The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,374

himself truly. Only his memory could be so perfect. Or maybe this was how madness felt—normal. He examined himself.

Here behold Gavin Guile, in all his glory. Ha!

As he barked a laugh, aloud, he saw the empty tooth socket where his dogtooth had been. He’d broken it out of his own head in his bid to escape prison beneath the Chromeria. It had been a longed-for freedom that was as much a lie as all his years of service. His dogtooth was gone.

Nor was that the last of his deformities. He held up his left hand, as if waving to that loathsome figure: Hey! Looking good! The hand had only two fingers and a thumb.

It—he—was gaunt, one-eyed, hardly more than one-handed, gap-toothed. He, who had been beauty itself. He was revealed, finally, as the wretch he had always been. A cripple outside where he’d been a cripple for years within.

He’d told himself he was a victim of circumstance, who’d only chosen to survive.

His heart plummeted.

That was all lies, wasn’t it? He’d chosen to pursue his young love Karris after he’d barely met her, knowing his father would be outraged, knowing his elder brother would be furious. He’d chosen to strike the White Oaks when he was afraid. He’d chosen to keep that gate locked when he thought Karris’s lady-in-waiting had betrayed him. He’d not intended for anyone else to die, maybe, but he’d left her to the fire, to die a horrible death.

Gavin hadn’t merely chosen to live; he’d chosen to kill so that he could live.

‘You know this is wrong! I see it in your eyes!’ a drafter had said to him on the night of a Freeing, furious, eyes straining his halos.

How many times had Gavin heard some variation of those words? At every single Freeing. And often in between.

Gavin staggered. Shying away from looking at his brother, he braced himself on the Great Mirror.

Like spring ice, the cracked mirror gave way. His hand plunged through it.

A chill shot through his entire body as if his blood were icing over, and when he ripped his arm back from the mirror’s cold grip, his hand was gone.

He backed away from the mirror in horror, stumbled—fell.

Cracks spidered from the hole in the mirror toward every edge.

Pushing off the ground, Gavin leapt to his feet, certain some monstrous threat was about to pounce through it at him.

Then he realized he had pushed off the ground with both hands. He couldn’t help but glance at his hand. It hadn’t been lopped off; he hadn’t lost it . . . but his flesh and bones had turned invisible; only weird, thick, dark veins remained, still opaque. As he turned his wrist, to his color-blind sight his veins were like black thorns waving in the wind, pulsing with a gentle darkness.

He flexed the fingers of his glassine right hand. His hand was still there, whatever this illusion was, merely invisible except for the thorns within it.

Up the mirror’s pure gleaming surface, the cracks shot toward heaven. As they finally touched the top of the mirror and every edge simultaneously, a boom like thunder shook him and the tower, then modulated with the wom- wom- wom of a great temple bell.

It was so low it shook his belly and palpated the air in his lungs. The Great Mirror trembled.

High above, over the top of the Great Mirror, blood began pulsing. Not spilling down the mirror’s surface as if poured out from a glass, but pumping, as if each of the myriad hearts Gavin had stilled was waking from death to condemn him. Rivulets streamed and stuck and raced together toward the ground, widened. The blood doubled and redoubled until not even a finger’s width of shining glass remained clean. Like a curtain dropping, the blood draped the mirror entire.

It draped it red.

All the world was black and white . . . and now red, as if Orholam, who gives and takes away, had now given him the cursed gift of seeing his own crimson guilt in vibrant color. In his world of gray and the leeched nothingness of white and the triumph of gathering midnight-black, the vermilion hues sank into his skull like daggers into his eye sockets.

Red, everywhere red.

And in the blood mirror, Gavin saw himself again.

As every Freeing came around, Gavin had braced himself, and he’d felt bad . . . and he’d done the murdering expected of him. And he’d wept and he’d repented privately and he’d gotten drunk and he’d tried to