The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,305

said. At least, that’s where he hoped the answers were. “I’m blaming this all on you if it doesn’t work.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Big Leo said.

Wiseass.

They made their way past checkpoints again. On the way up, they’d been staffed by Blackguards Kip and Big Leo hardly had known. But apparently they’d gone and gotten others.

Their welcome was warmer than Kip had expected. The Lightguards had had all the time in the world to paint Kip and the Mighty as murderous traitors. At the very least, the Mighty had left the Blackguard at a time when they’d really needed good people.

Instead, he saw Gill Greyling waiting for them.

“Gill!” Kip said. “They made you a trainer? Those poor nunks!”

The man flashed a huge smile. “I get along with the slow and clumsy.” Kip laughed as they embraced.

“Where’s Gav?” Kip asked.

He felt it instantly. Every face fell.

“No!” Kip said. But he saw the truth of it on Gill’s face. “How?”

“We’d been out looking for your father. Gav had been pushing it for a while, drafting too much. We got ambushed by some wights. He saved two of his brothers in the fighting, but blew his halos.”

“He make it back here?”

“Yeah. The White herself took care of him for the end.”

Kip muttered a curse.

“You should go see her, Lord Guile,” Gill said. He called him Lord Guile, not Breaker.

“Yeah, I know,” Kip said. He supposed Gill thought Breaker was his Blackguard name, and though it was forgivable under the circumstances, Kip had still abandoned the Blackguard.

“Promise me.”

Kip squirmed. It wasn’t like Gill not to let things go. “Look, we didn’t leave things so—”

“She’s got one son she can’t abide and one that she loves but drove away. Promise me.”

“I’m not really her son. She made that very clear—”

“Gav spent his dying breaths making her see what kind of a cockroach Zymun is. She gets it now. But if you make my brother’s sacrifice moot, you’re turning your back on us. Or have you already done that?”

Kip swore under his breath. “Come on! Don’t be—fine! I’ll do it. I gotta go handle some trivial life-and-death stuff first. Let’s do this again, though. It was fun.”

He pushed through them, but stopped before the lift and turned. He cursed again. “Gill. Trainer. I’m sorry. About . . .”

“I know,” Gill said.

Moments later, Kip and Big Leo stepped off the lift at the tall, wide-open level that housed all the tower’s mirrors. Dozens of mirror slaves were hard at work prepping for Sun Day. It was the biggest day of the year for them. Not only were there all the festivities and parades to prepare for, many of which required special lenses and tight coordination, but they went on all day long, on the day of the year with the most intense sunlight.

Mistakes in coordinating the mirrors not only were deemed harbingers of bad luck, but they could also send errant burning hot rays into the crowds of pilgrims. Small smudges on the mirrors could turn them into a smoking ruin. Untrained or sick staff could fall to their deaths with the rigors of the long, long day. Thus, today was filled with everything from checking the health of the slaves here and on the Thousand Stars throughout the Jaspers, to checking and filling the cleaning solutions for the mirrors themselves, to drilling the star-keepers on hitting their sequences during the parades.

Kip had served with the mirror slaves before; it was a favorite punishment for nunks, and the slaves had laughed at the nunks’ sweating and bumbling, saying that day was nothing compared to Sun Day.

There were no nunks here now. Kip figured they’d probably just get in the way. He started looking around for the slaves’ overseer, but couldn’t see one immediately. That was odd. Usually the overseers made a real effort to distinguish themselves above their fellows.

“I see how, I just don’t understand why, Overseer Amadis,” a boy said.

Kip homed in on the conversation and wove through the workers to the east side of the tower. The boy who’d spoken was watching as an older man swung a mirror from one position to another. But the mirror he was swinging was blackened, melted.

“Because we’ve got no backup mirrors. We use what we’ve got,” the old man said.

“Why not take it out altogether?”

Overseer Amadis looked up at Kip. “My lord, will you give me one moment to deal with this?”

“Of course.”

He turned back to the boy. “Because it’s the counterweight to Valor’s mirror. We’ve got two hundred twenty-seven position changes