The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Gunner nodded.

  Ridiculous. Gavin had never told anyone about that. Maybe he would’ve told Karris, if they’d had longer together.

  “From the Freein’?” Gunner asked.

  “Aye.” ‘Ayes’ and ‘ain’ts’ now seasoned Gavin’s speech like salt in jerked meat. “There was this girl…” He trailed off. And at the end, he’d given her death. He gave them all death.

  It made him want to vomit all over again. How could I have done that?

  “Ya killed her, I s’pose? So what? It’s the voyage they sign on for, innit?” Gunner asked. “Yer drafters.”

  “It is,” Gavin allowed, narrowly avoiding using another ‘aye.’

  “Then what’s the pro’lem? They know the deal: Light duty mos’ times, respect e’erwhere, good pay, and when they take the last lonely boat, their family gets a sack o’ gold. They get all that, and in return they gotta obey and they get a short life. Sailors get nothing ’ceptin’ the obedience and short life.”

  Putting it like that, it didn’t sound like such a bad deal. Better than working a farm until the arthritis made every move hell, and then working it another ten years, prayin’ you could hold on to life until your sons and daughters could fend for themselves.

  Didn’t sound like a bad deal, when you were fifteen years old and forty sounded ancient and they asked you to scrawl your damn idiot signature on the vow.

  But it didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were a father who still felt young and you held an infant in your arms who’d already never know her drafter mother, and the Prism who’d killed her first now asked you to hand over the child to some uncaring luxiat so he could slice your heart out, too.

  It didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were the man who held the knife and murdered artist kids like Aheyyad Brightwater.

  “In all my time as the head of the faith,” Gavin said, “I could never come up with more than two questions that were worth a damn. As it were.”

  It sailed over Gunner’s head. In his world, ‘damn’ was for punctuation, not punning. And it wasn’t the full truth anyway. Gavin had a third question, but he didn’t let himself even think it too loudly.

  Gavin looked at the great tower of cloud on the horizon, growing ever closer.

  “Two questions?” Gunner prompted. “Or did you mean that metty-forcibly?”

  “No. I mean, yes? First: is Orholam real? And second: if He is real, is He like we think He is?”

  Gunner was looking at him like he wasn’t making sense. “Uh… what?”

  Gavin tried again. “You and I, Captain, we’ve seen the shit. The real problem with Orholam comes if He is who He says He is.”

  “And who else would he be?” Gunner asked. “Hand me that hoo-dad, wouldja?”

  Gavin handed him a brush, then other tools, one by one, as Gunner proceeded to happily clean the great cannon on the front quarterdeck.

  All his life, he’d kicked against the goads: Tell me I have to do this? I’ll find my own way, and you can go to hell. When the dichotomy was ‘Do I obey Grinwoody or do I defy him?’ given Gavin’s nature, that wasn’t even a choice.

  But defying Grinwoody meant either a fast death (say, by blurting out his name while wearing this stabby hellstone eye patch) or a slow one (by accepting failure and death), so Gavin, despairing and defiant but not suicidal, had chosen ‘slow.’

  ‘Slow’ meant becoming passive. And his whole soul hated that. Sinking into sarcasm is the heart’s last rebellion against a mind choosing helplessness.

  Logical step to inexorable step, his answers had marched him into waters that now closed over his head. When your answers lead you logically to despair, you don’t have the wrong answers; you have the right answers—to the wrong questions.

  Gavin didn’t want to give Grinwoody what he wanted, but there was no way out. In his current state and situation, Gavin couldn’t outsmart him or outfight him or out-magic him. He couldn’t deny Grinwoody what he wanted.

  But that was framing the problem exactly wrong. In truth, it didn’t matter what Grinwoody wanted—it mattered what Gavin wanted.

  Gavin didn’t want Grinwoody to win…? Gavin didn’t want to die…?

  Divergent as those seemed, both of them were importantly distinct from wanting victory or wanting life.

  What do I want?

  Odd thing to wonder, here, when he had no power to get it. Before, he’d never asked it in any profound way. His ‘great’ goals for every seven years he served as Prism hadn’t been great in any way. They’d been field dressings on a gaping wound of purposelessness. His housebroken dream had been merely to stay alive, to not be unmasked as a fraud.

  Sure, that made sense for a month or two after the war while he healed.

  But he’d never become more. Never dreamed more than declawed dreams.

  He’d put his brother in the grave, but Dazen had also died at Sundered Rock.

  What did Gavin want?

  Which Gavin?

  Time stretched, as if something were supposed to happen right now—but nothing did. Gavin looked around. Nothing. Odd. He sank back into his thoughts.

  Maybe Gavin only wanted to win.

  In Gavin’s place, a hero would strive for some positive good. Say, to save the empire. That kind of goal would ready him to fight a diverse host of battles. He would be one man: integrated, of one purpose, strong whether he had to fight to save the empire from foreign enemies, or from traitors, or from those corrupting it, or if it needed renewing, he would be strong enough to undertake even its reformation. A hero might begin one kind of fight and then any of those others in turn and still be a whole man.

  Such people had lived before: heroes and heroines with clear eyes and straight backs. And short lives, often. Sure, but villains got those, too, so maybe that was a wash.

  It was all moot. Gavin wasn’t a hero. He didn’t believe in heroes anymore, and he didn’t believe in a god who could let this world become what it was.

  He’d been fighting Grinwoody because fighting was what Gavin did. So Gavin had been preparing, but passionlessly. He’d treated Grinwoody’s demands as merely another prison that he had to figure out how to escape… and yet, even with his own life and all the world on the wager, Gavin hadn’t found any heart for the effort.

  He just didn’t care to save the Chromeria. Not in the abstract.

  He loved many people there. But the Chromeria itself was as corrupt as he was. The ‘White King’ was a murderer, a liar when it served him, and a wielder of oversimplifications, but Gavin couldn’t object to the basic charge that the Chromeria was often shitty, and had been throughout history. Nor could he claim that the Magisterium, whose High Luxiats were entrenched beside those in power and empowered to speak against them, had, instead of standing against those abusing power, become indistinguishable from them. When was the last time a High Luxiat had called Gavin to account for something he’d done? Not since the first year, not even in private.

  Gavin didn’t believe Koios’s reign would bring a society that was any better, certainly not so much better that it was worth the seas of blood he was spilling to establish it.

  The universe had conspired to give Gavin one chance to go where he’d never dared go. Here, now, Gavin and only Gavin might actually confront Orholam—or prove He wasn’t there at all.

  What if, instead of turning all his genius to figuring out some third way out of Grinwoody’s errand, treating the task as if it were merely another prison…

  What if, instead, Gavin put his whole mind and heart and will into actually… succeeding?

  He had to admit, the audacity of the quest was vastly appealing.

  No, it was damn near irresistible.

  Maybe the Old Man of the Desert was so clever he’d been counting on exactly this. It didn’t matter. What he wanted was beside the point—if Gavin wanted it too.

  Gavin hadn’t had an audacious thought since he’d lost his powers. This? This wasn’t audacious. This was le
gendary.

  How do you prove once and for all that there’s no God? How do you show that even if He is there, He’s small and weak and unworthy of adoration? How do you prove that Orholam doesn’t see, He doesn’t hear, He doesn’t care, He doesn’t save?

  You show up on His front door, uninvited. You go inside without knocking. You take a look around. And if you like the place…

  A thrill shot through Gavin. It was his first great goal again, so carefully concealed for so long. There was nothing more impossible—and that very thought was like a breath of clean air after months in the must and stench of himself in the black cell.

  The Old Man of the Desert, Grinwoody, real name Amalu Anazâr, hoped to change the world’s entire social and political order by killing magic itself. He believed that what lay at the center of White Mist Reef wasn’t a personality, but simply the central node upon which the whole network of magic depended. He thought if Gavin destroyed that, all magic would fail.

  Grinwoody thought that would change the world. He thought that was enough.

  Grinwoody was wrong.

  Throwing luxin around was merely a personal power. The genius of the Chromeria as an organization was that through education first and coercion later, they’d turned that power into communal power, then traditional power, first subservient to political power, then enmeshed with it, and finally indistinguishable from it. They had ensconced themselves in the world’s politics and culture and religion and trade. But even if a sconce is originally placed high so that it may cast its light far, if the fire it held dies, the sconce remains, and it remains in its high place. So, too, the Chromeria’s social and political and commercial and ceremonial power would falter if magic were lost, but it wouldn’t necessarily be broken.

  Destroying magic wasn’t enough.

  Fearing the lash, even freed of his chains, the slave will still pull at his oar, but men of unfettered soul, who though chained are still whole, will smash it like trash on the floor.

  Magic was one major tool by which Orholam and Orholam’s Chosen worked His will in the world, but they had others. People didn’t send their daughters to be living and dying sacrifices to the Chromeria because of magic, but because they believed it was what Orholam demanded.

  Gavin—High Lord Gavin Guile, Emperor, Promachos, and mighty Prism, Orholam’s Chosen, the Highest Luxiat, the Defender of the Faith—Gavin the Liar Prince, the High Deceiver, was the only one who might be able to kill the religion itself. Down to its rotten root.

  If that fell, everything built on it would, too.

  He who’d been ‘blessed’ with the gift of black luxin could kill the Lord of Light and watch tumble all the horrors built on men’s fear of Him. Half-blind and chained and toothless as he was, Gavin might stagger to the pillars that upheld the roof of the empire. He might find strength had come once more to his old muscular will—strength enough to lever apart the pillars upholding the very heavens and bring it all down. Gavin the Liar, who’d murdered innocents to uphold others’ lies, could destroy the greatest lie of all.

  Gavin would bring down the rebels, not in order to save the empire but in order to make it fall correctly.

  Fuck the old way. Fuck the new way. As he had always been, he himself would be the third way. He would be himself, and he would be terrible. He would come back from death, come back from this journey to heaven and hell, and Gavin would invert all they had hoped. Gavin, the Son of the Morning, the Bright Hope of the World, had been cast down into a ninefold hell. But he hadn’t stayed down. He’d broken through and escaped from one color of hell to another and another—until his own father had shut him into the inner darkness. The blackest heart of Chromeria, its very foundation.

  From those depths, a nameless wretch had been sent to scale the heavens and kill God Himself. Who could return from such an impossible journey?

  Only one man. Only one man might have been born for such a thing. Only one who could make and remake himself, who refused to die, who defied the schemes of those who held every advantage over him—and won.

  Triumphant, with a cloak of fire and a crown of blood, Dazen the Black would return. He would bring down heaven and he would raze hell.

  But.

  Gavin could only triumph if he did what no one had ever done: he must make it through White Mist Reef, scale the Tower of Heaven, kill Orholam, and then make it back home to escape, outwit, and destroy the Order—he’d need to do all that by Sun Day if he were to save Karris.

  Then he could live happily ever after.

  Easy.

  Of course, he could say nothing of all this. Not among these doomed servants of the Order.

  But he wasn’t one of the doomed anymore. Not in his own mind.

  Looking over at Gunner, Gavin felt the old, reckless, confident Guile grin spread over his face for the first time in eons. “Gunner? Captain? Let’s go find God. I’ll bring the sword, just in case He’s a dick.”

  Gunner’s mercurial mood abruptly stilled. All the guns of his attention drew broadside. His eyes weighed Gavin, judging velocity, pitch, charge, spin. Eyes tightening, he calculated windage, current, the target’s distance, speed, and parallax.

  Gavin welcomed the judgment, fatal as it might be. The end began here. This was Gunner’s destiny. He would join Gavin; he simply didn’t know it yet.

  Frankly, but fearlessly, his demeanor void of forced jollity or feigned madness, Gunner said, “You must know that’s impossible.”

  “Impossible is what I do.”

  Chapter 17

  By his own count, Daragh the Coward had four hundred seventeen scars—none of them on his back. It might not have been an exaggeration. The bandit lord had bragged that there was one scar for each kill. It was said that if the killed man hadn’t possessed the skill to cut Daragh as they fought, Daragh cut himself. He bore one scar for each man. Deeper or longer for the men he respected.

  He didn’t kill women or children. Or, if one believed the darker rumors, he simply didn’t think they counted enough to deserve their own scars when he did kill them.

  Kip was the son of an emperor. He didn’t want to be impressed at the sight of the man who’d strolled into the audience chamber this morning as if he owned it, but there was no denying that Daragh was impressive. Daragh the Coward didn’t just have four hundred seventeen scars covering his arms and cheeks and forehead and fists: every one of his scars was hypertrophic. Hypertrophic scars didn’t spread beyond the original wound like keloid scars did, but they did puff up, thick and red against Daragh’s olive skin, cartilaginous and angry.

  Apparently such scars often itched terribly.

  Which made the bandit lord’s skin a striped shrine not only to human mortality past, but to one man’s misery past and present.

  Kip regarded the bandit with lidded eyes. This wasn’t going to be easy. He knew what he had to do.

  Daragh the Coward wore his dark, curly hair in long dreadlocks piled into a tail on top of his head. He tucked his tight breeches into rich knee-high boots. Doubtless in order to better display his mutilated pelt, he wore no tunic, only a leather weapons harness, currently with many empty sheaths and pistol hooks, as the Mighty had resolutely refused his demands to come into Kip’s presence armed.

  Kip had been tired of being the center of attention all the time, so he’d expected to feel relieved as the smiling bandit king drew every eye.

  Instead, Kip was surprised by how it irked him.

  “Your Highness,” Daragh said, making an elegant bow. He was flanked by two muscular men and followed by three more. Kip presumed they were all warrior-drafters.

  “‘My lord’ will do,” Kip said.

  “Ah, but you’re not that, are you?” Daragh said pleasantly.

  Really? You’re going to play the shame-me-with-my-past card? Instead of saying anything, though, Kip merely stared at the man, as if monumentally bored by the stupid games this bandit was trying to play.

  The moment stretched uncomfortably, and Ki
p the Lip somehow managed to hold his words like a disciplined line of infantry holding its fire while enemy cavalry charged into range.

  Daragh broke first. He was, after all, the one who had requested this meeting. “Not my lord, that is. Not yet, anyway.” He gave a gap-toothed grin, backing off from the other possible implication of his words: that Kip was a bastard.

  “You fled from your owner seventeen years ago now,” Kip said. “That’s long enough to learn correct terms of address, even if one were possessed merely of low cunning and not much intelligence.”

  With some tightness around his eyes, Daragh the Coward smiled again, and Kip could well imagine him holding that same smile while he slid a dagger into your ribs. “We learn different things in the forests and firths than do the soft-handed boys that weaker men call lords.”

  Kip let the jab hit only air. “I should hope you’ve learned quite a lot, or we’re both wasting our time. You see, Daragh… or, I’m sorry, my own education was geared more toward drafting and war than rhetoric and finer points of alionymics: do you prefer Master the Coward, or is it always Daragh the Coward…? Seems too long for ordinary daily usage. Just Daragh, perhaps? Dar-Dar?”

  It had taken Tisis no small amount of prying to find that old nickname, and that Daragh hated it.

  The bandit let it roll past, but wet his lips. “Daragh is fine for my friends.”

  Don’t say, ‘You can call me Daragh the Coward.’

  “You can call me Daragh the Coward. Or Lord Daragh, if you prefer.”

  Kip sighed.

  Grandfather, is this how you feel all the time? Playing against stupid people? “Lord? Baron of the Bayou, I suppose? The Earl of the Estuary? The Count Who Can’t?” Kip didn’t give him the time to reply. “Enough pleasantries. I would rather be serving this people, and for your part, Lord Daragh, you would doubtless rather be raping and murdering them, as you do, but we’ve things to discuss, don’t we? The growth of my power has come at the expense of yours, yet you’ve been careful to avoid attacking me directly.