Epiphany of the Long Sun (30 page)

Silk shook his head. "I am Silk, but I can't prove that here. You would have to find someone you trust who knows me and can identify me, and that would consume more time than I have; so I'm begging you instead. Assume-though I swear to you that this is contrary to fact-that I am not Silk. That I am-this, of course, is entirely factual-a poor young augur in urgent need of your assistance. If you won't help me for my sake, or for that of the god I serve, do so for your own, I implore you."

"I can't launch an attack without an order from Brigadier Bison."

"You shouldn't," Silk told her, "with one. There's an armored floater behind those sandbags. I can see the turret above them. If your people attacked, they would be advancing into its fire, and I've seen what a buzz gun can do."

The young woman drew herself up to her full height, which was a span and a half less than his own. "We will attack if we are ordered to do so, Caldé."

Oreb bobbed his approbation. "Good girl!"

Looking at the sleeping figures behind the barricade, children of fifteen and fourteen, thirteen and even twelve, Silk shook his head.

"They're pretty young." (The young woman could not have been more than twenty herself.) "But they'll fight if they're led, and I'll lead them." When Silk said nothing, she added "That's not all. I've got a few men, too, and some slug guns. Most of the women-the other women, I ought to say-are working in the fire companies. You were surprised to find me in command, but General Mint's a woman."

"I am surprised at that, as well," Silk told her.

"Men want to fight a male officer. Besides, the women of Trivigaunte are famous troopers, and we women of Viron are in no way inferior to them!"

Recalling Doctor Crane, Silk said, "I'd like to believe that our men are as brave as theirs, as well."

The young woman was shocked. "They're slaves!"

"Have you been there?"

She shook her head.

"Neither have I. Surely then it's pointless for us to discuss their customs. A moment ago you called me Caldé. Did you mean that…?"

"Lieutenant. I'm Lieutenant Liana now. I used the title as a courtesy, nothing more. If you want my opinion, I think you're who you say you are. An augur wouldn't lie about that, and there's the bird. They say you've got a pet bird."

"Silk here," the bird informed her.

"Then do as I ask. Do you have a white flag?"

"For surrender?" Liana was offended. "Certainly not!"

"To signal a truce. You can make one by tying a white rag to a stick. I want you to wave it and call to them, on the other side. Tell them there's an augur here who's brought the pardon of Pas to your wounded. That's entirely true, as you know. Say he wants to cross and do the same for theirs."

"They'll kill you when they find out who you are."

"Perhaps they won't find out. I promise you that I won't volunteer the information."

Liana ran her fingers through her tousled hair; it was the same gesture he used in the grip of indecision. "Why me? No, Caldé, I can't let you risk yourself."

"You can," he told her. "What you cannot do is maintain that position with even an appearance of logic. Either I am Caldé or I am not. If I am, it is your duty to obey any order I give. If I'm not, the life of the Caldé is not at risk."

A few minutes later, as she and a young man called Linsang helped him up the barricade, Silk wondered whether he had been wise to invoke logic. Logic condemned everything he had done since Oosik had handed him Hyacinth's letter. When Hyacinth had written, the city had been at peace, at least relatively. She had no doubt expected to shop on the Palatine, stay the night at Ermine's, and return-

"No fall," Oreb cautioned him.

He was trying not to. The barricade had been heaped up from anything and everything: rubble from ruined buildings, desks and counters from shops, beds, barrels, and bales piled upon one another without any order he could discern.

He paused at the top, waiting for a shot. The troopers behind the sandbag redoubt had been told he was an augur, and might know of the Prolocutor's letter by this time. Seeing Oreb, they might know which augur he was, as well.

And shoot. It would be better, perhaps, to fall backward toward Liana and Linsang if they did-better, certainly, to jump that way if they missed.

No shot came; he began a cautious descent, slightly impeded by the traveling bag. Oosik had not killed him because Oosik had taken the long view, had been at least as much politician as trooper, as every high-ranking officer no doubt had to be. The officer commanding the redoubt would be younger, ready to obey the orders of the Ayuntamiento without question.

Yet here he was.

Once invoked, logic was like a god. One might entreat a god to visit one's Window; but if a god came it could not be dismissed, nor could any message that it vouchsafed mankind be ignored, suppressed, or denied. He had invoked logic, and logic told him that he should be in bed in the house that had become Oosik's temporary headquarters-that he should be getting the rest and care he needed so badly.

"He knew I'd go, Oreb." Something closed his throat; he coughed and spat a soft lump that could have been mucus. "He'd read her letter before he came in, and he's seen her." Silk found that he could not, even now, bring himself to mention that Oosik had lain with Hyacinth. "He knew I'd go, and take his problem with me."

"Man watch," Oreb informed him.

He paused again scanning the sandbag wall but unable to distinguish, at this distance, rounded sandbags from helmeted heads. "As long as they don't shoot," he muttered.

"No shoot."

This stretch of Gold Street had been lined with jewelers, the largest and richest shops nearest the Palatine, the richest of all clinging to the skirts of the hill itself, so that their patrons could boast of buying their bangles "uphill." Most of the shops were empty now, their grills and bars torn from their fronts by a thousand arms, their gutted interiors guarded only by those who had died defending or looting them. Beyond the redoubt, other richer shops waited, still intact. Silk tried and failed to imagine the children over whose recumbent bodies he had stepped looting them. They would not, of course. They would charge, fight, and very quickly die at Liana's order, and she with them. The looters would follow-if they succeeded. This body (Silk crouched to examine it) was that of a boy of thirteen or so; one side of his face had been shot away.

He had not been on Gold Street often; but he was certain that it had never been this long, or half this wide.

Here a trooper of the Guard and a tough-looking man who might have been the one who had questioned him after Kypris's theophany lay side-by-side, their knives in each other's ribs.

"Patera!" It was the rasping voice that had answered Liana's hail.

"What is it, my son?"

"Hurry up, will you!"

He broke into a trot, though not without protest from his ankle. When he had feared a shot at any moment, this lowest slope of the Palatine had been very steep; now he was scarcely conscious of its grade.

"Here. Grab my hand."

The Guard's redoubt was only half the height of the rebel barricade, although it was (as Silk saw when he had scrambled to the top) rather thicker. Its front was nearly sheer, its back stepped for the troopers who would fire over it.

The one who had helped him up said, "Come on. I don't know how long he'll last."

Silk nodded, out of breath from his climb and afraid he had torn the stitches in his lung. "Take me to him."

The trooper jumped from the sandbag step; Silk followed more circumspectly. There were sleepers here as well, a score of armored Guardsmen lying in the street wrapped in blankets that were probably green but looked black in the skylight.

"They going to rush us, over there?" the trooper asked.

"No. Not tonight, I'd say-tomorrow morning, perhaps."

The trooper grunted. "Slugs'll go right through a lot of that stuff in their fieldwork. I been lookin' it over, and there's a lot of furniture in there. Boards no thicker than your thumb in junk like that. I'm Sergeant Eft."

They shook hands, and Silk said, "I was thinking the same thing as I climbed over it, Sergeant. There are heavier things as well, though, and even the chairs and so forth must obstruct your view."

Eft snorted. "They got nothin' I want to see."

That could not be said of the Guard, as Silk realized as soon as he looked past the floater. A talus had been posted at an intersection a hundred paces uphill, its great, tusked head (so like that of the one he had killed beneath Scylla's shrine that he could have believed them brothers) swiveling to peer down each street in turn. Liana would have been interested in it, he thought, if she did not know about it already.

"In here." Eft opened the door of one of the dark shops; his voice and the thump of the door brightened lights inside, where troopers stripped of parts of their armor and more or less bandaged lay on blankets on a terrazzo floor. One moaned, awakened by the noise or the lights; two, it seemed, were not breathing. Silk knelt by the nearest, feeling for a pulse.

"Not him. Over here."

"All of them," Silk said. "I'm going to bring the Pardon of Pas to all of them, and I won't do it en masse. There's no justification for that."

"Most's already had it. He has."

Silk looked up at the sergeant, but there was no judging his truthfulness from his hard, ill-favored face. Silk rose. "This man's dead, I believe."

"All right, we'll get him out of here. Come over here. He's not." Eft was standing beside the man who had moaned.

Silk knelt again. The injured man's skin was cold to his touch. "You're not keeping him warm enough, Sergeant."

"You a doctor, too?"

"No, but I know something about caring for the sick. An augur must."

"No hurt." Oreb hopped from Silk's shoulder to the injured man's chest. "No blood."

"Leave him alone, you silly bird."

"No hurt!" Oreb whistled. "No blood!"

A bald man no taller than Liana stepped from behind one of the empty showcases. Although he held a slug gun, he was not in armor or even in uniform. "He-he isn't, Patera. Isn't wounded. At least he doesn't-I couldn't find a thing. I think it must be his heart."

"Get a blanket," Silk told Eft. "Two blankets. Now!"

"I don't take orders from any shaggy butcher."

"Then his death will be on your head, Sergeant." Silk took his beads from his pocket. "Bring two blankets. Three wouldn't be too many. The men watching the rebels can spare theirs, surely. Three blankets and clean water."

He bent over the injured man, his prayer beads dangling in the approved fashion from his right hand. "In the names of all the gods you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Molpe…"

The names rolled from his tongue, each with its sonorous honorific, names empty or freighted with horror. Pas, whose Plan the Outsider had endorsed, was dead; Echidna a monster. The ghost that haunted Silk's mind now, as he spoke and swung his beads, was not Doctor Crane's but that of the handsome, brutal chem who had believed himself Councillor Lemur.

"The monarch wanted a son to succeed him," the false Lemur had said. "Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself but female. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. His queen bore the monarch another child, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe. The third was male, but no better than the first two because he was born blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see by daylight. Echidna conceived again, and bore another male, a healthy boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. We call him Hierax now-"

And this boy over whom he bent and traced sign after sign of addition was nearly dead. Possibly-just possibly-he might derive comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone's; but the worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some scales somewhere, surely. It had to, or else the Whorl was mad.

"The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for him, too." A final sign of addition and it was over. Silk sighed, shivered, and put away his beads.

"The other one didn't say that," the civilian with the slug gun told him. "That last."

He had waited so long in fear of some such remark that it came now as an anticlimax. "Many augurs include the Outsider among the minor gods," he explained, "but I don't. His heart? Is that what you said? He's very young for heart problems."

"His name's Cornet Mattak. His father's a customer of mine." The little jeweler leaned closer. "That sergeant, he killed the other one."

"The other-?"

"Patera Moray. He told me his name. We chatted awhile when he'd said the prayers of the Pardon, and I-I- And I-" Tears flooded the jeweler's eyes, abrupt and unexpected as the gush from a broken jar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose.

Silk bent over the cornet again, searching for a wound.

"I said I'd give him a chalice. To catch the blood, you know what I mean?"

"Yes," Silk said absently. "I know what they're for."

"He said theirs was yellow pottery, and I said-said-"

Silk rose and picked up the small traveling bag. "Where is his body? Are you certain he's dead?" Oreb fluttered back to his shoulder.

The jeweler wiped his eyes and nose. "Is he dead? Holy Hierax! If you'd seen him, you wouldn't ask. He's out in the alley. That sergeant came in while we were talking and shot him. In my own store! He dragged him out there afterward."

"Show him to me, please. He brought the Pardon of Pas to all these others? Is that correct?"

Leading Silk past empty display cases toward the back of the shop, the jeweler nodded.