in the room once more. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Dead?”

  “I think so. He was flung from the crow’s nest. The ship was crushed against a reef by a sea demon.”

  “Go back. Be certain!”

  Kip didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to give up on his father, not while there was still a chance.

  He found the time again and replayed it once more—though it felt like rubbing an open wound. He went beyond it, tried to search the seas.

  He could feel the presence of sharks before his awareness faded from those scattered, dead bits of himself. “The bay is full of sharks,” he heard himself saying. “With several sea demons outside it. But I can’t feel him anywhere now. There’s… there’s a bit of the forecastle left, perched on the coral.”

  And that was it. Nothing for a time, and then the awareness of a single soul clambering up onto the forecastle.

  But it wasn’t Gavin Guile. It was Gunner.

  Kip stayed with him for days, but Gavin never came, and Gunner only seemed to get more and more desperate.

  He pulled his hand away once more and told what he’d seen.
“Maybe… maybe he made it ashore?”

  “Several sea demons, you said?” Andross asked.

  Kip nodded. He wished suddenly that he could have seen Andross’s face when he’d first given him the news that his last surviving son was now almost certainly dead. Maybe there would have been a flicker of humanity in it then, but now he spoke with the merciless focus of a captain steering his ship straight through a sandbar, scraping off the barnacles of wife and sons and grandsons and throwing into disarray everything in his life not bolted down, but always, always winning through the sand to victory and position and pride.

  “He might have lived,” Kip said. “A reef means there’s an island close, right?” If he survived the initial collision. If he were flung into the bay rather than the open sea. If he weren’t knocked unconscious by the fall. If he made it past the sharks.

  If, if, if.

  “Was there a wall of mist? At the reef?”

  “Not… not that I was aware of?” Kip said. “But… awareness isn’t so good in the cards. Why?”

  Andross hmphed. “There are stories that the sea demons circle White Mist Reef. If you saw several of them, he must have been there. I wonder why. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an island, you said. Even if he survived, even if he finds another ship, there are sea demons infesting the waters there. Very well. That tells me all I need to know. Gavin’s dead, or at least dead to us. He’s not coming back. Certainly not in time to help. Not in time to change anything. Which tells me that our last game is necessary.”

  His father was dead. There would be no Gavin Guile swooping in to save him at the last moment. It had been one thing to hear he was gone, and another to admit it might be true but hold on to hope, but now? “I’m done,” Kip said, moving to stand. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  “You get out of that chair and I will pop your eyes out with my thumbs and fuck your skull until you bite off your swollen black tongue and drown in a bucket of your own blood.”

  For a moment Kip was a terrified little boy again, his mother hurling the cooking pot and the fire poker at him, shrieking at him like a wounded animal. He dropped back into his seat, baffled.