The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “No,” Orholam said. “If I wished to rob humans of their will, would the world be so full of trouble? No. Slavery is what happens when men act on their desire to be gods, and slavery shows what kind of gods you’d be. How about a son who strives to be the best son he can be?”

  “Then I swear to honor and obey You with all my strength.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m Yours. To spend as You will.”

  Dazen looked up and saw eyes harder than a hurricane sky. And he was reminded that all the temporal power of even the greatest emperor was but an intimation and premonition of the power and passion he beheld here.

  “Accomplish something with me, would You?” Dazen asked.

  “Conditions? Already?” Orholam asked, and His voice was soft as stone.

  “None except Your nature.” Dazen could only pray it was true, that he wasn’t as wrong about that as he had been about so much else. With a trembling hand, he touched Orholam’s foot.

  “First, then,” Orholam said, “you’ve brought something detestable into My presence. You cast away nine boon stones to make the leap here, but you kept one.”

  “What?!”

  “Give Me the black boon stone.”

  Gavin gulped. “Whatever do You mean?”

  But he knew what He meant.

  Orholam pointed a very pointy finger at Gavin.

  No. Not at Gavin. At his eye.

  Mother Dark herself. The black seed crystal that had become his eye. Orholam wanted that for tribute?

  “I’m… uh, You don’t want that,” Gavin said. He swallowed.

  “I want you to give it to Me.”

  “Give me some time and I’ll… I’ll devise a more fitting gift.” He was a coward.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Do You think I’m lying, or that I won’t be able to make a fitting gift? On second thought, don’t answer that,” Gavin said with a weak grin.

  But Orholam didn’t smile this time. “Is this what your obedience looks like?”

  “I’ll die. Don’t You know what You’re asking?! I have nothing left—and You’d demand…” But Gavin had fought enough. He was tired.

  His hands slumped down into the blood.

  Maybe he’d see Sevastian now. Maybe he’d see Karris.

  He’d sent Orholam rivers of blood—unasked for, he knew now, as his heart had always known. It was only right that Orholam should demand his own blood in return.

  He sighed, and with his breath went out all defensiveness, all hope that he could deceive his way out of this one.

  The old Gavin finally, finally breathed his last, and died.

  Dazen sank into the stones and bent back his head to stare into eyes that blazed with judgment hotter than the noonday sun.

  Orholam was nothing if not fast. He braced Dazen’s forehead with a hand, knotting his hair between His fingers to keep his head in place. Dazen could feel the evil eye twist and buck in his skull of its own accord, as if it were a living thing and it knew what was coming—

  Then Orholam’s hand stabbed into his face, and it felt like his hand went into Dazen’s flesh whole, through and into his head.

  It clamped down on the eye and wrenched.

  Dazen gagged at the pain. Agony shot from eye to brain, down his neck and down his spine, everywhere through his chest and radiating through every limb. As Orholam twisted His clenched fist, as if drawing out a parasitic worm, Dazen’s body bucked of its own accord. Every muscle clenched. He gagged, and his hands flew up to fight off his persecutor—

  But he willed them be still. He flung his hands out and willed them stay spread as wide as if he were nailed in place.

  Something gave within him, tore.

  Orholam’s fist turned over and over, like He was coiling rope around His hand. At the same time, like a wet cloth to a fevered man, Orholam’s other hand was cool on Dazen’s forehead. It was the only comfort in a world of suffering.

  And then Orholam ripped the thing out of Dazen’s left eye socket and threw it on the ground.

  Dazen gagged and gasped and coughed, breathing fresh air for the first time in eternity. He sank to his haunches, almost fell—but then his one good eye caught sight of the black Thing.

  It twisted on the ground like a legged serpent made entirely of thorns. Every surface was a shard of obsidian, curled in hooks and barbs. And it lived.

  Shocked from being torn free and flung down to the ground, it twisted its form together now, at once like a lion crouching to pounce and a snake coiling to strike. Baleful eyes, unblinking, blacker than the gathering night, stared primordial nyxian hatred at Dazen. It had been created to kill him if he removed it, and from his knees, gasping still, breathless, frozen with horror, there was no way Dazen could defend himself before it attacked.

  The Thing lunged at his face—

  And things happened so fast Dazen could scarcely comprehend them. Orholam flashed suddenly colossal. He was the giant from Dazen’s dream, immense beyond belief. And Dazen saw the fury in His sun-bright eyes, and a fist the size of the tower itself came crashing down in judgment.

  On his knees, Dazen barely fit between the fingers of the clenched fist as it smote the entire top of the tower.

  The tower shook from the concussion. Thunder crashed, but it was thunder beyond mere sound. Every hair stood on end. The air itself shouted with a triumphant yell. Lights fired in every color Dazen remembered and a myriad he didn’t know—for one instant, even his color-blinded eye could see. And a shock wave spread out, as great waves rippling in the ocean give an angle to see momentarily into the ocean’s depths, for an instant, Dazen could see into the Thousand Worlds as if here his realm and the heavenly realms overlapped. He could see figures, bloodied warriors joining a victory shout.

  And then… all was normal once more. That shock wave disappeared into the distance in every direction, ripples in the pond of time, but Dazen still knelt here. Orholam, masked as the old prophet once more, stood again before him, now looking oddly and entirely mundane.

  The black Thing, broken now in a hundred places, writhed yet.

  And it twisted, relentlessly, toward Dazen.

  Orholam stepped forward and crushed its head under His foot.

  It squirmed and snapped in its death throes, snapping at His heel, and died.

  But Orholam nonchalantly tore away the dead Thing and tossed it off the tower.

  He turned and quirked a grin at Dazen, and though every crease remained on old Orholam’s face, and His teeth were just as crooked and stained as before—though nothing was changed—every seam of the old man’s visage leaked out glory.

  Dazen dropped to his face.

  The midnight, hungry stone beneath him seemed now merely bright black. The air tasted fresh. The ache in his finger stubs felt somehow clean, a body doing what a body was made to do when it had been injured. His vision, still black and white, somehow seemed crisp.

  He was changed, as if he’d been made anew.

  “Get up,” Orholam said with a voice that seemed to resound with hidden undertones of power. “We’ve business to finish.”

  Dazen glanced up, but it was still old man Orholam. “The giant? Was that…?” he asked. As if that were the most pressing question to ask Orholam Himself.

  “The same one from your dream? Of course. You’ve had such a terrible attitude about prophets, so I made you one.” He lifted his eyebrows, and Dazen, remembering he’d been told to get up, stood quickly.

  “Obedience,” Dazen said. “Yeah, not my strong suit.”

  Orholam looked at him levelly. Right, Orholam knew that.

  “What would You have me do, sir?” Dazen asked.

  “There’s one matter we must attend to first.”

  “Huh?”

  “Traditionally, pilgrims who deliver a boon stone may ask Me a boon.”

  I get to ask a… what? After all that? After what I just saw?

  But his mouth was already running away, unmoored from sense.
“Seems like a stupid tradition, though, doesn’t it? I mean, ‘Here’s my pride rock, now gimme stuff’?”

  Orholam laughed aloud, and Dazen was struck by the sound. He was actually enjoying Himself, as if talking with Dazen was something that could bring Orholam joy. Absurd! And yet, here it was. “Traditions,” Orholam said, “like people, tend to fall short. I work with what I’m given.”

  He was serious, and suddenly Dazen was baffled.

  What could he ask for? How could he dare ask more? He’d seen his brother again. He’d been condemned to death and been given back life.

  It wasn’t that there was nothing he wanted. He thought of them all now: His fingers back. His eye to see again. His powers. His position. More than any of those, he wanted his wife and his son.

  He thought of asking for them to survive. He thought of framing some request so broad and precisely legalistic that he might get back everything good and nothing bad from his old life.

  He would have done that, too. Old Gavin would have, that man of guile, the master of land ways and sea ways, breaking the rules to win the game.

  But here, after what he’d seen, it not only seemed witless to try to gull God Himself, but it seemed breathtakingly ungrateful.

  Dazen still wanted it all. He wanted everything good for those he loved even more. His mouth opened to ask for Karris and Kip to live, to thrive, to have all that was good in the world.

  But then he stopped as he gazed out toward the great seas and the reef that circled this island. “They suffer?”

  He didn’t have to clarify. Orholam knew how his mind skipped around and how it focused intently on things others ignored. The One who knew the punchline to every joke knew Dazen spoke of the sea demons, the monsters he could so easily have become, his predecessors in power and in pride and in loss and in striving for what they could not have and what they could not be.

  “They’ve chosen to be separated from Me forever,” Orholam said. “That’s one of the better descriptions of hell.”

  Gavin had been a son of separation himself, where delicacies turned to ash in your mouth. It was the land of madness and murder and a life drained of color. It was a life that was worse than death. “Then for my boon, I ask that You cut their punishment short. Or their penance. Or whatever it is. I ask that You release them from this suffering,” Dazen said, and he knew that his words were a foolishness beyond understanding. What was wrong with him?

  “You think they didn’t have a fair chance? That they didn’t know what it meant when they made their choices?”

  Dazen knew he was being audacious, presumptuous, but this, too, was how he’d been made. “I know that people make choices about eternity before they understand what eternity means. I know I threw away a thousand second chances before I took the last one. I know they probably won’t take it, but… what if they do? So for my boon, my lord, I beg that You offer these undeserving one more chance.”

  Orholam studied him. “You stand broken and powerless, stripped of all you loved, with all your world in the balance, your son and your wife fighting for their very lives, and for your boon you ask clemency for strangers?”

  “My wife and son are Yours. If You don’t care for them even more than I do, You’re not who You say You are. If You’re not who You say You are, what use is a boon? But I think You are. My wife and son are loved, by me and by You and by thousands of others. The sea demons…” He thought of them: feeding on light itself but living in darkness, alone, outliving everyone who’d ever loved them, twisted into something hideous by their own choices.

  Dazen’s heart emptied all at once, like a dam bursting and all his hopes rushing out, like he was doing something disastrous—but right. “The sea demons aren’t strangers. They’re me.”

  “O Dazen,” Orholam said, and his voice was soft and his eyes were proud. “Here at your end, you are indeed a man after my own heart. So let it be. Come. Your penance awaits.”

  Chapter 123

  Kip flexed his burn-scarred left hand, working the stiffness out of it before taking the intricately engraved golden bar in his grip. It fit like they’d been made for each other.

  “Breaker, I don’t mean to minimize the challenge you’re taking on there,” Ferkudi said from the edge of the roof where he was looking out over the Jaspers, “but whatever you’re going to do, could you… maybe… you know, start?”

  With his free right hand, Kip pulled the mirror array’s crystal to rest against his forehead, exactly where the pagans said the third eye resides.

  “The bane have all made landfall,” Big Leo said from beside Ferkudi. “Thousands of drafters and wights are swarming from every one of them. We’re surrounded.”

  “Not all the bane. Superviolet’s gone,” Kip said.

  Liv had found her old loyalties were stronger than she’d expected after all. She’d withdrawn from the fight. Thank you, Liv.

  He drafted superviolet and put his right hand on the other grip—and suddenly felt his awareness cast out of his body as if he’d been catapulted from himself, far out into the ocean.

  “Whoa, whoa! What was that?!” He yanked his hands away from the grips. It had not done that before. It was as if the presence of the bane had somehow charged it up.

  Everyone was staring at him, unnerved.

  “Not that I’m surprised or anything,” he said with a weak smile.

  “Boss?” Ferkudi asked.

  “No worries,” Kip said. “I got this.” He checked himself. This wasn’t what had happened yesterday, but yesterday he’d practiced using only the barest amount of superviolet and no other colors—knowing that the bane would deny him the use of them. He’d already had so much to learn. The superviolet let him focus the mirrors. Today—dammit, when had he drafted a little bit of blue? Probably just spectral bleed from the superviolet, and this bluer-than-blue beautiful day.

  He emptied himself of blue on the nub of hellstone he kept at his belt, then tried again with only superviolet. Now he was simply directing the mirrors as he had yesterday.

  Andross had told Kip not to draft on the array, told him drafting with so much power at hand would burn him out in seconds or minutes. He was—irritatingly—surely right. But if Kip drafted not through the array but before he touched it, and then it still worked without frying him, then maybe that was worth exploring.

  So he lifted his hand, drafted a bit of blue—and now he could cast his vision wherever he wanted.

  He blew out an exasperated breath. Why did he always have to figure things out the hard way? Could no one leave a short instruction book chained to these magical devices?

  There was no time to waste, though.

  He launched himself back to where Zymun had last focused the array, far out in the sea, but saw nothing there.

  Why that bit of the sea? No reason?

  Zymun must have kicked the mirror array when they’d hauled him off it after he’d blown his halos.

  Kip drew his attention back to Big Jasper.

  The array snapped into focus instantly, the entire thing lifting him bodily on an articulated arm to point him wherever he willed. This damn thing was one of the wonders of the world. Of course it was: it had been made for the Prisms themselves. Probably it had been made so they could look out for bane.

  If he were a Prism, if he could split light and draft as much as he wanted, this battle would be finished in ten minutes.

  Did Koios know that? Had the White King attacked now because he knew the Chromeria had no Prism to defend the Jaspers, or was he just that lucky?

  It didn’t matter.

  Kip’s vision had passed over the armada as he’d brought his will back to the Jaspers, but now he went back. They were bombarding Big Jasper’s cannon towers. A gunner stood on deck, linstock in his hand.

  A spotlight the size of the gunner’s whole body suddenly lit him up as hundreds of mirrors turned toward him. He turned, shocked at the heat, throwing his arm up in front his eyes at the glare.

  Kip
sharpened the focus convulsively.

  A beam of light no thicker than a thumb shot through the man’s upraised arm and then out the back of his head.

  He dropped, and every part of his head that passed through the beam as he fell was burnt through. His open skull smoked on the deck, and a hissing furrow was carved deep into the sea beyond him.

  Kip’s self was pulled with it, as tightly focused as the beam itself, plunging into deep waters sizzling and hissing to steam. He pulled back.

  Someone was yelling at him, but he realized he’d done the wrong thing.

  He didn’t have time to kill men one by one. He widened his focus.

  In a broad spotlight that encompassed the entire ship, where men were standing agog, a hundred hands put up in front of eyes in the same way the gunner had, Kip found an open barrel of black powder on the deck behind the cannons.

  He tightened the beam once more.

  The powder keg exploded in his face.

  He threw himself back as the explosion overwhelmed him.

  His hands came away from the grips and he found himself in his own body once more.

  “The storm, Breaker! The lightstorm! Kip!” Ben-hadad was yelling. “Come on, brother!”

  “You’re back?” Kip asked, blinking. “When did you get back? Did you get Zymun?”

  “No,” Ben-hadad said. He seemed relieved Kip had finally heard him. “They’re regrouping. We think they’re going to attack us up here—it doesn’t matter. Kip, you gotta do something about the lightstorm.”

  “Lightstorm? Oh, right!”

  Superviolet was so alien, so orderly, and so damned curious that Kip had been working his way from the small-scale applications to the larger ones without even fully realizing it. He’d momentarily lost regular human concern—like for the crackling, seething sapphire tornado streaming upward from the seas around the blue bane.

  He turned away from the exploded, burning, sinking ship and moved his will to the skies.

  Within the brewing blue lightstorm were tens of thousands of razor-edged crystals of blue luxin. Some smaller, some heavier, different shapes from square caltrops to edged planes to spikes.