The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,353

were congregated directly around the gate—and, as if this death were contagious, the people around them were surging back away from them.

Kip heard screams reverberate throughout the island as others were dying in droves in the far corners of Big Jasper, just as suddenly.

Quentin jumped to his feet as the people roared. “Be not afraid!” he shouted. “Orholam fights with us. Orholam fights with us!”

Only Kip knew the truth. My God, he thought, and he wasn’t sure if it was a curse or a holy invocation of the divine mystery: Teia’s just wiped out the Order of the Broken Eye.

All of it.

Today a great warrior like Big Leo might kill twenty of the enemy. Maybe, maybe forty. He would be accounted a hero for such valor.

If her estimates were right, in one day, of the empire’s most dedicated, most cunning, most dangerous, and most implacable enemies, Teia had just killed four hundred.

And no one would ever know. Despite all Quentin’s talk of Orholam’s mercy, like a mighty man levering apart the pillars of a pagan temple, Teia had killed the enemies in their hundreds only at the cost of killing herself.

Kip climbed up on the wall.

The masses of people were cheering now with new hope, but Kip’s eyes were drawn to the horizon, because among the cacophony of alarms and screams of horror and disgust and shouts of praise and relief, he’d heard the whistle of the lookouts, and he saw the horizon darken with the long shadows of the White King’s approaching armada.

It seemed much, much bigger than Kip remembered.

Then his eyes were drawn to the waves—and, illuminated in the angled rays of dawn—what was swimming in undulating ranks beneath them.

Chapter 107

Gasping between his words, Gavin said, “You’re . . . really . . . fucking strong.”

“Annoying, huh?” Lucidonius said, hands on his knees.

They were standing within two steps of each other, not even pretending to be on guard against a sudden move from the other.

Gavin had tried sudden moves when they’d rested briefly before. His moves were no longer at all sudden.

Truthfully, they were hardly even moves now.

And it was getting worse. He’d noticed it immediately, how the ascended man’s eyes mirrored the sun, slowly shrinking in apparent size as the sun rose, but growing in intensity.

Lucidonius obviously wasn’t as tired as Gavin was, nor as bloodied. He had only a split lip while Gavin’s nose had bled and clotted, bled and clotted. His cheek swollen from a collision with the marble, elbows throbbing, knees abraded.

Gavin had noticed that Lucidonius’s body, too, seemed to grow stronger as the sun did. Somehow the godling’s magic was tied to the rising of the light. On realizing that, Gavin had made desperate attempts to end the fight quickly.

Those times had been the times he’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing. Now there was only endurance, not the thought of victory.

They’d reached the sword not once, but several times. It now lay not far from the Great Mirror itself. Gavin counted that as his only victory. If Lucidonius were smarter, he would attempt to throw the Blinding Knife off the tower. As long as it was so close to the Great Mirror, Gavin had a chance.

“Shouldn’t you be . . . you know, on your way elsewhere?” Gavin asked.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s Sun Day. Don’t you go visit the poor assholes giving their lives for you over at the Chromeria?”

“I wish I could go help them in their hour of need. I’m needed here.”

“Hour of need?” Gavin asked. He wouldn’t call the Freeing that.

“The Jaspers are under siege. The White King has floated seven bane and tens of thousands of soldiers and drafters for the attack. And there are traitors within the walls.”

“And yet you’re here. While they worship you.”

“They don’t worship me.”

“You know what I mean. Whatever you want to call yourself, Lucidonius, it doesn’t change that they’re dying because they believe your words.”

Lucidonius stood and dusted himself off. “You seem to have recovered your strength, if not your sense of irony. Ready?”

“How’d you do it?” Gavin said, not least because he most certainly was not ready.

“Are you hoping I’ll get distracted now, or that I’ll give you instructions?” Lucidonius asked.

“You give me too much credit. I’m just buying time to rest. But seriously, you ascended to godhood. How?” Not that Gavin wouldn’t take any opening if the creature offered it, but he didn’t expect that. Lucidonius was too sharp for simpler ploys to work.

“Oh, you’re hoping I’ll wear myself out a