The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “No, no, I never did.”

  “At the end you did.”

  Ironfist grunted. It might have been an admission.

  Dazen decided to take it for one anyway.

  “Actually, a space did open up,” Dazen said. “Commander Fisk had some things go real sideways in the battle. He’s asked to retire. Said he’ll give us one more year as a trainer, though, more maybe, if we can get the right replacement as commander. And we really need him as trainer with the state the ’guard is in.”

  “You’re asking me to be the commander of the Blackguard again?” Disbelief.

  “Seems like.”

  Ironfist’s jaw tightened with suppressed emotion. “There are others who can do the job.”

  “Oh, I know, you’re not that special,” Dazen said. “But I already offered it to all of them. Every last one said they’d love the job, but they’d rather serve under you instead. Threatened to resign en masse if you didn’t get it, actually. So if you don’t take the post, the Blackguard is finished. It’ll be a hundred years before it recovers. If ever.”

  Ironfist’s lips compressed, and his forehead tightened. He whispered, “They didn’t really…”

  “They did. But honestly, I don’t think they like you that much. I think they just really want a chance to hit you with one of those Blackguard Names. You know, one of those sort-of-respectful, more-kind-of-mocking things?”

  “They want to change my Name?”

  “Yeah, I dunno, maybe Ironfist’s too flashy and original for ’em. I don’t know if they conspired on this or what—they’re so insubordinate sometimes—but you’d have to accept the new Name if you came back.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “I think they’re gonna call you ‘Rex.’”

  Ironfist laughed, then winced. “‘Commander Rex’? Those little shits!”

  But the man seemed to glow. He was suddenly soaking all of this up, a great treasure of joy that he would examine later. His Blackguards meant so much to him, and that they loved him still was favor he didn’t believe he merited. It was precious to him beyond all words.

  Then he pressed his lips together, and his eyes hollowed. “I miss ’em,” he said. “All of ’em we lost the day you made this.” He gestured to the white luxin. “And since. My sister. And my brother most of all.”

  “Me, too,” Dazen said quietly.

  “So is that it?”

  “There is a condition,” Dazen said, taking Ironfist’s acceptance for granted.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Ironfist said. “Several, I guessed. You are still a Guile.”

  The truth was, if Dazen hadn’t been at least a little bit of an asshole as he delivered his offer, he knew that Ironfist would get stuck in his own head, and might actually have turned it down. Being an asshole about it directed Ironfist’s gaze outward, to the job, to the people who needed him, to the personalities he saw himself needing to rein in.

  But that was fine. Dazen could pretend to be an asshole when required.

  Pretend.

  He said, “There’s just the one condition—well, for me. A few other people have to sign off on this, and they might really need convincing, but you know what? I am really convincing.”

  “Hadn’t noticed that about you,” Ironfist said.

  “So here’s the thing,” Dazen said as if it pained him. “I need you to get up, like, right now, while everyone’s distracted with the big wedding spectacle, and come do that thing with me.”

  “‘That thing’?” Ironfist asked, sitting up more in bed. He was trying to look irritated, but Dazen could tell he was on the hook already. A man like Ironfist needed to be needed, needed to be active, or he’d just die. “You mean that adventure? I thought you were joking.”

  “Nope. Has to be you. Has to be now, while everyone’s distracted.”

  Ironfist hesitated. “What are you going to do with the Blinding Knife while everyone’s distracted?”

  “We, you mean. As in ‘What are we going to do?’”

  “No, I meant you. I’m not touching that thing.”

  “Right, agreed. That’s fine. And I meant you’re going to help me get there to do what I have to do. So you can parse that as us doing it or as me doing it while you help me, I mean, whatever floats your—”

  “Gavin!”

  “Dazen.”

  “Whatever!”

  “Well, here’s the thing. You’ve been there, too, like I have. And there’s no one else I can trust to not succumb to them. And we’ve only got one chance to do this. Any other time, and I’m afraid they’d have allies show up. I know you don’t feel well right now. And regardless of how good I look, I’m not at my full strength, either, so I guess we’ll just be wounded warlords together.”

  “‘Wounded warriors,’ you mean?”

  “Eh, you and me? Come on. We’re a bit more than just ‘warriors,’ don’t you think?”

  “Just shut up and tell me.”

  Dazen finally got serious. “It’s now or never. I’ve always been proud, Harrdun. I’ve always wanted my greatness to be known, to be acknowledged. This? This will be the greatest thing I ever do, and no one will ever know it. That’s my penance. Or at least my way of showing I’ve changed. Maybe you’ll find some penance in it, too.”

  “Gavin,” Ironfist said, low and dangerous. He was halfway out of his bed now. “What are we gonna do with the Blinding Knife?”

  “The wedding’s a huge spectacle, not just on the mortal side but this… librarian? I dunno. One of them who likes Kip has arranged some spectacle on the immortal side, too. The truth is, both the mortal and the immortal spectacles are merely a distraction for two old warlords—one of whom is the last person you’d expect to go all hooded-man-sneaky—to go quietly to do something only they could possibly do, right under the noses of hundreds of watching immortals, while hoping that the right half of them are watching the wrong thing. We’ll have no allies with us, none. No help whatsoever. It’ll just be you and me, against the eight of them. We’ll take them one at a time, though, at least if we’re lucky.”

  “Wait. Uh-uh. Gavin, you are not going back down to those cells to face those—”

  “Oh, yes I am. And unless you want to explain to my widow afterward why you made me go alone, Commander, you are, too.” Dazen gave him the big smile that he knew Ironfist hated. “Ironfist, buddy! C’mon! We’re gonna kill us some gods.” He spun the scintillating sword on its point. “You in or what?”

  Acknowledgments

  Wait a second, are you one o’ them curious readers who reads acknowledgments? Even though you know your name isn’t going to be here? You shouldn’t be here! Book’s over! Scram!

  Fine. One more paragraph. I know you’re a fast reader, and it’s hard to not read a little bit more than you meant to, but after this one, stop.

  There are few authors who have nearly a million and a half words’ worth of riveting story to tell. The jury’s out on whether I’m one of them, and that jury includes you. So my first thanks goes to you—even though you don’t listen so well. Many of you first discovered me with my Night Angel trilogy and might’ve frowned at seeing that my next trilogy wasn’t even set in the same world. Worse, the trilogy then became a tetralogy, then a pentalogy. (The man can’t even count to three?!) But you gave Lightbringer, and me, a chance.

  I’ve given my all to repay those acts of faith with these books. I will never take such trust for granted. I hope and strive to bring you joy and more.

  Thank you for your graciousness as this final book took an extra year. For me it was worth the ink, sweat, and tears to present you with something I can be proud of.

  Thank you to my editor, Brit Hvide, who took on a series after it was already a million words long—and an author who had difficulties understanding the term ‘deadline.’ Thank you for working to give this project the time and space and the pacing and polish it needed. Few authors understand the
complexities of your job, but thank you for all you do.

  Thanks to Bryn A. McDonald for taking on the mammoth task of producing a book of this size and complexity, and to my heroic copy editers. (Hi! Yep, I’m totally stetting that!) Thanks to Lauren Panepinto and your team for consistently brilliant covers and so much more besides. No one finds out what’s in a book if they never pick it up, so pretty much all my success is because of you. (Bring this up the next time you ask for a raise.) Thank you to Laura, Ellen, Alex, Paola, Nivia, and to the rest of the team at Orbit US, UK, and AUS.

  Thank you to my translators. I can’t even tell how ingenious you are, because I are American and thus more polygluttonous than polyglotinous, yet I know from my brief, bruising encounters with little Latin and less Greek how much effort goes into your work. I do think of you when I write plays on words—and usually just laugh. Writing is pain. Should translation not be? (But seriously, sorry for the Gunner chapters.)

  Thank you to my beta readers: John, Tim, Elisa, Heather, and John again for also being my gamma reader, and Keith for being my alpha to omega reader.

  Thank you to my agent, Donald Maass. You have been a tireless advocate and a straight shot of sanity. Thanks to Katie for all the follow-up e-mails to foreign publishers and for the continual education on a complex business.

  Thank you to Simon Vance, my audiobook narrator. With your skills, you bring all the benefits of adding talents together and none of the drawbacks. I am so glad you were brought to this project under false pretenses.

  Thanks to Joseph Mondragon. I came across your synopses of Lightbringer online and realized to my great chagrin and greater delight that they were better than mine. (Turns out that writing a huge book and describing briefly what happens in it are different skills. Who’da thunk?) So I did what people do on the Internet and stole your work. I hope you never read this. Please don’t sue me. (I’m kidding. I got his permission.) Joseph’s (somewhat edited) work appears here. Any errors are mine—but would be seriously ironic.

  Thank you to my assistant, the Dread Pirate CAPSLOCK. Though your predecessor should have most likely killed you in the morning, I’m flabbergasted by your unending brilliance and towering intellect. You’re a paragon of strength, resilience, humility, and hilarity. Thank you for being the person who makes those last-second edits and additions to the manuscript that sometimes even I don’t see before they show up in print.

  Going a bit further afield now—no, no, go ahead, you can quit reading anytime! Thank you to Dante Alighieri, for literally writing a character named ‘Dante’ meeting the greatest poets of all human history in the afterlife and having them welcome him to join them at their fire as an equal. Whenever I worry my pride may be getting the better of me, I think of your—

  Dante: Hey! It’s not arrogance if it’s accurate!

  Brent: I’m not so sure about that, bucko. And putting your enemies in literal hell?

  Dante: Bucko? Psh. Call me Dan. Now, come on, why don’t you join us at the fire? I’ll introduce you to everyone you don’t know. Oh, don’t worry. They all know you! We were just having a great discussion about how amazing Lightbringer is.

  Brent: Yessir, whatever you say, Master Alighieri, sir… uh, Dan.

  But seriously, I’ve always had a keen understanding of which fire I don’t belong at, and—more’s the pity—that’s one of ’em. But my sincere thanks to you and Homie and Bill and Eddie for showing me how high the bar can be. Even if you are laughing at me as I Fosbury Flop right under it.

  Tim Mackie, thank you for the glimpses into the Ur. My thanks to the Monday Night Irregulars, and my thanks to those who have stood in the gap for me when it seemed my help was caught up over Babylon.

  My deepest gratitude to the one who ended that storm at the exact right moment and brought me diamonds in moonlight. I’ve been a lot of trouble.

  My thanks to Dr. Jacob Klein for decades of dumbing down ancient Greek and Latin and philosophy for me. Some of it is going to stick any day now. Call it purgatory for that impressive jumping spinning sidekick on the racquetball court that was supposed to miss my face.

  Thanks to my brother, Kevin. Kristi says whenever I speak Andross Guile’s lines, I imitate your voice. (Weird!) Without the dirt-clod incident, the pitch-black locked closet with the spiders crawling under the door with their glowing red eyes, and the plastic zippered under-the-bed laundry bags, I’d probably have a lot more brain cells, but I wouldn’t be able to write claustrophobic terror nearly so well. Huh, this makes you sound mean. Sorry. Please don’t hurt me.

  Sorry to that one guy who wrote me the angriest e-mail I’ve ever gotten—for writing a world in which color differentiation is so important that color-blind drafters are discriminated against. I appreciate your yearning for a kinder world. A world where all people knew what was true and beautiful and acted on it would have only one drawback: writing fiction there would be impossible—and probably unnecessary. In my worlds, characters believe many ugly things that I don’t. Indeed, some even believe beautiful things I don’t. Some authors confront the truth that people suck by imagining a world in which people don’t suck in some particular way; I choose to say, “People suck. What do we do about that?”

  Thanks to my akhuya Ishak Micheil for the Arabic translations. Any errors are either Teia’s, because she was doing her best to translate phonetically what she heard, or your practical joke on me. But you wouldn’t do that, right?

  Thank you to Thomas McCarthy, for the Irish pronunciations, translations, and the patience with our Internet-translated (i.e., wrong) declensions.

  Thank you to the late Mitch Hedberg. Sorry for stealing the ‘I used to… I still do’ joke form that one time. I put you in the acknowledgments to make up for it…?

  To my dearest Kristi, without whom no one would be reading these words. When we were thirteen years old, I thought, ‘That girl is going to make an amazing wife someday.’ I love being right.

  When we were planning our wedding (twelve years later, readers!) and you said you thought you should work the day job so that I could write full-time, I wanted to say YES! so badly that I was almost afraid to. An artist on a mission can be a terribly inhumane creature, as willing to make others suffer for his art as he is willing to suffer for it himself. I’ve tried not to be that careless creature—and too often failed. Thank you for suffering with me, for learning with me, and for laughing with me. Thank you for helping me understand my story-children as much as our real ones. Your singing makes the stars shine brighter.

  Oh, and for you stubborn, quirky readers who read to the very last line of the book: Thanks for supporting me in doing what I love. You deserve to be rewarded. Flip the page for a special, secret little thank-you gift for you.

  BUT JUST THIS ONCE! Don’t you expect me to do it again!

  Postlude

  In the burned-out ruins of Master Atevia’s house, Teia stepped into the cool, dark room and hung the master cloak on a mechanical peg, much like another one she remembered. She had only time to make out two figures in the room, one seated wearing spectacles and the other standing at his right hand.

  As she closed the door behind her as if her heart weren’t in her throat, an altered voice said out of the darkness, “You’ll pardon my caution, I hope.”

  It had been three months since the Battle of Sun Day, and this morning, she’d found the note in her pocket, inscribed with the Broken Eye, telling her how to get to the Old Man of the Desert’s secret new offices on Big Jasper. That she’d received a note instead of a knife in the back meant the Old Man didn’t know (at least for sure) that she was the one who’d poisoned the entire Order. That the note had been planted in her very pocket suggested that he had at least one last Shadow.

  Andross had given Grinwoody the chance to run, but he just couldn’t do it.

  That was why she was here, foolish as it was. She had too many friends upon whom the Old Man still wanted vengeance.

  “What the hell happened to all of us on S
un Day?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to find out, but everyone’s just claiming it was an act of Orholam. No one’s telling me anything.”

  “Not even your friend the White?”

  “You know how that infiltration went, don’t you?” Teia said. “I’ve been demoted for being absent without leave. I’ve been lucky to keep my place in the Blackguard.”

  “You were at the Feast of the Dying Light,” the Old Man said. “I wasn’t aware you were invited. You were supposed to be watching Gavin Guile.”

  “I’d just got back. Master Sharp took me to the Feast, just for a bit, he said. Said I shouldn’t miss out on the holiest day of the year and my first chance to drink the bloodwine and see the community I was giving so much to serve. Then, afterward, he saved me. He guessed what the poison was and told me our only hope to live through it. But he drank too much of it. I watched him die.”

  “As I watched many more,” the Old Man said.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “One of the high priests betrayed us, a man named Atevia Zelorn. He poisoned the wine. He gave his life to betray us. This was his home. He was acting, I think, on Karris Guile’s orders. We will have our vengeance soon.”

  Teia cursed as if she hated the White.

  You just couldn’t run away, could you, Old Man?

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “We build anew,” the Old Man said. “I still have riches. I still know who’s weak, who can be bribed, who can be blackmailed, who’s fearful, who can be conned or seduced. Best of all, I still have several shimmercloaks. You and Aram will be the foundation on which we rebuild the Order.”

  “Aram?!” she couldn’t help but say.

  The man beside Grinwoody in the dark didn’t speak, but he gave a satisfied, arrogant little grunt.

  Grinwoody spoke for him. “Aram is sharp and bitter and unquestioningly obedient—and a better fighter than most people would guess, considering. And in a sign that our gods have power beyond the Chromeria’s knowing, I’ve discovered that Aram is a lightsplitter. You, Adrasteia Sharp, my strong right hand, you will train him. You two will be our first team of the new era.”