The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Red, everywhere red.

  And in the blood mirror, Gavin saw himself again.

  As every Freeing came around, Gavin had braced himself, and he’d felt bad… and he’d done the murdering expected of him. And he’d wept and he’d repented privately and he’d gotten drunk and he’d tried to forget. And the next year, he did it again. Over and over.

  What would the Spectrum have done if instead he’d stood up on Sun Day and used his platform to declare, ‘This ends now! I will not kill in your name. This is evil. It is finished!’

  What if he’d spent his life trying to find some other way? Things had been different before Vician’s Sin; they all knew that. What if Dazen, who routinely did the impossible, had turned himself to the impossible task of fixing the Chromeria and the Seven Satrapies?

  Instead, Gavin had spent all his charisma on himself. He’d hidden when he could have fought.

  The blood reached the bottom of the mirror. It poured out onto the obsidian of the tower’s top, rushed past his feet, sticky.

  He could smell it.

  He’d been made for more than this. With his natural gifts, Dazen could have been more. Should have been more.

  He’d secretly dared to be a god? He’d not even been a man! Alone, isolated by his own secrets and shame, he’d become a monster.

  I have nothing to give you, Dulcina Dulceana had said at the Freeing, but my time. Take my five minutes, and rest. She’d been so quiet, so still yet welcoming, her presence had been an enveloping peace, like the warmth of hot springs on a chill night.

  He’d taken her five minutes. Her action: her offer, her sacrifice, and her love, had been beautiful, pure. Where time was the measure of wealth, he, the rich man with many flocks, had taken a poor woman’s last beloved lamb—and devoured it before her eyes.

  And then he’d slaughtered her. He’d cast from this world that young woman whose very presence was healing. He’d cost the whole world all she could have done.

  He regarded the broken thing in the Great Mirror. Here was ‘Gavin’ Guile. Any accusation he could level against his father, any sin of which he could accuse the Spectrum, any cupidity and vice he hated in others, all that he despised, lay living and breathing and strong in him.

  The climb up the tower was supposed to purge his sins? It had only revealed them. He’d held on to a core of himself, an ambition, a pride. He’d held on to the sword, thinking: Judge me, O God? You dare? I am broken, but I will rise in bitter triumph. I submit to the truth of Your every accusation, but soon… I will be God!

  He looked at the mighty blade in his maimed left hand and transferred it to his thorny, strong right. He felt a gathering darkness in the blade that echoed the gathering darkness of the night and within him. Gavin was not a holy man; he was a man wholly dark. The black sheathing the blade was the same black that had become his left eye, that had burrowed deep. Perhaps it wasn’t hiding, as he had thought. Perhaps it was incubating.

  Woe to the world when it hatched.

  It had spread from his heart throughout his body, reaching even to his hands, to the black blade.

  Or perhaps, seed crystal that it was, the black eye had simply titrated all the darkness that was already within him, latent. It wasn’t foreign, alien, other. The black was his true self.

  What if it is yourself that you fear? Your power?

  His vision shivered once more, and in the blood mirror through his truth-seeing black eye Gavin saw great wings sprouting from his back, unfurling with a crack. He saw his form swelling with power, growing invincible. He would take, and punish, and live. Live forever. What could he not do, given time? He would make all things right. Fix all he’d broken. Even himself.

  But visible from his mortal eye, the self remained, aghast, ashamed at him.

  Take the blade, and strike—or they will take everything from you! Strike! Be the god you really are! You’ve suffered enough. You deserve this! All can be healed! Rise from ashes, glorious!

  Closing his left eye, he looked once more upon the man in the mirror. Lips cracked, skin burnt, hair lank, eye patch leering, his whole aspect a shadow of a shadow of the glory of his former self. There were only skeletal remains of Dazen Guile. He’d killed him. He’d killed everything good. And why? In order to extend an existence he hated?

  Why would you kill an innocent to give another day to a person you despise? He had failed in every good thing he’d tried to do. He was loathsome. Everyone he loved would be better off if he were dead.

  Let this be the end.

  He braced the hilt of the gun-sword on the ground and set the point of the cruel sword between his fifth and sixth rib. Then he shifted his weight, adjusting to get it right.

  Of all the things not to fuck up, falling on your sword had to rate pretty high.

  “Dazen!” Sevastian said. “Elrahee. Elishama. Eliada. Eliphalet. He sees. He hears. He cares. He saves.”

  Gavin snorted. “And yet here I am, on His front porch. Knocked on the door. Hell, I even punched a hole in it! He isn’t here, brother. Never was. This tower’s a monument to nothing. And you’re nothing but my madness.”

  “Dazen, if Orholam came to speak to you in the flesh, you still wouldn’t listen. Didn’t, for your whole climb and for your whole life. But you listened to me. So who’s the right messenger to send to you?”

  “You’re not a messenger. You’re a hallucination.” But tears were flowing. He was so ashamed and he could hide none of it now.

  “A hallucination who tells you things you don’t know and kicks your ass?”

  “Hey, you didn’t kick my ass!”

  “You just don’t want to admit you lost a fight to an eight-year-old boy.”

  From its brief levity, Gavin’s heart dropped again.

  “It was supposed to be you, wasn’t it?” Gavin said. “You were the best of us. You were supposed to be the Lightbringer.”

  Sevastian took a deep breath and pursed his lips.

  “So we’re lost. Father killed the Lightbringer.”

  “Sometimes the wicked win a battle. Sometimes those who hear the call say no to it. Men have power. Our actions matter, even unto eternity. But the ultimate victory is still assured.”

  “We killed the fucking Lightbringer, Sevastian.”

  “A Lightbringer,” Sevastian said. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I, too, would have been turned aside, corrupted, or killed. Who’s to say? What I know is this. If God needed perfect mirrors to bring His light to the world, it would be a world forever dark. Imperfect mirrors also—”

  Gavin scoffed, pointing at himself. “Imperfect?! What, you see this as mildly flawed? Look at me! You know what I was! What I am.”

  “I see. I see and I’m not turning away.”

  “How can you not?”

  Sevastian pierced him with a gaze that combined the best of Felia and Andross Guile and yet was somehow fully his own. “Because I love you, brother. I see the you that’s you, under all this. Yes, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting, but you can be more. I know what you can become, even still. There’s still work for you to do.”

  Gavin sneered. “Not for me. I’m finished. It’s sunset. I’ve failed my mission. Karris is dead by now. I’ve betrayed half the people in my life, and failed all the rest. My time’s up.”

  He remembered then his dream. In the dream, his hand had looked like this—this thorny, skeletal abomination. He’d been on a tower like this, and a giant had come striding up to smash him in judgment. Orholam Himself. And Gavin had known he deserved his fate, but still begged for more time.

  It had been more than a dream. It had been prophecy.

  And had done him just as much good as prophecy usually does.

  He braced the hilt of the sword on the stones once more. The blood would make it slick.

  He was so very tired of his lies, and his false bravery, and his false fronts, and his falsity on every human axis of virtue. His lies had gutted every word of praise uttered for him, denuded every moment of triumph,
hamstrung every victory. Now it was time to let every lie die, no matter how precious.

  “You know, for all the awful shit you did,” Sevastian said, “you had some good things about you. Even as Gavin, you were amazingly brave. You would risk your life to do amazing things at the drop of a hat. Not sure why you’d give that up, right at the end, when you could do the most amazing thing of all. If you had the guts, that is.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re gonna kill yourself, why don’t you go out like a man?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like you said, the front door’s right there.” He motioned to the Great Mirror, still streaming blood. “The Mirror of Waking is open. Why don’t you go inside?”

  “It’s a trap,” Gavin said.

  “So what do you care if it is? You climbed all this way to confront God Himself, and at His doorstep you’re just going to kill yourself? Really? You’re just going to lie down in the bog and wait for the muck to close over your face? No fighting, huh?” He faked a yawn. “Out of all the things you’ve been called, brother, I never thought at the end you’d opt for ‘boring.’”

  Gavin narrowed his eyes. “Why are you egging me on?”

  “I’m a little brother. It’s what we do.” Sevastian grinned, and if his version of the Guile grin was more innocent than Gavin’s knowing grin, it was equally mischievous, and more winning. Gavin’s grin had always said, ‘Look at me, aren’t I wonderful?’ Sevastian’s said, ‘Look at us, aren’t we wonderful?’

  Even here, even now, Gavin couldn’t hold on to all of his anger.

  “You’re kind of a dick,” Gavin murmured.

  “I’m a Guile.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  Ah. Acknowledging the truth, but drawing the parallel so as to shoot the insult back to include Dazen, who was a Guile as well.

  Sevastian was joyfully quick.

  It made the ache of losing him deepen. Had he lived, Sevastian would have been a peerless friend. A man keen and sharp and strong. The best of the Guiles, surely. If he’d lived, might not his goodness have moored Dazen to some integrity?

  They all would’ve been so different: Gavin, father, mother, and Dazen, too.

  But Gavin was staring at the mirror now with something like purpose. Sevastian was right: he had climbed all this way. He had to know.

  And if it cost his life to find out, so much the better. Right?

  But first…“I’ll lose you if I do this, won’t I?” he asked.

  “For a time,” Sevastian said, his voice low.

  “A long time?”

  “I hope not, for my sake. I miss you. And I hope so for your sake and the world’s.”

  Gavin looked at him, as if one last look would tell him if this were all real or madness, but his vision still bifurcated with his two eyes. “All right, then. Delusion… Brother. Whichever. Thank you.” He took a deep breath, but there wasn’t air enough in all the world for him to be ready for what he was going to do next, so he simply said, “Now, enough fuckin’ around.”

  Without another word, he charged the cage that held the monster he’d been fleeing for his whole life: he ran at the Great Mirror. His reflected self—bloody, crimson, deformed, raw, haggard, and hard—ran at him. They screamed their defiance of each other and their acceptance of death, and crashed into each other.

  Chapter 116

  “Would you look at that?” Kip said as the Mighty crested the last hill before heading over the bridge to the Chromeria. All around the Jaspers, the bane were now visible, just under the surface, slowly rising, and coming in closer toward the shore every moment, propelled by magic and the will of their dark gods.

  By now all the drafters on the Jaspers had pressed their fingers on hellstone to empty themselves of all the luxin in their bodies, and Kip should have been up on the mirror array, even though the bane weren’t doing anything yet.

  “You still with me?” Kip asked. “Even if…?” He didn’t make eye contact with the Mighty. He hadn’t told them about the game, about the Lightbringer stakes. There were lots of reasons for that. He didn’t want to tell them what he’d wagered against it, for one. Tisis wasn’t going to take that well, once he told her—and he would, just not hours before a battle. Andross could well refuse to honor his debt, might find some loophole.

  Truth was, he didn’t feel like the most important person in history.

  Winsen said, “We’ve placed our bets. We’re yours, asshole.”

  That it was Winsen who said it warmed Kip’s heart unexpectedly. He nodded to the enigmatic man, his friend.

  “Just wish we coulda done right by Crux before the end,” Big Leo said.

  “Bollocks,” Ben-hadad said. “Fighting for what’s good and right? Fighting for what we believe in and for each other? We are doing right by Cruxer and by every other friend we’ve buried in this war. Enough. Let’s—”

  They all stopped talking as above them a sudden beam of light shot from the Great Mirrors atop the Prism’s Tower.

  “What the—” Big Leo said.

  “Zymun,” Kip said. “Bastard. That’s my signal. The one I can’t miss.”

  They rode across the Lily’s Stem and saw several Lightguards go running, doubtless to tell their master. Kip and his Mighty and fifty of the best of the Cwn y Wawr and numerous units fortified by Daragh the Coward’s men made their way to the grand atrium. Forty Lightguards stood in ranks before the lifts, and another twenty before the slaves’ stair entrance.

  The Lightguards were sweating and pale. Not the best of that august company. Kip’s men couldn’t help but sneer at them, but one of Andross Guile’s secretaries at the mouth of the passage that led out to the back docks spoke up, “My lord! High Lord Guile! The promachos awaits you out back!”

  Kip couldn’t attack those Lightguards, even though he’d heard they’d had some kind of skirmish with the Blackguards. The Lightguards were at least nominally Andross Guile’s men. Attacking them would start a civil war.

  Now was not the time.

  So Kip simply walked past them. He reached the Blackguards at the gate to the passage to the back docks. “The old man back there?” Kip asked.

  They nodded jerkily.

  Kip left the majority of his men there—he didn’t want to get stuck on the wrong side of a choke point. Then he walked through, only Ferkudi and Big Leo and a dozen of his best following him.

  There were Blackguards at the back gate, of course. New people Kip didn’t know. Another two stood on the dock, scanning the water for sea wights who might be swimming below. But Andross Guile wasn’t with them. With four more Blackguards watching over him carefully, he was off to one side, on the small beach, staring out over the Cerulean Sea.

  Kip approached him alone, coming to stand where the very beach was wet with little lapping waves.

  “Do you want to know what’s bathetic?” Andross Guile said, standing at the waterline.

  “What?” Kip said.

  “I’m standing here because of a translation my wife was unsure of, in a dead language, on a partial scroll, which may have been dictated to a poor student by a prophet who himself was rejected by the Chromeria’s leading scholars—a prophet of a god I don’t believe particularly cares about us.” He shook his head. “And yet here I stand. It’s a stubborn thing, the faith of one’s youth.”

  “Oh,” Kip said. “I was actually wondering what the word ‘bathetic’ means.”

  “Haven’t Viewed my card yet, have you?” Andross asked.

  “There’s a war on,” Kip said. “Did you not notice?”

  “We have so many things in common, you and I,” Andross said.

  “Some,” Kip admitted. Not many.

  “Both outsiders, both drawn inexorably to the center of all things, both overlooked, both with a tenacity to outlast stones and shatter cities. We approach life with hearts broken but heads unbowed. We both are surrounded by the mighty. We were both great from o
ur youth: I recognized as a young man with a destiny, you… well, that other meaning of ‘great.’ Depending on how you parse such things, one might say one or the other of us has brought down gods. Only you have killed a king, but if today goes well, I’ll add kings to my list, too.”

  “Both wasting our time on a beach?” Kip offered.

  “Odd. Flippancy is a trait of the fearful, not of those who inspire fear.”

  “Do I look fearful to you?”

  After a moment, Andross said, “No.”

  “Then can we move this along? I saw the sign you told me to look for. I have places to be.”

  “No, you have one place to be. This place.”

  “Sir?” a young Blackguard interrupted. “Pardon me, High Lord Promachos. It’s the Prism, sir. Er, Prism-elect?”

  “Yes?” Andross said, irritated.

  “Commander Fisk wanted me to tell you… He’s, um, the Prism-elect that is—He’s sort of gone crazy, sir? Not like battle exhausted or catatonic, sir. He’s using the mirrors to burn people, apparently on purpose. He’s laughing. Our people, sir. The bane are almost to the shore, but he’s mostly ignoring them. Said it’s like ants under a glass.”

  Andross sighed heavily. “Well, that’s inconvenient, if not a total surprise. Kip, remind me the next time you louse something up that you aren’t half as bad as your brother.”

  “He’s only my half brother, so there you have it,” Kip said. “What were you hoping he’d do?”

  “Oh, exactly what he’s doing, but half competently. He was supposed to get angry you’d been favored and get on the mirror array to defend the islands until he burned himself out, broke the halo, and needed to be put down by the Blackguard.”

  “What?” Kip asked.

  “He was supposed to ‘ascend to the heights and fail’—thus clearing the path for you to… be what we said. Young man,” Andross said to the Blackguard, “tell Commander Fisk this falls under the Fourth Oath. You’ll find him stationed with our young Prism.”

  “The Fourth Oath, sir, yes, my lord.” But the young man had a panicked look on his face, like he was failing a sudden quiz.