The Burning White (40 page)

“Who are we talking—wait, you can’t be serious.”

* * *

Karris stepped out of the room a minute later. Her young Blackguard Amzîn was waiting, precisely where he was supposed to be, with perfect posture and alertness.

“Good kid,” Karris said, closing the door behind her.

She saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes. She gave him leave to speak with a gesture.

“Isn’t that the luxiat who murdered that girl?” he asked.

She nodded. “Sad story, huh? Promising young talent gets elevated too high too soon. Ends with a young woman with a bullet in her throat.”

Amzîn got a pained look on his face, but it was the wrong kind of pained look. He could tell she was doing more than repeating the facts, but he had no idea why.

She said, “You and me, Amzîn. You’re the promising young talent. Let’s do our best not to reprise the part where
someone
takes a bullet because of it, eh?”

~The Guile~

40 years ago. (Age 26.)

“
This
,” Lord Dariush announces, spreading his arms grandly, “is the world’s
last
surviving Solarch!”

He is so proud that I almost burst into inappropriate laughter.

“No,” I say, but with not nearly the true degree of horror I feel. I infuse my disbelief more with ‘No, really? How’d you manage that, you brilliant man?’ than ‘No, no, it’s not.’

“Oh yes!” he says. He is
delighted
.

“This?” I allow myself, for anyone would have doubts, not just anyone with a brain.

And here, moments ago, I had hoped for this man’s daughter to breed in some emotional brilliance to the Guile family line. Maybe his wife is very, very smart. I shall have to hope.

He chortles. “I told you you’d find it incredible.”

I clear my throat. “I thought you meant the other definition of that word,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I know. Study it. You’ll see.”

I’m never going to want to look at another painting in my life.

But, dutifully, I lean close and pretend to be enrapt.

I didn’t come to Atash for art appreciation—unless one wishes to call enjoying the nude figure of this man’s daughter ‘art appreciation.’

Alas, there’s not only been none of that, but I’ve barely even
seen
the woman I’ve come to woo and wed.

In a full week, I’ve seen more of her sister, Ninharissi, than I have of her, and when I
have
seen Felia, it’s been at dinners—where I wasn’t even seated next to her.

My pique is nearing the level of rage.

I’ve figured out why he’s kept me from her now—it’s all part of his maneuvering for these barbaric bride-price negotiations these savages practice—but it still rankles me.

“Speaking of definitions of words,” he says, “how did your parents come to bestow such a name on you?”

“You’ve been wanting to ask that for days, haven’t you?” I ask, as if amused.

I’m not. I think I’m coming to hate this man. I turn briefly away from the painting. Honestly, I’ve not caught even two details about it, I’m so focused on not letting my rage bleed through.

I shall need to take a break from drafting red, I think. I am not naturally a patient man, even without it.

He smiles. “Was it so obvious? I tried to wait until it wouldn’t be rude.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, staring again back at the painting as if I care. “Well . . . I knew that a philologist such as yourself would be disappointed if I said my mother simply liked the sound of the words, so . . . I’ll tell you that the name came to her in a dream.”

He laughs. “Fair! Fair. I suppose not all men spend their lives trying to escape the shadow of their name.”

“Did you try to escape yours, my lord?
Roshe Roshan Dârayava-hush
is no easy yoke for the shoulders of an infant. Nor even for a man to bear, one should think.”

I don’t quite suppress my pleasure at saying the name with precisely the correct diction and accent.

On the ship here, hoping to make a good impression on my father-in-law-to-be, I practiced for three dark days so I could say his name exactly as a local would. Three days I’ll never have back, for one offhand sentence, to woo a woman I may no longer want.

But I continue nonchalantly. “Quite a lot to live up to.”

Felia explained the name to me in one of her letters. It took her two full parchments, and she is not a woman to ramble. It means Judge Bright (or Light) Who Possesses Much Good (or Many Goods). ‘Judge’ placed first to hearken back to when petty kings (called ‘judges’ here) had ruled Atash. Judging—literally ‘bringing justice’—was what Atashians understood as sole reason to
have
kings. It’s something they’re still quite proud of, centuries after the fact, believing it denoted some deep truth about their national character: here rulers were established in order to serve the people.

Funny how
that
didn’t last. Denying reality only works as long as enough powerful people see a benefit in playing along.

So Lord Dariush—his name was usually shortened from Dârayavahush—had a name that meant the Rich, Smart, Good, and Perceptive (or Able to See through the Surface of Things to the Truth) Bringer of Justice.

I’m sure the other children had no problems with a boy named
that
. Here I’d been angry at
my
mother that my name so easily devolved into the sarcastic ‘Handy Andy’ after a sudden growth spurt out of my youthful rotundity had left me clumsy—a good trade, I’ll grant. Clumsiness can pass, fat is forever. ‘Randy Andy’ came after my first failed attempt at wooing a girl. (Quoting ancient Parian poetry, spoken of in my beloved books as being such a strong aphrodisiac that many kings had banned it, was not, as it turned out, appreciated by the puzzled thirteen-year-old target of my affections, neither in the original language nor in the best translation I could find.) ‘Glossy Rossy’ came during the same lovely oleofacurating pubertal years, and ‘At-a-loss Andross’ was from my first fight at age fourteen, when a lout called me Fart Eater and I’d asked what ‘Fart Eater’ even meant.

It would not be the last time the human race disappointed me. I’d learned then that reflecting the vacuity of the congenitally un-self-aware back to themselves will not inspire a philosophical awakening.

As it turns out, ‘Do you see how stupid that is?’ is a question you can only ask an intelligent person. Or more precisely, an intelligent person who is acting, saying, or believing something stupid. Thus, either one who is intelligent but not brilliant, or one who is young or uneducated or unequipped with formal logical apparatus.

I was indeed at a loss in that fight: lost in thought, thinking these things.

Then, coming to strategic grips with my intellectual discovery and realizing that the present situation called for a different type of solution altogether, I punched the lout across the nose.

Then I sat on his chest, grabbed a handful of his hair in my left hand, and said, ‘That’s Right-Cross Andross to you.’

Then I’d demonstrated my right cross again, careful to hold his head tight so it didn’t rebound off the cobblestones. I wanted to teach him and his friends a lesson, not kill him.

I’d been so disappointed that ‘ Right-Cross Andross’ hadn’t caught on.

‘Cross Ross’ had.

Those stinky, sebaceous little semen secretors.

‘Criss-cross Ross’ came after one of my more maladroit early schemes had failed. That still stung—the failure, not the sophomoric onomatopoeia.

You know, on second thought, best not to remember the teen years.

The Guile memory is not always a gift.

Fortunately, though far-ranging, my mnemonic vacation has been brief. Nor is Lord Dariush one to hurry. And I had the good sense to drift while facing his little painting.

On actually studying it, I now wish I’d begun with my examination first and let my mind wander later.

Barely a foot square, the painting is prominently displayed where one must view it on the way to the solarium gallery’s exit. The technique and colors and sensitivity are exquisite, and the style so idiosyncratic that one might see any painting by this master and know it to be his, regardless of the subject.

But the subject.

What in Orholam’s lowest hell?

“What . . . is . . . this?” I can’t help but ask.

“Some say that Solarch was a Mirror, and this is meant to be art for a Card, though I’ve seen no corroborating evidence of that.”

I don’t think that can be true. This is merely genius. As tragically misplaced and misapplied as it is undeniably, bafflingly superior.

This is a painting that would cause contemporary critics to scoff, his patron to grumble, and his competitors to throw down their brushes in agony and vexation.

Breathed by the greatest wordsmith ever to turn a phrase, this is a poem . . . about a bowel movement. This is the greatest composer of all time making fart jokes instead of penning concertos.

“It’s . . . cute?” I say.

I can’t take my eyes off it. The more I look, the more baffled I am.

“Cute, yes,” Lord Dariush says. “Fat and rather adorable, isn’t it?”

The abuse of talent is so outrageous, I can’t help wondering if it’s purposeful—perhaps Gollaïr, so certain that his own talents were being outstripped, had commissioned this piece simply to waste a few of Solarch’s days on earth.

Some great painters can dash off a masterpiece in a day. Other styles require a year or more. This has the hallmarks of the latter. The paint so thick it gives a depth to the image, the colors balanced not only against each other, but also within the image so as to guide the eye from one pleasing line to the next.

It is a lovely travesty.

It is as if the fastest racer entered the great hippodrome of Aslal for the final laps of the mountains-to-sea race that caps the novennial Philocteian Games, and as every tribe in Paria cheered, he started skipping, backward, even as the other runners caught him up and passed him by to take the laurel crown.

One
might
skip quickly, even backward. Such speed might astound, in its own witless way, but . . . why?

What a shame.

“What, uh, what
is
it?” I ask finally.

After a long moment, Lord Dariush says, “It’s a young dragon.”

“This . . . doesn’t look anything like . . .”

“In the highlands, our memories of dragons are rather different.”

Memories? “You’re . . . talking about a real animal?” I ask. “Something that gets translated ‘dragon’?”

I suddenly have no read on this man at all: one moment sly, clever, even brilliant, the next superstitious, foolish, and queer. If he’s actively delusional, I’ll have to leave, regardless. We’ve enough madness already in the Guile family line without me breeding more into it by marrying his daughter.

Lord Dariush is engrossed in his viewing. “Dragons are vulnerable in their youth, but then they spring up seemingly all at once, terrifying in their might. Cuddly, though, huh? Little round belly and all!”

He chuckles, then tears his eyes away from what is clearly his favorite possession of everything he’s shown me in the last week.

“What?” he asks suddenly, “Oh, a
real
animal? Oh, no. I mean, not to
my
knowledge. Maybe in the mists of time? But no, it’s uh, it’s uh, merely an important bit of our highland mythology. You see . . . hmmph. Do you know anything about scale-bearers? You know, serpents, lizards, geckos, the color-changers—some call them ‘reptiles’ now?”

“General knowledge,” I say. “I’ve certainly seen snakes and salamanders, of course, but nothing specialized.”

“Well, the sub-reds of Atash have studied them for centuries. Find them quite fascinating. They classify them as exotherms, whereas you and I and most animals are endotherms. We make heat internally; reptiles absorb it from their surroundings. If you believe heat to be a species of light, then animals who absorb it rather than give it off are rather suspect indeed. They are like little pits of darkness, light-devourers. Some say this is why men have always hated snakes.” He waves it away. “But that’s neither here nor there. My highland ancestors knew about exotherms and endotherms, and it’s a factor in the tale.”

“Go on,” I say. Now I’m actually interested. A little.

“We humans, we’re social. Sometimes we’re scolding squirrels, or monkeys shrieking and flinging excrement. At better times, loyal dogs or wolves hunting together to take down prey that none of us could face alone. Like other endotherms, we care about our pack, in our cases the family, the tribe, the satrapy, even the empire. We care deeply about our position within those groups. We are
zoon politikon
, social animals. There’s great strength in this, of course. A man alone in the wilderness will have trouble even surviving. We care for our sick, our elderly, and our children. But there’s waste and danger to living in society, too. We obsess over trivialities.

“Consider Sulak and Ben-sulak, towns that, if not separated by a river, would have long grown together into one single city. Today, in one, a man is mocked for darkening his eyebrows with kohl. Across the river, his twin is considered brutish for
not
doing so. The former is considered barbaric for growing his beard, the latter childish because he lacks one. We go along with things that make no sense. This year our cloaks are worn so short they no longer keep us warm. Next year they’ll be so long they’ll make it impossible to run.

“Reptiles stand at the antipodes from this. They care nothing for what their sisters love or their fathers hate. They seek out company only when it’s time to mate. There are some few men and women like this, of course, the broken ones, those born soulless, who possess neither empathy nor plans, nor can even be taught to feel much beyond their immediate fear, hunger, or lust. But most of us aren’t like that at all.”

Lord Dariush gestures to the painting. “See the fur? In our stories, the dragon is the wisest of all created beasts, for he has a dual nature: neither the blindnesses of the cold-blooded nor the weaknesses of the warm. Thus, we highlanders seek to emulate our ‘dragon.’ We discern when it is time to be a monkey of the tribe, and when it is time to be the cold lone serpent. Or whichsoever animals you will, given a particular circumstance.”