The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Do I put up a good fight?” Gunner asked. He was standing delicately on his right foot as if the deck were covered in broken glass and he didn’t want to put down his left foot. He made little fists with his toes.

  Orholam twisted his mouth, a man trapped between his morality and his mortality. “For a man who’s cooked in the sun for days without shelter and drunk seawater… you certainly, uh, give it your all.”

  “All of ’em are here?” Gunner asked.

  “All eight,” Orholam said.

  “Do I kill any afore they get me?” Gunner asked.

  “You don’t kill any of the dark ones, and they don’t get you,” Orholam said.

  Gavin expected Gunner to rage at that, but he got very quiet instead. He removed the match cord from the linstock. Stubbed it out on the great cannon, then buffed out the black smear with his coat sleeve.

  “He’s a beaut, ain’t he?” Gunner said. “Makes me almost want to turn pirateer again, just to get the chance to try him in battle. Curved shots? Hell, he’s got two dozen other tricks that are even better. I sailed out a few leagues from the Jaspers and popped off as many shots as I could for weeks, getting my mastery up. I can make a Compelling Argument myself, alone, on a mere count to fifty-seven. Four of that aim time. See that tank over there, Guile? Water. Pump that up afore battle, puts it under pressure. Every ten shots, Compie gets too hot. Spray that water inside and out, then that lever tilts the whole boy up to drain—whole thing! counterweighted so’s I can do it myself—swab, tilt him back, and go on as afore. Adds only a fifteen count to the process. With the right crew and materiel, he can fire all day without getting overhot or cracking.”

  “He’s really something,” Gavin said, puzzled.

  “Man’d be crazy to lie what you just told me,” Gunner told Orholam. “So I think you’re not just honest, you’re brave. That deserves rewardin’.”

  He cut Orholam free.

  Perhaps wisely, Orholam kept his mouth shut now, even as he rubbed feeling back into his legs and arms.

  “White Mist Reef ain’t like the Everdark Gates,” Gunner said. “Men have shot the Gates afore. There are ways through. You need luck and a chart and a great crew, but it can be done. It’s special, sure, but not legendary. But no one’s made it through White Mist Reef. At least, none who’ve also made it back. No one. I thought if anyone could do it, it’d be you an’ me, Guile.”

  “I suppose it would,” Gavin said, uncertain where this was going.

  “Magnificent critter, she was. We named her Ceres, said the whole sea must be hers. She followed us half a week while Captain scouted the reef, and seemed well-nigh content to hold back, until we tried to shoot the gap. Then she boiled the seas with her fury. We’d been expectin’ it. Plan was to distract her with the shock and sounds of the rafts blowin’ up in the waters ’round us. The gun captain was a fool, though. Didn’t set the fuses right. Got the timing wrong. Wouldn’t listen when I told him. So when it all went to shit, I pushed him out a gunport and took charge. I walked our shots right in a line to the last raft, heavy-loaded with black powder. Six hundred paces out. My timin’ never been so good. Ceres came up from beneath and just as she lifted that raft up inta the air in her jaws… My shot hit the barrels of black powder.

  “For half a minute, I felt like a god. Everyone cheered. And then I felt ashamed. I watched that great beauty bubble and bleed and sink with her jaws all blown four directions, and the other dark ones stopped their circlin’ and came fast to their dead sister. They tried to prop her up in the water. I swear, they grieved. And I knew then that what I done was wrong. I knew I was acurst. Been runnin’ from Ceres’s vengeance ever since.”

  “Why did you come back?” Gavin asked.

  “A man gets tired a runnin’, Guile.”

  Gunner disappeared then, and left Gavin and Orholam bewildered on the forecastle. “It’s not a death sentence,” Orholam said. “Well, not necessarily.”

  “Shut up,” Gavin said.

  Gunner reappeared. He tossed the Blinding Knife to Gavin. Orholam immediately began helping Gavin tie the long blade to his back with the very ropes he’d been bound with moments before. Gavin didn’t even think to ask why.

  “Well, look at that,” Gunner said. Inexplicably, his bright mood had returned.

  “Land ho!” a voice called from the crow’s nest. The sailor hadn’t even fully climbed the rigging to get in the nest, the clouds had parted so suddenly.

  It was a bright spring day.

  The sound of the surf rushing through the teeth of the coral came to them.

  “Behold,” Orholam said. “White Mist Reef.”

  “We go down fighting,” Gunner announced.

  “‘Old age hath yet his honor and his toil’?” Gavin quoted.

  “Old farts always did like them lines,” Gunner said. “‘Though much is taken, naught abides.’”

  “I don’t think that’s how that—”

  A shout rang out from the crow’s nest: “Creature, hie!”

  “Critter? What critter?!” Pansy called from the wheel.

  Gunner and Gavin cursed in concert.

  “Reef ho!” the lookout shouted. “And… a spout? A spout! It’s a whale! A great black whale!”

  “Aha!” Gunner said. He danced in a little circle, then waggled a finger in front of Orholam’s face. “So much for that, eh? Sunk by a sea demon? Everyone knows whales and the dark ones won’t tolerate each other—hair goat, a whale here means there can’t be no—”

  “More whales! A full pod, sir!” the lookout cried.

  Gunner laughed aloud, delighted. It was an infectious sound. “A pod! That means they’ve driven away the—”

  “No. Wait.” The lookout’s voice dropped so low Gavin could barely hear it. “No, that’s not possible.”

  “Report!” Gunner shouted. “Damn your poxy orbs! Report!”

  “Sea demons! Three—maybe four sea demons. Closing on the whale, fast.”

  The news settled on the crew like a burial shroud.

  “Permission to go unchain the oar slaves, Captain?” Orholam asked, breaking the silence. He muttered. “They won’t stop rowing, I can promise you that.”

  Gunner didn’t answer him, still stunned by the news.

  Orholam said quietly, “They all die regardless, but it’ll give ’em hope. It’s no small thing to give a man facing his doom.”

  “Permission denied,” Gunner said, snapping back into action. “You!” he shouted at a man. “Get me a pack. Stuffed with rations and water and brandy. Much as you can carry. Get back soonest. Gun crews! Stations! Gunports open!”

  The rattle of commands didn’t stop. The reef was beyond the battle unfolding before them, and the wind was suddenly hard in their sails.

  Gunner spared Gavin and Orholam a single look, if only to usher them off to one side as his gun crew came onto the foredeck. “Looks like you get to see a Compelling Argument for your own selfs, after all!” He patted the cannon and winked at them, his black mood unaccountably vanished.

  “Some of us survive?” Gavin asked Orholam. Of course, it was superstitious nonsense, prophecy. Of course it was.

  But when his fate flies from his own hands, a man takes comfort where he can.

  “Oh, aye, some of us,” Orholam said. “Gods have always been fond of prophets and madmen.”

  “And emperors?” Gavin suggested.

  Orholam said, “I don’t see any of those here.”

  Chapter 23

  “You strike me as decent and fundamentally honest,” Kip said, staring not at the Keeper but at the mechanism filling the great white oak tree towering above them.

  “Thank you,” the Keeper of the Flame said.

  “Fundamentally honest, but you’re not being honest now,” Kip said, as if merely clarifying.

  He pretended to ignore her, examining the Great Mirror. He’d never seen such an odd collision of materials. Nested metal frames on three axes were supported by limbs that had obvi
ously been grown for the task, and the foliage itself had been husbanded so as to leave gaps for the light to come in and go out.

  Kip had held suspicions that some things in the natural world were shaped by luxin as much as human drafters were. The extinct atasifusta trees were the most obvious candidates, but sea demons were said to be deeply entwined with magic, too, and his Night Mares said there was a special feel to giant elk, giant grizzlies, giant javelinas, and certain other animals. Certainly this tree was larger than any white oak he’d ever heard of.

  She spoke up. “Perhaps you misread my discomfort. This entire area is virtually aglow with chi. Unless you and all your friends wish to get the same cancers that are killing me, we must keep this very brief.”

  The Keeper was once more ensconced in her golden armor and veils, so Kip was studying her more covertly: heeding her vocal inflections, her stance, where her feet pointed, her crossed arms, her chin tucked as if he’d go for her throat. For all that she’d said she would answer their questions, she had secrets here she was protecting.

  “You’ve survived ten years of working with chi constantly. Are we to be fearful of dying after a quarter hour?” Kip asked.

  “Chi is as unpredictable as a mad old bull, my lord. It’s wisest to stay out of the corral.”

  Around him, the Mighty shuffled uneasily amid the verdant low underbrush of the old-growth forest here so oddly atop a palace, complete with mossy boulders and fallen tree limbs dissolving into the ground to feed mushrooms.

  On a sudden hunch, Kip tightened his eyes all the way to chi. “That’s why you wear the armor,” he said. “That’s what you meant when you said you’re not safe.”

  The Keeper’s body itself had become so infused with chi that it emanated chi. She had become a living lantern of lethal light. That was the reason for the heavy armor she wore—not to keep attacks out but to keep them in.

  No wonder she didn’t want anyone to stand close. No wonder others feared her so. No wonder the Chromeria feared chi and its drafters. Like paryl drafters, chi drafters could kill invisibly, but unlike their paryl counterparts, they did so unwittingly, unknowably, uncontrollably.

  “That’s correct,” she said stiffly.

  “You may have given us a cancer already,” Kip said.

  “Yes.” Bitterness leaked through her clipped tones. It wasn’t enough that she was dying, disfigured, and in pain, but she must be avoided by even caretakers, worse than a leper.

  Kip didn’t fight the sudden wave of fear that pushed through him, but neither did he step farther away. He looked for the seed of compassion he’d felt for her instead. He took a slow breath, choosing to see her as a brave and noble woman while ignoring himself. “You’re a good person, strong and brave,” Kip said, “so—”

  “Are you mocking me, my lord?”

  Oh, she was angry. Right on the edge. Or she was terrified.

  “Actually,” Kip said, “I was using this tricky rhetorical device we learn in the hinterlands of far Tyrea where I was born. We call it a ‘compliment.’”

  She didn’t seem to know how to take that.

  “So…” Kip said, “since you’re that person. I can only figure that you’ve decided that deceiving me is the right thing for you to do. Can you help me understand why?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Answering a question with a question is a classic telltale of a lie.”

  “I haven’t lied!” she said. “What do you want of us, Guile?”

  “Your secret is no secret,” Kip said. “You use the Great Mirror to pass messages to Green Haven. That’s a stunning distance for a simple beam of light, so you can’t be doing it directly. You’ve got to be using other smaller mirrors in between. Relay stations, like bonfires on hilltops. That’s the only reason you’d need three axes for this mirror, so you could move the beam elsewhere in case one of those hilltop mirror stations is taken or needs repairs. But then it occurred to me that if you have mirror stations already, there’s no reason you’d only communicate with Green Haven. With a few dozen stations, you could reach the entire satrapy. A message could be relayed from one end of the satrapy to the other in the course of a night. This is what I want from you—I want to use your network. I have people far afield. If I can reach them, I can coordinate this satrapy’s defenses in ways the Wight King couldn’t hope to counter. He’s blockaded the Great River. Do you know that? With your mirrors, I could find out where, and I could speak with our allies. Even if I could only get a message halfway across the satrapy but on the other side of the blockade, we could—”

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  “What?”

  “There was such a network, long ago, before the Blood Wars. It was a huge defensive advantage—but the Ruthgari realized it, too. They murdered any chi drafters they could find and destroyed the mirror holds. Chi drafters have always been short-lived, and many of those few people who can learn to draft chi choose not to, given the costs. So we were always rare. The network fell centuries ago. A few mirrors still remain, some buried, hidden by their old keepers for the day when all could be restored, but they’ve no one tending them now. Where they’re known at all, they’re mere curiosities. Messages are only possible between here and Green Haven now, the old capital and the new.”

  “Why is it a secret, then?”

  “We’re not supposed to have it at all. The Chromeria wanted us to shut down all our defenses. They required it, but with the Ruthgari raiding, our ancestors broke that part of the treaty immediately. All this was centuries ago, mind you. The Chromeria didn’t care, as long as we kept our defiance discreet. That need for discretion and their long revulsion for chi drafters has enforced us keeping a low profile. An overly zealous Magisterium or a hostile Prism could mean our deaths.”

  There was still something she wasn’t telling him. “You use chi to adjust the mirror’s positioning?” A yes-or-no question.

  “We can use it for all sorts of things. Sending the beam of the signal, of course, being the most important,” she said.

  Not a direct answer. “You use chi to adjust the mirror’s position?” he insisted.

  She hesitated.

  That was the problem with an unpracticed liar. She hoped to mislead Kip without lying outright. She hadn’t considered exactly how far she was willing to go to hide her secrets, or what Kip was likely to already know.

  “I thought it went without saying,” she said.

  “Odd thing to lie about,” Kip mused.

  “Are you quite dense?” she asked.

  “Again a question in reply to a question,” Kip said, as if commenting on the weather.

  It was strange. What was it that allowed him to react so differently to her than to the Divines? She was lying to him. She’d just called him stupid. But he was able to see that this wasn’t about him at all, so he didn’t need to win here.

  Stranger still, without him pushing back, she had nothing to push against, and she was falling over.

  She said, “The Mirror has to be adjusted for weather conditions—some of which we understand and others we don’t,” she said. “For example, the light will travel differently after or during a rain or on a very humid day. Other times, it seems some quality of the sunlight itself changes how clearly the beams travel over these great distances. So minute movements are necessary even with our well-known target of Green Haven. Using even small amounts of chi repeatedly is, as you’ve seen, quite hazardous.”

  “Still hiding. Still deflecting,” Kip said.

  A perfect black globe broader across than Kip’s shoulders rested in the trunk of the vast white oak itself, sunk into the wood—but leaving no rupture in the living wood, nor any oozing sap from a wound, nor any sign of the bark curling around it the way a natural tree might grow around a fence post. It looked as unnatural as if an image of a sphere had been superimposed on the tree trunk.

  Inset around it were a number of similar black, featureless plates, only the oils of past fingers p
roving they weren’t illusory.

  But Kip wasn’t drawn to those. Instead, he set his hands directly on the globe, and extended his will into it.

  “What are you doing?” the Keeper of the Flame asked. “Don’t touch that!”

  He ignored her.

  “You could die!” she said. She turned to Cruxer. “He could die! You have to stop him!”

  None of the Mighty moved.

  “We could all die if he does the wrong thing!” she said.

  She reached a hand out to grab Kip, but suddenly found her arm held immobile.

  “Then whatever he’s doing,” Cruxer said, his voice calmly professional but his grip on her arm unyielding, “I suggest you don’t louse it up.”

  A touch of superviolet, and suddenly, above them, the vast shining disk that was the Great Mirror wobbled.

  “Like I thought,” Kip said. “You don’t use chi to move the mirror. So what do you use it for?”

  The mask hid all but a bit of her shaking her head. “Chi is more energetic than any other color. It can go farther, with less diffusion. The messages themselves are beams of chi.”

  Now, that was new. Kip had assumed they were reflecting the sun or a bonfire. “You reach Green Haven directly? All the way from here?!”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You didn’t get cancers doing nothing.”

  “There’s… procedures.”

  “There’s something in here, inside this globe. I can feel a hollow. Open it for me, would you?” Kip asked.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Won’t,” Kip corrected. “No matter. Big Leo, you think you can smash this thing open with your chain?”

  Big Leo grunted and slid the heavy fighting chain off his shoulders. His voice low and emotionless, he said, “Happy to try.”

  Winsen turned to Big Leo. “You know, if you do break it, they’re gonna give him the credit, right? We should never have named him Breaker.”

  “Eh. I’m all right with that,” Big Leo said. “Long as I get to use my chain.”

  O’s beard, but he played the big dumb thug beautifully when he wanted to.