The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “I’m not Lucidonius.”

  “It doesn’t matter who you say you are. You have to die. You have to die or Karris dies.”

  “You have it exactly backward… brother.”

  The final word struck Gavin in the stomach, driving the breath from him, and if the figure had moved then, he could’ve slain Gavin easily.

  No, this was a nightmare, the way the giant fist coming down to crush him had been from that earlier dream. Gavin must be feverish. He must be mad.

  No! No. He was here. This was real.

  So this was all calculated. It was a trap.

  “You’re not Orholam,” Gavin said. “And you’re nothing like my brother. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Usually, we mortals don’t get to serve as messengers,” the man said as if Gavin hadn’t spoken. “But He was making an exception for one brother. And we Guiles can be very persuasive.”

  “What’d you do, Lucidonius? Try to mold the illusion to look like me as much as you could, and hope the brightness of your eyes would blind me to all its shortcomings?”

  “Flaws? Please, brother,” the godling said. “I’m the handsome one.” His eyes twinkled with good humor, and he held the blade casually, but kept enough distance between them that Gavin wasn’t going to be able to take him by surprise.

  “Well, that’s a little bit like him, I confess. But it’s still not good enough.”

  “Brother. You’ve tried to hold out until nightfall. What do you hope comes with the darkness?”

  “Your power is faded already,” Gavin said.

  “Indeed. Mine is. Orholam’s is not.”

  Gavin sighed. “Orholam. Lucidonius. Me. Now you’re someone else again? It’s so tiresome. Just pick one, huh?”

  The god laughed. “Oh, is this Gavin complaining, or Dazen, or He Who Would Be Orholam himself?”

  “I… I—fair enough.”

  Gavin wondered if Karris were already dead. Gavin would have one small opportunity here. Grinwoody had proven himself patient above all things, so he wouldn’t be impatient with all his plans on the line. He wouldn’t kill Karris before sunset. He wouldn’t even kill her at the very moment of it, surely, as if he were a timepiece. Surely he would wait, if only a few long moments, to see if all his plans might still work out. To see if Gavin might yet come through.

  Or so Gavin had to hope.

  There would be a few moments soon, just after sunset, where Lucidonius would be at his very weakest. Gavin would wrest the blade away then, and kill him, whether or not he’d told Gavin how to ascend to godhood.

  Karris was worth Gavin delaying godhood.

  She was worth Gavin losing it.

  “You have the sword. I’m at your mercy,” Gavin said. “Surely now you can tell me how you ascended.”

  “Are you waiting only for sunset, or do you hope to delay me until full dark?” the god asked. He seemed amused at Gavin’s attempts. “That is quite a long time from now, on the longest day of the year. What’s your plan?”

  Not stupid, Lucidonius.

  “I don’t think I need full dark,” Gavin said. “A little more and I’m going to take that blade from you and ram it through your heart.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” the god said, looking mournfully at the blade.

  “Nice try,” Gavin scoffed. “I mean, as guesses go. I suppose all that black luxin at Sundered Rock messed up even your vision, huh? I didn’t use the Knife to kill Gavin.”

  Lucidonius shook his head. “It must be exhausting, seeing lies and schemes everywhere. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been so steeped in your shame that you never saw how deeply father was lost in his. Of course, he’s very good at hiding it. From you most of all. For many years now, he’s been killing everyone who knows, exiling those who might even suspect. As if the Lightbringer, of all people, would bring darkness.” He expelled a long breath.

  Gavin waved that all away. “Lightbringer?” Gavin said. “Father? You think he believes in that? Father’s not remotely superstitious.”

  “Where you turned your shame in, he has turned it out on the world. But you, brother, do you think that when Orholam’s Eye sets, that He can no longer see? His light burns unceasing, though all the earth turns its back and sees darkness. In the darkness, He gives us celestial lights that we may be reminded of Him, and the world turns once more. And to you, it is given to be a mirror set on high, to shine light even to the depths and bring others hope of the swiftly coming dawn.”

  “What are you, insane?”

  “I never said you killed me.”

  It was such a non sequitur that Gavin couldn’t even respond for a moment. “Ah, I see. Now you’re simply throwing as many words at me as possible. My confusion is the point. But I know how this works. I remember what you just said. I’m a Guile. It’s what we do. I might have lost a few things because I drafted black, but I certainly fucking remember killing Gavin.”

  “And with all the memories you lost, I’m so sorry you kept that one.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you are, as it gives the lie to your little—”

  “Brother. Peace. I never said I was Gavin.”

  “You just—” Gavin suddenly couldn’t breathe as the implication of Lucidonius’s words slipped through his defenses like a knife between a child’s ribs.

  The godling said, “This is how I would’ve looked now, had I lived. You needed to exhaust your rage, fighting all through the day, so I begged for the duty. I didn’t expect to get it. But then I worried that the young face of him you loved so well might push you to madness.”

  “No.” Gavin wouldn’t allow this. “Not him. Don’t you… don’t you defile him,” he whispered.

  “Dazen, there is no gentle way to lance a boil. Nor an easy way to bring a betrayal to light.”

  “Says the man who poses as a god?! Take off that face! And you stop talking right fucking now,” Gavin said.

  “There’s work yet to do, big brother. And only just time enough for it. The sun sinks, and your son is dying.”

  “Don’t you—see?! This is exactly what I was talking about! You throw more and more at me, hoping to confound me. Hoping to get me tangled up, hoping to distract me from—”

  “It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you.”

  “You fuck!” Gavin nearly leapt to attack him, sword be damned. “I said don’t you dare—”

  The creature who pretended to be Sevastian did the last thing Gavin expected: Sevastian tossed the sword to him—or at him, somewhat, for though hilt-first, it was no gentle toss.

  Gavin cut his fingers as he bobbled the blade. He retreated, stunned back into recognition of their fight and the blade and the peril he was in.

  But ‘Sevastian’ made no move to attack, nor even to close the gap between them.

  Gavin came down with the blade in his right hand, without his adversary so much as attacking. He was so stunned that his adversary had given up every advantage that they’d fought for throughout the entire, long day that he nearly forgot his rage, Guile though he was.

  “Before any of us were born, father came to believe he was the Lightbringer,” Sevastian said.

  “Stop it now,” Gavin said. “I have the monopoly on the madness here.”

  “He thought only he could save the world. That he was the most important person in history.”

  “Well, that much does sound like father,” Gavin admitted.

  “He thought that if he didn’t save the world, no one would. He laid out a path, and as he always did, he pushed through every obstacle. But one time, he got outmaneuvered, outplayed at the great game. High Lord Ulbear Rathcore saw the size of father’s ambition. Before father was even on the Spectrum, Rathcore pushed an obscure rule change about the Prism sacrifice through the Spectrum that he thought would stop father’s ambitions.”

  Ulbear Rathcore? Gavin had barely known the older man, only that he resigned from the Spectrum and left the Chromeria around the time when his wife, Or
ea Pullawr, had become the White. That was decades ago. Orea had only spoken of him with fondness, which had seemed odd, given that they’d lived apart for as long as Gavin could remember. Rathcore had never even visited the Chromeria again, and as the White, Orea couldn’t leave it.

  “Wait. What? What? The Prism what?”

  “Centuries ago now, Vician was the last true Prism. Born, not made. But when it came time to step down and surrender his powers, he murdered his successor instead. And then he murdered all those he could find with the gift, renewing his own powers—for a time—with theirs. He cowed and bought off the Magisterium and the Spectrum, and they helped him, rather than fighting him. But true Prisms stopped being born, even after Vician was gone. Some say those with the gift were still being born, but that a faithful luxiat had used black luxin to destroy the knowledge of how to find them. Others said it was Orholam’s own punishment for the Magisterium’s faithlessness.

  “But by repeating Vician’s murders, the Magisterium found they could make a Prism, and instead of an outsider upending their power every generation, they could choose one of their own to be the new Prism, which they liked very much indeed. Unfortunately, unlike a true Prism’s powers, this made-Prism’s powers would fade over the course of at most seven years. They knew what they made was a fraud, but some thought if Orholam wouldn’t save the world from the luxin storms and warring gods, they would do it themselves. So they renamed their murders sacrifices. They found when they sacrificed adults, it might take dozens to fill a single jewel of the Blinding Knife with a color. It was as if days of life and power were being transferred. Then one had the diabolical idea to sacrifice a child, one whose gift for drafting had just awakened. And to the world’s sorrow, it worked. Perhaps it was yet another test for the High Magisters: would they stoop so low?

  “Of course they did. With a child, they’d get a full color from one murder, sometimes two. And it was so much easier to hide the death of one child, separated from her parents for tutelage at the Chromeria. A sudden illness, the High Luxiats would claim. With all the influx of pilgrims around Sun Day—often bringing the ill, hoping to be cured—who would notice the deaths of seven or ten children every seven years? The High Magisters never chose their victims from important families. Like predators, they hunted the weak and outcast children, the friendless ones. As if Orholam, who commands the exalted to bring succor to the lowly, would have them bring death instead.”

  The pieces were snapping together for Gavin. He remembered some of his mother’s last words now. She had told him, with a peculiar intensity, ‘You are a true Prism.’ He’d thought she meant he was a good Prism, that he served well, despite the fraud of replacing his brother.

  She would’ve known he thought that; she would’ve intended it. She’d given him a piece, knowing he would remember it, believing that he would put it in place when the time came.

  And it fit. Perfectly.

  His chest felt banded with iron. He couldn’t get enough air.

  He remembered bafflement among the older High Luxiats and the High Magisters as his seven-year anniversary of being Prism had approached. He could tell they expected something from him, and fearing to give them the wrong response, he’d given them none. Was he supposed to have been buying their allegiance, so that he could renew his reign? Was he supposed to react with dread?

  Gavin’s ignorance must have seemed feigned to them.

  Meanwhile, Andross Guile had been removing or buying the silence of everyone who knew. And if the High Magisters and High Luxiats figured it out, what were they to do? Move against the first True Prism in centuries? Orholam’s own blessed? His coming saved them from another round of murders—and to open the secret would be to reveal their own guilt.

  And doubtless Felia had been working her own magic, too, to protect her last living son. She’d had men killed for him, she’d confessed to him. Felia, who was never fierce, except for when she was defending Gavin.

  Their power was built on the murder of children, every seven years? No wonder so many Prisms had only lasted through one term, or been driven by shame into drunkenness and self-destruction.

  It had been a cancer in the very heart of the Chromeria.

  Children?

  “But the Freeing,” Gavin said. “Surely a sip of power a hundred times over would equal the full gulp? Surely they could have used all those…”

  “Sometimes. For certain colors, as long as they had the Blinding Knife. But those drafters who come to be Freed have almost nothing left of their power. They have none to give. The children selected for the sacrifice—one lightsplitter, and one or two for each color—were always confined in a special ward in the infirmary just before Sun Day. They were drugged so that they would feel ill. When a particular child’s color wasn’t required, she would simply recover from her ‘illness,’ and never know how close she had come to death.”

  So that was why father needed the Blinding Knife. It was what transferred the power. And this was why they’d always tried to select Prisms who were already polychromes—fewer colors needing transfer meant fewer murdered children. But the Chromeria cared about installing men or women from the right families more. They’d told themselves they killed the innocent to save the innocent of all the Seven Satrapies… but they’d killed the innocent to serve their ambitions, too.

  “Who knew all this?” Gavin asked.

  “Those at the very top. The circle was kept very tight. Any luxiat who didn’t show enough moral flexibility to ignore matters of doctrine for matters of political necessity was derailed long before he could rise high enough to endanger them all. And the Spectrum has always been made up of political creatures. Most of them didn’t even see it as an existential hypocrisy: to keep themselves and everyone else safe, they were happy to trade the lives of a few poor slaves, or commoners’ children; whom they saw as hardly better. Most of them kept the secret simply because they thought its discovery would at worst make them look a bit heartless.”

  Gavin had thought himself the worst man in leadership at the Chromeria, an unparalleled deceiver. But they were all liars, black hearts in colored robes.

  Perhaps that revelation should have been a relief. It was quite the opposite.

  “You said… you said father got outflanked. What was the rule? What was the change?”

  Behind the creature that called itself Sevastian, the spiderweb of cracks from Gavin’s fist had spread up the mirror like sin. Cracks now reached nearly to the top of the Great Mirror and to every edge.

  “The new rule was that no one could serve on the Spectrum while an immediate family member also served, in any capacity, whether as Color or Prism or promachos or the White or the Black. Everyone liked that, because Orea’s name had been put forth several times to become the White, and people feared what she and Ulbear might do together. By tradition, such rule changes are required to have contingencies, in case an unforeseen emergency requires it, so Ulbear proposed a contingency that simply seemed outrageous. If two family members wished to sit in such high offices simultaneously—which at the time only applied to Ulbear and Orea—they had to supply one of their own children for the Prism sacrifice.”

  And then Gavin saw it coming, like the windup to a gut punch, when his arms were bound and there was no defending himself.

  The man went on. “Father didn’t even learn who’d pushed that rule through for years. No one thought it would apply to anyone but Ulbear Rathcore ever again. He resigned to let Orea join the Spectrum, thereby cementing the precedent, binding it into law and tradition both.

  “But for father’s plans, Gavin had to be made Prism, and father could only protect him if he himself were on the Spectrum, too. Father believed that the prophecies indicated he could only become the Lightbringer if he were the promachos first. So the price for father’s ambition—and, he thought, the price to save the whole world—was that he sacrifice his sons. One to die after his term as Prism, and one…”

  And then Gavin remember
ed it again, vividly. That wound on his little brother’s chest. A single thrust, at an angle that had always seemed wrong. It wasn’t the perpendicular angle of an intruder stabbing a child lying flat in his bed. It was an angle downward, through the ribs to the heart. As if the child had knelt before an adult, submissive to the blade.

  “Father could only fully save one of his sons,” Sevastian said, gently, as the dying sun finally touched the horizon. “He chose you.”

  Chapter 114

  Karris watched the pagan armada approaching her beloved isles from her balcony. Her young luxiats, many of them now trained in rudimentary battlefield medicine, were awaiting her orders for where to deploy. She would be joining them as soon as the battle began in earnest with a large contingent of Blackguards. They would be medics and helpers to any civilians caught up in the fighting, doing the unseen work of making war slightly less hellish.

  Then, if they saw a place where they were needed, she and the Blackguards could at least give one hammer blow of reinforcement.

  She had a slim hope that that wouldn’t be necessary today.

  “High Lady,” one of Karris’s room slaves said, a young woman, round and shy. “The new Prism has taken the roof and installed himself on the balancing array. He’s, he’s using the mirrors to kill people.”

  That answered the question of where the hell Zymun was, though it wasn’t the answer she wanted. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  The girl looked ill. “Yes?… But… he seems not very careful in who he’s burning? He’s laughing, Mistress. He cut through our lines, must have killed a dozen men. Just said oops, and laughed and laughed. He’s talking to someone who isn’t there. He’s bragging that even the immortals serve him now.”

  “Have the Blackguards seen this?” Karris asked. Though no current Blackguard had ever done it, they were sworn to kill Prisms if they became a danger. Not that any Blackguard would expect to have to do it on a Prism’s first day.