The Broken Eye (Lightbringer, #3)

by Brent Weeks

She looked down and lifted a bit of her haik from over her thigh. There was a small hole in the fabric. But Gavin’s eyes were drawn lower, where blood was pooling around her feet. A lot of blood. Like an artery had been cut. She wobbled, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed.

“You can kiss the bald spot where my fat thighs rub together,” Kip said. He threw open the bedroom door.

“Done,” Andross said. “With one caveat: my card, my sons’ cards, and my wife’s are mine. If you even look at them before you hand them over, this deal is moot.

“My part is finished,” she says. “But to make this cloak a shimmercloak, you need to find yourself a Prism willing to give you his life and Will.” She barks a laugh. “Unless you’ve got some other splitter of light at hand?”

“What the hell, Winsen?” Kip asked. “There were nearly a hundred people here. How’d you even make that shot, with that many innocents in the way?” Winsen looked at Cruxer, then at Teia, and finally at Kip. Teia had killed before, and it had left her shaken and weepy. She’d been stunned at first, sure, not able to understand or process what had happened exactly. The finality of it had sunk in immediately, so she was slow to judge those who seemed cold when they killed. It wasn’t the same for everyone. But Winsen’s eyes didn’t have that numb look in them that said he hadn’t processed the killing yet, that he was stunned. His eyes were clear. Buskin had been a bad man. He needed to be killed. Winsen had done it. What more was there to say or think about? Winsen shrugged, puzzled. “I didn’t care if I missed.”

“She’s a Seer. She can tell all sorts of things. But there’s an order of assassins that wears these special cloaks. It makes them invisible to her gift. She’s seen that in many futures she dies, but she can’t see how, which has never happened to her before. So we believe one of these assassins must be after her. Me coming here likely means that the woman I love will die. That’s how much I care for you. I came for you, knowing it might cost me her. Fare well, daughter. Orholam’s light shine upon you.” “I’m

Phyros stood, and as his back turned, she slid her hand under the edge of the table and found it. A knife. A knife? When she had four pistols, a sword, and another knife on her belt? This was what her father gave her? Nonetheless, she swept it into her hand, palming it, and followed.

“Marry me, Kip.” A sound like someone was strangling a small animal came from somewhere. Oh, Kip’s throat. She blushed harder. “Just think about it?” “What?!” Then she daintily dashed up the steps out of the bath, snatched Kip’s bathing robe from its hook, and ran tiptoe out of the room. Between her words and her nudity, Kip was speechless. “Hey, wait!” he shouted finally. “I don’t know how to get out of here! There’s only that one robe!” Then he realized he, a man, had just shouted—in the women’s baths. Idiot! He jumped out of the water and dashed in the opposite direction from where Tisis had disappeared. Naked turtle-bear coming through!

How many lethal secrets sat here? Papers and notes and ink and even a number of Nine Kings cards—funny, Teia didn’t know the old lady played.

White has nine kings cards

Zee Oakenshield blinks to clear her eyes. There are enemy armies on both sides of the Great River. She feels a pang at the sight. It isn’t fear. Regret. Should have tried harder. Shouldn’t have spit those witticisms in Darien Guile’s face. The flush of pleasure at besting one of the smartest men in the world, the laughter of the

Atasifusta. That was the wood. The wood that burned forever.

Delauria. Kip Guile. Lard Guile. Breaker. Godslayer. Perhaps Diakoptês?

The masks slammed back in place, and the immortal said, “I am Abaddon, the King, one of the Two Hundred who marched out of the Tyrant’s palaces and went to make our own way in this wilderness, and a thousand worlds like it. I am a lover of queens and a father of gods. I am the Day Star, ushered from the heavens in glory.”

This woman isn’t Tazerwalt. This isn’t his wife. This is her handmaid, Hada, dressed in her lady’s garments. He stands, trembling, an image flashing through his head, a slave girl rushing him. A horrid intuition. A sickness unto death. A stone in his gullet. He finds the room. Tazerwalt. His wife, disguised as a slave. She’d been alive, unharmed by the Tiru attackers, hidden, until he’d come. A slave girl had rushed him. A slave girl, loyal to the Tiru, surely. Thinking it an attack, he’d slashed her neck as she threw herself at him, and he’d moved on, heedless. Her eyes are open, questioning, and dead. So very dead. He falls to his knees, screaming. Mind tearing, separating from himself. He sees a man, caked in blood, screaming. His screams sound no different than any of a hundred others he’s heard all night. His throat is tearing, unable to contain the force of his suffering. Kip

Darkness is the broken eye, the ever-blind unseeing. Darkness is less substantial than smoke, and even a dim mirror is brighter than the void.”

The Color Prince needed time, so he was using this time to divide his enemies. And the Nuqaba was deluded enough to think that if only she had total power over Paria, she could use that time better than the Color Prince could use his time to gather resources from five satrapies.

“Because you’re young, and you haven’t learned the difference between a twinge of conscience and a twinge of fear. In other words, ass from elbow.” “Oh, no,” Kip said. “In my time under your tutelage, I’ve become quite adept in recognizing an ass.”

Karris wished she could try it out, but drafting at all risked destroying the disguise. Cursed pale skin. She would undo the good months of abstaining from drafting had done.

Teia looked at Kip, and he looked at her. She was glowing with joy and morning light, her skin radiant, her eyes holding a million colors Kip had never seen. And they were flying, and they were holding each other, and they were safe, and they were alive, and they were breathing pure glory, and Orholam’s Eye gazed on them with the approval that only young lovers know, and in that moment Kip knew the difference between love and infatuation, and love and hunger, and love and the longing not to go unloved. And he wanted to know nothing more than this, and he wanted this moment to freeze forever and thought to cease. He kissed her. And she kissed him. And it was infatuation, and it was hunger, and it was longing to be loved, and it was an all-consuming fire so hot it devoured worry and loneliness and fear and time and being and thought itself. They kissed, embracing, flying, and for a hundred heartbeats, there was no war, no death, no pain, nothing hard, nothing terrible, nothing but warmth and acceptance.

The dwarf Caelia Green of new Tyrea seemed like she could be a natural ally. Gavin would need those in the days to come. Karris should have already made her acquaintance. Cathán Golden Briar was the newest Color, stepping into Arys Sub-red’s place after she had died in childbirth. Cathán was a cousin of both Arys Greenveil and Ela Jorvis, and therefore to Ana Jorvis, whom Gavin had thrown off his balcony, albeit accidentally.

“Grinwoody,” Ironfist said. Grinwoody waved a hand. “That’s not necessary, not here, not today.” “Uncle,” Ironfist said, cracking a grin. The men embraced.

Grinwoody said, “Throwing away your life to kill some noble was never to be your Ulta. There were … questions about your loyalty. Questions you’ve quite answered now.” He opened the box a crack and exhaled reverently, then closed it. “They call us masters of secrecy, and yet in dazzling the eye with lying light, the Chromeria is without rival. They say you’re the Blackguard because your skin is black, because your clothes are black, because in wearing no color, you show that your allegiance is to none of the Colors. They say you are Blackguards because you surrender your own light of reason to serve as a slave, that you are like the black-robed luxiats in taking on the humility of colorlessness. They say you serve in the dark. They say a hundred things that are all true—all to obscure one, central truth: you are called the Blackguard because you guard the black. The black seed crystal. Accessible only with the cooperation of the White and the commander of the Blackguard both. It is the weapon that kills Prisms and quenches luxin. This is the tool that will rebuild the Order. This is the pen that rewrites history. This, nephew, was your Ulta. You have succeeded. You’ve done more for the Order of the Broken Eye than anyone in three centuries.”

Ironfist looked at his uncle, the slave, the hidden Old Man of the Desert, the head of the Order of the Broken Eye, and he could almost see fates being written as he chose his words. “He is not Kip Delauria, bastard, that I know. Nor is he Kip Guile. He is the Breaker, he is the Lightbringer, and he is our Diakoptês come again.” “Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”