The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  When they reached the wall near Overhill, it became plain how desperate things had gotten here.

  “Where the hell’s the rest of the Seventh?” Ferkudi asked a poor woman struggling to beat out the sparks that had landed in her family’s thatch roof.

  The woman slapped a sopping-wet dress against the spreading flames. “Half those bastards took some nobles’ coin to defend the walls near their own houses up south. Commander here done nothing to stop ’em when they left.”

  Without a word, Ferkudi spurred his horse onward.

  At the wall, he leapt out of the saddle and slapped the stallion’s flank. “Good boy!”

  No need for him to die, too.

  As he mounted the wall without so much as being challenged once, he saw the wan terror on the defenders’ faces. He knew this music here. This was what people look like right before they break.

  He reached the top of the wall with his Mighty hard behind him.

  A hellscape greeted him.

  The red bane was a charred landscape that broke open in red seams everywhere it folded over, some of them afire, the rest ever threatening to take fire. The whole seemed to have the rigidity of a beached jellyfish that somehow yet moved, oozing up the shoreline toward the wall.

  One of the Mighty said, “How do we invade that?”

  Thousands of drafters and wights were surging from its surface toward the walls.

  From the Prism’s Tower, Ferkudi had seen how Kip had set this whole bane afire by throwing the sub-red lux storm against it. From the charred bodies, it was clear that hundreds and hundreds of the enemy had died in that attack—but there were still so many more, and while the mundane soldiers had died in droves, the drafters and the wights had survived.

  Now, whatever the reds’ original plan had been, they attacked without any discernible plan at all—and they attacked with rage to spare. They had no siege engines, no siege ladders, instead merely throwing themselves against the walls and using red luxin to clamber and stick and boost themselves as well as they could. It was stupidly inefficient, even insane, as the Chromeria always said.

  But the numbers were on their side, and as fast as the few defenders atop the wall could pick them off with arrows and musket balls, still the rest climbed faster, heedless of their own dead, heedless of all but rage.

  “We wait for our chance,” Ferkudi said. “Corvan Danavis is gonna give us a distraction. Maybe that’ll be it.”

  “And until then?”

  Some of the attackers had torn up still-burning trees and had flung them against the walls as makeshift ladders. The defenders couldn’t dislodge them.

  “Until then we keep these poor bastards alive. We defend the wall,” Ferkudi said, hopping up and sprinting. His men ran hot on his heels along the top of the wall. They were spotted instantly, and soon missiles spitting flames were crackling past their heads.

  They rammed into a tree and hurled it back from the wall, astonishing the scrawny defenders—surely the worst of the city’s worst—who’d been unable to move it at all.

  But it wasn’t enough. Somewhere a hundred paces down some reds burst into view on top of the wall and lit into terrified defenders.

  Ferkudi and his men cut through those fleeing.

  His axes sent limbs spinning. As each of his axes got stuck—one in a Blood Robe’s shoulder joint and the other pinched between a screaming wight’s ribs—a wight popped into view over the top of the wall, and Ferkudi butted his bear helm into the thing’s face, sending it flying off the wall.

  The next minutes passed in that odd blur of fighting—every moment lasting an eternity and every minute gone in a blink.

  The reds reached the top of the wall in new places every minute, and Ferkudi spread his Mighty out. Most of the other defenders had disappeared, which at first Ferkudi thought was good—no one in his way as he ran back and forth.

  Then he realized how bad it was.

  One of his Mighty, Arius, went down with a leg wound. The nearest man, Amastan, flashed hand signals: Arius would live, but he’d fight no more today.

  And then, inattentive for a moment while he tied a tourniquet around Arius’s bloody leg, Amastan took a spear through his armpit. Dying, Amastan clawed a pistol from the bag at his hip and handed it to the wounded Arius, even as he used his other hand to hold the spear piercing him in place. From his back, Arius shot the pagan drafter in the face, and they all collapsed on him.

  Suddenly, the wall felt very, very empty.

  Screaming defiance, Ferkudi reached up with his will and triggered the mirrors. He was flooded with blue light from a half-dozen directions in the waning light of the day. He jumped up on the battlements and bellowed his challenge at the Blood Robes below.

  It drove them mad. Drafters who’d been unstoppably far to one side for Ferkudi to possibly fight abandoned attacking where they were and came to join the horde directly in front of him. They climbed over one another, crushing each other, making a ramp of their very bodies, heedless of everything except trying to kill him.

  He hurled blue-luxin javelins into them. He broke reaching arms. He smashed faces with his knees and with his hellstone-knuckled fists. He carved great crimson wounds into their crimson bodies. Split heads with his glittering hand axes. Smashed once-men into each other. Extinguished flaming wights with blunderbuss gusts of blue luxin. Picked up wights and hurled them bodily from the walls.

  But what he completely forgot was to let go of blue.

  It should have helped him remember, blue should have, rational as it was.

  But even blue can’t overcome the full grip of battle fury.

  He didn’t remember the danger until he felt something twisting around his very will. It froze him, and locked up all the luxin in his body.

  He couldn’t move. He stood with a Blood Robe’s chin in one hand, a fistful of his hair in the other, broken-necked. The dying man dropped from Ferkudi’s grip, almost taking him down with him. Better that he had. Now Ferkudi was exposed at the top of the wall, defenseless, hands extending, muscles straining against the empty air, his inchoate yell the only thing that could escape.

  A red wight hopped up to the top of the wall a few paces away. His hair was slicked back to his head with white, fire-retardant gel and, uncommonly for a red wight, this man had no fresh burns or burn-scars whatsoever on his half-naked body, over which red danced and flickered. A careful red wight.

  He balled fire in his hand, even as others mounted the wall and coiled to unleash it in Ferkudi’s face, when something dark and soft hit him from below. A wet cloth?

  Ferkudi couldn’t even move to see where it came from. The wight threw down the wet dress—and was pierced through the ribs by a spear.

  An instant later, he realized that the roaring of blood in his ears had been joined by another roar, and he heard impacts around him, saw bricks flung from inside the city pelting the Blood Robes taking the wall, and then hundreds of men streamed into view. The woman he’d seen beating at her flaming thatched roof with that wet dress pulled the spear from the wounded wight’s ribs and stabbed him with it again and again.

  Then she stood, looking for Ferkudi’s approval. She looked scared and exhilarated, and her grip on the spear was all wrong.

  Ferkudi noticed others claiming the top of the wall now, too: men in tradesman’s caftans, women in burnouses. They’d picked up the weapons dropped by the fleeing soldiers, and now suddenly even the soldiers were returning.

  And Ferkudi was at the heart of it all. He was the frozen heart of it all.

  They rallied around him, saving him, and saving themselves and their own homes.

  But Ferkudi felt the blue twisting deeper into him, vengeful, seeking to still his very heart, his lungs. Breathing became slower, slower, and panic rose in him.

  And then it snapped.

  Mot’s hold on blue was dropped, and Ferkudi fell.

  “What was that?!” Arius asked. The people had carried the wounded Mighty to be together so t
hat they could be protected together.

  Ferkudi lay gasping, and slowly felt sensation and control returning to his limbs.

  And then Mot seemed to wink out of existence altogether, and the blue was truly free.

  “The blue bane is broken,” Arius said, and a big crooked-toothed smile lit his dark face.

  “Good, good,” Ferkudi said, pushing himself to his feet, his legs trembling. “Now we can attack.”

  “What?” Arius asked.

  Ferkudi took a step. His leg folded and he caught himself on the edge of the wall. He picked up one of his hand axes from a Blood Robe’s split skull. Had he thrown this ax? That never worked! And then he found his other one, stuck where it had split another drafter’s mouth. Yuck. The guy wasn’t dead, either.

  Ferkudi slashed the man’s throat and gave him a moment to die before retrieving that one. “Where’s Itri? Where’s Yuften?” he asked. “We gotta go. We got orders!”

  “Itri got burned. Bad. They gave him poppy wine. He’s out, but… we’re gonna have to give him the black mercy. Yuften’s got a broken arm.”

  “It’s my off hand! I can fight!” Yuften said, limping into sight. Apparently the broken arm wasn’t his only wound. “I’m with you, sir! To the end!”

  “Are you hurt?” Arius asked.

  Ferkudi checked himself. There was a lot of blood on him, but none of it seemed to be his. He’d had some hair singed off—that’s right, now he remembered extinguishing the flames with blue. He was sore in a dozen places and knew that by tomorrow that would expand to a hundred. But he didn’t seem to be injured, just exhausted with the bone-deep weariness and the shakes that come every time after the terror and thrill and total muscular exertion of a battle. And Ferkudi had never fought so hard or so long in his life.

  He sucked down some watered wine from a skin someone put in his hand, and watched the red drafters and wights falling back.

  “Shit,” he said at a sudden thought. It could be mere exhaustion and lightsickness. But maybe it was more. “How are my halos?”

  Arius looked at him. “Strained to the absolute limits, sir.”

  “But not broken?”

  Yuften said, “Wouldn’t lie to you, sir.”

  So merely exhausted, lightsick, and half-dead. It didn’t make Ferkudi feel better. Nor did the adoring looks in all the people’s eyes—even the woman who’d saved his life.

  “We have our orders,” he said plaintively. He looked at the people and the few soldiers standing atop the wall, all jubilant at their victory. They were already talking of what they’d done, sharing stories and asking each other if they’d seen some dragon’s wings or fire wings or something down north on the island, and something about a beam of white light like Orholam’s finger stretching across the sky. (Ferkudi did remember a white light, briefly, there at the end.) They were all thrilled with themselves—but they weren’t proper soldiers. These were people defending their homes. They wouldn’t leave this wall to go charging across that hellscape out there, not even if led by Ferkudi.

  And if they did? They’d be massacred in the first counterattack.

  The people had rallied. Ferkudi had saved the wall at its weakest spot… but he’d saved nothing else. He’d spent the last, best portion of his life’s strength on this fight, and he’d changed nothing. The red bane remained. Dagnu still ruled it, and the seed crystal was intact.

  They’d be back tomorrow at first light, and Ferkudi wouldn’t be able to stop them.

  ‘Avoid battle, seek victory,’ Breaker always said. Ferkudi had gotten caught up in a battle instead, and he’d won it. But he’d guaranteed the Blood Robes would win the next battle, tomorrow.

  He sank down, and sat on a ledge. He didn’t even have the strength to stand now.

  He’d had his orders, and he’d failed.

  Chapter 131

  “You’re a tenacious little bastard,” Karris said. She’d regained her breath from the run, and had been in the only group that made it off the blue bane before it dissolved and dropped everything and everyone on it into the waves.

  “I accept the compliment,” Grinwoody said, hands on his knees, dripping water, chest heaving.

  She hadn’t been waiting for him—not specifically—but she had needed to re-form her forces here, just outside the city walls. Half of her people had been dropped into the water, and not a few of those in water deep enough to drown men wearing armor. She’d sent her good swimmers to save those they could while she did the necessary work of cataloging the wounded, gathering weapons and armor, and coordinating the attack on the yellow bane.

  Destroying them all was the only route to victory. Even if she didn’t have much hope of it.

  The wall’s defenders had lowered ladders for them, and now she climbed up to start sending the necessary messages, but first, she grabbed an officer’s long-lens to see what she could of the Jaspers situation.

  Her Mighty were cleaning up the stunned blue wights and drafters on Cannon Island. Good, as far as it went, but with the blue bane dissolved, her people were marooned out there, useless to her for at least another hour.

  She turned the lens toward the green bane, her next target. The officer’s long-lens wasn’t very good, but she thought she saw—yes, another. A green wight fell, seemingly at random. The drafters under his control stared at one another, baffled. Karris couldn’t see why, either; then, when the Blood Robes were looking the other way, she saw a small form pop up out of the vegetation covering the forestlike surface of the green bane.

  The archer sprinted forward a few steps, bow in hand, then dove down out of view again. He was running toward the great central tree-thing that dominated the middle of the green bane.

  He popped up again, and she saw him loose an arrow, but couldn’t see any target anywhere in bow range of him. Then she saw an enraged giant grizzly burst from a cage the greens had been keeping it in, surely more than three hundred paces away from the figure. It stood on its hind legs and roared as greens scattered. The giant grizzly went berserk, but Karris was already looking for the little archer: Winsen, she saw now. She was sure of it.

  Winsen was attacking the green bane—by himself.

  Madness. But she was too far away to do anything for him.

  She slewed the long-lens to the yellow bane, overshot and saw the Great Fountain.

  No, no, no! It was being attacked.

  She put the lens down, and turned to shout to her people to move immediately, when a messenger from Corvan came galloping in. Several other messengers were already waiting for Karris, but he practically rode over the top of them.

  “High Lady White!” he shouted. “Urgent message from High General Danavis: Good work stopping blue! Forces have breached the walls in three places we know and are assailing the command post at the Great Fountain now. We can hold. Don’t reinforce us. At least one platoon of the White King’s best has been tasked with finding and killing you personally. Don’t go to green next. Go to Orholam’s Glare. Now!”

  “What’s at Orholam’s Glare?” Karris asked, hardly able to absorb all the bad news. Then she noticed the Thousand Stars. All of the city’s mirrors were pointed exactly where they would be for an execution.

  What?!

  “Have you not seen the great wings of fire?” one of the other messengers asked, turning to point.

  But just then, an incredible beam of incandescent white light leapt from somewhere on Big Jasper’s north shore up to the Great Mirrors (Orholam’s Glare?) and out to the east. The beam was the width of a man’s spread arms, with a mass, a weight, to it. It was whiter than white, like mother-of-pearl and ivory lit from within.

  Karris had seen something like this, just once, at Garriston—and that, drafted by Gavin himself, was but a candle to this inferno. She had no question now what it was: white luxin.

  But no one could draft that much.

  No one could draft that much—and live.

  And then it stopped.

  Who could possibly
draft so…?

  Oh, God.

  * * *

  “So it’s too late,” Dazen said as the sun set and the darkness gathered. Orholam had just told him of the battle being waged and lost beyond the horizon. Of Kip strapped in, being executed. Of Karris being hunted by her own merciless brother.

  Here, in Orholam’s own presence, it was perhaps impossible to feel fully hopeless, but Dazen felt an emptiness vast as the space between him and those he wished he could rush in to save. It’s what he would have done, before.

  Now he was a shell of that man. Clean, perhaps now. But broken. Useless. The consequences of his choices lying before his eyes.

  “Too late?” Orholam asked. “What do I look like? A broken-down old oar-puller?”

  “Please don’t try to cheer me up.”

  “You’ll need this later,” Orholam said. He stepped away from the gun-sword He’d been leaning on. Somehow, its tip had sunk deep into the marble of the black roof they stood on.

  “‘Later’?! Is that a joke? There is no later! The sun’s down!” Kip was dying. Karris was dead, or would be any moment—and there was nothing he could do to save them. Dazen swept his hand out in the direction of the Chromeria as the last light died. “It’s all darkness now! Look!”

  Just as Dazen’s hand waved to the dark hopelessness of the dead horizon, a wide beam of white light shot out squarely at him from exactly where the Chromeria must be.

  Its brilliance nearly blinded him. It was so intense there was a physical weight to it. It almost knocked him off his feet. Merely standing in its path felt like sucking in a great gasping breath after being submerged in a lake for far too long. It was pure, unsealed white luxin, a torrent, like someone had pumped the crank of a well and hope and courage and life shot forth, one time—then stopped.

  And it was gone.

  “What was that!?” Dazen breathed.

  “That was Kip. Fighting. Dying.” A tear rolled down each of Orholam’s cheeks, but He seemed proud of Kip, even in His sorrow. “That was your answer.”