The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,141

happen more than once?”

“More than once. For you,” Karris said.

“Doing some work tonight?” Essel asked.

“Yeah.”

“Want me stationed inside instead?”

Karris wanted the company, but said, “No. It’s, um, no . . . not tonight, friend.” She didn’t know what was in the folio. No one should know it even existed.

Essel nodded, and Karris could tell her feelings were bruised. But Essel was a professional. She asked immediately, “Want me to send to the kitchens for some kopi? It’ll be at least an hour before the kid gets back. With lukewarm kopi, I’d guess, too.”

“Sure,” Karris said. “But don’t let Amzîn know, would ya? Just in case. That old man’s kopi really is the best.”

Essel reached to close the door, then hesitated. “Gav was a great kid. I miss him, too.”

Karris took a deep breath, letting the sorrow flow through her. “I miss a lot of us,” she said.

Essel nodded, though there was a flash of sorrow there. Even between them there was a bit of death, a gap of secrets held, old trust between comrades abrogated—not by malice but by duty and war. She went.

* * *

In the next hours as Karris read, over perfectly hot kopi—it turned out Amzîn was a sub-red—the worries and tribulations of the night faded away as her attention was seized wholly by the advice and the stories the Whites before her had left to help her. Here were lessons from hundreds of years of women and men who’d led and protected drafters through the reigns of Prisms great and good and wretched and bitter and venial (not just one or two of those having reputations from other sources that differed widely from what the Whites past reported). But then they began referring to things that Karris couldn’t understand. Sections were missing. There were blank lines, perfectly erased. Later Whites had clearly tried to piece together what was missing, obviously as perturbed as Karris was now.

And the revelations came in, like waves pounding wet sand in Karris’s heart. And a new dedication, a new direction, and a new mission was born as the night yielded to the dawn in a single-breath prayer that broke from a chrysalis of horror and blasphemy at Karris’s lips. “Oh my God,” she repeated, as she flipped the pages one by one.

“Oh my God.”

It wasn’t a reverent salutation beginning some sacerdotal benediction; it was the curse of a warrior who’d just taken a mortal wound.

“Oh my God.”

It wasn’t the hushed intonation of a supplicant seeking divine favor; it was the shock of an officer coming upon the scene of a massacre, with his men standing, bloody, near the innocent slain.

But given time, horror fades, and repetition makes what was unthinkable now normal; the monstrous is made manageable. For mankind adapts to every horror.

This can’t have happened.

This happened but not often.

This happened often, but this happens no longer.

This happens still but not often.

This happens often, but this is what must happen. This is what someone must do.

This is what I must do.

This is what I will do.

I am doing this.

I have done that, and it is what you must do in your turn.

“O my God,” Karris said, “please, please, save us.”

And the words were that commander’s grief, as he held a dead child in his arms, at finding out the massacre hadn’t been committed by some mortal foe but by his own men.

“O my God, save us from what we’ve done.” Save us, Orholam, from You.

Chapter 38

~The Guile~

38 years ago. (Age 28.)

“This is like no prophecy I’ve ever seen, Andross,” Felia says. She is nineteen years old and heavily pregnant with our first child. A son, she thinks. I’ve always wanted a girl first, to take care of me in my old age. It’s a disappointment I can’t hide from her, but she forgives me this, as she forgives so much else.

“I should hope not. This one might cost me drafting for thirty-eight years.”

She ignores that. Through another scroll we discovered when it’s likely the seal on the Everdark Gates will fail. That, plus this scroll, gives us either that the Lightbringer already came, years ago, and no one noticed; or that he is still to come thirty-eight years from now. So in order to see the prophecy fulfilled—if this prophecy is true—we’ll have to live another thirty-eight years. That means giving up drafting. Not exactly how either of us wants to live.

She sighs. “For a prophecy, that which hasn’t been redacted is so clear. Which makes me wonder if it’s somehow