The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,426

felt her.

He wouldn’t have thought he could know anyone from this distance, but he couldn’t have missed her, not if she’d been twice so far away. Her will burned in the evaporating cloud he’d thrown, like a lighthouse burning white in the black of a lost captain’s night.

Karris!

* * *

Karris’s Blackguards and all the other soldiers they’d recruited on the spot had made it halfway to Orholam’s Glare when they’d been jumped by the White King’s platoon of assassins. Forty men didn’t seem like they’d be a problem against her hundred and fifty, especially when fifty of them were her Blackguards—who’d appeared from all over the island, escaping from the Chromeria and abandoning Zymun, or the promachos, or the Colors to find and join their Iron White.

Forty men wouldn’t have been a problem. Forty wights was a huge problem. They were clad head to toe in white, gloved and hooded to hide what colors they drafted. In moments, she was in a fight for her life.

And no fair fight. Every one of the Blackguards except the monochrome blues were feeling it. The bane had tightened their grip. Anyone who had the least luxin left in their bodies had to fight against luxin locking up inside them—and every drafter except the youngest had some luxin permanently in their bodies.

Even those who’d carefully drained their power with hellstone were slowed. The best off fought as if in a high wind. Those worse off fought as if in water, sluggish, their old strength turned against them.

But then she felt something. The air turned colder, somehow murky, as if a dry fog had rolled in. The city darkened perceptibly. Night had arrived on sprinting feet instead of its usual gentle wings. But, in the fighting, everyone around her missed it.

She stepped back from the fight, back into the mass of Blackguards here to protect her.

There was something familiar—

She gasped.

Gavin!

She opened her will to him, and she knew. He was dying.

She felt his strength faltering, fraying. Her heart froze.

Live, damn you, live! You come back to me!

* * *

But it was too late. He was dying. He was failing her, again.

He could feel her weighed down by the bane’s oppressive power. Her light dimmed, her limbs heavy from the very luxin that lived in her, shackled, unable to defend herself from the death he knew was stalking her. He could feel the lock and knew how he might release her from it, but from this distance, it was like feeling the teeth of a key with a fingertip.

No.

No, not while he had breath.

He released all else and clung to her, his lighthouse, the white in the foggy seas of his black.

* * *

Karris was frozen, even amid the clash of arms around her. Gill Greyling, blood splashed across his face, was shouting something at her. ‘Retreat. We’ve failed. We can’t . . .’

Mere words.

It was like they didn’t even notice.

Don’t do it, my love. Please, no. Gavin, what are you doing?

There was something fatal and final she could feel in Gavin’s will.

Please, no. Forgive me, my love, but I gave up on you once—don’t you dare do it, too. Don’t you dare!

And then he was gone.

* * *

“More darkness,” Dazen gasped as he dropped the luxin. He pulled his hand angrily out of Orholam’s. “I need more black! More black!”

The sky above was dotted now with thousands of stars, shining, brilliant. The descending darkness should have given him more source, but it only made those points of defiant light shine all the brighter.

Orholam said, “Even eagles must sometimes dive into a lake to hunt, no matter that it momentarily destroys the lake’s reflection of the sky.”

“What are You even talking about? Reflection of the—”

Dazen looked at the sword stuck into the black crust covering the tower.

When he’d stepped through to the other side of the mirror, the tower in that other world had been white. It had been as it ought to be, maybe as it had been on this side of the mirror before Vician’s Sin, before the relentless tide of the Chromeria’s murders.

Surely now every bit of the black tower was covered in a great cascade of blood flowing from the Mirror of Waking.

There was an entire tower’s worth of unadulterated black luxin at Dazen’s feet. Pure, concentrated darkness, and the blood of martyrs connected him with all of it.

Dazen plunged his hands again into the flowing blood, smeared it up the blade until it made an unbroken line to his hand.

He gazed