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Men, when they think in this way—that the crisis, the moment of revealed power, has passed—are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers. When people have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in fact, wide-open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not the moment of birth—the bursting through a shell into the world—that imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that comes after and marks the soul.
The past kept impinging upon the present: all he saw now appeared shot through with images of things seen before. Too many interwoven memories. He would die on some tomorrow that lay waiting even now, and then everything would become yesterday—in the god’s mild Light, if Jad were merciful.
A sunset, while Jad was rising? Opposite the god? There was a heresy, he thought, sitting suddenly up in his bed, awake and disoriented. But he couldn’t remember what sort it was, and he fell fitfully asleep again.
He was in the world, neither above it nor walled off from it anymore. If he had sailed to anything, it was to that truth.
