The Burning White (119 page)

“Oh,” Kip said. “I was actually wondering what the word ‘bathetic’ means.”

“Haven’t Viewed my card yet, have you?” Andross asked.

“There’s a war on,” Kip said. “Did you not notice?”

“We have so many things in common, you and I,” Andross said.

“Some,” Kip admitted. Not many.

“Both outsiders, both drawn inexorably to the center of all things, both overlooked, both with a tenacity to outlast stones and shatter cities. We approach life with hearts broken but heads unbowed. We both are surrounded by the mighty. We were both great from our youth: I recognized as a young man with a destiny, you . . . well, that other meaning of ‘great.’ Depending on how you parse such things, one might say one or the other of us has brought down gods. Only you have killed a king, but if today goes well, I’ll add kings to my list, too.”

“Both wasting our time on a beach?” Kip offered.

“Odd. Flippancy is a trait of the fearful, not of those who inspire fear.”

“Do I look fearful to you?”

After a moment, Andross said, “No.”

“Then can we move this along? I saw the sign you told me to look for. I have places to be.”

“No, you have one place to be. This place.”

“Sir?” a young Blackguard interrupted. “Pardon me, High Lord Promachos. It’s the Prism, sir. Er, Prism-elect?”

“Yes?” Andross said, irritated.

“Commander Fisk wanted me to tell you . . . He’s, um, the Prismelect that is—He’s sort of gone crazy, sir? Not like battle exhausted or catatonic, sir. He’s using the mirrors to burn people, apparently on purpose. He’s laughing. Our people, sir. The bane are almost to the shore, but he’s mostly ignoring them. Said it’s like ants under a glass.”

Andross sighed heavily. “Well, that’s inconvenient, if not a total surprise. Kip, remind me the next time you louse something up that you aren’t half as bad as your brother.”

“He’s only my half brother, so there you have it,” Kip said. “What were you hoping he’d do?”

“Oh, exactly what he’s doing, but half competently. He was supposed to get angry you’d been favored and get on the mirror array to defend the islands until he burned himself out, broke the halo, and needed to be put down by the Blackguard.”

“What?” Kip asked.

“He was supposed to ‘ascend to the heights and fail’—thus clearing the path for you to . . . be what we said. Young man,” Andross said to the Blackguard, “tell Commander Fisk this falls under the Fourth Oath. You’ll find him stationed with our young Prism.”

“The Fourth Oath, sir, yes, my lord.” But the young man had a panicked look on his face, like he was failing a sudden quiz.

Andross sighed again. “In the last extremity, your duty to protect the Prism is replaced by your duty to protect the Seven Satrapies
from
the Prism. This, you damned fool,
is
the last extremity.”

“Oh! Yessir!” the Blackguard said.

Then he ran.

Kip turned to follow him.

“Hold,” Andross said. “The bane will come ashore in mere minutes. I’ve lookouts posted to let me know the moment it happens.” He pointed up to the orange tower where a man with a hand mirror stood waiting on a side balcony of a tower above them, ready to relay the signal.

“I don’t understand,” Kip said. “What does it matter?”

“For one reason—that you can look at two different ways. There was a lost prophecy hidden in a forbidden scroll at the Great Library in Azûlay. I recovered it at . . . great cost to our family, not least yourself. It said the Seven Satrapies would be plunged into a thousand years of night if the Lightbringer didn’t stand on the shores of the Jaspers when the bane made landfall—as in literally where the water touches land. So one way of looking at that is this: if you’re not standing on the shore when the bane land, you can’t be the Lightbringer. The other way is that if you
are
the Lightbringer, you’d damned well better be standing on the shore, or it’ll mean a thousand years of night for all of us.

“Either way, Kip . . . when history calls your name, you raise your damn hand.”

“Are you telling me
that’s
why you’ve been standing down here holding your dick while you could have been stopping Zymun?” Kip demanded. “Because of some idiotic prophecy?”

“He’ll be stopped soon, regardless,” Andross said. “A bet thirty-eight years in the making is about to be decided. The last card flipped. I’m not about to walk away from the table now. Zymun’s nothing. He’s got no money, no connections, certainly no friends. And very little time left. ”

Kip said, “No money? It doesn’t matter who has the
money
; it only matters who has the
guns
!”

“You’re missing the forest for the trees.”

“One of those trees is on fire!”

“Kip. This is your last chance. Two minutes. Maybe five. If you’re the Lightbringer, you’ve got to be
here
. If you leave, I
will
take the mantle of that office from you. Someone must save this empire, and if you won’t, I will.”

“By standing here?” Kip said, “All this time. Everything you’ve seen and heard of me, and you still don’t know me at all, do you? I don’t care about being the Lightbringer. I—”

“Yes, you do. There’s a time to lie about the scope of one’s ambitions. I should know. I’ve done it for all my life. But that time is past.”

Zymun was killing people. The bane were landing, and Kip wasn’t helping the defense. But Kip felt that old surge of longing, to matter, to matter so much that no one could ever deny it, no one could underestimate or minimize or ignore him ever again. To have the respect he’d won from a few people be in
everyone’s
eyes.

At the cost of a few extra dead defenders, people who would never know that Kip could have saved them but didn’t. Here’s all you could ever want, and the price for it will be paid by someone else.

“I do want it. But I want to save my friends more. To hell with your prophecies. The Lightbringer can’t be the one who stands around waiting for the light. He’s the one who brings it.”

“Kip! Grandson,” Andross said to his back, and his voiced seemed almost kind. “If you want to survive up there on the array, don’t draft. You’re no Prism. The power will break your halos in moments. It’ll burn you out. You break our enemies with your
will
. Earn your name, Breaker.”

Kip glanced back at him over his shoulder, eyebrows drawn down. “As much as you don’t know me, grandfather . . . maybe I don’t know you, either. Farewell, sir.”

* * *

Andross watched as Kip ran back inside.

Very little of the fat boy he’d once been clung to the man Kip had become, except his compassion, his loyalty. Andross liked that about him.

Too bad. His leaving early surely meant that he, too, would ascend the heights and fail.

Light flashed across Andross’s face and he looked up to the signalman with the hand mirror high on the side of the orange towers:
The bane have made landfall.
That signalman was merely passing along a message from another spotter. It would have taken several moments at each station to confirm the message and then pass it along. Kip
might
have still been standing on the shoreline at the moment the bane landed.

Inconclusive. How annoying.

But, after all, Kip was still only the backup plan. Andross sent a man on ahead to order his supper sent to his stateroom. It was going to be a long day, and he’d need his strength. He’d take a bite to eat and await Kip’s failure before heading up to the mirrors himself.

“I thought You’d beat me,” Andross said aloud, slowly turning a bitter gaze to the heavens. “But perhaps I may yet snatch the victory from Your greedy hands.”

A thunderous waterfall blasted Dazen off his feet. He tumbled and rolled across bright marble, coming to rest with his head in his arms, bruised and battered and dazed, eyes stinging from the force of the blast.

But he wasn’t
wet
.

And as far as he could tell, he wasn’t
dead
, either.

He moved to push himself up off the ground and saw his arms. Both had gone fully invisible, except for those black thorns within them. He sat up to his knees and saw his dream made flesh: the black thorns were everywhere twined through his transparent flesh, everywhere weakening him, wrapped around his heart, infiltrating it in such fine threads it turned the sadly palpitating, pitiful pink organ gray.

He didn’t dare look at the mirror. His whole body was a playground of jagged dark thorns, and he didn’t want to see it, didn’t know if he could handle loathing himself more.

Okay, he thought. Maybe I’m dead after all. This
could
be hell. A very tricky introduction to it, what with the bloodfall and the bright colors, but—

The
colors
. They struck him all at once. God
damn
.

Dazen stood and took in the world. The stone at his feet was white marble, here. So too was everything changed, better. This was like a bright reflection of the real world.

No, that was exactly backward, he thought;
this
was the real world, and he’d lived in the dim reflection of it for his entire life.

The mirror stood just as tall here as it did atop the tower in his world, but the cataract here poured pure water. It flowed clear and bright and everywhere it brought life. Instead of howling, the wind soughed sweetly.

The tower itself was shaped somewhat differently, but Dazen lost all track of his thoughts as he saw the sunset.

His heart swelled within its black-barbed cage as he beheld the polychromatic miracle of a sunset once again. Here, with the sun just down, every hue wielded the weight of glory.

A long moment passed before he remembered to breathe.

For the first time he could remember since he was a boy, his mind went quiet. He turned from wonder to wonder, to see the winking stars brighten in their realms, to see the million gradations of color from the blackness of the night yielding to ruddy vitality on the horizon. The cosmos stretched luxuriant above him, around him, embracing him.

He could stay here forever, watching wonders unfold like the petals of a flower opening and opening anew. But then he felt his skin tingling. Reluctantly, he looked at himself again. Frowned.

A droplet of the bright water standing suspended on his invisible arm suddenly soaked into the skin, like rain into thirsty soil—and his skin blossomed from invisibility into visibility. Everywhere he’d been immersed—so, everywhere—Dazen saw his skin not so much reappear as seem to grow anew at the touch of the water. He held up his left hand, which was tingling sharply, and saw his pinky and ring fingers grow afresh from the hacked-off stubs the Nuqaba had left him with. He tapped the whole, perfect digits with his thumb, bewildered. There was
feeling
in them.

He dropped his hand to his side, though, and felt a flash of rage.

This wasn’t real. This could only be some new kind of torture. It was a trap, right?

And now he looked around intently, as he should have from the very first moment, for his Enemy.

But he could see no one else. He circled the tower peak slowly, to see if anyone hid behind the mirror.

The tower itself looked slightly odd, so once Dazen had assured himself that he was alone, he went to one edge. The tower itself wasn’t
black
as it was on his side of the mirror. Here it was lambent white, all the way up.

On a whim, Gavin went to the side where he’d left the old prophet below him.

Of course he wasn’t there.

“Orholam isn’t here, either,” Gavin said.

He suddenly barked a sad laugh. Orholam isn’t here.

There’s nothing here.

It’s beautiful . . . and there’s nothing for me here.

I came all this way, and now I’ve lost everything, and there’s nothing here.

Every effort had been wasted. Deluded.

Then he felt something tingling deep within him. He knew instantly what it was. It was as if a flame had touched an old black wick. He looked up to where the sky was still blue—and drafted blue luxin into his palm. Then he did the same with red. And with every color in turn.

His gift had been restored.

But only to torture him.

He sighed out all his hope. He released the colors from limp hands and groaned.

Maybe he should climb down the tower. Maybe he should try to live here, in this better world, where he was whole. Maybe there were versions here of all the people he had known . . . though that didn’t make sense. Sevastian and the old prophet were gone.

No. There was nothing for him here. It was perfect, and he was not. No matter that his skin had regrown, he could still feel those black thorns inside his body, sapping his strength, rending his flesh anew with every movement, no matter that here he healed immediately.

He’d made it here. Alive. He’d invaded Orholam’s own realm. But he didn’t belong here.

He looked at the great waterfall. He knew that when he went through it again, back to his world, he’d lose his fingers and his powers and even his color vision. Again.

He’d thought he might die, invading this realm, and instead he’d found life. Now, going back, he would find his drab life, adorned only with all the encroachments of death.

The black eye throbbed. It felt like it had been loosened in his skull by the cascading water, and now it ached. Gavin rubbed around it, carefully. He couldn’t bear to touch the damned thing here.

He took one last look around, locking the colors in the vault of his memory, and then before he could lose his courage, he took one last deep breath of air, so pure it made his lungs ache with goodness, and ducked quickly back through the waterfall—

—emerging soaked in blood.

He was disgusted, angry, full of contempt for the meanness, the stench, the sticky grotesquerie of all this world. It could be all he had just seen, and was relentlessly not.

Beauty is possible, but we choose ugliness.

He scraped the streaming, steaming, sticky blood from his face, and eyes, using his hand as a strigil to scrape away all the accusatory gore. His two fingers were gone again, as he knew they would be. Dogtooth gone. His sight once again black, white, and red.