by Dave Duncan
His mood turned glum again. “Yes, I do. I use the magic they give me to heal babies and then tell them that this is a miracle sent by a god I don't believe in myself."
"What would happen if you told them the truth?"
"What is truth? That all my power comes from their belief? They wouldn't believe me. Even charisma has its limits."
No faith, no mana. No mana, no crusade.
"Are you quite sure God didn't send you?"
"Alice! Please! If I start thinking like that I'll turn into a total theomaniac."
"You're not the type. I'd say you're a pragmatist. You're doing the best you can in the circumstances. The object of the Game is to kill Zath, isn't it? And thereby rid the world of a monster?"
Again he ran a hand through his curls. He needed a haircut. “So the ends justify the means?"
Memories, memories! “You're playing devil's advocate, my lad. You always did that.” She saw his shy grin flicker and that, too, was heart-stoppingly familiar from years gone by. “And you've had a lot more time to think up the answers than I have. You tell me."
He stared sadly into the fire for a moment. “I think that sometimes life forces us to choose the path of least evil. How's that for rationalization?"
"It sounds sound to me,” she said loyally.
"It didn't convince friend Smedley the other day. It's not the way a saint thinks. A saint won't bend his principles no matter what the cost—to himself or anyone else. I'm just a political revolutionary masquerading as a prophet."
"You're more saintly than most. You've always had strict principles."
"So did Holy Roly. You know, I used to think the old bat enjoyed heaping brimstone on his wayward nephew's head? Now I'm not so sure."
"Good heavens! You really have been gathering insights, haven't you?"
He laughed, probably not noticing the surprised smiles of his guards. “Wonderful to see you here!” Abruptly he turned serious again. “Dear Alice, I don't doubt that you are the true, dear Alice. I don't doubt your motives in the slightest, and yet your arrival here leaves me a teeny-weeny bit suspicious still. Are you quite certain that the Miss Pimm you met was the genuine Miss Pimm?"
Alice opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. “Well, I suppose the answer to that is No! I mean, how could I ever be certain? She did seem younger than she was two years ago. I assumed that was because she'd been playing a role then, and wasn't now—or at least not the same role.” She realized that she had not told him about Zath's appearance at Olympus, which was the reason for her coming here at all.
Edward bit his lip. “Doesn't really mean anything,” he muttered. “So you went to Olympus. Whose idea was it for you and Jumbo—"
He was interrupted by shouts and a clatter of boots. His bodyguards sprang to their feet. The little blond disciple she had seen earlier came running into the hollow, waving a flaming torch. Right on his heels came Ursula Newton. Much singsong jabber was exchanged. Edward rose and began to move toward the exit. At once two of the guards set themselves between him and Alice. She stayed put on her nice, comfortable rock.
The torchbearer ran out again, probably taking word that the Liberator was coming.
"You'll have to excuse me a moment,” Edward said. “There's a young girl out there having some sort of seizure, and everyone thinks she's about to die.” He grinned ruefully as he passed her. “A god's work is never done."
"As I recall,” she countered, “under similar circumstances, Jesus did not need to go to the centurion's house."
Edward's smile vanished. But that was Jesus. This is only me.” He disappeared, too, into the passageway. Well, at least he wasn't a total theomaniac yet.
The sound of singing was still drifting in over the barrier. Most of the Free must be quite unaware of the current medical emergency. The bodyguards all sat down, not following the Liberator. Did that mean they were now jailers? Ursula Newton had stayed behind also. She made herself comfortable on the next rock with a sigh of wearied satisfaction, like a schoolmistress after the final bell of the day, and fixed Alice with a gaze as steady as a recruiting poster's.
"I assume you're now certified as the genuine article, so may I start all over? I'm Ursula Newton, and I'm very happy to meet you.” She leaned over to offer a hand. Her smile was more hearty than winsome, but that was because her face would never manage winsome. The smile itself seemed genuine enough. She had a grip like a blacksmith.
"No offense,” Alice said. “You're quite right to take precautions. He's a pretty important man, now.” The significance of her own words seemed to ricochet back at her from the megalithic walls. Important? Edward was working his way into the history books of a world. “I mean he will be if he succeeds, like Moses."
"He'll be Jan Hus if he fails."
Alice shuddered. “Meaning?"
"Martyrdom, murder, massacre, and mayhem. He knew the risks when he burned his first bridge. He had no choice, you know."
"Edward or Jan Hus?"
"Your cousin, of course!” Mrs. Newton glowered belligerently. “Julian has told me what happened back Home, how the Blighters almost caught him—and you too. Obviously Zath will never stop trying to kill him. He was forced to defend himself, and this was the only way open to him."
Alice was taken aback. She could not recall saying anything critical of Edward's crusade and did not see why Mrs. Newton need defend it to her so aggressively. Besides, she found the proposed defense repellent.
"I can't believe Edward would have involved so many innocent people just to save his own skin. I am sure he seeks some greater good than just his personal survival."
Her companion conceded the point with a faint pout. “He chose a more daring path than I anticipated. I expected him to begin by freeing the slaves in the Thargian mines."
"Being Moses?"
"Exactly. ‘The Liberator,’ you see?"
"But you don't have a Red Sea handy. I suppose the pursuing Thargians could have been buried in a landslide instead."
Mrs. Newton was not amused. “He elected instead to be Christ, which is a bolder concept altogether."
It certainly did not lack ambition, but putting it in words raised worrisome questions that Jumbo had not been able to answer. “What will happen when he reaches Tharg itself? I understand crucifixion is not a Valian custom."
Ursula grimaced. “They've never heard of it. Thargians execute criminals by dashing their brains out on an anvil. They'll have to catch him first, won't they? I don't believe your cousin has anything so barbaric in mind for Zath or so suicidal for himself, Mrs. Pearson. I do wish the cooks would hurry up. I'm hungry."
The guards had begun whispering, perhaps discussing the strangely ill-tongued intruder.
"But he may fail?” Alice said. “How do you rate his chances?"
"Impossible to say."
"You must have a better idea than I do, for I have no way of judging at all. If you thought he had no chance you wouldn't be here, would you?"
"On the face of it he doesn't, frankly.” Ursula folded her arms and thought for a moment, scowling at the fire. “There are three unknowns. The biggest is the Pentatheon. If enough of them rally to Exeter's side in the final scrum, then they may tip the scales. They're scared of Zath, but they have no real reason to set up your cousin in his place, which is basically what they'd be trying to do if they intervened."
"I suppose they're fence-sitting at the moment?"
"Absolutely. Don't expect a peep out of any of them until the last possible minute. I expect every one of them has a spy or two within the Free, though. They're watching. And there's no way to know how they're judging Edward's performance, which is what this parade is.” She seemed to be warming to her lecture. “The second factor is the Filoby Testament itself. It hasn't hit a wrong note in eighty-five years. That's impressive! Prof Rawlinson estimates that three quarters of the prophecies have already been fulfilled."
"But there can always be a first time failure?"
"Oh, crikey
, yes! And I'm a little bit suspicious of the way verse three eighty-six is worded. It doesn't say that the Liberator will slay Zath, or that he will win a fight. It just says he will bring death to Death. I only hope that isn't to be interpreted in some sort of mystical way. Nevertheless, I'd much rather have the Filoby Testament working for me than against me."
"It saved my life once,” Alice said. “Or, rather, it saved Edward's and I was with him. The third factor must be his own mana?"
"Right. No way to measure that, either, of course. Can't stick a thermometer in a man and test his mana level. Drat them, I wish they'd bring the tuck basket around!” With a sudden show of irritation, Ursula grabbed up a log and hurled it on the fire. She was concealing something, or trying to detour the conversation away from something.
Alice prompted. “Edward's obviously collected great power if he can give a blind man back his sight."
"True."
"And the miracles inspire the crowd to provide more mana? He gets it back?"
Ursula nodded, beating her hands on her knees and staring angrily at the rocks as if trying to glare through them. “All that singing going on out there doesn't sound like anyone's doing much eating yet."
"What's wrong? Why don't you want to talk about it?"
"I never...” The doughty Mrs. Newton scowled at this frontal attack. She glanced at the wall around them as if looking for listeners. “You really want my opinion, no matter what?"
"Please."
"Well, I suppose you are his next of kin. I wouldn't say this to anyone else. You won't repeat my words to Jumbo or your cousin?"
"Certainly not."
"Rain, Mrs. Pearson! The rain's bad news. He's lost a lot of people since yesterday. If the weather continues bad, he's going to come a cropper. He can't travel as fast in the rain, he can't attract enough people. So he won't collect enough mana—or even enough money. If he can't feed his flock, it'll wander away. He's certainly not strong enough yet to do loaves-and-fishes miracles, not on that scale."
Ursula scowled at the fire for a moment. “And that's not all. I keep telling him he's not ruthless enough. As you said, when he uses mana to perform miracles, the resulting adoration should give him back more than he spent. That's the way it should work. But he's too softhearted. It begins that way, but it's astonishingly easy for people to become ... um, saturated. Blase. The first couple of miracles today, I could feel the whole node tremble with the surge of mana. Did you notice?"
"I felt something."
"That was just a whiff of spray we were getting—the waves were hitting the Liberator and they must have rocked him to his toenails. Did you notice how much less the response was the fourth time?"
"He overdoes it, you mean?"
"Absolutely. The Pentatheon's god of healing is Paa, one of Tion's. We estimate he grants about one real healing miracle a year, plus a few minor, show-offy things: squints or harelips or measles. Those keep the crowds coming. Tion himself does one miracle cure every year at his festival. By definition, miracles need to be rarities."
"I suppose Edward can't refuse suffering babies."
"He could tell them to wait until tomorrow,” Ursula growled. “Listen!” She waved a hand at the dark. “They're still singing! He went out there to perform a miracle. He can cure an attack of epilepsy with a snap of his fingers, if that's all it is. But why do it that way? Why hasn't he ordered the singing stopped and made everybody gather round to watch? He's not enough of a showman! Oh, he does quite well, but he could do a lot better."
Showing off would go against everything he had ever been taught. “So you think he isn't gathering mana fast enough?” But if there was no way to measure mana...
"I'm very much afraid he's losing it. I don't think he has as much now as he did—"
She was interrupted by a scream. It began, very briefly, as a yell of outrage or anger. It immediately shot up to the unmistakable shrill note of mortal terror, four and a third octaves above middle C, the universal alarm cry of the human species. It came from somewhere very close, amid the encircling maze of rocks and stalagmites. It reverberated through the cavern, doubled and redoubled by its own echoes. It froze the blood. Alice and Ursula and the four bodyguards leaped to their feet, peering around, trying to locate the source.
Then the human scream was joined by a sound much greater, an earsplitting animal roar. The two swelled in chorus, alternating, combining, mingling with mighty cracks and thumps.
Alice clapped her hands over her ears. “What in the world is that?” she howled.
Ursula yelled back through the din. “A mithiar! What they call a jugular. It's killing someone."
Judging by the noise, it was tearing someone apart.
As suddenly as they'd begun, the sounds stopped. They were replaced by the blurred roar of a multitude of terrified people on the far side of the rockfall. Their screams, too, echoed everywhere, but at least they were not as close. Roaring Cave suddenly justified its name.
Alice uncovered her ears. Ursula was ashen. She could not possibly be more shaken than Alice, though, and the men looked no better, apparently torn between a desire to flee and a need to stay close to the light. One of them had hauled a burning branch from the fire, but he wasn't going anywhere with it.
Ursula snatched it from him and headed toward the source of the trouble. The men all yelled and tried to stop her. Shouting and shaking her head, she cleared them out of the way with her flaming brand and kept on going. Shamed, perhaps, they followed. Alice did too, determined not to be left alone in this nightmare.
They did not have very far to go, and then they all stopped dead, blocking the way and also Alice's view of what they had found. She scrambled up on a table-high ledge and peered over their heads. Steep walls rose to shoulder height on one side and even higher on the other, forming a narrow canyon that continued on, twisting out of sight. The rocks were pale gray, mottled and cemented together with oozings of white stalagmite like melted candle wax, but now all splattered with sheets of shocking red as if a whole barrel of blood had exploded. In places streaks of blood and blobs of flesh had splashed ten or twelve feet up, glittering wetly in the light of Ursula's torch. Surely it would have taken a dozen victims to produce so much blood?
The shouting in the main cave had almost stopped, probably because most of the Free were outside in the rain by now. Flickers of light reflecting from the roof showed that more people were coming to investigate.
A woman's body lay facedown in the center of the shambles. It was naked and smeared with gore, but it bore no obvious wounds. How was that possible? Ursula and the men were all talking at once, not a word intelligible to Alice. Some of those lumps were not rock. A leg. An arm. A couple of the men cried out at the same moment, pointing at a small boulder, coated with blood. Its eyes were open.
Revulsion! Nausea! Suddenly every shadow held a monster, every rock was a tooth. Alice half fell, half jumped from her perch and went stumbling back to the fire, moving as fast as she dared and banging her shins and elbows in the process. She threw a heap of sticks on the blaze to try and make it brighter, then hunkered down beside it, shivering. Two victims, one torn to pieces, one not visibly harmed. That made no sense at all! The sort of claws Jumbo had described could never rip a woman's clothes off without tearing her skin to ribbons as well. Where had the jugular gone?
Where had it come from?
The crowd in the main cave was silent now or else had fled out into the night. She heard voices nearby, and recognized Edward's, issuing commands. She was shaking from shock and nausea. Even the smoke from the fire seemed tainted with the reek of blood. She could make no sense of the talk, and no one was going to be speaking English for a while. She considered going in search of Jumbo, but she could not be sure he was still in the cave. With Edward's snub still rankling, he might have taken the dragons and ridden off in a huff. No, Jumbo was too much a gentleman to do that, but she had better wait here until Edward had straightened out the emergency. Her vac
ation was turning out to be more stressful than she had expected.
A moment later, light advanced out of the passageway. Ursula appeared with her torch, followed by Edward himself carrying the woman's body in his arms. Other men came after. As he lowered his burden to one of the heaps of bedding, Alice snatched up a blanket and went to cover her. She was only a girl.
Edward straightened, wiping bloody hands on his robe, which was already well smeared. “Thanks."
"She's alive?” Of course. He would not have brought a corpse.
"Eleal Singer. She was starting to come around. I've put her to sleep. See if you can clean her up, will you?” He turned to his followers and began giving more orders. He was paler than before, but calm, completely in command. Though they were all older men, they did not argue or hesitate. Most went out by the way Alice had entered, others returned to the scene of the accident—of the murder?
Ursula came to help, dragging a water skin. Alice chose a tattered cloth that might be somebody's bedding and ripped a strip from it. Together they began washing away the bloodstains. Eleal muttered and stirred as they wiped her face but did not awaken. There was little they could do about her long hair, which was caked and matted. Her skin bore only a few scrapes from contact with the rock, and there was a reddening welt around her waist that Alice could not explain. When Ursula started work on Eleal's hands, she moaned and tried to pull them loose. The tips of her fingers were swollen, some of the nails broken. Her toes were the same. Alice exchanged shocked glances with Ursula and thrust away the impossible suspicions that kept boiling up in her mind.
"How are you doing?” Edward asked.
He was standing with his back to the proceedings. This absurd display of modesty almost provoked Alice to sniggers, but she fought against them. That way lay full-blown hysterics.
Ursula pulled the blanket over the patient again. “You can look. She has serious bruising around her middle. There's something wrong with her fingers and toes."
Edward knelt down and considered Eleal's draped form. “A couple of broken ribs, too.” He touched the blanket over her waist for a moment. Then he lifted one of her hands and gritted his teeth. “Swine!” He covered the girl's hand with both of his and healed the finger wounds, even the broken nails. He moved on to do the other hand, both feet.