The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,482

or I’d draw the wrong kind of attention. Not that I’m eager to draft just now. You ever run a long race and it wipes you out, and then a few days later you think you’ve recovered and you run again and then you realize, no, you really, really haven’t recovered? That’s how I feel about drafting right now. Like I don’t know if I tore some muscles or if they’re really tired, but either way, I hurt like hell.”

“What are you talking about?” Ironfist said. “Who told you not to draft? What ‘attention’?”

“I’m trying to awaken the white luxin in the sword. I know it’s there.” He stared up at the ceiling. “C’mon, you told me white luxin isn’t overcome by black.”

He tossed the chunk of white luxin to Ironfist, then passed him the sword. “Here, you try.”

“Try what?” Ironfist demanded, but before the words were out of his mouth a scintillating shine flashed down the length of the blade in every color. The muted seven stars surfaced through the darkness and now shone as hot in the blade as Orholam’s Eye at noon. In the light of the blade, every color in the room suddenly glowed brighter, sharper, and more real.

“Great! That’ll do,” Dazen said. He took the sword from Ironfist’s limp hand and quickly wrapped it back up in the cloths, as if worried someone would see it, though there was no one else in the room, and no windows, and no one who even knew where it was hidden.

“Huh,” Dazen said, now that it was fully covered once more. “Guess that’s what I get for thinking I’m so special. Good job. You can probably put away the white-luxin chunk now. It might draw attention, too. They weren’t terribly specific.”

“Who?” Ironfist looked at him, but he looked more troubled than in awe. “What have we just done?”

“Not ‘we.’ You. You just fixed the sword. It’s what I figured out. Before Vician’s Sin, drafters used to retire. The Knife passed through a drafter’s heart, purging her of the buildup of toxic luxin but also taking away her drafting. You ever hear about this?”

“Some.”

“Between the drafter’s conscience and the Prism’s judgment and Orholam Himself, other things might happen: a blue drafter who’d misused his Color would find himself blind to blue, where one who’d used his Color well might find himself granted more drafting ability even than before—even more years, or an additional color. A faithful artist might find herself made a superchromat, or a traumatized woman might find her memories eased or even erased. And lastly, some few would be judged worthy of death for what they’d done with their gifts. And the sword would then blind them to all color forever—or to all light forever, with death. It prefigured the final judgment of the afterlife, not only for drafters but also for those who watched, and they called it the Freeing, because once judgment is rendered, we’re freed from fear, and because so often mercy prevailed. You know about Vician’s Sin now?”

“The others told me, yeah.”

“After Vician’s Sin, the white luxin went dormant in the blades—all of them. The Knives would still kill and steal, but unbalanced by white, the Knife almost always killed, and it never gave gifts. Orholam sent prophets to call the Chromeria to repent, but they beat and killed the prophets, and when Vician finally died, the Chromeria began murdering innocents in order to make their own Prisms and to cover up their sins. The stories kept leaking out, so they commissioned their most fanatical as luxors to suppress the truth, even wielding black luxin to erase lines from books and from memories. Handling the black luxin repeatedly corrupted the luxors more than they already were, whereupon the purgers themselves were purged and the crime deemed complete.

“The Chromeria henceforth was a house of hypocrisy, its jealousy for power held side by side—sometimes within the same heart—with all its acts of mercy and tending to the indigent and sick.”

“And you think we just fixed it?” Ironfist asked.

“We? You.”

“Why me? I didn’t do anything!”

“Despite all your doubts, you held on to the white luxin, didn’t you?”

“Doesn’t seem like enough, does it?” Ironfist rubbed his lower lip. “You really believe Orholam intervenes personally?”

Dazen snorted. “How’s your prayer go? ‘God hears. God sees. God cares. God saves’? I more than believe it now. I know it.”

Ironfist looked away. “Do you know this word ‘ebenezer’?”

“What’s that, Old Abornean . . . some kind of stone?”

“The word’s Old Abornean,