On his knees, Dazen barely fit between the fingers of the clenched fist as it smote the entire top of the tower.
The tower shook from the concussion. Thunder crashed, but it was thunder beyond mere sound. Every hair stood on end. The air itself shouted with a triumphant yell. Lights fired in every color Dazen remembered and a myriad he didn’t know—for one instant, even his color-blinded eye could see. And a shock wave spread out, as great waves rippling in the ocean give an angle to see momentarily into the ocean’s depths, for an instant, Dazen could see into the Thousand Worlds as if here his realm and the heavenly realms overlapped. He could see figures, bloodied warriors joining a victory shout.
And then . . . all was normal once more. That shock wave disappeared into the distance in every direction, ripples in the pond of time, but Dazen still knelt here. Orholam, masked as the old prophet once more, stood again before him, now looking oddly and entirely mundane.
The black Thing, broken now in a hundred places, writhed yet.
And it twisted, relentlessly, toward Dazen.
Orholam stepped forward and crushed its head under His foot.
It squirmed and snapped in its death throes, snapping at His heel, and died.
But Orholam nonchalantly tore away the dead Thing and tossed it off the tower.
He turned and quirked a grin at Dazen, and though every crease remained on old Orholam’s face, and His teeth were just as crooked and stained as before—though nothing was changed—every seam of the old man’s visage leaked out glory.
Dazen dropped to his face.
The midnight, hungry stone beneath him seemed now merely bright black. The air tasted fresh. The ache in his finger stubs felt somehow clean, a body doing what a body was made to do when it had been injured. His vision, still black and white, somehow seemed crisp.
He was changed, as if he’d been made anew.
“Get up,” Orholam said with a voice that seemed to resound with hidden undertones of power. “We’ve business to finish.”
Dazen glanced up, but it was still old man Orholam. “The giant? Was that . . . ?” he asked. As if that were the most pressing question to ask Orholam Himself.
“The same one from your dream? Of course. You’ve had such a terrible attitude about prophets, so I made you one.” He lifted his eyebrows, and Dazen, remembering he’d been told to get up, stood quickly.
“Obedience,” Dazen said. “Yeah, not my strong suit.”
Orholam looked at him levelly. Right, Orholam knew that.
“What would You have me do, sir?” Dazen asked.
“There’s one matter we must attend to first.”
“Huh?”
“Traditionally, pilgrims who deliver a boon stone may ask Me a boon.”
I get to ask a . . . what? After all that? After what I just saw?
But his mouth was already running away, unmoored from sense. “Seems like a stupid tradition, though, doesn’t it? I mean, ‘Here’s my pride rock, now gimme stuff’?”
Orholam laughed aloud, and Dazen was struck by the sound. He was actually enjoying Himself, as if talking with Dazen was something that could bring Orholam joy. Absurd! And yet, here it was. “Traditions,” Orholam said, “like people, tend to fall short. I work with what I’m given.”
He was serious, and suddenly Dazen was baffled.
What could he ask for? How could he dare ask more? He’d seen his brother again. He’d been condemned to death and been given back life.
It wasn’t that there was nothing he wanted. He thought of them all now: His fingers back. His eye to see again. His powers. His position. More than any of those, he wanted his wife and his son.
He thought of asking for them to survive. He thought of framing some request so broad and precisely legalistic that he might get back everything good and nothing bad from his old life.
He would have done that, too. Old Gavin would have, that man of guile, the master of land ways and sea ways, breaking the rules to win the game.
But here, after what he’d seen, it not only seemed witless to try to gull God Himself, but it seemed breathtakingly ungrateful.
Dazen still wanted it all. He wanted everything good for those he loved even more. His mouth opened to ask for Karris and Kip to live, to thrive, to have all that was good in the world.
But then he stopped as he gazed out toward the great seas and the reef that circled this island. “They suffer?”
He didn’t have to clarify. Orholam knew how his mind skipped around and how it focused intently on things others ignored. The One who knew the punchline to every joke knew Dazen spoke of the sea demons, the monsters he could so easily have become, his predecessors in power and in pride and in loss and in striving for what they could not have and what they could not be.
“They’ve chosen to be separated from Me forever,” Orholam said. “That’s one of the better descriptions of hell.”
Gavin had been a son of separation himself, where delicacies turned to ash in your mouth. It was the land of madness and murder and a life drained of color. It was a life that was worse than death. “Then for my boon, I ask that You cut their punishment short. Or their penance. Or whatever it is. I ask that You release them from this suffering,” Dazen said, and he knew that his words were a foolishness beyond understanding. What was wrong with him?
“You think they didn’t have a fair chance? That they didn’t know what it meant when they made their choices?”
Dazen knew he was being audacious, presumptuous, but this, too, was how he’d been made. “I know that people make choices about eternity before they understand what eternity means. I know I threw away a thousand second chances before I took the last one. I know they probably won’t take it, but . . . what if they do? So for my boon, my lord, I beg that You offer these undeserving one more chance.”
Orholam studied him. “You stand broken and powerless, stripped of all you loved, with all your world in the balance, your son and your wife fighting for their very lives, and for your boon you ask clemency for strangers?”
“My wife and son are Yours. If You don’t care for them even more than I do, You’re not who You say You are. If You’re not who You say You are, what use is a boon? But I think You are. My wife and son are loved, by me and by You and by thousands of others. The sea demons . . .” He thought of them: feeding on light itself but living in darkness, alone, outliving everyone who’d ever loved them, twisted into something hideous by their own choices.
Dazen’s heart emptied all at once, like a dam bursting and all his hopes rushing out, like he was doing something disastrous—but right. “The sea demons aren’t strangers. They’re me.”
“O Dazen,” Orholam said, and his voice was soft and his eyes were proud. “Here at your end, you are indeed a man after my own heart. So let it be. Come. Your penance awaits.”
Chapter 123
Kip flexed his burn-scarred left hand, working the stiffness out of it before taking the intricately engraved golden bar in his grip. It fit like they’d been made for each other.
“Breaker, I don’t mean to minimize the challenge you’re taking on there,” Ferkudi said from the edge of the roof where he was looking out over the Jaspers, “but whatever you’re going to do, could you . . . maybe . . . you know, start?”