there’s good news,” Kip said, raising his voice.
“Pray tell,” Andross Guile said, eyes flashing.
Kip said, “I can stop them.”
Chapter 70
“This is like one of those festival games, isn’t it?” Gavin said, coming up to the gap. “The promise of an amazing prize if only you do something that looks simple . . . but is actually impossible.” He looked into the abyss before his toes and tried to still the turning of his stomach.
“Many have made the jump with greater infirmities than your own.”
“I’m infirm now, huh?”
They had climbed every circle, and Gavin had just tucked away the last boon stone into his constricting and now heavy pilgrim’s garment. The crown of this great tower couldn’t be more than a half circle away. But here, rather than sitting right in front of the next gate, the pilgrims’ rest area sat right next to an enormous gap in the trail.
Orholam came up to stand beside Gavin at the precipice. “It’s not so far.”
“Not so far?” Gavin asked, incredulous. It had to be seven paces.
Gavin had endured a lifetime’s worth of trials to get this far, and he’d kept his pilgrimage mind-set as well as he could. But this was impossible. Ludicrous. It was suicide.
He leaned forward over the abyss. Wind buffeted him, and he staggered back, heart seizing up in his chest.
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