The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,62

power, then enmeshed with it, and finally indistinguishable from it. They had ensconced themselves in the world’s politics and culture and religion and trade. But even if a sconce is originally placed high so that it may cast its light far, if the fire it held dies, the sconce remains, and it remains in its high place. So, too, the Chromeria’s social and political and commercial and ceremonial power would falter if magic were lost, but it wouldn’t necessarily be broken.

Destroying magic wasn’t enough.

Fearing the lash, even freed of his chains, the slave will still pull at his oar, but men of unfettered soul, who though chained are still whole, will smash it like trash on the floor.

Magic was one major tool by which Orholam and Orholam’s Chosen worked His will in the world, but they had others. People didn’t send their daughters to be living and dying sacrifices to the Chromeria because of magic, but because they believed it was what Orholam demanded.

Gavin—High Lord Gavin Guile, Emperor, Promachos, and mighty Prism, Orholam’s Chosen, the Highest Luxiat, the Defender of the Faith—Gavin the Liar Prince, the High Deceiver, was the only one who might be able to kill the religion itself. Down to its rotten root.

If that fell, everything built on it would, too.

He who’d been ‘blessed’ with the gift of black luxin could kill the Lord of Light and watch tumble all the horrors built on men’s fear of Him. Half-blind and chained and toothless as he was, Gavin might stagger to the pillars that upheld the roof of the empire. He might find strength had come once more to his old muscular will—strength enough to lever apart the pillars upholding the very heavens and bring it all down. Gavin the Liar, who’d murdered innocents to uphold others’ lies, could destroy the greatest lie of all.

Gavin would bring down the rebels, not in order to save the empire but in order to make it fall correctly.

Fuck the old way. Fuck the new way. As he had always been, he himself would be the third way. He would be himself, and he would be terrible. He would come back from death, come back from this journey to heaven and hell, and Gavin would invert all they had hoped. Gavin, the Son of the Morning, the Bright Hope of the World, had been cast down into a ninefold hell. But he hadn’t stayed down. He’d broken through and escaped from one color of hell to another and another—until his own father had shut him into the inner darkness. The blackest heart of Chromeria, its very foundation.

From those depths, a nameless wretch had been sent to scale the heavens and kill God Himself. Who could return from such an impossible journey?

Only one man. Only one man might have been born for such a thing. Only one who could make and remake himself, who refused to die, who defied the schemes of those who held every advantage over him—and won.

Triumphant, with a cloak of fire and a crown of blood, Dazen the Black would return. He would bring down heaven and he would raze hell.

But.

Gavin could only triumph if he did what no one had ever done: he must make it through White Mist Reef, scale the Tower of Heaven, kill Orholam, and then make it back home to escape, outwit, and destroy the Order—he’d need to do all that by Sun Day if he were to save Karris.

Then he could live happily ever after.

Easy.

Of course, he could say nothing of all this. Not among these doomed servants of the Order.

But he wasn’t one of the doomed anymore. Not in his own mind.

Looking over at Gunner, Gavin felt the old, reckless, confident Guile grin spread over his face for the first time in eons. “Gunner? Captain? Let’s go find God. I’ll bring the sword, just in case He’s a dick.”

Gunner’s mercurial mood abruptly stilled. All the guns of his attention drew broadside. His eyes weighed Gavin, judging velocity, pitch, charge, spin. Eyes tightening, he calculated windage, current, the target’s distance, speed, and parallax.

Gavin welcomed the judgment, fatal as it might be. The end began here. This was Gunner’s destiny. He would join Gavin; he simply didn’t know it yet.

Frankly, but fearlessly, his demeanor void of forced jollity or feigned madness, Gunner said, “You must know that’s impossible.”

“Impossible is what I do.”

Chapter 17

By his own count, Daragh the Coward had four hundred seventeen scars—none of them on his back. It might not have been