He rubbed the black eye, but even that did nothing to soothe him.
“I can’t make that kind of jump,” Gavin said. “There’s no way in hell you can make it.”
“Nope. But like I said, this isn’t my pilgrimage.”
Gavin turned on the old man. “You’re not going with me?”
“My task was to get you here,” Orholam said. He smiled a toothy smile and patted himself on the back. “ ‘Good job, old boy. Well done!’ ‘Oh, Master, you’re too kind. I was pretty good, though, wasn’t I? Especially considering the load I had to carry up this tower!’ ” Plopping down his pack, Orholam sat and dangled his legs over the drop.
“Load?!” Gavin said. “I oughta kick you off this damned tower!”
“Meh. How do you think I plan to get down? Walk?”
“Huh?” Gavin asked.
“Below here, it’s a . . . what do you call it? The entrance to the, uh, the thing you slide down.”
“What? The chute?”
“Chute, that’s it! Yeah, I mean, after the initial plunge, which is apparently quite bracing. You saw where it spits you out at the bottom of the tower. Safely, too, albeit likely with damp undergarments. This is a pilgrimage to the Father of Mercy. Failure doesn’t mean death here. If you fall, you slide down the chute and start over. Or give up, I suppose.”
“Start over?”
Gavin looked across the gap, despair welling up in him. How was he supposed to leap seven paces? Maybe at his strongest he might have leapt so far, but now?
“It’s customary to take a meal as one contemplates this test. Hmm.” Orholam was looking around. “There were benches and tables . . . once. Wood, I guess. No sign of them now after the centuries. Sad. Imagine the dedication of those who carried tables and chairs up through all that we’ve just seen, merely to ease the burdens of others who’d climbed! Come, sit.”
Gavin was looking at the gap. In his prime, healthy, unencumbered, he could’ve cleared it. Probably.
Maybe.
“How strong are you, Guile? You look well—”
“Thank you.”
“—considering your age and what you’ve been through.”
“Let me take that back,” Gavin said.
He had regained much of his strength, even through the climb, oddly. His body felt strong. Against the strop of successive circles, his mind had been honed to a keen edge.
But Orholam wasn’t wrong in adding in that consideration of age: Gavin wasn’t of that strength which in the old days shook the pillars of the earth.
“Are you going to throw the blade across?” Orholam asked, seeing Gavin contemplating its weight, turning it in his hands.
“And risk losing it in this wind? No way.”
“Leave it here?” Orholam asked.
“And trust you with it?”
“You could do worse.”
Jumping across while holding the Blinding Knife—Blinding Sword?—tempted serious injury. And that was if he could clear the gap at all with all the weight he was carrying. If the blade slowed his run up to the edge of the precipice even a little, Gavin wouldn’t make it.
“How the hell would old people make it across this?” Gavin asked. “You said there were wood tables. Was there a plank or something, too? A little walk of faith, huge drop-off to either side, have to step exactly right or you fall?”
“That’s how you see Him?”
“Accurately, you mean?”
Orholam shook his head sadly. “It’s said that the gap adjusts to be a perfect test for each penitent.”
“Adjusts?” Gavin asked. “So for some old lady, it’d be like a big step? You should’ve told me! I’d have brought an old lady with me. Oh wait, I sort of did. How about I make you go first?”
Orholam shrugged. “I’m not crossing. I’ll jump if you try to make me.”
“You’re serious? You can’t be serious. You got all the way here and now you’re gonna quit? Half a turn from the top? You don’t want to see if He really is there?”
“This isn’t about me, Guile,” the old rower said.
“It is now. I need you. If you’re not going to help me, I deserve to know why.” Right before I throw your geriatric ass off the no-chute side of the tower.
“That will of yours. No wonder it got you in trouble.” Orholam sighed. “Very well. This is my penance. Many years ago, and for many years, I refused to go where Orholam told me to go. Now He told me to come here. And, as I understand, to go no farther. So here I am, standing at the door and knocking, but I won’t go in uninvited.”
“ ‘As you understand’? Change your understanding!”
“Here I stand. I can do no other.”
“I guess I should’ve expected this much help from Orholam in my hour of need.”
“I never claimed to be the Lord of Lights. I merely allowed myself to be used as a stand-in on our ship for enslaved men who couldn’t understand how an invisible god could be present with them in their sufferings. I’m not Orholam Himself. ”
“Oh, but you are. If He allows you to speak in His name, and you lie, then He is weak or a liar or absent. You are Orholam here on earth, and in a way, so was I. But one of us is finished with the lies and dodging responsibility.”
“How is it, my friend, that after all this climb, your heart is still hard against one who loves you most?”
“What you want’s impossible. Fuck you, friend,” Gavin said. “I’m sorry I ever saved you.”
The old prophet seemed unperturbed. “I’ll be here praying for you. That is, unless you do me some violence that prevents it. That edge over there will see me miss the chute and fall to my death.”
The fires of rage burned only for a few moments more. Without further fuel, they dimmed. The old man wouldn’t fight him.
Did Gavin really want to kill another person who didn’t resist?
“No,” Gavin said. “Killing deluded old men is exactly what I got tired of doing with my life. Plus I’m not going to let you die thinking you’re a martyr.”
He turned away. The gap remained. The gap was impossible.
Whatever happened to ‘Impossible is what I do’?
The penitent’s robes held Gavin’s boon-stone burdens wonderfully, but they were burdens nonetheless. And heavy, no matter how well carried.
“Tell me again. What exactly happens if I fall?” Gavin asked.
“You slide down to the bottom, where you may either give up or climb again.”
“All the way to the bottom? Are there shortcuts on the way back up? Ladders or something you didn’t tell me about the first time? Is it easier the second time? I learned my lessons on my first trip, O wise and great master.”
Orholam shook his head. “Oh! But there is an important bit I may not have told you? Didn’t I tell you that where the celestial realm and ours overlap, time works somewhat differently?”
“Yes.” And I totally believed you.
“It’s nearly Sun Day now.”
“What?” Gavin asked. It had certainly seemed a long climb, but long as in days, not weeks.
“If you fall? Your next climb will take a year. The next try takes ten. Some few have left behind all their lives and family to climb for a century, perhaps more.”