The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,78

her forehead was tied.

The Mighty vibrated with tension like a bowstring drawn full to the lips, and held . . . held.

Slowly, she lifted not just the veil, not just the band around her forehead, but what seemed at first to be her entire scalp.

No, it was a cap, a wig into which the red hair was woven.

Revealed under the wig, her natural brown hair was patchy, her scalp mottled by open sores. She set aside the veil and wig and lifted her face.

And suddenly, even as he heard the sharp intake of breath through teeth beside him as Tisis saw and stifled a gasp, Kip’s heart was moved not to disgust or fear but to pity.

Though she was not yet thirty years old, the Keeper’s face was covered with weeping sores and distended by tumors. No wonder she kept herself wrapped like a corpse for the pyre—she would surely go to one soon. Everywhere, even where it was swollen by tumors, her skin gleamed. Little points of gritty golden light burned within her distressed skin everywhere, as if an exploding shell had pierced her with a hundred thousand fragments of ever-burning shrapnel.

It had a fatal beauty to it, pulsing brightly in time with her every heartbeat.

The Keeper held herself defiantly, though, apparently impervious to her wounds and to Kip’s scrutiny as much as to her assured demise.

It was a resolve Kip knew well.

She wasn’t horrified at her own ugliness nor dismayed by the warm death humming glee in her bones. She was stalwart despite what must be constant pain: she was like a runner who’d be damned if she would falter this close to the finish line.

And Kip knew with his heart: This wasn’t a dying woman who happened to hold an important position. This was a woman dying because of her position. This was the warrior who’d volunteered for a fatal mission; this was a high priestess who’d offered herself for the sacrifice, approaching the altar and the knife. But she wasn’t going to go quietly.

She unbuckled the fabric-covered plates from her forearms and then her broad, heavy skirts, and stood in her simple tunic and trousers, creased from her overgarments.

“Chi,” Kip blurted. “You’re a chi drafter, aren’t you?”

Puzzlement flickered in her angry eyes. “Why would you say that? You haven’t even touched chi since you got here. I’ve been watching your eyes and your soulbrand from the moment you arrived. I heard about the lightstorm out on the waters. They say you pulled apart paryl and chi twisted into waterspouts, drafting both at the same time. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. Or is that a lie meant to pass to legend?”

Soulbrand?

“Do you know a lot about lies . . . Priestess?” Kip asked instead.

She blinked as if struck.

“I’m not here to give answers, but to hear them,” Kip said.

“Not lies,” she said, defensive, bitter. “Secrets. Secrets we must keep lest the Chromeria put us on Orholam’s Glare.”

Kip had no idea what a masterful drafter of chi could do, but it would be invisible to the Mighty, and to Kip—unless he acted immediately. The danger hadn’t passed. Indeed, stripping a secret truth naked risked shame, and shame could spur violence.

What he did next was exactly the wrong thing to do. It was exactly the opposite of what Andross or Gavin would have done, but Kip waved the Mighty off.

Though the Mighty barely shifted their positions, the air changed immediately.

The Keeper noticed. The golden burning of her skin dimmed; her pulse slowed. But her shoulders slumped. “We only want to use the gift Orholam gave us,” she said. “Drafting kills every drafter. But our color makes us ugly first, so ours is forbidden? Ours kills us faster, yes—in five or ten years rather than ten or twenty—but if we studied chi as every other color is studied, could we not learn what is safe? Why can we not bring our gifts in offering to the Lord of Lights, too? Why can we not serve mankind openly, as other drafters do? You, Lord Guile, have a wealth of colors. If you never draft chi again, you can serve with eight other colors. I have only the one. Are we chi drafters so monstrous that Orholam would have us destroyed? Or can God see beauty where the Magisterium sees only shame?”

“Tell me,” Kip said. He looked down at his hands. He’d known, somehow. That ugly heat in his joints when he’d drafted chi—it had felt like he was