The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  He could do this, because even if he failed to die well, it didn’t matter. Who, out of all the people that mattered, would think less of him?

  The moment passed and the vision passed as Kip was ratcheted into place, but the peace clung to him like the smell of smoke after a bonfire.

  Zymun didn’t order Kip turned upward to face the sky, as they did with traitors and wights to keep them from lashing out at the audience. No, Zymun didn’t want to miss the agony on Kip’s face, and he obviously wasn’t worried that Kip would kill innocents.

  The mirrors were all coming into alignment, covered with their cloths, heating up.

  “Oh, Kip. Just in case you get any ideas: you make any move to attack me or my men, I kill Tisis. Even if you stop me, my men’ll do it. You stop the man with a gun, another’s got a knife. Probably went without saying, right? But—”

  Suddenly, a fruit seller stepped forward. Kip had never seen the man before in his life. “Lord Guile!” he shouted, interrupting Zymun, who stopped, thinking the man was speaking to him. “No, not you,” the man said. “Kip, I have a word for you. A word from the Lord of Lights Himself! I’ve no idea what it means, but I never do. Orholam says, ‘Remember blubber.’”

  “What the—? Who is that?” Zymun demanded. “Seize him!”

  But the fruit seller ran off, and the Lightguards didn’t try very hard to catch him.

  Kip started cry-laughing. An inappropriate word from Orholam? Only the inappropriate could be appropriate for Kip. Andross Guile, the smartest man Kip had ever met, had been unable to conceive of a god who could be both big enough to create all the Thousand Worlds and small enough to care about each living thing on them.

  But Andross was wrong. One terrified fruit seller who hadn’t dared to be a prophet had proven the smartest man in the world wrong. Orholam saw. Elrahee. Orholam heard. Elishama. Orholam cared. Eliada.

  It was as if He were saying, ‘Kip, I waste nothing. You fear that you’ll scream for mercy? I made you for this yoke. I’ve already made you so that you won’t.’

  Blubber can take punishment. Fat kids are tougher than anyone knows, especially themselves.

  “Start it now!” Zymun ordered. “Just the colored mirrors. I don’t want to wait anymore. Let’s see him pop!”

  Kip had avoided looking at Tisis. Hadn’t thought he could take the sight of softness and care. He should have known better.

  Zymun had forced her to her knees, and there was a bright-red handprint across her cheek—he must have slapped her—but though her eyes streamed tears, she stared defiantly, proudly at Kip.

  I can’t protect her, Orholam. They’re gonna kill me, and that leaves her alone with that animal. And with an army coming over the walls. Orholam, I can’t do anything for her.

  That was the real reason he hadn’t dared look at her. He was leaving so much work undone. He was leaving people who counted on him.

  Orholam, You are Eliphalet. Save her, please.

  For Kip could not. There was only one thing he could do for her now.

  He could die well.

  He could do that. He could suffer. That was his one great talent, after all.

  He met her gaze, and hoped his eyes said all that his lips wished to.

  During normal executions on the Glare, the mirrors were covered with black cloth until all the mirrors were in place, but Zymun afforded Kip no such decency and didn’t wait until the mirrors got killing-hot.

  They seared him instantly.

  Kip was already exhausted from his ordeal directing the mirrors. But fat kids know how to take punishment.

  Zymun didn’t keep Kip covered until all the mirrors were brought into line. He didn’t care how executions on the Glare were usually done, or about minimizing the condemned’s suffering. He wanted the opposite. As soon as the city’s mirrors could be turned, Kip was pummeled with hot light in every color.

  Green hit Kip first, tearing his eyes open like a too-large swallow of water—except that the swallowing just wouldn’t end. He felt a crack as deep as his bones, taking his breath, stabbing his eyes, and sending shivers down every limb as his halos blew out.

  Slivers of luxin exploded out of the white of his eyes, blinding him momentarily. Blood trickled down his face.

  Then sub-red burrowed into him like hot coals pressed sizzling through his eyeballs.

  It was pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced. When he’d fallen in the fire and burned his left hand, he’d squeezed it convulsively into a fist—but here the fist was his mind itself, crackling, cooking, splitting in the heat like an overcooked sausage.

  Breaking the halo shattered the boundaries of his self. He was suddenly connected to all the green around him. The green drafters on the Jaspers felt like beacons; the bane felt like a star come to earth. It was dazzling, it was beautiful, it was insanity itself, and it called to him.

  And then he was connected to the sub-reds, and to the red bane.

  And then orange hit him.

  Yellow.

  Superviolet. Each like the blows of a spiked mace cracking his skull, again, again, again. Crushing him.

  It was like someone was gagging him, forcing impossibly too much light into his eyes at the same time that someone else brought a sledge down on his fingers, on his wrists, on his knees, his ankles, his groin.

  For a drafter, there was only one choice on Orholam’s Glare: to not draft and explode from the buildup of luxin, or to draft and be forced to draft more than any human possibly could. Every conversion generated heat.

  Converting so much meant burning up.

  ‘Did you cast sub-red, or fire?’ Janus Borig had asked him once, oddly intense.

  Writhing against his steel bonds, Kip vented fire now in the only safe direction he could, waves of it bursting from the outer edges of his arms and forearms like wings reaching out wide and up into the sky.

  But he couldn’t vent it all. He was only prolonging things.

  “Why is this taking so long?” he heard a distant voice demand.

  As he felt his heart convulse in an irregular, belabored beat, too late he figured it out. Puzzles and prophecies. Remember blubber. What is it about blubber?

  Blubber bounces back.

  He was the Turtle-Bear. He was a dragon. He was sitting passive before all these mirrors, acting as if they had no will, acting as if he didn’t either, when instead the mirrors were pressing one message in upon him with great force from every direction—one word, one command: die.

  He didn’t have to be passive. He could fight.

  He didn’t have the mirror array, but Kip had seen how it worked, and he could draft all the colors it could. He could surely not equal its power, but with the superviolet bane broken, he could mimic its function.

  He left alone the mirrors nearest him—the Great Mirrors focused on him—so that Zymun wouldn’t think he was attacking, and then Kip shot his will up through the mirrors reflecting killing light into him, and found the mirror array on the Prism’s Tower roof, still connected to all the mirrors through superviolet. Manipulating it was like trying to use a spoon to eat, if the spoon’s handle were a pace long, but—clumsily—he began to press his will on it, and he began to turn distant mirrors.

  The blue bane and the superviolet were defeated, and Kip knew the drafters of each were on Big Jasper—he could feel them.

  Kip couldn’t attack Zymun without risking the man simply shooting him. But he could help the islands’ defenders.

  So Kip, flawed mirror that he was, burned for his friends, shooting blue and superviolet light to every corner of Big Jasper, spotlighting friendly drafters so they’d have a source, helping them repel the attacks at the walls. He slaved mirror towers nearest to superviolets to them, arming them for their fight.

  And then he had an idea about paryl, the bane the Wight King didn’t have.

  If he were fast enough, before he died, he could use the master color on the very—

  He felt the mirror array snatched away
from him, and his will locked with one who stood at the top of the Prism’s Tower, and they communicated at the speed of thought, mind to mind.

  ‘You attacked me,’ Aliviana Danavis said. But she wasn’t Liv now. She was the Ferrilux.

  ‘You attacked me first,’ Kip told her.

  ‘I did not! And I am Ferrilux; I cannot lie.’

  ‘Your immortal attacked me through you,’ Kip told her.

  She hesitated. But it would change nothing, he could see. He’d insulted the goddess of Pride in the worst way possible: he’d handled her. Humiliated her.

  ‘You failed,’ she said. ‘I left a door open for you to win here, but you missed it. You lose. I won’t join you in a loss. Can’t. Goodbye, Kip.’

  And then she tore away the control of all the mirrors from him, easily.

  He threw his will against her, but hers was the will of a goddess now. Superviolet controlled the mirrors, and the superviolet goddess would not let anyone be her master. A Ferrilux does not yield.

  Maybe he could have beaten her had he been fresh. Maybe if he’d thought of it instantly. On a good day, his will might be second to no one’s. But today wasn’t a good day.

  He knew Aliviana’s will now, felt the sheer scale of it. He couldn’t beat her. She had faded far from the young woman who’d half hoped Kip might rise; she’d changed even since she’d made a plan involving the Great Mirrors and repaired and activated them for him. She’d lost interest in that plan now.

  He saw then the outlines of it, barely. Superviolet is orderly, and concerned with divining order where others couldn’t see it. She had hunted down, visited, and repaired the ancient Great Mirrors in every arc of the Seven Satrapies.

  They were the answer to a question Kip hadn’t known enough to ask. What were the Great Mirrors for? Communication. Defense. Artillery. Source. But they were also lightwells. Not figuratively, the way the term had come to be used now, meaning ‘where the buildings were kept wide apart so the sun could still reach the ground,’ but literally: vast repositories of light against the night.

  ‘Give them to me,’ Kip pleaded. ‘It’s not too late.’

  ‘No,’ she said. Stern. Simple. Like an experienced mother to a child pleading to stay up far too late. Her mind was made up. Kip simply needed to die so she could get on with other things she needed to do. The less he fought, the better it would be for everyone.

  His strength was fading fast, and hers was implacable. It was like trying to scale a sheer wall that got taller by the moment.

  Kip had promised himself he wouldn’t scream. A turtle-bear might scream plaintively, wheezing in pain like some pathetic, persecuted fatty.

  Dragons don’t scream. Dragons don’t beg or grovel. Dragons roar.

  “MORE LIGHT!” he shouted. He shouted as if all his soul were carried in the sound.

  He could feel their shock, their wonder. All but the soulless one.

  “How’s he still alive? Why aren’t these other mirrors on him?” Zymun demanded from somewhere far away, his voice tinny with distance, insignificance.

  “High Lord, there was a problem with their filters. You asked for colors only. So we—”

  “He’s not burning! You promised he’d burn! Do it! All of them! Now!”

  And though she could have stopped them easily, Kip’s onetime friend Liv let them turn the mirrors on him—all of the Jaspers’ mirrors. She did more than let them. She helped them.

  White light poured over him, into him. Light he couldn’t split. He was no Prism.

  As he roared, Kip gathered his remaining will and threw light back into the mirrors with all his fading strength.

  But with the mirrors locked into place by the goddess herself, each reflecting light from Orholam’s Eye straight to Kip, he was only throwing light harmlessly back toward the sun.

  It was a ruthlessly closed system, a thousand mirrors each focusing their light to the greatest mirrors, and those focusing those concentrated beams on Kip.

  He was burning to death, flames venting out to the sides uncontrollably in great wings. Tears sizzled on his cheeks. He felt the gallium necklace soften and melt on his chest, the chi bane burning another hot point into his skin.

  And then something cracked.

  Under the heat of Kip’s returned onslaught, a single flawed mirror high in the Prism’s Tower—its surface blackened and half melted from a past execution—suddenly shattered.

  A weak beam of light shot through the broken mirror’s empty frame, throwing light out to the east.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Kip couldn’t wrest control of the mirrors from the goddess. She was too strong. He’d broken his halo in every color; his will had failed.

  He’d failed.

  I’m so sorry, friends. He looked at them one last time through the blazing glory of the light, and found, oddly, that he could actually see them. The chi bane touching his chest helped his gaze cut through everything. He gathered up the vision of his wife, his friends, the Chromeria he’d loved, and held them in his eyes.

  He wouldn’t finish this job.

  Unless—

  Chi! He could use chi to reach the seven Great Mirrors around the satrapies, and—

  But no. It was too late. Ferrilux held the array now.

  Besides, he was too weak to throw chi to the ends of the earth.

  His strength was at an end, his body shutting off, his talent burnt out, red burning out to black, yellow numbing to cold gray, green winking out, blue dying, and with each turning off, the heat in his body ratcheted ever skyward, his thoughts collapsing, focus dulling, his light dimming.

  He thought, too late—far, far too late—that he couldn’t split white light—but maybe he could draft it.

  And so he could.

  It filled him, then, with one last gasp of power, a glorious final breath of life and light and happiness, all flooding too late through his broken limbs and broken talent and broken mind.

  His last thought was of that sole, single shattered mirror in the tower—one mirror out of a thousand mirrors, melted and broken and as failed as Kip himself—but pointed, as Kip finally was, in the right direction.

  Releasing all else as even his pain grew wan and distant, Kip threw a last gasp toward that broken mirror, throwing white luxin woven through with sustaining chi back into the array. It was a cry into the darkness beyond the horizon, whose answer, if answer there ever was, he would never hear.

  And as a single beam escaped, all the thousand mirrors minus one remained in their executioners’ stations, functioning perfectly, concentrating the fading light of the setting sun on the condemned, burning him to death.

  He sank against his bonds into the burning white of Orholam’s Glare, a mighty man with arms outstretched, and his head slumped at last, as his burden overcame him.

  Chapter 130

  Ferkudi had barely hopped off the little platform that had sped him down the escape chains when a groom shouted to him from the open yard of a nearby smithy. “My lord, do you need a horse?”

  After a quick glance around, Ferkudi realized he was the ‘my lord.’ “Yes!” he said belatedly, looking back up the escape chain, where the other blues out of the prospective Mighty were coming. “Five of them! But who said to—why?”

  “High General Danavis said, ‘Anyone comes down those chains, they’ll probably need a good, fast horse.’”

  Ferkudi clambered up into the saddle. He loved horses. He and horses understood each other. Two of his five men had already reached ground.

  They readied their horses while Ferkudi sat in the saddle, suddenly awkward that he wasn’t helping; he was just sitting on his horse like he thought he really was a ‘my lord.’ He looked up at the next man descending, and noticed the arrows flying up in the air at him. There were reports from muskets, too, but those had been a constant from everywhere. “They shoot at you?” he asked. He hadn’t really noticed if they’d shot at him. He’d been watching the whole battle unfold, all the ships a
nd the bane, and the descending sun.

  It looked like it was going to be a real pretty sunset tonight.

  “Yessir. Used a glove on the line to brake now and then to make myself a tougher target.”

  They waited together on their horses. The groom held the last two and looked up at Ferkudi.

  He blanked, then dug in a pocket for a coin. He offered it to the man.

  “Milord!” the man said, scolding. “It’s a war. I don’t need a gratuity.”

  “Oh, right, right.” Ferkudi tucked the coin away and busied himself with checking his weapons, as if that took his full attention. The twin hand axes were right where they’d been a minute ago, on his back, double-bladed, their hafts slotted to be sword-breakers—which also meant they caught on pretty much everything. The leather gloves with their hellstone studs at the knuckles were also unchanged. He tightened the chin strap of his bear helm… then loosened it. As he’d done before.

  He really needed to make a new hole in that strap, halfway between one and the other.

  The next new Mighty, Arius, jumped off his platform early, hit the ground, rolled, and hopped up into his saddle instantly. Show-off.

  Still. Pretty deft.

  Ferkudi heard a curse, and watched with the others as the last of his Mighty slid down the remainder of the escape chain, swaying crazily, barely holding on. Ferkudi was out of his saddle instantly. Caught him.

  The man had been hit with several arrows. One under his ribs. One was stuck under his helmet’s chin strap and made the skin of his opposite cheek bulge.

  There was no way the man should still be alive, but he’d held on. Ferkudi took him in his arms and lay him on the ground.

  He whispered praises and a blessing in the man’s ear, and when he raised his head, the man’s eyes were glassy, unseeing. They left him there, only taking the time to array his limbs somewhat and beg the groom to take care of him.

  Then they saddled up and rode, hard.

  He had no compunctions about taking four horses out of he didn’t know how many. His was the farthest assignment away from the escape-chain disembarkation point. They avoided blockades the defenders had set up, asking questions and cutting through strange narrow alleys, with the sounds of muskets and fighting everywhere growing more intense.