The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks Read Free Book Online

I paints my deck chunky, little Guile. Red and gray and bony, you elucidate? I know luxinly smells,” Gunner said as he led him onto the deck of the Bitter Cob . “Or more like, I paint it all in brown and squashy, right, right?”
    Gavin walked into the light with a lead heart.
    “Right,” he said. Because he had feces for brains. Funny.
    “Luxinly? Luxic? Luxinic?” Gunner asked. The man loved language the way a wife beater loves his wife.
    “Luxiny, but I like your way better.”
    “Bah.”
    It was close to noon, choppy seas tossing the light galley more than he expected. These Angari ships were different. But what had been the most salient fact of his whole life—the light—struck him as insignificant. It was an overcast day, but with lots of light for a Prism. But this light kissed his skin like a lingering lover leaving. The hues of gray and white and black gave him despair where before the scintillant spectra had given him inconceivable power. He’d thought he’d adjusted to the loss of his colors, but it was one thing to face his loss in the darkness of a prison, another thing altogether to see that his prison was the whole world. And Gunner knew it. He had taken one look at Gavin’s eyes the night he’d captured him and he’d known.
    So why is Gunner paranoid now?
    Because he’s Gunner.
    “On yer knobbies,” Gunner said.
    Gavin got on his knees, planting them wide on the deck so the rolling motion wouldn’t knock him down. He couldn’t tell if the stretching hurt good or hurt bad, but as long as he didn’t lose his head or any other limb more important to him, any break from the oars was a good thing.
    Gunner looked at him. “What happened to Gavin Guile, levering the world on the fulcrum of his wantings?”
    On one level, this was the clearest thing Gunner had said to him yet, but Gavin had told Gunner he wasn’t Gavin. It was probably one of the dumber things he’d done in the last year, though there were a lot of contenders for that crown. “He died.” That ought to work, regardless of which Gavin Gunner meant.
    “Tragical. How?”
    The trick to working with the insane was never to profess surprise. Nor to expect it. Opacity was a dagger Gavin could wield, too. “I ran out of mercies until I had only the musket-ball mercy left. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Boom boom. Meatsack mercy. Yellow cell red, liver made dead.”
    Gunner folded his arms. He looked at Gavin like he was very puzzling. “You rave.”
    “I crave.”
    “You knave.”
    “I slave.”
    “I save.”
    “From waves?”
    “And you gave,” Gunner said. He gestured to his big white musket, propped against a doorframe some paces away.
    Gavin stopped to let Gunner win. He did want to get a better look at that odd thing, but Gunner alternately wanted to show it off and looked paranoid that someone was going to steal it. Gavin couldn’t pay too much attention to what Gunner treasured. Nor too little.
    Gunner laughed, sealing his win, taking Gavin’s hesitation to be a concession of defeat. They’d played this game before. Years and years ago now. If Gavin weren’t utterly in the man’s power, and Gunner utterly insane, Gavin thought he might like him. Gunner said, “I don’t take men who’ve been in Ceres’s bosom too sincere. Them watery kisses make men crazy, and ain’t no Guile started out overmuch sane. Tell it straight as shooting. Are you Dazen Guile, back from the dead? You tell me this, and not half the tale.”
    Which didn’t mean what the words meant. Gunner’s patience was shorter than his fuses. So Gavin gave it in brief: “Never died. Captured my brother at Sundered Rock, and took his place. His friends looked better than mine, so I took my brother’s clothes, and I took his place. But not a month back, I decided my imprisoned brother had gone frothing mad, and I killed him.”
    It was so simple to say the words. Gavin had thought it would be impossible to tell the truth he’d worked so hard to