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 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.