The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “No, Mistress. They’re all stationed farther out, as if he doesn’t trust them. Only the Lightguards are near him.”

  So they might not know.

  Karris cursed under her breath, but it was loud enough to further scare the young girl, who had some idea of the gravity of the situation she’d found herself in.

  As she tucked pistols into her waistband behind her back, Karris said, “Why don’t you go to your quarters for a while? Go see your friends or family. It may not be safe for you here.”

  The Blackguards were sworn to the Prism first of all. Technically, they had an equal duty to the White, but if Karris initiated violence and they didn’t believe Zymun was mad… they would put down the threat. Many of the old hands hated Zymun and would want to side with Karris, but what would they think their duty was? And what would the new kids do?

  Karris rolled her neck and checked her ataghan and the old scorpion held tight against her forearm. She was resplendent in her white-and-gold silk directly over her mirror-armor breastplate. It was the only practical part of her armor. She had no helm at all; instead her hair had been dyed in many colors and woven together in braids to show the unity of the Chromeria, and the white-enameled mail was so light that it probably wouldn’t survive more than a single blow—nor would she.

  She was meant to be seen as ready to fight today, not to actually fight.

  One last glance toward the shores. Despite the constant cannon fire, the bane were getting close.

  Karris had intended to go to the roof and take the White’s escape lines down to get to the battle lines wherever she was most needed, as quickly as possible.

  She wasn’t going to be getting that far.

  Zymun was murdering friendly soldiers, for fun. If that was the case, who would definitely be foremost in his sights?

  Kip. And Karris. And Andross. And anyone who vexed him in the least, but these first of all, because only they had the power to stop him.

  So. There it was. She had been so certain that she would die in this fight. Perhaps she’d been right. Perhaps she’d only been wrong about the day.

  She was a warrior. That was why Orholam had selected her. Because she was ready to die.

  Maybe, in order to do what she must, she’d even had to be ready to die in dishonor—because what was worse than a mother who killed her own child?

  Zymun, son of my shame.

  Maybe all that was preparation for this.

  She had no more feeling than that. She’d grieved already. She had no wish to die, but she wished even less that others would die because she did nothing.

  Five paces at most, she thought. Three would be better. Two pistols, just in case.

  And with that, it was simply a thing she needed to do, and it jumped to the front of her list:

  Get close enough to get a clean shot.

  How many of the Blackguards remembered how fast she was? Definitely Commander Fisk. He wouldn’t have forgotten. She’d have to hope he wasn’t up there with Zymun.

  She double-checked her powder and shot, checked that the flints and the frizzen were clean and dry, then practiced her draw of the two pistols from her belt. She pulled a crease out of her tunic at the back, cocked the pistols, and tucked them back into her belt.

  Gavin, you would’ve done this smiling. You would’ve come out of it successful and with everyone cheering you. What is this last bit of fear in me?

  Maybe it’s that you won’t understand. But if I hesitate, Zymun may move against me first.

  My love, I only hope that when you hear of this, you’re proud of me. I hope you understand. I hope it matters.

  She took one last deep breath, and put on a neutrally pleasant face. She was going to need it to get close to Zymun.

  She opened the door.

  Commander Fisk stood there, his hand raised to knock. His expression was pained. “High Lady,” he said.

  There were twenty Blackguards with him. At least. Oh, no.

  He cleared his throat. “High Lady, we’ve come to arrest you. For treason.”

  There were Lightguards beyond the Blackguards, too.

  “Treason?” she asked.

  “Please don’t make this any worse than it has to be,” he said.

  Chapter 115

  “There was a storm that night,” Dazen said, his own voice sounding far away. “Mother was away. Father and Gavin were off on one of their trainings, leaving me behind. Again. You know I loved you, but I… I felt so left out. Like I got put at the kids’ table at dinner. But I was supposed to take care of you.”

  “We had a great day,” Sevastian said, “scouting out the ruins of the old Varigari manor, where father was building the new house, remember? We forgot lunch, and somehow you convinced that tavern owner to give us the full spread? She thought you were so cute.”

  “I forgot about that,” Dazen said. Those events had been overshadowed by the night’s.

  “A great day together,” Sevastian said with a smile. “But all day is a long time to be stuck caring for a brother so much younger than you. You’d had no breaks.”

  “You’re trying to let me off easy.”

  “You were mature for your age, but you were still young,” Sevastian said. “Would you judge any ten-year-old so harshly if it weren’t you?”

  But Dazen couldn’t even hear him. “The storm was shaking the entire house. You were scared. You wanted to sleep in my bed with me. I was scared, too, but I thought Gavin would mock me if he found us. I called you a baby. You wouldn’t go. You held on to me, and I said you couldn’t stay because you’d pee the bed. You hadn’t peed the bed in two years, but I knew saying it would shame you. You didn’t get angry.” A hot tear coursed from Dazen’s good eye; the black eye was incapable of tears. “You hunched your shoulders, defeated… your little shoulders shaking, and you went without a word. Like you respected me. Like my word was law, and I’d just used my power to crush you. That’s who I am, Sevastian: I’m the one who finds himself in power by accident and then uses it to crush what’s good.”

  The sun was almost all the way down now, and Sevastian’s eyes were merely warm embers, filled with such compassion that Dazen couldn’t bear to look at them.

  “I knew I should go to you,” Dazen said. “But I hardened my heart, and I slept. I slept, peaceful as a man without a conscience.”

  “Exhausted, yes. Petty, yes. Even cruel at times, as a child,” Sevastian said. “But a lack of conscience was never your problem, big brother.”

  “If I hadn’t turned you away… If I hadn’t pushed you out…” Dazen said.

  “I’d be alive.” Sevastian shrugged.

  Dazen flared hot. “What? Like, ‘Oh well’? ‘Shit happens’? Like, ‘Water under the bridge’?!” He could feel the blackness growing inside him, like the black seed crystal in his eye was growing like a twining ivy, climbing down his throat, interlocking with the darkness that had so long lived in his heart.

  He wanted to strike down his brother now with the sword. How dare he trivialize all Gavin had endured? This wasn’t Sevastian. This was madness indeed. He—

  “If…” Sevastian said.

  “What?”

  “I’d be alive, if… C’mon, brother. I already gave you this. Show that mental flexibility that’s made you the wonder of the Seven Satrapies.”

  But he hesitated only a moment, and Gavin couldn’t regain his bearings so quickly. He could barely disentangle his thoughts from his rage.

  Sevastian said, “I’d be alive… if I’d been killed by a blue wight with some grudge against our family. If I were killed by a blue wight, as you’ve thought all these years, then your rejection that night cost me my life. Or maybe it would have come and killed both of us. A blue wight would’ve been able to handle two children, don’t you think?”

  Gavin frowned, off balance.

  “Father didn’t take any chances,” Sevastian said. “He could have framed a groom or a governess for my killing, easily. Instead, he emptied the
house of nearly everyone through a dozen different errands and excuses. Why else would two young scions of the Guile house be alone? We were never alone. Brother, please. We didn’t fall through the cracks of a busy household. He arranged it to look like we had. But he didn’t want to murder any more innocents than he had to, not even a groom or a governess. But do you really think that if he found me sleeping in your room instead of my own, he would have given up the whole endeavor? All his plans undone so easily? Does that sound like our father? Or would he have had a backup plan? Do you think a servant left that wineskin we found after dinner?”

  Dazen was reeling. He knew dimly that father had changed after those days, at the same time that his elder brother had, but Dazen had thought father’s hardening attitudes had been because he’d preferred his eldest son, Gavin—and that father blamed Dazen for not protecting Sevastian… from a wight.

  But all that aside, Dazen didn’t know what Andross had really been like before he’d become the bitter, conniving spider of the second half of his life.

  “I wasn’t even killed in our home, brother,” Sevastian said.

  Dazen said, “That can’t be true. I came to your room. I tried to tell myself for years that I was coming to apologize, but I know that wasn’t true. I was wakened by a cry. I remember it.”

  “Father carried me home. He was arranging the evidence in my room: the blue luxin shards, the torn window latch, the note. He’d donned the blue mask and cloak. But he faltered when it came time to arrange my body the way he’d planned. It broke him. I think he lost all faith that night, and yet his path was set. It was his cry you heard, not mine. And then you burst in and caught him… like that. His favorite son, catching him in his moment of greatest shame.”

  Dazen couldn’t breathe for the longest moment.

  “But… but, how could he?” Dazen said.

  “The murder? The act itself? He didn’t. He made Gavin do it.”

  Just when Dazen thought it couldn’t get any worse. It was an uppercut to the chin after a gut punch makes you drop your guard.

  Sevastian said, “They didn’t and don’t understand exactly how the Blinding Knife works. What’s necessary. What’s not. They didn’t dare let me die for nothing. Prisms or Prisms-elect were always the ones who’d wielded the blade before. Father told Gavin that this was why we Guiles held high office, that this was what made Guiles worthy of all the power and prestige and riches that flow to us: sacrifice. He told Gavin that if he wanted to be great, he mustn’t shrink from his duty. He told him that they were literally saving not only the Seven Satrapies but the whole world, that all of this rested on Gavin doing what he must.”

  And there it was at last. Not only why the real Gavin had changed so, so much after that night.

  Here also was why Gavin must have felt betrayed—betrayed by Orholam Himself!—when Dazen had shared with him that his own powers were expanding and expanding. Dazen was a polychrome now, and adding new colors every day! Dazen said what if he could split light, too? Wouldn’t that be amazing? He was just like his big brother, wasn’t it exciting, Gavin?!

  How could Gavin feel anything but threatened to his very core by the news? Gavin had murdered Sevastian to get those powers, Sevastian, whom he loved.

  Dazen was telling Gavin that he’d been born with them?

  Gavin had murdered their beloved little brother for nothing—and, without even knowing what he was implying to his guilty older brother, Dazen was telling Gavin that he was the one who should really be Prism.

  … Or how had that happened? Dazen thought that he’d remembered… Hadn’t he himself killed the White Oaks to take their power? Hadn’t he stolen power with black luxin?

  Why was he confused about that? Had he remembered it being that way, or was that something he’d been told? What was wrong with his memory?

  His left eye throbbed. He rubbed it.

  The pain helped Gavin refocus. It felt oddly good. None of that mattered now, anyway.

  The last edge of the sun disappeared from the horizon.

  “It really is you, isn’t it?” Gavin said. But he was worried all this was a hallucination. “Karris is going to die if I don’t… try, anyway, to kill this—” He waved toward the mirror. “And you, I guess. I don’t know.” He looked at the Blinding Knife in his hand. Could he really use it to kill his own brother a second time, this blade that had stolen both brothers from him, and his father, too? And his mother.

  Was he going to use this blade to serve Grinwoody? For some slim hope that that monster back at the Chromeria might spare Karris?

  Really?

  “Time’s running out. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Be Dazen,” Sevastian said.

  “I don’t know who that is anymore,” Dazen said.

  There was an echo of the little boy Sevastian had been as the man before Dazen turned his palms up helplessly, but then he tossed his head to the side as if very-unsubtly subtly trying to direct Dazen’s attention.

  Dazen turned and saw his brother was trying to get him to look at the Great Mirror. He snorted and then shook his head. “Goddammit, Sevastian.”

  “Rather the opposite, I hope,” Sevastian said, suddenly serious.

  Dazen looked at the Great Mirror. In all the long day of fighting, he’d never had a moment to spare to question the thing. The monument stood impossibly thin and tall, without supports, the wind bothering it not at all: an immense mirror, flawless except for that great crack, with only his experience having touched it and some old Tyrean Empire filigree as evidence that it was a physical thing at all, resting as if weightless on the ground as it did.

  He’d only seen glimpses of his own image reflected there. Hadn’t wanted to look longer, maybe.

  Now Gavin sneered at his second self. The figure seemed to flicker, seemed to split his head, as if his eyes were sending him opposing visions. He rubbed his right eye, wondering what was wrong with him.

  Through his dead eye, through the black seed crystal embedded there, he could see himself truly. Only his memory could be so perfect. Or maybe this was how madness felt—normal. He examined himself.

  Here behold Gavin Guile, in all his glory. Ha!

  As he barked a laugh, aloud, he saw the empty tooth socket where his dogtooth had been. He’d broken it out of his own head in his bid to escape prison beneath the Chromeria. It had been a longed-for freedom that was as much a lie as all his years of service. His dogtooth was gone.

  Nor was that the last of his deformities. He held up his left hand, as if waving to that loathsome figure: Hey! Looking good! The hand had only two fingers and a thumb.

  It—he—was gaunt, one-eyed, hardly more than one-handed, gap-toothed. He, who had been beauty itself. He was revealed, finally, as the wretch he had always been. A cripple outside where he’d been a cripple for years within.

  He’d told himself he was a victim of circumstance, who’d only chosen to survive.

  His heart plummeted.

  That was all lies, wasn’t it? He’d chosen to pursue his young love Karris after he’d barely met her, knowing his father would be outraged, knowing his elder brother would be furious. He’d chosen to strike the White Oaks when he was afraid. He’d chosen to keep that gate locked when he thought Karris’s lady-in-waiting had betrayed him. He’d not intended for anyone else to die, maybe, but he’d left her to the fire, to die a horrible death.

  Gavin hadn’t merely chosen to live; he’d chosen to kill so that he could live.

  ‘You know this is wrong! I see it in your eyes!’ a drafter had said to him on the night of a Freeing, furious, eyes straining his halos.

  How many times had Gavin heard some variation of those words? At every single Freeing. And often in between.

  Gavin staggered. Shying away from looking at his brother, he braced himself on the Great Mirror.

  Like spring ice, the cracked mirror gave way. His hand plunged through it.

  A chill shot through his entire body as if his blood we
re icing over, and when he ripped his arm back from the mirror’s cold grip, his hand was gone.

  He backed away from the mirror in horror, stumbled—fell.

  Cracks spidered from the hole in the mirror toward every edge.

  Pushing off the ground, Gavin leapt to his feet, certain some monstrous threat was about to pounce through it at him.

  Then he realized he had pushed off the ground with both hands. He couldn’t help but glance at his hand. It hadn’t been lopped off; he hadn’t lost it… but his flesh and bones had turned invisible; only weird, thick, dark veins remained, still opaque. As he turned his wrist, to his color-blind sight his veins were like black thorns waving in the wind, pulsing with a gentle darkness.

  He flexed the fingers of his glassine right hand. His hand was still there, whatever this illusion was, merely invisible except for the thorns within it.

  Up the mirror’s pure gleaming surface, the cracks shot toward heaven. As they finally touched the top of the mirror and every edge simultaneously, a boom like thunder shook him and the tower, then modulated with the wom-wom-wom of a great temple bell.

  It was so low it shook his belly and palpated the air in his lungs. The Great Mirror trembled.

  High above, over the top of the Great Mirror, blood began pulsing. Not spilling down the mirror’s surface as if poured out from a glass, but pumping, as if each of the myriad hearts Gavin had stilled was waking from death to condemn him. Rivulets streamed and stuck and raced together toward the ground, widened. The blood doubled and redoubled until not even a finger’s width of shining glass remained clean. Like a curtain dropping, the blood draped the mirror entire.

  It draped it red.

  All the world was black and white… and now red, as if Orholam, who gives and takes away, had now given him the cursed gift of seeing his own crimson guilt in vibrant color. In his world of gray and the leeched nothingness of white and the triumph of gathering midnight-black, the vermilion hues sank into his skull like daggers into his eye sockets.