The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,100

back, but instead of trying to keep her feet, she flopped to the side, her body reacting faster than her mind.

Someone! Not something! her mind shrilled. Paryl! Move or die!

Rolling, desperate, eyes streaming at the blow to her nose, Teia jumped to her feet, her hand stabbing down into the gun pouch at her hip, slipping over the smooth ball handle of the pistol.

And then someone unseen cuffed her upside the head, like she was a child, not an assassin. An arm circled around her chest and another around her neck, and as he tightened that arm on the sides of her neck—a dangerous move no Blackguard would use, because though it was meant not to, it could kill—she heard a voice, his voice.

“All my work, and you throw it away at the first tough job. You’re such a disappointment, Adrasteia,” Murder Sharp said.

The blackness was rising even faster than her terror, but Teia clawed at the pistol in its pouch. His foot was right next to her own, and there would be no time for aiming carefully before she lost consciousness.

Her straining fingertips brushed the polished-smooth pistol butt, and fingernails tore as she scrambled to lift the heavy, slick weapon up to her palm. But she did it. She did it faster than cowardice and a heartbeat before unconsciousness could claim the laurel crown. With a hot lead prayer, she pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. Like a runner tripping within steps of the finish line, she wondered what might have betrayed her—a faulty flint? a broken cockjaw?

Blackness triumphing, her hands began pulling at his forearm like she was some moron who’d never trained against such things. Her knees sagged. It was too late to do all the right things. She was too weak for the chin turn, too . . .

Her last thought swam through the gathering wet darkness like some unseen loathsome sea creature sliding against her bare toes on a midnight swim: There’d been no mechanical failure. Teia had failed.

She hadn’t cocked the pistol.

There was no way to try again. She was out of time and strength. There were no second chances here.

She slumped into the wages of that mortal sin: losing.

Chapter 26

Gavin knifed into the waves—tumbled, spun deeper. Black spots swam in his vision. He stabbed his hands forward and racked water back, back. It was several long strokes before he realized he was pulling himself deeper, like a disoriented eagle trying to swim, as if its pinions could beat the waves rather than the air.

He turned toward the greater light, and pulled for the sky.

His progress slowed. His chest convulsed. Vision darkened.

And then his hand pulled weakly on the air, and he bobbed to the surface. He gasped in a great breath, caught some wave with the air he inhaled, and coughed. He floundered, slapping at the water, gulping in air, trying to see.

The lagoon was calmer than the afternoon chop of the waves outside the reef. First he saw the remains of the ship, torn to pieces, part of the forecastle still perched on the reef it had been dropped on, the rest shearing away into a flotsam of broken wood and broken men and women.

Flung from the highest height, Gavin was the closest in toward land, but he saw others, their heads dotting the waves, yet alive. Some screamed with fear or injury, some clung to bits of crates or decking. Others danced to the sea’s cruel, silent song, bobbing without a word, drowning: for the drowning haven’t the breath to spare for screams.

Ceres hated anyone to interrupt her dancers, so in his terror, a drowning man would often force his rescuer under the waves himself, and Ceres would claim two victims rather than one. Fully half of the distance back to the ship from where he was now, Gavin saw Orholam, wet hair streaming over his face, hands plunging down and down, frenetic—dancing to that tune.

It took a strong and healthy swimmer to dare pull a man away from Ceres’s fatal song. Gavin felt neither. He looked at the shore calling him.

Then he saw the fins cutting through the water.

Then he felt the stinging on his back. He was still wearing the gun-sword, and in the fall, it had cut him. He was bleeding into the water; he had no idea how badly.

But he knew how blood called sharks.

Orholam bobbed up, up, up arrhythmically. He’d known he was going to die. Had accepted it as far as he could. Come to peace with