The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,93

all if they find out we have it. Call us blasphemers, heretics, apostates, pagans. Blindfold and burn us, or put out our eyes, or put us on the Glare. All we’ve wanted is to be accepted back into the fold.”

“No. You wanted to keep power, too.”

“We save lives with our training!” she protested.

And yet here she was dying, and dying young.

But she went on. “We’ll be anathema. No one will be allowed to draft chi ever again, on pain of death. That’s what it means, if you tell them.”

She sighed again, but something about her seemed relieved. An honest woman indeed. But then, chi was ever so good at exposing secrets; Kip shouldn’t have expected a chi drafter would love keeping them.

The Keeper walked to the globe. She touched it, and it opened like a flower. She reached a gloved hand inside and pulled out something smaller than her thumb. The air around her hand shimmered as if she held an invisible fire, but as she moved it, it spat out sparks of liquid-gold fire. The thing itself was hard to see at all from this distance, but it was much smaller than he’d expected. Kip had seen larger stones set in women’s rings.

“Is that . . .” Cruxer started. “Is that solid chi? I didn’t think such a thing existed! Chi luxin?!”

She shook her head. “Lord Guile,” the Keeper said, her voice taking on a formal tone, “Luíseach, you have come to bring light, which means bringing shameful secrets to the light. Here is both our light and our shameful secret. Behold that which slays us, and that without which this city and my order is nothing. Behold the chi bane.”

“Excellent,” Kip said. “I’ll take it.”

Chapter 24

Gavin had charged toward a likely death several dozen times. This was different.

In the early part of the Prisms’ War, the hours before every battle had been exhausting: the anxious mental rehearsals and the fears of cowardice and shaming himself publicly, the fears of death, and worse—in the mind of the young man he had been—the fear of living maimed or broken, which he’d thought were the same thing. There had been the righting of relationships: Just, you know, in case. There had been the writing of wills. There had been the selfish prayers; it was the closest he’d ever come to real piety.

For all the damnable emotional and mental sweat of it, it had served one purpose at least: the heightened state of fear and exhilaration had come effortlessly, giving incredible energy and even strength, allowing him to shrug off pain and fatigue, though at the cost of tunnel vision.

Over time, most of that had fallen away. It felt oddly like a loss.

Fear and excitement were gone, replaced with a butcher’s efficiency. Today’s fight was today’s work. I know what to do. I know what I control and what I don’t.

And while he always knew the possible costs, he’d had little time or energy to get worked up about it. There were things to do, things that would keep him alive.

Today was different. This was different.

He had nothing to do. He could only listen to the call of the overseer below his feet, keeping the slaves’ rowing tempo. Eighteen months ago, that insistent beat would have meant terror and torn calluses and burning legs and lungs and new manacle cuts and blood. It now meant only the passage of time.

He had none of the old careful mental cataloging of his arsenal of luxin weapons to decide what best would match this much available light, this enemy, this battlefield, this likely enemy tactic. He had no generals to consult, no messengers to hear out or to send out, no scouts’ reports, no orders to give, nor anyone who would listen to them if he tried.

As their galleon, the Golden Mean, shot across the waves, driven by both oar and wind, Gavin had no one to pick out of the enemy line and say, ‘That one shall be mine first.’

All there was to do was wait, powerless.

Gavin’s chest went tight as the rowers’ drums, pounding, pounding.

There should have been some kind of towering storm. There wasn’t. Today was the kind of day that makes landsmen romanticize the lives of sailors. The sun blazing overhead, the sea light and bright and clear and shallow. Blinding azure and turquoise and sapphire, Gavin guessed. And many other jewel colors denied him now.

He wished he could see them just one last time.

Under Captain Gunner’s direction, the ship was