The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  —And then they’d sent Winsen to give her the news. He was the worst!

  A sharp little laugh burst from her lips. Winsen! Of course it had to be Winsen. Because they couldn’t treat it like it was a big deal.

  “Win?” Teia said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, for the longest time I used to think you were an asshole.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “And now?”

  “Oh, I still do. I just used to, too.”

  Epilogue 3

  Dazen waved his empty hands around the corner before he entered the hidden room. “Please don’t shoot,” he said. “It’d feel ridiculous to die now in some silly accident.” He poked his head around the corner.

  Ironfist lowered the flintlock unsteadily, grumbling, “What makes you think it’d be an accident?” He looked like what he was: a man who’d recently lain on the brink of death. They’d hidden Ironfist away in Murder Sharp’s old lair.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?” Ironfist asked. Maybe he’d just woken.

  “No. It’s all fireworks and celebrating now. Kip and Tisis are good and hitched. Re-hitched? Anyway, I’d just be a distraction right now. Don’t want to steal the spotlight.”

  “Still got the old magic, don’t you?” Ironfist said. Then his brow furrowed. “Poor choice of words.”

  Dazen waved it away. He came in, ignoring Ironfist’s frown at the big, wrapped-up sword he was carrying. “So, are you enjoying your time… uh, resting, or do you have one more adventure in ya?”

  “Weddings and hobbling around watching sycophants rush to kiss the royal… ahem, ring isn’t exactly an adventure.”

  “You seem to be forgetting what happened the first time I tried to marry Karris. You know, when our eloping somehow turned into the Prisms’ War?”

  “I actually did mean to come to Kip’s ceremony,” Ironfist confessed. “How long have I been here?”

  “Long enough for Gill to get bored watching you sleep.”

  “That’s not really an answer,” Ironfist said.

  “Well, you didn’t answer me, either.”

  The two men stared at each other. Then Dazen waggled his eyebrows. They both knew Ironfist was a man of action. He had to be bored out of his mind. He wasn’t in any shape for a battle of wills. “What’s the adventure?” Ironfist asked grudgingly.

  “Epic derring-do. Legendary opponents. And total secrecy. Even afterward. I expect you to be too weak and say no, but I thought you’d be furious with me for going to face so much danger without asking you. ‘I would have come,’ you’ll say later. ‘If you’d waited for me, you’d still have your legs,’ you’ll say. Pfft.”

  “Have I ever told you that you’re a real piece of… work?” Ironfist asked.

  “Look, they told me you were cranky, and I knew you were going to be too weak to come. But I just knew someone would be mad if I didn’t at least ask my old friend along.”

  “Friend?” Ironfist asked. He swallowed, but then growled, “I don’t even like you.”

  “A sadly common malady among my friends,” Dazen said.

  Ironfist laughed despite himself, then winced at his wounds. “Orholam’s beard, mercy.”

  “You know what I came for?” Dazen said.

  “Figured there’d be an ulterior motive. It’s yours anyway. Always planned to give it to you.” Ironfist pulled open a drawer on his bedside table and tossed a white stone tied on a leather thong to him.

  Dazen caught the white luxin and looked at the lambent stone, then lifted his white eye patch and stared at it more. “I really drafted this at Garriston, huh?”

  “Why’re you still wearing the eye patch?” Ironfist asked.

  “It’s a bit intense to see everything without it. Maybe I’ll be able to build up some tolerance to it eventually, but for the time being it looks like I’m going to have to labor under the burden of having a slight aura of mystery about me.”

  “You can make anything look good, can’t you? It’s annoying. Not to mention the getting-healed-instantly thing. Everything works out for you, doesn’t it? No wonder you don’t have friends.”

  “It’s true, there’s just not many people with the ego strength for it. That’s why I’ve had to go for pirates and prophets and beautiful women and Blackguards and traitors and kings. Sometimes traitorous kings even—king, really. Singular. Don’t want to exaggerate. The other king wasn’t as friendly as you are.”

  Ironfist only shook his head.

  “I figured it out,” Dazen said.

  “‘It’?”

  “History.”

  “A suitably humble claim.”

  “Not all of it. Just the relevant bits,” Dazen said. He took out the sword from where he’d propped it carelessly on the ground and unwrapped the cloths around it.

  Ironfist goggled at it. The Blinding Sword didn’t look at all the same as he remembered. A dark, molten and shimmering iridescence swept down the entire blade. There was a depth to it, like staring into the night sky, with all the colors of creation seen twinkling in the muted seven stars on the blade. Entire sections of it dulled though as it turned, as if it were covered in a polarizing lens.

  Dazen started tapping the white luxin on the blade, then on the pommel. He rubbed it down its length like a whetstone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, she told me not to draft or I’d draw the wrong kind of attention. Not that I’m eager to draft just now. You ever run a long race and it wipes you out, and then a few days later you think you’ve recovered and you run again and then you realize, no, you really, really haven’t recovered? That’s how I feel about drafting right now. Like I don’t know if I tore some muscles or if they’re really tired, but either way, I hurt like hell.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ironfist said. “Who told you not to draft? What ‘attention’?”

  “I’m trying to awaken the white luxin in the sword. I know it’s there.” He stared up at the ceiling. “C’mon, you told me white luxin isn’t overcome by black.”

  He tossed the chunk of white luxin to Ironfist, then passed him the sword. “Here, you try.”

  “Try what?” Ironfist demanded, but before the words were out of his mouth a scintillating shine flashed down the length of the blade in every color. The muted seven stars surfaced through the darkness and now shone as hot in the blade as Orholam’s Eye at noon. In the light of the blade, every color in the room suddenly glowed brighter, sharper, and more real.

  “Great! That’ll do,” Dazen said. He took the sword from Ironfist’s limp hand and quickly wrapped it back up in the cloths, as if worried someone would see it, though there was no one else in the room, and no windows, and no one who even knew where it was hidden.

  “Huh,” Dazen said, now that it was fully covered once more. “Guess that’s what I get for thinking I’m so special. Good job. You can probably put away the white-luxin chunk now. It might draw attention, too. They weren’t terribly specific.”

  “Who?” Ironfist looked at him, but he looked more troubled than in awe. “What have we just done?”

  “Not ‘we.’ You. You just fixed the sword. It’s what I figured out. Before Vician’s Sin, drafters used to retire. The Knife passed through a drafter’s heart, purging her of the buildup of toxic luxin but also taking away her drafting. You ever hear about this?”

  “Some.”

  “Between the drafter’s conscience and the Prism’s judgment and Orholam Himself, other things might happen: a blue drafter who’d misused his Color would find himself blind to blue, where one who’d used his Color well might find himself granted more drafting ability even than before—even more years, or an additional color. A faithful artist might find herself made a superchromat, or a traumatized woman might find her memories eased or even erased. And lastly, some few would be judged worthy of death for what they’d done with their gifts. And the sword would then blind them to all color forever—or to all light forev
er, with death. It prefigured the final judgment of the afterlife, not only for drafters but also for those who watched, and they called it the Freeing, because once judgment is rendered, we’re freed from fear, and because so often mercy prevailed. You know about Vician’s Sin now?”

  “The others told me, yeah.”

  “After Vician’s Sin, the white luxin went dormant in the blades—all of them. The Knives would still kill and steal, but unbalanced by white, the Knife almost always killed, and it never gave gifts. Orholam sent prophets to call the Chromeria to repent, but they beat and killed the prophets, and when Vician finally died, the Chromeria began murdering innocents in order to make their own Prisms and to cover up their sins. The stories kept leaking out, so they commissioned their most fanatical as luxors to suppress the truth, even wielding black luxin to erase lines from books and from memories. Handling the black luxin repeatedly corrupted the luxors more than they already were, whereupon the purgers themselves were purged and the crime deemed complete.

  “The Chromeria henceforth was a house of hypocrisy, its jealousy for power held side by side—sometimes within the same heart—with all its acts of mercy and tending to the indigent and sick.”

  “And you think we just fixed it?” Ironfist asked.

  “We? You.”

  “Why me? I didn’t do anything!”

  “Despite all your doubts, you held on to the white luxin, didn’t you?”

  “Doesn’t seem like enough, does it?” Ironfist rubbed his lower lip. “You really believe Orholam intervenes personally?”

  Dazen snorted. “How’s your prayer go? ‘God hears. God sees. God cares. God saves’? I more than believe it now. I know it.”

  Ironfist looked away. “Do you know this word ‘ebenezer’?”

  “What’s that, Old Abornean… some kind of stone?”

  “The word’s Old Abornean, but the practice is ours. Means ‘rock of remembrance.’ When a great event happened in our communal life, we would set up a stone there so we’d be reminded every time we saw it. A great event in our own lives might even necessitate replacing our name. My birth name, Harrdun, means ‘gazelle.’”

  “Let me guess, ‘rhinoceros’ was already taken?” Dazen asked.

  “If you’re going be so you, I’m gonna need more poppy.”

  “Fresh out,” Dazen said. It wasn’t true, but he needed Ironfist sharp for what they were going to do next. “Please, go on.”

  “After… a race I did, they called me Izdârasen Winaruz.”

  “They gave you a double name for a race? Must have been some race. What’s it mean?”

  Ironfist seemed reluctant, but said, “‘He Carries His Hope with the Strength of a Lion.’ But, you know, that’s way too long to ask the trainers to shout at a Blackguard scrub—”

  “And it was a Parian double name, so everyone would have known you were a big deal. For winning a race.”

  “We didn’t win,” Ironfist said. “Anyway, it was a burden, so I welcomed it when they named me Ironfist. Not too flashy, not too original, but solid. I wanted to be hard enough to protect those I loved, because I didn’t believe that Orholam cared about me. I’d accepted early on that I wasn’t important enough to attract the attention of the maker of all things. So I remade myself into one who would be strong, and one who would be important. I took it as Orholam revealing to me who I was. I was become a hand raised in violence, my flesh turned to iron. To save my sister’s life, I’d already sworn myself to the Order, and now to save my brother from our family’s enemies for his murders at Aghbalu, I had proven our worth to the Chromeria. I had to become the best. So I did. But to save them, I lost them. And myself.

  “Then that day at Ruic Head, He spoke to me. Orholam Himself. He helped me. Helped me in war. I had turned myself into someone utterly worthy of rejection, but He accepted me. He saw. He reached out his hand to save me, and I took it, and I… then didn’t acknowledge it in the days after that battle. I didn’t come clean. Didn’t change my name or my life. I was too embarrassed. I had too much to lose—like the Magisterium in your story, after Vician was dead.

  “I knew, at the very least, that confessing would mean I would lose my position as commander. Even self-confessed, an Order traitor as the commander of the Blackguard? Unthinkable. Would Andross Guile be content with less than my head? And then, how would I blunt the Chromeria’s rage with my sister? What about the Order’s? I… I had to think it through.

  “But I didn’t. Not really. I simply fell back into my old ways, telling myself I’d come clean soon—and then I lost it all anyway. And when my uncle was there, right in front of me, and all he asked for was the black bane… Though he is what he is, he was the last family I had left. I obeyed him from sheer habit. And then I left, ashamed. And then my brother died, and I learned he’d been trying to save me for all those years, to stitch back to wholeness a man split down the middle—while himself so wounded and guilt-stricken from Aghbalu. He served, for me. I damned myself by seeking vengeance and to save my sister’s life. I saved her life, but I lost her soul and mine. My brother served humbly instead, and somehow I missed him for all those years. Right beside me, standing faithfully in a blind spot so large I missed the best thing around me. I had my chances to turn around. And with every one I didn’t take, I brought a little more hell to earth. I even killed my best student, a young man like my own son. It’s too late for me, Guile.”

  “Maybe Orholam has something to say about that?” Dazen said, gesturing to the sword Ironfist had just fixed.

  “I can’t explain that! But look, I can’t make up for what I’ve done. The misery I caused in my arrogance.”

  “You’ll never balance the scales,” Dazen agreed. “So what?”

  “I… I don’t follow.”

  “Becoming a good man’s easy. Act like one, even if it’s an act. Some say, ‘Who you are is what you do.’ They’re wrong, but not all wrong. What you do forms who you are. Then who you are forms what you do. It’s a vicious cycle, or a virtuous one, depending. One act doesn’t undo all of who you are, but a thousand acts make you who you are. So it’s simple, though not easy: stop creating the wrong you. Stop trying to prove to yourself that you really are the bad man you believe you are despite what others say, and simply start doing good. Even if deep down you’re a bad man, if what you do every day for the rest of your life is good, you’ll be a bad man indistinguishable from a good one.”

  “Why go on at all?”

  “Because there’s a whole lot you can do, you moron. Not for yourself. For everyone else. If you had a scrub who loused up a hundred times but finally figured out what to do, and then he decided to volunteer for the Freeing because he believed those hundred mistakes made him a fuckup forever, would you send him off to the luxiats to die?”

  “This is different.”

  “You thinking you’re so different is what got you here.”

  “You just don’t get it,” Ironfist said.

  “Fine. You know who did?”

  “You mean who did get it?”

  “Yeah. Your brother,” Dazen said.

  “I’m not sure I want you talking about him.”

  “He couldn’t balance the scales. He was the Butcher of Aghbalu! By your logic, because he couldn’t take away all the misery he caused, everything he did in the years between that massacre and his dying—including his dying for Kip and those boys—all of it was worthless. Because he couldn’t balance the scales.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You’re measuring yourself by a standard that’d make you furious if anyone used it on your own brother.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “My point exactly. It should be. You want to be a man of integrity? Start by having one set of weights and measures for others and yourself.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re seriously going to tell me how higher moral standards should apply to you than to your brother, who was a better man tha
n you by far? You are getting up on your moral high horse? Ironfist, you’re a liar and a traitor and an apostate and a pagan, a man who ordered murders and a coward. So that’s a little rich, isn’t it?”

  Angry clouds gathered in Ironfist’s brow, but they sat there and then receded some as Ironfist nodded.

  Dazen said, “Arrogance is a ladder, and your ladder got you to the top of the mountain. The top of the Blackguard. You know what you find on mountaintops? An amazing view—and no life. No food, no water, no shelter, no companionship. Maybe it’s time you come down. Life isn’t a climb; it’s a marathon. If you want to make it across the desert sections, you should run carrying water, not a ladder. Your arrogance got you here. Maybe it’s time you left it behind. Maybe it’s time you pick up some water and join the race. Your arms are strong from climbing; now they can carry extra water for others. You’ll find stragglers along the way who need it, I think. But get your ass moving, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Ironfist sat with that for a few moments, and Dazen couldn’t tell how much was sticking. Then Ironfist said, “Hearing this from you is a bit much.”

  “Who better to teach a lesson than one who had to learn it?” Dazen asked. “I’m not saying I’m ahead of you in this particular race. I’m saying you won’t be running alone.”

  “You’re some real motivational motherfucker, aren’t you?”

  “Watch it. A Blackguard guards his tongue.”

  “I’m not a Blackguard anymore.”

  “Yeah, about that…” Dazen said.

  “What about it?” Ironfist asked suspiciously.

  “We’ve got space in the newest cohort. Could use a good nunk.”

  Ironfist laughed. “You’re an asshole.”

  “I know. It’s why you always liked me.”