The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,125

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