The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,198

except access to a good harbor.”

“How do you know all this?” Kip asked.

“We deep Foresters keep our traditions alive in our songs, not on corruptible parchments or skins that can be changed.” Daimhin’s face clouded. “Or we did. I wasn’t a singer of the songs and I don’t know all the stories. They’ll die now, I suppose. Already have, maybe, with my village.”

And that’s why you put the stories in books, Kip thought but didn’t say. Books don’t tend to get killed.

But that wasn’t helpful. Nor kind. Nor the point.

Daimhin said, “I thought it was a coincidence that this Seer should contact me and want me to come here. It’s been centuries since my people were here. I feel no connection to this land. I love my forests wild. I am no tender of domesticated trees.”

“Arborist,” Kip supplied. Also not helpful, but his mind was far away. “Did you say something about an orange grove? In Tyrea?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you know where that was?” Kip asked.

“I can’t recall the name. Near the Great Dome.”

“ ‘Great Dome’?” Tisis asked.

Kip felt like he’d plucked an invisible spiderweb, or perhaps a tripwire. He remembered the old ruin in the orange grove where he’d gone so often. He said, “There were stories that Sundered Rock was once a great stone dome. Maybe it was, back when these groves were established.” He turned back to Daimhin. “What happened here? What cracked the ground?”

“I assume something happened to make the Great Mirror move recently. But you’re the drafter. You tell me,” Daimhin said.

What mirror? Liv Danavis had directed them here saying she’d activated a mirror . . . but there was no mirror here, just a big empty field in the middle of an apple orchard.

But Daimhin was close enough now that the light caught on his leather armband. It shimmered a bit, like it was made of many tiny scales.

And that lute string of memory thrummed once more.

This moment was the kind of thing a Seer might see: Daimhin standing with his armband in the sun, talking to Kip, who was suddenly intensely interested in it, rather than the blood all over the young hunter or the blade in his hand or the cracked earth at his feet.

“Daimhin, do me a favor,” Kip said. “Close your eyes, and think that you’re in the blackest night, and that you want desperately to hide. Will yourself to disappear into the blackness.”

After a moment of staring at him inscrutably, Daimhin closed his eyes. The armband shimmered and went a smoky, mottled black.

The others muttered imprecations, and when Daimhin opened his eyes and saw it, he seemed stunned.

“What does that mean?” Tisis asked.

“How did you know to do that?” Ben-hadad asked Kip.

“Because I’ve seen that kind of skin before,” Kip said.

It was the same skin as what made the master cloak he’d given Teia. Kip had thought that cloak had been made of human skin—a light skin and a dark one stitched together—but he’d been wrong.

That shimmer reminded him of a being who changed his appearance at will, in far more complex ways than simple camouflage, who appeared beautiful when in reality he was ugly and burnt: Abaddon.

And then it reminded Kip of another immortal, whose glory had shimmered like the sun, but who had shifted herself effortlessly to walk among mortals: Rea Siluz.

“It’s an immortal’s skin,” Kip said. “One of those from whose ranks came the old gods. Not men dressed in luxin and power to fool the gullible, the real gods. The Two Hundred. The Fallen. The djinn.”

“I don’t suppose they shed their skin?” Cruxer asked.

“I, I don’t think so.”

“So someone skinned one?” Cruxer asked.

“Who could do that?” Ben-hadad asked.

“Maybe we can,” Winsen said flatly.

“Shut up, Win. Not funny,” Cruxer said.

“No,” Kip said. “I think Winsen’s kind of right. We’re fighting the gods. The Third Eye wants us to know . . . we can do it. They can be killed.”

Chapter 56

Teia was running out of time. She leaned against the wall of a cooper’s stall, half-shaded in the afternoon sun, nearly invisible not because of paryl magic but because she wore the hooded cloak low over her face and its stripes matched the tones of the wall and the shadows perfectly. She couldn’t maintain her paryl cloud for hours, and hours it had been.

Sun Day was only ten days away. Whatever the Order was planning, it would spring then. Tens of thousands of pilgrims had swollen Big Jasper’s streets. It seemed that for every person who