Small gods is a masterpiece and one of the most important moments in it deserves more attention.
I think this exchange gets overlooked a lot because it happens right before the big climax, but I think it shows the basic principle of the book boiled down to its most essential core. The importants of humanity and view people as people.
"Think logically, will you?" he said. "You're a philosopher, aren't you? Look at the crowd!"
Urn looked at the crowd.
"Well?"
"They don't like it,." Simony turned. "Look, Brutha's going to die anyway. But this way it'll mean something. People don't understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they'll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha's death a symbol for people, don't you see?"
Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth.
"A symbol?" he said. His throat was dry.
"It has to be."
He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh.
Otherwise you'd go mad.
"You know," he said, turning to Simony. "Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It's just war. It's all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what's special? Do you know what it is?"
"Of course," said Simony. "It's what he's doing to-ā
"It's what he's done to you."
"What?"
"He turns other people into copies of himself."
Simony's grip was like a vice. "You're saying I'm like him?"
"Once you said you'd cut him down," said Urn.
"Now you're thinking like him . . .
"So we rush them, then?" said Simony. "I'm sure of-maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?"
Urn's face was gray with horror now.
"You mean you don't know?" he said.
Some of the crowd looked round curiously at him.
"You don't know?" he said.
This is such a profoundly important part of the message of small gods, it's what makes Vorbis that monster that he is and what makes Brutha the man that he is.
The thing that Simony cannot understand, and that Vorbis never did is summed up best by granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum
'There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, iswhen you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.'
'It's a lot more complicated than that-'
'No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.'
Simony just sees Brutha as a martyr, a tool to strenghten his rebellion and rally around, he's not seeing the person bound on the burning turtle, just how he can use its ashes.
Vorbis always thought like this, in fact he never saw people at all, his mind was never open to a single other person, he was the very embodiment of sin as viewed by granny, he never saw a single person as a person, only ever as a thing.
"So," said Vorbis. "The desert. And at the end of the desert?"
JUDGEMENT.
"Yes, yes, of course."
Vorbis tried to concentrate. He couldn't. He could feel certainty draining away. And he'd always been certain. He hesitated, like a man opening a door to a familiar room and finding nothing there but a bottomless pit. The memories were still there. He could feel them. They had the right shape. It was just that he couldn't remember what they were. There had been a voice . . . . Surely, there had been a voice? But all he could remember was the sound of his own thoughts, bouncing off the inside of his own head.
Now he had to cross the desert. What could there be to fear? The desert was what you believed.
Vorbis looked inside himself.
And went on looking.
He sagged to his knees.
I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE BUSY, said Death.
"Don't leave me! It's so empty!"
Death looked around at the endless desert. He snapped his fingers and a large white horse trotted up.
I SEE A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, he said, swinging himself into the saddle.
"Where? Where?"
HERE. WITH YOU.
"I can't see them!"
Death gathered up the reins.
NEVERTHELESS, he said. His horse trotted forward a few steps.
"I don't understand!" screamed Vorbis.
Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
"Yes. Yes, of course."
Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.
The fact that the desert is empty for him because, even when he was alive he never saw the people infront of him so how could he now? He never listend, never learned, never took in the perspective of anyone else, just had his own thoughts echoing inside him.
Then there's Brutha who always saw people as people, he helped Vorbis through the desert when he had every reason to kill him, and when confronted with the same task again, he chose to help him across the black desert of death. In the same way he was the only person to believe in Om, he was the only person to actually see Vorbis. Not just as a monster, or the head of the Quisition, or a prophet or whatever other ideas of him people built up in their minds, he still saw him as a person in the end.
