The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,440

would live, while the brave died.

Dazen could wait no longer.

Houses shattered and tore apart, the earth rent, a spire shot into the sky, and then the superviolet mirror slashed through the village. The brave fell and the rubble of their own homes crushed and buried them.

He flashed back to his own body, staggering.

No, not yet. He’d taken seven colors, but there were nine. He sank deep into the mirror to feel for those last two, but found only a single trace: a bane atop Hellmount, far, far to the west, pulsing like the sun, its slopes littered with the burnt bones of the dead who’d tried to approach, to claim it for themselves. But there was no mirror nor lightwell for that great chi bane, nor anywhere else. Nor for paryl. Even the ingenuity of the drafters of old had never subdued those colors.

No wonder the Chromeria had always feared those colors. Light cannot be chained indeed. Not all of it anyway. The mystery always escapes us.

Finished, he came back to his body again.

He felt disconcertingly wonderful, but he knew it was a false strength now. He’d lifted weights with the strength of a thousand men, but his muscles were going to give out on him without warning at any moment.

The whole thing must have taken only a few minutes, because even as he gasped on the sweet night air, he could feel the distant Great Mirrors still finishing turning, still settling their beams onto the Great Mirror behind him.

And then, as more strength came into his hands than perhaps had ever been held by one person, he realized that he was deeply and truly fucked.

The Mirror of Waking began to spin. Suspended on nothing at all that he could see, it began to turn into a blur, on several invisible axes. The air filled with its sound, and wind whipped over him.

Dazen felt the lightwells under each of the seven Great Mirrors in their far-spread satrapies slowly uncorking themselves like shaken bottles of bubbly wine. They would blast perfect, pure light in their respective spectra, pulsing in time with each rotation of the Great Mirror behind Dazen. Thus, basically simultaneously, Dazen could direct light from every arc of the Seven Satrapies to any point and to as many points as he wished.

He had under his will as much power to distribute as he could hope.

But no matter how good it felt, he was damn near dead. Drafting white was like sprinting downhill—deceptively effortless, so long as he kept his feet under him. Giving him this much power was like giving that downhill sprinter a hard shove in the back.

He’d done what no other drafter could have done. No other drafter in the world could’ve handled that much magic. No other drafter could’ve reached so far. Other than Kip, no one could’ve lifted so much as a single one of those towers alone.

He’d raised five.

But now? Even if he could handle the light, somehow feeling the colors needed despite his color-blindness, even if he could survive more than another few seconds of so much power, the Chromeria was far beyond the horizon. The mirrors themselves could settle into their old grooves to find one another, but it would be impossibly fine work to strike at a single foe on the island or to take the mirror array and use it himself.

Dazen couldn’t strike down wights from here. He’d broken the bane’s control of magic, but he couldn’t fight those floating islands from here, couldn’t unwind their magic and drown the wights in their thousands. Not from here.

He couldn’t save the Chromeria.

He was a runner collapsing on the last lap, begging that someone carry him to the finish line.

Without warning, the colors bubbled forth from their long imprisonment. Dazen didn’t know what else to do but throw them toward the Chromeria. First, they effervesced across the sky, but then he wrestled them back to a tight beam. One last act of white will.

In the now tightening spray of colors, he felt a vortex reaching out, giving him a point to aim for. It was an answering Will, some desperate or brilliant drafter who intuited that now, in the middle of the night, after the wash of black luxin had freed the skies, she or he should mount the Prism’s mirror array.

Maybe there was some hope after all—

Dazen felt the colors sucked in, suddenly. One two threefourfi—all of them!

A full-spectrum polychrome.

A man—yes, it felt like a man—of chthonic strength and titanic will.

Across