The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,434

filling himself with power.

Dazen, I wish you could see this. You would’ve loved it.

He sketched out the arcs in his mind. It was actually going to work a lot better in the dark. Half pyroturgy, half luxin imbued with will—and a shit ton of black powder.

Looking one last time at his people, he said, “Pleasure. Honor. All the shit. Keep fighting. And get back farther. This is most likely just gonna blow me up.”

He crouched to jump and then sheathed his entire body in red luxin. He looked over at Lorenço, who was standing by the black powder launch pad with the linstock in his hand.

‘Titan of the Great Fountain’ my ass.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “Now.”

With a loud report, the first of the powder barrels was flung sky-high.

Chapter 135

“I’m . . . not dead?” Dazen said, opening his eyes. “I’m not dead!”

“Yet,” Orholam said.

Dazen glowered at Him. “Well, that’s not a very nice joke after what I just went through.”

“It’s funnier in other realms.”

That didn’t make him feel any better. “When You say ‘yet’ what kind of time frame are You operating on?”

Orholam shook His head.

“I mean, I feel like I’ve been dead for three days,” Dazen said.

Orholam lifted an eyebrow.

“I suppose I have You to thank for this? Being alive, I mean? In the more immediate sense, I mean, not in the sense of ‘I made all this shit and that means you, too, especially the shit part.’ ”

“I want you to remember this, a little later,” Orholam said.

“Which ‘this’? This, the You saving me, or this this, my impertinence?” Dazen asked. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

As the last fog of the black departed from him, Dazen noticed that the tower he was kneeling on was now awash with water, not blood. And the tower’s entire shell of black luxin that the blood had covered over was gone. Dazen now knelt on radiant white luxin like what he’d seen on the other side of the Great Mirror of Waking—an entire massive edifice of the luxin he’d so long believed mythical.

“Are you ready to continue?” Orholam asked.

“Continue?” Dazen turned his hands palms up. “I thought that was my penance. What, that didn’t count?”

“It counted for quite a lot.”

Dazen expelled a breath. “Thank You, by the by,” he said, standing with great effort. He was exhausted.

“You’re welcome.”

“What’s next?” he asked. The waning wick of his life was already smoldering on its last wax. “I can only draft two colors—if you call black and white ‘colors’—Wow, am I scattered after that.”

He looked at Orholam. Then at the tower. Then at Orholam.

“This one is going to be death, isn’t it?”

“No, no. This will be—”

“Oh, good!”

“—a good penance,” Orholam said, nodding. “And life for many.”

Dazen wrinkled his brow. “You say that as if we’re somehow in agreement.”

“Promachos, hurling black luxin across half the breadth of the satrapies was a well-nigh lethal and well-nigh impossible magical test—”

“Yes! It was! Thank You!”

“—that allowed you to do exactly what you wanted.”

Dazen had no answer for that.

“Doing impossible magic to overcome ludicrous odds and smash my enemies?” he said. “That’s what I do!” So maybe he did have an answer.

“Did,” Orholam said quietly. It was the gentlest whipcrack Dazen had ever heard. It had a sound of finality to it.

Dazen had the sudden and too-slow-arriving insight that Orholam was accustomed to having the last word.

Orholam continued, “There was never a question of your will or your ability, Dazen, so such a test is hardly a test at all, much less a penance.”

“So You’re saying this is the one that’s going to be hard for me,” Dazen said.

“Yes.”

“As if the first one was so easy,” Dazen groused.

“The first counted as an answer to your greatest question: ‘Could you ever be the man you were before?’ ”

In a tone inappropriate from a son to his father, Dazen snarled, “And what’s this gonna answer?”

“My question is, ‘Is that the man you want to be?’ ”

Dazen’s stomach turned, and fear hit him like cold water chilling his throat, icing his belly, and filling every limb with doubt. What could such a test possibly be? “Just when I was starting to like You,” he said. His bravado was thin, but on a cold night a thin cloak is better than none, and this night was starting to feel cold indeed, in the gale of Orholam’s gaze. “What do You want me to do?”

“Touch the mirror.”

I already did that, Dazen thought. But he was smart enough not to say it, barely. He moved over