“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.