Epiphany of the Long Sun (3 page)

Auk started.

"Not ter you nor your pa neither. He maybe don't know it hisself, but he do. His bird an' that needler he's got, an' the big hangersword, an' his knife what he tells he's got in his boots, they all show it. You got ter know it better'n me. As fer this augur you're gettin' set ter offer me up, I fished him out O' the lake last night, and t'other day I seen another fished up. They do say-"

"Describe him."

"Yes'm." The old fisherman considered. "You was down in the cuddy then, I guess. When they'd got him out, I seen him look over our way. Lookin' at the bird, seemed like. Pretty young. Tall as the big feller. Yeller hair-"

"Silk!" Auk exclaimed.

"Pulled out of the water, you said?"

The fisherman nodded. "Scup's boat. I've knowed Scup thirty year."

"You may be right," Chenille told him. "You may be too valuable to sacrifice, and one old man is nothing anyway."

She strode toward the Window before whirling to face them again. "Pay attention to what I say, all three of you. In a moment, I'll depart from this whore. My divine essence will pass from her into the Sacred Window that I have caused to be put here, and be reintegrated with my greater divine self in Mainframe. Do you understand me? All of you?"

Auk nodded mutely The augur knelt, his head bowed.

"Kypris, my mortal enemy and the enemy of my mother, my brothers, and my sisters-of our whole family, in fact-has been mischief-making here in Viron. Already she seems to have won to her side the meager fdol this idiot-What's your name, anyhow?"

"Incus, Savage Scylla. I-I'm Patera
Incus.
"

"The fool this idiot calls His Eminence. I don't doubt that she intends to win over my Prolocutor and my Ayuntamiento too, if she can. The four of you, I include the whore after I'm through with her, are to see to it that she fails. Use threats and force and the power of my name. Kill anyone you need to, it won't be held against you. If Kypris returns, do something to get my attention. Fifty or a hundred children should catch my eye, and Viron's got plenty to spare."

She glared at each man in turn. "Questions? Let's hear them now, if there are any. Objections?"

Oreb croaked in his throat, one bright black eye trained warily upon her.

"Good. You're my prophets henceforth. Keep Viron loyal, and you'll have my favor. Believe nothing Kypris may tell you. My slave should be here shortly. He'll carry you there, and assist you. See the Prolocutor and talk to the commissions in the Juzgado. Tell everyone who'll listen about me. Tell them everything I've said to you. I'd hoped that the Ayuntamiento's boat would be in this dock. It usually is. It isn't today, so you'll have to see the councillors for me. The old man can bring you back here. Tell them I mean to sink their boat and drown them all in my lake if my city goes over to Kypris."

Incus stammered, "A th-theophany, S-savage S-s-scylla, w-would-"

"Not convince your councillors. They think themselves too wise. Theophanies may be useful, however. Reintegrated, I may consider them."

She strode to the damp stone altar and sprang effonlessly to its top.

"I had this built so your Ayuntamiento might offer private sacrifices and, when I chose, confer with me. Not a trace of ash! They'll pay for that as well.

"You." She pointed to Auk. "This augur Silk's plotting to overthrow them for Kypris. Help him, but show him where his duty lies. If he can't see it, kill him. You've my permission to rule yourself as my Caldé in that case. The idiot here can be Prolocutor under similar circumstances, I suppose."

She faced the Window and knelt. Auk knelt, too, pulling the fisherman down. (Incus was kneeling already.) Clearing his throat, Auk began the prayer that he had bungled upon the Pilgrims' Way, when Scylla had revealed her divine identity. "Behold us, lovely Scylla, woman of the waters-"

Incus and the fisherman joined in. "Behold our love and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla!"

At the name of the goddess, Chenille threw high her arms with a strangled cry. The dancing colors called the Holy Hues filled the Sacred Window with chestnut and brown, aquamarine, orange, scarlet, and yellow, cerulean blue and a curious shade of rose brushed with drab. And for a moment it seemed to Auk that he glimpsed the sneering features of a girl a year or two from womanhood.

Chenille trembled violently and went limp, slumping to the altar top and roiling off to fall to the dark and slimy stone of the quay.

Oreb fluttered over to her. "God go?"

The girl's face-if it had been a face-vanished into a wall of green water, like an onrushing wave. The Holy Hues returned, first as sun-sparkles on the wave, then claiming the entire Window and filling it with their whirling ballet before fading back to luminescent gray.

"I think so," Auk said. He rose, and discovered that his needler was still in his hand; he thrust it beneath his tunic, and asked tentatively, "You all right, Jugs?"

Chenille moaned.

He lifted her into a sitting position. "You banged your head on the rock, Jugs, but you're going to be all right." Eager to do something for her, but unsure what he should do, he called, "You! Patera! Get some water."

"She throw?"

Auk swung at Oreb, who hopped agilely to one side.

"Hackum?"

"Yeah, Jugs. Right here." He squeezed her gently with the arm that supponed her, conscious of the febrile heat of her sunburned skin.

"You came back. Hackum, I'm so glad."

The old fisherman coughed, striving to keep his eyes from Chenille's breasts. "Mebbe it'd be better if me an' him stayed on the boat awhile?"

"We're all going on your boat," Auk told him. He picked up Chenille.

Incus, a battered tin cup of water in his hand, asked, "You intend to
disobey?
"

Auk dodged. "She said to go to the Juzgado. We got to get back to Limna, then there's wagons to the city."

"She was sending someone, sending her slave she said, to take us there." Incus raised the cup and sipped. "She also said
I
was to be
Prolocutor.
"

The old fisherman scowled. "This feller she's sendin', he'll have a boat o' his own. Have ter, ter git out here. What becomes o' mine if we go off with him? She said fer me ter fetch the rest back ter see them councillors, didn't she? How'm I s'posed ter do that if I ain't got my boat?"

Oreb fluttered onto Auk's shoulder. "Find Silk?"

"You got it." Carrying Chenille, Auk strode across the quay to eye the open water between it and the boat; it was one thing to spring from the gunnel to the quay, another to jump from the quay to the boat while carrying a woman taller than most. "Get that rope," he snapped to Incus. "Pull it closer. You left too much slack."

Incus pursed his lips. "We cannot
possibly
disobey the instructions of the goddess."

"You can stay here and wait for whoever she's sending. Tell him we'll meet up with him in Limna. Me and Jugs are going in Dace's boat."

The old fisherman nodded emphatically.

"If
you
wish to disobey, my son,
I
will not attempt to prevent you. However-"

Something in the darkness beyond the last tank fell with a crash, and the scream of metal on stone echoed from the walls of the cavern. A new voice, deeper and louder than any merely human voice, roared, "
I bring her! Give her to me!
"

It was that of a talus larger than the largest Auk had ever seen; its virescent bronze face was cast in a grimace of hate, blinding yellow light glared from its eyes, and the oily black barrels of a flamer and a pair of buzz guns jutted from its open mouth. Behind it, the black dark at the back of the cavern had been replaced by a sickly greenish glow.

"
I bring her! All of you! Give her to me!
" The talus extended a lengthening arm as it rolled toward them. A steel hand the size of the altar from which she had fallen closed about Chenille and plucked her from Auk's grasp; so a child might have snatched a small and unloved doll from the arms of another doll. "
Get on my back! Scylla commands it!
"

A half dozen widely spaced rungs of bent rod laddered the talus's metal flank. Auk scrambled up with the night chough flapping ahead of him; as he gained the top, the talus's huge hand deposited Chenille on the sloping black metal before him.

"Hang on!"

Two rows of bent rods much like the steps of the ladder ran the length of the talus's back. Auk grasped one with his left hand and Chenille with his right. Her eyelids fluttered. "Hackum?"

"Still here."

Incus's head appeared as he clambered up; his sly face looked sick in the watery light. "By-by
Hierax!
"

Auk chuckled.

"You-You-Help me
up.
"

"Help yourself, Patera. You were the one that wanted to wait for him. You won. He's here."

Before Auk had finished speaking, Incus sprang onto the talus's back with astonishing alacrity, apparently impelled by the muscular arm of the fisherman, who clambered up a moment later. "You'd make a dimber burglar, old man," Auk told him.

"Hackum, where are we?"

"In a cave on the west side of the lake."

The talus turned in place, one wide black belt crawling, the other locked. Auk felt the thump of machinery under him.

Puffs of black smoke escaped from the joint between the upright thorax and long wagon-like abdomen to which they clung. It rocked, jerked, and skewed backward. A sickening sidewise skid ended in a geyser of icy water as one belt slipped off the quay. Incus clutched at Auk's tunic as their side of the talus went under, and for a dizzying second Auk saw the boat tossed higher than their heads.

The wave that had lifted it broke over them like a blow, a suffocating, freezing whorl that at once drained away; when Auk opened his eyes again Chenille was sitting up screaming, her dripping face blank with terror.

Something black and scarlet landed with a thump upon his sopping shoulder. "Bad boat! Sink."

It had not, as he saw when the talus heaved itself up onto the quay again; Dace's boat lay on its side, the mast unshipped and tossing like driftwood in the turbulent water.

Huge as a boulder, the talus's head swiveled around to glare at them, revolving until it seemed its neck must snap. "
Five ride! The small may go!
"

Auk glanced from the augur to the fisherman, and from him to the hysterical Chenille, before he realized who was meant. "You can beat the hoof if you want to, bird. He says he won't hurt you if you do."

"Bird stay," Oreb muttered. "Find Silk."

The talus's head completed its revolution, and the talus lunged forward. Yellow light glared back at them, reflected from the curved white side of the last tank, leaving the Sacred Window empty and dead looking behind them. Sallow green lights winked into being just above the talus's helmeted head, and the still-tossing waters of the channel congealed to rough stone as the cavern dwindled to a dim tunnel.

Auk put his arm around Chenille's waist. "Fancy a bit of company, Jugs?"

She wept on, sobs lost in the wind of their passage.

He released her, got out his needler, and pushed back the sideplate; a trickle of gritty water ran onto his fingers, and he blew into the mechanism. "Should be all right," he told Oreb, "soon as it dries out. I ought to put a couple drops of oil on the needles, though."

"Good girl," Oreb informed him nervously. "No shoot."

"Bad girl," Auk explained. "Bad man, too. No shoot. No go away, either."

"Bad bird!"

"Lily." Gently, he kissed Chenille's inflamed back. "Lie down if you want to. Lay your head in my lap. Maybe you can get a little sleep."

As he pronounced the words, he sensed that they came too late. The talus was descending, the tunnel angling downward, if only slightly. The mouths of other tunnels flashed past to left and right, darker even than the damp shiprock walls. Drops of water clinging to the unchanging ceiling gleamed like diamonds, vanishing as they passed.

The talus slowed, and something struck its great bronze head, ringing it like a gong. Its buzz guns rattled and it spat a tongue of blue fire.

Silk's Back!

"I
t would be better," Maytera Marble murmured to Maytera Mint, "if you did it, sib."

Maytera Mint's small mouth fell open, then firmly closed. Obedience meant obeying, as she had told herself thousands of times; obedience was more than setting the table or fetching a plate of cookies. "If you wish it, Maytera. High Hierax knows I have no voice, but I suppose I must."

Maytera Marble sighed to herself with satisfaction, a hish from the speaker behind her lips so soft that no ears but hers could hear it.

Maytera Mint stood, her cheeks aflame already, and studied the congregation. Half or more were certainly thieves; briefly she wondered whether even the images of the gods were safe.

She mounted the steps to the ambion, acutely conscious of the murmur of talk filling the manteion and the steady drum of rain on its roof; for the first time since early spring, fresh smelling rain was stabbing through the god gate to spatter the blackened altartop-though there was less now than there had been earlier.

Molpe, she prayed, Marvelous Molpe, for once let me have a voice. "Some-" Deep breath. "Some of you do not know me…"

Few so much as looked at her, and it was apparent that those who did could not hear her. How ashamed that gallant captain who had showed her his sword would be of her now!

Please Kypris! Sabered Sphigx, great goddess of war.

There was a strange swelling beneath her ribs; through her mind a swirl of sounds she had never heard and sights she had not seen: the rumbling hoofbeats of cavalry and the booming of big guns. the terrifying roars of Sphigx's lions, the silver voices of trumpets, and the sharp crotaline clatter of a buzz gun. A woman with a bloodstained rag about her head steadied the line:
Form up! Form Up! Forward now! Forward! Follow me!