Litany of the Long Sun (66 page)

"Mucor?" Mamelta indicated herself, both hands at her face.

"No," Silk told her, "you are not Mucor, although Mucor possessed you for a short time. It woke you, I think, while you were still in your glass tube. I don't believe that was supposed to happen. Can we walk a bit faster now?"

"All right."

"It wouldn't do to run. He might hear, and it would make him suspicious, I'm sure; but if we walk, we may be able to get away from him. If we don't, and he finds us, he'll think you energized the lights, no doubt. That should satisfy him, and we'll have lost nothing." Under his breath Silk added, "I hope."

"Who is Mucor?"

He looked at Mamelta in some surprise. "You're feeling better now, aren't you?"

She stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the distant wall, and did not appear to have heard his question.

"I suppose-no, I know-that you're morally entitled to an answer, the best I can provide; but I'm afraid I can't provide a very good one. I don't know nearly as much about her as I'd like, and at least two of the things I think I know are conjectural. She is a young woman who can leave her body-or to put it another way, send forth her spirit. She's not well mentally, or at least I felt that she wasn't on the one occasion when I met her face-to-face.

Now that I've had time to think about her, I believe she may be less disturbed than I assumed. She must see the whorl very differently from the way that most of us see it."

"I feel I am Mucor…"

He nodded. "This morning-though I suppose it may be yesterday morning by now-I conferred with-" Words failed him. "With someone I'll call an extraordinary woman. We were talking about possession, and she said something that I didn't give as much attention as I should have. But I was thinking about our conversation as I walked out to the shrine-I'll tell you about that later, perhaps- and I realized that it might be extremely important. She had said, 'Even then, there would be something left behind, as there always is.' Or words to that effect. If I under- stood her, Mucor must leave a part of her spirit behind when she leaves a person, and must take a small part of that person's spirit with her when she goes. We usually think of spirits as indivisible, I'm afraid; but the Writings compare them to winds again and again. Winds aren't indivisible. Winds are air in motion, and air is divided each time we shut a door or draw a breath."

Mamelta whispered, "So many dead." She was looking at a crystalline cylinder that held only bones, what appeared to be black soil, and a few strands of hair.

"Some of that must be Mucor's doing, I'm afraid." Silk fell silent for a moment, tortured by conscience. "I said I'd tell you about her, but I haven't told you one of the most important things-to me, at any rate. It is that I betrayed her. She's the daughter of a man named Blood, a powerful man who treats her abominably. When I talked with her, I told her that whenever I had a chance to see her father I'd remonstrate with him. Later I had a lengthy conversation with him, but I never brought up his treatment of his daughter. I was afraid he'd punish her if he knew she'd spoken to me; but now I feel it was a betrayal nonetheless. If she were shown that others value her, she might-" "Patera!" It was Hammerstone's voice.

Silk looked around for him. "Yes, my son?"

"Over this way. Couple rows, maybe. You all right?"

"Oh, yes, I'm fine," Silk told him. "I've been, well, more or less touring this fascinating warehouse or whatever you call it, and looking at some of the people."

"Who were you talking to?"

"To tell you the truth, to one of these women. I've been lecturing her, I'm afraid."

Hammerstone chuckled, the same dry, inhuman sound Silk had heard from Sergeant Sand in the tunnel. "You see anybody?"

"Intruders? No, no one."

"All right. The guard detail ought to be here now, but they haven't showed. I'm going to find out what's keeping them. Meet me over at the door where we came in." Without waiting for Silk's reply, Hammerstone clattered away.

"I must get back into the tunnels," Silk told Mamelta. "I left something valuable there; it isn't mine, and even if that soldier's officer allows me to leave, he's sure to see that I'm escorted back to Limna."

"This way," she said, and pointed, though Silk was not sure at what.

He nodded and set off. "I can't run, I'm afraid. Not like you. I'd run now, if I could."

For the first time, she seemed to see him. "You have a bruise on your face, and you're lame." He nodded. "I've had various accidents. I was dropped down a flight of stairs, for one thing. My bruises will heal though, quite quickly. I was going to tell you about Mucor, who I'm afraid will not. Are you sure we're going the right way? If we go back-"

Mamelta pointed again, and this time he saw that she was indicating a green line in the floor. "We follow that."

He smiled. "I should have realized that there must be a system of some kind."

The green line ended before a cubical structure faced with a panel of many small plates. Mamelta pressed its center, and the plates shuddered and squealed, turned pale, and eventually creaked into motion, first reminding Silk of the irising door that had defied his efforts, then of the unfolding of a blush rose. "It's beautiful," he told Mamelta. "But this can't be the way out. It looks like… a toolshed, perhaps."

The square room, revealed as the rose door opened, was dim and dirty; there were bits of broken glass on its floor, and its comers held heaps of the gray-painted steel. Mamelta sat on one, educing a minute puff of dust. "Will this take us to the lifter?"

Although she had looked at him as she spoke, Silk felt it was not his face that she had seen. "This won't take us anywhere, I'm afraid," he told her as the door folded again. "But I suppose that we might hide here for a time. If the soldiers have gone when we come out, I may be able to find my way back to the tunnels."

"We want to go back. Sit down."

He sat, feeling unaccountably that the stacked steel- that the whole storeroom in fact-was sinking beneath him. "What is the lifter, Mamelta?"

"The Loganslone, the ship that will take us up to the starcrosser Whorl."

"I think-" Silk wrestled briefly with the unfamiliar term. "I mean, don't you-haven't you considered-that, that perhaps this boat that was to take you wherever it was, that it may have been a long time ago? A very long time?"

She was staring straight ahead; he was conscious of the tightness of her jaw.

"I was going to tell you about Mucor. Perhaps I ought to finish that; then we can go on to other things. I realize all this must be very unsettling to you."

Mamelta nodded almost imperceptibly.

"I was going to say that it has bothered me a great deal that her father appears to be unaware of what she does. She goes forth in spirit, as I told you. She possesses people, as she possessed you. She appeared to me, bodiless, in my manse, and later-today, actually-in the tunnels after I dreamed of her. Furthermore, the ghost of a very dear friend-of my teacher and advisor, I should have said- appeared to me at almost the same time that she did. I believe her appearance must have made his possible in some fashion, though I really know much less than I should about such matters."

"Am I a ghost?"

"No, certainly not. You're very much alive-a living woman, and a very attractive one. Nor was Mucor a ghost when she appeared to me. It was a spirit of the living that I saw, in other words, and not that of someone who had died. When she spoke, what I heard was actual sound, I feel certain, and she must have shouted or broken something in the room outside to make the lights so bright." Silk bit his lips; some sixth sense told him (though clearly falsely) that he was falling, falling forever, the stack of gray steel and the glass-strewn floor itself dropping perpetually from under him and pulling him down with them. "I was going to say that when Mucor possessed some women at a house in our city, her father never appeared to suspect that the devil they complained of was his own daughter; that puzzled me all day. I believe I've hit upon the answer, and I'd like you to tell me, if you can, whether I'm correct. If Mucor left a small part of her spirit with you, it's possible you know. Has she ever undergone a surgical procedure? An operation on her head?"

There was a long pause. "I'm not sure."

"Because her father and I talked about physicians, among many other things. He has a resident physician, and he told me that an earlier one had been a brain surgeon." Silk waited for Mamelta's reaction, but there was none.

"That seemed strange to me until it occurred to me that the brain surgeon might have been employed to meet a specific need. Suppose that Mucor had been a normal child in every respect except for her ability to possess others. She would have possessed those closest to her, or so I'd think, and they can hardly have enjoyed it. Blood probably consulted several physicians-treating her phenomenal ability as a disease, since he is by no means religious. Eventually he must have found one who told him that he could 'cure' her by removing a tumor or something of that kind from her brain. Or perhaps even by removing a part of the brain itself, though that is such a horrible thought that I wish there were some way to avoid it."

Mamelta nodded.

Encouraged, Silk continued, "Blood must have believed that the operation had been a complete success. He didn't suspect it was his own daughter who was possessing the women because he firmly believed, as he presumably had for years, that she was no longer able to possess anyone. I think it's probable that the operation did in fact interfere with her ability until she was older, just as it seems to have damaged her thought processes. But in time, as that part of her brain regenerated, her ability returned; and having been granted a second chance, she was prudent enough to go farther afield, and in general to conceal her restored ability; although it would seem that she followed her father or some other member of the household to the place where the women lived, as she undoubtedly followed me later. Does any of this sound at all familiar to you, Mamelta? Can you tell me anything about it?"

"The operation was before I went on the ship,"

"I see," Silk said, although he did not. "And then…?"

"It came. I remember now. They strapped us in."

"Was it a slave boat? We don't have them in Viron, but I know that some other cities do, and that there are slave boats on the Amnis that raid the fishing villages. I would be sorry to learn that there are slave boats beyond the whorl as well."

"Yes," Mamelta said.

Silk rose and pressed the center of the door as Mamelta had, but the door did not open.

"Not yet. It will open automatically, soon."

He sat down again, feeling unaccountably that the whole room was slipping left and falling too. "The boat came?"

"We had to volunteer. They were-you couldn't say no."

"Do you recall being outside, Mamelta? Grass and trees and sky and so on?"

"Yes." A smile lifted the comers of her mouth. "Yes, with my brothers." Her face became animated. "Playing ball in the patio. Mama wouldn't let me go out in the street the way they did. There was a fountain, and we'd throw the ball through the water so that whoever caught it would get wet."

"Could you see the sun? Was it long or short?"

"I don't understand."

Silk searched his memory for everything Maytera Marble had ever said relating to the Short Sun. "Here," he began carefully, "our sun is long and straight, a line of burning gold fencing our lands from the skylands. Was it like that for you? Or was it a disk in the center of the sky?"

Her face crumpled, while tears overflowed her eyes. "And never come back. Hold me. Oh, hold me!"

He did so, awkward as a boy and acutely conscious of the soft, warm flesh beneath the worn black twill of the robe he had lent her.

ON THE BELLY OF THE WHORL

A
uk leaned across the squat balustrade of Scylla's shrine to study the jagged slabs of gray rock at the foot of the cliff. Their disordered, acutely angled surfaces gleamed ghostly pale in the skylight, but the clefts and fissures between them were as black as pitch.

"Here, here!" Oreb pecked enthusiastically at Scylla's lips. "Shrine eat!"

"I'm not going back with you," Chenille told Auk. "You made me walk all the way out here in my good wool dress for nothing. All right. You hit me and kicked me-all right, too. But if you want me to go back with you, you're going to have to carry me. Try it. Smack me a couple more times and give me a good hard kick. See if I get up."

"You can't stay here all night," Auk growled.

"I can't? Watch me."

Oreb pecked again. "Here Auk!"

"Here yourself." Auk caught him. "Now you listen up. I'm going to pitch you over like I pitched you off the path back there. You look for Patera, Silk like you did before. If you find him, sing out."

With weary indifference, Chenille warned, "He won't come back this time."

"Sure he will. Get set, bird. Here you go." He tossed Oreb over the balustrade and watched as he glided down.

Chenille said, "There's a hundred places where that long butcher could have fallen."

"Eight or ten, maybe. I was looking."

She stretched out on the stone floor. "Oh, Molpe, I'm so tired!"

Auk turned to face her. "You really going to stay here all night?"

If she nodded, it was too dark beneath the dome of the shrine for him to see her.

"Somebody could come out here."

"Somebody worse than you?"

He grunted.

"That's so funny. I'd bet everything I've got that if you checked out every last cull in that godforsaken little town you couldn't find a single-"

"Shut up!"

For a time she did, whether from fear or sheer fatigue she could not herself have said. In the silence, she could hear the lapping of the waves at the foot of the cliff, the sob of the wind through the strangely twisted pillars of the shrine, the surge of blood in her own ears, and the rhythmic thumping of her heart.

Rust would have made everything all right. Recalling the empty vial she had left on her bed at Orchid's, she imagined one twenty times larger, a vial bigger than a bottle, filled with rust. She would sniff a pinch, and drop a big one in her lip, and walk back with Auk till they reached that bit where you felt like you were hanging in air, then push him off, down and down, until he fell into the lake below.