The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,61

did. Gavin looked around. Nothing. Odd. He sank back into his thoughts.

Maybe Gavin only wanted to win.

In Gavin’s place, a hero would strive for some positive good. Say, to save the empire. That kind of goal would ready him to fight a diverse host of battles. He would be one man: integrated, of one purpose, strong whether he had to fight to save the empire from foreign enemies, or from traitors, or from those corrupting it, or if it needed renewing, he would be strong enough to undertake even its reformation. A hero might begin one kind of fight and then any of those others in turn and still be a whole man.

Such people had lived before: heroes and heroines with clear eyes and straight backs. And short lives, often. Sure, but villains got those, too, so maybe that was a wash.

It was all moot. Gavin wasn’t a hero. He didn’t believe in heroes anymore, and he didn’t believe in a god who could let this world become what it was.

He’d been fighting Grinwoody because fighting was what Gavin did. So Gavin had been preparing, but passionlessly. He’d treated Grinwoody’s demands as merely another prison that he had to figure out how to escape . . . and yet, even with his own life and all the world on the wager, Gavin hadn’t found any heart for the effort.

He just didn’t care to save the Chromeria. Not in the abstract.

He loved many people there. But the Chromeria itself was as corrupt as he was. The ‘White King’ was a murderer, a liar when it served him, and a wielder of oversimplifications, but Gavin couldn’t object to the basic charge that the Chromeria was often shitty, and had been throughout history. Nor could he claim that the Magisterium, whose High Luxiats were entrenched beside those in power and empowered to speak against them, had, instead of standing against those abusing power, become indistinguishable from them. When was the last time a High Luxiat had called Gavin to account for something he’d done? Not since the first year, not even in private.

Gavin didn’t believe Koios’s reign would bring a society that was any better, certainly not so much better that it was worth the seas of blood he was spilling to establish it.

The universe had conspired to give Gavin one chance to go where he’d never dared go. Here, now, Gavin and only Gavin might actually confront Orholam—or prove He wasn’t there at all.

What if, instead of turning all his genius to figuring out some third way out of Grinwoody’s errand, treating the task as if it were merely another prison . . .

What if, instead, Gavin put his whole mind and heart and will into actually . . . succeeding?

He had to admit, the audacity of the quest was vastly appealing.

No, it was damn near irresistible.

Maybe the Old Man of the Desert was so clever he’d been counting on exactly this. It didn’t matter. What he wanted was beside the point—if Gavin wanted it too.

Gavin hadn’t had an audacious thought since he’d lost his powers. This? This wasn’t audacious. This was legendary.

How do you prove once and for all that there’s no God? How do you show that even if He is there, He’s small and weak and unworthy of adoration? How do you prove that Orholam doesn’t see, He doesn’t hear, He doesn’t care, He doesn’t save?

You show up on His front door, uninvited. You go inside without knocking. You take a look around. And if you like the place . . .

A thrill shot through Gavin. It was his first great goal again, so carefully concealed for so long. There was nothing more impossible—and that very thought was like a breath of clean air after months in the must and stench of himself in the black cell.

The Old Man of the Desert, Grinwoody, real name Amalu Anazâr, hoped to change the world’s entire social and political order by killing magic itself. He believed that what lay at the center of White Mist Reef wasn’t a personality, but simply the central node upon which the whole network of magic depended. He thought if Gavin destroyed that, all magic would fail.

Grinwoody thought that would change the world. He thought that was enough.

Grinwoody was wrong.

Throwing luxin around was merely a personal power. The genius of the Chromeria as an organization was that through education first and coercion later, they’d turned that power into communal power, then traditional power, first subservient to political