The Burning White (133 page)

“What’s at Orholam’s Glare?” Karris asked, hardly able to absorb all the bad news. Then she noticed the Thousand Stars. All of the city’s mirrors were pointed exactly where they would be for an execution.

What?!

“Have you not seen the great wings of fire?” one of the other messengers asked, turning to point.

But just then, an incredible beam of incandescent white light leapt from somewhere on Big Jasper’s north shore up to the Great Mirrors (Orholam’s Glare?) and out to the east. The beam was the width of a man’s spread arms, with a mass, a weight, to it. It was whiter than white, like mother-of-pearl and ivory lit from within.

Karris had seen something like this, just once, at Garriston—and that, drafted by Gavin himself, was but a candle to this inferno. She had no question now what it was: white luxin.

But no one could draft that much.

No one could draft that much—and live.

And then it stopped.

Who could possibly draft so . . . ?

Oh, God.

* * *

“So it’s too late,” Dazen said as the sun set and the darkness gathered. Orholam had just told him of the battle being waged and lost beyond the horizon. Of Kip strapped in, being executed. Of Karris being hunted by her own merciless brother.

Here, in Orholam’s own presence, it was perhaps impossible to feel fully hopeless, but Dazen felt an emptiness vast as the space between him and those he wished he could rush in to save. It’s what he would have done, before.

Now he was a shell of that man. Clean, perhaps now. But broken. Useless. The consequences of his choices lying before his eyes.

“Too late?” Orholam asked. “What do I look like? A broken-down old oar-puller?”

“Please don’t try to cheer me up.”

“You’ll need this later,” Orholam said. He stepped away from the gun-sword He’d been leaning on. Somehow, its tip had sunk deep into the marble of the black roof they stood on.

“ ‘Later’?! Is that a joke? There
is
no later! The sun’s down!” Kip was dying. Karris was dead, or would be any moment—and there was nothing he could do to save them. Dazen swept his hand out in the direction of the Chromeria as the last light died. “It’s all darkness now! Look!”

Just as Dazen’s hand waved to the dark hopelessness of the dead horizon, a wide beam of white light shot out squarely at him from exactly where the Chromeria must be.

Its brilliance nearly blinded him. It was so intense there was a physical weight to it. It almost knocked him off his feet. Merely standing in its path felt like sucking in a great gasping breath after being submerged in a lake for far too long. It was pure, unsealed white luxin, a torrent, like someone had pumped the crank of a well and hope and courage and life shot forth, one time—then stopped.

And it was gone.

“What was that!?” Dazen breathed.

“That was Kip. Fighting. Dying.” A tear rolled down each of Orholam’s cheeks, but He seemed proud of Kip, even in His sorrow. “That was your answer.”

“To what?”

“The only question.”

“Why?” Dazen asked, weeping.

“Yes. Why all your suffering? Why Alvaro’s? Why Kip’s?” Orholam said.

Dazen wept harder. “It was his cry for help, wasn’t it? I should have been there to save—”

“Stop. You’re not getting it. Kip outgrew his overt self-pity before his father could outgrow his subtler kind. He wanted your help, yes, but not to save his own life. He wanted your help to save those you both love.”

Dazen raised his hands, supplicating, disbelieving. “How can I possibly . . . ?”

Orholam was studying the descending night sky. The moon hadn’t yet risen. “Awfully dark out here,” He said. “Dark enough a drafter of black could find source in the sky, don’t you think? That’s one color you can still draft, isn’t it?”

The consequences of doing that settled around Dazen’s neck like a mantle of iron. Softly he said, “It’ll obliterate me.”

“It will, if you let go of Me,” Orholam agreed.

Dazen looked angrily at him. “I don’t understand what You think I can do from here.”

“I don’t require your understanding.”

“Just my obedience,” Dazen said bitterly. “Got it.”

“And your strength,” Orholam said.

Dazen stood, laboriously, and in the process got his hands thoroughly bloody. He didn’t feel strong. He hadn’t felt strong this morning, before everything this awful day had thrown at him. He followed Orholam to where He’d left the sword as if in a trance.

He didn’t want to die, but now, finally, he was ready. If it was all for this, then so be it.

Orholam extended a hand to him, and Dazen took Orholam’s clean hand in his own bloody, three-fingered one.

“You remember the coordinates?” Orholam asked.

“I never forget anything. You know that. But . . . uh . . . coordinates?”

“Kip gave you the position of the Chromeria. But there’s only one drafter in the world strong enough to throw magic that far.”

Dazen shrugged. “Kip was strong enough.”

“He was.”

Was
. That little word was a punch in the guts.

It pissed Dazen off, and not at Orholam this time.

It sank into the cool ashes of his heart and blew the embers to flame. They’d killed Kip. They’d murdered his son.

He was going to make them pay for that.

He had a sudden thought. “The bane are there?”

Orholam nodded. “Kip and Karris got two. There’s five left.”

“Five on one. That’s hardly fair,” Dazen said.

“Five on one?” Orholam asked, amused. “Not five on two?”

Dazen looked at Him, opened his mouth, shut it. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.” I’ll just do the magic part, and the fighting part. You . . . do Your thing. Whatever that is.

But the time for sniping was finished. Impossible magic, against impossible odds?

That’s what I do.

He breathed out, widening his pupils and gazing toward the darkest part of the sky.

Before, he’d wrestled black luxin to obliterate, to destroy others, and to destroy himself, to rip himself asunder and blot out parts he hated. It had been the sum of all wild beasts, bucking against him like a mustang, whipping its tusks toward his belly like a giant javelina, charging him like an iron bull—and in all the fights, he’d been a brute with a whip, determined to break the beast. Like a cornered, injured animal, the black luxin had been all violence and madness, both against his enemies and against himself.

Now, entering the great beast’s demesne, he extended an open will with his open right hand, offering partnership, not mastery.

And the black came roaring from the night upon him—charging over the horizon and into Dazen’s undefended, wide-open eye. Dazen lay supine, exposing his belly to the snarling maw of the great wolf Death.

Here am I, Death. Let us walk together one last time, and fight each other no more.

The beast paused, snuffling at his bloody open hand, even as the magic filled Dazen’s eyes and made his bones hot within him.

A shiver passed through him, from the crown of his head, down his spine and hands, which burned hot with blood, and to the heated soles of his feet, rooted in the blood that connected skin to tower.

Without the scent of fear inflaming its predator’s nose, but accepted, respected, the great black beast calmed. Then its power entered him.

Even at Sundered Rock, he hadn’t drafted so much. He drew and drew, taking all the dark night into his soul. He drew, lancing those darkened memories for all his own old poison, all the hatred and envy inside him, all the cruelty of taunting victory he’d unleashed before. He connected the darkness above with the old darkness within, though each was punctuated by its celestial lights. He was beyond fear now. How could he be daunted? He could give no more than everything in him, and that was exactly what he planned to do.

He threaded his fingers tight through the beast’s mantle and then with a yell of defiance, Dazen slapped its flank: Take all this, and go! Go!

The black luxin leapt toward the horizon like a war hound on a lead seeing a cat and leaping to the hunt. It nearly tore Dazen’s arm off. He could only nudge it this way and that, directing his fraying will toward the Chromeria.

It took all the excellence of Dazen’s superchromacy to maintain the exact tone. The slightest flaw would mean madness or agonizing death or the obliteration of memory and self or even time.

Even the descending starlight eroded the black as they flew across so many leagues, and Dazen had to cushion every quantum that infected his streaming black, had to split it away from the stream and push more power into it, like a sprinter shrugging off battering rain, forging through buffeting winds—and he lost precious luxin continuously as he did it, a hundred times a second. Dazen could feel the black unraveling in his grasp, like the southern lights dancing across the sky, defying his control.

And as the magic unraveled, it unraveled him. He braided the open cords together again and again, weaving them tight with fingers that felt a million paces away. He himself was dissipating, losing awareness altogether into the cold dark, but he pulled himself back to consciousness again and again.

This was for Karris. This was for Kip. This was for Marissia. This was for mother. This was for Gavin. This was for Sevastian . . .

He couldn’t fail them. He couldn’t fail them
again
.

But then he was there. He couldn’t see the islands, he couldn’t see anything, but he could
feel
the entirety of Big Jasper and Little Jasper both, those shapes he knew and loved so well. He could feel the physical and magical shapes of the bane, each one extending overlapping bubbles of control far beyond themselves. No red drafter could draft red within the red bane’s bubble, nor green in green’s, nor yellow in yellow’s, and so on.

Dazen didn’t have enough time or will or magic or life left to obliterate the bane. They were too far away, too dense, too numerous, too different from one another.

The control he would need to find the seed crystals themselves was far too fine for his skills. Father had always told him he needed to develop his fine-drafting skills, but Dazen had always ignored him, believing more was better: always the hammer, never the tweezers.

There they lay: all the bane, everywhere around the islands, like leeches clinging to the Chromeria’s face. He could pierce those bubbles of drafting control easily with the black, but to find five single figures—these so-called gods?—in the few seconds he had left? To find the bane’s hidden seed crystals?

It would be like trying to pick a lock with a feather duster.

His will, thus overextended, began to fray apart now in hopelessness. The black he’d flung so far dissipated into the amorphous clouds as the magic finally pulled itself away from his fingers.

And then he felt her.

He wouldn’t have thought he could know anyone from this distance, but he couldn’t have missed her, not if she’d been twice so far away. Her will burned in the evaporating cloud he’d thrown, like a lighthouse burning white in the black of a lost captain’s night.

Karris!

* * *

Karris’s Blackguards and all the other soldiers they’d recruited on the spot had made it halfway to Orholam’s Glare when they’d been jumped by the White King’s platoon of assassins. Forty men didn’t seem like they’d be a problem against her hundred and fifty, especially when fifty of them were her Blackguards—who’d appeared from all over the island, escaping from the Chromeria and abandoning Zymun, or the promachos, or the Colors to find and join their Iron White.

Forty
men
wouldn’t have been a problem. Forty
wights
was a huge problem. They were clad head to toe in white, gloved and hooded to hide what colors they drafted. In moments, she was in a fight for her life.

And no fair fight. Every one of the Blackguards except the monochrome blues were feeling it. The bane had tightened their grip. Anyone who had the least luxin left in their bodies had to fight against luxin locking up inside them—and every drafter except the youngest had some luxin permanently in their bodies.

Even those who’d carefully drained their power with hellstone were slowed. The best off fought as if in a high wind. Those worse off fought as if in water, sluggish, their old strength turned against them.

But then she felt
something
. The air turned colder, somehow murky, as if a dry fog had rolled in. The city darkened perceptibly. Night had arrived on sprinting feet instead of its usual gentle wings. But, in the fighting, everyone around her missed it.

She stepped back from the fight, back into the mass of Blackguards here to protect her.

There was something familiar—

She gasped.

Gavin!

She opened her will to him, and she knew. He was dying.

She felt his strength faltering, fraying. Her heart froze.

Live, damn you,
live
! You come back to me!

* * *

But it was too late. He was dying. He was failing her,
again
.

He could feel her weighed down by the bane’s oppressive power. Her light dimmed, her limbs heavy from the very luxin that lived in her, shackled, unable to defend herself from the death he knew was stalking her. He could feel the lock and knew how he might release her from it, but from this distance, it was like feeling the teeth of a key with a fingertip.

No.

No, not while he had breath.

He released all else and clung to her, his lighthouse, the white in the foggy seas of his black.

* * *

Karris was frozen, even amid the clash of arms around her. Gill Greyling, blood splashed across his face, was shouting something at her. ‘
Retreat. We’ve failed. We can’t . . .
’

Mere words.

It was like they didn’t even notice.

Don’t do it, my love. Please, no. Gavin, what are you doing?

There was something fatal and final she could feel in Gavin’s will.

Please, no. Forgive me, my love, but I gave up on you once—don’t you dare do it, too. Don’t you dare!

And then he was gone.

* * *