The Burning White: Book Five of Lightbringer

by Brent Weeks

  Well, let’s see: He was basically all-powerful, and he cajoled, charmed, and used wit and humor to take the edge off of whatever he was going to do anyway. Plus he was incredibly handsome, which never hurt. Oh, and when people defied him, sometimes he’d kill all of them.

  So no one went into a meeting with Gavin Guile entirely fearlessly, which meant that when he was charming instead, and told them how it was going to be, most people found themselves nodding along, or even laughing along, admitting it was all for the best.

  Kip wasn’t all those things, but maybe, between emulating his father and his grandfather, he might be enough.

  That was why Kip had gone to the window and waved to the crowd. But that hadn’t been a full plan, only an intuition of one.

  While the old men were conferring with one another again yesterday, Kip had said to the Mighty, ‘I want to turtle-bear their porcelain shop and give the old Divines a heart attack or three. Ideas?’

  ‘Oh, I have ideas!’ Big Leo said.

  ‘Ripping people’s arms off is not an idea,’ Kip said. ‘It’s a daydream.’

  ‘You didn’t even let me tell you what I’d do with them,’ Big Leo complained.

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t share it,’ Kip said. Morning had expired, and with his realization that he was being handled, so had his patience. ‘Also Lord Golden Briar has the worst breath I’ve ever smelled.’

  ‘You’re telling me that’s his breath?’ Ben-hadad asked. ‘I thought—’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Cruxer said as the men came back.

  ‘Yeah, we don’t know if they’re all deaf,’ Ferkudi said, too loudly. ‘I’ve been watching, and Lord Appleton is faking that old-man shuffle.’

  Lord Appleton looked over.

  ‘They’re none of them dumb, either,’ Kip said, carefully screening his mouth against lipreading with a lifted cup.

  Winsen hissed, ‘Unlike our pal whose name rhymes with Jerkudi.’

  After the meeting adjourned on more empty promises and stalling, Kip had listened to his wife’s idea.

  So today, they met the Divines in one of the side gardens, where Tisis made much of the flowers. Then Kip suggested she see some of the exotics the people had been bringing. In no hurry, they made their way to the front of the palace. Kip split his time between pleasantries to the old Divines and greeting people waiting in the long queue to see Túsaíonn Domhan that wrapped around the building, more and more spending his time on the people, much to the Divines’ consternation.

  Finally, on the way to the front of the palace, they picked up the hundreds of admirers to whom Kip had waved yesterday. Cruxer had not been a fan of this part of the plan, but the people kept a respectful distance once the Mighty demonstrated what that was. They themselves weren’t quite certain what they wanted of Kip.

  The Divines looked more and more uncomfortable, but when Lord Aodán Appleton suggested reconvening inside, Kip pretended not to hear. And finally, they made it to the mound of flowers that had been piled out in front of the palace, partly in thanks to Kip’s Nightbringers for liberating the city and partly to cover the smell of the putrefying and still hanging Divine and conn.

  By tradition, the men’s bodies were to stay in place for several days more yet. The stench was nearly intolerable. Kip stopped at the top of the steps as Tisis pretended to admire the flowers here. The Divines were painfully aware of their dead compatriots nearby, though none dared look at them.

  Kip said, “You’ve told me we need a full council to have a quorum to vote on certain matters, matters that must be decided immediately. So let’s agree—”

  “New councillors! Yes!” Lord Rathcore said. “Just what a conn is for!”

  “A conn?” Kip asked as if this were a surprise. It was supposed to be a great honor, and they’d been trying to extract all sorts of concessions from him in return while only hinting it might be possible. In reality, he was being asked to pay for the privilege of eating two slices of warm bread hiding a turd.

  Being named conn was an honor, and it would give him legitimacy that wasn’t derived from his father or grandfather. It would be something he’d earned himself. He wanted that, and they obviously sensed that.

  But by law and tradition, a conn had significant limits to his power here. By assenting to a defined role and swearing to its oaths, Kip would be assenting to its limits, too. The Divines weren’t offering a gift; they were offering Kip chains decorated with gold filigree.

  “No,” Kip said. “I don’t have time for the frippery and delay. I’ll give you my suggestions. You can approve them if you do so unanimously, yes? I suggest Lady Proud Hart and Lady Greenwood.”

  Their heads did not literally explode, but several of them turned shades redder.

  “My lord,” Lord Appleton said, “we could make you conn within the hour. It would honor our ways, and then perhaps we might even”—he looked like he was trying to swallow a mouthful of salt—“come to an agreement on one of those noble matriarchs.”

  “You’re not hearing me,” Kip said. “I don’t want the position.” He was feeling red, and he almost insulted the pointless position itself—which would have been an insult to the whole city.

  “Milord,” Lord Spreading Oak said patiently as if trying to counsel reason, “becoming conn is the only way for you to accomplish all you think you need to do.”

  “Funny,” Kip said, “the last conn believed that was true, too.” He looked up at the hanged, rotting Conn Hill. “Tell me, Lord Spreading Oak, if a man has as much power as a king but not the name, is he more or less than a king?”

  By long tradition and by an explicit oath as he took office, a conn couldn’t become a king. It was one of the stupider things they were trying to keep from Kip’s grasp. King? He didn’t even want to be a mayor!

  A thrill went through the crowd at the very word ‘king,’ and the Divines alternately blanched and went purple. It was one nice thing about these northerners’ pallid skin: it made them so easy to read sometimes.

  Lord Spreading Oak could find no words.

  Kip said, “My esteemed Lords Divine, when the bandit king Daragh the Coward arrives tomorrow with his thousands of raiders and runaway drafters and slave-takers and desperate men, I should like to be here to protect you. But later today, I’m meeting with Satrap Willow Bough’s ambassador. He’s going to ask to me to abandon Dúnbheo and bring my forces to lift the siege on Green Haven—also a worthy and necessary fight. Now, if I’m to stay, if I’m to help this city I so love, I need your help. Can you find it in your hearts to help me, please?”

  The crowd heard only that Kip wanted to save them, again, and that the Divines were somehow driving him out of the city instead. Ugly suggestions rippled through them, and the air took on a palpable menace.

  The Divines looked at the mob uneasily, and then at each other.

  Chapter 13

  “My mama suicided just like that,” Gunner announced, heedless of all cues.

  Gavin lay stretched out sunning himself on the hard, unforgiving deck of the ship’s forecastle, his eyes closed, still adjusting to the harsh, bleached sunlight of freedom after his long stint in darkness.

  Gunner’s voice was like a child pounding on the door when you’re in the middle of a bad lay: Gavin wasn’t enjoying himself as much as he’d expected, but what he was doing was a lot more enjoyable than what he was being called to do.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Captain,” he said, shading his eyes and cracking them open briefly—only because Gunner was the kind of man who might stomp on Gavin’s head if he thought he wasn’t being shown the proper respect.

  Gavin had told himself he needed to get sun, needed to get his eyes reaccustomed to the light, needed to feel the light on his skin in case just maybe his disability was healing itself. Or something.

  He was better at lying to others, though, than to himself. No, Gavin was lying about, seeking an idyll and finding himself merely idle.

  Closing his eyes as if to fend of
f the captain through his obvious exhaustion, Gavin reached out his fingertips, wishing they might dip into the sapphire waters as they had that morning he touched the sea demon.

  Eyes? Eye. Funny how he still thought of them in the plural, while at other times he couldn’t ignore the jagged black monstrosity strapped to him in that eye patch, feeling like it was trying to burrow into his head.

  “Y’ain’t gonna ask, is ya?” Gunner said.

  He moved into Gavin’s sun, swaying with the waves, so that Orholam’s one eye blinded Gavin’s one eye only half the time.

  Instead of conjuring that morning of peace, arms spread touching the waters, and that numinous creature, the memory that came swimming serpentine to the surface was of the day he’d been shackled spread-eagled in the hippodrome, as Orholam stared down, pitiless or powerless, and Gavin’s eye was burnt out by a very apologetic chirurgeon. When she wasn’t burning out people’s eyeballs with a white-hot poker, she was probably quite nice.

  Ha. People had thought the same of him, on Sun Days, as he slaughtered so many.

  “That evil eye of yourn,” Gunner said with a shudder. That was his charming name for the black jewel that would kill Gavin if he tried to remove it. “It still shivs me the givers.”

  Go away, Gunner.

  Come to think of it, perhaps many had denounced Gavin for the fraud he was, but his circle of privilege had kept those cries from his ears.

  “Kin I touch it?” Gunner asked.

  “Probably kill us both if you do. Go ahead.”

  What if Grinwoody—traitorous monster that he was—while certainly an asshole, was fundamentally correct? Gavin—nice and charismatic man that he was—had certainly served a monstrous function. All of the empire’s power was predicated on its control of drafters: identifying, training, distributing, and then eliminating them.

  Eliminating them? No. Executing them for crimes they might commit.

  The Chromeria did this by defining morality and medicine for their own ends. They said that like dementia striking an elderly person, breaking the halo has no moral dimension. It’s a sad, natural process that leads to a person acting contrary to their own character, and in ways that are terribly destructive. Gavin had fought wights; he’d seen the destruction they could wreak. Could.

  But the Chromeria coupled this with a moral injunction. It’s not wrong to break the halo, but it’s wrong to run if you do. It’s good, they said, to die right before you do. They said it’s not suicide to volunteer to be killed. 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 buttboy.

  “But kin you believe? All that good he done us, and Mama cheated on him, too. Some folk—my mama, me, you—we got the devil in us, Guile. Canna go straight, no gatter how many second chances we met.”

  Gatter? Met?

  Matter. Get. No matter how many second chances we get.

  Ah, Gavin thought. It had been a while since he’d heard the pirate speak at length. It took some getting used to.

  Again Gunner spat over the gunwale with a muttered curse at Ceres.

  “Papa didn’t learn it out, but I did. I punched her in the face and gave her the raspy side a’ my tongue. But I didn’t hell tim neither. I had little brothers and sisters. What would they do without ’im, if he left ’er? Mama was so keen on makin’ the beast with two backs with any dangerous man what winked at her that she never even noticed she uz setting her own house on fire by doin’ it—with all us kids inside, burnin’. She was pregnant, that’s what for I hit her in the face. She told ’im the black eye was from falling down. Uz a better lie than you’d think. Only thing she was e
ver good at was gettin’ on her back in a hurry.”

  Please don’t tell me you murdered her.

  “S’pose the harpies took vengeance on her, since no one else would. Somethin’ broke in ’er after she shat out that last babe. One night after we were all asleep, she cut her arms up good, almost bled dry. Papa patched her up. Never seen a man what done nothin’ wrong look so hunted.

  “Mama went on crying and carrying on most every day. Elgin, she named him. Algae, we all said. The baby, right?”

  “Right,” Gavin said. He felt sick to his stomach already, and he was worried this was only going to get worse.

  “Pa was a smith. One day, when he wouldn’t stop cryin’, Mama quick snatched up Pa’s hammer, and laid li’l Algae down on the workbench, lined him up good—she uz gonna smash his head, we thought. Then she stopped herself, and she smashed her hand instead, smashed it jelly, kept smashing. Wouldn’t stop. That wet, sloppy sound and her screamin’ won’t never come out me ears. Hear the echoes to this day, rattlin’ from cliff to cliff inside my skull. Said she had ta be punished for wantin’ a do such a thing.”

  Fuck, Gunner! I am trying to enjoy some goddam sunshine!

  “To save her life, Pa had to cut the hand off and burn the stump dry and sizzly, while she cursed him and screamed and asked to die. I hope you never have to hear yer mama beggin’ ta die, Guile.”

  No, mine didn’t beg. She asked politely, and I killed her politely. Thanks for the reminder of that, asshole.

  “We thought she was gettin’ better, after that. Healin’. I was jus’ ’bout to ship out. Her ‘little man,’ she called me. Made her so proud, she said. Not that it should mean much coming from her, she said. Broken woman, Guile. It ain’t how it s’pos’d ta be. Well, one day she puts on her finest and wanders out to the bog. Lays down and spreads her arms out lick thet. Lick what you done earlier.

  “Someone saw her. Threw her a rope, but the whole area was too treach’rous to get close. She wouldnae take the rope, right at her hand. Help, that near. I s’pose she reckoned she’d take different kinder escape. Thatcher—that’s who threw the rope—ran to get help. But when we all come, she was gone. Sunk.”