The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

“—dear. You know we’ve a tradition in the Guile family of passing around our whores. My own mother rushed from my uncle’s bed to my father’s as soon as she figured out which one was a winner. Some people might call that slatternly or opportunistic. Terrible things to say about a woman in such a vulnerable position, though. She was just making the best of it, wasn’t she? And look! Now she’s the White, and no one even talks about her tawdry early days. Me? I don’t call a woman like her a disloyal whore, I call her practical. Besides, who wants to share a loser’s bed? You ought to consider trying her approach: find out what it’s like to be fucked by a winner, for once. Tonight, maybe? I can promise you won’t remember Kip’s name by dawn. Hell, you might not even remember your own.”

  He looked up at his men, and the Lightguards laughed belatedly like the sycophants they were. Some of them chuckled awkwardly instead, like men who suddenly felt like they’d gotten into something much worse than they’d bargained for.

  Tisis launched herself at him, screaming incoherently.

  He slapped her hard, as if he’d been waiting for it.

  Then he leaned over, just as Quentin finally made his way to the front.

  “Careful, sweetheart. I’m going to interpret that pathetic attack as spirit, fire, whatever you want to call it. But do it again, and I call it treason. And you’ve seen what I do to traitors.” He turned. “Now, then, what’s happening up on top of my tower?”

  Tisis’s nose was streaming blood, but she rose to her hands and knees.

  Just in front of her, one of the Lightguard shifted his weight and put a hand on his hip, flaring his cloak out around where his pistol was tucked, cocking it with the back of his hand as he did so, as if by accident. He cleared his throat to cover the sound, looking away.

  Zymun’s back was turned, and the Lightguards were turning with him to head back to the Chromeria.

  Tisis leapt to her feet, grabbing the pistol from the Lightguard’s belt. She leveled it at the back of Zymun’s head, not a pace away.

  But a spear butt flashed up between them and threw the pistol into the sky. And in a blink the spear’s holder—the Lightguard commander, Aram—was holding Tisis, his spear under her neck, choking her.

  “Treason!” Aram shouted.

  Several other Lightguards took up the shout. It all had the feeling of something poorly choreographed. The people in the square looked merely horrified.

  “My lord!” Aram said loudly. “What should we do with this traitor?”

  Zymun put his hand to his heart as if sorely wounded. “No, no, no. Tisis, why?!” He lowered his voice. “Thank you for giving me the excuse, my dear. Oh, and just so you know—that pistol wasn’t even loaded. You stupid, stupid girl.”

  He turned back to the crowd. “The Glare is too cruel for this poor woman. And I shouldn’t want her to have to wait for justice. Who knows what might happen before tomorrow? Put a rope up on the Glare, and hang her. Immediately.”

  “No!” someone cried out in the crowd.

  Zymun went purple. “What? You saw what she just tried to do! She tried to kill me!”

  “Mercy, my lord, mercy!” someone shouted.

  Others began to take up the chant.

  “Enough!” Zymun screamed. “Who the fuck do all you people think you are, anyway? I am the High Lord Prism Zymun Guile. I am untouchable. Invincible. To dare to raise your hand against me is to die! And anyone who says different will share this traitor’s fate. The next to shout for mercy will hang beside her. This I swear!”

  The crowd fell silent, aghast. A young man stepped forward as if to shout—but his family grabbed him and clamped a hand over his mouth.

  “What’s the holdup?” Zymun demanded. “Hang her!”

  The Lightguards shuffled their feet. “Sir, there’s… We don’t have any rope. All the supplies like that have been taken for the barricades. We—”

  Zymun cursed them. “No one has rope? Surely someone here has rope! And someone, give me a musket. No, no, a blunderbuss. We Guiles are hard to kill, and I need to make sure about my brother.”

  Quentin could tell no one was going to offer rope, not even if they had it.

  Suddenly, he found himself stepping forward. “My lord! High Lord Prism, I don’t have a rope, but… but I do have this good strong belt.”

  “Off with it, then. I have things to do.”

  Quentin began unwinding his silk belt. He said, “I have a confession to make, High Lord Prism. As you are now the head of our faith, it is forbidden for me to keep secrets from you. Too long the High Magisterium has violated this dictum. With Gavin Guile, we—”

  “Oh, hurry it up,” Zymun said. To a Lightguard, he said, “There, that blunderbuss. It is loaded, yes?”

  “Lord Prism,” Quentin said loudly, “by the command of the promachos and the White, I was invested as a luxor.”

  “A luxor?” Zymun asked.

  “Yes, my lord. My sacred and, until now, secret duty is to root out filth in the Chromeria.”

  “Good, good,” Zymun said, checking the flint. “I can certainly put you to work—”

  With a tone of certainty and authority that Quentin had never before heard in his own voice, he declared, “In the eyes of God and the Magisterium, you, sir, are filth.”

  “What?” Zymun asked, looking up, more surprised than outraged.

  None of the Lightguards had thought to train a musket on the effete little rich-robed young man who was helping them. His two hands came up, and the two hammers of the most expensive pistols money could buy came down.

  They fired simultaneously, blowing off half of Zymun’s head.

  Both pistols had fired. Ilytian handiwork. One had to admire that. The Ilytians made fine pistols.

  Chapter 137

  This time, the magic came easily. It hit Dazen like liquid joy, spreading throughout his body as if he were a starving man eating a ripe peach, licking the juice from his fingertips, exulting in the sweetness.

  As black had marched him like a prisoner to the brink of death, so white freed him and filled him with vigor. Within moments of beginning to drink from the fountain at his feet, he felt as if he had slept a long, full night in a feather bed and awakened to a gentle dawn, his bride warm beside him and the smells of a fine repast filling his nostrils.

  White luxin was Orholam’s warm regard for the world.

  How did we lose this? How could we let this go?

  Like that sleeper waking, stretching his arms, Dazen stretched out his magic luxuriously toward the Chromeria, and the pains stretching thus brought him were pains leaving his body. White blazed out from him to the horizon and beyond, toward his beloved islands, his beloved wife, and all those many others he loved there. It was a great gift—a privilege!—to bring such light.

  Dazen’s will burned white through the darkness, over the face of waters as if tracing the white-luxin line Kip had thrown toward him back to its source.

  As he raced back, he felt a whisper of will in the fading white luxin Kip had cast. Was it a prayer? Desperation, but no message was discernible at this distance as the luxin was disappearing. Dazen’s heart leapt. It was Kip’s will, Kip’s voice!

  Kip was alive?!

  But then he realized, like a distant cannon’s flash outruns the sound of its firing, that what he was sensing now, becoming clearer and clearer with every league his will came closer, was only the last echo of his dead son’s voice. And yet he grabbed after it, desperately, that this one remaining piece of Kip might not be lost to him.

  The message became clear only as Dazen closed on the Jaspers themselves.

  “Please! God! Please, someone finish what I’ve…”

  And that was it. Weakly, the voice and the will that had sustained it had trailed off.

  Dazen had just heard his son’s final words.

  And now the final filaments of the magic decayed so that even that message was lost. Bereaved afresh, Dazen’s will burst back through the still-smoking broken mirror that the slav
e boy Alvaro had sabotaged, and thence into the mirror network itself.

  Kip was gone—dead and removed now from the execution scaffold and the mirrors’ grasp. No trace of living will remained, but the luxin he’d been weaving had not yet decayed completely, though it was unraveling by the moment.

  What were you doing, son?

  It had something to do with the mirror array, but Kip hadn’t averted the larger mirrors from himself—as any sane man being baked to death on Orholam’s Glare would’ve been trying to do. Why not?

  But there were seven fading streaks, like dim arrows of chi and white luxin. And then those, too, were gone.

  And now nothing of Kip remained.

  Finish what I’ve begun? What have you—

  Seven arrows. Seven different directions: if Dazen extended the lines, one pointed to each of the seven satrapies.

  The closest one was Blood Forest. In a blink, Dazen followed it like an arrow pointing him the right way, and there found his answer. There was a Great Mirror here, standing afresh in a place where no Great Mirror had been known to be mere months ago.

  Dazen’s will jumped to follow the next line, and the next.

  Every line of Kip’s magic pointed to a Great Mirror, some buried, most forgotten, and only the ones at Ru and Apple Grove fully operational.

  But why?

  And regardless, what use were mirrors at night?

  And then, as Dazen explored the mirrors, he found the answer for that as well. Each mirror tower held an odd reservoir, like liquid luxin of its own color within or beneath it. Tyrea’s Great Mirror outside Rekton brimmed with sub-red, a shrine outside Idoss stored red, Ru’s Great Mirror stored orange, Blood Forest’s held yellow, Melos—capital of the ancient united kingdom comprising most of Ruthgar and Blood Forest—held green, Paria held blue, and Ilyta superviolet.

  But why would Kip look for more light as he was dying from too much?

  Because he wasn’t looking for it for himself.

  Kip had given his life trying to bring light for his friends, who would need it to fight in the darkness. As night fell, the Chromeria’s drafters had no source—but here was a network of mirrors and lightwells throughout the world, with every color the defenders needed.

  One source of color in each of the Seven Satrapies, and Dazen himself stood atop an immeasurable source of white like a wheel’s axle around which all of them turned.

  Kip had pointed the way. Kip had discovered the design, so long forgotten, but only Dazen could cast his will so far that he might finish the tapestry Kip had begun.

  To raise even one tower holding a Great Mirror from its great hiding place underground would have daunted any drafter in the world. Only Dazen—maybe—had the strength to raise them all.

  So he did it.

  He cast his will to the easiest first, the mirror in Ru at the pinnacle of the mighty pyramid there, and he lashed its Great Mirror to his will. He felt the mirror turn and then shiver as it came into place, as if it were made for this, as if the mirror was settling into an old groove—and felt it lock, not on him but on the Great Mirror right behind him.

  Of course.

  Connected once again to its ancient network, under its cascading gardens and beautiful waterfalls, the surface of the Great Pyramid of Ru suddenly flowered with orange runes and ancient designs. Dazen heard cries of fear turn to shouts of delight as the people of Ru came forth to see this wonder. But he had no time to enjoy it with them. He’d already moved on.

  The Great Mirror in Blood Forest at Apple Grove had already been raised by Kip—but there were children playing at the base, in the way of the gears. They might be crushed if Dazen moved it without warning.

  He shook the Great Mirror, beginning the process. It threw several off their feet.

  Then he moved on. He’d come back.

  Outside the ruins of Kip’s home village of Rekton, within sight of Sundered Rock, he found a fallen statue, perhaps of the old Tyrean Empire warrior-priest Darjan. It once guarded and marked the mirror’s location. Dazen realized then that at least some of the Great Mirrors were older than Lucidonius, older than the nine kingdoms he’d conquered. They were at least as old as the Tyrean Empire, fifteen hundred to three thousand years old.

  Now the crumpled statue seemed to guard nothing more than an orange grove, but still a slow mist of paryl rose from the very soil. It shivered at Dazen’s touch, and a puff of superviolet joined it, allowing his will to thread down and down through seemingly solid earth.

  He gathered color after thickening strands of color into his grasp like the fibers of a rope. And taking it full in hand, heaved heavenward.

  The earth split, tree roots tore, and in a fountain of dirt, a spire shot into the sky.

  Dazen laughed as the magic poured through him.

  He glanced in wonder and awe at Orholam beside him and found Him smiling His own delight and encouragement: ‘Go on!’

  Dazen sank into it once more. This was his old strength, doubled and redoubled. He felt virile, potent, alive in a way he’d not felt in years. The joy of drafting came back to him. It was like, after being buried alive and breathing as shallowly as possible, he’d suddenly broken free of the prison earth and was taking the deepest breath of his life. He was strong.

  No, ‘strong’ didn’t cover it. He had the might of a Titan.

  A vast disk shot into the air, and then, with a pulse of magic that had lain dormant waiting for this moment, it vibrated, and all the dirt and detritus of long ages jumped off its surface and it gleamed as sharply clear as the day it had been made. On protected gears and belts undecaying, on luxin and old infusions of will, the mirror swiveled to answer Dazen’s call.

  And his will shot away again. To an abandoned temple atop the first soaring butte of the Red Cliffs outside Idoss.

  Then to a high valley between green round-shouldered mountains in Ilyta, where the superviolet mirror had been buried beneath the banks of a river. Bandits had set up a camp on this forbidden ground, a camp that had become a village. If he raised this mirror without warning, houses would be destroyed, and perhaps innocents kidnapped for ransom or slavery or even children crushed.

  Dazen shook the earth hard, laid a hex foreboding doom, and moved on.

  In Paria, near two vast and trunkless legs of stone, the blue mirror lay hidden under the lone and level sands. A brickwork floor opened smoothly on centuries-old hinges, swallowing half a dune effortlessly, and the mirror rose.

  In Ruthgar, the green mirror rose from the heart of a butte over the verdant grasslands outside the once-great city of Melos, setting a nearby herd of iron bulls stampeding.

  Back to Blood Forest, where for the first time he realized that though the well of white luxin might be limitless, his own endurance was not. He blinked, and wondered how long it had been since he’d blinked last.

  The children had scattered. Some still watched from a distance, clinging to a wary young man near Kip’s age as if he were a father to them all. A safe enough distance.

  Dazen knew what he was doing now, and he pulled the Great Mirror to its groove. This one was a different design, though, from some other people, some other time, claimed and retrofitted by later conquerors but not made new.

  This mirror was connected, communal somehow. It spoke to… trees? He felt root speak to root, and his will was drawn from this mirror to others, deeper into the forest, all the way to Dúnbheo and Green Haven and other, smaller mirrors. It wasn’t a luxin-based web, though, so Dazen couldn’t raise all of them directly.

  Instead, he turned the first mirror toward them—and they answered! The Great Mirrors of Dúnbheo and Green Haven didn’t even need to be raised; they’d never been hidden in the first place. Some of the smaller mirrors were broken, nodes that lived only in memory, but others had rested shielded within the trunks of great trees. Now coiled roots pushed out, and others, stretched, pulled taut. Working like ligaments and muscles, with no gears anywhere, the tree roots worked together to heave sev
eral dozen mirrors across the satrapy into position.

  Had this been the work of some empire Dazen had never heard of? Was this the magic of the pygmy peoples?

  But there was no time to study the marvel, or even to wonder at it. Dazen felt his body gasping, his own strength stretching him too far.

  Back to Ilyta, where some people had scattered, but others had come bearing their muskets and long knives. Bandits, Dazen hoped. But maybe just the sons of bandits, only trying to defend their homes from something that filled others with dread.

  Brave men, regardless.

  Dazen shook the earth once more. One last wordless warning to people who could die in a war they didn’t even know about.

  Some fled, but others stood their ground, shaking their spears as if some monster stomped between their homes. You’ve built your home on the monstrous, you fools. As did we. The cowards who ran would live, while the brave died.

  Dazen could wait no longer.

  Houses shattered and tore apart, the earth rent, a spire shot into the sky, and then the superviolet mirror slashed through the village. The brave fell and the rubble of their own homes crushed and buried them.

  He flashed back to his own body, staggering.

  No, not yet. He’d taken seven colors, but there were nine. He sank deep into the mirror to feel for those last two, but found only a single trace: a bane atop Hellmount, far, far to the west, pulsing like the sun, its slopes littered with the burnt bones of the dead who’d tried to approach, to claim it for themselves. But there was no mirror nor lightwell for that great chi bane, nor anywhere else. Nor for paryl. Even the ingenuity of the drafters of old had never subdued those colors.

  No wonder the Chromeria had always feared those colors. Light cannot be chained indeed. Not all of it anyway. The mystery always escapes us.

  Finished, he came back to his body again.

  He felt disconcertingly wonderful, but he knew it was a false strength now. He’d lifted weights with the strength of a thousand men, but his muscles were going to give out on him without warning at any moment.

  The whole thing must have taken only a few minutes, because even as he gasped on the sweet night air, he could feel the distant Great Mirrors still finishing turning, still settling their beams onto the Great Mirror behind him.