The Burning White (139 page)

No one else appeared armed.

Though many looked afraid of the Blackguards, of Karris, of glowering Big Leo with his great chain, no one in the crowd appeared threatening, or guilty, or shifty.

A flash from behind him made Gill whip his head around. A last flash of red light from the Great Market, the following sound of a distant explosion, and now the titan was gone.

High General Danavis had said he had a better than even chance of dying if he tried whatever he was planning—and almost no chance of not breaking the halo, which was really the same thing. Gill could only hope that he’d accomplished what he hoped, that he’d made those pagan bastards pay.

Part of Gill wanted to urge Karris to take them all to the general, to help them in whatever desperate straits they were in. But that wasn’t his role. He was a trainer of the Blackguard, not a general.

As he turned back to things nearer at hand, Gill realized that the young man whose wreck of a head was still pumping blood on the ground could only be Zymun Guile.

He sought his ward’s reaction, but the White’s face was a cipher. She was already looking to Tisis, who was moving, pushing people out of her way.

“Zymun was about to hang Tisis,” Quentin told Karris. “I was too late for . . . High Lady, I’m so sorry.”

Tisis reached where she was going, kneeling, pulling a body into her lap, and the crowd melted back to let Karris see.

To let Karris see
Kip
.

Dead.

Beside Gill, Big Leo dropped to his knees, dropped his big chain with a clatter to the stones.

But Gill didn’t even look at him. Big Leo wasn’t his ward; Karris was. And if he lived a hundred years, Gill would never forget the expression on her face now.

It wasn’t denial, for in her face there wasn’t rejection, but instead the note of confirmation of something suspected. He saw in her face her last hope for happiness die. It was as if she’d thought, At least I’ll have one good thing, and though it was less than I wanted, I shall make myself be content with this.

And now she’d had that last good thing snatched away and smashed before her eyes.

Gill turned away, telling himself his job was to scan for threats, telling himself that he should give her the dignity of mourning in private, telling himself he was the wrong person to comfort her in this. She should be comforted by a mother, a father, a husband—but she had none of these: they’d all been stolen from her.

Well, then, surely she needed a friend her own age, not him, not a man who worshipped her, who was ten years younger. It would seem presumptuous to even step forward to try to be a comforter. He wasn’t the one who could be that for her—

Suddenly, she keened, and her scream was so incoherent that everyone who heard it understood perfectly.

Eyes turned away, faces filled with shame around the square.

“
NO!
”

She seemed to almost attack Tisis as she pulled Kip’s body into her own arms. She froze, trembling, muttering her denials under her breath as she stabbed fingers into his neck to feel for the pounding of life there.

Finding none, she stood, Kip’s body sliding limp, gracelessly, out of her lap. She staggered as one drunk.

Her eyes searched the crowd unseeing, wild.

Gill felt a surge of shame. He should guard her in this, too. Protect her somehow from this shame. But he didn’t know what to do. When Gav had died, they’d known what to do for him, how to honor him; Karris had stood with him, somehow. But he had nothing.

She keened again.

He felt sick.

She was the Iron White. They shouldn’t see her like this.

“High Lady . . .” he said quietly.

She shook with her weeping or with rage, the red rising in her against this evil day.

Tisis looked up at her, haunted. “He didn’t try to save himself. Even to the end, he was trying to bring light to us. He was fighting for us. To the very end.”

“No!” Karris shouted, decorum abandoned, spit flying. “This isn’t right! This isn’t happening!”

“High Lady, please . . .”

“You don’t understand! He’s not dead! He’s not dead. Oh,
God
. . .”

Gill reached a hand out to steady her, but she slapped it away angrily.

“Karris, please, the people—”

“No!” she shouted at him. “Don’t you tell me about—YOU! I know you!”

Suddenly her ire turned on a man in the crowd. An artisan by his dress. He looked familiar, but it took Gill a moment to place him. That was it: the kopi seller from her favorite little stand. Parian by his look, but Ilytian by his accent. Gill couldn’t remember his name or any other connection, though.

Karris quieted as the little man came forward uncertainly. Speaking to the rest of them, she said, “Send everyone to go aid High General Danavis, if he yet lives. If he doesn’t, he’ll have left someone competent in charge.”

“High Lady . . .”

“That’s an order!” she bellowed. “I have work to do.”

Gill waved to the others to go.

Big Leo and his Mighty didn’t move, and Gill didn’t insist.

“You, Jalal. You saved me,” Karris said quietly to the weathered old artisan. “That day those men beat me. Andross’s men. When they beat me to teach me a lesson. I thought . . . but it was
you
. You carried me back to the Chromeria, didn’t you?”

The old man said, “Who are you, child?”

“Who am I? Who am
I
?!”

Even to Gill, it seemed a strange question. Was the old man blind?

But Karris. Oh, his beloved High Lady Karris White. His Iron White was edging into hysteria.

Tears spilled down his cheeks and he dashed them away. This was unseemly.

“I’ll tell you who I am,” Karris said, cheeks wet, but with hidden heat like a coal burnt to white ash suddenly breathed upon to glow a sullen red. “I’m the fatherless daughter, the bereaved sister, I’m the widow, I’m the impure White, I’m the leader who failed—but there’s one thing I won’t be. I’m the slip of a girl who’ll run through brick walls, and I won’t be the mother without a son. Because who
I
am doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong.”

But she barreled ahead. “
You
carried me through all this. You were there when I was broken down, beaten up. And you will
not
leave me now! You promised me that you’d repay me for the years the locusts have eaten. You promised! And I believe. Orea told me, and the Third Eye confirmed it. So you swore it! HE IS MY SON! And you will
not
let him be dead. You can’t!” she screamed the last. “You
can’t
, because if he’s dead, then you’re a liar. You can bring him back. I know you can! If you will it, you can give him back to me. And you have to, or your word is good for
nothing
!”

She was barely keeping her feet.

Gill’s heart lurched. War had broken strong men and indomitable women before, but Karris?

Not his Iron White, please no.

Did she even know how she sounded?

“I don’t care!” Karris shouted at everyone around her as they looked away, embarrassed for her, brokenhearted. “I don’t care how you look at me. You think I’m crazy? I don’t matter!
He
does.” She pointed ferociously at the kopi seller. “You all think they could kill my Kip? You morons! You think they could kill Kip on Orholam’s Glare? Orholam’s
Glare
? How could Orholam look on my son with anything but favor? And mercy. And mercy.
Please
. . .”

“High Lady, he’s dead. Let him go,” Gill said.

Tears streamed down her face. “I failed, don’t you see? Don’t you understand?! I reached the end of myself, and I failed—but Orholam cannot. He
cannot
. It’s what I do now that matters, right? And I believe. I believe.”

She sank to her knees and took the hand Tisis offered. And together they wept.

“Please,” Karris begged the old man. “Please, tell them. Tell them who you are.”

“Who do you say I am?”

She looked up and through her tears she said, “I say you’re the one who holds the wind in his fists. I say you’re the one who wraps up the oceans in his cloak. I say you’re the one whose every word proves true. I say you’re the Lord of Lights. I say you’re stronger than death, and . . .” She sank farther, lying prostrate, her face on the very cobblestones, stretching her hands toward the old man as if he were unimaginably far away. “I say I’ll praise you, though you slay me.”

Only then did the old man move. He came forward, and he knelt beside her. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you have been very much misled.”

She expelled a breath, so hopelessly that she clearly wished it were her last.

“Shh, shh,” he said, brushing back her hair behind her ear as if soothing a child. “Very much misled about the extent of your failures, and even more so about your own worth, Karris
Agapêtê
. Be still, child. Be still. For about this at least you are right: your son isn’t dead, only sleeping.”

Karris took a sharp breath, and Gill’s hand convulsed on his spear. What new insult was this? Was the old man mocking her?

But Karris lifted her head, and the hope in her voice as she spoke to the old man hurt Gill most of all. “Then you’ll wake him?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, slinging his pack around and pulling out his little cups, and filling them with his dark, steaming brew. “What do you think kopi is for?”

His eyes twinkled as with many lights. And as he gently poured the drink into Kip’s mouth, suddenly the night lit with incandescence above them all.

Every eye turned to the Prism’s Tower as a great white light from the east hit it, unimaginably pure and bright.

The whole tower lit with color, and then, too, did all the other towers of the Chromeria in turn as every one of the Thousand Stars flared to life throughout Big Jasper—radiating first with white light, then with every color under the sun.

Then, under the control of some masterful hand on the mirror array, the night filled with light. Directed by some great intelligence that could hold a hundred details at once, the Thousand Stars blossomed and turned—here shooting red source, here focused tight and hot enough to burn some unseen enemy, here giving blue or green, here flooding the enemy with light they couldn’t use, and in fifty other places seeking out friendly drafters to give them exactly what light they needed.

Faces turned heavenward, seeing hope brought to their despair and light brought into their darkness. Cheers broke out throughout the square and throughout Big and Little Jasper.

But Gill, after checking for any immediate threat from the outpouring of magic and seeing none, saw little more of it. He saw only his mistress’s face, and she saw only Kip—and her son suddenly took a deep breath, and sat up, eyes opening.

Only as Kip breathed out, smiling as if waking from a pleasant dream, did Gill realize that the old kopi seller had disappeared.

“This here is the point where you make a decision,” Orholam said.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Dazen said. “I thought that’s what I just did.” He was an old cloak drenched in the rain and now wrung out, and there was nothing he wanted so much as to hang up in the air to dry a bit. He’d just given father everything the old cancer had wanted for more than forty years. Worst, he’d given father vindication. It made Dazen’s heart hurt. Could he not just curl up in a corner for the next decade or two?

Orholam said, “You came all this way for one reason. Did you forget it already?”

To kill You? Oh, not that. “To save Karris?” Dazen asked.

“You still want to?”

“What are you talking about? She’s on the other side of the world. Me drafting anything is impossible at this point. Like, I
thought
it was impossible before, but now? It’s really, really not happening.”

“A man is more than his magic, Promachos.”

Wow, that sounded like a deep lesson, but c’mon . . . “What can I do? You got another ship and crew tucked away inside the reef somewhere I didn’t notice? What’s the rush now? It’ll take me weeks or even months to get back. Everything will be over by then. There’s no way I can get back in time to help.”

“Time. Psh,” Orholam said.

“Easy for You to say.”

“What about your glider? What’d you call it, ‘the condor’?”

“That would be handy. You know, if I hadn’t destroyed it in Tyrea, hundreds of leagues from here. You gonna make me a new one?”

“Right now I prefer making things new to making new things.”

“You are
really
hard to understand sometimes,” Dazen said. “It’s lost. Broken. I destroyed it so no one could learn its secrets. And I couldn’t fix it anyway, now.”

“Like I said, fixing is
My
specialty,” Orholam said. “You want to fly with Me?”

Dazen said nothing for a moment. “You’re serious.”

“I seem to recall you rather enjoy it.”

“Flying? What?!” Dazen’s exasperation was as unbounded as the night sky.

“That vexation you’re feeling?” Orholam said. “Been feeling that for you. For years.”

This did not make Dazen feel less vexed.

“But, you know,” Orholam went on, “it’d be hazardous. It
is
pretty dark out, and some people say Orholam can’t see at night.”

Dazen glowered.

It turned out that the reckless, winsome Guile grin had nothing on God’s.

“So what is this?” Dazen demanded. “You’ve actually got a condor up your sleeve? No, You’d have to do me one better, wouldn’t you? An eagle or something?”

“A machina, up My sleeve? That’d be cheating. Now, hurry. It’s a long fall if you miss the timing.”

“Timing? What timing?”

“For the jump! You do remember where the gap is on the level below this, right? Go through that gap—or it’ll be a short fall.”

Dazen said, “You want me to
jump
? Off this tower? In the dark?”

“Admit it, your last leap of faith was terrible,” Orholam said.

“Huh?”

“I’m giving you a do-over. A second chance,” Orholam said. He bent his knees, readying himself to run. “It’s what I do. Any moment now. Three . . . Two . . . Oh, don’t forget the blade!”