The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,397

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