Epiphany of the Long Sun (38 page)

"You said you took a floater," Silk told Hyacinth. "I thought you meant that you just, well, took it."

"I wouldn't know how to make one go." Sitting, she edged nearer, grasping the coaming of the turret hatch. "Would you? But that driver's my friend, and I gave him a little money."

They rounded a corner, and innumerable throats cheered from the dimness beyond the lights. Someone shouted, "We've gone over to Silk!"

A thrown chrysanthemum brushed his cheek, and he waved. Another voice shouted, "Live the Caldé!" It brought a storm of cheering, and Hyacinth waved and smiled as if she herself were that Caldé, evoking a fresh outburst. "Where are we going? Did Oosie tell you?"

"To the Alambrera." Silk had to shout to make himself heard. "We'll free the convicts. The Juzgado afterward."

A jumble of boxes and furniture opened to let them pass-Liana's barricade.

Beside him, Quetzal invoked the Nine: "In the name of Marvelous Molpe, you are blessed. In the name of Tenebrous Tartaros…" They trust the gods, Silk thought, all these wretched men; and because they do, they have made me their leader. Yet I feel I can't trust any god at all, not even the Outsider.

As if they had been chatting over lunch, Quetzal said, "Only a fool would, Patera Caldé."

Silk stared.

"Didn't I tell you that I've done everything I could to prevent theophanies? Those we call gods are nothing more than ghosts. Powerful ghosts, but only because they entailed that power to themselves in life."

"I-" Silk swallowed. "I wasn't aware that I had spoken aloud, Your Cognizance. I apologize; my remark was singularly inappropriate." Oreb stirred apprehensively on his shoulder.

"You didn't, Patera Caldé. I saw your face, and I've had lots of practice. Don't look at me or your young woman. Look at the people. Wave. Look ahead. Smile."

Both waved, and Silk tried to smile as well. His eyes had adjusted to the lights well enough now for him to glimpse indistinct figures beyond the mounted officers, many waving slug guns just as he waved the cane. Through clenched teeth he ventured, "Echidna told us Pas was dead. Your Cognizance confirmed it."

"Dead long ago," Quetzal agreed, "whoever he really was, poor old fellow. Murdered by his family, as was inevitable." Deftly he caught a bouquet. "Blessings on you, my children. Blessings, blessings… May Great Pas and the immortal gods smile upon you and all that you own, forever!"

"Silk is Caldé! Long live Silk!"

Hyacinth told him happily, "We're getting a real tour of the city!"

He nodded, feeling his smile grow warm and real.

"Look at them, Patera Caldé. This is their moment. They have bled for this."

"Peace!" Silk called to the shadowy crowds, waving the cane. "Peace!"

"Peace!" Oreb confirmed, and hopped up onto Silk's head flapping his wings. The day was brightening at last, Silk decided, in spite of the storm-black cloud hanging over the city. How appropriate that shadeup should come now-peace and sunlight together! A cheering woman waved an evergreen bough, the symbol of life. He waved in return, meeting her eyes and smiling, and she seemed ready to swoon with delight.

"Don't start throwing flowers to yourself," Hyacinth told him with mock severity. "They'll be blaming you soon enough."

"Then let's enjoy this while we can." Seeing the woman with the bough had recalled one of the ten thousand things the Outsider had shown him-a hero riding through some foreign city while a cheering crowd waved big fan-like leaves. Would Echidna and her children kill the Outsider too? With a flash of insight, he felt sure they were already trying.

"Look! There's Orchid, throwing out the house."

A light directed at the flag showed her plainly, leaning so far from the second-story window through which Kypris had called to him that it seemed she might fall any moment. They were floating down Lamp Street, clearly; the Alambrera could not be far.

As Hyacinth blew Orchid a kiss, something whizzed past Silk's ear, striking the foredeck like a gong. A high whine and a booming explosion were followed by the rattle of a buzz gun. Somebody shouted for someone to come down, and someone inside the floater caught his injured ankle and pulled.

He looked up instead, to where something new and enormous that was not a cloud at all filled the sky. Another whine, louder, mounting ever higher, until Lamp Street exploded in front of them, peppering his face and throwing something solid at his head.

Oosik shouted, "Faster!" and disappeared down his hatch, slamming it behind him.

"Inside, Patera Caldé!"

He scooped Hyacinth into his arms instead, dropping the cane into the floater. It was racing now, careering along Lamp Street and scattering people like chaff. She shrieked.

Here was Cage Street, overlooked by the despotic wall of the Alambrera. Hanging in the air in front of it was a single trooper with wings-a female trooper, from the bulge at her chest-who leveled a slug gun. He slid off the coaming and dropped, still holding Hyadnth, onto the men below.

They sprawled in a tangle of arms and legs, like beetles swept into a jar. Someone stepped on his shoulder and swarmed up the spidery ladder. The turret hatch banged shut. At the front of the floater Oosik snapped, "Faster, Sergeant!"

"We're getting a vector now, sir."

Silk tried to apologize, to tug Hyacinth's scarlet skirt (about which Hyacinth herself seemed to care not a cardbit) over her thighs, and to stand in a space in which he could not possibly have stood upright, all at once. Nothing succeeded.

Something struck the floater like a sledge, sending it yawing into something else solid; it rolled and plunged and righted itself, its straining engine roaring like a wounded bull. Reeking of fish, a wisp of oily black smoke writhed through the compartment.

"Faster!"
Oosik shouted.

The turret gun spoke as if in response, a clatter that went on and on, as though the turret gunner were intent on massacring the whole city.

Scrambling across Xiphias and the surgeon, Silk peered over Oosik's shoulder. Fiery red letters danced across his glass: VECTOR UNACCEPTABLE.

Something banged the slanted foredeck above their heads, and the thunder of the engine rose to a deafening crescendo; Silk felt that he had been jerked backwards.

Abruptly, their motion changed.

The floater no longer rocked or raced. The noise of the engine waned until he could distinguish the high-pitched song of the blowers. It ascended to an agonized scream and faded away. A red light flared on the instrument panel.

For the second time in a floater, Silk felt that he was truly floating; it was, he thought, like the uncanny sensation of the moving room in which he had ridden with Mamelta.

Behind him, Hyacinth gasped. A strangely-shaped object had risen from Oosik's side. Before Silk recognized it, it had completed a leisurely quarter revolution, scarcely a span in front of his nose. It was a large needler, similar to the one in his own waistband; and it had bobbed up like a cork, unimpelled, from Oosik's holster.

"Look! Look! They're picking us up!" Hyacinth's full breasts pressed his back as she stared at the glass.

He plucked Oosik's needler out of the air and returned it to its holster. When he looked at the glass again, it showed a sprawling pattern of crooked lines, enlivened here and there by crimson sparks. It looked, he decided, like a city in the skylands, except that it seemed much closer. Intrigued, he undogged the hatcheover over Oosik's seat and threw it back. As he completed the motion, both his feet left the floor; he snatched at the hatch dog, missed it by a finger, and drifted up like Oosik's needler until someone inside caught his foot.

The pattern he had seen in the glass was spread before him without limit here: a twilit skyland city, ringed by sunbright brown fields and huddled villages; and to one side, a silver mirror anchored by a winding, dun-colored thread Oreb fluttered from his shoulder as he gaped and disappeared into the twilight.

"We're flying." Incredulity and dismay turned the words to a sigh that dwindled with the black bird. Silk coughed, spat congealed blood, and tried again. "We are flying upside down. I see Viron and the lake, even the road to the lake."

Quetzal spoke from inside the floater. "Look behind us, Patera Caldé."

They were nearer now, so near that the vast dark belly of the thing roofed out the sky. Beneath it, suspended by cables that appeared no thicker than gossamer, dangled a structure like a boat with many short oars; Silk's lungs had filled and emptied before he realized that the oars were the barrels of guns, and half a minute crept by before he made out the blood-red triangle on its bottom. "Your Cognizance…"

"You don't understand why they're not shooting at us." Quetzal shook himself. "I imagine it's only that they haven't noticed us yet. A wind is forcing them to hold their airship parallel to the sun, so they're peering down at a dark city. At the moment our floater's presenting its narrowest aspect to them. But we're turning, and soon they'll be looking straight down at us. Let's duck inside and shut the hatch."

The glass showed Lake Limna now. Watching its shoreline creep from one corner to the other, Silk thought of Oosik's needler; their floater seemed to be tumbling through the sky in the same dilatory fashion.

Clinging to him, Hyacinth whispered, "You're not afraid at all, are you? Are we up terribly high?" She trembled.

"Of course I am; when I was out there, I was terrified." He examined his emotional state. "I'm still badly frightened; but thinking about what's happening-how it can possibly have come about except by a miracle-keeps my mind off my fear." Watching the glass, he tried to describe the airship.

"Pulling us up, lad! That's what she said! Think we could cut it?"

"There's nothing to cut; if there were, they'd know where we were and shoot us, I believe. This is something else. Was it you who held my foot, by the way? Thank you."

Xiphias shook his head and indicated the surgeon.

"Thank you," Silk repeated. "Thank you very much indeed, Doctor." He grasped the operator's shoulder. "You said we were getting a vector. Exactly what does that mean?"

"It's a message you get if you float too fast, My Caldé, either north or south. You're supposed to slow down. The monitor's supposed to make you if you don't, but that doesn't work any more on this floater."

"I see." Silk nodded, encouragingly he hoped. "Why are you supposed to slow down?"

Oosik put in, "Going too fast north makes you feel as if someone were shoveling sand on you. It is not good for you, and makes everyone in the floater slow to react. Going south too fast makes you giddy. It feels like swimming."

Almost too softly to be heard, Quetzal inquired, "Do you know the shape of the whorl, Patera Caldé?"

"The whorl? Why, it's cylindrical, Your Cognizance."

"Are we on the outside of the cylinder, Patera Caldé? Or on the inside?"

"We're inside, Your Cognizance. If we were outside, we'd fall off."

"Exactly. What is it that holds us down? What makes a book fall if you drop it?"

"I can't remember the name, Your Cognizance," Silk said, "but it's the tendency that keeps a stone in a sling until it is thrown."

Hyacinth had released him; now her hand found his, and he squeezed it. "As long as the boy keeps twirling his sling, the stone in it can't fall out. The Whorl turns-I see! If the stone were a-a mouse and the mouse ran in the direction the sling was going, it would be held in place more securely, as though the sling were being twirled faster. But if the mouse were to run the other way, it would be as if the sling weren't twirling fast enough. It would fall out."

"Gunner!" Oosik was staring at the glass. "Your gun should bear." As he flicked off his own buzz gun's safety, the red triangle crept into view.

"Trivigaunte," Hyacinth whispered. "Sphigx won't let them make pictures of anything. That mark's on their flag."

Auk stood, unable for a moment to recall where he was or why he had come. Had he fallen off a roof? Salt blood from his lips trickled into his mouth. A man with arms and legs no thicker than kindling and a face like a bearded skull dashed past him. Then another and another.

"Don't be afraid," the blind god whispered. "Be brave and act wisely, and I will protect you." He took Auk's hand, not as Hyacinth had put her own hand into Silk's a few minutes before, but as an older man clasps a younger's at a crisis.

"All right," Auk told him. "I ain't scared, only kind of shook up." The blind god's hand felt good in his own, big and strong, with long powerful fingers; he could not think of the blind god's name and was embarrassed by his failure.

"I am Tartaros, and your friend. Tell me everything you see. You may speak or not, as you wish."

"There's a big hole with smoke coming out in the middle of the wall," Auk reported. "That wasn't there before, I'm pretty sure. There's some dead culls around besides the ones Patera killed and the one I killed. One's a trooper, like, only a mort it looks like. Her wings broke, I guess, maybe when she hit the ground. Everything's brown, the wings and pants and a kind of a bandage, like, over her boobs."

"Brown?"

Auk looked more closely. "Not exactly. Yellowy-brown, more like. Dirt color. Here comes Chenille."

"That is well. Comfort her, Auk my noctolater. Is the airship still overhead?"

"Sure," Auk said, implying by his tone that he did not require a god to coach him in such elementary things. "Yeah, it is." Chenille rushed into his arms.

"It's all right, Jugs," he told her. "Going to be candy. You'll see. Tartaros is a dimber mate of mine." To Tartaros himself, Auk added, "There's this hoppy floater that's falling in the pit, only slow, while it shoots. That's up there, too. And there's maybe a couple hundred troopers like the dead mort flying around, way up."

The blind god gave his hand a gentle tug. "We emerged from a smaller pit into this one, Auk. If you see no other way out, it would be well to return to the tunnel. There are other egresses, and I know them all."

"Just a minute. I lost my whin. I see it." Releasing Chenille, Auk hurried over, jerked his hanger from the mire, and wiped the blade on his tunic.