It is a small room, and it eats you.
I stood inside it because my betters told me to, four of us packed close as beasts in a byre, and the doors slid shut with no hand upon them. Then the floor took a breath. My belly rose up into my throat the way it does when I misjudge a ladder and the good Lord snatches me back. I said my prayers. The others said nothing. They looked at the glowing numbers above the door, counting, the way I count sheep back through the gate, only these sheep were us, and something was counting us as we rose.
We did not climb. That is the sorcery of it. A man goes to the top of the miller's tower on his own two legs, and his heart hammers, and his knees curse him, and by the top he has earned the view. Here no one earned anything. The room lifted us like the hand of an angel lifting the blessed, or the hand of something else lifting the sack of grain it means to keep.
When it stopped my stomach fell back into its rightful place. The doors opened onto a floor I could not have reached in an hour of stairs, and I had done nothing. Nothing at all. My legs were as fresh as when I entered.
That is what frightened me most. A day's height, and no ache to show for it. My whole life the ache has been the proof that I am still owed my supper. Here was a place that would carry a man to Heaven and let him arrive with soft hands.
The Lord will know those hands. He always knows them.