Small Gods (35 page)

What happened next happened in frozen time. Deacon Cusp grabbed at the weight for support. It sank down, ponderously, his extra poundage adding to the weight of the water. He clawed higher. It sank further, dropping below the lip of the pit. He sought for balance again, but this time it was against fresh air, and he tumbled on top of the falling weight.

Urn saw his face staring up at him as the weight fell into the gloom.

With a lever, he could change the world. It had certainly changed it for Deacon Cusp. It had made it stop existing.

Fergmen was standing over the guard, his pipe raised.

“I know this one,” he said. “I’m going to give him a—”

“Never mind about that!”

“But—”

Above them linkage clanked into action. There was a distant creaking of bronze against bronze.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Urn. “Only the gods know what’s happening up there.”

And blows rained on the unmoving Moving Turtle’s carapace.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” shouted Simony, thumping it
again. “Move! I command you to move! Can you understand plain Ephebian! Move!”

The unmoving machine leaked steam and sat there.

And Om pulled himself up the slope of a small hill. So it came to this, then. There was only one way to get to the Citadel now.

It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.

And Brutha stood in front of the huge doors, oblivious to the crowd and the muttering guards. The Quisition could arrest anyone, but the guards weren’t certain what happened to you if you apprehended an archbishop, especially one so recently favored by the Prophet.

Just a sign, Brutha thought, in the loneliness of his head.

The doors trembled, and swung slowly outwards.

Brutha stepped forward. He wasn’t fully conscious now, not in any coherent way as understood by normal people. Just one part of him was still capable of looking at the state of his own mind and thinking: perhaps the Great Prophets felt like this
all the time
.

The thousands inside the temple were looking around in confusion. The choirs of lesser Iams paused in their chant. Brutha walked on up the aisle, the only one with a purpose in the suddenly bewildered throng.

Vorbis was standing in the center of the temple, under the vault of the dome. Guards hurried toward Brutha, but Vorbis raised a hand in a gentle but very positive movement.

Now Brutha could take in the scene. There was the staff of Ossory, and Abbys’s cloak, and the sandals of Cena. And, supporting the dome, the massive statues of
the first four prophets. He’d never seen them. He’d heard about them every day of his childhood.

And what did they mean now? They didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything, if Vorbis was Prophet. Nothing meant anything, if the Cenobiarch was a man who’d heard nothing in the inner spaces of his own head but his own thoughts.

He was aware that Vorbis’s gesture had not only halted the guards, although they surrounded him like a hedge. It had also filled the temple with silence. Into which Vorbis spoke.

“Ah. My Brutha. We had looked for you in vain. And now even you are here…”

Brutha stopped a few feet away. The moment of…whatever it had been…that had propelled him through the doors had drained away.

Now all there was, was Vorbis.

Smiling.

The part of him still capable of thought was thinking: there is nothing you can say. No one will listen. No one will care. It doesn’t matter what you tell people about Ephebe, and Brother Murduck, and the desert. It won’t be
fundamentally
true.

Fundamentally true. That’s what the world is, with Vorbis in it.

Vorbis said, “There is something wrong? Something you wish to say?”

The black-on-black eyes filled the world, like two pits.

Brutha’s mind gave up, and Brutha’s body took over. It brought his hand back and raised it, oblivious to the sudden rush forward of the guards.

He saw Vorbis turn his cheek, and smile.

Brutha stopped, and lowered his hand.

He said, “No, I won’t.”

Then, for the first and only time, he saw Vorbis really enraged. There had been times before when the deacon had been angry, but it had been something driven by the brain, switched on and off as the need arose. This was something else, something out of control. And it flashed across his face only for a moment.

As the hands of the guards closed on him, Vorbis stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder. He looked Brutha in the eye for a moment and then said softly:

“Thrash him within an inch of his life and burn him the rest of the way.”

An Iam began to speak, but stopped when he saw Vorbis’s expression.

“Do it
now
.”

A world of silence. No sound up here, except the rush of wind through the feathers.

Up here the world is round, bordered by a band of sea. The viewpoint is from horizon to horizon, the sun is closer.

And yet, looking down, looking for shapes……down in the farmland on the edge of the wilderness…

…on a small hill……a tiny moving dome, ridiculously exposed…

No sound but the rush of wind through feathers as the eagle pulls in its wings and drops like an arrow, the world spinning around the little moving shape that is the focus of all the eagle’s attention.

Closer and…

…talons down…

…
grip
……and rise…

Brutha opened his eyes.

His back was merely agonizing. He’d long ago got used to switching off pain.

But he was spread-eagled on a surface, his arms and legs chained to something he couldn’t see. Sky above. The towering frontage of the temple to one side.

By turning his head a little he could see the silent crowd. And the brown metal of the iron turtle. He could smell smoke.

Someone was just tightening the shackles on his hand. Brutha looked over at the inquisitor. Now, what was it he had to say? Oh, yes.

“The Turtle Moves?” he mumbled.

The man sighed.

“Not this one, friend,” he said.

The world spun under Om as the eagle sought for shell-cracking height, and his mind was besieged by the tortoise’s existential dread of being off the ground. And Brutha’s thoughts, bright and clear this close to death…

I’m on my back and getting hotter and I’m going to die
…

Careful, careful. Concentrate,
concentrate
. It’ll let go any second…

Om stuck out his long scrawny neck, stared at the body just above him, picked what he hoped was about the right spot, plunged his beak through the brown feathers between the talons, and
gripped
.

The eagle blinked. No tortoise had ever done that to an eagle, anywhere else in history.

Om’s thoughts arrived in the little silvery world of its mind:

“We don’t want to hurt one another, now do we?”

The eagle blinked again.

Eagles have never evolved much imagination or fore-thought, beyond that necessary to know that a turtle smashes when you drop it on the rocks. But it was forming a mental picture of what happened when you let go of a heavy tortoise that was still intimately gripping an essential bit of you.

Its eyes watered.

Another thought crept into its mind.

“Now. You play, uh, ball with me, I’ll play…ball with you. Understand? This is important. This is what I want you to do…”

The eagle soared on a thermal off the hot rocks, and sped towards the distant gleam of the Citadel.

No tortoise had ever done this before. No tortoise in the whole universe. But no tortoise had ever been a god, and knew the unwritten motto of the Quisition:
Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum
.

When you have their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.

Urn pushed his way through the crowds, with Fergmen trailing behind. That was the best and the worst of civil war, at least at the start—everyone wore the same uniform. It was much easier when you picked enemies who were a different color or at least spoke with a funny accent. You could call them “gooks” or something. It made things easier.

Hey, Urn thought. This is nearly philosophy. Pity I probably won’t live to tell anyone.

The big doors were ajar. The crowd was silent, and
very attentive. He craned forward to see, and then looked up at the soldier beside him.

It was Simony.

“I thought—”

“It didn’t work,” said Simony, bitterly.

“Did you—?”

“We did everything! Something broke!”

“It must be the steel they make here,” said Urn. “The link pins on—”

“That doesn’t matter now,” said Simony.

The flat tones of his voice made Urn follow the eyes of the crowd.

There was another iron turtle there—a proper model of a turtle, mounted on a sort of open gridwork of metal bars in which a couple of inquisitors were even now lighting a fire. And chained to the back of the turtle—

“Who’s that?”

“Brutha.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what happened. He hit Vorbis, or didn’t hit him. Or something. Enraged him anyway. Vorbis stopped the ceremony, right there and then.”

Urn glanced at the deacon. Not Cenobiarch yet, so uncrowned. Among the Iams and bishops standing uncertainly in the open doorway, his bald head gleamed in the morning light.

“Come on, then,” said Urn.

“Come on what?”

“We can rush the steps and save him!”

“There’s more of them than there are of us,” said Simony.

“Well, haven’t there always been? There’s not magically more of them than there are of us just because they’ve got Brutha, are there?”

Simony grabbed his arm.

“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.” Simon 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—”

“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 around curiously at him.

“You don’t
know?
” he said.

The sky was blue. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to turn it into Omnia’s normal copper bowl.

Brutha turned his head again, towards the sun. It was about a width above the horizon, although if Didactylos’s theories about the speed of light were correct, it was really setting, thousands of years in the future.

It was eclipsed by the head of Vorbis.

“Hot yet, Brutha?” said the deacon.

“Warm.”

“It will get warmer.”

There was a disturbance in the crowd. Someone was shouting. Vorbis ignored it.

“Nothing you want to say?” he said. “Can’t you manage even a curse? Not even a curse?”

“You never heard Om,” said Brutha. “You never believed. You never, ever heard his voice. All you heard were the echoes inside your own mind.”

“Really? But I am the Cenobiarch and you are going to burn for treachery and heresy,” said Vorbis. “So much for Om, perhaps?”

“There will be justice,” said Brutha. “If there is no justice, there is nothing.”

He was aware of a small voice in his head, too faint yet to distinguish words.

“Justice?” said Vorbis. The idea seemed to enrage him. He spun around to the crowd of bishops. “Did you hear him? There will be justice? Om
has
judged! Through
me!
This
is
justice!”

There was a speck in the sun now, speeding toward the Citadel. And the little voice was saying
left left left up up left right a bit up left
—The mass of metal under him was getting uncomfortably hot.

“He comes now,” said Brutha.

Vorbis waved his hand to the great facade of the temple. “Men built this. We built this,” he said. “And what did Om do? Om comes? Let him come! Let him judge between us!”

“He comes now,” Brutha repeated. “The God.”

People looked apprehensively upward. There was that moment, just one moment, when the world holds its breath and against all experience waits for a miracle.

—
up left now, when I say three, one, two, THREE
—

“Vorbis?” croaked Brutha.

“What?” snapped the deacon.