Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (16 page)

In spite of his pain, Porto could not help his amusement. “What a colorful phrase—may I appropriate it?”

With another drunken growl the prime minister jabbed at Porto again, and this time Acron did not remove the stick for a long time, until Porto no longer felt the pain in consciousness.

H
e was tortured by experts. He had endured torture of a minor sort before, but these were sophisticated men. At first he had been able to act his way through the proceedings—but in the end, they had stripped him of all of his performance trappings until only the truth was left. And then they pulled the raw leavings of truth from him, leaving him weak, and drained, and feeling traitorous. When they finally left him alone he tried to hang himself, but was denied this exit and left weaponless and alone in his cell.

Acron did come to see him, after the fact. And though the fat prime minister was even drunker than when they had first met, he was smirking now, as he shouted through the bars of Porto’s cell.

“You see, vermin? I told you this was how it would go! And now I will give you the privilege of living to see what your information will do to your friends! Now, when the High Leader drops his bombs on the Lost Lands, I will take you there afterward and make you lick the dead bones of your brothers!”

Chapter 18

“W
here
is
she?” Wrath-Pei demanded.

For the first time in a long time, something like a smile of pleasure found its way onto Kamath Clan’s face. The Wrath-Pei she beheld on the Screen before her was one she had never before witnessed. The calm, chilling coldness was stripped away, revealing the animal within; and his eyes—if only she were close enough now to see into his seething eyes—close enough to claw them out with her bare fingers—

“She is somewhere you cannot get at her. On her way back to Mars.”

“So it’s true!” Wrath-Pei fumed. “You’ve actually smuggled her off Titan!”

“Yes, it’s true,” Queen Clan said. Even through her pain, she could not help showing her satisfaction.

“Are you
mad?
Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve given Cornelian every reason to attack without worry now! He’ll destroy Titan!”

“He’ll destroy you. And we’ve made a pact.”

“A
pact?
You
are
mad! Treaties mean nothing to that creature! He’ll annihilate all of us!”

“So be it. The House of Clan will survive, as will the Sect of Faran Clan. Even if I don’t survive.”

“You won’t! And your religion means nothing to Cornelian either! He’ll honor
nothing!”

“Perhaps.”

With a renewed measure of control, Wrath-Pei said, “Let me show you something, Queen Clan.”

“As you wish.”

Wrath-Pei held up a thin amber vial. “What if I told you I had succeeded in my… experiments?”

“I would say that it meant nothing to me now. Those times have passed; I no longer require what Quog provided. I have found … other things to dwell on.”

“Other things? What other things could there be?” For a moment Wrath-Pei regained his old confidence and oily charm. “Not religion, I hope?”

Queen Clan returned silence for a moment before saying, “As I said, I have moved on to other things. Good-bye, Wrath-Pei.”

“You fool!”

But the transmission went dead.

And, in his gyro chair, Wrath-Pei screamed and clutched at his snips, pulling them closed, and opened, and closed again.

O
n Jo, Queen Kamath Clan turned from her own Screen and said, “Are you sure Wrath-Pei could not detect the relay?”

Jon-Ten, Minister of Faith, one of only two men on all of Titan whom the Queen knew she could trust implicitly, nodded his bald head. “I’m sure he thinks you are still on Titan.”

“And he will proceed there?”

“With all due speed, no doubt.”

“And you still believe General Pron-Kel can handle a Martian attack, if it comes?”

With a trace of smile, the priest said, “For a Martian, he is very much of Titan.”

“Indeed.”

Her gaze drifted from the secular priest for a moment; but when Jon-Ten cleared his throat politely, she gave him her attention once more.

“I have kept that much of my bargain with Prime Cornelian, at least,” the Queen said. “How much time does this really give us, Jon-Ten?”

The priest puffed his cheeks full of air and let it out slowly while he pondered. “Perhaps a week; perhaps more. We both know how porous the royal ranks have become, my queen. I’m certain we escaped without detection. But sooner or later…” The man shrugged.

“Yes. Sooner or later …”

Again, Kamath Clan’s gaze drifted away.

“My queen, are you… well?”

“I allowed myself to think for a moment of what Wrath-Pei claimed.”

“That he had removed Quog’s essence?”

“Yes.”

“Unlikely. And even so…”

The queen’s gaze slowly returned from its dreaming place and resumed its old air of resolve and aloofness; there was, however, a difference now, another kind of depth that softened the deep lines in her face that withdrawal from Quog had etched, and the pronounced stoop that her symptoms had forced on her already unwieldy frame; she had always been ugly, but now her ugliness had marked itself in new ways—she had, with an irony that she did not comprehend, attained some of Quog’s own deformities concurrent with his withdrawal from her body.

“And the girl?” Queen Clan asked simply.

“She continues to sleep, I wager.”

“My own potions are still powerful. And useful.”

“It is only a shame that in Jamal’s case…”

Again the queen’s gaze slipped elsewhere. “For his sake only, I would think further on Wrath-Pei’s claim.”

“My queen!” Jon-Ten said, alarmed.

“But that would be foolish. So we are where we are.”

“
Yes,
my queen.”

“Prepare the ceremony, then.”

“It will take a day, at least.”

“Proceed, then,” Kamath Clan ordered.

T
he Cleansing Ritual was as old as the philosophy of Moral Guidance itself. Faran Clan had, it was told, come up with the ceremony after the most rigorous of his self-inflicted tests. It was said with some certainty that Moral Guidance was born only after Faran Clan had absorbed every teaching of every religion and philosophy, from the ancients to his own time, digested and distilled them all down to their essence. At the time, during the Religious Wars in the middle of the twenty-second century, he was being held in an Earth prison for sedition and other crimes, and it was during this period of the famous Ninety-four Days, when he went, it was claimed, with neither water nor food to sustain him—only these teachings of morality handed down from the dawn of man—that the teachings of Moral Guidance were fully formulated.

And it was Faran Clan’s son, Pen Clan, who led his followers to newly settled Titan, where the secular religion flourished after persecution on Earth and failure on Mars.

But Jo—sulfurous, yellow, ravaged, volcanic, odorous—had always been the movement’s mecca from the very beginning.

It was the cleansing musk of sulfur that had become central to the philosophy of Moral Guidance from the very beginning. It was sulfur, pure, yellow, primeval, elemental, whose properties Faran Clan and his followers found most conducive to their thoughts and symbolic of their thought.

“Sulfur,”
Faran Clan had written, during his second stay in prison during 2157, when his treatise was composed
, “denotes both heaven and earth. It is the most elemental of elements, distinctive, pleasant to the touch, yet malevolent when misused. It is the nature of man distilled to nonorganic matter. It is man itself, in symbol.”

And Moral Guidance put great store in ceremony and symbol, for Faran Clan taught that balance between soul and body could only be attained within by attaining it without. Balance outside the flesh was essential, and desirable, for the attainment of peace, which was Moral Guidance’s goal.

And thus the great Temple of Faran Clan on Titan, and the others elsewhere.

And the ceremonies held within.

T
he temple on Jo was, secretly, even larger than that on Titan. During the early days on Titan, when the movement’s success was in no way certain on the newly colonized moon, Pen Clan, with the help of certain wealthy interests, had secretly undertaken a project on Jo in case the Titanian experiment was a failure. After Titan, otherwise, there would be nowhere to go; Pluto was in the early stages of terra-forming and was slated only for partial taming—and even then, besides the building of a single city to exploit mining and research, the planet would be used as nothing more than a prison—something the followers of Moral Guidance were well acquainted with and sought at all risks to avoid in the future. That left undeveloped territory; specifically, to the followers of Moral Guidance, it left Jo.

Jo was already much in their province; as a provider of sulfur so dear to their ceremonies, the movement had naturally been involved in this moon of Jupiter’s limited development. Only that development had been more extensive than the ore commerce it hid. While sulfur was being dug from beneath the surface of Jo, other construction was being done within also. Caverns as spectacular as any found naturally or otherwise on the Five Worlds were excavated, and then, within these underground grottos of yellow-gold, were built secret monuments to Moral Guidance.

The most spectacular was the Temple of Jo itself.

A
nd this, then, was where Kamath Clan went for the Cleansing Ritual.

Already underground, she preferred to walk rather than take the open transport provided for such a trip. As had her walks through the Ruz Balib section on Titan, these walks afforded her the time she needed to contemplate what needed contemplation. There was much, now, as there had been much for some time, such as her worries over Titan, which she had unwillingly left behind; though it might soon fall into Martian hands, that fate was preferable to Wrath Pei’s continued rule. And the Martians, she was convinced, could be dealt with, while Wrath-Pei could not. After all, she still had the girl, Tabrel Kris, to bargain with, and she was convinced that Prime Cornelian would, if he chose to overlook her present treachery as a strategic move, allow her to continue to rule Titan (albeit as a Martian protectorate) in trade for her return of Princess Kris. She had little illusion about Cornelian’s promise of reconciliation between Mars and Titan on the question of the unification of the Houses of Kris and Clan. Though the Martian despot might eschew his promise of public acknowledgment, the act was already a fait accompli, while Tabrel Kris remained married to Jamal, the two houses were already united, whether by public declaration or not. And since Queen Clan was convinced that the girl would be kept alive by Cornelian, it made no difference that the union was not a physical one. It had not been to this point, anyway—so what if a few million miles distance was added to the bride and groom’s separation?

Jamal

Here, then, was her great worry. As the queen made her shuffling way through the faintly sulfur-scented tunnel, whose faint illumination sent strange lemon shadows against the walls, she thought on her only son. He was a problem. Shuffling past his room, she heard him moaning within. Slated to one day rule Titan (in whatever capacity that rule would assume, as Martian protectorate or otherwise) but, even more importantly, set to oversee, as Faran Clan’s direct descendant, the reaches of Moral Guidance itself, Jamal was, at the moment, incapable of either. As she thought of what he had become…

A spasm overtook the queen; she stopped, putting her hands on the soft yellow rock walls of the tunnel for support until it passed. She doubted these intermittent pains would ever cease completely; while the current pain persisted, her mind was blank, and then she gradually returned to herself.

Poor Jamal

Once again, thoughts of her son entered her mind. While Quog’s essence had eventually given the queen up, and Tabrel (to the point where she needed other of Kamath’s potions to be kept under control), it had, in the case of Jamal, done something quite different.

Would he ever rule?

In either capacity?

Shuffling on, Kamath Clan turned her mind to different things.—to, specifically, the ceremony awaiting her in the temple, whose intricately carved portal at the end of the tunnel she now approached.

“B
ehold within these walls the mind and soul of Clan!”

The words, spoken by Jon-Ten, echoed portentously in the empty temple. Above the priest’s place at the altar, the temple’s ceiling fled upward, lost in misty heights of sulfurous incense. The temple’s apex actually protruded from Jo’s surface above, letting in a glint of natural light; but it was well hidden and had never been detected.

With the help of artificial lighting, the temple’s immensity became immediately evident. It dwarfed its sister structure on Titan; and though the workmanship on Titan’s structure had been superb, the best materials had been saved for Jo’s secret shrine. The walls, of precious forest wood, were carved with details from Faran Clan’s writings depicting the aeons of man’s struggle with his own mind, and the search for his own soul. Veritably, the history Faran Clan had absorbed and distilled was here for all to see.

“Enter, and allow the Cleansing Ritual to begin!”

Kamath Clan stepped completely into the temple, letting the tunnel’s portal close with an echoing clang behind her. The odor of sulfur was nearly overpowering, but Kamath Clan drank it in.

As the queen approached the altar, Jon-Ten drew back from the bath of roiling yellow; his bright yellow robes issued the steam they had absorbed, making him appear for a moment, afire.

Queen Clan drew open her own yellow robe, preparing to step into the bath—

There came a piercing scream, which stayed Kamath Clan’s foot even as it hovered over the steaming liquid sulfur.