Litany of the Long Sun (70 page)

How much-

SILK'S RIGHT EYE opened, saw a wall as gray as ash, and closed again.

HE TRIED TO count his shots-and found himself in the eating house again. "Well, Patera, for one thing mine holds a lot more needles… All of them good and thick, this was the Alambrera in the old days." The door opened and Potto came in with their dinners on a tray, Sergeant Sand behind him with the box and the terrible rods.

Back! Back! Kneeling in the ashes, digging with his hands. A god who took five needles and still stood at the edge of the lantern light, snarling, blood and slaver running from its mouth. The boom of a slug gun, loud in the tunnel and very near.

… did you give him?

Metal rods jammed into his groin. Sand's arm spinning the crank, his expressionless face washed away by unbearable pain.

He bought your manteion.

"Yes. I'm a-"

Indefinitely? He let you stay indefinitely?

"Yes."

Indefinitely.

"Yes. I don't know…"

(Back, oh, back, but the current is too strong.)

Silk's left eye opened. Painted steel, gray as ash. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, his head aching and his stomach queasy. He was in a gray-walled room of modest size, without windows. He shivered. He had been lying on a low, hard, and very narrow cot.

A voice from the edge of memory said, "Ah, you're awake. I need somebody to talk to."

He gasped and blinked. It was Doctor Crane, one hand raised, eyes sparkling. "How many fingers?"

"You? I dreamed…"

"You got caught, Silk. So did I. How many fingers do you see?"

"Three."

"Good. What day is it?"

Silk had to consider; it was an effort to remember. At last he said, "Tarsday? Orpine's obsequies were on Scylsday; we went to the lake on Molpsday, and I went down…"

"Yes?"

"Into these tunnels. I've been down here a long time. It might even be Hieraxday by now."

"Good enough, but we're not in the tunnels."

"The Alambrera?"

Crane shook his head. "I'll tell you, but it'll take some explaining, and I ought to warn you first that they've probably locked us up together hoping we may say something useful. You may not want to oblige them."

Silk nodded and found it a mistake. "I wish I had some water."

"It's all around us. But you'll have to wait till they give us some, if they ever do."

"Councillor Potto hit me with his fist." Silk caressed the swelling on the side of his head gingerly. "That's the last thing that I remember. When you say they, do you mean our Ayuntamiento?"

"That's right." Crane sat down on the cot beside him. "I hope you don't mind. I was sitting on the floor while you were unconscious, and it's cold and hard on the buttocks. Why did you go out to the lake? Mind telling me?"

"I can't remember."

Crane nodded approvingly. "That's probably the best line to take."

"It isn't a line at all. I've-I've had very strange dreams." Silk pushed away terrifying memories of Potto and Sand. "One about a naked woman who had strange dreams too."

"Tch, tch!"

"I talked with a-it doesn't matter. And I vanquished a devil. You won't believe that, Doctor."

"I don't," Crane told him cheerfully.

"But I did. I called on the gods in turn. Only Hierax frightened her."

"A female devil. Did she look like this?" Crane bared his teeth.

"Yes, a little." Silk paused, rubbing his head. "And it wasn't a dream-it's not fading. You know her. You must."

Crane lifted an eyebrow. "I know the devil you drove away? My circle of acquaintances is wide, I admit, but-"

"She's Mucor, Blood's daughter. She can possess people, and she possessed the woman I was with."

Suddenly serious, Crane whistled softly.

"Was it you who operated on her?"

Crane shook his head. "Blood told you?"

"He told me he'd had a brain surgeon in the house before you. When I learned what Mucor could do, I understood-or at least, I think I do. Will you tell me about it?"

Crane fingered his beard, then shrugged. "Can't hurt, I suppose. The Ayuntamiento knows all the important points anyhow, and we've got to pass the time some way. If I do, will you answer a few questions of mine? Honest, complete answers, unless it's something that you don't want them to know?"

"I know nothing that I wouldn't want the Ayuntamiento to leam," Silk declared, "and I've already answered a great many questions for Councillor Potto. I'll tell you anything concerning myself, and anything I know about other people that wasn't learned under the seal."

Crane grinned. "In that case I'll start with the most basic one. Who are you working for?"

"I should have said that I'll answer after you answer my own questions about Mucor. That was the agreement, and I'd like to help her if I can."

The eyebrow went up again. "Including my first one?"

"Yes," Silk said. "Very much including that one. That one first of all. Is Mucor really Blood's daughter? That's what she told me."

"Legally. His adopted daughter. Unmarried men aren't usually allowed to adopt, but Blood's been working for the Ayuntamiento. Were you aware of that?"

Silk remembered in the nick of time not to shake his head. "No. Nor do I believe it now. He's a criminal."

"They don't pay him so many cards, you understand. They let him operate without interference as long as there's no serious trouble at any of his places, and do him favors. This seems to have been one of them. A word to the judge from any of the councillors would have been more than enough, and by adopting her he could control her up to the age of consent."

"I see. Who are her real parents?"

Crane shrugged again. "She doesn't have any. Not in our whorl, anyhow. And whoever they were, they probably met in a petri dish. She was a frozen embryo. Blood paid a good deal for it, I imagine. I know he paid a small fortune to get that brain man you mentioned."

Recalling the bare and filthy room in which he had first encountered Mucor, Silk said bitterly, "A fortune to destroy what he had given so much to get."

"Not really. It was supposed to make her pliable. She was a holy terror, from what I've heard. But when the brain man-he came from Palustria, by the way, which is how we found out what was going on. When he opened up her cranium, he got hit with a new organ." Crane chuckled. "I've read his report. It's in the medical file back at the villa."

"A new organ? What was it?"

"I didn't mean that it wasn't a brain. It was. But it wasn't like anything the brain man had worked on before. It wasn't a human brain for medical purposes, or an animal's brain, either. He had to go by guess and good gods, as they say. And in the end he made a botch of it. He as much as admitted it."

Silk wiped his eyes.

"Oh, come now. It was.ten years ago, and we spies are supposed to be of sterner stuff."

"Has anybody ever cried for her, Doctor?" Silk asked. "You, or Blood, or Musk, or the brain surgeon? Anyone at all?"

"Not that I know of."

"Then let me cry for her. Let her have that at least."

"I wouldn't think of trying to slop you. You haven't asked why Blood didn't get rid of her."

"No."

"She's his daughter, according to what you just told me-his daughter legally, at least."

"That. wouldn't stop him. It was because the brain man said her subrogative abilities could regenerate some time after she'd healed. It was only a guess, but judging from your story about a devil, they have. And the Ayuntamiento knows it now, thanks to you. It's going to make Viron more dangerous than ever."

Silk daubed at his eyes again with a comer of his robe and wiped his nose. "More formidable, you mean. That may trouble your government in Palustria, but it doesn't bother me."

"I see." Crane slid backward on the cot until he could prop his spine against the steel wall. "You promised you'd tell me who you were working for, if I told you about Mucor. Now you're going to say you're working for His Cognizance the Prolocutor, or something like that. Is that it? Hardly what I'd call fair play."

"No. Or perhaps, in a way, I am. It's a nice ethical point. Certainly I'm doing what His Cognizance would wish me to do, but I haven't told him-haven't informed the Chapter formally, I should say. I really haven't had time, the old excuse. Would you have believed me if I'd said I was a spy for His Cognizance?"

"I wouldn't and I don't. Your Prolocutor's got spies, plenty of them. But they aren't holy augurs. He's not so foolish as that. Who is it?"

"The Outsider."

"The god?"

"Yes." Silk sensed that Crane's eyebrow had been raised again, though he was not looking at Crane's face; he filled his lungs and expelled the air through his mouth. "No one believes me-except for Maytera Marble, a little-so I don't expect you to, either, Doctor. You least of all. But I've already told Councillor Potto, and I'll tell you. The Outsider spoke to me last Phaesday, on the ballcourt at our palaestra." He waited for Crane's snort of contempt.

"Now that's interesting. We ought to be able to talk about that for a long time. Did you see him?"

Silk considered the question. "Not in the way I see you now, and in fact I feel sure it's impossible to see him like that. All visual representations of the gods are ultimately false, as I told Blood a few days ago; they're more or less appropriate, not more or less like. But the Outsider showed himself to me-his spirit, if one can speak of the spirit of a god-by showing me innumerable things he had done and made, people and animals and plants and myriad other things that he cares very much about, not all of them beautiful or lovable things to you, Doctor, or to me. Huge fires outside the whorl, a beetle that looked like a piece of jewelry but laid its eggs in dung, and a boy who can't speak and lives-well, like a wild beast.

"There was a naked criminal on a scaffold, and we came back to that when he died, and again when his body was taken down. His mother was watching with a group of his friends, and when someone said he had incited sedition, she said that she didn't think he had ever been really bad, and that she would always love him. There was a dead woman who had been left in an alley, and Patera Pike, and it was all connected, as if they were pieces of something larger." Silk paused, remembering.

"Let's get back to the god. Could you hear his voice?"

"Voices," Silk said. "One spoke into each ear most of the time. One was very masculine-not falsely deep, but solid, as if a mountain of stone were speaking. The other was feminine, a sort of gentle cooing; yet both voices were his. When my enlightenment was over, I understood far, far better than I ever had before why artists show Pas with two heads, though I believe, too, that the Outsider had a great many more voices as well. I could hear them in back of me at times, although indistinctly. It was as if a crowd were waiting behind me while its leaders whispered in my ears; but as if the crowd was actually all one person, somehow: the Outsider. Do you want to comment?"

Crane shook his head. "When both voices spoke at once, could you understand what they said?"

"Oh, yes. Even when they were saying quite different things, as they usually did. The difficult thing for me to understand, even now-one of the difficult things, anyway-is that all of this took place in an instant. I think I told someone later that it seemed to last hundreds of years, but the truth is that it didn't occupy any amount of time at all. It took place during something else that wasn't time, something I've never known at any other time. That's badly expressed, but perhaps you understand what I mean."

Crane nodded.

"One of the boys-Horn, the best player we have-was reaching for a catch. He had his fingers almost on the ball, and then this took place outside of time. It was as if the Outsider had been standing in back of me all my life, but had never spoken until it was necessary. He showed me who he was and how he felt about everything he had made. Then how he felt about me, and what he wanted me to do. He warned me that he wouldn't help me…" The words faded away; Silk pressed his palm to his forehead.

Crane chuckled. "That wasn't very nice of him."

"I don't believe it's a question of niceness," Silk said slowly. "It's a matter of logic. If I was to be his agent, as he asked-he never demanded anything. I ought to have emphasized that.

"But if I was to be his agent, then he was doing it; he was preserving our manteion, because that was what he wanted me to do. He is preserving it through me. I'm the help he sent, you see; and you don't rescue the rescuer, just as you don't scrub a bar of soap or buy plums to hang on your plum tree. I said I'd try to do it, of course. I said I'd try to do whatever he wanted me to."

"So then you sallied forth to save that run-down manteion on Sun Street? And that little house where you live, and the rest of it?"

"Yes." Silk nodded, wished he had not, and added, "Not necessarily the buildings that are there now. If they could be replaced with new and larger buildings-Patera Remora, the coadjutor, hinted at that the other night-it would be even better. But that answers your question. That tells you whom I'm working for. Spying for, if you like, because I was spying on you."

"For a minor god called the Outsider."

"Yes. Correct. We were going-I was going to tell you that I knew you were a spy, the next time you came to treat my ankle. That I'd talked to people who'd provided you with information, without realizing why you wanted it, who'd carried messages for you and to you; and I'd seen a pattern in those things-I see it more clearly now, but I had seen it even then."

Crane smiled and shook his head in mock despair. "So did Councillor Lemur, unfortunately." "I see other things, too," Silk told him. "Why you were at Blood's, for example; and why I encountered Blood's talus here in the tunnels."

"We're not in the tunnels," Crane said absently, "didn't you hear me say that there's water all around us? We're in a sunken ship in the lake. Or to be a little more exact, in a ship that was built to sink, and to float to the surface on the captain's order. To swim underwater like a fish, if you can believe that. This is the secret capital of Viron. I'd be a wealthy man as well as a hero, if only I could get that information to my superiors back home."