by Brent Weeks
“Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”
Epilogue 1
The distant explosion’s roar raced through Big Jasper’s broad avenues and lightwells, between the arches of its Thousand Stars, past whitewashed homes and gleaming domes. The cheering throngs along the Sun Day parade route fell silent, and every eye looked to the horizon, Ironfist’s eyes first of all.
Ironfist’s bitter regrets and introspection blew away with the last echoes of the great blast, and a rippling cloud billowed upward somewhere near the docks, so intensely hot and huge that it folded in on itself like a mushroom cap. There was only one place on that side of the island that held enough black powder to make an explosion so huge. He ran.
With his height and constant training and knowledge of every back street on this island, the half league passed in no time. Crowds coming and going both slowed his pace as he reached the narrow peninsula. Promachos Andross Guile’s Lightguards were trying to set up a perimeter, and doing a predictably bad job of it.
As Ironfist approached the line—were those idiots keeping out chirurgeons?—he couldn’t help but stare at the dissipating black cloud and the rubble beneath it. The explosion had come from the cannon tower that guarded the harbor. The tower’s powder stores were sunk into its bedrock bowels so that even an invading navy’s fire couldn’t hit them. Carver Black, in charge of the island’s defenses, was meticulous in checking that appropriate discipline in storing and working around so much black powder was maintained.
Of course, with the Lightguards having taken over, those clumsy fools might have begun storing the powder above ground. A dropped lamp, an iron-nailed boot—if you let discipline slip for a heartbeat, this kind of accident could happen.
But Ironfist knew in his gut that this was no accident.
The Lightguards tried to bar him from the peninsula, but he said, “I’m Commander Ironfist, let me pass.”
He actually forgot that it wasn’t true anymore until the words were out of his mouth. He’d been commander so long, it was impossible to think of himself as anything else.
They moved immediately. So they hadn’t heard yet.
The cannon tower was still standing. Reinforced with iron and Orholam only knew what kinds of luxin, the outer walls were cracked in some places, but otherwise intact. The blast, thus contained, had shot up from the cellar through each of the five floors, hurling everything out the top, transforming the cannon tower into a cannon aimed at heaven. Everything within had been flung into the sky: broad paving stones that had made the floors, splintered wood, rags, and, nearer to the tower itself, even the massive cannons themselves.
The entry door had been blown out into the harbor, and heavy smoke roiled out of it still. Civilians and Lightguards alike surrounded the tower, looking for survivors, surveying the damage, counting the dead. Ironfist saw a corpse, legless, charred, his clothes blown entirely off him. Others bobbed in the waters. But of most of the dead, there was almost nothing left. A boot here, a piece of meat unidentifiable there. Blood smears.
Ironfist found a corpse, dead not from the explosion, but of a slash through the neck. It could have been from flying shrapnel, but the man had no burn marks or evidence of injury from the concussion wave. He’d been lying here when the explosion happened, already dead.
That meant sabotage. Ironfist looked to the horizon. Was there a fleet out there? No. And they’d have had warning if there was. Why this target, then? Surely the Color Prince wouldn’t spend lives and treasure blowing up a tower for no reason.
A yell sounded from a knot of Lightguards at the water’s edge. Ironfist made his way over there as they pulled the man from the waves. The man was Parian, tall, hugely muscular, and wearing only dark trousers, his tunic lost, his headscarf lost. It was his brother.
Tremblefist. Dear Orholam, no. Ironfist’s heart stopped. It couldn’t—it couldn’t … And yet there was no mistaking that imposing figure, the smaller twin of Ironfist’s own body.
“He’s alive!” someone shouted.
Ironfist crashed the lines of gawking Lightguards. “Away!” he roared. “That’s my brother! Move!”
And then, with no time intervening, he was holding his brother in his arms. He must have been convincing, because everyone had moved back a good ten paces.
It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. Tremblefist’s body bore no wounds that Ironfist could see, but when his eyelids fluttered open, the whites of his eyes were bloodshot almost pure red. If he had that kind of damage to his head …
No. Ironfist didn’t want to believe what his experience knew.
“Harrdun,” his brother said, looking up at him.
“Hanishu.” They had barely spoken each other’s birth names in all the days since they’d taken their Blackguard names, there was so much pride in the latter names, and so much pain in the former.
“You should have seen me fight,” Hanishu said. “Twenty-seven men. In less than a minute. Not a scratch on me. They even used … mmmm. Used muskets. Orholam forgave me, Harrdun. For Aghbalu. His holy breath was on me in this fight. I made it through the whole tower.”
Ironfist was still trying to recover, the words clanged against each other like a cacophony of pots and pans. “You did this?” he whispered tensely. “I thought maybe an attack by the Color—”
“I saved the Lightbringer. They were going to sink his ship.” He found Ironfist’s hand and clasped it. “I made it to the cellars. Set the fuse, ran. But they’d locked the door out. So I climbed the entire tower, fighting, jumped off the top just as she blew. Landed it. One for the ages. Surfaced, was swimming back to shore, and a damn rock fell out of the sky. Had no idea they’d be in the air that long … I’m all busted inside.”
From his eyes, he hadn’t made the jump quite as clearly as he seemed to think. But blows to the head could skew everything. And it didn’t matter, did it?
“Not long now,” Hanishu said. “Got a question, big brother.”
“Anything,” Ironfist said.
“Not for me. For you. Will take a while to answer.”
“What is it?”
“Before you left home to come here, you met with some people. You made them an oath.”
“What people?” But Ironfist knew, and his heart sank again that Tremblefist knew about that.
“I didn’t want to come to the Chromeria, you know, after what I did at Aghbalu. But I came for you. Seeing you swear yourself to the Order, it, it wouldn’t leave me. I would have happily killed myself, but I couldn’t go while you were in danger. Funny thing. Coming here to save you is what saved me. I came so that someday, when your soul was on the line, and you had to decide which oaths to keep, that I would be here for you. I’m not going to make it, big brother. All that effort, all this time…” And he began weeping. “I failed you.”
As if the failure were his.
There was nothing to say, no way to combat the tears spilling freely down Ironfist’s cheeks.
Tremblefist said, “After the fall of Ru, the others told me how you prayed. It had to be the first time you prayed since mother was killed, huh?”
Ironfist nodded tightly.
“And he answered.”
“He did.” A miracle cannon shot, five thousand paces, to save friends he might be called on to kill.
“So you’ve taken unbreakable oaths to implacable enemies. One to the Bearer of Light, and one to the Maker of it. So you have to decide without me, brother. Which man are you?”
Ironfist had no answer. He clung for comfort to the brother he should be comforting. Like his life, Tremblefist’s death wasn’t easy.
Epilogue 2
Gavin woke, facedown, cold, naked, lying on a hard floor. His missing eye was
professionally bandaged, but he had new bruises everywhere. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. Wherever here was. He rolled over, wincing at the many voices of pain singing like a Sun Day chorus, and opened his eye.
It was a small room, curving around him in a circle, shaped like a flattened ball. There was a hole above for bread to be dropped in, and a hole below for his waste. He couldn’t see the color, but the winking crystalline facets told him he was in the very blue cell he’d made for his brother.
It had been repaired.
In the peaceful perfection of the passionless prison, Gavin felt a horror and revulsion unlike any he had ever known. Pain stabbed through his chest. Tight. Breathless, fighting for little gasps of air. His secrets were out, all at once, in front of the last person he loved and the one person he knew could never understand.
Those repairs meant his father was his captor. If he’d found this cell, he’d found them all. That meant he knew everything: the false victory at Sundered Rock, Dazen’s imposture of Gavin, and finally his murder of Andross Guile’s eldest and favorite son in the yellow cell.
It meant Andross planned to make him pay for it.
Stripped bare of clothes, and titles, and privileges, and power, and vision, and freedom, and stripped now of even his false name, Dazen stared at the grim reflection in the shining wall. It looked like a dead man.
Acknowledgments
The problem with standards is living up to them. Acknowledgments are usually as tedious but necessary as a EULA. Where can I scroll and hit Accept already? Then you hit Accept, and it forces you to perjure yourself by averring that YES, I DID READ all that tiny print that I just didn’t read. What, you don’t believe my 12,000-words-per-minute pace? I tell you, I’m Harriet Klausner, and I read every last word of the contracts I review. ACCEPT!
I had a standard. I thought, acknowledgments are boring. I shall make my acknowledgments un-boring. Acknowledgments shall be a new genre of creative nonfiction, to which readers shall flock! New readers shall buy my books with no intent of reading the fantasy herein, no, even dyed-in-the-wool octogenarian mystery readers who actually do wear wool that has been dyed—natty sweaters mostly—will buy my books solely in the hope of seeing my witticitudes. (That being, of course, my witticisms about the vicissitudes of the publishing business. The mystery readers already sussed that out. Sharp lot. You fantasy folk have been put on notice.)
But. And isn’t there always a “but”? And inasmuch as I have been enjoined not to begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction until I can spell “coordinating conjunction” [Note to proofreader: Have a double look at this, will you? Would be terribly embarrasing to misspell in the middle of a witticitude.], [yeah, and check that punctuation, too, always get hung up on by what marks to put around nested clauses!] every so often in life, a sentence must needs start with an And But Yet Or For Nor.
Amirite? (Octogenarian mysteriods, the fantasy folks sussed that neologism instantly. You’ve been put on notice.)
But. But after writing acknowledgments for six books now, I’m beginning to see how the grind has worn down souls greater than I. Truth is, at some point, adding witty lines to computer code as an amuse-bouche for that one other programmer who actually reads lines 3.5 million to 3.6 million is dust in the wind. Dust. Wind. Dude. Because the list of people to be thanked only adds names. And do you know who gets to add drama to reading a list of names? Let’s ask the cast of the Grammy-winning Bible Experience, which features a who’s who of African American actors reading the entirety of the Bible. Of course Samuel L. Jackson gets to read Ezekiel 25:17—hopefully the real verse this time, not the one from the Gospel of Quentin—but who “gets” to read the begats?
Like success, a novel has many fathers. Here are my co-begetters:
Thank you to my wife, Kristi. For believing in the beginning, and for believing still. Thank you to my daughter, who did her best to hold back being born until daddy could finish the first draft, and then slept well so that daddy could edit this behemoth.
Thank you to my editorial assistant, E. dub, for enduring interminable nicknames: Monie, CAPSLOCK, and others too good to be shared. Your goat’s leash is over here. Seriously, even though you do cruel things like, well, make me work, having you around has been an enormous help. Our life is better—and so is my writing—because of the work you do.
Thank you to Devi (fierce friend and peerless provocatrix of production peeps), Anne, Alex, Tim, Susan, Ellen, Lauren, Laura, James, and Rose of Orbit Books US and UK. Thank you to Don Maass, Cameron McClure, and the rest of the staff at Donald Maass Literary Agency. I know this is kind of what we do, but you make the work part of this work rewarding and as smooth as possible—and you make the art of it better than anything of mine has any right to be.
A special thank-you to my beta readers: Mary Robinette Kowal, Heather, Andrew, Tim, Jacob, and John. I still kind of hate you right now, but my gratitude will grow as the memory of the pains you inflicted on me fades. And double thanks to Tim and John for diving back into the word trenches a second time.
Thanks to Aristotle for ideas so big that I couldn’t escape them even in a secondary-world fantasy.
Thank you to Dr. J. Klein, former roommate, for my continuing work-ethic inferiority complex and for last-second translations. Any abuses of philosophy or translation herein are the ones I either didn’t ask him about, or ignored his sterling advice about. If he’s your prof, ask about swimming the Hellespont and scaling the tower. Or at least about his Bruce Lee impression.
Thank you to Stephen R. Lawhead, who showed me that there was fantasy after Tolkien. Much of my writing is an attempt to make others feel how I felt after reading Taliesin and Merlin. Quentin is for you.
And last, thank you to my readers. Thank you for sharing these worlds with me, for your encouragement, and for sharing me with other readers. It is a gift and a privilege to get to do what I love for a living. Thank you.
—Brent Weeks
Glossary
Aghbalu: A Parian city.
alcaldesa: A Tyrean term, akin to village mayor or chief.
Am, Children of: Archaic term for the people of the Seven Satrapies.
Anat: God of wrath, associated with sub-red.
Angar: A country beyond the Seven Satrapies and the Everdark Gates. Its skilled sailors occasionally shoot the Everdark Gates to enter the Cerulean Sea.
aristeia: A concept encompassing genius, purpose, and excellence.
Aslal: The capital city of Paria.
ataghan: A narrow, slightly forward-curving sword with a single edge for most of its length.
Atan’s Teeth: Mountains to the east of Tyrea.
atasifusta: The widest tree in the world, believed extinct after the False Prism’s War. Its sap has properties like concentrated red luxin, which, when allowed to drain slowly, can keep a flame lit for hundreds of years if the tree is large enough. The wood itself is ivory white, and when the trees are immature, a small amount can keep a home warm for months.
Atirat: God of lust, associated with green.
Aved Barayah: A legendary ship. Its name means The Fire Breather.
aventail: Usually made of chain mail, it is attached to the helmet and drapes over the neck, shoulders, and upper chest.
Azûlay: A coastal city in Paria; the Nuqaba lives there.
balance: The primary work of the Prism. When the Prism drafts at the top of the Chromeria, he alone can sense all the world’s imbalances in magic and can draft enough of its opposite (i.e., balancing) color to stop the imbalance from getting any worse and leading to catastrophe. Frequent imbalances occurred throughout the world’s history before Lucidonius came, and the resulting disasters of fire, famine, and sword killed thousands if not millions. Superviolet balances sub-red, blue balances red, and green balances orange. Yellow seems to exist in balance naturally.
bane: An old Ptarsu term, could be either singular or plural. It may have meant a temple or holy place, though Lucidonius’s P
arians believed they were abominations. The Parians acquired the word from the Ptarsu.
beakhead: The protruding part of the foremost section of the ship.
beams: See Chromeria trained.
Belphegor: God of sloth, associated with yellow.
belt-flange: A flattened hook attached to a pistol so it can be tucked securely into a belt.
belt knife: A blade small enough to be tucked in a man’s belt, commonly used for eating, rarely for defense.
bich’hwa: A “scorpion,” a dagger with a loop hilt and a narrow, undulating recurved blade. Sometimes made with a claw.
bichrome: A drafter who can draft two different colors.
Big Jasper (Island): The island on which the city of Big Jasper rests just opposite the Chromeria, and where the embassies of all the satrapies reside.
binocle: A double-barreled spyglass that allows the use of both eyes for viewing objects at a distance.
Blackguard, the: The White’s bodyguard. The Blackguard was also instituted by Lucidonius both to prevent the Prism’s overreaching power and to guard the Prism from external threats.
blindage: A screen for the open deck of a ship during battle.
Blood Plains, the: An older collective term for Ruthgar and Blood Forest, so called since Vician’s Sin caused the Blood War between them.
Blood War, the: A series of battles that began after Vician’s Sin tore apart the formerly close allies of Blood Forest and Ruthgar. The war was seemingly interminable, often starting and stopping, until Gavin Guile put an end to it following the False Prism’s War. It seems there will be no further hostilities. Also known as the Blood Wars among some scholars who differentiate between the various campaigns.
Blue-Eyed Demons, the: A famed company of bandits whose king Gavin Guile killed after the False Prism’s War.
