Epiphany of the Long Sun (35 page)

"Shut up."

She took Gelada's lantern off the barrel of her launcher and advanced hesitantly toward Auk, nearly falling when she tripped over a roll of rags in the darkness.

Auk said, "You do it, Urus. Keep it pretty near shut," and one of the men accepted the lantern from her.

The acrid smell of smoke cut through the prevailing reek of excrement and unwashed bodies; a bearded man with eyes like the sockets in a skull had removed the lid of a firebox. He puffed the coals it held until their crimson glow lit his face-a face she quickly decided she would rather not have seen. A wisp of flame appeared. Urus held the lantern to it, then closed the shutter, narrowing the yellow light to a beam no thicker than her forefinger.

"You want it, Auk?"

"I got no place to put it," Auk told him; and Chenille, edging nearer, saw that he had his hanger in his right hand and a slug gun in his left. The blade of the hanger was dark with blood. "Show her Patera first," he said.

On legs as thin as sticks, the shadowy figures parted; a pencil of light settled on a dark bundle that stared up at her with Incus's agonized eyes. A rag covered his mouth.

"Looks cute, don't he?" Auk chuckled.

She ventured, "He really is an augur…"

"He shot a couple of 'em with my needler, Jugs. It got 'em mad, and they jumped him. We'll cut him loose in a minute, maybe. Urus, show her the soldier."

Hammerstone was bound as well, though no rag had been tied over his mouth; she wondered whether it would work on a chem anyway, and decided that it might not. "I'm sorry, Stony," she said. "I'll get you out of this. Patera, too."

"They were going to stab him in the throat," Hammerstone told her. "They'd grabbed him from behind." He spoke slowly and without rancor, but there was a whorl of self-loathing in his voice, "I got careless."

"Those ropes are made out of that muscle in the back of your leg," Auk told her conversationally. "That's what they got him tied up with. They're pretty strong, I guess."

Neither she nor Hammerstone replied.

"Only I don't think they'd hold him. Not if he really tried. It'd take chains. Big ones, if you ask me."

"Hackum, maybe I shouldn't say this-"

"Go ahead."

"What if they jump you and me like they did Patera?"

"I was going to tell you why Hammerstone here don't break loose. Maybe I ought to do that first."

"Because you've got his slug gun?"

"Uh-huh. Only they had it then, see? They got hold of Incus, and they made Hammerstone give it to 'em. It takes a lot to kill a soldier, but a slug gun'll do it. So'll that launcher you got."

She scarcely heard him. When she had struggled through the narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, the deep humming from above had so merged with the rush of blood in her ears that she had assumed it was one with it; now she realized that it actually proceeded from the dark bulk in the sky that she (like Maytera Marble) had thought a cloud. She peered up at it, astonished.

"We'll get to that in a minute," Auk told her, looking upward too. "Terrible Tartaros says it's a airship. That's a thing kind of like the old man's boat, see? Only it sails through the air instead of water. The Rani of Trivigaunte's invaded Viron. That's another reason for us to do like he showed us down there-"

Hammerstone heaved himself upright, throwing aside four stick-limbed men who tried to hold him down. The sinews that bound his wrists and ankles broke in a rattattoo of poppings, like the burning of a string of firecrackers.

Almost casually, Auk thrust his hanger into the ground at his feet and leveled the slug gun. "Don't try it."

"We got to fight," Hammerstone told him. "Patera and me. We got to defend the city."

Reluctantly, Chenille trained the launcher Hammerstone had taught her to load and fire at his broad metal chest. He knelt to tear off Incus's gag, snapping the cords that had secured Incus's hands and feet between his fingers.

"Look! Look!" Urus shouted and pointed, then futilely directed the beam of Gelada's lantern upward. Others around him shouted and pointed, too.

Another voice, remote but louder than the loudest merely human voice silenced them, filling the pit with its thunder: "
Convicts, you are free! Viron has need of every one of you. In the name of all the-in the Outsider's name, forget your quarrel with the Civil Guard, which now supports our Charter. Forget any quarrel you may have with your fellow citizens. Most of all, forget every quarrel among yourselves!
"

Chenille grasped Auk's elbow. "That's Patera Silk! I recognize his voice!"

Auk could only shake his head, unbelieving. Something-a tumbling, flying thing that appeared, incredibly, to have a turret and a buzz gun-had cleared the parapet on the wall and was drifting into the pit, dropping lower and lower, an armed floater blown upwind by a wind that was none, hundreds of cubits above the Alambrera.

Chenille's launcher was snatched from her hands and fired as soon as it had left them, Hammerstone aiming at the immense shape far above the floater, directing a single missile at it (or perhaps at the winged figures that streamed from it like smoke), and watching it expectantly to observe the strike and correct his aim.

"
There Auk!
" thundered a hoarse voice from the floater tumbling slowly overhead. "
Here girl!
"

A second missile, and Auk was firing the slug gun that had been Hammerstone's, too, shooting winged troopers who swooped and soared above the pit firing slug guns of their own.

A minute dot of black fell from the vast flying thing Auk had called an airship. She saw it streak through the milling cloud of winged troopers. An instant later, the dark wall of the Alambrera exploded with a force that rocked the Whorl.

Silk stood in his boyhood bedroom, looking down at the boy who had been himself. The boy's face was buried in his pillow; by an effort of will he made it look toward him; each time it turned, its features dissolved in mist.

He sat down on the sill of the open window, conscious of the borage growing under it and of lilacs and violets beyond it. A copybook lay open, waiting, on the sleeping boy's small table; there were quills beside it, their ends more or less chewed. He ought to write, he knew-tell this boy who had been himself that he was taking his blue tunic, and leave him advice that would be of help in the troubles to come.

Yet he could not settle upon the right words, and he knew that the boy would soon wake. It was shadeup, and he would be late at his palaestra; already Mother approached the bed.

What could he say that would have meaning for this boy? That this boy might recall more than a decade later?

Mother shook his shoulder, and Silk felt his own shoulder touched; it was strange she could not see him.

Fear no love
, he wrote; and then:
Carry out the Plan of Pus
. But Mother's hand was shaking him so hard that the final words were practically unreadable;
of Pas
faded from the soft, blue-lined paper as he watched. Pas was, after all, a thing of the past. Like the boy.

Xiphias and the Prolocutor were standing at the foot of the boy's bed, which had become his own.

He blinked.

As if to preside over a sacrifice at the Grand Manteion, the Prolocutor wore mulberry vestments crusted with diamonds and sapphires, and held the gold baculus that symbolized his authority; Xiphias had what appeared to be an augur's black robe folded over his arm. It seemed the wildest of dreams.

His blankets were pushed away; and the surgeon, standing next to his bed beside Hyacinth, rolled him onto his side and bent to pull off the bandages he had applied earlier. Silk managed to smile up at Hyacinth, and she smiled in return-a shy, frightened smile that was like a kiss.

From the other side of the bed, Colonel Oosik inquired, "Can you speak, Caldé?"

He could not, though it was his emotions that kept him silent.

"He talked to me last night before he went to sleep," Hyacinth told Oosik.

"Silk talk!" Oreb confirmed from the top of a bedpost.

"Please don't sit up." The surgeon laid his hand-a much larger and stronger one than the hand that had awakened him-upon Silk's shoulder to prevent it.

"I can speak." he told them. "Your Cognizance. I very much regret having subjected you to this."

Quetzal shook his head and told Hyacinth, "Perhaps you'd better get him dressed."

"No time to dawdle, lad!" Xiphias exclaimed. "Shadeup in an hour! Want them to start shooting again?"

Then the surgeon who had held him down was helping him to rise, and Hyacinth (who smelled better than an entire garden of flowers) was helping him into a tunic. "I did this for you last Phaesday night, remember?"

"Do I still have your azoth?" he asked her. And then, "What in the Whorl's going on?"

"They sent Oosie to kill you. He just came back and he doesn't want to."

Silk was looking, or trying to look, into the corners of the room. Gods and others who were not gods waited there, he felt certain. watching and nearly visible, their shining heads turned toward him. He remembered climbing onto Blood's roof and his desperate struggle with the whiteheaded one, Hyacinth snatching his hatchet from his waistband. He groped for it, but hatchet and waistband had vanished alike. Quetzal muttered, "Somebody will have to tell him what to tell them. How to make peace."

"I don't expect you to believe me, Your Cognizance-" Hyacinth began.

"Whether I believe you or not, my child, will depend on what you say."

"We didn't! I swear to you by Thelxiepeia and Scalding Scylla-"

"For example. If you were to say that Patera Caldé Silk had violated his oath and disgraced his vocation, I would not believe you."

Standing upon the arm of his mother's reading chair, he had studied the Caldé's head, carved by a skillful hand from hard brown wood. "Is this my father?" Mother's smile as she lifted him down, warning him not to touch it. "No, no, that's my friend the Caldé." Then the Caldé was dead and buried, and his head buried, too-buried in the darkest reaches of her closet, although she spoke at times of burning it in the big black kitchen stove and perhaps believed eventually that she had. It was not well to have been a friend of the Caldé's.

"I know our Patera Caldé Silk too well for that," Quetral was telling Hyacinth. "On the other hand, if you were to say that nothing of the kind had taken place, I would believe you implicitly, my child."

Xiphias helped Silk to his feet, and Hyacinth pulled up a pair of unbicached linen drawers that had somehow appeared around his ankles and were new and clean and not his at all, and tied the cord for him.

"Caldé-"

At that moment, the title sounded like a death sentence. He said, "I'm only Patera-Only Silk. Nobody's Caldé now."

Oosik stroked his drooping, white-tipped mustache. "You fear that because my men and I are loyal to the Ayuntamiento, we will kill you. I understand. It is undoubtedly true, as this young woman has said-"

In the presence of the Prolocutor, Oosik was pretending he did not know Hyacinth, exactly as he himself had tried to pretend he was not Caldé;; Silk found wry amusement in that.

"-and already you have almost perished in this foolish fighting," Oosik was saying. "Another dies now, even as we speak. On our side or yours, it does not matter. If it was one of us, we will kill one of you soon. If one of you, you will kill one of us. Perhaps it will be me. Perhaps my son, though he has already-"

Xiphias interrupted him. "Couldn't get home, lad! Tried to! Big night attack! Still fighting! Didn't think they'd try that. You don't mind my coming back to look out for you?"

Kneeling with his trousers, Hyacinth nodded confirmation. "If you listen at the window, you can still hear shooting."

Silk sat on the rumpled bed again and pushed his feet into the legs. "I'm confused. Are we still at Ermine's?"

She nodded again. "In my room."

Oosik had circled the bed to hold his attention. "Would it not be a great thing, Caldé, if we-if you and I, and His Cognizance-could end this fighting before shadeup?"

With less confidence in his legs than he tried to show, Silk stood to pull up and adjust his waistband. "That's what I'd hoped to do." He sat as quickly as he could without loss of dignity.

"We will-"

Quetzal interposed, "We must strike fast. We can't wait for you to recover, Patera Caldé. I wish we could. You were startled to see me vested like this. My clothes always shock you. I'm afraid."

"So it seems, Your Cognizance."

"I'm under arrest, too, technically. But I'm trying to bring peace, just as you are."

"We've both failed, in that case, Your Cognizance."

Oosik laid his hand upon Silk's; it felt warm and damp. thick with muscle. "Do not burden yourself with reproaches, Caldé. No! Success is possible still. Who had you in mind as commander of your Civil Guard?"

The gods had gone, but one-perhaps crafty Thelxiepeia. whose day was just beginning-had left behind a small gift of cunning. "If anyone could put an end to this bloodshed, he would surely deserve a greater reward than that."

"But if that were all the reward he asked?"

"I'd do everything I could to see that he obtained it."

"Wise Silk!" Oreb cocked a bright black eye approvingly from the bedpost.

Oosik smiled. "You are better already, I think. I was greatly concerned for you when I saw you." He looked at the surgeon. "What do you think, Doctor? Should our Caldé have more blood?"

Quetzal stiffened, and the surgeon shook his head.

"Achieving peace, Caldé, may not be as difficult as you imagine. Our men and yours must be made to understand that loyalty to the Ayuntamiento is not disloyalty to you. Nor is loyalty to you disloyalty to the Ayuntamiento. When I was a young man we had both. Did you know that?"

Xiphias exclaimed, "It's true, lad!"

"There is a vacancy on the Ayuntamiento. Clearly it must be filled. On the other hand, there are councillors presently in the Ayuntamiento. Their places are theirs. Why ought they not retain them?"