The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,46

It’s serving your community.

They defined Life as one of Orholam’s Great Gifts, but carved out a remarkable exception. To most of the world, a drafter who’d served their community for one or two decades went on a last pilgrimage—Sun Day at the Chromeria—and simply never came back.

Drafters simply only lived to forty or forty-five. That was the way it was.

But Gavin had been the instrument of that brutal reality, ramming the knife through ribs, vomiting empty prayers at black heavens painted white. His conscience revolted at what he did, and he did it anyway.

He was the monstrous fist inside the velvet glove. If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally, requires in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous?

Can one commit murder and walk away clean?

Gunner huffed some sound between a grunt and a bark, still standing there. He hadn’t touched Gavin’s eye, but he’d been watching him all the while.

“What kinda shit horse is this? I get me a broken Guile?”

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

The implications were horrifying.

If the Chromeria was fundamentally corrupt, then they were all of them—the Chromeria, the Broken Eye, and the Blood Robes—equally horrific. All committed evil, and all excused their own evil as necessary.

Maybe it was worse than that. It wasn’t that each defined the good differently and thus excused different evils; it was that right and wrong were meaningless concepts: there was only what flavor of power you preferred.

Can good fruit come from a bad tree?

“Blackberries,” Gunner said, moving out of the sun once more, allowing Orholam’s cursed eye to dazzle Gavin.

“What?” Gavin asked, grimacing against the light. “She killed herself with blackberries? How? The brambles?”

“No, that just sorter popped in me eggshelf. Egg bone? Shell. Eggshell.” He rapped on his forehead with his knuckles. “Words, sentences, you know, not my own? Popped in there? Happens to ever’one, right?”

“Yeah, sure, right—no, no. I don’t follow at all. How’d your mom die?” It was the most delicate way Gavin could think of to ask about a suicide. Seemed like Gunner wanted to talk about it, and Gavin probably needed to humor the man. He propped himself up on an elbow, squinting at the man standing over him.

“Wrong question,” Gunner said. “You got it sorter back swords, don’tcha?”

Orholam help him, either Gunner was starting to make more sense, or his madness was contagious, because Gavin understood him perfectly.

He blew a long-suffering sigh. Very well. He sat up. He knew what Gunner meant about the wrong question. He was to ask not, ‘How did she die, Gunner?’ but, ‘How’d she live?’

Oddly, with Gunner, this would actually be the quicker way to get to how she died (and thus, get him to go the hell away) than trying to get a straight answer. Gunner seemed a bit bored being a captain when there was neither ship nor storm to fight. He’d already trained his new crew to some acceptable degree of proficiency on the many cannons that worked in concert, and now even that diversion was denied him, as he’d decided to conserve the rest of their powder for the dangers to come.

“Smart man, y’are, Yer Guileship.” Gunner grinned the big, happy gap-toothed grin of a man who was rarely understood and who prized it when he was.

Gunner took a deep breath, spat in the waves, muttered a curse to Ceres, and made the sign of the seven. “She uz pregnant most ’er time. Not with my pa’s brats, and that was clear as the Atashian shallows, him bein’ a sailor, en’ gone most the time.

“He’d leave with her pregnant with one, and come back an’ she was already bellyful with the next. Not that he were the subject of any hagioglyphics his ownself. Probably had ’least four other wives in other ports. He was the marrying sort. Gave my mama nothing but baby-batter and beatings, though. Finally died, or got took slave, I guess.

“I got my luck from her, though, cuz she mat a good man after that. Didn’t beat her once, not even when she ast for it. Treated us li’l brats like ’is own, though we were a right handful a hell and hot coals. Arranged apprenticery for me, and afore he put me on a ship he taught me to fight so I wouldn’t be made a