The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,240

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.”

“I know. You said that. I just didn’t really believe you. We didn’t see anyone else on our climb.”

“And yet we passed many, and more passed us. You think the creator of the Thousand Worlds has made only one path of pilgrimage?”

Okay, lots of religious obfuscation there, but it was possible that there was some sort of anomaly here on this island that made time seem warped. If so, it made sense that primitive peoples would build a monument in such a place. How perception and reality overlapped with will-casting was something Gavin didn’t understand well. No