The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,113

or thousands die throughout the satrapies, isn’t it? We Braxians, we say our way’s better: assassinate a few to save many, but how’s that make sense? If the Chromeria is doing it all wrong, I suppose, turning Atash into desert so Tyrea can bloom, that’s bad, right? But the records show we did the same. I mean the opposite. All we did was make sure that the thousands who died weren’t ours. Who’s the monster then? Maybe our way was best against the nine kings, but now?”

Sharp was not a good storyteller. Teia couldn’t even tell when he was referring to which side.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Teia said. “Can you start from the beginning?”

He shook his head, paused. Checked a denture as if it had felt loose.

“The Order ruined me,” Sharp said. “Lied to me. Broke me in the worst way—they made me break myself.” He reached into his mouth and took out his bottom set of teeth. He sat on the little stool and squinted at the teeth in order. With a tiny brush, he scraped away some tiny imperfection, wiggled a canine. He clucked his tongue between his jagged natural teeth, displeased, and tended to the rest of the dentures.

But he kept glancing up, noting her eyes at unpredictable intervals. She couldn’t draft without getting caught. Dammit. She had to wait until he was more distracted.

He said, “It’s a funny thing, you know, you and I.”

“How’s that?” Teia asked.

He hadn’t looked up in perhaps a count of ten—as if he were daring her to try to draft. That she hadn’t dared—that she might have missed her last chance through her lack of courage was infuriating, sickening, terrifying.

He dried the dentures and daubed paste from a jar along the length of the teeth channel with a tiny brush. Then he glanced over, quickly.

“It’s funny that we both kind of want to be the other person—but only kind of,” Sharp said. “You want to be a master of paryl. A killer. You’re a brittle weakling, and you want to be strong. You want to be scary. But only kind of, because you don’t want it badly enough to do what you need to become who you want to be. Me, I’m strong, but . . . I kind of want to be a traitor like you.”

It was like a rope thrown toward a drowning woman.

“It’s never betrayal to do what’s right,” Teia said.

He barked a laugh. “Think the Old Man would agree?”

“It’s not too late for you,” Teia said.

He tamped his gums and broken teeth dry by biting a towel. Then he fit the dentures back into his mouth. He pressed firmly on them and waited a moment. He sighed. “Oh, girl,” he said. “Your naive-it, naïveté? naiveness? is a blindness worse than your shitty color-blind eyes. Do you know how many men I’ve killed?”

He was looking directly at her now. There was no chance to draft unless he turned away again.

“I—”

“Twenty-seven slaves, in my training. If you count those. They started me with worn-out old men. I knew those poor bastards’d soon be on the streets, dying, begging, miserable. Unwanted, uncared for. Not so hard to end a life that was gonna look like that. You’re doing ’em a favor, aren’t you? The Order worked me up from there, breaking me in until I was like an old, dependable pair of work boots.”

It hit Teia like a punch in the stomach. She’d thought her training method was coincidental, that old slaves were the cheapest.

It was no coincidence. It was all by design.

They’d been chipping away at her conscience deliberately, by degrees.

And she’d helped them. Justifying it at every step. A victim, but a victim partaking in the evil done to her. Breaking herself. Sometimes she’d looked forward to trying out new paryl tricks on her victims, hadn’t she? Experiments.

They’re gonna die anyway. I might as well learn something from them.

Someone’s going to kill them. Might as well be me. It’s better that it’s done by me, because . . .

Because why, exactly?

Someone’s gonna do evil, might as well be me.

And if everyone in the world said that, what kind of world would it be?

Death had been certain for any one slave who’d stood before her. That man was going to die, regardless of what she did. But if she’d not killed that one, the Order wouldn’t have purchased the next for her to kill.

Or the next. Or the next.

What if everyone in the world said,