The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,249

not the Felia I know you to be.” Before tears can gather once more in her eyes, I say, “So don’t lump us in with those desert assassins.”

She is defeated. “My lord husband, look at Gavin’s last letter to you.” She hands me a parchment, not Gavin’s letter, which was in code, but the decryption of it.

“How did you get this?” I ask.

“Read.”

She’s made a mark next to a paragraph: ‘Father, I have him on the run now. Dazen doubtless hopes to retreat to the mountains around Kelfing, but we’ve a plan to entrap his army at a bend in the river near a town called Rekton.’

I look at the map Felia has spread on the table. She sweeps a hand over Tyrea, and the little dot that is Rekton on the Umber River. In orange luxin, names appear—old names, though. “At the height of the Tyrean Empire,” she says, “there was a city here, its name lost to time. It was a holy city, consecrated to Anat Sub-red, before Karris Atiriel or her followers demolished it. There’s a great dome of rock there. Anat’s Dome, or Anat’s Furnace, the Lady of the Desert’s milk-swollen breast or her pregnant belly, they say. Upon it, the ancient Tyreans sacrificed their sons and fed their blood to the sands, begging the goddess to make their desert bloom.” Her voice grows distant. “How blithely I condemned them as monsters, Andross. What mother worthy of the name could murder her sons and believe that, of such enormity, good would come? I couldn’t imagine . . . How could we let this happen?”

“Felia,” I say, “how can you even ask that? While you translate this? If there’s no Lightbringer, we’re doomed. Everything. Everyone. I—”

She brushes it off. “Karris Atiriel or her followers demolished the temple and city and put to the sword those who wouldn’t flee. The wrecked town was settled by refugees from other places, who eventually called it Rekton.

“Andross, if Janus was right about Dazen, and if all these leaps of intuition are somehow correct . . . What if ‘the black fires of hell’ means ‘burning hellstone’? ‘Living hellstone’? ‘A great rock’ could be ‘the Great Rock’ . . . Andy, it could mean, ‘Breaking the Great Rock, black luxin shall unleash the Two Hundred once more upon the earth.’ ” She takes a deep breath. “Gavin is trying to trap Dazen at Anat’s Great Rock.”

“And,” I say, a dread birthed full grown from my heart in an instant, “Dazen can draft black luxin.”

She looks out the ship’s porthole. “What we’ve sacrificed—and what we’ve stolen from that poor librarian—has bought us all we needed to know to avert catastrophe, but too late. Gavin sent this letter a week ago. There’s no way we can get to Rekton in time to stop them.”

Chapter 72

There were only two ways Teia could uproot the entire Order of the Broken Eye, and tonight was her last chance to take the option that didn’t involve dozens of loyal Chromeria soldiers dying. Tonight, it seemed, the priests of the various sects were meeting with the Old Man of the Desert himself to pull together the details for the Feast of the Dying Light.

Or, as not-evil fucks called it, Sun Day Eve.

The Braxians didn’t celebrate the summer solstice as the longest day of the year; they celebrated it as the day after which the days would get shorter. That sort of made sense for the desert-dwelling Braxians, who’d suffered under the blistering, debilitating heat of their desert summers, but it still seemed kind of evil to Teia. Doubly so now, because these new Braxians weren’t desert people at all; the new followers of the Order just hated Orholam.

She could be wrong, of course. She’d been shadowing Atevia—Shadowing? she thought.

No, T, stop thinking. Last time you thought too much, you nearly had to explain ‘nocturnal emissions’ to a luxiat.

She’d been, ahem, shadowing Atevia pretty much constantly, and she’d still missed the plant. The barrel-chested wine merchant/pagan priest had reached into a pocket and suddenly flinched in a way that made it obvious he’d found something there that hadn’t been there before. Then he’d made his way hurriedly into a nearby alley, looked around furtively, and opened it. It must have been only a few words, because he closed it before Teia could lean around him to read it.

“Hate it when the old man does that,” Atevia muttered. “What if I hadn’t checked my pockets before tonight?”

Had he meant ‘the old