The Burning White (77 page)

“Yeah, I will.”

“It also seems to me that if you tossed the sword aside instead, you might be able to carry a couple of those stones. But what do I know?”

Somehow, Gavin hadn’t even thought of the sword. He’d grown accustomed to the makeshift scabbard banging against him with every step.

“The sword’s like my testicles, friend,” Gavin said.

“Not the genitalia one usually hears a sword compared to.”

“It can get in my way. It’s a weak spot, but not one I’m willing to part with. Losing the sword is not an option.”

So long as he had the sword, perhaps he could compel Orholam to give him a boon. Or kill Him, as Grinwoody demanded. But Gavin would do what it took. Whatever it took.

But he hadn’t turned away from the gap as he spoke. He cracked open his left eye—the crystalline black eye—and he saw his trajectories. A hundred different attempts played out in front of him: he jumped too early; he stumbled on the last step; he tried to run along the wall for a few steps and then leap.

Again and again, he fell short, his body slamming into the wall on the other side, rebounding off the stones and into the abyss. There was no case even where he just barely grabbed the edge and then clambered up. Going from a full sprint to a full stop by colliding with a stone wall didn’t leave a human grabbing much of anything.

Odd that the eye didn’t account for the wind, he thought. Too irregular, perhaps. But it gusted fitfully up and across the gap, sometimes with startling force. It would certainly confound attempts at a wall run: a wrong gust would blast his feet from any step, and any lost step would mean a fall.

“Burn in hell, Orholam,” Gavin said. He tossed the last boon stone aside.

“Why do you cling so tightly?” Orholam asked.

Now he looked again. The cold rationality of the black jewel showed him it was still too far. Just barely too far, but too far.

Tight, ill-fitting, pulling at his legs with every stride, the pilgrim’s clothes had only been good for their pockets. Gavin stripped them off.

“Unique approach,” Orholam said. “It may make for some real discomfort as you shoot down the, um, chute.”

“I don’t intend to fall,” Gavin said.

“No one
intends
to fall,” Orholam said. “Well. Except me. I intend to fall. So not really fall, I guess. Jump.”

Still
too far on all but the luckiest jump.

Gavin tore his pilgrim’s clothes into strips, cutting them with the edge of the Blinding Knife where necessary. He bound the pieces together into a makeshift rope and then tied it around the hilt. He checked and double-checked his knots.

Then, before he went through with his stupid plan, he walked to the edge of the precipice again, set the sword at his feet, and looked at the jump through the cold eye of death.

Sure enough, he could still louse this up. But if he didn’t carry the sword, more than half the time, he would clear the gap.

Those were the best odds he’d faced in years.

“Are you going to try what I think you’re going to try?” Orholam asked.

“If you think it’s a stupid idea, I agree with you,” Gavin said. “So shut up.”

He checked the rope yet again. No way was he going to come this far and then drop the Blinding Knife out into the abyss because he was careless.

The top of the tower was only a single level above him now: one gap and a single corkscrew turn of the stairs. With his hand protruding into empty air, he could spin the sword on the rope like a sling and toss
it
up onto the roof.

It took him half a dozen tries to get the sword to land above him, on the crown of the tower, and stick . . . up there somewhere. He had no idea what it looked like up there, so he had no idea if this could work.

His plan
had
been to throw the blade up there, jump the gap, and then run up to the roof to grab it again before Orholam Himself—or the magic nexus, or
whatever
—noticed.

But the sword stuck, and when he tugged on the rope and it stayed stuck, he couldn’t help but hope that maybe
one
test in his life would turn out to be easier than he’d guessed. Maybe it was well and truly stuck. Maybe it could hold his weight. Maybe he could use the rope to swing across the gap. Maybe he could just climb the rope to the tower roof instead of risking his life on the jump.

He pulled harder.

The sword pulled free and flipped, speeding straight at his open-mouthed face.

He dodged out of the way at the last instant—and then nearly lost the rope and sword both from his nerveless fingers as the sword continued its fall.

“Throwing a sharp sword into the sky and then tugging it at your face?” Orholam said. “Not the smartest thing I’ve seen you do.”

“Probably not the dumbest either,” Gavin said. He started spinning the sword again.

“Hard to say. Lotta contenders.”

Gavin shook his head. “I’m kind of going to miss you, old man.”

“Only ‘kind of’?”

“Only kind of.”

It took Gavin another ten tries to get the blade to stay up there again. He pulled on it, and it slid easily off, almost striking him as it fell again.

Telling himself that it was better to take a few hours now than to take a year to make the climb again, he threw the sword back up onto the top of the tower dozens of times more. It never stuck fast enough for him to be able to put his own weight on it and simply climb. The roof must have no convenient ledges, and the sword was certainly no grapnel.

This was one test Gavin couldn’t completely break by cheating: he wouldn’t be climbing a rope to the top.

He’d have to jump the gap.

But at least he could do it without trying to hold a sword in his hand.

After one last good throw, where the sword seemed to land deeper and thus more safely than most of his tosses, Gavin said, “If I hand you this rope, will you promise just to hold on to it until I get up there and can take it back?”

“You’re trying to pull a fast one on the Creator Himself,” Orholam said. “You think I’m gonna help you with that?”

“I thought maybe you’d just hold a fucking rope,” Gavin said. He spat at Orholam’s feet.

Gavin spooled out the rope in his hand gingerly so as not to drop even the rope’s own small weight onto the blade balanced above. He released the rope slowly, hand hovering in case it dropped suddenly.

But it stayed.

“What is that sword to you, Guile?” Orholam asked.

“It’s my hope,” Gavin said. “Be a pal and don’t throw it into the abyss, would ya?”

“Guile.” Orholam shook his head, reproving. “You know better. If it falls, it will be from your ineptitude, not my intervention. Orholam lets men choose; how could I do otherwise?”

Gavin took a deep breath. No point in delay. Delay would only give the winds time to nudge the blade toward the edge. Besides, he knew exactly where to place his feet to take the correct number of steps, and which type of jump was most likely to carry him across the chasm.

“Goodbye, old man,” he said. “May we never see each other again.”

“I think that unlikely,” Orholam said. “But go now. Go find your answers, if you dare.”

Gavin wiped the soles of his feet clean, rubbed his hands together, and breathed, breathed. He said, “A lack of daring has never been my problem.”

Then he sprinted toward the gap.

And he leapt.

And he, Gavin Guile, who had fallen so far, only to climb so high; Gavin Guile the indomitable, the dauntless; Gavin Down but Never Defeated; Gavin Guile soared through the air as the winds plucked at him and tried to turn him from his purpose—and he landed safely on the other side, rolling once and then coming to his feet.

He stood and whooped, recklessly baring his teeth at the gate so few had even seen.

It was simple gold, adorned in a spare Ptarsu style, latched but not locked. There were no boon stones here for having made the jump. Perhaps finishing the pilgrimage was supposed to be reward enough. Orholam lay beyond, supposedly.

Gavin pulled the gate open.

A membrane hovered in the air between him and the last stair: the lock to which Grinwoody had claimed only Gavin himself could be the key. The test only Gavin himself could pass.

Without hesitating, Gavin pushed into it. It bubbled and clung and gripped, seeming to catch on the fragments of his dead power like splinters catching on a wool tunic, but he pushed through, and soon stood gasping on the other side.

Then, grinning his fierce broken-toothed grin, victorious, he sprinted up the stairs two at a time to his destiny. Or his doom. Whichever.

~Andross the Red~

18 years ago. (Age 48.)

Felia says, “The grammar here can be parsed half a dozen ways, as usual with the Scriptivist’s prophecies, and that’s without what was redacted. Worse, I’ve seen translations of it before. ‘Breaking a great rock, the black fires of hell, on earth once more unleashed / did unleash / shall unleash / unleashes the . . .’ ”

“Does it help us?”

“I would have said no, if I’d known what it would cost us for you to get it from that girl . . .” And suddenly, she is blinking back tears. Her jaw is tight and she looks away. But then she is suddenly fierce. “Tell me. You never told me. Three weeks you were on a ship, coming home, and I can’t stop smelling you, as if her scent would linger so long.”

What is this? “You gave me permission. Explicitly.”

“I didn’t know it would feel like this!”

Felia is better than this. Next she’ll be asking for information she doesn’t want to know.

She hits my chest with an overhand blow that must hurt her more than it hurts me. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, Andy! Don’t you dare!”

I go flat, a calm to her storm. I drop the paper on the table. I wave a hand to the slaves attending us in the open garden to begone, and a look to Grinwoody to let him know to tell them that if the others eavesdrop, they’ll be beaten and sold to the galleys or the mines. Then I turn my attention back to my love.

“Ask what you will,” I say. “But ask only what you want answered.”

“Did you fuck her?”

“Yes,” I answer immediately. I had thought that was implicit.

She swallows. “Damn you.” She takes a few breaths, but I can’t read whether she’s regained herself. On her head be it. She will get only the truth of me, as I have sworn.

“Did you have to?”

“That was our deal,” I say.

“I know what our deal was. I’m asking you to say it.”

“I deemed it the best course.”

“And how hard was it to convince you, Andy? I know you had many lovers before our marriage. Are you bored with me? I know that since Sevastian died I’ve not been the eager lover I once—”

“Stop! This had nothing to do with you, or that.” I take a breath. There were deeper wells of suffering here than I was aware of. But her anger triggers something at my core, burning and furious.

I beat down the flames. As I so often do.

“Flirtation wasn’t enough,” I say. “I gently floated bribery, but her family is wealthy and she loved her position at the library. There was nothing I could give her. And she was so young and innocent, there was nothing to use as blackmail. I didn’t have the time to hire agents to put pressures on those she loved, or the security that I could do so without her simply reporting it. So I seduced her.”

“Did you enjoy it?” she practically spits.

I go cold. “It had been more than a month since I last shared your bed, and that had been a perfunctory goodbye, not the desperate lovemaking of a woman likely to be driven mad by jealousy, my dear. Yes, I enjoyed the release.”

“ ‘
Release,
’ ” she says. I used the word to imply that the sex had been a mere physical process, but somehow she turns it into an indictment of our whole marriage. As if I want to be released from her. From my vows.

But I’ve already said more than I would’ve, were I fully in control. “Anything else?” I growl.

“Did she enjoy it? How was it? For her. For you.” Felia has retreated into cold bitch.

I take a deep breath, and then another, until the red recedes, until I can see her with compassion again. My Felia. She has been so alone, and everything she loves has been threatened. First Sevastian taken. Then Gavin’s growing distance. Now this thing we must do with Dazen. And now me.

Felia is afraid she’ll lose me, too.

“Did I give her the first orgasms of her life? Did I turn her into a wanton who craved my cock like the desert-parched crave water? Did she wake me in the morning with her mouth hot on me? Did she beg me for acts that you’ve avoided since soon after we wed? Did she pursue me as you have not in years? Is that what you want to ask? Why don’t you ask this question, instead, and ask it of yourself: in the pursuit of my goals, was I ever a man to take half measures?”

“Never,” she breathes, unblinking, but her hands have gone to her stomach, like a man with a gut wound in war, wanting to know how bad it is, needing to know, but not daring to find out.

“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know? Did I hold her afterward? Did I let her sleep with her head on my shoulder in your place?” All the questions slip from my grasp like hounds eager for the hunt. I can’t bear for her to be dishonest in this. Felia doesn’t care about the mechanics of the thing, where we’d fornicated or how many times I’d brought the girl to the storms and the rain. She wants to know if she can be
replaced
.

The love of my life is fierce, and she is bleeding, and that’s my fault as much as it is Orholam’s and Orea’s and Ulbear’s.

“Fee,” I say gently. “Let there be no darkness between us. Having decided the bed was the only battlefield by which I could seize our prize, you’re damn right I didn’t tiptoe over those marriage oaths you released me from. Doing that could have meant I did it all for nothing. Do you want to hear how I alternated between mumming the masterful, attentive lover such as she’ll never know again in her life and the guilt-wrenched husband who needed to go back to his wife and children, just so that she was ever desperate for me and ever fearful to lose me? Do you want to know every step by which I isolated her from her family and friends so that when it came time to betray them and her duties, she was happy to do it, if only it meant I would stay for another few weeks? And how when she gave me the scrolls, I left that very night, with no explanation at all, doubtless destroying her—because my heart ached for you? You think that one awkward, arrhythmic virgin could displace
you
? You think she could be your equal in the bedchamber or—”