The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,41

most dangerous. Orange is wily, but hates direct conflict. Red and sub-red must be manipulated but are too chaotic to be threatening and are easily read and therefore misled. Paryl is profoundly influenced by any color at all, and therefore any magic. It can easily be made a puppet. But a paryl god could be as dangerous as a yellow, given a century or two. If her mind and will weren’t destroyed by a long tutelage of being controlled by every magic, one such might invert her weakness and attempt to control every magic instead.

“A less intelligent full-spectrum polychrome would have made himself the yellow god, hoping to balance all the others. Instead, you seek something harder, to take power over all the gods at once, because once held, that’s a power you could actually keep. You will become a king of djinn. Or, apologies, a god of gods.”

“Thank you,” the White King said.

She nodded.

“And you, you hardly fear me at all?”

“You’ll have better than my fear: you’ll know you can trust me.”

“Really? You bear me no ill feeling for when that rash fool Phyros Seaborn tried to chain you with the black luxin?”

She shook her head, baffled. If Phyros Seaborn had put the living black-luxin necklace on her neck, it would have plunged through her very spine if she’d tried to remove it or if she’d disobeyed the White King. She’d killed Phyros for trying to make her a slave. “Yours was a logical effort. Exactly what you should’ve attempted at the time. In truth, I resent you implying Phyros did it without your orders more than I resent the attempt.”

“A mistake,” the White King said. “I was curious to see how far you’d embraced your godhood. A mortal would be furious with me.”

It struck her oddly. “I remember a peculiar joy in being carried along at times by fury. It made me feel powerful.” She shrugged. “That’s no longer necessary. Nor is you chaining me.”

“Oh?”

“The power of order for one of my metaphysical nature is proportional to my power absolutely.”

It took him a moment to understand. “Ah. Ferrilux doesn’t lie.”

“I suppose that’s close enough,” she said. If one disdains nuance.

But apparently she’d not kept her face blank.

His lip curled.

She remembered again that though she had left most emotion behind, he had most certainly not. Her statements of fact could be taken as insufferable arrogance. How tiresome. She sighed. “What it means is that if I take an oath, I could break it, in my current state. But doing so would set me back two to three centuries. During all that time I would be vulnerable.”

“And in two or three centuries?” he asked with a smile that showed no contraction of the orbicularis oculi. It was not the part of his face that had been burned; thus the tell was true.

“In two or three centuries I hope I shall never be in such a vulnerable position that I shall need to take an oath.”

He gave a thin smile, as if she were a particularly dense child. “What I’m asking is, will you be able to break an oath you make, then?”

“An oath bonds one’s will and one’s nature in a temporalized and external rubric,” she said.

He was nodding, but he had a blank look.

“That’s the whole point of an oath,” she said. How could a man of intelligence not see this immediately? “All liars weaken themselves, but breaking an oath would break me. Besides,” she said, “we’ll give each other plenty of space.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“When you win, King Koios, because of the way”—‘the stupid way,’ she didn’t say; she had to speak truth, but she didn’t have to speak all the truth all the time—“you’ve chosen to wipe out most of your warriors and all the Chromeria’s, you’ll be very, very weak for a decade or two. Stronger than everyone else, however, so your weakness won’t matter. Unless . . .”

“Unless?” His eyebrows knit.

“You’ve heard the Everdark Gates are open? It’s true. And I can tell you that the Angari wave-tamers have been truly fascinated this past year by what’s happening in their seas, and by what’s happening here. They’re hungry for new lands to conquer, and they believe that the Gates’ failure is a sign of favor from their gods.”

“I’ll happily fight their gods with my own.”

“Then you’ll die happily. The first wave they’re amassing is three times the size of all your armies together, I should say. And I mean your armies now, before all the