The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,365

closeness, he couldn’t get any force into it.

“You think I don’t know?” Gavin demanded.

Lucidonius only drove him in a circle with little steps.

The sun had swollen fat with the day’s many injuries. It limped now along the last of its lonely path home, hemorrhaging gouts of light, spattering streaky cirrus clouds with arterial glory, seeking some safety, but its horizon-home held only its warm, waiting deathbed.

Lucidonius said nothing. His eyes were dimming with the dimming of the sun, and though they still burned, Gavin’s gamble was paying off: Lucidonius was weakening.

He fought with merely a man’s strength now, while Gavin swelled stronger. From beneath the smooth skin of his practiced social proprieties, the day’s battle had made his long-sunken veins of rage jut forth, declaiming his righteous fury at the god who lied.

“The mirror!” Gavin snarled. They were within a few steps of it. Lucidonius had ever angled them back toward it, over the course of the year’s longest day. “I know what it is.”

He was a black drafter. Born that way. Born special. To have that ability wasn’t a curse. Nor a blessing, either, for to call it a blessing assumed there is one who gives the blessing. This simply was, an accident of birth or propitious parentage or both. It was simply another way Gavin was different, better than others, yes, he’d not be afraid to say it now. Better, but also isolated from them thereby. He was also unhappier than those blind, those deceived.

His way was harder. He could see what others couldn’ t—that wasn’t fair. But now, through the black gem—which was nothing less than a physical manifestation of all that made Gavin Gavin—he saw that the mirror itself was an elaborate trap for him. The godling had come from the mirror. It was a portal to his home. It was where he had power.

Gavin said, “It’s not just mockery, is it? It’s much—”

Lucidonius must have thought Gavin would push into his home. Gavin would invade, to try to find what had given Lucidonius the power of a god and take it. But the god would have all his defenses in there.

The mirror would be where Gavin could be trapped, slain.

Gavin took some breaths as Lucidonius shifted his grip on a sweaty shoulder, trying to get some advantage. “It’s even more insidious than that, isn’t it?”

“You see punishment where there is mercy,” Lucidonius said, as if Gavin were a tremendous disappointment.

“Mercy? You’ve arranged this! It’s all perfectly designed for me. Even you. Your appearance itself! I’m the Prism! You think I don’t know what an elaborate deception looks like?!”

“On the contrary.” Lucidonius breathed raggedly into his ear. “You are the very son of deception. And it’s time for that to end.”

And then he collapsed.

Gavin staggered into him, and then over him, tripping and tumbling over the man. But Lucidonius grabbed his leg as Gavin fell, and wrenched on it, twisting to slam him into the ground.

There was a strain and shooting pain as Gavin’s hip almost popped out of its socket, but Lucidonius’s hands slipped. Gavin’s back hit the ground, and Lucidonius was pulled off balance. His grip had now slid down to Gavin’s foot. But he didn’t let go. He was pulled down, losing his balance, aiming a knee—

Gavin caught him with both feet.

Then he launched the man off him toward the mirror, kicking both legs as hard as he could.

Lucidonius slammed into the Great Mirror, and the entire surface wobbled and deformed. His whole body seemed to sink into it a little.

Instead of leaping for the sword, Gavin leapt forward, trying to press his advantage. He punched Lucidonius in the stomach, but the muscles there were taut, tensed for the impact. Gavin’s left-handed uppercut missed its huge swing at Lucidonius’s chin, and he stumbled forward.

To avoid even touching the mirror, Gavin slammed his forearm into Lucidonius’s chest in order to regain his balance. But as the mirror rippled once from the force of Lucidonius’s back smacking into it again, rather than trying to break free, the man hugged Gavin’s forearm to his chest.

He rolled sideways, trying to throw Gavin into the mirror.

Gavin threw up his right hand to stop himself—

Once, on a bitterly cold morning in the mountains of Paria when he was first Prism, Gavin had followed the blue wight he was hunting out onto a frozen pond. Ever since a blue had murdered his brother Sevastian, he’d always held a special hatred for them. It had made him foolish that day. The