The Burning White (101 page)

Up. Up!

Ironfist must surely be running out of time before the execution. He looked at the stars, but he’d never paid enough attention to know at what hour certain stars rose and set at this time of year. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been unconscious. Besides, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was saving Gavin Guile.

“One more lap,” he said.

The great race ended with two laps in the hippodrome before cheering crowds. Hanishu and Harrdun had no idea that they’d nearly caught up with the Tiru-clan bastards they’d been following across the desert until they arrived in the hippodrome itself. The men were walking, beaten, exhausted. One was limping. They looked at Hanishu and Harrdun’s entrance with frank terror.

Like young antelope, Hanishu and Harrdun had found sudden energy. They’d closed the gap. They’d passed the men, laughing as they headed into the final lap.

They were going to win.
Win!

Forty thousand people were on their feet, shouting, cheering. And then the young men passed the Tiru section. Their tribal rivals had been aghast, in denial on the first lap.

This time, they were furious. They began pelting the boys with stones, crockery, coins, anything they could throw.

Ironfist had given Hanishu the inside, intending to make the last lap a friendly rivalry, to see if he could pass him in the final stretch. But that put Hanishu closest to them, so he caught the brunt of the Tirus’ fury. A cup hit him in the knee, midstride, and then a gruel bowl smashed over his ear.

Hanishu had gone down, nearly unconscious.

“Come on, brother,” Ironfist said aloud now, his worlds blurring together. “Everything we’ve done up to now has been for this. No surrender, or it’s all for nothing.”

Using his good hand while keeping his other arm clamped tight to his side to try to slow the blood loss, Ironfist pushed off the ground. He swayed, faint, and reached out. He braced himself on the boathouse to keep from falling, a sudden wave of vertigo cresting over him.

After he steadied himself and the dizziness passed, he opened his eyes.

He was a good ten paces from the boathouse. There was nothing to steady himself on.

Hanishu had stood, staggered, and fell again as the Tiru runners came back into view around the corner behind them, catching up.

Harrdun pulled him to his feet and braced him with an arm, and tried to pull him to a jog.

But his younger brother’s knee gave out after the first step. He fell again, pulling Harrdun down with him.

Hanishu had started weeping. ‘I can’t. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.’

“Don’t you make me carry you,” Ironfist said aloud now.

Two more teams had just entered the stadium. There was a near riot in the stands where other fans were attacking the Tiru for their stone-throwing.

With trembling arms and trembling legs, he’d picked up his little brother. Hanishu clung to him fiercely, trying to distribute his weight, trying to help, even as he’d doomed them.

Ironfist had jogged a few steps, but he couldn’t keep it up, not after all the leagues they’d run. He slowed to a walk, and then it was all he could do to stagger forward one slow step at a time.

And then the hippodrome erupted in cheers and also shouts of outrage as the Tiru team crossed the finish line to win, and the brothers were both weeping.

And then another team passed them. And another. And Hanishu broke down as his big brother carried him. ‘I failed you. I failed you.’

God
damn
this whole world to fire. Those were the very words Hanishu said again last year as he’d lain dying in Ironfist’s arms. As if the failure were his.

The last hundred paces were agony. Someone offered to help, but Ironfist hadn’t even been able to see them. There was only the finish line, and his brokenness and his rage and a tenacious love for his brother that said,
I will not quit
.

“We don’t quit, brother. We don’t quit,” he’d said then and said now.

The last forty paces were a blur of unvariegated pain. The acid in his muscles, the roar of the crowd—helpful or hostile, he couldn’t tell—building to a crescendo, and the burning of the sun. He wept—ashamed as a boy is foolishly ashamed of tears—and none judged him. He wept, and those walking behind him, a throng swollen to hundreds, perhaps thousands, wept with him.

They finished fourth, collapsing across the line, and that placement only because the fifth-and sixth-place clan teams had seen what happened and slowed to a walk behind them, and refused to let anyone else pass them.

They fell—and were instantly lifted on shoulders and paraded through another lap, the actual victors forgotten.

Their defeat had garnered more acclaim and support for their clan than any victory would have. Their grit and courage in adversity had not only made them famous, but had guaranteed their Tlanu-clan ascendancy.

Mother had been assassinated soon thereafter. And once a rival to his big brother, bitter at his constant defeats, Hanishu had changed utterly. He’d suddenly worshipped Harrdun, taking his few victories over his big brother with quiet joy and his own defeats with equanimity.

The two had become best friends.

And it had all been for evil.

If Ironfist hadn’t decided on a whim to join that race and forced his little brother to be his partner, if Ironfist hadn’t carried his little brother that one lap, Hanishu wouldn’t have come to the Chromeria to join his big brother. He’d still be alive.

Ironfist slogged now to the rear dock and the hidden door in the little boathouse that disappeared into the secret bowels of the Chromeria. It was right where his last Order contact had said.

Even the Old Man needed people to do the actual digging, and even the Old Man had recruitment problems—if you simply kill your workers every time they dig a tunnel for you, you run out of workers.

He ducked his head to enter yet another tight, loathsome place. He was fully in the darkness before he realized that this time, he didn’t need to worry about anyone seeing a light. His thinking was coagulating like the blood matting his tunic.

Cracking open a mag torch, he was blinded by the glow—too stupid in his present state to look away.

The path forked and he took the higher way. Soon he caught sight of a blue arc off to one side of the path. Like a tangent line, this path had been cut through the rock to intersect with a blue sphere at only one point. The path was above the luminous sphere, looking diagonally down on its contents.

Ironfist braced himself on the rock and looked down. 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.

The pieces tumbled around Ironfist’s besieged brain like the individual colored tiles of a mosaic refusing to coalesce into an image: Gavin, in the first year after the False Prism’s War, once asking, ‘Ironfist, your family were priests long ago, right? Do you know what happens when the djinn die?’

It had been an odd question, but Gavin had been an odd young man.

Gavin wasn’t in there, and Ironfist was dying. He had to move on before his time ran out.

He pushed off the wall and kept walking, leaning heavily on the wall.

Ironfist had known nothing special to tell the Prism, no family secrets. But he’d delved into the subject for some months before finally abandoning it as nothing more than the Prism’s whim.

That piece, and Gavin’s fierce insistence that he hunt wights alone—though not always alone. Sometimes he’d fought the Blackguard most to fight alone when the wight was the most powerful, and let others come to help him when one seemed least dangerous.

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.

Not here either, go on.

The djinn were the old gods. To the pagans, they were immortal gods, spirits who sometimes partnered with favored humans—high priests or heroes—and might extend a human’s life indefinitely. The Old Parians had believed the djinn were malignant, that they waited until the hour of death so they could take possession of a body, a host that was always a drafter, in whose body they might then walk the earth. Sometimes they waited for old age; other times they prompted young heroes and heroines to an early death through heroism or suicide. Thus, with their stolen bodies, these spirits might experience physical life—sex and food and time and human relationships, parenthood, even the feel of the wind across one’s face—treasured novelties for the otherwise incorporeal.

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.

No Gavin.

Weakening further still, Ironfist moved on. Hallucinations. These must be the hallucinations of trauma and fear of impending death.

After all the study Ironfist had done, Gavin had never inquired about the djinn again. Ironfist had dismissed it as the young Prism’s capricious, capacious intellect shining its light every which way, even into dead histories.

As for Gavin’s question, everyone supposed that the djinn simply slipped back into a spirit form when their host finally died, for even their magic couldn’t keep a human body alive forever.

And that was the final piece of the mosaic.

That was why Gavin had hunted alone on those times. He was hunting the contemporary equivalent of high priests, the men and women who might be hosting immortals. He hadn’t been hunting men; he’d been hunting
gods
. With each successful hunt, Gavin had brought a host and djinn here. Somehow he’d figured out how to bind the spirit of the immortals within this prison. Maybe he’d even made the prison itself.

But now Gavin wasn’t in the orange, and there was no obvious escape route from this one. The orange thing sat, quiet, just a little orange man, not scary, not fascinating, just pathetic. Just longing to be free.

An altogether understandable wish, and why shouldn’t he be free? Ironfist wondered if there wasn’t some way he could help the poor—

It’s a hex.
Many, many hexes together, Ironfist saw now, swimming under the surface of the thing’s orange skin.

He blinked and looked away. He didn’t dare look again.

But he buckled at the next step, and he wouldn’t have been able to stand if he hadn’t been helped.

He took up the mag torch again. “Tore open my wound pretty good,” he said to—

To whom? He looked around him.

Who’d helped him up just now?

And what had kept him from falling outside, when he’d been ten paces from the boathouse?

Most mortals can’t see them. You only can because you’re so close to death, where the veil thins between your world and reality. This next part is going to be hard for you.

The voice seemed so familiar, but Ironfist couldn’t place it.

Ironfist pushed along the corridor. Past the red immortal—Dagnu, he realized now—who was in the form of a man yet looked like a thousand tiny embers catching flame, descending as ash, and catching flame and climbing again. It turned and glared fire at him as he staggered past.

Gavin wasn’t in there.

Gavin wasn’t in the superviolet cell that hurt the eyes.

Gavin wasn’t in the sub-red inferno, where a face of flame floated.

Gavin wasn’t in the black cell, where Ironfist couldn’t see any creature, but could feel a malignant presence watching him back.

“I can save you,” a quiet, calm, reasonable voice from that cell said. “
He
cannot. I can heal you. What use are you in this condition? Do not believe what the liars have told you. You know they’re liars, do you not? They weaken the strong, and you, you could be very, very strong indeed. With my help.”

But Ironfist had been around men and women more persuasive than himself for his entire life. Simplicity was the cloak that fit him.

Every time he tried subtlety and lies, it turned to blood.

Like today.

Oh, Cruxer. Orholam forgive me.

He stepped away.

Touch this.

Under his fingers he found hellstone, and he pressed it hard, making sure he was drafting nothing, making sure the magic of the old gods didn’t cling to him.

How did he know to do that?

But then, within sight of the exit, he suddenly grew faint as the realization finally crested over him like a tsunami wave. He was leaving. He’d searched all the prisons.

Gavin Guile
had
been here. He had—unbelievably, horribly, unthinkably—been imprisoned with these things.

But Gavin was here no longer. Which meant . . .

It meant Ironfist had murdered Cruxer for nothing.

He fell to the cold stones of the tunnel. His mag torch finally sputtered out, leaving him in darkness.

It was all for nothing. He’d come too late. He’d faltered on the last lap. If Gavin wasn’t here, and no one had heard of him since he’d left, that meant he was dead.

Ironfist had failed. He had tried to compete in subtlety with the Orea Pullawrs and the Andross Guiles and the Amalu Anazâr Tlanus of the world, and he’d failed.

He sank down, down. He could go on no longer.

God, he cried out, damn me! Give me what I deserve! Let me die. I’m finished. No more. No more.

You’re not dying today, brother. I won’t let you. We’re not going to quit. Not today.

What? Ironfist thought.

Something was glowing in the darkness.

“Don’t you make me carry you,” Tremblefist said.

It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Ironfist knew that. He was dying, and his mind was playing tricks. Torturing him or comforting him. It wasn’t reliable, that was all that mattered.

He lay down.

“You are the most loyal man I know,” Tremblefist said. “I
know
you, brother.”