The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Right. Whatever.”

  “I sent others, over the centuries. Some denied the call. Others were killed. Others were seduced, corrupted before they could fulfill their purpose. The sea demons, for example.”

  “The—wait, what?”

  “Lucidonius was to be the Lightbringer. He turned aside. Chose conquest. Sought godhood. And then, in terror of my judgment, he sought immortality. He soul-cast himself into the gentle creature that had been his servant and friend. Lucidonius became the first sea demon. He swims still. All the later ones took their inspiration from him.”

  He swims still? Gavin’s jaw went slack. He’d fought Lucidonius himself: the greatest of the sea demons had smashed the Golden Mean onto the reef.

  “Wait, wait, wait, how come no one at the Chromeria told me this?” he asked. “I was the Prism. The emperor! I was even promachos for a while!”

  “Would you tell Gavin Guile how to find immortality, knowing what it would cost everyone else?” the old prophet asked.

  My God. That was the real reason Karris Atiriel had created the Blackguard: they guarded the black secret. What had seemed the contradictory goals of guarding his life and ensuring his death weren’t opposed at all: they guarded the Prism and his honor—by forcibly marching him to an honorable death, if necessary. As brothers in arms would kill a compatriot drafter out of mercy if she broke the halo, so the Blackguard would kill the Prism before they’d let him become a monster forever. “You’re telling me the sea demons are all former Prisms?”

  A gentle head shake. “Most were, and all those who remain are, but the magic is possible for others.”

  It was all suddenly too much.

  Too much explanation. A prophet might know many hidden things, sure, but all of this? So clearly? Plain answers and not a goddamned rhyme in the whole thing?

  Gavin took a step back. His throat suddenly felt like a fist had clamped around it.

  As if retreating from a snarling dog, pretending his heart wasn’t laboring, he staggered to his feet, and stepped back and back.

  The old prophet watched him, amused. He didn’t pursue him.

  That didn’t make Gavin feel any better.

  There was something sinister in that amusement, wasn’t there? Gavin’s heart clenched with the old feeling like he was going to die.

  He reached the spot he wanted at the edge and craned his neck to look over to the level below him.

  Gavin was standing directly above that gap he’d had to leap across before he could climb the final stairs to the tower’s top—the gap where he’d left Orholam.

  An old man was still down there, directly below Dazen, on his knees, scowling at all the blood. He looked up suddenly. “Gavin?! You’re still alive! Hey, is there someone up there with you? I thought I saw someone’s back a few—hey, Gavin!”

  But Dazen had whipped his head around, startled back from the edge. The doppelgänger was still up here, now standing mere feet away from him, though Dazen hadn’t heard him move. It was holding the gun-sword.

  A chill shot down Dazen’s spine. His breath caught. He took a step backward and felt his heel shift on the empty air beyond the tower’s edge.

  The doppelgänger poked the gun-sword into the bloody ground and folded his hands atop it as if it were a walking stick and he simply a kindly old man.

  Looking between the two copies of the same man, one before him and one below him, Dazen addressed the deceiver on the tower’s top with him. “You tricked me! You’re not Orholam!”

  The old man leaned on the gun-sword. He smiled. “Oh, but I Am.”

  Chapter 121

  “Where the hell’d they go?” Kip said.

  He and his men had been bracing for battle with the forty or fifty Lightguards that had been guarding the lift. He’d even come up with a plan to get the jump on them, but it hadn’t been a good one. He’d expected to spill blood.

  But the thugs were simply gone.

  “We, uh, detained them,” a soft-looking young nobleman said. He appeared to be the last person who could have done such a thing.

  Kip and his men looked at each other. Someone triggered the lift to summon it. They weren’t going to slow too much to investigate a mystery right now; they needed to get to the roof.

  “The Iron White came. She showed us how,” a woman volunteered.

  “And Commander Fisk,” the first man said. “The stones on that guy! I’m surprised he doesn’t have to travel with a wheelbarrow.”

  Kip lifted an eyebrow and the man fell silent. “They left? Just now?”

  He got nods all around.

  “They were going to kill her! They were taking her to execute her!” someone said.

  “We’ve got those bastards disarmed and locked in a storage room. Do you want to—”

  Kip shook his head as the lift arrived. He didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth: not having to have a battle with the Lightguards here was a huge boon, but Andross had assumed Commander Fisk would stay at his post upstairs with Zymun. Fisk was supposed to be using those giant stones of his to lead the Blackguard in killing Zymun after he went wight.

  I can’t exactly be mad that Fisk is saving Karris instead… but as a general, I’m furious.

  Of course, Andross surely hadn’t told Fisk his plan. Andross never told anyone his plans for fear they’d screw them up. So it was Andross’s fault. In a battle, there were too many moving parts to manage every detail, too many players acting in extreme ways for even an Andross Guile to predict everything.

  There was no one for whom Fisk would leave his post—except for Karris, and only if her life were in danger.

  The lift took them up to the penultimate level, where they had to switch lifts to get to the highest level.

  Kip’s chest felt tight. “You feel it?” he asked as they set the weights.

  Nods all around. The dull thrum of the bane could be felt in all of their bones, but that was the next fight. This one was enough for now.

  The Mighty were checking their weapons, never mind they’d checked them minutes before.

  The lift opened to the Prism’s and White’s level of the tower. The Mighty and the best of their compatriots presented a hedgehog of muskets, drawn arrows, spears, and crossbow bolts—to an empty foyer.

  No one stood at the checkpoint here, or farther down the hallway. It made things infinitely easier for Kip and his people—this hall could be held at the checkpoints by a dozen men with muskets for hours.

  Good luck? Kip was so unfamiliar with the creature he didn’t dare trust it.

  “Superviolets, sub-reds, out!” Big Leo said, suddenly every bit the commander.

  Kip, with nothing to do until others finished their work, thought idly, ‘Commander Big Leo’?

  Huh. That did sound a bit awkward. ‘Commander Leonidas’?

  Hmm. Maybe so.

  If we live.

  The superviolets and sub-reds streamed out of the lift, checking for traps. Kip thought again of Teia. Orholam, but it would have been nice to have Teia here. She was so fast, so sharp.

  And so absent. Curled up in her darkened room, shivering against the lacrimae sanguinis in her very eyes, hoping it might wear off before it killed her.

  They all wanted to be with her, to give her all the comfort and companionship she deserved. Kip had a million things to say, a thousand apologies—but war silenced all.

  They motioned an all clear, and Big Leo motioned everyone forward. Kip wasn’t allowed to lead, not into what could be an ambush.

  They made it all the way to the doors to the roof. What was wrong with the Lightguards? Not even a lookout out here? It was odd to be reminded that the enemy could be poorly led, too. Even at the top, it wasn’t always geniuses and masterminds. Sometimes it was just thugs willing to work with the worst kinds of masters. Sometimes it was the amoral, selected primarily for their skills at bootlicking.

  Still, no soldiers here didn’t mean Kip wasn’t going to barge into the middle of a hundred
on the other side of these doors.

  So the Mighty stacked up at the doors to the roof, forty men. Ferkudi—with no sign of the silly, dopey, spacey Ferkudi he so often lapsed into—was giving rapid hand signals to the warriors in the stack.

  For the space of a few heartbeats, Kip saw the young man blurred with the boy he had been. Big, soft, dopey Ferkudi, the butt of all the jokes, the oblivious knucklehead who could oddly do long calculations in his head had turned into this lethal warrior, this leader of men.

  And yet he was Ferkudi still. He wasn’t one or the other; he was one or the other as the situation demanded.

  Kip loved them both.

  And he was terrified that he was going to get his friend killed.

  But not terrified to inaction.

  Kip checked his pistols’ load and action and flint and frizzen. No luxin, not now.

  Big Leo looked to him. Kip nodded.

  The commander gave the tempo with one hand. Took a breath.

  Three. Two. Boom!

  They charged up the stairs onto the roof, fanning out.

  In mere seconds, the forty were on the roof, guns pointed every direction.

  There were a mere dozen people on the roof: six Lightguards, who raised their muskets to the sky instantly; two trembling courtiers; two messengers; and two scantily clad young slave women.

  No Zymun.

  “Where is he?” Kip bellowed into the face of one of the courtiers.

  “Sir, I—”

  “Where?!”

  “He had to… he had to answer the call of nature, sir.”

  “He broke the halo,” one of the women said with a hollow tone. She had the look of one who’d been traumatized by Zymun and was courageously fighting to reclaim herself. “His eyes bled. Sub-red. They took him downstairs.”

  The courtier looked at her with rage. Advancing on her and lifting a hand, he said, “We were ordered not to—”

  Big Leo pummeled the man across the jaw.

  The courtier skidded across the ground, unconscious, maybe dead.

  Kip turned to Ben-hadad. “Take twenty men. Arrest him or kill him.”

  “And if they look to fight back? It’ll threaten civil war,” Ben said.

  “That war would end as soon as he’s dead,” Kip said.

  “Got it,” Ben said. And left.

  Kip realized that his friend was not even going to try to arrest Zymun.

  But it just wasn’t a priority now.

  “Quickly, my lord,” someone said.

  Kip turned to the enormous crystal that hung suspended between great iron arms, half of its circumference enshrouded in mirrors. Kip grabbed the straps and golden hand grips and beautifully carven sigils of Prisms past and levered himself into place. Others strapped him in.

  Just in time.

  For roaring over the horizon, already nearing the Jaspers, the first of the lux storms was coming.

  Chapter 122

  Dazen couldn’t claim that he dropped to his knees out of piety, but he certainly dropped to his knees.

  There was no denial. The pieces snapped together all too tightly. There was even a certain whimsy to it: Dazen had deceived the world to hide his identity; Orholam had deceived Dazen by hiding His own—and He’d hidden behind His own real name.

  “I brought you a tribute,” Dazen said, motioning to the gun-sword he’d discarded. “I see you found it already. Good handiwork. Shoot an apple clean out of a fool’s mouth at forty paces. Farther if you’re not on a heaving ship. Or if you’re God, I suppose.”

  He didn’t know why he was doing this. Maybe no form of address seemed right, coming from him. Certainly not all the high-priestly benedictions he’d parroted, those rote noises from a liar, who’d believed they were lies every time he’d said them before in his life.

  “You call this a tribute?” Orholam asked, patting the blade.

  “A certain prophet told me bringing an offering was customary.”

  “Oh, you’re following what’s customary now?” Orholam asked.

  “Worth a shot…?” Gavin asked. He wanted to stand, but he hadn’t the strength for it. Blood swirled around his knees and over the edge. “No pun intended. Gun-sword. Shot. You—” He stopped at Orholam’s look. “Right, you probably know what I intend, huh?”

  Orholam didn’t look amused. “You wouldn’t give your garbage to a beggar and expect his gratitude. You threw this away. Should I be grateful for you giving Me your garbage?”

  He had him there. “Uh. I dunno. Thought maybe you could use it?”

  “You think that to accomplish My will I need an old sword that’s lost its edge?”

  Dazen said, “Probably not? Wait, are you calling me an old sword?”

  “Haven’t lost your edge, after all.”

  “Or at least not all my edge,” Dazen said.

  “Lot of edge up here, if you lose it.”

  Dazen couldn’t help but crack a smile.

  Yep. This was it.

  Certain proof.

  He’d gone mad.

  This wasn’t how this would go, if it were real. If it were real, there would be ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s. There would be ponderous grammar straight out of Doni’el Machos.

  Orholam merely studied him in the fading light.

  “You know,” Gavin said, “I hadn’t thought of you having… well, personality. No offense. You know what I mean, right? I kinda like you. Despite myself. You oughta come down every once in a while. Mix with the locals.”

  “That’s a great idea. I’ll have to consider it.” There was a certain flatness to the tone. A little jab at Gavin’s honestly giving suggestions. To God. As if God had never thought of them.

  Gavin scowled. “You… you already do? Walk around incognito and all?”

  Orholam merely lifted his eyebrows.

  “Damn! Er, sorry. Well then, you really should come visit the Chromeria. Sit in on a Spectrum meeting. You’d straighten a few things out real quick, I think.”

  “Quick? In a committee meeting?”

  Dazen laughed aloud. “No, you’re right. I can just imagine you floating in, all glowy, trumpets blaring, ready to orate, and Klytos Blue suddenly interjecting, ‘Point of order! Has the gentleman in the clouds of glory been granted the floor?’”

  They laughed together.

  Madness was more fun than it had any right to be.

  Then Gavin said, “Comedy must really suck for you, huh? I mean, you’ve gotta always see the punchline coming, right?”

  “It’s all in the delivery,” Orholam said. He gave a sly grin. “Speaking of which…”

  Dazen swallowed. “I’m not gonna like what you say next, am I?”

  “No.” The joviality was abruptly gone. “You’re supposed to deliver a tribute.”

  “So you were really serious about the garbage thing? Like, the gun-sword doesn’t count?” Gavin said. “I mean…”

  “Oh, I’m not above using others’ garbage. I’ll use a stone the builders reject as a cornerstone, but you can’t give Me as tribute what’s garbage to you. That’s no sacrifice. I’m a healer to healers and a servant to servants, but to kings I’m a king—not a slave.”

  The last layer of denial fell away as Dazen saw finally the sense of it.

  He wasn’t mad.

  Orholam wasn’t one simplistic personality. He was vast. One person could only behold so much of Him. Encountering Him was like trying to see a gem the size of the earth itself, made of every color inside and outside the visible spectrum: the human eye and a mortal’s mind’s eye could only behold so much and so truly. Gavin himself was a wit, funny and kind, but at the end of the day, he was definitely the emperor, and he wouldn’t allow anyone to forget it. So Orholam appeared to him thus, a divine mirror, so that Gavin might have some hope of understanding a part of the truth, a corporeal synecdoche: a part standing in for the whole.

  “I’ve got nothing that’s a fitting tribute for You,” Dazen said. “I’m broken-down trash myself.”
>
  “I accept.”

  “What?”

  “You! I accept! With delight! An excellent tribute. None finer.”

  “Me?! You don’t need me. You just said—”

  “Does a king need friends?” Orholam asked.

  “What? What?” Dazen knew how Gavin would’ve answered, but he also knew it would be wrong.

  “Does a father need his children?” Orholam asked. “Does a mother need the babe in her arms?”

  “Of course not. But… yes? Not need need, but that’s totally different. What are You saying?”

  Dazen thought of his own father and what it had done to Andross to think he didn’t need his children. He thought of his mother, who’d been so broken by her own loss. And he thought of Kip, and what he himself must have done to Kip, thinking the boy didn’t need need Dazen to stand in as his father.

  Dazen said, “I see what You’re saying, though it’s not exactly an apt meta—”

  “Perfectly apt. Will you come be My son?”

  What?! Dazen couldn’t wrap his head around that. It didn’t make sense.

  But what was perfectly clear was the ruin he’d left everywhere in his wake. He could see in color sharper and more jagged than all his memories. He could remember sliding the dagger home into ribs, over and over, until he was numbed to the deed.

  And he’d done it thousands of times. Thousands.

  He’d known the Freeing was wrong, and he’d done it anyway.

  Gavin knew what he was. Orholam had to know it, too, or he wasn’t Orholam.

  A wave of self-loathing crested over him, a tide of blood guilt as unending as the blood river coursing past his knees. Gavin didn’t deserve acceptance, forgiveness, or anything soft and good, certainly not love, certainly not from Orholam Himself.

  He sucked in a breath, and it was heavy with the stench of fresh blood. It was time to end this. “You gave me a chance, before. Not one—hundreds. Every voice that cried out and told me what my conscience had already shouted at me was another. You even put me in chains, but I saw myself as an emperor in chains, but never a slave. I could never see myself as a wretch, wretched as I was. ‘I wouldn’t give trash even to a beggar,’ You said. And You’re right. You want me? Fine. I’m yours. But not as a son. I don’t deserve that. That’s not a punishment. Let me pay for all those deaths with all my remaining life. Let me be Your slave.”