The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,155

failed,’ Orea had told her.

Well. This was where the rot began, so this is where Karris would begin, too. At some point, the shining, idealistic faces of the young luxiats before her would become old and powerful . . . and compromised, and even corrupt.

She didn’t have a master plan yet, but she knew that what Orholam had for her to do began here.

“It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s as if they almost think that the life-giving Lord in whom we believe is not, perhaps, so superior to the pagans’ ancestor worship and ritual orgies, and their elevation of drafters as innately more valuable than other men and women. Why are our leaders so tentative? Is it merely because they are old? What is so wrong with us? Has one day passed since High Luxiat Tawleb’s execution on Orholam’s Glare that you haven’t asked yourself, ‘How could the High Magisterium itself shelter such a person?’ A murderer in league with Nabiros himself? And then we saw Pheronike—not simply serving the immortal but somehow hosting him. How can such things be? Why is our faith spineless? Have we nothing to offer a dark world desperate for light?”

There was still time to bail out, to offer some anodyne exhortation to be faithful and do good.

Karris hadn’t brought the red folio, but everything she did now was informed by it, and by the fact that Orholam had armed her with it. Why would Orea choose Karris to succeed her? Why, out of all those smarter, holier, and more impressive in a hundred ways, would Orholam choose her to be His White now?

It could only be because Karris was a warrior. So she sometimes needed direction? Orea’s letter was that much: clean up the mess, whatever the cost. Fight. Die if necessary. Inspire others to join you in that, through your example. Karris could do that.

The red volume was, damnably, missing large chunks of its text. Apparently at least one of the later recipients of the work had ignored their pledge, or considered themselves not bound by an oath they hadn’t consented to.

A later pen claimed that at one point, the folio had been sealed with some sort of a will-crafting magic so that it wouldn’t even open until a new White had signed her name and assented with her will to the oath. Now oath-binding was another magic forbidden, and mercifully lost.

But despite what had been erased, what remained was enough. Karris wasn’t the first of the Whites after the folio had been altered, and her predecessors had been brilliant and curious and indefatigable in restoring what they could. While some had written circumspectly, others were bruisingly blunt.

Careful to use the past tense, Karris said, “My own husband, the Lord Prism, the Highest Luxiat, himself did not believe in Orholam.”

Gasps went up. They looked at her as if she were sullying the dead, and her own husband, no less. These young luxiats liked her a lot, she could tell, so they were doubly aghast.

“You’re shocked,” she said. “So it will grieve you to learn that none of the High Magisters were shocked at all by his disbelief. In fact, I’d be surprised if his atheism wasn’t shared by some of them. They cared little. So long as Gavin kept up the pretense of faith, they were content. He did his duty faithfully, except that he had not the faith that undergirds those duties.”

If they had dared to shout her down, they would have then. It was why she had excluded the High Luxiats and their staff, not by barring them from the meeting but by pretending it was yet another informal exhortation of the kind she’d done many times before.

Indeed, she’d met with three other classes recently and given them each an uninspiring lecture. Giving the same stultifying lecture, three times, had been enough to bore the important luxiats and magisters away.

All that in order to set this up.

The sole person of any standing in the room, a Magister Jens Galden, looked ill to the point of fainting. He stood at the back, and suddenly looked as if he were uncertain if he should bolt and go summon his superiors, or if he had better stay so he could keep a record of what outrage she spoke next.

She and Quentin had not chosen these young luxiats at random. Among their number was the order of the auditarae—a group dedicated to the preservation of contemporary and ancient history. The auditarae’s discipline involved