Litany of the Long Sun (65 page)

"Yeah, and that's one place where I feel like old Pas sort of slipped up. Me and a fem-chem could make a sprat. You know about that?"

"Certainly."

"Each of us is hardwired with half the plans. But the thing is, it might take us a year or so if we're lucky, maybe twenty if we weren't, where you bios can do the main business any night after work."

"Believe me," Silk told him, "I wish with all my heart that you were more like us, and we more like you. I have never been more sincere in my life."

"Thanks. Well, anyhow, after awhile there got to be more bios and the tools were better, mostly 'cause there was still a lot of chems around to make them. Also, there was quite a few slug guns floating around in all the cities that'd had wars, 'cause the soldiers that had owned them were dead. A slug gun isn't all that tough to make, really. You got to have some bar stock and a lathe for the barrel, and a milling machine's nice. But there's nothing a milling machine can do that somebody careful can't do about as good with a set of files and a hand drill, if he's got the time."

Hammerstone included the entire armory m a gesture. "So here we are. Not near as steady as we used to be, and all set to lay the blame on poor old Pas the first time we lose."

"It seems a pity," Silk said pensively.

"Chin up, Patera. Right here's the best thing I got to show you, you being a augur, so I saved it for the last, or almost the last, anyway. Have you ever heard of what they - call Pas's seal?"

Silk's eyes went wide with astonishment. "Certainly I have. It's mentioned in the Pardon. 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath.' "

Hammerstone threw back his head in another grin. "Have you ever seen it?"

"Why no. Pas's seal is-to the best of my knowledge at any rate-largely a metaphor. If I were to shrive you, for example, anything I learned during your shriving would be under the seal of Pas, never to be divulged to a third party without your express permission."

"Well, have a look," Hammerstone said, and stepped to one side.

Waist-high on the line where the double doors met, they were joined by a broad daub of dark synthetic. Silk dropped to one knee to read the letters and numbers pressed into it.

5553 8783 4223 9700 34

2221 0401 1101 7276 56

SEALED FOR THE MONARCH

"There it is," Hammerstone told Silk. "It's been there ever since we came on board, and whenever people talk about Pas's seal, that thing you're looking at's what they're talking about. There used to be a lot more of them."

"If this imprint is truly what is intended by the seal of Pas," Silk whispered, "it is a priceless relic." Bowing reverently, he traced the sign of addition in the air before the seal and murmured a prayer.

"If we could take it off and carry it up to one of those big manteions it would be, maybe. The thing is, you can't. If you were to try to get it off of those doors, that black stuff would bust into a million pieces. We broke a bunch after we got here, and what's left isn't a whole lot bigger than H-Six Powder." "And no one knows what lies beyond it?" Silk inquired. "In the next room?"

"Oh, no. We know what's in there all right. It's pretty much like this one, a whole lot of people in the rack. Only in there it's bios. Want to see them?"

"Bios?" Silk repeated. At the word, his dream of a few hours earlier returned to the forefront of his mind with an urgency and immediacy that were wholly new: the bramble-covered hillside, Maytera Marble (absurdly) sick in bed, the oversweet scent of Maytera Rose's blue-glass lamp, and Mucor seated upon the still water when the dream in which she had played her part had vanished. "It's drier farther on. Meet me where the bios sleep."

"Sure," Hammerslone confirmed, "bios just like you. See, this one we're in right now had extra soldiers, and this next one, with the seal still on the doors, has extra bios. Old Pas must of been scared there might be some kind of a disease, or maybe a famine, and Viron would have to have more bios to get started again. They don't get to lie down like us, though. They're all standing up. Want to see them?"

"Certainly," Silk told him, "if it can be done without breaking Pas's seal."

"Don't worry. I've done this probably a couple dozen times." Hammerstone's steel knuckles rang against one of the doors. "That's not so somebody'll come and let us in, see. I got to stir up the lights inside, or you won't be able to see anything."

Silk nodded. "I doubt your hands are strong enough, so I'll have to do it for you." He wedged chisel-like fingernails into the crevice between the doors. "There's a button underneath of the seal and it's got them latched shut. That's the way a lot of them were when we first come aboard. So Pas's seal won't break even when I pull as hard as I can. But I can get this top part far enough apart for you to peek inside if you put your eye to the crack. Have a look."

There was a faint thrumming from Hammerstone's thorax as he spoke, and the dark line where the edges of the doors met became a thread of greenish light. "You'll have to sort of wiggle between me and the door to see in, but you got to get your eye up close to see anything anyhow."

With his body pressed against the hard, smooth surfaces of the doors, Silk managed to peer through the crevice. He was looking at a thin section of what appeared to be a wide and brilliantly illuminated hall. Here, too, stood racks of gray-painted steel; but the motionless bios in the row nearest the floor (in line with the crevice through which he peered) were nearly upright. Each was contained in what appeared to be a cylinder of the thinnest glass, glass rendered visible only by a coating of dust. With his vision constricted by the narrow opening between the doors, he could make out only three of these sleepers clearly: a woman and two men. All three were naked and were (in appearance at least) of approximately his own age. All three stared straight ahead, with open eyes in empty, untroubled faces.

"Lights on enough?" Hammerstone asked; he leaned forward to peer through the crevice himself, the tip of his chin well above the top of Silk's head.

"Someone's in there," Silk informed him. "Someone who's not asleep."

"Inside?" There was a metallic clang as Hammerstone's forehead struck the doors.

"Look at how bright it is. Every light in the room must be blazing. A few taps on the door cannot possibly have done that."

"There can't be anybody in there!"

"Of course there can," Silk told him. "There's another way in, that's all."

Slowly-so slowly that at first Silk was not sure he was seeing them move at all-the woman in the lowest row lifted her hands to press against the crystalline wall that confined her.

"Corporal of the guard!" Hammerstone blared. "Back of Personnel Storage!" Faintly, a distant sentry took up the cry.

Before Silk could protest, Hammerstone had slammed the butt of his slug gun against, the seal, which shattered into coarse black dust. As Silk recoiled in horror, Hammerstone jerked open both doors and charged into the enormous hall beyond them.

Silk knelt, collected as much of the black dust as he could, and, lacking any more suitable receptacle, folded it into his remaining sheet of paper and deposited it in his pen case.

By the time that he had closed the case and returned it to the pocket of his robe, the imprisoned woman's hands were clutching her throat and her eyes starting from her head. He scrambled to his feet, hobbled into the brilliantly lit hall, and wasted precious seconds trying to discover some means of broaching the transparent cylinder that confined her before snatching Hyacinth's needler-from his pocket and striking the almost invisible crystal with its butt.

It shattered at the first blow. At once the atmosphere within it darkened to the blue-black of ripe grapes, swirling and spiraling as it mixed with air, then vanished as abruptly as Mucor in the aftermath of his dream. With somnambulistic slowness the naked woman's hands returned to her sides.

She gasped for breath.

Silk averted his eyes and untied the bands of his robe. "Will you put this. on, please?"

"We'll be lovers," the woman told him loudly, her voice breaking at the penultimate syllable. Her hair was as black as Hyacinth's, her eyes a startling blue deeper than Silk's own.

"Do you know this place?" Silk asked her urgently. "Is there another way out?"

"Everything." Moving almost normally, she stepped from the rack.

"I must get away." Silk spoke as quickly as he could, wondering whether she would understand him even if he had spoken as slowly as he would have to a child. "There must be another way out, because there was someone in here who hadn't come through these doors. Show me, please."

"That way."

He risked a glance at her face, careful not to let his gaze stray below her long and graceful neck; there was something familiar-something horrible that he struggled to deny-in her smile. With cautious hands, he draped his robe about her shoulders. "You'll have to hold it closed in front."

"Tie it for me?"

He hesitated. "It would be better…"

"I don't know how."

She stepped toward him. "Please?" Her voice was under better control now, and almost familiar.

He fumbled the bands; it seemed unfair that something he did automatically each morning should be so difficult to do for someone else.

"Now I can fly!" With outstretched arms she spread the robe wide, running slowly and clumsily down the aisle until she nearly disappeared from view at the distant wall. There she turned and dashed back, sprinting without wasted motion. "I-really-can!" She gulped for air, breasts heaving. "But-you-can't-see-me-then." Still gasping, she smiled proudly, her head thrown back like Hammerstone's; and in her smile, the grinning rictus of a corpse, Silk knew her.

"You have no right to this woman, Mucor!" He traced the sign of addition. "In the name of Pas, Master of the Whorl, be gone!"

"I-am-a-woman. Oh-yes!"

"In the name of Lady Echidna, be gone!"

"I-know-her. She-likes-me."

"In the names of Scylla and Sphigx! In the most sacred name of the Outsider!"

She was no longer paying attention. "Do you-know why this-place is-so high?" She gestured toward the domed ceiling. "So that fliers-could fly-over it without-having to-walk." She pointed to a jumbled heap of bones, hair, and blackened flesh at the bottom of a cylinder on the second level. "I was her-once. She-remembered."

"To me you're the devil who possessed that poor woman's daughter," Silk told her angrily. "The devil who possessed Orpine." He saw a flash of fear in her eyes. "I am a bad man, granted-a lawless man, and often less than pious. Yet I am a holy augur, consecrated and blessed. Is there no name that you respect?"

"I will not be afraid, Silk." She backed away from him as she spoke.

"In the name ofPhaea, go! In the name of Thelxiepeia, go! In the name of Molpe, whose day this is, and in those of Scylla and Sphigx. Be gone in the names of these gods!"

"I wanted to help…"

"Be gone in the names of Tartaros and Hierax!"

She raised her hands, as he had to ward off Hammerstone's blow; and Silk, seeing her fear, remembered that Hierax had been the name that Musk had given the white-headed one, the griffon vulture on Blood's roof. With that memory, Phaesday night returned: his frantic dash across Blood's lawn in the shadow of a racing cloud; the thump of his forked branch on the roof of the conservatory; and the blade of his hatchet wedged between the casement of Mucor's window and its frame, the window that had supplied the threat he had used the next day to banish her from Orchid's.

Almost kindly he told her, "I will close your window, Mucor, so that it can never be opened again, if you don't leave me alone. Go."

As though she had never been present, she abandoned the tall, raven-haired woman who faced him; he had seen nothing and heard nothing, but he knew it as surely as if there had been a flash of fire or a gale of wind.

The woman blinked twice, her eyes unfocused and without comprehension. "Go? Where?" She drew his robe about her.

"Praise Great Hierax, the Son of Death, the New Death, whose mercy is terminal and infinite," Silk said feelingly. "Are you all right, my daughter?"

She stared at him, a hand between her breasts. "My- heart?"

"It's still racing from Mucor's exertions, I'm sure; but your pulse should slow in a few minutes." She trembled, saying nothing. In the silence he heard the pounding of steel feet.

He closed the double doors that Hammerstone had opened, reflecting that Hammerstone had specified the back of the armory. It might be some time before the hurrying soldiers realized that he had actually meant to summon them to this vast hall beyond it. "Perhaps if we walk a little," he suggested. "We may be able to find a place of comfort, where you can sit down. Do you know a way out?"

The woman said nothing but offered no objection as Silk led her along an aisle he chose at random. The bases of the crystal cylinders, as he now saw, were black with print. By rising on his toes, he was able to examine one on the second tier, reading the name (Olive) of the woman in the cylinder, her age (twenty-four), and what he took to be a precis of her education.

"I ought to have read yours." He spoke to her as he had to Oreb, to give form to his thoughts. "But we'd better not go back. If I had when I had the opportunity, I'd know your name, at least."

"Mamelta."

He looked at her curiously. "Is that your name?" It was one that he had never heard. "I think so. I can't…"

"Remember?" he suggested gently.

She nodded.

"It's certainly not a common name." The greenish lights overhead were dimming now; in the twilight that remained, he glimpsed Hammerstone running down an intersecting aisle half the hall away and asked, "Can you walk just a little faster, Mamelta?"

She did not reply.

"I'd like to avoid him," he explained, "for reasons of my own. You don't have to be afraid of him, however-he won't hurt you or me."

Mamelta nodded, although he could not be sure that she understood.

"He won't find what he's searching for, I'm afraid, poor fellow. He wants to find the person who energized all these lights, but I'm reasonably sure that it was Mucor, and she's gone."