The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “You make this sound like it’s all cold intellect and unblinking rationale. It’s not.”

  “Oh?” Andross asked.

  “You’re punishing me.”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “Why? I brought an army of drafters back here! I’ve done more for this family than anyone. And more for the Seven Satrapies, too!”

  “Your disobedience destroyed my plans,” Andross said.

  “Your plans were shit! You underestimated me. You thought I was worthless, so you gave me a worthless post as a hostage in Ruthgar’s court.”

  “I don’t like to dwell on plans that went nowhere—”

  “Because you can’t admit that what I did was better. You, O Mighty Andross Guile, you were wrong!”

  Andross shook his head slowly. He tamped the ash off his zigarro. Finished his last sip of whiskey, then stopped Grinwoody from pouring him more. “My tea now, I think,” he said. Then he looked at Kip once more. “Finished?”

  “Yes,” Kip said.

  He was only delaying the inevitable.

  He was going to have to play, wasn’t he?

  “Then know this,” Andross said. “If you’d obeyed me and gone to Eirene Malargos, the Nuqaba would have been obligated to stay another week or month while the preparations for your official wedding to Tisis were made. In that time, with your help—or without it, if you chose to be worthless—that insane bitch who put out Gavin’s eye would have been assassinated. Things were arranged so the blame would’ve fallen on the White King. Regardless, the Parians would have spent the last year united and rallying troops for us. And without that Nuqaba at their doorstep, whom they’d considered untrustworthy and hated and been preparing their defenses against, the Aborneans would’ve built us another navy. The Parians then would’ve been deployed on those Abornean ships and circled the satrapies behind the White King—claiming Garriston first, then Ru. That navy would’ve attacked any supply lines the White King mustered near the coast. The White King would’ve had to try to deal with that threat. Depending on how many troops the White King sent back from his front lines to deal with that, Blood Forest might not have fallen. But you’re right, I was willing to let it fall, to win the war.

  “Instead, the Nuqaba lived. And her indecision about whether she was willing to commit treason outright and join the White King ending up freezing Ruthgar, Paria, and Abornea while the White King got stronger everywhere. All that, grandson, is on you. All that happened so you could go play boy soldier. Then Ironfist showed up and took power, and everyone was frozen again, because no one knew which way he would jump.

  “So, Kip, you ask if I’m punishing you? The truth is your punishment. If you’d obeyed me, you may well have been stuck in Rath for a year, but there’d be no need now for you to annul your marriage to Tisis. Nor would I have let Eirene treat you like a hostage, much less a prisoner. Do you really think I’d let the world see a Guile disrespected?”

  “If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have…” Kip said, but he sounded pathetic.

  “And you showed me you were trustworthy when?” Andross asked sharply.

  In the last year, Kip had begun to feel that he was a somebody. That he had something to contribute. That he was smart, brilliant even. That he’d done good things.

  And he had. But they’d been small things, with no understanding of the big picture.

  So now he was the author of his own misery. The identities fell from his too-narrow shoulders, and their drawstrings caught about his neck as they fell, strangling him—Kip the Hero, General Kip, Satrap Kip, King Kip. Everything he’d done had made things worse than if he’d done nothing.

  How does grandfather do this? How does this man make all my accomplishments look like shit before my own eyes?

  And if he can still do this to me—even if it’s not fair, and I fear that it is—then does that not, in itself, prove that he is better than I? Ten thousand men might follow me to likely death, but Andross can turn a hundred thousand by his will and word alone.

  Who, then, is the greater? Who’s smarter? Who’s more worthy to lead?

  Andross seemed loathsome because he wasn’t Gavin Guile. But if this loathsome man could and would save a million lives, what made him loathsome? The dying might march into the grave smiling behind Kip’s banners, yet they would still be marching into the grave.

  How exactly did that make Kip better than his grandfather?

  How we must seem like insects to this man. Kip was a smart man. He knew that now. Without arrogance, without joking self-deprecation. It was a fact. But Andross Guile was as high above him as a man was over dogs.

  By chain, or beatings, or simply by voice and with wagging tail and lolling tongue, in the end, Kip would obey him.

  He might as well take the offered treat.

  “I’ll play,” Kip said, and it was a betrayal, and it was inevitable, and it was freedom. “But there’s a condition.”

  Chapter 82

  ~The Master~

  Three years ago. (Age 63.)

  “It’s over, dear,” she says. “We were wrong. Join me in the Freeing this year. Maybe we can find forgiveness for our sins together.”

  “We just need to hold out,” I say, adjusting my dark spectacles even as the sun sinks low on the horizon. “The world needs us.”

  “So we believed,” Felia says quietly.

  “The time’s fast approaching. We knew what we were in for. Forty years—that’s only a few more!”

  “So we believed,” she says.

  “The Lightbringer is to be the greatest man of his era. Who else could it be? Who is greater than I?”

  “You are a great man, Andross Guile,” she says calmly.

  “You’re patronizing me.”

  “Never,” she said, and I believe her.

  “You’re mollifying me, then? Why? Are you afraid of me now?”

  “It was never your greatness I questioned.”

  “That? Again? After all these years?! You think me a monster now?”

  Her tone sharpens for the first time: “Do you think me a fool? You think you can hide your eyes from me? Your wife?”

  I look away. “Something can surely be done. I’m not finished yet—”

  “Take them off!” she snaps.

  I remove the dark lenses, revealing my broken halos.

  Her jaw tightens first, but then her mouth quivers.

  “It’s not—it’s not like they say,” I say. “It’s not madness.”

  “Of course you would say that. They all do.”

  “BUT IT’S ME!” I roar.

  It is exactly the wrong thing to shout when one is a red wight. But she doesn’t shrink. Closes her eyes only for a moment. There is no fear or tension on her face when she regards me.

  God. She thinks I might kill her. That I really am mad. And yet she shows no fear.

  I cannot imagine such courage.

  “It’s me,” I whisper. “I always was special. I always was different. I was meant to do—to, to be… but somehow it’s all gone wrong. This can’t be happening. I couldn’t—we couldn’t have been wrong. We worked it out perfectly.”

  “There’s only one man in the world who could have fooled you, my dearest,” Felia says.

  “If there is, I’ve not met him,” I scoff.

  “A man unmirrored indeed,” she says quietly. “I meant you.”

  “You think I wanted this? That this was all self-delusion? The hundred prophecies, the, the things we’ve seen? You think I wanted to do what we’ve done?”

  “I think reason is the devil’s whore.”

  “I hate that line. Always have.”

  “You’ve always misunderstood it,” Felia says. “It doesn’t mean reason itself is corrupt. It means we use her to get what we want. We are the devil, and our reason is nothing more to us than the means by which we achieve our gratification. There’s always a purpose behind the questions we ask, and there’s always an answer we’re really seeking, even if we keep
our preferences secret even from ourselves.”

  “Now, that is a handy rhetorical bludgeon,” I sneer. “I can be accused of being nefarious or deceptive or malign at will. I’m simply so sneaky that I don’t even know it myself.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I don’t think you wanted to hurt… anyone.”

  “I’m not so fragile. You can say his name,” I snap. The red is rising in me.

  She tries. But a wave of grief goes over her face. Maybe I can say his name, but she can’t. She hasn’t said Sevastian’s name three times since he died.

  ‘Since he died.’ Curious that I put it that way. Even in my own mind. I’ve always put it that way, even when I only think about him, don’t I?

  “I love you, Andross,” she says finally.

  “I’ve never doubted that.”

  “You should’ve. Because I didn’t, at first.”

  “What do you mean? You mean when we courted? Of course you did. I still have your letters. I still have that night at the pyre dances with Ninharissi emblazoned in my mind as with flames.”

  But the memory doesn’t even elicit a smile, though it always has in the past. “No,” she says. “I had an instinct about you. I was so young. But somehow, I felt the heart of you, more clearly and instantaneously than I have ever understood another soul in all my life. Perhaps Orholam Himself gave me a special charism. Or a burden. For I didn’t choose you blindly. That’s my curse. I chose this. When my father put you off for an entire week? We made up all that stuff about Ninharissi later, after it was taking me too long. We did it because we worried it would sabotage the start of our marriage, and make you think twice about me.”

  “What?!” I ask.

  “Did you really think my father became the richest man in the empire by being an affable goof who laughed too much at his own jokes like a simpleton? Or that my mother was the boozy, brazen older lady susceptible to a bit of flattery? Andross, come on. We Dariushes are oranges all. Even my little brother fooled you.”

  “What? He was eight years old!”

  “He said you seemed to think he ought to be quite impressed with some knickknack you drafted for him. A bat or something? He tried to be polite, but thought you were a bit daft.”

  “It was a dragon, and it breathed fire! And I swore that little shit to secrecy.” I’m suddenly glad he’s dead. Little fucker. I hope he was inside the palace when they torched it.

  Of course, I can’t say any of that aloud. I can’t tell Felia anything she’ll find wight-ish.

  Gods fucking in a fire, what am I going to do if she threatens to report my current state? One look at my eyes and… The law’s the law. That law applies even to men normally above it. It’s the one law that can’t be bought or bent. Voluntarily or not, wights must die. All the Chromeria’s power rests on that plank.

  She goes on. “I asked my father to put you off while I went to sit vigil, to ask what Orholam intended for me.”

  “I thought that was when I was still on my way.”

  “I try to wrap the little deceptions in as much truth as possible, so I don’t have to worry so much about slipping later on. I haven’t got your memory.”

  I say, “I figured that was simply a good way to go party with your friends for a while.”

  “If by ‘party’ you mean ‘pray,’ and by ‘friends’ you mean Janus Borig.”

  Janus Borig, one of my least favorite people. “The Mirror. That lying bitch.”

  “Are you so surprised a Mirror should deceive?”

  “Did she lie to you?” I ask. “Or was I special in that, too?”

  “Never to me,” Felia says. “She confirmed that I was right about you.”

  “Right about what?” I ask gruffly.

  “That you were unstoppable. That you would become the most powerful man in the world one day. That if any impediment stopped you from proving yourself peerless, you would smash it. That you would not be a Prism, but you would be a promachos one day. And that if you couldn’t rise within the structures of the Seven Satrapies, you would go outside them and rise regardless and take vengeance on all who stopped you. That you were a bad man, but one who had goodness in him. Goodness, we both hoped, that might grow.”

  “You did tell me you were afraid of me, that night,” I say.

  “‘Afraid’ was the most tepid and colorless word I could find for how I felt about you,” she says.

  “Thank you for that, dear. That is a story I could have gone down to the grave not knowing. Lovely that you share it now. Thank you.”

  “I fell for you soon after that,” she says mournfully. “I did. Even though I could never claim real ignorance about what I was doing. I didn’t know what awaited us, but I knew who I was getting into it with.”

  “You believed in me. And you loved me from the beginning. This is the raving of an old woman. You’re losing your mind. I can’t hold it against you. I don’t. Age is a cruel matron. You’re saying things that have never been true.”

  “You think me senile? Me?! I’m the mad one? Not you, the wight?”

  “You wouldn’t have approved of the things we did if you hadn’t believed. You wouldn’t have joined me in them.”

  “Andross, I didn’t love you so much I wanted to take over the world with you. I loved the world so much that when you did, I wanted to be there to keep you from destroying it.”

  “You believed in what we’re doing. I know you did.”

  “Maybe I did. For surely the Lightbringer must be a man unstoppable. And then I fell in love with you, and I justified everything. I made my reason a whore. If you were the greatest man ever, that made me the right hand of the greatest man ever. That made me special. That justified my sins, my suffering. Whatever was good for us was surely for the good of all. It is the same convenient deception the powerful so often believe. And for it, I know I’ll answer. But it didn’t matter what I believed. Not really. The Lightbringer might be greater than Lucidonius himself, so of course you would believe that person must be you. Lightbringer! Ha! You went to Lucidonius’s statue and wept, because by the time he was your age, he’d conquered the world. You think you’re the Lightbringer because you couldn’t bear to stand in another man’s shadow! You needed it. You need it still. The text of every prophecy was illuminated by that need in you. How many prophecies did we skip as incomprehensible or decide were clearly not authoritative or corrupted because they didn’t fit you?”

  She’s trembling with rage that should be mine.

  If there’s proof that breaking the halo doesn’t necessarily make one a wight, it is this: she raves; I listen.

  “Look at you!” she shouts, despite those that might hear through these walls. “You’ve gone wight! You think that’s bringing light? It’s over! We deluded ourselves!”

  “You think I don’t know that?!” I shout, flinging a crystal decanter to shatter against the wall.

  But she goes on, heedless, voice cracking. “We sacrificed our boys for our ambition. We murdered our sons! Our own sons!”

  “Felia, stop it! Stop it!”

  “My sons, Andross. My sons. Better I had put them in pagans’ fires as babes. Sevastian! God curse me, all these years gone and I still see his sweet, trusting face every time I close my eyes!”

  There is no answer.

  “We sold our souls for this wretched dream. We sacrificed our sons with our own hands. Our beautiful boys. To our pride. Not just yours, Andross. Mine too. I thought I was part of something so important, but we’re nothing but schemers. We’re just like everyone else. You hold on to whatever you need to, but I’m finished. I deserve death, and I will have it. I will join the Freeing this year,” she says. She’s been bringing this up for five years. But this time is different.

  “I forbid it.”

  “If you stop me, I’ll reveal what you are. I want my own apartments, Andross. Immediately. I won’t share a room with you anymore. Your face is as revolting to me as a bloody mirror.”

  Chapter 83


  Andross had already been extending a pair of decks toward Kip, and his eyebrows dipped, lips tightened. “Yes?”

  Kip’s heart had leapt into his throat.

  ‘You won’t be the next Prism,’ Janus Borig had told him. But was she telling him—or was she steering him? But Kip wasn’t so worried about whether the prophecy was predicting the future or forming it; he was wondering how it could help him.

  Like, if I play to become the next Prism, I’ll definitely lose. But if I play for stakes other than becoming the next Prism, maybe I can win? But how could the outcome of the game be affected by the choice of the stakes? It was the same game, and Kip certainly wasn’t going to play differently depending on what he won; he had too much to lose to give it anything less than his best regardless. It didn’t make any sense.

  And Andross was the cold, unblinking master of Nine Kings. He wouldn’t play differently, either.

  Unless… unless the stakes were high enough to rattle even Andross Guile.

  “Please,” Andross said languidly. He sipped his almond tea. He didn’t offer Kip any. “Take your time. I’ve no other pressing matters to attend to while you sit there in uffish thought.”

  Janus Borig had said something else that night she died, hadn’t she? Not just ‘You won’t be Prism.’

  “If I win, I don’t want to be named Prism; I want you to publicly acknowledge me as the Lightbringer.”

  The teacup hovered halfway to Andross’s mouth. His lower eyelids tensed and his eyebrows moved almost imperceptibly—merely surprise, or was that fear?—then his lips narrowed and his eyes tightened, back into an expression Kip had seen before.

  “Now, that was interesting,” Kip the Lip said. “Why would you be afraid of that?”

  The anger hardened. “Not ‘afraid.’ It’s certainly audacious. I guess you learned something about overawing your opponents when you demanded to be made satrap in Dúnbheo. Well done. It won’t work here.”

  “My God,” Kip said, ignoring him. “You think you’re the Lightbringer!”