The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,130

make you Prism first,” Winsen said.

Kip threw his hands up. Oh, like that’s no big deal. But a phrase rattled around inside of his head: ‘You won’t be the next Prism,’ Janus Borig had said.

“Breaker, focus on the problem, not the title,” Ben-hadad said. “It’s our best chance—not just to save the Chromeria but to stop the White King once and for all, to save the empire, and Blood Forest, and hundreds of thousands of people, and even ourselves. If we stay, I don’t know if this Great Mirror could stop a bane by itself. And I don’t know why he’d bring all of them here, or even if he could. He wouldn’t need to. This is our last chance. We’ve seen you tear apart a lux storm. You drafted a hundred different threads when you sank Pash Vecchio’s great ship. No one else could do that. So, directing the Thousand Stars with speed and accuracy that no one else could equal? Figuring out a tough problem? You’re the Turtle-Bear. Taking those on isn’t arrogance; those are just things you can do.”

Chapter 35

Teia heard the chair creak sharply as Murder Sharp popped to his feet.

He figured it out. Here’s where it ends.

She couldn’t see anything. She’d thought that might make it easier—if she didn’t see his eyes go paryl-black to tell her that her death was coming.

It didn’t.

“Ben-Kaleb,” he said. “ Ben-Zoheth! Dammit! Is that what she meant? Goddam soothsayers. The hell can’t they talk straight? I should’a made it hurt.”

What?

He cursed some more, and she could hear his footfalls as he paced.

“I want you to know this,” he said, getting right in her face. “You ain’t good, and us bad. Your Chromeria’s as bad as we are. Near enough anyway.”

“So I don’t get to choose between good and bad?”

“Choose, yeah. I didn’t get to choose, anyway.” He started mumbling. “Separation, that’s it. That’s what separates me.” He cursed the Chromeria then.

But Teia had a sudden revelation. She was an idiot. How had she not thought of this before?

Well, I’ve never been blindfolded since becoming proficient with paryl.

Paryl could be cast through clothes. It could be sent out through flesh. If it could go out, surely it come in.

There was no reason she couldn’t gather paryl through a blindfold and her closed eyelids.

Half to keep him talking, she said deadpan, “I’m stunned. All this time I’ve been so sure of our righteousness as I was murdering innocents. But . . . but maybe there’s some subtlety to this that, uh, you could explain?”

“Maybe so,” he growled. He was puzzled. He wasn’t good at detecting sarcasm.

Which was probably much better for her continued health. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Dammit, T! Are you trying to get yourself killed?

Her eyes relaxed to sub-red, and then those odd drafter’s muscles pried them wider, wider. And there it was, sweet tenebrous paryl. A bare hint of it, though, between being indoors and the fact that whatever bounced around here wasn’t focused.

The first wash of it slid into her, down her gullet like brandy going down hot.

She tilted her head, blackly amused, a hint of condescending amusement leaking through, “If I have to choose between ‘sometimes not great’ and ‘always fucking evil,’ is that supposed to be tough for me?”

The skritch of a foot pivoting on the gritty floor was her warning. He’d snatched something up from the table, and—skritch—something smashed into her face.

Her head felt like her skull had become a gambler’s dice cup with a furious loser rattling her brain around, hoping by rage alone he might shake good luck out from bad.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. There was a thought, a plan that was trying to form. Blood filled her mouth. Her left dogtooth had smashed through her lip, and she felt a surge of terror. Is this what death tastes like?

Her head lolled on her chest. She’d lost the little paryl she’d already gathered.

She felt him grab a fistful of her hair at the forehead. He pushed back, banging her head against the wall, tearing hair from her scalp.

He shoved whatever he’d hit her with between her bloody teeth. It was leather and parchment? Oh, the pages he’d stolen from Marissia, bound in a folio.

“You take this,” he said. “You take it and read it, and you decide if what they’ve done counts as ‘not great.’ You decide if all the blood on their hands demands vengeance.”

Bound, helpless, bleeding, and having trouble focusing, with a butcher holding a fistful of her hair,