The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,206

activated the Great Mirror here. But . . . there’s no Great Mirror here. Right? I mean, is it hidden somewhere else in Apple Grove?”

They shook their heads. It was a small town, and their people had searched all of it. Even if the Mirror were half the size of the one housed in Ru or Dúnbheo, it would still be impossible to hide.

“And saying it’s been ‘activated’ makes it sound like it’s functional, so it’s not lying in some barn or something; there has to be the whole frame system, right?” Kip asked. He looked at the plinth. Was it supposed to be the base of the frame, or where you’d set the frame?

“Well, then, it’s obvious, especially given that,” Ben-hadad said, pointing to the plinth. “The mirror’s buried right under us.”

“Well, yeah, obviously,” Kip said. He looked over at the cracked earth at the base of the plinth. “The crack made that impossible to miss, right?”

He’d missed it. Apparently so had some of the others. They were looking down uneasily.

Kip said, “I meant, uh, since it’s there, how do we raise it?”

“Sure you did, boss,” Ben-hadad said. “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m a genius.”

“We don’t. We hate you for all sorts of reasons,” Winsen said easily.

Kip walked over to the plinth. There were no superviolet panels on it. It felt like it was just a marker. And maybe it had been, the ancient equivalent of ‘Dig here.’

Ferkudi said, “Please don’t tell me we have to dig it up.”

“We?” Ben-hadad said. “I’m gonna be overseeing the drafters building our skimmers down at the coast. Actually, I should really be on my way.”

But he didn’t leave. Ben couldn’t leave an unsolved puzzle.

Kip shielded his eyes against most of the light and looked into the chi, though it pained his eyes to compress them so far. He’d gone blind for three days the last time he’d used a lot of chi, and he couldn’t afford that now.

He shot a pulse down into the earth, and it seemed to burn his skin in a line from his eyes, down his shoulders, along his entire arm. He tensed, but no one seemed to notice.

With its tremendous energy, the chi penetrated the earth easily, and he saw that Ben-hadad was right. Under a thin layer of grasses, the soil yielded from the native loam to a vast bowl of sand, and within that sand was a frame system, and lower still was a vast quantity of luxin. Green probably, considering the history of this satrapy. A temple? A shrine of some sort? It felt strange, though, as if being underground so long had changed it from solid luxin to a liquid. Or maybe it was just that he’d reached the limits of his tiny chi burst.

But that was all he could see in the tiny burst he’d shot out.

“It’s a moot point,” Cruxer said. “The Blood Robe army’s gone. It’d be like building a siege engine when there’s no siege . . . Unless . . .” Cruxer cleared his throat. “Our Lightbringer needs to tinker?”

They all looked at him.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben-hadad said, “and I keep coming up short. I mean, I get why the mirror towers would have been tremendously useful to the ancients. The kingdoms were broken into single colors, right? All the red drafters would go to Atash, greens here, and so on. They didn’t have colored lenses, so simply fighting in bad light or at the wrong time of day or without decent sources would have been the death of many of them. So before lenses were developed, a king could gather thousands of precious or semiprecious stones—anything in their color—and use the Great Mirrors to beam their color out to their drafters. And when colored lenses were first invented, the Mirrors would still be useful—because they were so, so expensive and difficult to make. But, Breaker, I don’t understand how the Mirrors are going to help us now: every drafter at the Chromeria has spectacles in their own color, and all the buildings are white by design. Sourcing isn’t a problem for us. The real problem is how the bane paralyze us. Are you certain that the Great Mirrors even do anything about that? Like, you bombard a drafter—or even the bane—with a complementary color, or what?”

They all looked at Kip. It wasn’t exactly a problem he hadn’t thought about in the long days on the trail.

“Hand me your water skin, would you?” Kip asked Cruxer,