Epiphany of the Long Sun (40 page)

In spite of pain and weakness, Silk smiled. "Some do, perhaps, Your Cognizance."

"Last night before you saw me in the alley, Patera Caldé. I met your acolyte, young Gulo. He is most embarrassed."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Your Cognizance."

"You shouldn't be. His uncle is a major in the Second Brigade. One uncle of many. Were you aware of it?"

"No, Your Cognizance. I don't know much about Patera."

"Neither do I, though he was one of our copyists until my coadjutor sent him to you. He commands several thousand now. It's a great responsibility for someone so young. More join every hour, he tells me, because they know he's your acolyte."

Silk managed to swallow. "I hope he won't waste their lives, Your Cognizance."

"So do I. I asked if it was hard. He said he discussed each operation with those who would have to fight. He finds them sensible, and he knows something of war from his uncle's table talk. He fights in the front rank afterward, he says."

"Your Cognizance mentioned that he was embarrassed."

"So he is, Patera Caldé." Quetzal shook himself, lifting one corner of his mouth by the thickness of a thread. "He has captured his uncle. Our clergy have hidden depths. The older man is humiliated. It's an awkward situation, I'm afraid, but I was amused."

"So am I, Your Cognizance. Thank you."

Quetzal rose. "We'll find our own amusing, when we find our way out. May I look for water?"

"Of course, Your Cognizance."

"You won't try to stand until I'm back? Give me your word, Patera Caldé."

Silk sat up.

"Please, Patera-"

"I have to go with you, Your Cognizance. I have to find water, wash, and drink, so I can do whatever I can for Viron and Hyacinth. You've got nothing to carry water in, and all four of you couldn't possibly carry me far."

"You've been suffocated, Patera Caldé," Quetzal bent over him. "We merely thought you dead, and I shouldn't have hinted at a miracle. No god can turn back death, and if they could, no god would to please us. You were still alive when we dug you out. You revived naturally-"

Unaided, Silk staggered to his feet. "I had a cane, Your Cognizance. Master Xiphias gave it to me. I didn't need it then, or at least not much. Now I do."

Quetzal offered him the baculus. "Use this."

"Never, Your Cognizance. Councillor Lemur called me-No, I won't."

The tunnel behind them was nearly choked with earth; a trampled path led Silk to an opening in the wall. "Is this where you found me, Your Cognizance? In there?"

"Yes, Patera Caldé. But if your young woman is in there, she is surely dead by now."

"I realize that." Silk put his head through the opening, "and I believe she's in the pit with Auk, anyway; but Master Xiphias values that cane, I need it, and it's probably very close to the place where you found me." He began to work his shoulders through.

"Be careful, Patera Caldé."

The wall was shiprock, little more than a cubit thick. Beyond it lay a cavity hollowed from the tumbled soil that seemed utterly dark. When Silk tried to stand, he found his head capped by a rough dome; earth and small stones showered him invisibly. "This could collapse any moment," he told the swaying figure in the tunnel.

"So it could, Patera Caldé. Come out, please."

His questing fingers had come upon stubby protuberances he assumed were roots. Exploring his pockets, he discovered the cards Remora had given him and used one to scrape away the soil. One root wore a ring. He cleared away more soil until he could get a firm grip on the hand, tugged, dug farther, and tugged again.

"There are new sounds in this tunnel, Patera Caldé. You had better leave that place."

"I've found someone, Your Cognizance. Somebody else." Silk hesitated, unwilling to trust his judgement. "I don't think it's Hyacinth. The hand is too big."

"Then it doesn't matter whose it is. We must go."

Getting a firm grip on the arm, Silk heaved with all the strength that remained to him, and was rewarded by a cataract of earth and a dead man's embrace.

I'm robbing a grave, he thought, spitting grit and wiping his eyes. Robbing this man's grave from below-stealing his grave as well as his body.

It should have been at least as amusing as Gulo's uncle the major, but was not. Holding onto the jagged edge of the opening in the tunnel wall, he succeeded in pulling his own partially buried body free. Back in the tunnel (suddenly very glad of its cold, sighing airs and watery lights) he was able to extract the corpse from the loose soil that had reclaimed it. Quetzal was nowhere to be seen.

"He's gone to look for water," Silk muttered. "Perhaps water could revive you the way something revived me," but the dead man's ears were stopped with earth. As he cleaned the pitiful face, Silk added, "I'm sorry, Doctor."

He searched his pockets again; his beads were not there, left behind with his own worn and dirty robe at Ermine's. It seemed a very long time ago.

He wriggled back into the dark cavity beyond the tunnel wall. Hyacinth had bathed him in their bedroom at Ermine's, undressing him, and scrubbing and drying him bit by bit. He ought to have been embarrassed (he told himself); but he had been too exhausted to feel anything beyond vague satisfaction, a weak pleasure at finding himself the object of so beautiful a woman's attention. Now all her concern had been undone, and Remora's fine robe, scarcely worn, ruined.

"You returned me to life, Outsider," Silk murmured as he resumed digging, "I wish you'd cleaned me up, too." But the Outsider had doubtless been, as Doctor Crane had maintained, no more than a vein's bursting.

Or had Doctor Crane-who had thought himself, or at any rate called himself, an agent of the Rani-been in truth an agent of the Outsider? Doctor Crane had made it possible for him to proceed in his attempt to save the manteion despite his broken ankle; and Doctor Crane had freed him when he had been taken by the Ayuntamiento. It was conceivable, even likely, that Doctor Crane's scepticism had been a test of faith.

Had he passed?

Weighing that question, he dug harder than ever, making the dark, evil-smelling earth fly. If he had, he would almost certainly be tested again, after this surrender to doubt.

The card struck something hard. At first he assumed it was a stone, but it was too smooth; another half minute's work bared the new find: a slender hook. As soon as he grasped it to pull it free, he knew that he had found the silver-banded cane Xiphias had brought to Ermine's for him.

Without warning, brilliant light flooded the cavity. He turned away from it, covering his eyes.

"I see you in there. Come on out."

There was something familiar about the harsh voice, but it was not until its owner said, "Put your hands where I can see them," that Silk recognized it as Sergeant Sand's.

Sitting the white stallion in the middle of Fisc Street, Maytera Mint surveyed the advancing ranks. Every one of those soldiers would be worth three of her best, but they were few. Hearteningly few, and the troopers from Trivigaunte had come. Just a few hundred now, but thousands more were on the way.

"Fire and fall back," she called softly, adding under her breath, "Gracious Echidna, grant that I be heard by our people but not by those soldiers." Then, a trifle louder, "Not too quickly. But not too slowly, either. This isn't the time to impress me. Don't get yourselves killed."

The first level metal rank was practically within slug-gun range. She wheeled her stallion and cantered off, hearing the firing break out behind her, the
whiz…bang!
of missiles and the dull booming of slug guns.

Someone cried out.

I told them to, she reminded herself. I emphasized it in the briefing.

Yet she knew the wound had been real. She reined in the stallion and turned to look again: behind the soldiers, Rook's blocking force was straggling into position. Too early, she thought. Far too early. You never appreciated men like Bison and the captain-men who helped you make plans and carried them out-until you got something like this.

One long cable had been looped around each pillar of the Corn Exchange; it was not taut yet, nor should it have been. She risked a glance up at the towering facade, another at Wool and his bullock men, motionless in the shadows half a street away. He and they stood ready beside their animals, waiting for her signal.

The bullock men trusted her. So did the ragged men and women who were shooting and retreating as she had taught them. Shooting and dying, because they had trusted a weak woman-trusted her because Brocket had taught her to ride when she was a child.

She clapped heels to the stallion's sides. He had been used long and hard yesterday, yet he surged forward, a foaming wave of strength. Patera Silk's azoth was in her hand; she thumbed the demon.

Seeing its terrible blade split the sky, Wool's bullock men prodded their animals. The cable tightened, a slithering monster of steel and silence, Echidna's greatest serpent.

The soldiers halted and faced about at a loud command, their officer having seen Rook's force and detected the trap. They would have to attack in earnest now, but her own voice (she told herself) was incapable of launching troops against the enemy. Her voice would not inspire anyone, so her person must. She neck-reined the stallion, and the silver trumpet that was her voice in fact echoed from every wall.

Five chains away, the blade of the azoth wrecked a fusion generator, and the soldier whose heart it had been died.

Forward! Past her own disorderly line. Another soldier down, and another! Forward!

The stallion stumbled, crying out like a man in pain.

A half-dozen soldiers dashed forward. The stallion fell, too weak to stand; it seemed to her that the street itself had struck her, casting all its clods and ridges at her at once. Steel hands laid hold of her, and bios wrestled with chems in a desperate foolish fight. A woman three times her size swung a wrecking bar. The soldier she struck, struck her with the butt of his slug gun; she fell backward and did not rise.

Maytera Mint struggled in a soldier's grasp. The azoth was gone- No! Was under her shoe. He lifted her, his arms clamping her like tongs; she stamped on the azoth with all her strength, and its lancing point sheared off his foot. Smoking black fluid spurted from the stump of his leg, slippery as so much grease. They fell, and his grip weakened.

She tore herself away, stooping for the azoth, and ran, nearly falling again, pursued with terrifying speed until the facade of the Corn Exchange frowned above her and she whirled to cut down a soldier whose blazing, arcing halves tumbled at her feet. "Run! Run! Save yourselves!"

Her people streamed past in full flight, though to her, her voice was a powerless wail.

"Hierax, accept my spirit." The azoth blade struck the first pillar, and it shattered like glass. Another, and the facade seemed to hang in air, an ominous cloud of grimy brick.

A soldier leveled his slug gun, firing an instant before her blade split his skullplate. She felt the slug tear her habit, smelled the powder smoke, and fled, slashing wildly at a third pillar without breaking stride-stopped and turned back, hot tears streaming. "You gods, for
twenty years!
Now let me go!"

The weightless, endless blade came up. The weightless, endless blade came down. And the facade of the Corn Exchange was coming down too, falling like a picture, nearly whole and almost maintaining its graceless design as it fell, its stone sills falling neither faster nor slower than its tons of brick and timber. Her right hand, still clutching the azoth, had begun the sign of addition when Rock grabbed her from behind and dashed away with her.

Caldé Silk

"L
et me go," Maytera Marble insisted Phaesday morning. "They won't shoot me."

Generalissimo Oosik regarded her through his left eye alone; his right was concealed by a patch of surgical gauze. He shrugged. General Saba, the commander from Trivigaunte, pursed pendulous lips. "We've wasted a shaggy hole too much time on this country house already, when nobody can say-"

"You're quite wrong, my daughter," Maytera Marble told her firmly. "Mucor can and does. Our Patera Silk is a prisoner in there, just as the Ayuntamiento claims."

"Spirits!"

"Only hers, really. I'd never seen anyone possessed until she began doing it to our students. I find it very upsetting." She beckoned Horn. "You've made me a white flag? Wonderful! Such a nice long stick, too. Thank you!"

General Saba snorted.

"You don't like my bringing our boys and girls."

"Children shouldn't have to fight."

"Certainly not." Maytera Marble nodded solemn agreement. "But they were, and some have been killed. They'd run off with General Mint, you see, almost all of them. I tried to think who might help me after Mucor left, and our students were the only ones I could think of. Horn and a few others are really mature enough already, more grown up than a great many adults. It got them away from the city, too, where the worst fighting was." She looked to Oosik for support, but found none.

"Where it still is," General Saba snapped. "Where the troops we've got out here are badly needed."

"They were fighting your girls, some of them, as well as our Army, and some are dead. Have I told you that? Some are dead, some hurt very badly. Ginger's had her hand blown off, I'm told. No doubt some of your girls are hurt as well."

"Which is why-"

"You said we're wasting time." Maytera Marble sniffed; she had acquired a devastating sniff. "I couldn't agree more. It will only take a minute to shoot me, if they do. Then you can attack at once. But if they don't, I may be able to talk to the councillors in there. They can order the Army and the Guards who are still fighting you-"

"The Second," Oosik supplied.

"Yes, the Second Brigade and our Army." Maytera Marble bowed in humble appreciation of his information. "Thank you, my son. The councillors could order them to give up, but no one knows whether there are really councillors in the Juzgado." Without waiting for a reply, she accepted the flag from Horn.