The Burning White (20 page)

But really.

Seriously now.

How long has it been since that was true?

“You really t’ink you’re gonna fight the suckin’ sand? Then why’d you wander into this bog in the first place?” Gunner said.

Suddenly another piece of this dangerous little man snapped into focus for Gavin. Gunner was the soul of tenacity. That was what had made him the best cannoneer in the world. When a mystery or even a whim took Gunner in its teeth, he would follow it to the bitter end. If a shot wobbled, another man might fire another ten rounds from his cannons to figure out why before abandoning it as fruitless; Gunner would empty a treasury to fire a thousand rounds until he understood exactly why one shot deviated a hand’s breadth from the last.

“That’s a shit question,” Gavin said, forgetting for a moment who he wasn’t. “The whole world’s a bog. Some stay on a safe path, some step off it unwittingly, some are led off it, and some are pushed. All that matters is that once caught in the bog, some fight, some ask for help, and some lie down.”

Gunner picked his teeth. “You been lyin’ down lots.”

That stung. When he wasn’t sunning himself, ostensibly to accustom his eyes to the brightness of the sun, but really hoping to reawaken his magic and his color vision, Gavin had been sleeping like the dead. He woke late and went to his rack early, not to plot but to sleep. He was actually starting to feel human again after his imprisonment, no longer so easily tired—but before this past year had demolished him so thoroughly, he’d been one of the most highly energetic men he’d ever known. Gunner’s barb was a reminder that he was not now what once he had been.

“A metaphor’s a gun. You gotta know its range,” Gavin said, with less defiance than he’d intended.

“Aye. But even a man firin’ at greatest random hits the mark sometimes,” Gunner said. “Like what your man Commander Ironfist done at Ru. Snatched your bacon from the coals, eh? But I guess you were speakin’ o’ metty-force. Metal farcically . . . ?”

“They trip up the best of us,” Gavin said, smirking.

Sudden as a summer squall races over the horizon, Gunner’s face went murder dark. “And how ’bout the worst of us? You got a bone to prick with me, Guile?”

Gavin blinked. “It’s, uh, it’s only an expression. I meant it could happen to any of us.”

“You di’n’t say that. And a Guile never misspeaks. And when a Guile says ‘the best of us,’ he means hisself. You meant yourself, didn’t you?”

“In this, uh, particular instance, I—You know something, Gunner? Captain Gunner, I mean. Sir.”

“Something?! Do I know something?!” The little man drew himself to his full height and grabbed his wild beard in a defiant fist. He slapped his chest. “Cap’n Gunner knows half the mysteries of the sea and sky, and all lissome lies and winsome ways of a woman’s wink, and more of the conundra of the cannonade than other cunts kin count!” He frowned at a sudden thought. “Also not bad with a fiddle.”

Gavin took a deep breath. “You know why we’re doing this?” Gavin asked.

Gunner ignored him. “Also a fair hand with a fiddle. Also a fine . . . Aha! A fair fine fiddler, too!”

“Do you know why we’re doing this?” Gavin repeated.

“I heard ya! It’s only din a few bays. Days. I ain’t forgot. We go to ensconce our legends in the firmament of the Celestine! They’ll be naming constellations after us. Me mostly, ’tis truth, but there’s stars enough to go ’round.”

“That ain’t the why for me,” Gavin said.

Gunner made his voice small, whiny, mocking: “ ‘We’re already legends!’ says you. I know. So why for you? You really think you’ll save your lady’s skin? From the master o’
them
?” Gunner threw his chin toward his Order crew, meaning Grinwoody.

“You ever wonder if you’re a good man, Gunner?”

“Eh?” Gunner scrunched his face like he was trying to pick some jerked meat out between his teeth with his tongue. “I’m tops at most things what I put my hand to. But being a man? Ain’t really something you gotta try at if you’re in our perfessions, aye? Not sure what kinda pirate worries ’bout how manly he is.” Gunner stopped, looked at his first mate. “Pansy!”

The woman, with her hair glued in hard, spiky points, resembled a flower in zero respects; she was at the ship’s wheel on the sterncastle, twenty paces away. Her body was as hard as a terebinth tree clinging to a wind-torn cliff, and her face was harder still. “Aye, Cap’n?” she shouted, even her voice harsh.

“Pansy, you ever worry ’bout how manly you are?”

She answered immediately. “Daily, Cap’n!”

“Didn’t think so!” Gunner said. He scowled at Gavin.

Gavin couldn’t tell if the pirate was taking the piss.

He tried another tack. “Captain, I got a head full o’ books, enough to know a few things. For good and ill, history’s written with a blood-dipped quill. Good men died, fighting against me, under the banners of bad men, held there perhaps by old loyalties or law. But that never bothered me. We who gamble in taking up arms with the intent to kill know that our own lives are our ante,” Gavin said. “But I get this dream. Not every night, but often enough to dread sleep. In it, I’m manacled to a kneeler, and buckets of blameless blood march into a darkened room and pour themselves over my hands while I fight to get away, and all the time, they
shriek
at me. You ken?”

Gunner nodded.

Ridiculous. Gavin had never told anyone about that. Maybe he would’ve told Karris, if they’d had longer together.

“From the Freein’?” Gunner asked.

“Aye.” ‘Ayes’ and ‘ain’ts’ now seasoned Gavin’s speech like salt in jerked meat. “There was this girl . . .” He trailed off. And at the end, he’d given her death. He gave them all death.

It made him want to vomit all over again. How could I have done that?

“Ya killed her, I s’pose? So what? It’s the voyage they sign on for, innit?” Gunner asked. “Yer drafters.”

“It is,” Gavin allowed, narrowly avoiding using another ‘aye.’

“Then what’s the pro’lem? They know the deal: Light duty mos’ times, respect e’erwhere, good pay, and when they take the last lonely boat, their family gets a sack o’ gold. They get all that, and in return they gotta obey and they get a short life. Sailors get nothing ’ceptin’ the obedience and short life.”

Putting it like that, it didn’t sound like such a bad deal. Better than working a farm until the arthritis made every move hell, and then working it another ten years, prayin’ you could hold on to life until your sons and daughters could fend for themselves.

Didn’t sound like a bad deal, when you were fifteen years old and forty sounded ancient and they asked you to scrawl your damn idiot signature on the vow.

But it didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were a father who still felt young and you held an infant in your arms who’d already never know her drafter mother, and the Prism who’d killed her first now asked you to hand over the child to some uncaring luxiat so he could slice your heart out, too.

It didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were the man who held the knife and murdered artist kids like Aheyyad Brightwater.

“In all my time as the head of the faith,” Gavin said, “I could never come up with more than two questions that were worth a damn. As it were.”

It sailed over Gunner’s head. In his world, ‘damn’ was for punctuation, not punning. And it wasn’t the full truth anyway. Gavin had a third question, but he didn’t let himself even think it too loudly.

Gavin looked at the great tower of cloud on the horizon, growing ever closer.

“Two questions?” Gunner prompted. “Or did you mean that metty-forcibly?”

“No. I mean, yes? First: is Orholam real? And second: if He is real, is He like we think He is?”

Gunner was looking at him like he wasn’t making sense. “Uh . . . what?”

Gavin tried again. “You and I, Captain, we’ve seen the shit. The real problem with Orholam comes if He is who He says He is.”

“And who else would he be?” Gunner asked. “Hand me that hoo-dad, wouldja?”

Gavin handed him a brush, then other tools, one by one, as Gunner proceeded to happily clean the great cannon on the front quarterdeck.

All his life, he’d kicked against the goads: Tell me I have to do this? I’ll find my own way, and you can go to hell. When the dichotomy was ‘Do I obey Grinwoody or do I defy him?’ given Gavin’s nature, that wasn’t even a choice.

But defying Grinwoody meant either a fast death (say, by blurting out his name while wearing this stabby hellstone eye patch) or a slow one (by accepting failure and death), so Gavin, despairing and defiant but not suicidal, had chosen ‘slow.’

‘Slow’ meant becoming passive. And his whole soul hated that. Sinking into sarcasm is the heart’s last rebellion against a mind choosing helplessness.

Logical step to inexorable step, his answers had marched him into waters that now closed over his head. When your answers lead you logically to despair, you don’t have the wrong answers; you have the right answers—to the wrong questions.

Gavin didn’t want to give Grinwoody what he wanted, but there was no way out. In his current state and situation, Gavin couldn’t outsmart him or outfight him or out-magic him. He couldn’t deny Grinwoody what he wanted.

But that was framing the problem exactly wrong. In truth, it didn’t matter what Grinwoody wanted—it mattered what Gavin wanted.

Gavin didn’t want Grinwoody to win . . . ? Gavin didn’t want to die . . . ?

Divergent as those seemed, both of them were importantly distinct from wanting victory or wanting life.

What
do
I want?

Odd thing to wonder, here, when he had no power to get it. Before, he’d never asked it in any profound way. His ‘great’ goals for every seven years he served as Prism hadn’t been great in any way. They’d been field dressings on a gaping wound of purposelessness. His housebroken dream had been merely to stay alive, to not be unmasked as a fraud.

Sure, that made sense for a month or two after the war while he healed.

But he’d never become more. Never dreamed more than declawed dreams.

He’d put his brother in the grave, but Dazen had also died at Sundered Rock.

What did Gavin want?

Which Gavin?

Time stretched, as if something were supposed to happen right now—but nothing 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.