The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Even the Old Man needed people to do the actual digging, and even the Old Man had recruitment problems—if you simply kill your workers every time they dig a tunnel for you, you run out of workers.

  He ducked his head to enter yet another tight, loathsome place. He was fully in the darkness before he realized that this time, he didn’t need to worry about anyone seeing a light. His thinking was coagulating like the blood matting his tunic.

  Cracking open a mag torch, he was blinded by the glow—too stupid in his present state to look away.

  The path forked and he took the higher way. Soon he caught sight of a blue arc off to one side of the path. Like a tangent line, this path had been cut through the rock to intersect with a blue sphere at only one point. The path was above the luminous sphere, looking diagonally down on its contents.

  Ironfist braced himself on the rock and looked down. Gavin Guile wasn’t inside.

  But something was. A vaguely man-shaped mass of glittering blue motes swirled in the cell. The cell itself was broken, a hole gaping in one side, and shards of blue luxin littering the area beyond. But jagged hellstone glimmered in that tunnel, trapping the glimmering creature.

  The pieces tumbled around Ironfist’s besieged brain like the individual colored tiles of a mosaic refusing to coalesce into an image: Gavin, in the first year after the False Prism’s War, once asking, ‘Ironfist, your family were priests long ago, right? Do you know what happens when the djinn die?’

  It had been an odd question, but Gavin had been an odd young man.

  Gavin wasn’t in there, and Ironfist was dying. He had to move on before his time ran out.

  He pushed off the wall and kept walking, leaning heavily on the wall.

  Ironfist had known nothing special to tell the Prism, no family secrets. But he’d delved into the subject for some months before finally abandoning it as nothing more than the Prism’s whim.

  That piece, and Gavin’s fierce insistence that he hunt wights alone—though not always alone. Sometimes he’d fought the Blackguard most to fight alone when the wight was the most powerful, and let others come to help him when one seemed least dangerous.

  Ironfist reached the portal to the green cell. Gavin wasn’t there, either. Some skeletal tree-thing, like climbing ivy twisted around itself, dragged branch claws against its circular walls, fists knotting.

  Not here either, go on.

  The djinn were the old gods. To the pagans, they were immortal gods, spirits who sometimes partnered with favored humans—high priests or heroes—and might extend a human’s life indefinitely. The Old Parians had believed the djinn were malignant, that they waited until the hour of death so they could take possession of a body, a host that was always a drafter, in whose body they might then walk the earth. Sometimes they waited for old age; other times they prompted young heroes and heroines to an early death through heroism or suicide. Thus, with their stolen bodies, these spirits might experience physical life—sex and food and time and human relationships, parenthood, even the feel of the wind across one’s face—treasured novelties for the otherwise incorporeal.

  The yellow god in the yellow cell was like a taste of sickly sunlight. It was liquid gold coruscating and crashing like ocean waves as it alternately threw itself against the walls and then meditated quietly, lights sloshing about its incorporeal figure, eyes like unquiet stars.

  No Gavin.

  Weakening further still, Ironfist moved on. Hallucinations. These must be the hallucinations of trauma and fear of impending death.

  After all the study Ironfist had done, Gavin had never inquired about the djinn again. Ironfist had dismissed it as the young Prism’s capricious, capacious intellect shining its light every which way, even into dead histories.

  As for Gavin’s question, everyone supposed that the djinn simply slipped back into a spirit form when their host finally died, for even their magic couldn’t keep a human body alive forever.

  And that was the final piece of the mosaic.

  That was why Gavin had hunted alone on those times. He was hunting the contemporary equivalent of high priests, the men and women who might be hosting immortals. He hadn’t been hunting men; he’d been hunting gods. With each successful hunt, Gavin had brought a host and djinn here. Somehow he’d figured out how to bind the spirit of the immortals within this prison. Maybe he’d even made the prison itself.

  But now Gavin wasn’t in the orange, and there was no obvious escape route from this one. The orange thing sat, quiet, just a little orange man, not scary, not fascinating, just pathetic. Just longing to be free.

  An altogether understandable wish, and why shouldn’t he be free? Ironfist wondered if there wasn’t some way he could help the poor—

  It’s a hex. Many, many hexes together, Ironfist saw now, swimming under the surface of the thing’s orange skin.

  He blinked and looked away. He didn’t dare look again.

  But he buckled at the next step, and he wouldn’t have been able to stand if he hadn’t been helped.

  He took up the mag torch again. “Tore open my wound pretty good,” he said to—

  To whom? He looked around him.

  Who’d helped him up just now?

  And what had kept him from falling outside, when he’d been ten paces from the boathouse?

  Most mortals can’t see them. You only can because you’re so close to death, where the veil thins between your world and reality. This next part is going to be hard for you.

  The voice seemed so familiar, but Ironfist couldn’t place it.

  Ironfist pushed along the corridor. Past the red immortal—Dagnu, he realized now—who was in the form of a man yet looked like a thousand tiny embers catching flame, descending as ash, and catching flame and climbing again. It turned and glared fire at him as he staggered past.

  Gavin wasn’t in there.

  Gavin wasn’t in the superviolet cell that hurt the eyes.

  Gavin wasn’t in the sub-red inferno, where a face of flame floated.

  Gavin wasn’t in the black cell, where Ironfist couldn’t see any creature, but could feel a malignant presence watching him back.

  “I can save you,” a quiet, calm, reasonable voice from that cell said. “He cannot. I can heal you. What use are you in this condition? Do not believe what the liars have told you. You know they’re liars, do you not? They weaken the strong, and you, you could be very, very strong indeed. With my help.”

  But Ironfist had been around men and women more persuasive than himself for his entire life. Simplicity was the cloak that fit him.

  Every time he tried subtlety and lies, it turned to blood.

  Like today.

  Oh, Cruxer. Orholam forgive me.

  He stepped away.

  Touch this.

  Under his fingers he found hellstone, and he pressed it hard, making sure he was drafting nothing, making sure the magic of the old gods didn’t cling to him.

  How did he know to do that?

  But then, within sight of the exit, he suddenly grew faint as the realization finally crested over him like a tsunami wave. He was leaving. He’d searched all the prisons.

  Gavin Guile had been here. He had—unbelievably, horribly, unthinkably—been imprisoned with these things.

  But Gavin was here no longer. Which meant…

  It meant Ironfist had murdered Cruxer for nothing.

  He fell to the cold stones of the tunnel. His mag torch finally sputtered out, leaving him in darkness.

  It was all for nothing. He’d come too late. He’d faltered on the last lap. If Gavin wasn’t here, and no one had heard of him since he’d left, that meant he was dead.

  Ironfist had failed. He had tried to compete in subtlety with the Orea Pullawrs and the Andross Guiles and the Amalu Anazâr Tlanus of the world, and he’d failed.

  He sank down, down. He could go on no longer.

  God, he cried out, damn me! Give me what I deserve! Let me die. I’m finished. No more. No more.


  You’re not dying today, brother. I won’t let you. We’re not going to quit. Not today.

  What? Ironfist thought.

  Something was glowing in the darkness.

  “Don’t you make me carry you,” Tremblefist said.

  It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Ironfist knew that. He was dying, and his mind was playing tricks. Torturing him or comforting him. It wasn’t reliable, that was all that mattered.

  He lay down.

  “You are the most loyal man I know,” Tremblefist said. “I know you, brother.”

  A hallucination. A bitter memory. Ironfist settled his head against the stones to die.

  “You think they cheered only because you carried me?” this phantasm of Tremblefist said. “Do you not remember your own wounds?”

  No. He hadn’t been harmed, had he? Hanishu had taken all the brunt of the Tiru fans’ rage.

  And then he remembered the blood. He’d taken blows in the face, a broken nose, a sliced forehead. Two or three broken ribs. He’d forgotten those.

  By the time he’d crossed the finish line, he and Hanishu had been a gory mess together.

  “I begged you to quit. I knew my wounds were temporary, but I was afraid you would die. You said, ‘I don’t know quit.’”

  “I’ve learned,” Ironfist said bitterly.

  Hanishu flashed an exasperated smile, exactly as he had done in life, except that Ironfist could see the wall through his form. “This doesn’t happen, you know,” Tremblefist said. “We peaceful departed, we don’t return. And I am at peace, brother. But he told me that uncommon loyalty deserves uncommon rewards. You took a wrong turn, associating with the Order to avenge mother and protect Haruru. But you’re no traitor, brother.”

  After Teia had killed Haruru, making himself king of Paria had been the only way Ironfist could get back to Little Jasper safely, and become too important to be killed or simply sent away by the Order’s people or Andross Guile’s. Becoming king had been the only way to muster an army and bring it here.

  It had been the only way he could hope to get vengeance on his uncle.

  The plan had been to relent at the last moment before the execution and say, ‘I’ve changed my mind. Instead of a Guile, I’ll let myself be contented with the blood of one of those most useful to them. That slave, Grinwoody. He’s your right hand. I’ll take him. Now.’

  Andross Guile would take the deal in a moment, and the Old Man of the Desert would never see it coming. Even if he had Blackguards in his employ, even if they were in the room, they didn’t know Grinwoody was the Old Man, so they wouldn’t know to try to save him.

  That was the trouble with keeping your identity secret from your own people.

  It had been a good plan. Devious. Very orange. It might have even worked, if not for Cruxer.

  But it was all too late now. All for nothing.

  At least they wouldn’t go ahead with the execution without him. Would they?

  What if they did? Would there be more blood on his tally?

  “I failed, brother,” he said, and the tears were hot and bitter.

  We all fail. It’s why we don’t walk alone.

  And for the first time in a long time, Ironfist didn’t feel alone.

  He felt himself lifted in strong arms.

  No one had lifted Ironfist since he was a young child.

  He clung to his brother like the lost, and wept, and he wept as a man weeps: weak and unashamed.

  At some point they had emerged into starlight and moonlight and night and the lapping waves. A figure approached. Voices spoke, Tremblefist’s rumbling through his chest, as Ironfist drifted between consciousness and not.

  And then he was handed off. His brother Hanishu took Harrdun’s face in his big hands one last time, and kissed his forehead in blessing, and then was gone.

  Ironfist must have been delirious, because he felt like the man now holding him was not nearly large enough to hold him, but the little round Parian managed not only Ironfist but also his own bags and jugs, and was also carrying him very quickly. They passed people, and everyone they passed seemed to be turning their backs or suddenly inattentive, yawning or rubbing their eyes.

  And then the man set him down on his feet inside the lift that could take him to the level of the audience chamber, where there would be many Blackguards. Ironfist tottered, eyes bleary. His side had been bandaged; he couldn’t remember when.

  “Do I know you?” Ironfist asked. The man smelled of… kopi?

  The man smiled, and his face shone. “Come now, she’s almost here.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who’s gonna save your life.” The round little man squinted. “Probably.” Then he seemed to flit out of and then back into the space he was standing, his jugs and cups clinking. Ironfist must have blinked or something. “Hmm. Well, if anyone can save you, she’s the one.”

  Chapter 93

  Don’t hit him in the face, Kip. That is not how adults solve problems.

  “We need to go ahead with this,” Zymun said. “I mean, I don’t want to any more than any of us. But I don’t think we can afford to wait.”

  But if he were going to hit him in the face, Kip had a coin stick in his left pocket that fit in his burn-scarred left fist perfectly. No sense breaking your hand on the eve of battle.

  The most important people in the Seven Satrapies had gathered in the audience chamber tonight: the High Magisterium, the Colors, nobles, the Prism-elect, the promachos, the White, Kip, at least twenty Blackguards, a veritable army of scribes who served them all, and one chubby little Parian ambassador, who looked like his heart was going to fail him.

  Carver Black said, “We all agreed we need to give the signal by midnight or the soldiers won’t have time to deploy before dawn.”

  “Midnight is the deadline the king has decreed,” the ambassador said timorously, then swallowed and sank back into himself.

  “We know what he said, traitor,” Caelia Green snapped. “And believe me, we’re going to interpret whatever amnesty comes along with this deal for Ironfist as narrowly as possible. It may not cover you, for instance.”

  “Midnight’s in four minutes,” Zymun said, as if he were just a clock, uncaring of the outcome, merely reminding everyone.

  Uppercut, right in the jaw. Maybe I’d break some teeth that way. I could be spared the sound of his insufferable voice for a while.

  “I’m ready,” Karris said, coming back from the side, where she’d been talking one more time with the luxiats; praying, Kip guessed. She’d already said her goodbyes to all the Blackguards earlier. “I don’t feel the need to scrounge about desperately for a few more minutes.”

  She was radiant, not just with her normal beauty and resolve, but there was an inner light, a deeper strength to her. There was nothing grim about her determination. She was, suddenly, a rock. All these events swirled around her, the stream diverting, but the rock unmoved.

  Only Kip stole a glance away toward Zymun, to see if even this could affect him. But Zymun flashed a wink at Kip instead, and then while pretending to blow his nose, he poked himself in each eye.

  The hell was that about?

  “I’m ready, too,” Zymun said. He moved forward, blinking, misty-eyed, his face lacquered with sorrow.

  The little piece of shit.

  “You can’t possibly be serious,” Kip said. “Ironfist isn’t even here yet. You’re not going to wait to see if he’s changed his mind?!”

  “He gave us the ultimatum,” Zymun said. “Time is of the essence. If we wait, we endanger everyone. You heard the scouts! The White King’s ships are within a league now, and not stopping for the night. By dawn they’ll be setting up the siege. If we don’t get those soldiers—”

  “Enough!” Karris said. “I said I’m ready. I don’t want to see hatred in my old friend’s eyes again anyway. There is no yielding in him once he’s set his course. Maybe it’s better this way.”

  Zymun grinned at Kip, and Kip saw that a few oth
ers caught the expression and bristled at it. “Very well, then, daughter. To your place.”

  “One of her beloved Blackguard kin has agreed to be the one who—” Andross began.

  “I’m the Prism,” Zymun said firmly. “It has to be me. This is my duty and should rest on my soul. Mine is the protection of this empire, and mine is the shepherding of this flock. Even in this. Right, mother? You wouldn’t deny us this last, holy moment together, would you?”

  Kip’s knuckles popped, he was clenching his fists so hard. He’d come here tonight ready to die. Because even if you think you know what’s going to happen, when death is in the offing, and Andross Guile is in the room… well, he’s Andross Guile.

  “Of course not,” Karris interjected. Her face twisted as she added, “son.”

  Zymun grinned in victory, changed his look to unconvincing sadness an instant later, and took the spear-point-bladed knife from Blackguard Commander Fisk.

  There was a kneeling pillow at the front center of the podium. Zymun extended his hand to Karris. “Come, daughter,” he said. As if he were Prism already.

  Kip looked at Andross and found Andross staring back at him, but his eyes were inscrutable.

  He was really going to let this happen.

  They all were.

  Though Kip had shown up ready to die, Zymun, of course, had never once thought that he might be the Guile to die. To him, this was all a game, a show for his entertainment.

  To Kip, it was a nightmare he couldn’t wake from. He could see why Andross didn’t want to depose Zymun today: he was a figurehead without any real power, but for the people of the Jaspers, losing another Prism on the very eve of a battle for their survival would be a devastating blow to morale. He was handsome, and the son of the beloved Gavin Guile—that’s all most of the people knew. Andross wanted Zymun to strut through whatever of the Sun Day events they could manage, maybe read a speech Andross had written for him, and then quietly go away right afterward. And Kip was needed for the islands’ defense.

  So it had to be Karris.

  She made a sign of benediction to the crowd. “My faithful ones,” she said, “I’ve run my race. I pass my light on to you, my friends. You fight like hell. Orholam be with you. And please, when we are victorious over the pagans—when we are, for I have no doubts of that—do not hold the shedding of my blood against Ironfist or the Parians. I am not without blame in this. Take no vengeance for me, but stitch Paria back into these Seven Satrapies with grace and mercy, as Orholam would will it.”