The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “To what?”

  “The only question.”

  “Why?” Dazen asked, weeping.

  “Yes. Why all your suffering? Why Alvaro’s? Why Kip’s?” Orholam said.

  Dazen wept harder. “It was his cry for help, wasn’t it? I should have been there to save—”

  “Stop. You’re not getting it. Kip outgrew his overt self-pity before his father could outgrow his subtler kind. He wanted your help, yes, but not to save his own life. He wanted your help to save those you both love.”

  Dazen raised his hands, supplicating, disbelieving. “How can I possibly…?”

  Orholam was studying the descending night sky. The moon hadn’t yet risen. “Awfully dark out here,” He said. “Dark enough a drafter of black could find source in the sky, don’t you think? That’s one color you can still draft, isn’t it?”

  The consequences of doing that settled around Dazen’s neck like a mantle of iron. Softly he said, “It’ll obliterate me.”

  “It will, if you let go of Me,” Orholam agreed.

  Dazen looked angrily at him. “I don’t understand what You think I can do from here.”

  “I don’t require your understanding.”

  “Just my obedience,” Dazen said bitterly. “Got it.”

  “And your strength,” Orholam said.

  Dazen stood, laboriously, and in the process got his hands thoroughly bloody. He didn’t feel strong. He hadn’t felt strong this morning, before everything this awful day had thrown at him. He followed Orholam to where He’d left the sword as if in a trance.

  He didn’t want to die, but now, finally, he was ready. If it was all for this, then so be it.

  Orholam extended a hand to him, and Dazen took Orholam’s clean hand in his own bloody, three-fingered one.

  “You remember the coordinates?” Orholam asked.

  “I never forget anything. You know that. But… uh… coordinates?”

  “Kip gave you the position of the Chromeria. But there’s only one drafter in the world strong enough to throw magic that far.”

  Dazen shrugged. “Kip was strong enough.”

  “He was.”

  Was. That little word was a punch in the guts.

  It pissed Dazen off, and not at Orholam this time.

  It sank into the cool ashes of his heart and blew the embers to flame. They’d killed Kip. They’d murdered his son.

  He was going to make them pay for that.

  He had a sudden thought. “The bane are there?”

  Orholam nodded. “Kip and Karris got two. There’s five left.”

  “Five on one. That’s hardly fair,” Dazen said.

  “Five on one?” Orholam asked, amused. “Not five on two?”

  Dazen looked at Him, opened his mouth, shut it. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.” I’ll just do the magic part, and the fighting part. You… do Your thing. Whatever that is.

  But the time for sniping was finished. Impossible magic, against impossible odds?

  That’s what I do.

  He breathed out, widening his pupils and gazing toward the darkest part of the sky.

  Before, he’d wrestled black luxin to obliterate, to destroy others, and to destroy himself, to rip himself asunder and blot out parts he hated. It had been the sum of all wild beasts, bucking against him like a mustang, whipping its tusks toward his belly like a giant javelina, charging him like an iron bull—and in all the fights, he’d been a brute with a whip, determined to break the beast. Like a cornered, injured animal, the black luxin had been all violence and madness, both against his enemies and against himself.

  Now, entering the great beast’s demesne, he extended an open will with his open right hand, offering partnership, not mastery.

  And the black came roaring from the night upon him—charging over the horizon and into Dazen’s undefended, wide-open eye. Dazen lay supine, exposing his belly to the snarling maw of the great wolf Death.

  Here am I, Death. Let us walk together one last time, and fight each other no more.

  The beast paused, snuffling at his bloody open hand, even as the magic filled Dazen’s eyes and made his bones hot within him.

  A shiver passed through him, from the crown of his head, down his spine and hands, which burned hot with blood, and to the heated soles of his feet, rooted in the blood that connected skin to tower.

  Without the scent of fear inflaming its predator’s nose, but accepted, respected, the great black beast calmed. Then its power entered him.

  Even at Sundered Rock, he hadn’t drafted so much. He drew and drew, taking all the dark night into his soul. He drew, lancing those darkened memories for all his own old poison, all the hatred and envy inside him, all the cruelty of taunting victory he’d unleashed before. He connected the darkness above with the old darkness within, though each was punctuated by its celestial lights. He was beyond fear now. How could he be daunted? He could give no more than everything in him, and that was exactly what he planned to do.

  He threaded his fingers tight through the beast’s mantle and then with a yell of defiance, Dazen slapped its flank: Take all this, and go! Go!

  The black luxin leapt toward the horizon like a war hound on a lead seeing a cat and leaping to the hunt. It nearly tore Dazen’s arm off. He could only nudge it this way and that, directing his fraying will toward the Chromeria.

  It took all the excellence of Dazen’s superchromacy to maintain the exact tone. The slightest flaw would mean madness or agonizing death or the obliteration of memory and self or even time.

  Even the descending starlight eroded the black as they flew across so many leagues, and Dazen had to cushion every quantum that infected his streaming black, had to split it away from the stream and push more power into it, like a sprinter shrugging off battering rain, forging through buffeting winds—and he lost precious luxin continuously as he did it, a hundred times a second. Dazen could feel the black unraveling in his grasp, like the southern lights dancing across the sky, defying his control.

  And as the magic unraveled, it unraveled him. He braided the open cords together again and again, weaving them tight with fingers that felt a million paces away. He himself was dissipating, losing awareness altogether into the cold dark, but he pulled himself back to consciousness again and again.

  This was for Karris. This was for Kip. This was for Marissia. This was for mother. This was for Gavin. This was for Sevastian…

  He couldn’t fail them. He couldn’t fail them again.

  But then he was there. He couldn’t see the islands, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the entirety of Big Jasper and Little Jasper both, those shapes he knew and loved so well. He could feel the physical and magical shapes of the bane, each one extending overlapping bubbles of control far beyond themselves. No red drafter could draft red within the red bane’s bubble, nor green in green’s, nor yellow in yellow’s, and so on.

  Dazen didn’t have enough time or will or magic or life left to obliterate the bane. They were too far away, too dense, too numerous, too different from one another.

  The control he would need to find the seed crystals themselves was far too fine for his skills. Father had always told him he needed to develop his fine-drafting skills, but Dazen had always ignored him, believing more was better: always the hammer, never the tweezers.

  There they lay: all the bane, everywhere around the islands, like leeches clinging to the Chromeria’s face. He could pierce those bubbles of drafting control easily with the black, but to find five single figures—these so-called gods?—in the few seconds he had left? To find the bane’s hidden seed crystals?

  It would be like trying to pick a lock with a feather duster.

  His will, thus overextended, began to fray apart now in hopelessness. The black he’d flung so far dissipated into the amorphous clouds as the magic finally pulled itself away from his fingers.

  And then he felt her.

  He wouldn’t have thought he could know anyone from this distance,
but he couldn’t have missed her, not if she’d been twice so far away. Her will burned in the evaporating cloud he’d thrown, like a lighthouse burning white in the black of a lost captain’s night.

  Karris!

  * * *

  Karris’s Blackguards and all the other soldiers they’d recruited on the spot had made it halfway to Orholam’s Glare when they’d been jumped by the White King’s platoon of assassins. Forty men didn’t seem like they’d be a problem against her hundred and fifty, especially when fifty of them were her Blackguards—who’d appeared from all over the island, escaping from the Chromeria and abandoning Zymun, or the promachos, or the Colors to find and join their Iron White.

  Forty men wouldn’t have been a problem. Forty wights was a huge problem. They were clad head to toe in white, gloved and hooded to hide what colors they drafted. In moments, she was in a fight for her life.

  And no fair fight. Every one of the Blackguards except the monochrome blues were feeling it. The bane had tightened their grip. Anyone who had the least luxin left in their bodies had to fight against luxin locking up inside them—and every drafter except the youngest had some luxin permanently in their bodies.

  Even those who’d carefully drained their power with hellstone were slowed. The best off fought as if in a high wind. Those worse off fought as if in water, sluggish, their old strength turned against them.

  But then she felt something. The air turned colder, somehow murky, as if a dry fog had rolled in. The city darkened perceptibly. Night had arrived on sprinting feet instead of its usual gentle wings. But, in the fighting, everyone around her missed it.

  She stepped back from the fight, back into the mass of Blackguards here to protect her.

  There was something familiar—

  She gasped.

  Gavin!

  She opened her will to him, and she knew. He was dying.

  She felt his strength faltering, fraying. Her heart froze.

  Live, damn you, live! You come back to me!

  * * *

  But it was too late. He was dying. He was failing her, again.

  He could feel her weighed down by the bane’s oppressive power. Her light dimmed, her limbs heavy from the very luxin that lived in her, shackled, unable to defend herself from the death he knew was stalking her. He could feel the lock and knew how he might release her from it, but from this distance, it was like feeling the teeth of a key with a fingertip.

  No.

  No, not while he had breath.

  He released all else and clung to her, his lighthouse, the white in the foggy seas of his black.

  * * *

  Karris was frozen, even amid the clash of arms around her. Gill Greyling, blood splashed across his face, was shouting something at her. ‘Retreat. We’ve failed. We can’t…’

  Mere words.

  It was like they didn’t even notice.

  Don’t do it, my love. Please, no. Gavin, what are you doing?

  There was something fatal and final she could feel in Gavin’s will.

  Please, no. Forgive me, my love, but I gave up on you once—don’t you dare do it, too. Don’t you dare!

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  “More darkness,” Dazen gasped as he dropped the luxin. He pulled his hand angrily out of Orholam’s. “I need more black! More black!”

  The sky above was dotted now with thousands of stars, shining, brilliant. The descending darkness should have given him more source, but it only made those points of defiant light shine all the brighter.

  Orholam said, “Even eagles must sometimes dive into a lake to hunt, no matter that it momentarily destroys the lake’s reflection of the sky.”

  “What are You even talking about? Reflection of the—”

  Dazen looked at the sword stuck into the black crust covering the tower.

  When he’d stepped through to the other side of the mirror, the tower in that other world had been white. It had been as it ought to be, maybe as it had been on this side of the mirror before Vician’s Sin, before the relentless tide of the Chromeria’s murders.

  Surely now every bit of the black tower was covered in a great cascade of blood flowing from the Mirror of Waking.

  There was an entire tower’s worth of unadulterated black luxin at Dazen’s feet. Pure, concentrated darkness, and the blood of martyrs connected him with all of it.

  Dazen plunged his hands again into the flowing blood, smeared it up the blade until it made an unbroken line to his hand.

  He gazed at the bloody thing that would be the instrument of his own execution. He had lived by the blade, wrongly sacrificing the innocent. It was only right he himself should be its final sacrifice.

  This is for you, Vell Parsham, my first murder. You tried to warn me.

  She’d said, ‘End me now, Lord Prism, but someday, may you end it all or be ended. Know that Orholam is just, and tremble.’

  This is for you, Edna, who thought your sins so black you couldn’t speak them. I understand you now as I couldn’t then.

  This is for you, Titrit, whom I despised. I came to despise myself more.

  This is for Dulcina Dulceana… He couldn’t think of her, but he remembered her words and his own disbelief at her quiet, her peace. She’d said, ‘You’ve been doing Orholam’s work all day, and will do so all night and through the morrow. Let me give you a gift. The only gift I have. The gift of my five minutes. You may speak or we can be silent. You can Free me first if you prefer solitude, or at the end if you prefer company. As you will.’ She’d believed in him so much—she’d been so generous of spirit that she’d given him her last five minutes: a poor woman giving her last mite to a man whose treasury overflowed.

  Her grace had broken him.

  Going in to his first Freeing, Gavin had believed in two gods, and with her had died his faith in the wrong one.

  This is for you Aheyyad Brightwater, that flower I plucked too soon.

  This is for… this is for all of you.

  Standing beside him, Orholam extended His hand again. Even though He’d just been holding Dazen’s bloody hand moments ago, His own hand was clean. “You want to do this with Me, or alone?”

  Dazen slapped his hand into the old man’s. He didn’t know what, if anything, Orholam was going to do, but he’d been a fool trying to do everything on his own for long enough. If a bit of help would help him help those he loved, he wasn’t gonna turn it down.

  He braced his feet wide, and taking a deep breath, he put his right hand on the blade before him. His source was a perfect black, unpolluted, deeper than the darkest night, but even with such a source, drafting from a color’s luxin was never efficient; it always generated heat and discomfort, even if you only drafted a little.

  Dazen didn’t plan to draft a little.

  Dazen never did anything little.

  He threw his will down into the whole tower. Everywhere the blood touched, his will connected with the old black luxin.

  It shot up into him like an erupting geyser, and filled him, impossibly fast. Beside him, he saw omnichromatic fire erupting from Orholam’s other hand, as if He were scraping the dross from all the black and venting it, allowing Dazen to be filled with purest black alone.

  Dazen became the lens focusing a vast well of black light onto a point hundreds of leagues distant.

  Then Dazen was filled beyond bursting, and with one last, mighty shout, he threw all his will into one final burst toward that dimly flickering light on the horizon, his beloved White…

  * * *

  With a foot kicking hard against the wight’s chest, Gill Greyling cleared his spear from the still-standing body of his foe, and in the same motion, lengthened his body out as if he were a striking serpent, smashing the spear’s butt directly into the throat of a red wight swinging a war hammer wreathed in flames at Karris’s back. Before the wight even hit the ground, Gill’s spear had spun an arc to slash through his crushed throat.

  Ending threats forcefully a
nd with finality, Karris thought dimly. It was what they were trained to do.

  But she was a ghost. Already dead inside, she walked the battlefield with the other spirits of the dead lingering only shortly on this side of the veil. The air had shifted. The black-luxin fingers that had reached from beyond the horizon were gone.

  Gavin’s will had let go. He was gone. Finally gone.

  She had given up on him. She’d failed him. She had thought she wouldn’t know when he died, that such thoughts were the nonsense of young fools in love. But she knew now.

  She knew.

  And then the air shifted again. Something to do with the black luxin. As if its withdrawal hadn’t been the withdrawal of an attack abandoned but the temporary withdrawal of ocean after an earthquake.

  Even the wights seemed suddenly discomfited. Men and wights both paused in their fighting, backing away from their enemies.

  “What is it?” Gill asked. “What’s happening?”

  Karris was looking out to sea toward her lost love, so she saw it first.

  Far out beyond East Bay, the lights of a ship winked out. Then another’s, far to one side. A burning ship’s fires simply disappeared. Then she noticed that the stars on the horizon were gone.

  Her breath caught in her throat as she saw it for what it was. Like a sandstorm thundering across the desert, towering into the night, an immense black wave broke over the horizon, wider than the Jaspers themselves, and as high as the clouds.

  In the distance, she heard screams at its onslaught.

  As if the sea were swelling and devouring all before it in a massive wave, every light on every ship was extinguished in turn, into the bay, and then over the towers, over the walls, and then—in the time it takes to suck in a startled breath—over the Jaspers entire.

  All went utterly, utterly black. Blacker than mere night. This was the black of blindness, after a life spent working light. It penetrated everything, soaking everything as water does—then scouring it away with all the strength of an earthquake’s wave.

  Eerily, it was silent.

  And it was, unmistakably, unquestionably, Gavin.

  Then, just as the wails of alarm and despair were rising up from women and men struck blind and dismayed at their sudden loss—the wave was gone.