The Burning White (138 page)

Dazen shook the earth hard, laid a hex foreboding doom, and moved on.

In Paria, near two vast and trunkless legs of stone, the blue mirror lay hidden under the lone and level sands. A brickwork floor opened smoothly on centuries-old hinges, swallowing half a dune effortlessly, and the mirror rose.

In Ruthgar, the green mirror rose from the heart of a butte over the verdant grasslands outside the once-great city of Melos, setting a nearby herd of iron bulls stampeding.

Back to Blood Forest, where for the first time he realized that though the well of white luxin might be limitless, his own endurance was not. He blinked, and wondered how long it had been since he’d blinked last.

The children had scattered. Some still watched from a distance, clinging to a wary young man near Kip’s age as if he were a father to them all. A safe enough distance.

Dazen knew what he was doing now, and he pulled the Great Mirror to its groove. This one was a different design, though, from some other people, some other time, claimed and retrofitted by later conquerors but not made new.

This mirror was connected, communal somehow. It spoke to . . . trees? He felt root speak to root, and his will was drawn from this mirror to others, deeper into the forest, all the way to Dúnbheo and Green Haven and other, smaller mirrors. It wasn’t a luxin-based web, though, so Dazen couldn’t raise all of them directly.

Instead, he turned the first mirror toward them—and they answered! The Great Mirrors of Dúnbheo and Green Haven didn’t even need to be raised; they’d never been hidden in the first place. Some of the smaller mirrors were broken, nodes that lived only in memory, but others had rested shielded within the trunks of great trees. Now coiled roots pushed out, and others, stretched, pulled taut. Working like ligaments and muscles, with no gears anywhere, the tree roots worked together to heave several dozen mirrors across the satrapy into position.

Had this been the work of some empire Dazen had never heard of? Was this the magic of the pygmy peoples?

But there was no time to study the marvel, or even to wonder at it. Dazen felt his body gasping, his own strength stretching him too far.

Back to Ilyta, where some people had scattered, but others had come bearing their muskets and long knives. Bandits, Dazen hoped. But maybe just the sons of bandits, only trying to defend their homes from something that filled others with dread.

Brave men, regardless.

Dazen shook the earth once more. One last wordless warning to people who could die in a war they didn’t even know about.

Some fled, but others stood their ground, shaking their spears as if some monster stomped between their homes. You’ve built your home on the monstrous, you fools. As did we. The cowards who ran would live, while the brave died.

Dazen could wait no longer.

Houses shattered and tore apart, the earth rent, a spire shot into the sky, and then the superviolet mirror slashed through the village. The brave fell and the rubble of their own homes crushed and buried them.

He flashed back to his own body, staggering.

No, not yet. He’d taken seven colors, but there were nine. He sank deep into the mirror to feel for those last two, but found only a single trace: a bane atop Hellmount, far, far to the west, pulsing like the sun, its slopes littered with the burnt bones of the dead who’d tried to approach, to claim it for themselves. But there was no mirror nor lightwell for that great chi bane, nor anywhere else. Nor for paryl. Even the ingenuity of the drafters of old had never subdued those colors.

No wonder the Chromeria had always feared those colors. Light cannot be chained indeed. Not all of it anyway. The mystery always escapes us.

Finished, he came back to his body again.

He felt disconcertingly wonderful, but he knew it was a false strength now. He’d lifted weights with the strength of a thousand men, but his muscles were going to give out on him without warning at any moment.

The whole thing must have taken only a few minutes, because even as he gasped on the sweet night air, he could feel the distant Great Mirrors still finishing turning, still settling their beams onto the Great Mirror behind him.

And then, as more strength came into his hands than perhaps had ever been held by one person, he realized that he was deeply and truly
fucked
.

The Mirror of Waking began to spin. Suspended on nothing at all that he could see, it began to turn into a blur, on several invisible axes. The air filled with its sound, and wind whipped over him.

Dazen felt the lightwells under each of the seven Great Mirrors in their far-spread satrapies slowly uncorking themselves like shaken bottles of bubbly wine. They would blast perfect, pure light in their respective spectra, pulsing in time with each rotation of the Great Mirror behind Dazen. Thus, basically simultaneously, Dazen could direct light from every arc of the Seven Satrapies to any point and to as many points as he wished.

He had under his will as much power to distribute as he could hope.

But no matter how good it felt, he was damn near dead. Drafting white was like sprinting downhill—deceptively effortless, so long as he kept his feet under him. Giving him this much power was like giving that downhill sprinter a hard shove in the back.

He’d done what no other drafter could have done. No other drafter in the world could’ve handled that much magic. No other drafter could’ve reached so far. Other than Kip, no one could’ve lifted so much as a single one of those towers alone.

He’d raised five.

But now? Even if he could handle the light, somehow
feeling
the colors needed despite his color-blindness, even if he could survive more than another few seconds of so much power, the Chromeria was far beyond the horizon. The mirrors themselves could settle into their old grooves to find one another, but it would be impossibly fine work to strike at a single foe on the island or to take the mirror array and use it himself.

Dazen couldn’t strike down wights from here. He’d broken the bane’s control of magic, but he couldn’t fight those floating islands from here, couldn’t unwind their magic and drown the wights in their thousands. Not from here.

He couldn’t save the Chromeria.

He was a runner collapsing on the last lap, begging that someone carry him to the finish line.

Without warning, the colors bubbled forth from their long imprisonment. Dazen didn’t know what else to do but throw them toward the Chromeria. First, they effervesced across the sky, but then he wrestled them back to a tight beam. One last act of white will.

In the now tightening spray of colors, he felt a vortex reaching out, giving him a point to aim for. It was an answering Will, some desperate or brilliant drafter who intuited that now, in the middle of the night, after the wash of black luxin had freed the skies, she or he should mount the Prism’s mirror array.

Maybe there was some hope after all—

Dazen felt the colors sucked in, suddenly. One two threefourfi—all of them!

A full-spectrum polychrome.

A man—yes, it felt like a man—of chthonic strength and titanic will.

Across the immensity of the space between them, their wills meshed like the gears that had raised the Great Mirrors, and without words they knew each other.

Father.

Dazen?

Dazen felt a shock of revulsion ripple through his entire body. The gears ground to a halt.

His father—and since when was Andross a full-spectrum polychrome?—his father wanted him to hand over control of the mirror array.

On the one hand, it was the obvious solution. Andross was there. No one else was. Who else could handle the magic? Who else had the will and concentration and pure fortitude?

But at the same time, it was a horror beyond countenancing.

If he gave his father this power, Andross Guile would be seen rescuing everyone.
He
would be hailed the Lightbringer. If Dazen gave him this, everything Andross had ever done would be excused. Forgiven. No, not even forgiven,
lauded
.

‘Murdering children? That must have been so hard for him!’

‘Yes, yes, but he was wiser than the rest of us. He knew what was necessary to save the world. He did that for us. He was a man of vision. A
great
man, willing to do what was necessary for all the rest of us. A hero.’

Everything in Dazen shouted
No!

Anyone but him!

Tears of rage poured. Dazen felt a cooling reassurance from the old monster, and a repeated demand that Dazen give him control of the array.
Now
. Like that was more important than anything.

You
murderer
! You killed Sevastian! You killed all that was good. We had everything and you killed it all. Don’t you dare say it was for the world. It was for you, your pride! You always had to be the best. You always had to be right. You always had to prove yourself smarter than anyone else! Always, always!

But the distance was vast, and they couldn’t hear each other’s words.

Orholam, please, no! Not this. Not this.

Dazen held all the weight of the empire’s salvation in his hands. He knew to hold on to the magic any longer would kill him, but to give it to that beast was impossible. His fists knotted white.

He felt a presence, and he opened his eyes.

Orholam stood in front of him.

He knew.

As they locked gazes, Orholam’s left eye deepened and morphed, and Dazen saw standing there a throng, silent in their penitents’ garb, but adorned in their Sun Day finest cosmetics and jewels. More than two thousand women and men, each with Dazen’s knife wound over their hearts. His victims from all the Freeings. His peaceful accusers.

Around them stood a vast multitude: the fathers who’d never dreamed their sons would die before them; the husbands so devastated at losing their wives they couldn’t even care for their children; those children, who’d lost their mothers; the orphans who’d had only one parent to begin with; the bereaved spouses hastily and unhappily remarried; the families who held together but always kept an empty seat at every dinner, every feast, and tried to tell themselves that it was all for the best, that this was Orholam’s will, though they could never fully believe it. Because it wasn’t.

They were his victims all. Dazen’s murders had rippled out into the world in a swamping wave greater than he’d even imagined. Not one corner was untouched.

He wept.

He couldn’t look anymore, didn’t dare to keep on seeing the truth of what he’d done—but in tearing his gaze away, he was arrested by another image, this one in Orholam’s right eye. Andross cradling a dying Sevastian, the long blade yet in his hand, blood still leaking from Sevastian’s chest. ‘Did I do well, father? Did I make you proud?’ Sevastian asked.

He died before the weeping Andross could find the will to speak.

Then, a mercy: Orholam’s eyes were merely eyes once more. But there was only truth reflected in both His eyes, and none of it was soft.

Orholam said, “I’ve forgiven your many, many murders. Will you forgive him one?”

Though Gill was one of perhaps half a dozen people who understood what he was seeing, he felt no less awestruck than everyone else he saw turning to the north, their eyes widening, jaws slack.

In the distance, rising into view from the Great Market, though the market itself was hidden by Ebon’s Hill, was a creature from legend. Outlined in fire, a titan emerged as from the earth itself, stretching skyward. It seemed to pluck a barrel from the ether, took it in its fist, and then hurled the thing, flaming, into the ground somewhere in the Blood Robes’ ranks. The flash of light was followed a moment later by the sound of the explosion.

When Corvan Danavis had told them what he planned, he’d said, ‘Should be a last stand to remember.’

And no one watching seemed to notice that the flash also showed the red titan had no body. The outline of fire was all it had—all it was—an outline of burning red luxin stretching high into the darkness of the night, grabbing barrels shot or lofted into the air. The titan moved with astonishing fluidity, and it really did throw the barrels of black powder, but with the benefit of forewarning and distance, Gill could see it for what it was—amazing drafting.

To everyone else, it was as if a great djinn had risen from the earth to intervene in the battle.

But then, just as they emerged into the great avenue running from the Chromeria to the Great Market, getting their clearest view yet, Gill heard the sound of a pistol shot.

His and Big Leo’s were two of the only faces that turned toward the sound. Near the base of Orholam’s Glare, a body fell dead, practically headless.

High Lady Karris’s luxiat slave, Quentin, held two smoking pistols over the body, a surprising, powerful gravitas in the usually tremulous young man’s face.

The Lightguards nearby were flinching back from the pistol shot, some cowering, others lifting their weapons instinctively, as if to block.

They were holding Tisis Guile as if she were their prisoner.

Now the Lightguards, shaken, were recovering. Some were pulling their own muskets toward Quentin, who’d dropped the pistols and had thrown his hands up in surrender.

Someone was going to shoot him.

“Stop!” Karris shouted beside Gill, and she ran toward the Lightguards. Gill ran beside her with Big Leo only one step behind, and the people crowding the square melted back for her and Gill and the rest of the Blackguards cutting through.

Deprived of their leader, caught out in the open with everything going wrong for them, the Lightguards panicked. They dropped Lady Tisis. Some dropped their muskets. Half a dozen, including—Gill saw through the gaps in the crowds—that crippled bastard Aram, ran back toward the Chromeria, moving with surprising speed despite his crutch.

And then they were there. Gill had expected to find some poor bastard dead, but instead he found two.

The man Quentin had shot was bleeding still, blood somehow still pouring from his shattered braincase onto the paving stones, but slowing, slowing, even as they arrived. Lady Tisis had been punched several times at least, and looked in terrible condition emotionally—but not seriously wounded. Gill didn’t concern himself with her further for now.