The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “I knew her, you know.”

  “Katalina Galden?” Kip asked. “Any relation to that asshole Magister Jens Galden?”

  Kip looked at the cards he’d drawn. Nothing. A big, heaping, steaming-on-a-cold-winter’s-day pile-of-stinky nothing. He’d drawn most of the equipment in his deck, but no direct attacks and no one good enough to put the equipment on. If he’d kept Katalina Galden, he would have had a chance.

  “Same family, though not likely by blood. I was actually speaking of Janus Borig,” Andross said, drawing his own cards, imperturbable. “The woman who drew the new cards.”

  It was whiplash for Kip. He’d been walking down another mental path completely. And then he remembered. This was how Andross Guile operated: overload your opponent with too many things to think about, and then drop a bomb with a burning fuse in his lap and see what he did.

  “How many people in history do you think were smarter than you are?” Kip asked.

  But the counter didn’t work.

  “She was a dear friend of your grandmother’s,” Andross said. “For a long time. She, more than anyone, I think, is responsible for our family’s troubles. She lied to me. She lied to us.” She? Oh, she Janus Borig.

  Kip got to go first, so he laid out nearly all of his cards. “How so?” Kip asked, suspicious.

  “I was going to say, ‘So beware of trusting anything she told you.’ But instead you’re surprised,” Andross said. “So you think she’s a truth teller? Because she’s a Mirror? Because ‘Mirror’ implies a passivity?”

  After his talk about mirrors with his wife not two hours ago, Kip felt like either history was bringing something together for him to understand or this was just one of those times where you learn a new word or concept and suddenly you’re seeing it everywhere.

  “I know this much,” Kip said, trying not to show how troubled he was. “She didn’t try to kill me before even meeting me.”

  “No, she was more interested in using you to kill someone else,” Andross said. He played three coccas; they were smaller ships, but each capable of decent damage. If Kip got the direct attacks his deck depended on, he would have to waste valuable turns taking them out.

  Kip was screwed. The game had barely started, and they both already knew he was going to lose. He looked at the card he’d drawn: Yellow Spectacles. Garbage.

  Yeah, Luck, go bugger yourself.

  “I’m sure anyone who has a message you can’t control must be untrustworthy,” Kip said, more furious at his cards than at his opponent. “From today forward I will get all my intelligence from you alone, grandfather.”

  A muscle in Andross’s jaw twitched, but he took a slow breath. “Do you know, it’s so frustrating. I’m making all the same mistakes with you I made with Dazen. I’m a better player than this. Fine.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care, and Kip had to hide his astonishment that he’d thrown his grandfather off his own planned path for once.

  “She told me,” Andross said, “when I first ascended to the Red seat on the Spectrum, that she wanted to paint my portrait for her cards. It was meant to be hugely flattering, of course, a known Mirror telling me that I was worthy of a card. If one excludes the procedure and discovery and weapon and monster cards, that fact alone would acknowledge me as one of the four hundred fifty-seven most important people throughout history to that point. Slightly more, actually, but I didn’t have an accurate count of the Black Cards then, and of course, there were many important people who never sat for their portrait, but they’re the less famous for it. What the originals of these cards did, though, was known to very few.”

  Andross played Amir Bazak on one of the coccas, and Red Spectacles, and equipped them on him. Amir had turned himself into a human bomb, penetrating the enemy lines during a battle through subterfuge and then drafting so much red it killed him in an explosion that took out thousands and opened a gap in the line. It was a weak card, easily killed—if you had something to kill it with.

  “But you knew,” Kip said. It was hard to imagine Andross Guile not knowing any secret. “You knew what the cards did.”

  “I married well, into a family that knew… most of it,” Andross said. “But Borig was clever. I think she’d already seen more than I guessed. She led me to believe that a card could only cover the time period up until its creation. Seems logical, right? And I believed that each person could only have one card. She lied. So tell me, my cleverer grandson, why would that be a problem?”

  It wasn’t the flattery of being told he was historically important, Kip realized. Though he imagined that flattery had meant quite a lot to Andross Guile, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  But Andross would have pushed past the flattery.

  Commemorating a mere Red? Andross had set his sights so much higher, and would soon achieve so much more. If Andross had believed that he was destined for much greater heights than merely being the youngest Red in history, then…

  “Ah,” Kip said. “You had plans. You knew that you were going to be promachos someday. Or maybe Prism? The White?”

  “Something like that,” Andross said. “Regardless, I should have known better. I was a young man, with a young man’s weaknesses. I thought potential meant something. I thought I was so very devious in having her paint my card before I had done most of the things I’d planned. See, I was worried about what my enemies might do with such a card after it was completed. I knew I deserved a card. So if I could get her to do my card early, then even if my enemies got it, the information they learned about me, being solely retrospective, would be of limited use to them.

  “But the truth was I hadn’t done anything up to that point to deserve a card. Seizing control of my family, winning my bride from the pool of suitors and against a father who initially opposed me, becoming the Red? These are but the foundation stones of a legend, not a legend itself. But she was clever to come to me then, when I was overwhelmed with other concerns and susceptible to flattery. I couldn’t take the time then to properly investigate the cards.”

  “They weren’t only retrospective?” Kip asked. He played his garbage, and drew a Great Mirror. Too late.

  Andross sipped his whiskey. He motioned that both ships and Amir Bazak would attack.

  Kip couldn’t stop the attack. The ships hurt him a little, and then Amir Bazak exploded and took out one of them, and badly damaged the other, but also took out almost all of Kip’s life.

  Andross said, “There are scholars’ papers that say things like ‘operating outside of time,’ which sounds profound, until you think about it and realize it’s nonsense. No, her lie was different. She told me—or I assumed—that it was only possible to have one card. After all, no one else has ever had more than one, and though I’m a proud man, I hadn’t considered myself quite that special. Reflecting on it later, I realized that I didn’t know that others hadn’t had multiple cards made of them, with only one kept for later use. I only knew the cards that had entered the registers. It’s possible the Mirrors have pulled this trick before. Lucidonius has no card, so far as we know, but there is an account of there being a Mirror during his era who met an early end. It was attributed to the Order, but they are a convenient scapegoat, aren’t they?”

  “You think Janus Borig made another card of you?”

  “That’s the question I think you will answer. Right. About. Now.” Andross played Sea Demon.

  Kip couldn’t kill it in one turn, and the cocca alone could kill him next round, so it was now impossible for him to win.

  He’d been focused during the game, focused on winning, on Andross’s words, and that tight focus had allowed his mother to blur into insignificance in the background. But now she came back into his vision, only for him to see her retreating into the distance. Andross wouldn’t give Kip her story; he never gave anyone anything, especially not something of great value to them.

  Kip hadn’t thought it would affect him, but suddenly it felt like losing his mother all over again—and eve
n worse now. Andross wasn’t going to let Kip find his grandfather, either, for his grandfather Asafa would likely tell Kip the story himself, and Andross wasn’t about to give up a prize for nothing.

  It was a moot point. Kip was going to die in this battle. It shouldn’t hurt.

  He didn’t have time to prattle on with some old stranger anyway.

  “Looks like a small man on a little ship wins it for you,” Kip said. “An unlikely hero, what with sea demons and Great Mirrors about.”

  “But a hero nonetheless… because I was willing to lose him.”

  Kip folded his cards, conceding. “So Zymun and I are your little ships?” he asked.

  Andross sipped his whiskey. “It’s a game, not a metaphor, and you’re the one who chose these decks. Not that I’m opposed to learning lessons from mere games or other unlikely places. Speaking of which, there’s the matter of our first wager. I believe you have a story to tell me about what happened to Janus Borig’s cards.”

  Chapter 79

  Even as Gavin ran up the steps to the Tower of Heaven’s roof, he noticed a change from the hewn conformity of all the stairs he’d climbed in the entire hike up until now.

  The steps became irregular, a more natural shape, with uncut stone, albeit worn by the passage of many thousands of feet over untold years. Coming out on the top of White Mist Tower felt not like reaching the top of one of the Chromeria’s seven towers but instead like summiting the stone crown of a mountain. The top wasn’t carved flat, but gently curved.

  It reminded him, quite suddenly, of the crest of Sundered Rock before he and his brother had shattered it.

  So long lost in darkness, that memory surfaced as sharply as did the black stone beneath his feet. For the entire climb, the black stone of the tower had been an oddity. Was it meant to evoke the black humility of a luxiat’s robes? The imagery had never gelled for Gavin. Luxiats showed they had no light of their own, but surely this pilgrimage should be toward light. Maybe a tower black at the base, but lighter as one climbed? That could make sense.

  Instead, White Mist Tower was unrelieved black.

  A part of Gavin knew he should move fast. He should grab the blade before anything else. He’d circled halfway around the tower with the last stair, which put the sword at the far side. But running before he knew what was here might be rushing heedless into danger—rather than running to safety. And a sight here struck him like Orholam’s own raised fist.

  Here, finally, at its topmost height, the Tower of Heaven poked its head above the wall of white mists that had obscured the rest of it for ages. Only here, at its crown, was Gavin high enough to see out beyond the mantle of cloud cloaking both tower and island.

  The rising sun, dimmed for all the timeless days he’d been here, shone brilliant, awakening the horizon with fire. White fire, to Gavin’s color-blind eyes, but the sun was beautiful yet, even stripped of its colors by a cruel god.

  The thought brought him back to himself. Brought him back to threats and death and killing. He couldn’t see the sword on the opposite side of the tower’s top, hidden as it was by the rise of the stone hill that was the tower’s center—but he didn’t see anything else, either.

  The summit was empty.

  The pilgrimage ended in nothing.

  I crossed half the world to come to God’s own house, and He’s not at home.

  Probably never was.

  But maybe this was an illusion, another will-casting, another test.

  Gavin covered his color-blind eye and stared through the black jewel. It revealed only bleak nothingness rendered in starker tones than his natural orb saw. Brittle stone, a tower not of heaven but of lies. This temple was all façade. Men had labored for a thousand years to build this tower to the heavens, and when they reached it, they found themselves punished only with the death of their delusions and a loneliness plunging as deep as this tower was tall.

  In piling up a tower to heaven, they only burrowed down exactly that deeply into hell. In the light of this open air, they’d found a darkness as great as the black cell under the Chromeria.

  On the day they’d finished, there had surely been some festival, some celebration with serious prayers from serious luxiats. Together, those gathered had surely shouted to heaven, ‘We built You a house! Come and live among us, Orholam! Fulfill the promise of the ages!’

  What had they done when there had been no answer?

  How long had it been before scandalized luxiats, seeing their own power dissolve with other men’s beliefs, concocted some excuse for Orholam’s absence?

  They’d lied then as they did now, because all their power rested on it.

  It was what Gavin had always suspected, but it was like suspecting your wife had cheated, dread growing in your heart as you became more certain, but the relationship not dying until you heard the admission from your becursed-beloved’s own lips.

  Gavin staggered. He fell to one knee. He clamped his eyes closed as his chest tightened and shut off his breath.

  He covered the eye patch and opened only his natural eye, praying to no one, but praying that his wounded natural orb would see things differently. Perhaps the black stone told him bleaker news than it ought.

  The darkness receded slowly from his vision like an oily film slowly sliding earthward, but even here in the beauty of a sunrise as he hadn’t seen in what felt like ages untold, the fundamental truth remained: there was nothing here.

  Nothing here meant everything Gavin had done—everything, for his whole life—was a breath exhaled into the storm. Worse, there being nothing here meant there was no nexus of magic. No nexus meant there was no nexus to kill.

  That meant there was no way to save Karris.

  What was Gavin to report to Grinwoody? ‘I went but there was nothing there’? Who would believe that? Before the White Mist Reef had closed off the isle, disillusioned pilgrims must have said the same thing a hundred thousand times to those who’d not made the journey, and yet the people of the satrapies had chosen to believe instead the liars who’d returned swearing they’d encountered Orholam here.

  Karris would die. Gavin would, too, even if he made it home. How could Grinwoody let him live?

  He had no future.

  But it was worse than a mission failed, and all Gavin’s happiness stolen. It was worse than losing his life to that worm. Everything Gavin had ever done had been in the service of lies. His own, and others’.

  His brother’s death, and everyone he’d murdered for the Freeing, it had all been only men wrestling for power, cloaking themselves in respectability by invoking a god who had nothing to do with any of it, because He didn’t exist.

  But though broken and barely able to breathe, Gavin fought his way to his feet.

  He’d knelt long enough.

  So his suspicion was right, and his long-held intuition was wrong. So his first great goal would go unmet. The world was as it was. Only one thing was left for him to do.

  He would pick up the sword, and he would hack at the very peak of the tower until he broke the Blinding Knife. He would carve the word ‘Lies’ into the very rock. And then, one last time, he would fly—as he hurled himself from the tower to a well-deserved death.

  Chapter 80

  Kip considered lying, of course. He was still a Guile.

  “My father had hidden a box in a training bag. I was kicking it when I heard something break. I was drafting, maybe all the colors at once, and I opened the bag and the cards flew out onto my skin. I… somehow absorbed the cards. Not on purpose. I lost consciousness and nearly died, but Teia was able to revive me. When she pried the cards off my skin, they were blank.”

  “But you Viewed them,” Andross said.

  “Not in any way that I could make sense of,” Kip said. “I saw them all at once. It killed me. Literally. My heart stopped. It, it felt like… It obliterated my mind. I couldn’t tell who I was anymore.”

  “But they’re not lost,” Andross insisted. “You’ve the Guile memory.�
��

  “In any meaningful sense, yes, they’re lost,” Kip said.

  “‘In any meaningful sense’? So in some other sense they’re not. Tell me how they’re not lost. Tell me what you experienced.”

  Of course it was like this. Kip had inadvertently destroyed the world’s most valuable intelligence. Of course Andross was going to go after the scraps.

  So Kip started talking. What did it matter, now, with their doom coming down on their heads? Kip ended up telling him about the Great Library and the immortal or djinn or whatever Abaddon was, with his broken ankles and pistol and that cracked mask of a visage. He skipped the master cloak. That was Teia’s secret now, not Kip’s.

  Andross got a funny look as Kip told him about the immortal, but if it was disbelief, clearly he decided not to challenge Kip on it right now.

  That was the great joy of speaking with Andross Guile, of course: you knew everything you said would be used against you sooner or later.

  “Tell me every card name you remember.”

  Kip told him. It didn’t take very long. He ended by saying, “And there was even a card that may have been you. I saw a man, maybe in a ship? The Master. He was writing a letter to the Color Prince, a treasonous letter about becoming Dagnu. He was cowled, though, as you used to be. And his hands were stained crimson like a red drafter who’s gone wight.”

  “Ah, that’s why you tried to assassinate me after the Battle of Ru,” Andross said.

  “That is… not what happened. And we both know it,” Kip said.

  “No, it’s not,” Andross admitted. “You remember no more of that card?”

  “No. Not then or ever. One glimpse.”

  Andross believed him, he could tell.

  “Now, I’ve fulfilled the terms of my wager,” Kip said. “More than fulfilled them.”

  “Tell me about these flashbacks you ‘sometimes’ get.”

  “That wasn’t part of the deal,” Kip said.

  “They’re part of the cards you destroyed, and it may be the key to saving us all, and who better to help you disentangle a puzzle than I?” Andross asked.