The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,227

be dead by the time I reached you. Murdered by the Order of the Broken Eye. She said anything she did to stop her assassination would only forestall it, wouldn’t affect the course of the war, and would have other costs too great for her to countenance.”

“Worthless to me, then. Figures. You know, I’ve met dozens of prophets and Seers through the years. Charlatans and half-wits, most of them. But at least those could be used against the kind of people who believe them. Yet the real ones were never any use at all.”

The near-blasphemy spurred no anger from the old Parian. He only stared at Andross calmly.

“What are you here for, old man?” Andross asked.

The old man smiled, finally. “I overestimated you. I thought surely you would place me in an instant. The Third Eye said that for a man who’d had the light restored to his eyes, you were remarkably blind, for you hardly ever look at other people, except to see how you might use them.”

Andross looked now. The age. The vocabulary. The diction. The red-gold buttons on his satchel, such as librarians use to carry their scrolls in Azûlay.

His heart suddenly clenched.

But the old man was already speaking: “You seduced my daughter. You convinced her to betray her oaths to her city and tribe and family. You turned her into a thief, and you left her banished, destitute, and pregnant.”

Aha. He’d arrived at it only a moment too late. “Asafa ar Veyda de Lauria del Luccia verd’Avonte. A pleasure to meet a Keeper of the Word, Chief Librarian.” This was Katalina Delauria’s father; this was Kip’s maternal grandfather.

Asafa’s eyes were burning embers in a face like coal ready to take the flame. He said, “Before you took her from me, Lina and I were very close. She was my joy, my everything. For a time, she wrote me letters even after she fled in disgrace,” Asafa said. “Long letters, unsparing of herself or others. She told me everything. And I’ve come, Andross Guile, to upend all you know and break your glacial heart.”

Chapter 67

As the first cannons began firing at them, the command skimmer broke apart.

But the enemy had no Gunner directing their fire. The shots—twenty of them at least—all sailed wide, short, or long. Few of them were even close.

Still, there was the familiar jolt of excitement at being shot at with no effect. That bracing, ‘Holy shit! I’m alive and I could have been dead and someone just wanted me dead and did all they could to make me dead, but I’m alive, hell yeah, you bastards!’

The Mighty were near enough the wall of galleys and galleons under the flying flags of broken chains on a black background that the roar of the guns was nearly simultaneous with the gushers of the smoke and the splash of the cannonballs, jetting water into the air.

Kip’s eyes were dragged below the line of the cannons, though, in front of the ripples that spread around each as the shock waves left their imprint on the waters beside the ships.

In a unison not possible for wild animals, dozens—no, hundreds—of sharks rose, dorsal fins in ranks, heading straight for the Mighty.

A primal fear struck him then, thalassophobia, a dread that man was not made for the depths, that the water was not his home, that this vast sea was itself hostile to him, hateful. If the foils of his skimmer hit a shark, Kip might kill the shark, but the collision would certainly pitch him into the water.

He would be helpless. Torn apart by those alien, unforgiving teeth.

The skimmer shivering as a musket ball ricocheted off the deck broke Kip’s brief paralysis. He aimed it down lower into the waves. The increased drag slowed him considerably.

Then, as he closed in on the sharks, he aimed skyward.

He shot into the air, and felt a jarring bump from beneath propelling him even higher.

It turned him off axis, but Ben-hadad—Orholam bless him for being such a damned genius—had built the skimmers well. The foils weren’t edged but round, so when Kip hit the waves again, there was little danger of catching an edge and flipping over. Instead, Kip skipped over the waves a couple of times, then the foils dug into the waves and he was off again.

Directly toward dozens more sharks.

But before any of them could attack, on some unseen cue, the majority of them turned away and dove.

Kip had no time to figure out why they’d turned away, or what