The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Is that an answer, or a dodge?” Kip asked.

  “A dodge,” Rea admitted happily. “But don’t worry, my tenacious Turtle-Bear, it is granted to me that I may come to you in your moments of deepest need. You see, Kip, you are the mirror in blood of my own deepest temptation.”

  “Huh? That doesn’t sound good.”

  “When the Thousand Worlds were young, many of my dear brothers and sisters fell. Much is given to us, as the first created of the Am. But we have no bodies, though we can filter our light such that we put on bodies for a time. But we don’t experience a body as an organizing principle of our selfhood, as you do. We are not given in marriage. We have no children. Thus, even as your kind wish to taste our powers, never realizing the costs therein, so our kind thirst for what you humans have that’s denied to us. The rebels among us promised us that we could have it all, that we could transcend the bounds laid out for us. And in some things, they did not lie, though they knew not all the truth, and spoke less. My great temptation was to be a mother, as you mortals experience such things. Motherhood is a true and good and beautiful thing. How could one impugn such a desire?! I thought. A true and good and beautiful thing—reserved for others? What an outrage! This I longed for: to be a demi-creator, to be all the source of sustenance and love to one utterly dependent on me. To experience the unquestioning love of a babe looking up from the breast, though unknowing, utterly dependent, utterly sated, utterly adoring? It is a true love, a mother’s. It is godly and good—but it is a love and gift and burden meant for mortals, not my kind. I was tempted to covetousness, because here was a love denied me. Who could deny me love? If He denied me this love, He must not love me. Was that not the work of a tyrant? Surely the Name above Names was holding out on me.

  “Rather than apprehending my pain according to the Love I knew, I apprehended His love according to my pain. Thus misapprehending, my pain threatened to turn His no to anger and thence to rage and thence to rebellion.

  “Each of the elohim were tempted thus, according to our station and our weakness. Some weren’t even close to rebelling. I was close, but ultimately did not. I made the right choice, though it has meant sacrifices. I volunteered for you, Kip, but you are so fit for me that I might as well have been assigned. You are… so much of what I love about mortals. And my Lord has allowed me to taste as much of human motherhood with you as I can bear. I will be here for parts of today, and I will be there at future moments of great joy for you, and I will be at your end, if it is at all possible.”

  “What do you mean, as much as you can bear?” Kip asked. He was tearing up, and he wasn’t sure why.

  She stopped as if gut-punched, and her glory dimmed palpably. But when she spoke, it was with a steady, quiet voice. “As human parents do, I got to taste what it means to fail my child.”

  “What?” he whispered.

  “In that closet…” she said, and a grief as potent as all her earlier glory flowed from her, palpably darkening the room.

  She didn’t have to say another word. There could be nothing else she was referring to except that lightless, godforsaken closet where Lina had locked him and gone on her binge, blotting out her cares and worries and mind and recollection of her son. The closet where his mother had forgotten him. Abandoned him without food or water to the rats for three days while no one noticed. While no one cared to look for him.

  And suddenly, Rea was weeping, too, and he knew that she could see that closet right now. He knew, instantly, that she could see it in the present moment, with an immediacy before her eyes that even he could no longer feel. She was seeing Kip screaming as the rats began biting him, as the blood poured down his back and as he threw himself against the walls, scratching and clawing for an escape that didn’t come. She could see his fear turn to terror, turn to despair, turn to madness. She was watching the pain that would shape and scar his entire life, even now as she spoke.

  “I was supposed to be there, Kip.” She could barely breathe the words over her sobs. “I was supposed to save you.”

  “What?” he asked as bitter tears spilled down.

  “I was elsewhere, fighting, doing good. I knew I could get to you in time. But when I entered your time, Gader’el and Suriel were waiting for me in ambush. For three days I contended with them while you suffered. I want you to know—and I am allowed to say this much—I wasn’t with you. But He was. When I arrived to save you, He was already there.”

  “But He did nothing,” Kip said as he wept, the wound opening afresh.

  “He spoke to you.”

  “No. I was alone.” But Kip could remember it now. A few words only, in the many hours. A few calm words, but they’d kept his sanity.

  “Kip. What if, in your darkest moment, He was there, all along, weeping with you?”

  “If He saw me, if He cared, He could have saved me. He could have saved me with a word.”

  “Indeed. And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  “What? ‘Indeed’?” Kip asked. “What does that even mean? I don’t understand Orholam at all.”

  “If even we could, I don’t think my friends would have rebelled. What I know is this: A tapestry made of only white threads is perfect, but blank. When He starts letting us add our own colors, things get more interesting.”

  Kip scoffed. “Color metaphors are a little bitter for me at the moment,” Kip said, holding up the blank color stick again. Then he shrugged as if he didn’t care. “I prayed that He would help me escape that place.”

  “And you did.”

  “I didn’t pray that He’d get me out after three fuckin’ days.”

  “You asked Him to get you out immediately and He said no. I don’t know why, Kip. But I know that sometimes when He says no to our desires, His no is mercy. I envied mothers, Kip, and now, having loved like one, I see how profoundly I’m not built for that blessing and that burden. For we immortals never forget. You Guiles have a miraculous memory—a gift of a redeemed sin from one of my kind deep in your ancestry—but we immortals carry all our memories before us at all times. I experience it as the present moment, always. My failure and your suffering will never not be before my eyes.”

  Her compassion was so genuine and so costly that Kip didn’t shoot back in anger, but he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone. “So there’s some greater good that makes it all fine?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I can’t answer every tragedy, but I know my Lord’s character and I know His power. I choose to trust Him, and though I’ve doubted that choice at times, I’ve never regretted it.”

  “I suppose I’m the last person who should shake his fist at Orholam,” Kip said. “Sure, I’ve been through some shit, but look at what I have. I should just shut up forever.” On the one hand, he’d saved his friends, his wife, and more thousands than he could know. He had been given his life back, when he should be dead. But on the other hand, he’d lost his best friend and many others, and he’d lost his powers and his claim to being the most important person in history.

  Why, in the darkness, in the quiet, did he keep looking at the wrong hand?

  Her tone was gentle. “He doesn’t want you to shut up, Kip. I know you’re not thinking just about the closet. You’re scared that you lost your identity when you lost your magic, and even though you chose this, it still hurts. You’re still scared, despite everything.”

  Kip scowled. So much for nonchalance. “Stop… understanding me and stuff.”

  “Kip. It’s okay to be angry.”

  “I feel ungrateful,” Kip said. “Greedy. I’m alive! Cruxer’s not. I’ve got it amazingly great, and I did the right thing, and people love me—but sometimes all I can think about is what I’m never going to be.” He must’ve pressed his fingers against that testing stick a hundred times, praying stupidly, blindly.

  “I think if your prayer in that closet might have a lesson, it was this: sometimes, Kip, the answer isn’t ‘No.’ It’s ‘Not yet.’” She smiled at him and
stood. “Now, please excuse me, but you’ve got a wedding to attend, and there’s a young woman in another realm who has a gift for getting in trouble that may rival your own. Not sure if my assignment to her is a reward or a punishment for how I’ve done with you.”

  “Bit of both?” Kip said.

  She looked up for a moment, and he got the impression again that she was seeking permission for something.

  “Don’t blink,” she said, grinning suddenly at him.

  Rea Siluz’s figure shimmered, and burst into something other. She didn’t get any bigger, but suddenly the room seemed to strain to contain her essence. To look at her carried a sensation for the eyes like when the ear hears a perfect harmony reverberate with overtones and undertones as the waveforms dance in joy. She was brighter than color, more alive than the sun on green grass. She wore black dragon’s-scale armor etched with designs in fire, and a helm of gleaming gold, and her eyes shone with lavender mischief. Her presence had a physical weight to it, like walking from a cool basement into the anvil of the desert sun. Kip dropped to the floor.

  “I told you I love a spectacle,” Rea said, and she smiled fiercely, and that smile was terrifying and sexy and breath-suckingly, knee-weakeningly, eye-blindingly bright; it was a flame that beckoned on a cold night and a fire that burned like a forge.

  Kip’s tongue failed him. He averted his eyes. He had to. The very room seemed more alive in the light of her presence. He nodded at the floor.

  I remember.

  I didn’t take it seriously.

  Holy shit.

  She flared golden wings out broader than the room; they went right through the walls. There was a hum of gathering energy. Then she beat those enormous wings once and shot out of the world.

  Slowly, he stood up and dusted himself off.

  Always fooling around with people—people?—he shouldn’t. One of these days that was really going to bite him in the ass. He saw the testing stick on the floor. He’d knocked it down as he fell. He reached over and picked it up.

  For an instant, the testing stick’s edge seemed to flash green like a quick wink at sunset. Kip scowled.

  He looked at it more closely, but there was no color in the ivory. None.

  He pressed his finger on the stick again.

  Nothing.

  Must have imagined it.

  Epilogue 2

  The dawn prayers atop the red tower had concluded. The young women and men, discipulae and luxiats both, departed quietly, as was required, allowing those who remained to continue meditating and praying. But the moment their feet touched the stairs, they immediately broke into happy conversation, eager to dive into days full of instruction and labors mental, spiritual, and—as the Jaspers needed workers for repairs and healing—quite physical.

  A few worshippers and contemplatives remained, huddled in warm layers against the early morning’s cool wind, hoping to hoard a treasure of quiet calm in their hearts against the chaos of the coming day.

  Teia was here on her physicker’s orders, sitting with her father. Every day she was supposed to try to last one minute closer to dawn before shielding her eyes once more behind layers of leather and her pitch-black spectacles. She couldn’t even make it halfway to dawn yet, but it was good to sit beside her father.

  Her physicker’s hope was that her contracting pupils would break down the crystals of the lacrimae sanguinis slowly so that the poison might be worked out over months without killing her. In the meantime, contracting against the hard crystal matrices would help her keep her eyes from atrophying so that she wouldn’t be blind when the poison did dissipate. He said ‘when,’ but she’d heard the ‘if’ he was hiding.

  What it actually meant was that she felt incredible pain and nausea every day, to the point where sometimes she hoped to die.

  Really, they had no idea whether it would work and she’d be rehabilitated, or if they were simply daily tearing open again a wound that would otherwise heal.

  Even if it worked, she had a long, long road ahead of her. She most likely would never work for the Blackguard again.

  So now she was on the disability dole, like a Blackguard who’d had a limb blown off. Her injuries weren’t visible, weren’t debilitating in the same way, but she was just as useless to the Blackguard. A sudden flash of light—such as, oh, every single time someone drafted, or lit a lantern, even the flash of sunlight on steel—might kill her. Even if it didn’t, it could blind her permanently, and it would definitely incapacitate her as she seized up, vomiting.

  So she was forced to wear impossibly dark spectacles and the eye patches over both eyes.

  “Baba,” Teia asked, “what are you supposed to do with a bird with broken wings?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, and when he finally spoke, there was a hitch in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. But I would hold her. Just hold her.”

  And so he did, embracing her silently, not trying to fix anything. He was not, perhaps, a great man who shook the pillars of the earth, but he was her father, and for today at least, for this hour, his embrace blunted the jagged black edges of her hellstone thoughts.

  He held her as she cried, and in some deeply aching, wordless place inside her, just a little, something thawed.

  Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “Come on, Baba. We’ve gotta go get ready soon so we can be there when Kip and Tisis get married. Again. Nobles are weird.”

  Her father grunted. “So… do I have to thank Kip for sending those bandits to find me and save me from the Order before I can punch him in the nose for breaking my little girl’s heart? Or can that wait until afterward?”

  “Baba! Don’t you dare! And he didn’t break my heart. I’m fine. And those men aren’t bandits… anymore. Daragh’s men were the only ones disreputable-looking enough to get into that neighborhood without raising any eyebrows.”

  But they’d barely started heading inside when someone barked from the stairs, “Hey! Shithead!”

  “Excuse me?” Teia’s father asked.

  “Not you. That stunted little crotch fruit of yours,” Winsen said. “Hey, layabout! Sluggard! The hell you doin’ up here still?”

  “What are you talking about?” Teia asked. “This is what I’ve—”

  “Training?” he said as if she were as dumb as a bag of rocks. “I know you’ve got a nice gig here, getting fat and fartin’ around with daddy. No disrespect, buddy—though I’m not sure why I oughta respect you. You clearly have none for yourself or you’d not have spawned our navel lint of doom here.”

  “Wh-what?” Teia’s father said.

  “Teia,” Winsen barked, “vacation’s over!”

  “You flea-bitten, pox-eaten son of a whore!” Teia said. “You shit-licking, vomit-slurping, fart—er, sorry, Baba. Winsen, you know—”

  “Oh,” Winsen interrupted. “Shit. Right.” Something hit her chest. She snatched it out of the air before it hit the ground. At least she still had her reflexes.

  “What’s this?”

  “Here, come inside.”

  Inside, where it was much darker, Teia examined them in paryl.

  They were glasses—no, more like small goggles, barely more than eye caps connected at the bridge of the nose. She shed her dark spectacles and eye patches, keeping her eyes shut tight, and put them on. She frowned. These new eyepieces had wide, curving lenses to preserve her peripheral vision, but otherwise fit tightly to the angles of her face perfectly, with leather cushions blacking out light from the sides or below. But the lenses were clear.

  Not helpful.

  “What’re these?” Teia asked.

  “This is the fun part,” Win said, and he smacked the frames at her temples.

  She cried out as tiny spikes stabbed into her skin and the lenses suddenly darkened.

  “What are you doing?!” Teia’s father demanded.

  “I told ’em we should cut you loose like so much deadwood,” Winsen said, “but Ben-hadad and Breaker been worki
ng on this all week. Ferkudi stole materials. Quentin translated some maybe-heretical books. Big Leo covered for everyone. Not that they all don’t have more important stuff to do, in my own humble and disregarded opinion, thank you very much! They copied some ideas from Breaker’s old spectacles, which were supposedly made by Lucidonius himself or whatever. Then they added some new tricks. These’ll darken or lighten almost as fast as your own eyes can dilate or constrict—and you won’t even have to think about it. There’s, ehh, maybe some slightly or totally forbidden will-casting in there, though you won’t hear me telling the tale. They’ll allow you to isolate whatever spectrum you want—including superviolet, which you couldn’t see before, so I guess that’s a bonus? Breaker had to beg Súil to help. She claimed the paryl nearly fried her brain.” Winsen shrugged. “Guess that explains what happened to make you the way you are, using paryl all the time. Anyway, now you can see. Without dying.”

  Teia couldn’t breathe. She hadn’t drafted paryl since that night, when she’d used the barest sliver necessary to make the master cloak work—and only for the few moments necessary to attack Liv and later Abaddon. The latter had left her shivering and puking, certain she was going to die. But this… Maybe Teia wouldn’t be able to draft the paryl cloud that made her invisible to even sub-red drafters, but she could suddenly—maybe? maybe!—do everything else.

  She felt like a champion sprinter going from losing a leg to merely having a limp.

  She tried to change the spectrum she was seeing. The goggles worked flawlessly, instantly, dimming and focusing the light so she could see once more.

  Dumbstruck, she glanced at her father—and looked away fast.

  He was blubbering. Oh hell, she was gonna lose it, too.

  “I dunno,” Winsen said, resigned. “I voted against taking you back. But the others said, ‘It isn’t a vote, Winsen. Once you’re one of the Mighty, you’re one of us forever, Winsen.’ Bah!”

  Oh, nine hells.

  Her boys. Her brothers hadn’t forgotten her. As she’d been blind, they’d seen her. As she’d been in the dark, they’d found her. They’d known. They’d understood. As she’d pulled away, they’d pursued her. They’d all been working to restore her. They’d saved her, body and soul. Her brothers—abrasive, idiotic, absentminded, cranky, wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, steadfast, and self-sacrificing as they were—her brothers had worked tirelessly to make her whole.