by Brent Weeks
Ironfist said, “I was there, within steps of that old scorpion. I could have… Did I fail you, uncle? Did I fail my Ulta? After all this time, and how high I rose.” He expelled a great breath.
“Do you have it?”
“The White had it hidden just where you said.” Ironfist handed over the polished ziricote-wood box, no wider than his hand and only a few thumbs deep. “I found no key.”
“Your commander’s pin,” Grinwoody said. Ironfist gave it to him, and Grinwoody snapped the pin between his fingers. Ironfist flinched, but Grinwoody wasn’t done. The halves hadn’t split randomly. He took one half and stuck it into the lock. It fit.
A line around the box glowed briefly.
Grinwoody said, “Throwing away your life to kill some noble was never to be your Ulta. There were… questions about your loyalty. Questions you’ve quite answered now.” He opened the box a crack and exhaled reverently, then closed it. “They call us masters of secrecy, and yet in dazzling the eye with lying light, the Chromeria is without rival. They say you’re the Blackguard because your skin is black, because your clothes are black, because in wearing no color, you show that your allegiance is to none of the Colors. They say you are Blackguards because you surrender your own light of reason to serve as a slave, that you are like the black-robed luxiats in taking on the humility of colorlessness. They say you serve in the dark. They say a hundred things that are all true—all to obscure one, central truth: you are called the Blackguard because you guard the black. The black seed crystal. Accessible only with the cooperation of the White and the commander of the Blackguard both. It is the weapon that kills Prisms and quenches luxin. This is the tool that will rebuild the Order. This is the pen that rewrites history. This, nephew, was your Ulta. You have succeeded. You’ve done more for the Order of the Broken Eye than anyone in three centuries.”
Why then was Ironfist ashamed? Ashamed that Grinwoody hadn’t trusted him. Ashamed that for some few months, he’d thought he didn’t have to choose sides, thought that his two oaths could be fulfilled without betraying either one, that ancient enemies could be made allies as they fought a common enemy, that his Ulta might be to kill the Color Prince. He took off his ghotra. Too late for that now. Orholam had reached out to Ironfist, and Ironfist had just spat in his face. “What do we do now?” Ironfist asked, without inflection.
“How we direct all the resources of the Order hinges on your answer to one question, my nephew and my right hand: after all you’ve seen, who is Kip Guile?”
Ironfist looked at his uncle, the slave, the hidden Old Man of the Desert, the head of the Order of the Broken Eye, and he could almost see fates being written as he chose his words. “He is not Kip Delauria, bastard, that I know. Nor is he Kip Guile. He is the Breaker, he is the Lightbringer, and he is our Diakoptês come again.”
“Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”
Epilogue 1
The distant explosion’s roar raced through Big Jasper’s broad avenues and lightwells, between the arches of its Thousand Stars, past whitewashed homes and gleaming domes. The cheering throngs along the Sun Day parade route fell silent, and every eye looked to the horizon, Ironfist’s eyes first of all.
Ironfist’s bitter regrets and introspection blew away with the last echoes of the great blast, and a rippling cloud billowed upward somewhere near the docks, so intensely hot and huge that it folded in on itself like a mushroom cap. There was only one place on that side of the island that held enough black powder to make an explosion so huge. He ran.
With his height and constant training and knowledge of every back street on this island, the half league passed in no time. Crowds coming and going both slowed his pace as he reached the narrow peninsula. Promachos Andross Guile’s Lightguards were trying to set up a perimeter, and doing a predictably bad job of it.
As Ironfist approached the line—were those idiots keeping out chirurgeons?—he couldn’t help but stare at the dissipating black cloud and the rubble beneath it. The explosion had come from the cannon tower that guarded the harbor. The tower’s powder stores were sunk into its bedrock bowels so that even an invading navy’s fire couldn’t hit them. Carver Black, in charge of the island’s defenses, was meticulous in checking that appropriate discipline in storing and working around so much black powder was maintained.
Of course, with the Lightguards having taken over, those clumsy fools might have begun storing the powder above ground. A dropped lamp, an iron-nailed boot—if you let discipline slip for a heartbeat, this kind of accident could happen.
But Ironfist knew in his gut that this was no accident.
The Lightguards tried to bar him from the peninsula, but he said, “I’m Commander Ironfist, let me pass.”
He actually forgot that it wasn’t true anymore until the words were out of his mouth. He’d been commander so long, it was impossible to think of himself as anything else.
They moved immediately. So they hadn’t heard yet.
The cannon tower was still standing. Reinforced with iron and Orholam only knew what kinds of luxin, the outer walls were cracked in some places, but otherwise intact. The blast, thus contained, had shot up from the cellar through each of the five floors, hurling everything out the top, transforming the cannon tower into a cannon aimed at heaven. Everything within had been flung into the sky: broad paving stones that had made the floors, splintered wood, rags, and, nearer to the tower itself, even the massive cannons themselves.
The entry door had been blown out into the harbor, and heavy smoke roiled out of it still. Civilians and Lightguards alike surrounded the tower, looking for survivors, surveying the damage, counting the dead. Ironfist saw a corpse, legless, charred, his clothes blown entirely off him. Others bobbed in the waters. But of most of the dead, there was almost nothing left. A boot here, a piece of meat unidentifiable there. Blood smears.
Ironfist found a corpse, dead not from the explosion, but of a slash through the neck. It could have been from flying shrapnel, but the man had no burn marks or evidence of injury from the concussion wave. He’d been lying here when the explosion happened, already dead.
That meant sabotage. Ironfist looked to the horizon. Was there a fleet out there? No. And they’d have had warning if there was. Why this target, then? Surely the Color Prince wouldn’t spend lives and treasure blowing up a tower for no reason.
A yell sounded from a knot of Lightguards at the water’s edge. Ironfist made his way over there as they pulled the man from the waves. The man was Parian, tall, hugely muscular, and wearing only dark trousers, his tunic lost, his headscarf lost. It was his brother.
Tremblefist. Dear Orholam, no. Ironfist’s heart stopped. It couldn’t—it couldn’t… And yet there was no mistaking that imposing figure, the smaller twin of Ironfist’s own body.
“He’s alive!” someone shouted.
Ironfist crashed the lines of gawking Lightguards. “Away!” he roared. “That’s my brother! Move!”
And then, with no time intervening, he was holding his brother in his arms. He must have been convincing, because everyone had moved back a good ten paces.
It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. Tremblefist’s body bore no wounds that Ironfist could see, but when his eyelids fluttered open, the whites of his eyes were bloodshot almost pure red. If he had that kind of damage to his head…
No. Ironfist didn’t want to believe what his experience knew.
“Harrdun,” his brother said, looking up at him.
“Hanishu.” They had barely spoken each other’s birth names in all the days since they’d taken their Blackguard names, there was so much pride in the latter names, and so much pain in the former.
“You should have seen me fight,”
Hanishu said. “Twenty-seven men. In less than a minute. Not a scratch on me. They even used… mmmm. Used muskets. Orholam forgave me, Harrdun. For Aghbalu. His holy breath was on me in this fight. I made it through the whole tower.”
Ironfist was still trying to recover, the words clanged against each other like a cacophony of pots and pans. “You did this?” he whispered tensely. “I thought maybe an attack by the Color—”
“I saved the Lightbringer. They were going to sink his ship.” He found Ironfist’s hand and clasped it. “I made it to the cellars. Set the fuse, ran. But they’d locked the door out. So I climbed the entire tower, fighting, jumped off the top just as she blew. Landed it. One for the ages. Surfaced, was swimming back to shore, and a damn rock fell out of the sky. Had no idea they’d be in the air that long… I’m all busted inside.”
From his eyes, he hadn’t made the jump quite as clearly as he seemed to think. But blows to the head could skew everything. And it didn’t matter, did it?
“Not long now,” Hanishu said. “Got a question, big brother.”
“Anything,” Ironfist said.
“Not for me. For you. Will take a while to answer.”
“What is it?”
“Before you left home to come here, you met with some people. You made them an oath.”
“What people?” But Ironfist knew, and his heart sank again that Tremblefist knew about that.
“I didn’t want to come to the Chromeria, you know, after what I did at Aghbalu. But I came for you. Seeing you swear yourself to the Order, it, it wouldn’t leave me. I would have happily killed myself, but I couldn’t go while you were in danger. Funny thing. Coming here to save you is what saved me. I came so that someday, when your soul was on the line, and you had to decide which oaths to keep, that I would be here for you. I’m not going to make it, big brother. All that effort, all this time…” And he began weeping. “I failed you.”
As if the failure were his.
There was nothing to say, no way to combat the tears spilling freely down Ironfist’s cheeks.
Tremblefist said, “After the fall of Ru, the others told me how you prayed. It had to be the first time you prayed since mother was killed, huh?”
Ironfist nodded tightly.
“And he answered.”
“He did.” A miracle cannon shot, five thousand paces, to save friends he might be called on to kill.
“So you’ve taken unbreakable oaths to implacable enemies. One to the Bearer of Light, and one to the Maker of it. So you have to decide without me, brother. Which man are you?”
Ironfist had no answer. He clung for comfort to the brother he should be comforting. Like his life, Tremblefist’s death wasn’t easy.
Epilogue 2
Gavin woke, facedown, cold, naked, lying on a hard floor. His missing eye was professionally bandaged, but he had new bruises everywhere. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. Wherever here was. He rolled over, wincing at the many voices of pain singing like a Sun Day chorus, and opened his eye.
It was a small room, curving around him in a circle, shaped like a flattened ball. There was a hole above for bread to be dropped in, and a hole below for his waste. He couldn’t see the color, but the winking crystalline facets told him he was in the very blue cell he’d made for his brother.
It had been repaired.
In the peaceful perfection of the passionless prison, Gavin felt a horror and revulsion unlike any he had ever known. Pain stabbed through his chest. Tight. Breathless, fighting for little gasps of air. His secrets were out, all at once, in front of the last person he loved and the one person he knew could never understand.
Those repairs meant his father was his captor. If he’d found this cell, he’d found them all. That meant he knew everything: the false victory at Sundered Rock, Dazen’s imposture of Gavin, and finally his murder of Andross Guile’s eldest and favorite son in the yellow cell.
It meant Andross planned to make him pay for it.
Stripped bare of clothes, and titles, and privileges, and power, and vision, and freedom, and stripped now of even his false name, Dazen stared at the grim reflection in the shining wall. It looked like a dead man.
Acknowledgments
The problem with standards is living up to them. Acknowledgments are usually as tedious but necessary as a EULA. Where can I scroll and hit Accept already? Then you hit Accept, and it forces you to perjure yourself by averring that YES, I DID READ all that tiny print that I just didn’t read. What, you don’t believe my 12,000-words-per-minute pace? I tell you, I’m Harriet Klausner, and I read every last word of the contracts I review. ACCEPT!
I had a standard. I thought, acknowledgments are boring. I shall make my acknowledgments un-boring. Acknowledgments shall be a new genre of creative nonfiction, to which readers shall flock! New readers shall buy my books with no intent of reading the fantasy herein, no, even dyed-in-the-wool octogenarian mystery readers who actually do wear wool that has been dyed—natty sweaters mostly—will buy my books solely in the hope of seeing my witticitudes. (That being, of course, my witticisms about the vicissitudes of the publishing business. The mystery readers already sussed that out. Sharp lot. You fantasy folk have been put on notice.)
But. And isn’t there always a “but”? And inasmuch as I have been enjoined not to begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction until I can spell “coordinating conjunction” [Note to proofreader: Have a double look at this, will you? Would be terribly embarrasing to misspell in the middle of a witticitude.], [yeah, and check that punctuation, too, always get hung up on by what marks to put around nested clauses!] every so often in life, a sentence must needs start with an And But Yet Or For Nor.
Amirite? (Octogenarian mysteriods, the fantasy folks sussed that neologism instantly. You’ve been put on notice.)
But. But after writing acknowledgments for six books now, I’m beginning to see how the grind has worn down souls greater than I. Truth is, at some point, adding witty lines to computer code as an amuse-bouche for that one other programmer who actually reads lines 3.5 million to 3.6 million is dust in the wind. Dust. Wind. Dude. Because the list of people to be thanked only adds names. And do you know who gets to add drama to reading a list of names? Let’s ask the cast of the Grammy-winning Bible Experience, which features a who’s who of African American actors reading the entirety of the Bible. Of course Samuel L. Jackson gets to read Ezekiel 25:17—hopefully the real verse this time, not the one from the Gospel of Quentin—but who “gets” to read the begats?
Like success, a novel has many fathers. Here are my co-begetters:
Thank you to my wife, Kristi. For believing in the beginning, and for believing still. Thank you to my daughter, who did her best to hold back being born until daddy could finish the first draft, and then slept well so that daddy could edit this behemoth.
Thank you to my editorial assistant, E. dub, for enduring interminable nicknames: Monie, CAPSLOCK, and others too good to be shared. Your goat’s leash is over here. Seriously, even though you do cruel things like, well, make me work, having you around has been an enormous help. Our life is better—and so is my writing—because of the work you do.
Thank you to Devi (fierce friend and peerless provocatrix of production peeps), Anne, Alex, Tim, Susan, Ellen, Lauren, Laura, James, and Rose of Orbit Books US and UK. Thank you to Don Maass, Cameron McClure, and the rest of the staff at Donald Maass Literary Agency. I know this is kind of what we do, but you make the work part of this work rewarding and as smooth as possible—and you make the art of it better than anything of mine has any right to be.
A special thank-you to my beta readers: Mary Robinette Kowal, Heather, Andrew, Tim, Jacob, and John. I still kind of hate you right now, but my gratitude will grow as the memory of the pains you inflicted on me fades. And double thanks to Tim and John for diving back into the word trenches a second time.
Thanks to Aristotle for ideas so big that I couldn’t escape them even in a secondary-world fant
asy.
Thank you to Dr. J. Klein, former roommate, for my continuing work-ethic inferiority complex and for last-second translations. Any abuses of philosophy or translation herein are the ones I either didn’t ask him about, or ignored his sterling advice about. If he’s your prof, ask about swimming the Hellespont and scaling the tower. Or at least about his Bruce Lee impression.
Thank you to Stephen R. Lawhead, who showed me that there was fantasy after Tolkien. Much of my writing is an attempt to make others feel how I felt after reading Taliesin and Merlin. Quentin is for you.
And last, thank you to my readers. Thank you for sharing these worlds with me, for your encouragement, and for sharing me with other readers. It is a gift and a privilege to get to do what I love for a living. Thank you.
—Brent Weeks
Books by Brent Weeks
Perfect Shadow (e-only novella)
THE NIGHT ANGEL TRILOGY
The Way of Shadows
Shadow’s Edge
Beyond the Shadows
Night Angel (omnibus)
THE LIGHTBRINGER SERIES
The Black Prism
The Blinding Knife
The Broken Eye
The Blood Mirror
Character List
Adrasteia (Teia): A student at the Chromeria. She is slave to Lady Lucretia Verangheti of the Smussato Veranghetis; a Blackguard candidate and a drafter of paryl.
Aheyyad: Orange drafter, grandson of Tala. A defender of Garriston, the designer of Garriston’s Brightwater Wall; dubbed Aheyyad Brightwater by Prism Gavin Guile.
Ahhanen: A Blackguard.
Aklos: A slave of Lady Aglaia Crassos.
Amestan: A Blackguard at the Battle of Garriston.
Aram: A Blackguard scrub. His parents were Blackguards, and he has been training in martial arts since he could walk.