The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,439

earth split, tree roots tore, and in a fountain of dirt, a spire shot into the sky.

Dazen laughed as the magic poured through him.

He glanced in wonder and awe at Orholam beside him and found Him smiling His own delight and encouragement: ‘Go on!’

Dazen sank into it once more. This was his old strength, doubled and redoubled. He felt virile, potent, alive in a way he’d not felt in years. The joy of drafting came back to him. It was like, after being buried alive and breathing as shallowly as possible, he’d suddenly broken free of the prison earth and was taking the deepest breath of his life. He was strong.

No, ‘strong’ didn’t cover it. He had the might of a Titan.

A vast disk shot into the air, and then, with a pulse of magic that had lain dormant waiting for this moment, it vibrated, and all the dirt and detritus of long ages jumped off its surface and it gleamed as sharply clear as the day it had been made. On protected gears and belts undecaying, on luxin and old infusions of will, the mirror swiveled to answer Dazen’s call.

And his will shot away again. To an abandoned temple atop the first soaring butte of the Red Cliffs outside Idoss.

Then to a high valley between green round-shouldered mountains in Ilyta, where the superviolet mirror had been buried beneath the banks of a river. Bandits had set up a camp on this forbidden ground, a camp that had become a village. If he raised this mirror without warning, houses would be destroyed, and perhaps innocents kidnapped for ransom or slavery or even children crushed.

Dazen shook the earth hard, laid a hex foreboding doom, and moved on.

In Paria, near two vast and trunkless legs of stone, the blue mirror lay hidden under the lone and level sands. A brickwork floor opened smoothly on centuries-old hinges, swallowing half a dune effortlessly, and the mirror rose.

In Ruthgar, the green mirror rose from the heart of a butte over the verdant grasslands outside the once-great city of Melos, setting a nearby herd of iron bulls stampeding.

Back to Blood Forest, where for the first time he realized that though the well of white luxin might be limitless, his own endurance was not. He blinked, and wondered how long it had been since he’d blinked last.

The children had scattered. Some still watched from a distance, clinging to a wary young man near Kip’s age as if he were a father to them all. A safe enough distance.

Dazen knew what he was doing now, and he pulled the Great Mirror to its groove. This one was a different design, though, from some other people, some other time, claimed and retrofitted by later conquerors but not made new.

This mirror was connected, communal somehow. It spoke to . . . trees? He felt root speak to root, and his will was drawn from this mirror to others, deeper into the forest, all the way to Dúnbheo and Green Haven and other, smaller mirrors. It wasn’t a luxin-based web, though, so Dazen couldn’t raise all of them directly.

Instead, he turned the first mirror toward them—and they answered! The Great Mirrors of Dúnbheo and Green Haven didn’t even need to be raised; they’d never been hidden in the first place. Some of the smaller mirrors were broken, nodes that lived only in memory, but others had rested shielded within the trunks of great trees. Now coiled roots pushed out, and others, stretched, pulled taut. Working like ligaments and muscles, with no gears anywhere, the tree roots worked together to heave several dozen mirrors across the satrapy into position.

Had this been the work of some empire Dazen had never heard of? Was this the magic of the pygmy peoples?

But there was no time to study the marvel, or even to wonder at it. Dazen felt his body gasping, his own strength stretching him too far.

Back to Ilyta, where some people had scattered, but others had come bearing their muskets and long knives. Bandits, Dazen hoped. But maybe just the sons of bandits, only trying to defend their homes from something that filled others with dread.

Brave men, regardless.

Dazen shook the earth once more. One last wordless warning to people who could die in a war they didn’t even know about.

Some fled, but others stood their ground, shaking their spears as if some monster stomped between their homes. You’ve built your home on the monstrous, you fools. As did we. The cowards who ran