It reminded him, quite suddenly, of the crest of Sundered Rock before he and his brother had shattered it.
So long lost in darkness, that memory surfaced as sharply as did the black stone beneath his feet. For the entire climb, the black stone of the tower had been an oddity. Was it meant to evoke the black humility of a luxiat’s robes? The imagery had never gelled for Gavin. Luxiats showed they had no light of their own, but surely this pilgrimage should be toward light. Maybe a tower black at the base, but lighter as one climbed? That could make sense.
Instead, White Mist Tower was unrelieved black.
A part of Gavin knew he should move fast. He should grab the blade before anything else. He’d circled halfway around the tower with the last stair, which put the sword at the far side. But running before he knew what was here might be rushing heedless into danger—rather than running to safety. And a sight here struck him like Orholam’s own raised fist.
Here, finally, at its topmost height, the Tower of Heaven poked its head above the wall of white mists that had obscured the rest of it for ages. Only here, at its crown, was Gavin high enough to see out beyond the mantle of cloud cloaking both tower and island.
The rising sun, dimmed for all the timeless days he’d been here, shone brilliant, awakening the horizon with fire. White fire, to Gavin’s color-blind eyes, but the sun was beautiful yet, even stripped of its colors by a cruel god.
The thought brought him back to himself. Brought him back to threats and death and killing. He couldn’t see the sword on the opposite side of the tower’s top, hidden as it was by the rise of the stone hill that was the tower’s center—but he didn’t see anything else, either.
The summit was empty.
The pilgrimage ended in nothing.
I crossed half the world to come to God’s own house, and He’s not at home.
Probably never was.
But maybe this was an illusion, another will-casting, another test.
Gavin covered his color-blind eye and stared through the black jewel. It revealed only bleak nothingness rendered in starker tones than his natural orb saw. Brittle stone, a tower not of heaven but of lies. This temple was all façade. Men had labored for a thousand years to build this tower to the heavens, and when they reached it, they found themselves punished only with the death of their delusions and a loneliness plunging as deep as this tower was tall.
In piling up a tower to heaven, they only burrowed down exactly that deeply into hell. In the light of this open air, they’d found a darkness as great as the black cell under the Chromeria.
On the day they’d finished, there had surely been some festival, some celebration with serious prayers from serious luxiats. Together, those gathered had surely shouted to heaven, ‘We built You a house! Come and live among us, Orholam! Fulfill the promise of the ages!’
What had they done when there had been no answer?
How long had it been before scandalized luxiats, seeing their own power dissolve with other men’s beliefs, concocted some excuse for Orholam’s absence?
They’d lied then as they did now, because all their power rested on it.
It was what Gavin had always suspected, but it was like suspecting your wife had cheated, dread growing in your heart as you became more certain, but the relationship not dying until you heard the admission from your becursed-beloved’s own lips.
Gavin staggered. He fell to one knee. He clamped his eyes closed as his chest tightened and shut off his breath.
He covered the eye patch and opened only his natural eye, praying to no one, but praying that his wounded natural orb would see things differently. Perhaps the black stone told him bleaker news than it ought.
The darkness receded slowly from his vision like an oily film slowly sliding earthward, but even here in the beauty of a sunrise as he hadn’t seen in what felt like ages untold, the fundamental truth remained: there was nothing here.
Nothing here meant everything Gavin had done—everything, for his whole life—was a breath exhaled into the storm. Worse, there being nothing here meant there was no nexus of magic. No nexus meant there was no nexus to kill.
That meant there was no way to save Karris.
What was Gavin to report to Grinwoody? ‘I went but there was nothing there’? Who would believe that? Before the White Mist Reef had closed off the isle, disillusioned pilgrims must have said the same thing a hundred thousand times to those who’d not made the journey, and yet the people of the satrapies had chosen to believe instead the liars who’d returned swearing they’d encountered Orholam here.
Karris would die. Gavin would, too, even if he made it home. How could Grinwoody let him live?
He had no future.
But it was worse than a mission failed, and all Gavin’s happiness stolen. It was worse than losing his life to that worm. Everything Gavin had ever done had been in the service of lies. His own, and others’.
His brother’s death, and everyone he’d murdered for the Freeing, it had all been only men wrestling for power, cloaking themselves in respectability by invoking a god who had nothing to do with any of it, because He didn’t exist.
But though broken and barely able to breathe, Gavin fought his way to his feet.
He’d knelt long enough.
So his suspicion was right, and his long-held intuition was wrong. So his first great goal would go unmet. The world was as it was. Only one thing was left for him to do.
He would pick up the sword, and he would hack at the very peak of the tower until he broke the Blinding Knife. He would carve the word ‘Lies’ into the very rock. And then, one last time, he would fly—as he hurled himself from the tower to a well-deserved death.
Chapter 80
Kip considered lying, of course. He was still a Guile.
“My father had hidden a box in a training bag. I was kicking it when I heard something break. I was drafting, maybe all the colors at once, and I opened the bag and the cards flew out onto my skin. I . . . somehow absorbed the cards. Not on purpose. I lost consciousness and nearly died, but Teia was able to revive me. When she pried the cards off my skin, they were blank.”
“But you Viewed them,” Andross said.
“Not in any way that I could make sense of,” Kip said. “I saw them all at once. It killed me. Literally. My heart stopped. It, it felt like . . . It obliterated my mind. I couldn’t tell who I was anymore.”
“But they’re not lost,” Andross insisted. “You’ve the Guile memory.”
“In any meaningful sense, yes, they’re lost,” Kip said.
“ ‘In any meaningful sense’? So in some other sense they’re not. Tell me how they’re not lost. Tell me what you experienced.”
Of course it was like this. Kip had inadvertently destroyed the world’s most valuable intelligence. Of course Andross was going to go after the scraps.
So Kip started talking. What did it matter, now, with their doom coming down on their heads? Kip ended up telling him about the Great Library and the immortal or djinn or whatever Abaddon was, with his broken ankles and pistol and that cracked mask of a visage. He skipped the master cloak. That was Teia’s secret now, not Kip’s.
Andross got a funny look as Kip told him about the immortal, but if it was disbelief, clearly he decided not to challenge Kip on it right now.