The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Andross sighed again. “In the last extremity, your duty to protect the Prism is replaced by your duty to protect the Seven Satrapies from the Prism. This, you damned fool, is the last extremity.”

  “Oh! Yessir!” the Blackguard said.

  Then he ran.

  Kip turned to follow him.

  “Hold,” Andross said. “The bane will come ashore in mere minutes. I’ve lookouts posted to let me know the moment it happens.” He pointed up to the orange tower where a man with a hand mirror stood waiting on a side balcony of a tower above them, ready to relay the signal.

  “I don’t understand,” Kip said. “What does it matter?”

  “For one reason—that you can look at two different ways. There was a lost prophecy hidden in a forbidden scroll at the Great Library in Azûlay. I recovered it at… great cost to our family, not least yourself. It said the Seven Satrapies would be plunged into a thousand years of night if the Lightbringer didn’t stand on the shores of the Jaspers when the bane made landfall—as in literally where the water touches land. So one way of looking at that is this: if you’re not standing on the shore when the bane land, you can’t be the Lightbringer. The other way is that if you are the Lightbringer, you’d damned well better be standing on the shore, or it’ll mean a thousand years of night for all of us.

  “Either way, Kip… when history calls your name, you raise your damn hand.”

  “Are you telling me that’s why you’ve been standing down here holding your dick while you could have been stopping Zymun?” Kip demanded. “Because of some idiotic prophecy?”

  “He’ll be stopped soon, regardless,” Andross said. “A bet thirty-eight years in the making is about to be decided. The last card flipped. I’m not about to walk away from the table now. Zymun’s nothing. He’s got no money, no connections, certainly no friends. And very little time left.”

  Kip said, “No money? It doesn’t matter who has the money; it only matters who has the guns!”

  “You’re missing the forest for the trees.”

  “One of those trees is on fire!”

  “Kip. This is your last chance. Two minutes. Maybe five. If you’re the Lightbringer, you’ve got to be here. If you leave, I will take the mantle of that office from you. Someone must save this empire, and if you won’t, I will.”

  “By standing here?” Kip said, “All this time. Everything you’ve seen and heard of me, and you still don’t know me at all, do you? I don’t care about being the Lightbringer. I—”

  “Yes, you do. There’s a time to lie about the scope of one’s ambitions. I should know. I’ve done it for all my life. But that time is past.”

  Zymun was killing people. The bane were landing, and Kip wasn’t helping the defense. But Kip felt that old surge of longing, to matter, to matter so much that no one could ever deny it, no one could underestimate or minimize or ignore him ever again. To have the respect he’d won from a few people be in everyone’s eyes.

  At the cost of a few extra dead defenders, people who would never know that Kip could have saved them but didn’t. Here’s all you could ever want, and the price for it will be paid by someone else.

  “I do want it. But I want to save my friends more. To hell with your prophecies. The Lightbringer can’t be the one who stands around waiting for the light. He’s the one who brings it.”

  “Kip! Grandson,” Andross said to his back, and his voiced seemed almost kind. “If you want to survive up there on the array, don’t draft. You’re no Prism. The power will break your halos in moments. It’ll burn you out. You break our enemies with your will. Earn your name, Breaker.”

  Kip glanced back at him over his shoulder, eyebrows drawn down. “As much as you don’t know me, grandfather… maybe I don’t know you, either. Farewell, sir.”

  * * *

  Andross watched as Kip ran back inside.

  Very little of the fat boy he’d once been clung to the man Kip had become, except his compassion, his loyalty. Andross liked that about him.

  Too bad. His leaving early surely meant that he, too, would ascend the heights and fail.

  Light flashed across Andross’s face and he looked up to the signalman with the hand mirror high on the side of the orange towers: The bane have made landfall. That signalman was merely passing along a message from another spotter. It would have taken several moments at each station to confirm the message and then pass it along. Kip might have still been standing on the shoreline at the moment the bane landed.

  Inconclusive. How annoying.

  But, after all, Kip was still only the backup plan. Andross sent a man on ahead to order his supper sent to his stateroom. It was going to be a long day, and he’d need his strength. He’d take a bite to eat and await Kip’s failure before heading up to the mirrors himself.

  “I thought You’d beat me,” Andross said aloud, slowly turning a bitter gaze to the heavens. “But perhaps I may yet snatch the victory from Your greedy hands.”

  Chapter 117

  A thunderous waterfall blasted Dazen off his feet. He tumbled and rolled across bright marble, coming to rest with his head in his arms, bruised and battered and dazed, eyes stinging from the force of the blast.

  But he wasn’t wet.

  And as far as he could tell, he wasn’t dead, either.

  He moved to push himself up off the ground and saw his arms. Both had gone fully invisible, except for those black thorns within them. He sat up to his knees and saw his dream made flesh: the black thorns were everywhere twined through his transparent flesh, everywhere weakening him, wrapped around his heart, infiltrating it in such fine threads it turned the sadly palpitating, pitiful pink organ gray.

  He didn’t dare look at the mirror. His whole body was a playground of jagged dark thorns, and he didn’t want to see it, didn’t know if he could handle loathing himself more.

  Okay, he thought. Maybe I’m dead after all. This could be hell. A very tricky introduction to it, what with the bloodfall and the bright colors, but—

  The colors. They struck him all at once. God damn.

  Dazen stood and took in the world. The stone at his feet was white marble, here. So too was everything changed, better. This was like a bright reflection of the real world.

  No, that was exactly backward, he thought; this was the real world, and he’d lived in the dim reflection of it for his entire life.

  The mirror stood just as tall here as it did atop the tower in his world, but the cataract here poured pure water. It flowed clear and bright and everywhere it brought life. Instead of howling, the wind soughed sweetly.

  The tower itself was shaped somewhat differently, but Dazen lost all track of his thoughts as he saw the sunset.

  His heart swelled within its black-barbed cage as he beheld the polychromatic miracle of a sunset once again. Here, with the sun just down, every hue wielded the weight of glory.

  A long moment passed before he remembered to breathe.

  For the first time he could remember since he was a boy, his mind went quiet. He turned from wonder to wonder, to see the winking stars brighten in their realms, to see the million gradations of color from the blackness of the night yielding to ruddy vitality on the horizon. The cosmos stretched luxuriant above him, around him, embracing him.

  He could stay here forever, watching wonders unfold like the petals of a flower opening and opening anew. But then he felt his skin tingling. Reluctantly, he looked at himself again. Frowned.

  A droplet of the bright water standing suspended on his invisible arm suddenly soaked into the skin, like rain into thirsty soil—and his skin blossomed from invisibility into visibility. Everywhere he’d been immersed—so, everywhere—Dazen saw his skin not so much reappear as seem to grow anew at the touch of the water. He held up his left hand, which was tingling sharply, and saw his pinky and ring fingers grow afresh from the hacked-off stubs the Nuqaba had left him with. He tapped the whole, perfect digits with his thumb, bewildered. There was feeling in them.


  He dropped his hand to his side, though, and felt a flash of rage.

  This wasn’t real. This could only be some new kind of torture. It was a trap, right?

  And now he looked around intently, as he should have from the very first moment, for his Enemy.

  But he could see no one else. He circled the tower peak slowly, to see if anyone hid behind the mirror.

  The tower itself looked slightly odd, so once Dazen had assured himself that he was alone, he went to one edge. The tower itself wasn’t black as it was on his side of the mirror. Here it was lambent white, all the way up.

  On a whim, Gavin went to the side where he’d left the old prophet below him.

  Of course he wasn’t there.

  “Orholam isn’t here, either,” Gavin said.

  He suddenly barked a sad laugh. Orholam isn’t here.

  There’s nothing here.

  It’s beautiful… and there’s nothing for me here.

  I came all this way, and now I’ve lost everything, and there’s nothing here.

  Every effort had been wasted. Deluded.

  Then he felt something tingling deep within him. He knew instantly what it was. It was as if a flame had touched an old black wick. He looked up to where the sky was still blue—and drafted blue luxin into his palm. Then he did the same with red. And with every color in turn.

  His gift had been restored.

  But only to torture him.

  He sighed out all his hope. He released the colors from limp hands and groaned.

  Maybe he should climb down the tower. Maybe he should try to live here, in this better world, where he was whole. Maybe there were versions here of all the people he had known… though that didn’t make sense. Sevastian and the old prophet were gone.

  No. There was nothing for him here. It was perfect, and he was not. No matter that his skin had regrown, he could still feel those black thorns inside his body, sapping his strength, rending his flesh anew with every movement, no matter that here he healed immediately.

  He’d made it here. Alive. He’d invaded Orholam’s own realm. But he didn’t belong here.

  He looked at the great waterfall. He knew that when he went through it again, back to his world, he’d lose his fingers and his powers and even his color vision. Again.

  He’d thought he might die, invading this realm, and instead he’d found life. Now, going back, he would find his drab life, adorned only with all the encroachments of death.

  The black eye throbbed. It felt like it had been loosened in his skull by the cascading water, and now it ached. Gavin rubbed around it, carefully. He couldn’t bear to touch the damned thing here.

  He took one last look around, locking the colors in the vault of his memory, and then before he could lose his courage, he took one last deep breath of air, so pure it made his lungs ache with goodness, and ducked quickly back through the waterfall—

  —emerging soaked in blood.

  He was disgusted, angry, full of contempt for the meanness, the stench, the sticky grotesquerie of all this world. It could be all he had just seen, and was relentlessly not.

  Beauty is possible, but we choose ugliness.

  He scraped the streaming, steaming, sticky blood from his face, and eyes, using his hand as a strigil to scrape away all the accusatory gore. His two fingers were gone again, as he knew they would be. Dogtooth gone. His sight once again black, white, and red.

  Of course the red remained.

  His gift was gone. Of course it was.

  And his brother was gone. Sevastian, the one last good thing in this world was gone.

  And yet Gavin lived, still. As ever.

  Then he saw a familiar figure. The old prophet was sitting over at the edge of the tower, watching the sunset, heedless of the slow cascade of blood, sitting in it, apparently unperturbed by the mess. Apparently, the bloodfall from above had alarmed the old man and spurred him to make the last bit of the climb to find out what the hell was going on.

  Gavin wondered how big the gap had been when Orholam had jumped it. Probably small. Old bastard.

  Gavin walked over toward him. The sword was on the way. He picked it up, bloody as it was from the endless stream pouring past it. Gavin was exhausted. What was he gonna do? Hack apart the mirror, hoping it accomplished something?

  He’d carried this damn blade halfway across the world. What had it done for him? It was as useless as he was.

  He was sick of it. Sick of his own shit.

  Without thinking too much—hell, he’d thought too much for his whole life—he simply threw the blade.

  The throw was as pathetic and weak as he was, in body and in will; he couldn’t even commit to throwing it hard. He threw it sort of to Orholam, sort of at him, and sort of toward the edge, that it might fall into oblivion.

  He didn’t even choose, merely tossed it away. But then, it was trash, like his plans; he didn’t care about it anymore.

  The blade clattered and slid and stopped short of the edge and Orholam both.

  The old prophet turned and looked at it, then at Gavin, then turned back to looking at the horizon without taking any more interest.

  Gavin strode over to the old man.

  The old man didn’t respond, so Gavin sat. He dangled his feet off the edge of the bloody tower.

  Orholam didn’t say a word. Gavin was reminded of their days rowing together. After a long hard day of rowing, sometimes, a rest would come, and they would simply sit. In such times, there would be no chatter. Bone-weary, there was nothing to say, but there was a silent communion in the rest from their mutual labor.

  As they had then, now in the cool of the evening, they sat together.

  What did anything matter now? There was no rush. It was too late. Someone else was steering the ship. Someone else calling the cadence. A broken-down slave wasn’t going to change history.

  Gavin was about to be cut free from his oar and tossed overboard; he was human jetsam.

  In his dream of this tower top, Gavin had begged the approaching giant for more time; he’d wanted to fix things. Fix himself, he supposed, as he’d held his black-marbled heart in his hands, as if he could disentangle the living and the dead flesh knotted together using instruments as blunt and clumsy as his fingers.

  The truth was, he was hopelessly broken, and time wasn’t going to fix him. Now he was out of time. But maybe he’d been out of time for years. If he’d had another century, he would still be himself.

  But a stillness descended on him as he sat there with the old man. He beheld the horizon, and though he saw only in a bichromatic palette made painful by his recent vision of the sunset in full color on the other side of the glass, he was filled to overflowing with wonder. What was absent to his blinded eyes was yet there.

  He could remember beauty, could remember how this gray-scale tone would correspond to a lemon yellow blushing to sweet tangerine. Velvet violet was stitched with subtle seams into the soft samite blanket of night, embroidered with silver points of light.

  It was there, and he knew it was there, knew it was more real than what his eyes could presently see.

  “What do you miss most?” Orholam asked quietly, not turning.

  They’d failed together, Gavin supposed. Orholam had climbed up here, after he’d been ‘told’ not to come, and perhaps he believed now he was being punished for his disobedience by finding nothing here. His world had to be shit right now, too.

  What came to mind wasn’t what Gavin expected, though.

  “When I called down that… holocaust at Sundered Rock, I didn’t know what it was going to do. Not exactly. I mean, I knew it was going be bad, but… I came to, standing there, naked. The black just devoured everything. And that hot day turned cold. Bitter cold. Frigid. Even my brother’s body was cold. I couldn’t tell how long it had been—if I’d been unconscious on my feet for hours, or if the hellstone magic sucked in even heat and it had only been moments.

  “You know, I was the one person on that battlefie
ld who should have understood what had happened, and I was… baffled. My skin was hairless in spots, but unharmed otherwise, but my clothes had disintegrated? I felt I had broken the world, like I’d cracked open an egg and something terrible had been released. But in that moment, there, among the dead… even the dying didn’t seem to moan. Or maybe I was deaf. I don’t know, but it was so still, as if a ripple of what I’d done was traveling out to infinity. Amid all that, I experienced this moment out of time, as if passing realms had locked here and the pressure had built until the earth heaved and everything fractured. Suddenly the landscape was changed, and you could only pray that the tensions had been relieved and that the aftershocks wouldn’t destroy you.

  “Something had happened that was bigger than I could even understand… but it had passed, and these stupid, normal, boring-ass concerns came rushing back. Like: I was naked. And I couldn’t find my friends. And first it, it, it wasn’t even that I was afraid they were all dead or that I’d killed them. I couldn’t even think that far ahead. I only knew I was lonely. After all that? After this conflagration of magic the likes of which no one had ever seen or even heard of? No one cared if some guy on the battlefield was naked and his hair didn’t look right or some shit. But I was cold, and I saw Gavin had clothes and there—at the end of the fucking world!—it made me remember this one time when we were kids.

  “We’d stopped on one of the little islands my father owned on our way between Rath and Big Jasper and we snuck out late one night and hiked up the mountain to look for this old ruin—which we’d been forbidden to do, of course. And we’d been going for hours and there was a sudden storm, and I’d left my cloak back at my room, and I thought Gavin was going to tell me what an idiot I was. He’d even reminded me to bring it. But instead of mocking me or hitting me—” Gavin’s voice cracked suddenly. He had to clear his throat hard. “Instead Gavin… Gavin hugged me under one arm and gave me his cloak. He said he was too hot. The damn liar. Asked me if I’d wear it home for him.”

  Gavin cleared his throat, irritated. “He didn’t deserve—I mean, at Sundered Rock I was naked and stupidly embarrassed about it and he had clothes and was dead, and I, I just took them. It seemed really practical, you know? He didn’t need ’em, right? But I looked back at it, and I stripped the dead like a looter. I stripped my brother’s corpse like a grave robber. It was like I’d planned, you know, with Corvan. I mean, it was one possible outcome of like six: set a bunch of smoky red luxin on fire, come out as Gavin, take charge of his armies and pretend to be him… I’ve never had a plan go so flawlessly and so poorly.