The Burning White (Lightbringer #5)

by Brent Weeks

Just need a dragon now.” He paused. “On second thought, no dragons. I think we’re fine without dragons.”

He was going to go full Andross Guile on those old bastards.

He couldn’t win every game like Andross Guile, and he couldn’t break every game like Gavin Guile, so he was forced to do his best to rebound a loss from one game (the financial war) into a win in another (the shooting war).

Blubber bounces back, boys.

“Crowd’s not that big. Oh, they’ve seen us,” Winsen said, now beside Cruxer. “Crux? How does a High Magister wave? Like so?” He waved a devil-may-care wave,

“Nine hundred fifty-seven,” Ferkudi said. They all stopped. They looked at him. “You didn’t just count them all…” Winsen said. “Huh? Of course not,” Ferkudi said, as if Win was crazy. “I was guessing. Why does everyone else always guess round numbers? They’re not any more likely.” He suddenly looked troubled.

Oh Ferk you lovable lug

“Gav?” Gill whispered. Teia’s heart tumbled to the floor. “Gavin? Is that you?” Gill asked

“I can feel your presence. I know you’re here. It’s you, isn’t it? Little brother…” His voice trailed off, and Teia saw him gulping convulsively against the threatening tears, joy and hope taking up arms against a tide of grief.

Teeth gritted, tears swimming in her eyes, she lifted her foot. The floor squeaked a protest. She retreated. From the barracks door, she looked back. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from Gill’s shoulders. He was standing, his face radiant. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me…” His face twisted suddenly, a cavalry charge of tears of grief smashing against the shields of a smile, and his last word was a whisper. “… alone.”

He wept then, and spoke to his dead little brother, and Teia couldn’t stay, and she couldn’t leave.

“Nine of the dark ones survived into our era. Nine were enough to devour all the bane that formed. On the day Uluch Assan killed the ninth, Dazen Guile’s gift awoke.”

Gavin Guile wasn’t inside. But something was. A vaguely man-shaped mass of glittering blue motes swirled in the cell. The cell itself was broken, a hole gaping in one side, and shards of blue luxin littering the area beyond. But jagged hellstone glimmered in that tunnel, trapping the glimmering creature.

Ironfist reached the portal to the green cell. Gavin wasn’t there, either. Some skeletal tree-thing, like climbing ivy twisted around itself, dragged branch claws against its circular walls, fists knotting.

The yellow god in the yellow cell was like a taste of sickly sunlight. It was liquid gold coruscating and crashing like ocean waves as it alternately threw itself against the walls and then meditated quietly, lights sloshing about its incorporeal figure, eyes like unquiet stars.

“You’re a motherfucker.” “In more ways than one.”

Karris slapped him. He crumpled against the wall and cowered. She rubbed her temples, thinking what to do next. Wild-eyed, Klytos was looking around at the Blackguards. “You all saw that! I’m the Blue. She’s assaulted me! Take her into custody immediately!” From where he stood at Karris’s left hand, Gill Greyling drawled, “Apologies, High Lord, I must’ve been distracted. I saw nothing.” He looked around at the seven other Blackguards in the room. “Anyone?” Around the room, lips pursed in chagrin. Heads shook. “I heard something,” one of the new kids volunteered. “Sounded like a shit plopping on the floor.”

“Centuries ago now, Vician was the last true Prism. Born, not made. But when it came time to step down and surrender his powers, he murdered his successor instead. And then he murdered all those he could find with the gift, renewing his own powers—for a time—with theirs. He cowed and bought off the Magisterium and the Spectrum, and they helped him, rather than fighting him. But true Prisms stopped being born, even after Vician was gone. Some say those with the gift were still being born, but that a faithful luxiat had used black luxin to destroy the knowledge of how to find them. Others said it was Orholam’s own punishment for the Magisterium’s faithlessness. “But by repeating Vician’s murders, the Magisterium found they could make a Prism, and instead of an outsider upending their power every generation, they could choose one of their own to be the new Prism, which they liked very much indeed. Unfortunately, unlike a true Prism’s powers, this made-Prism’s powers would fade over the course of at most seven years. They knew what they made was a fraud, but some thought if Orholam wouldn’t save the world from the luxin storms and warring gods, they would do it themselves. So they renamed their murders sacrifices. They found when they sacrificed adults, it might take dozens to fill a single jewel of the Blinding Knife with a color. It was as if days of life and power were being transferred. Then one had the diabolical idea to sacrifice a child, one whose gift for drafting had ...

“Of course they did. With a child, they’d get a full color from one murder, sometimes two. And it was so much easier to hide the death of one child, separated from her parents for tutelage at the Chromeria. A sudden illness, the High Luxiats would claim. With all the influx of pilgrims around Sun Day—often bringing the ill, hoping to be cured—who would notice the deaths of seven or ten children every seven years? The High Magisters never chose their victims from important families. Like predators, they hunted the weak and outcast

children, the friendless ones. As if Orholam, who commands the exalted to bring succor to the lowly, would ...

“But the Freeing,” Gavin said. “Surely a sip of power a hundred times over would equal the full gulp? Surely they could have used all those…” “Sometimes. For certain colors, as long as they had the Blinding Knife. But those drafters who come to be Freed have almost nothing left of their power. They have none to give. The children selected for the sacrifice—one

lightsplitter, and one or two for each color—were always confined in a special ward in the infirmary just before Sun Day. They were drugged so that they would feel ill. When a particular child’s color wasn’t required, she would simply recover from her ‘illness,’ and never know how close she had come to death.”

“The new rule was that no one could serve on the Spectrum while an immediate family member also served, in any capacity, whether as Color or Prism or promachos or the White or the Black. Everyone liked that, because Orea’s name had been put forth several times to become the White, and people feared what she and Ulbear might do together. By tradition, such rule changes are required to have contingencies, in case an unforeseen emergency requires it, so Ulbear proposed a contingency that simply seemed outrageous. If two family members wished to sit in such high offices simultaneously—which at the time only applied to Ulbear and Orea—they had to supply one of their own children for the Prism sacrifice.”

“But for father’s plans, Gavin had to be made Prism, and father could only protect him if he himself were on the Spectrum, too. Father believed that the prophecies indicated he could only become the Lightbringer if he were the promachos first. So the price for father’s ambition—and, he thought, the price to save the whole world—was that he sacrifice his sons. One to die after his term as Prism, and one…”

“Father could only fully save one of his sons,” Sevastian said, gently, as the dying sun finally touched the horizon. “He chose you.”

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.

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.