The Burning White (Lightbringer #5)

by Brent Weeks

Ferkudi loved lists, all lists. When the palace chatelaine had shown him her immaculately organized ledgers, the look on his face had been a baggage train of astonishment, then disbelief, then rapture, and finally utter infatuation for the bespectacled sexagenarian and her perfect figures.

her drafting that had allowed her to shift the vision of six hundred twenty-seven people and seventy-three wights, the people seemed impressed with their king instead. As if he had commanded her to be visible and she had no choice but to comply. As if it were proof that his magic was greater.

“Oh gods,” Kip said. “You’re not gonna have the servants primp me in front of the Mighty!” Being naked in front of the Mighty was nothing. But being bathed (by strangers!), and tweezed, and picked at, and salved, and massaged, and having strangers chatter things like, ‘Should we emphasize or de-emphasize the surprising and obvious power of his buttocks?’ Torture. Winsen said, “Me? And embarrass you like that? Your Grace, I am shocked!”

The Prism had always been the height of majesty, of virility, potency. She’d heard other Blackguards say in hushed tones, ‘Whatever else we do, whatever happens, we were Blackguards in the time of Gavin Guile.’ Here was a man who was emperor who actually deserved it.

“It’s just a matter of will, Adrasteia,” Gavin said. “You grab the one thread your fingers can reach, and you pull until the whole cloth unravels.”

“Time makes a coward’s decisions for her.”

In commissioning Teia to infiltrate the Order of the Broken Eye, Karris had wanted her to destroy the Order utterly, so they wouldn’t be able to enslave and blackmail and murder ever again. Teia had always understood her mission was necessary, but now it was personal.

Six weeks to find her father and free him. Six weeks to find those who would do him harm, and to end the threat forever. Teia had never fantasized about being frightening, had only wanted to be a shield—a big, obvious guardian against the violence of others. But against these people? She felt something gloriously strong and ugly and beautiful rising in her heart, easing the worry on her brow, and turning her mouth to a smile. The Order had made her. They were about to learn how well.

For this one thing, thank you, Grandpa Guile. You did me a good turn when—well, when you pretty much forced this stunning woman to marry me and made her think it was her own idea.

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

“I went out there this morning again,” Cruxer said. “I recognized some of them. Same people. They’re not leaving after they see the ceiling.” “They want to wait in the queue to see it again, that’s their business,” Kip said. “They aren’t in the queue,” Cruxer said, troubled. “Yesterday they came curious. They left exultant. Today they’re… expectant?” “I think they’re hoping to make you king,” Tisis said quietly. “Uh-huh,” Kip said, not looking up. “Too much to do today, sorry,” he said.

So far, Kip thought his own performance as a leader was decidedly lacking. 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, and Kip could hear the crowd go mad with excitement. “‘Not that big’?” Kip said, suddenly rooted to the desk, papers forgotten. “Nor that small,” Tisis said. “How not small is ‘not small’?” Kip asked. “I dunno,” Winsen said. “Maybe twenty thousand?” “What?!” Kip shot to his feet. “He’s joking,” Tisis said. “Maybe a thousand?” “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. “They aren’t more likely, are they?”

What would you do here, father? Kip suddenly stood, because the first step at least was obvious. Maybe it was time to see if he was the son of Gavin Guile after all. He looked over at Cruxer, and his commander’s throat bobbed as he saw what Kip intended. Kip flashed him a grin. And maybe it was the grin that did it, the intimation of confidence, for instead of raising an objection, Cruxer nodded. He was in with Kip, categorically. Kip strode to the windows, head high, threw back the drapes, and waved to the damned crowd, smiling broadly. They cheered. Of course they did.

“Oh God,” the White blasphemed, though perhaps such a desperate tone made uttering the holy title a prayer rather than a curse.

interrupted for a Blackguard’s Freeing. The people who’d put you in the place where you needed to die in order to serve them would hold the knife. And all you asked for all your suffering and sacrifice was a steady hand on the knife and a steady look in the eye. You asked them to affirm the meaning not just of your death but of your whole life, of the oath of service you’d given and that you were upholding even after breaking the halo, when everything in you screamed to break troth. You asked them to have the basic decency to honor your sacrifice.

Teia would give Karris her report. Not today. But eventually. Teia would do her duty. She always did. The monsters she fought were still monsters. Her friends still her friends. Her commanders still, unfortunately, her commanders. Doubts are for old warriors, not young ones. But on a personal level? Fuck you, Karris. You’re making everything you put me through, everything you made me do, be for nothing. Now you’ve given me a dead friend. Why would I give you a live husband? You took my Gavin. Why should I give you yours?

Teia waited until morning. As the Iron White slept in her soft bed, Adrasteia’s mind never wavered, her determination never faltered, her focus never flagged, her will never failed. Witness to weakness, she was implacable. When the morning shift came in, she slipped out the door and got to work.

Tisis would rather fight. Regardless. To her Koios was an invader, but Daragh the Coward was a traitor, which was worse. She might not forgive Kip if he fought the invader but forgave the traitor. Which made her right morally but wrong strategically. That was tomorrow’s problem.

“There’s a time to choose life, Conn, and you’re taking too damn long to make it,” Kip said. “You’re in a pit, so I’m throwing you a rope, but I ain’t gonna fuckin’ climb for you. You dyin’ today? It hurts me more than you. But if you choose to live, I want you to live for one reason—because you’re going to make yourself useful. You’re worried it hurts our traditions for me to let you live? Yes. It does. People will think you got preferential treatment? Yes, they will. Because you are. Not because I love you, but because I think you can do what others can’t for this people, this satrapy. I think you’ll be more help than harm. A lot more. If you climb out of this pit, you’re on the hook to prove me right. You’re on the hook to work every day to show you’re worth the third chance I’m giving you, and someday, when it’s your turn, when it’s wise, you’re on the hook to give that chance to someone else.” Kip blew out a breath in exasperation. “Look at your fucking shoulders, man. You were made to bear burdens. You are strong as fuck, and you’re not acting like it. So, if you want to stay and curl up and die? Then fuck you. You’ve already wasted too much of my time.” Kip turned away, but then paused. He pulled a knife from his belt and stared at Ruadhán, eye to eye. “It’d tear up the men to hang you,” Kip said. “So you want to die? Have the goddam decency to think of someone else a bit, would you?” Kip dropped the knife and the key, outside the cell. Ruadhán would have to strain ...

If you wish, have your wars among your humans. Let there be peace between the gods.”

What would you do here, father? he’d asked himself. How had Gavin done it? All Gavin’s life, he’d broken through all the horseshit like this, upending other people’s games and yet emerging not only unscathed but beloved.

Gunner’s voice was like a child pounding on the door when you’re in the middle of a bad lay: Gavin wasn’t enjoying himself as much as he’d expected, but what he was doing was a lot more enjoyable than what he was being called to do.

But Gavin had been the instrument of that brutal reality, ramming the knife through ribs, vomiting empty prayers at black heavens painted white. His conscience revolted at what he did, and he did it anyway. He was the monstrous fist inside the velvet glove. If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally, requires in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous?

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

The implications were horrifying. If the Chromeria was fundamentally corrupt, then they were all of them—the Chromeria, the Broken Eye, and the Blood Robes—equally horrific. All committed evil, and all excused their own evil as necessary. Maybe it was worse than that. It wasn’t that each defined the good differently and thus excused different evils; it was that right and wrong were meaningless concepts: there was only what flavor of power you preferred. Can good fruit come from a bad tree?

Arranged apprenticery for me, and afore he put me on a ship he taught me to fight so I wouldn’t be made a buttboy.

Mama was so keen on makin’ the beast with two backs with any dangerous man what winked at her that she never even noticed she uz setting her own house on fire by doin’ it—with all us kids inside, burnin’. She was pregnant, that’s what for I hit her in the face. She told ’im the black eye was from falling down. Uz a better lie than you’d think. Only thing she was ever good at was gettin’ on her back in a hurry.”

“Pa was a smith. One day, when he wouldn’t stop cryin’, Mama quick snatched up Pa’s hammer, and laid li’l Algae down on the workbench, lined him up good—she uz gonna smash his head, we thought. Then she stopped herself, and she smashed her hand instead, smashed it jelly, kept smashing. Wouldn’t stop. That wet, sloppy sound and her screamin’ won’t never come out me ears. Hear the echoes to this day, rattlin’ from cliff to cliff inside my skull. Said she had ta be punished for wantin’ a do such a thing.” Fuck, Gunner! I am trying to enjoy some goddam sunshine!

“To save her life, Pa had to cut the hand off and burn the stump dry and sizzly, while she cursed him and screamed and asked to die. I hope you never have to hear yer mama beggin’ ta die, Guile.” No, mine didn’t beg. She asked politely, and I killed her politely. Thanks for the reminder of that, asshole.

Gavin had entertained the notion at first that maybe Gunner was making sport of him, that he was going to reveal this was all a tale simply to wind him up and pass a few minutes of boredom at sea. Now he didn’t think so. Not at all. The bouncy, ceaselessly grinning and hollering and spitting pirate who, having been raised amid a cacophony of accents himself, veered wildly between all of them and none, who covered his habitual malapropisms and neologisms by purposely creating as many as possible so that he might become larger than life—that legend was suddenly simply a slender Ilytian man, hitting middle age earlier than he ought, his face drawn, eyes haunted by things forever lost. Gunner said, “I held this mammary like a puzzle box.” Mammary? Oh no. Memory. Don’t laugh, Gavin. For the sake of all that is holy, do not laugh right now when Gunner’s feeling this vulnerable.

“And here’s thing,” Gunner said. “I kin understand it when a man throws back a few too many drinks on a lonesome night, gets sour inside, and sucks at the teat of a musket for jus’ long enough so that big ole ‘fuck you’ we scream at the world bounces back as ‘fuck me’ and he pulls the trigger. I kin understand when a girl climbs a tree and tries on a noose necklace for size and once she got it on thinkin’, ‘I come this far, why not?’ and takin’ that hop. Prob’ly e’ryone who looks oft a cliff thinks a taking the sharp drop with a sudden stop. E’ery sailor has thought of takin’ that swim what fattens sharks. We all got the black moment when the evil eye of the barrel dares a starin’ contest. And we’re all a hair trigger’s pull from the musket’s dare. It’s the devil’s gift, ain’t it? It’s the heritage o’ man, aye?” Gavin’s moment of humor had dried to a desert. Though surely some folk lived who’d never known what it was like to only just barely hold on to life by your bloody fingernails, Gavin certainly did.

“Seems ya change every time I lay my orisons on ya. Yer name, your face, number of eyeballs and fingers, sometimes your heart. But you were never a quitter, not even when I had you pull that oar. Never gave up. Till now.” Gunner’s point was something else entirely, but Gavin couldn’t get past how he’d put ‘when I had you pull that oar.’ Oh, yes, let’s do pretend my enslavement was nothing personal, you piece of human— Then again, maybe it hadn’t been. As Prism, Gavin’s own murders had fallen like rain on the heads of the just and the unjust alike. Shit. There goes my righteous fury. That was the trouble of a consistency in moral affairs: holding yourself up to the measure you judge others by is three clicks past irritating.

“No games,” Ambassador Red Leaf said. “But we’ve work to do, and rapidly, you and me. I simply wanted to show you I’m not a fool.” “Many would consider showing your cards immediately to be foolish indeed,” Kip said. My grandfather, for one, the best player of them all. “Many would. But not you. You have shown yourself capable of wielding the truth like a scalpel, but you prefer to use it as a hammer. You like to shock people into silence by telling truths they can’t believe you’d actually say.” Kip said nothing. This man thought he was clever. Perhaps he was.

“My good lord Briun Willow Bough is”—despite the few ears here to hear his words, he lowered his voice—“not the most… naturally gifted of leaders. But he is sincere. He doesn’t want his people to die. To save his satrapy, he would trade his very life, or if he must, his city.” “Interesting,” Kip said. “I hadn’t heard he was stupid.” Ambassador Red Leaf didn’t so much as blink. He didn’t play along like a sycophant would, nor did he rush to his master’s defense. So he was either disloyal or simply a man capable of holding his tongue. “Now,” Kip said, “now I’m impressed. Forgive the slander. I didn’t mean it.” “That… that was a test?” the man asked. Kip gave the nod again. “And like a cur, I didn’t defend him…” The fat man’s sweaty upper lip thinned. “Please, please don’t tell him.” Ah, but just because I say the test is over, that doesn’t mean it is. For one wild, inappropriate moment, Kip missed Andross Guile. With that man, Kip was always sprinting to catch up, was always the pupil at the master’s feet. Every victory against him was hard fought and only half a victory at best. What a man Andross Guile could have been. Where had he gone wrong?

Satrap Briun Willow Bough might be no military leader, but he was clear-eyed about his situation. It was desperate, but he was taking desperate actions without panicking. It made Kip like the man. It took uncommon strength of character to present yourself to a foreigner, a younger man, and one of dubious birth no less, and say, ‘I’m in desperate straits. Will you please, please help?’

His eyes took on a distant look, red pain outlined with spiky black hatred, or black hatred impregnated with red pain, such that the two had mingled to a hue that stained the soul forever.

“Kip is easily handled,” he said. “Kip is like his father, not his grandfather. He reacts to the needs in front of him. He sees people, not numbers, not cards to play. To him, no one is disposable. He is brilliant, else I would have destroyed him already—and you’re right, I’ve tried. But the way to beat Kip remains simple: I’ll beat him with present needs and battles and victories far away from where they might matter. In terms of that game his grandfather likes so much, it doesn’t matter what card Kip pulls. He’s playing at the wrong table. And I’ll keep him there until the real game is decided.”

“O Dazen Guile,” Gunner mocked. His eyes were glittering mirrors as dark and sharp and dangerous as living black luxin. “O Master of Land Ways and Sea Ways, Man of Low Cunning and High Artifice, what are ye now?” What. Not who.

He who had flown, literally flown, in the peerless machina he’d dubbed his condor, tasting a freedom no one ever had before; he, a genius whose field of play had encompassed the sky itself—he himself was being dragged where he didn’t want to go, blackmailed, afraid, passive. He couldn’t even blame actual chains now, as he might have when he’d been a slave— —Enslaved! It’s different! He was crippled. Half-blind. Enslaved, yes. But enslaved, not a slave. His bondage had been a temporary condition, not an identity. Emperor Gavin Guile had setbacks, not losses. He was Gavin Guile, victor. Never Gavin Guile, victim. But really. Seriously now. How long has it been since that was true?

Suddenly another piece of this dangerous little man snapped into focus for Gavin. Gunner was the soul of tenacity. That was what had made him the best cannoneer in the world. When a mystery or even a whim took Gunner in its teeth, he would follow it to the bitter end. If a shot wobbled, another man might fire another ten rounds from his cannons to figure out why before abandoning it as fruitless; Gunner would empty a treasury to fire a thousand rounds until he understood exactly why one shot deviated a hand’s breadth from the last.

“Pansy, you ever worry ’bout how manly you are?” She answered immediately. “Daily, Cap’n!” “Didn’t think so!” Gunner said. He scowled at Gavin. Gavin couldn’t tell if the pirate was taking the piss.

“In all my time as the head of the faith,” Gavin said, “I could never come up with more than two questions that were worth a damn. As it were.” It sailed over Gunner’s head. In his world, ‘damn’ was for punctuation, not punning.

Sinking into sarcasm is the heart’s last rebellion against a mind choosing helplessness.

Logical step to inexorable step, his answers had marched him into waters that now closed over his head. When your answers lead you logically to despair, you don’t have the wrong answers; you have the right answers—to the wrong questions.

Gavin didn’t want to give Grinwoody what he wanted, but there was no way out. In his current state and situation, Gavin couldn’t outsmart him or outfight him or out-magic him. He couldn’t deny Grinwoody what he wanted. But that was framing the problem exactly wrong. In truth, it didn’t matter what Grinwoody wanted—it mattered what Gavin wanted. Gavin didn’t want Grinwoody to win…? Gavin didn’t want to die…? Divergent as those seemed, both of them were importantly distinct from wanting victory or wanting life. What do I want? Odd thing to wonder, here, when he had no power to get it. Before, he’d never asked it in any profound way. His ‘great’ goals for every seven years he served as Prism hadn’t been great in any way. They’d been field dressings on a gaping wound of purposelessness. His housebroken dream had been merely to stay alive, to not be unmasked as a fraud. Sure, that made sense for a month or two after the war while he healed. But he’d never become more. Never dreamed more than declawed dreams. He’d put his brother in th...

Gavin hadn’t had an audacious thought since he’d lost his powers. This? This wasn’t audacious. This was legendary. How do you prove once and for all that there’s no God? How do you show that even if He is there, He’s small and weak and unworthy of adoration? How do you prove that Orholam doesn’t see, He doesn’t hear, He doesn’t care, He doesn’t save? You show up on His front door, uninvited. You go inside without knocking. You take a look around. And if you like the place… A thrill shot through Gavin. It was his first great goal again, so carefully concealed for so long. There was nothing more impossible—and that very thought was like a breath of clean air after months in the must and stench of himself in the black cell.

The genius of the Chromeria as an organization was that through education first and coercion later, they’d turned that power into communal power, then traditional power, first subservient to political power, then enmeshed with it, and finally indistinguishable from it. They had ensconced themselves in the world’s politics and culture and religion and trade. But even if a sconce is originally placed high so that it may cast its light far, if the fire it held dies, the sconce remains, and it remains in its high place. So, too, the Chromeria’s social and political and commercial and ceremonial power would falter if magic were lost, but it wouldn’t necessarily be broken.

Fearing the lash, even freed of his chains, the slave will still pull at his oar, but men of unfettered soul, who though chained are still whole, will smash it like trash on the floor.

He who’d been ‘blessed’ with the gift of black luxin could kill the Lord of Light and watch tumble all the horrors built on men’s fear of Him. Half-blind and chained and toothless as he was, Gavin might stagger to the pillars that upheld the roof of the empire. He might find strength had come once more to his old muscular will—strength enough to lever apart the pillars upholding the very heavens and bring it all down. Gavin the Liar, who’d murdered innocents to uphold others’ lies, could destroy the greatest lie of all. Gavin would bring down the rebels, not in order to save the empire but in order to make it fall correctly. Fuck the old way. Fuck the new way. As he had always been, he himself would be the third way. He would be himself, and he would be terrible. He would come back from death, come back from this journey to heaven and hell, and Gavin would invert all they had hoped. Gavin, the Son of the Morning, the Bright Hope of the World, had been cast down into a ninefold hell. But he hadn’t stayed down. He’d broken through and escaped from one color of hell to another and another—until his own father had shut him into the inner darkness. The blackest heart of Chromeria, its very foundation. From those depths, a nameless wretch had been sent to scale the heavens and kill God Himself. Who could return from such an impossible journey? Only one man. Only one man might have been born for such a thing. Only one who could make and remake himself, who refused to die, who def...