Lake of the Long Sun tbotls-2

by Gene Wolfe

  That halted it momentarily. "Chems are junk!"

  "Chems are wonderful constructions, a race that we bios created long ago, our own image in metal and synthetics." "Bios are fish guts!" The backward glide resumed.

  Silk held the azoth firmly in his left hand, his thumb on the demon. "Please say that you won't kill me."

  "No!"

  "Let me return to the surface."

  "No!"

  "I'll do you no more harm, I swear; and I'll help you if I can."

  "I will drop you and crush you!" the talus roared. "One blow .'"The wall irised closed behind them, leaving them in a long, dim passageway, a little more than twice the talus's width, bored through the solid stone of the cliff.

  "Don't you fear the immortal gods, my son?" Silk asked in desperation. "I'm the servant of one god and the friend of another."

  "I serve Scylla!"

  "As an augur, I receive the protection of all the gods, including hers."

  The steel fingers shook him more violently than before, then released his robe; he fell, nearly losing his grip on the azoth as he struck the dark and dirty stone floor. Sprawling, half-blind with pain, he looked up into that ogre's mask of a metal face and glimpsed the steel fist lifted higher than its owner's head.

  The wings of Hierax roared in his ears; without time to think, reason, threaten, or equivocate, he pressed the demon.

  Stabbing out from the hilt, the azoth blade of universal discontinuity caught the talus below the right eye; jagged scraps of incandescent slag burst from the point it struck. The steel fist smashed down but appeared to lose direction as it descended, hammering the stone floor to his left.

  Black smoke and crackling orange flames erupted from the mass of wreckage that had been the talus's head, and with them a deafening roar of rage and anguish. The great steel fists swung wildly, pounding flying chips as sharp as flints from the stone sides of the passageway. Eyeless and ablaze, the talus lurched toward him.

  A single slash from the azoth severed both the wide dark belts on which it had moved; they lashed the floor, the walls, and the dying talus itself like whips, then fell limp. There was a muffled explosion; flames shot up from the wagonlike body behind the vertical torso.

  Scrambling away from the heat and smoke, Silk released the demon, stood, thrust the azoth back into his waistband, dusted off his black robe, and got out his beads. Swinging their voided cross toward the burning talus, he traced the sign of addition again and again. "I convey to you, my son, the forgiveness of all the gods."

  His chant was flat and almost mechanical at first, but as the wonder and magnanimity of divine amnesty filled his mind, his voice grew louder and shook with fervor. "Recall now the words of Pas, who said, 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath. Go willingly, and any wrong that you have ever done shall be forgiven you. . . .' "

  Incus returned Hyacinth's letter to Gulo with a smirk. Its new seal, similar though not identical to the original one, displayed a leaping flame between cupped hands. "Her full name would be Hymenocallis, I expect," Incus remarked. "Very pretty. I've used it a time or two myself."

  "I didn't write it," Gulo told him sullenly. "But you're supposed to write to Patera Silk now, telling him to wait upon His Eminence Tarsday. You're to set the hour and mark it on His Eminence's regimen."

  The buck-toothed prothonotary nodded. "You'll deliver it for us? I'd rather not have to whistle up another boy just now so old Remora can whip your randy cur to kennel." Pudgy Patera Gulo advanced on him with clenched fists and reddening cheeks. "Patera Silk's a real man, you manse-wife. Whatever he may've done with this woman, he's worth a dozen of you and three of me. Remember that, and the proportion."

  Incus grinned up at him. "Why Gully! You're in love!"

  Chapter 8. FOOD FOR THE GODS

  Patera Silk took two long steps back from the still tightly closed door and eyed it with the disgust he felt for himself and his failure. It opened in some fashion-the talus had opened it, after all. Open, it would give him access to the stair that led up to the floor of the cliff-top shrine, and from there it might be possible (might even be easy) to open the mouth of the image of Scylla graven in the floor above and so climb out into the shrine and return to Limna.

  Commissioners, Silk told himself, and-what else had the woman said?-judges and the like came here, clearly to confer with the Ayuntamiento. Before he had killed it with the azoth-

  (He had to force himself to face those words, although he had told himself repeatedly and with perfect truth that he had killed only to save his own life.)

  Before he had killed it, the talus had said that having been discharged by Musk it had returned here to Potto; and by "Potto" it had intended Councillor Potto, surely.

  Thus the figure who had entered the shrine and vanished had no doubt been a commissioner, a judge, or something of the sort. Nor was his disappearance at all mysterious: He had entered and been seen, presumably by the talus; possibly he had shown some sort of tessera; Scylla's mouth had opened for him, and he had descended the stair and been conducted to a location that could not be remote, since the talus had been back at its post a half hour later.

  It was all perfectly logical and showed clearly that the Ayuntamiento had offices nearby. The realization bowed Silk's shoulders like a burden. How could he, a citizen and an augur, withhold all that he had learned about Crane's activities, even to save the manteion?

  Heartsick, he turned back to the door that had opened so smoothly for the talus, but would not open at all for him. It appeared to have no lock, no handle, and in fact no mechanism of any kind to open it. Its irising plates were so tightly fitted that he could scarcely make out the curving lines between them. He had shouted open and a hundred other plausible words at it, without result.

  Hoarse and discouraged, he had hewed and stabbed it with the shimmering discontinuity that was the blade of the azoth, scarring and fusing the plates until it was doubtful that even one who knew their secret could cause them to iris as they had for the talus. It had made an earsplitting racket, causing stones enough to drop from the walls and ceiling of the tunnel to have killed him ten times over, and at length it rendered the hilt of the azoth almost too hot to hold-all without opening the door or piercing even a single small hole in one plate.

  And now there was, Silk told himself, no alternative but to set off, weary and hungry and bruised though he was, down the tunnel in the faint hope of finding some other place of egress. Ready almost to rage against the Outsider and every other god from sheer frustration, he sat down on the naked rock of the floor and removed Crane's wrapping. Crane, Silk recalled with some bitterness, had instructed him to beat only smooth surfaces with it, instancing his hassock or a carpet. No doubt Crane's recommendation had been intended to preserve the wrapping's soft, leather-like surface from needless wear; the rough floor hardly qualified, and he owed something to Crane, not least because he intended to extort the money Blood demanded from Crane if he could, though Crane had befriended him more than once.

  Sighing, Silk took off his robe, folded it, laid it on the floor, and lashed the folded cloth until the wrapping felt hotter than the hilt of the azoth. When it was back in place, he climbed laboriously to his feet, put on his robe again (its warmth was welcome in the cool and ever-soughing air) and set out resolutely, choosing the direction that seemed most likely to bring him nearer Limna.

  He began with the idea of counting his steps, so as to know how far he had traveled underground; he counted silently at first, moving his lips and extending a finger from his clenched fist at each hundred. Soon lie found that he was counting aloud, comforted by the faint echo of his voice, and that he was no longer certain whether he had recloscd his fist once for five hundred steps or twice for a thousand.

  The tunnel, which had appeared so unchanging, altered in minor ways as he progressed, and these soon became of such interest that he forgot his count in his hurry to examine them. In places
the native freestone gave way to shiprock, graduated like a cubit stick by seams at intervals of twenty-three steps. Here and there the creeping sound-kindled lights failed entirely, so that he was forced to advance in the dark; and though he realized how foolish such fears were, he could not entirely dispel the thought that he might fall into a pit, or that another talus or something more fearsome still might await him in the dark. Twice he passed irising doors much like the one that had excluded him from the room beneath Scylla's shrine, both tightly closed; once the tunnel divided, and he followed the left at random; three times side tunnels, dark and somehow menacing, opened from the one he followed.

  And always it seemed to him that it descended ever so slightly, and that its air grew cooler and its walls damper.

  He prayed his beads as he walked, then tried to reconcile the distance covered during three recitals with his subsequent count of steps, eventually concluding that he had taken ten thousand, three hundred and seventy-or the equivalent of five complete recitals of his beads and an odd decade. To this, add the original five hundred (or possibly one thousand) making . . .

  By that time his ankle was acutely painful; he renewed the wrapping as before and hobbled off down the tunnel again, which oppressed him more with each halting stride.

  Frequently he was tormented by an almost uncontrollable urge to turn back. If he had allowed the azoth to cool and attacked the door again, it seemed to him almost certain that it would have given way easily; by now he would have been back in Limna. Auk had recommended eating places there; he tried to recall their names, and those of the ones he had passed while looking for the Juzgado.

  No, it. had been the driver of the wagon who had recommended eating places. One, he had said, was quite good but expensive; that had been the Rusty Lantern. He had no fewer than seven cards in his pocket, five from Orpine's rites, plus two of the three that Blood had surrendered to him on Phaesday. His dinner with Auk in an uphill eating house had cost Auk eighteen bits. It had seemed an extravagant sum then, but it was a small one compared to seven cards. A sumptuous dinner in Limna at one of the better inns, a comfortable bed, and a fine breakfast would leave him change from a single card. It seemed foolish not to turn back, when all these things were (or might so easily be made) so near. Half a dozen words that might open the door, all untried, occurred to him in quick succession: free, disengage, separate, loose, dissolve, and cleave.

  Far worse was the unfounded feeling that he had already turned back, that he was walking not north toward Limna but south again, that at any minute, around any slight curve or turning, he would catch sight of the dead talus.

  Of the talus he had killed; but the talus had, or so it seemed, sent him to the grave.'It was dead, he buried. Soon, he felt, he would encounter Orpine, old Patera Pike, and his mother, each in the appropriate state of decay. He and they would lie down together on the floor of the tunnel, perhaps, one place being as good as another here, and they would tell him the many things he would need to know among the dead, just as Patera Pike had instructed him (when he had arrived at Sun Street) concerning the shops and people of the quarter, the necessity of buying one's tunics and turnips from those few shopkeepers who attended sacrifice with some regularity, and the need to beware of certain notorious liars and swindlers. Once he heard a distant tittering, a lunatic laughter without humor or merriment or even humanity: the laughter of a devil devouring its own flesh in the dark.

  After what seemed half a day or more of weary, frightened walking, he reached a point at which the floor of the tunnel was covered with water for as far as he could see, the dim reflections of the bleared lights that crept along the ceiling showing plainly that the extent of the flood was by no means inconsiderable. Irresolute at the brink of that clear, still pool, he was forced to admit that it was even possible that the tunnel he had followed so long was, within the next league or two, entirely filled.

  He knelt and drank, discovering that he was very thirsty indeed. When he tried to stand, his right ankle protested so vehemently that he sat instead, no longer able to hide from himself how tired he was. He would rest here for an hour; he felt certain that it was dark on the surface. Patera Gulo would no doubt be wondering what had become of him, eager to begin spying in earnest. Maytera Marble might be wondering too; but Auk and Chenille would have gone back to the city some time ago, after having left word for him at the wagon stop.

  Silk took off his shoes and rubbed his feet (finding it a delightful exercise), and at last lay down. The rough floor of the tunnel ought certainly to have been uncomfortable, but somehow was not. He had been wise, clearly, to take this opportunity to nap on the seat of Blood's floater. He would be more alert, better able to grasp every advantage that their peculiar relationship conferred, thanks to this brief rest. "Can't float too fast," the driver told him, "not going this way!" But quite soon now, as the swift floater sailed over a landscape grown liquid, his mother would come to kiss him good-night; he liked to be awake for it, to say distinctly, "Good night to you, too, Mama," when she left.

  He resolved not to sleep until she came.

  Weaving and more than half-drunk, Chenilte emerged from the door of the Full Sail, caught sight of Auk, and waved. "You there! You, Bucko. Don' I know you?" When he smiled and waved in return, she crossed the street and caught his arm. "You've been to Orchid's place. Sure you have, lots, and I oughta know your name. It'll come to me in a minute. Listen, Buck, I'm not queering a lay for you, am I?"

  Auk had learned early in childhood to cooperate in such instances. "Dimber with me. Stand you a glass?" He jerked his thumb toward the Full Sail. "I bet there's a nice quiet corner in there?"

  "Oh, Bucko, would you?" Chenille leaned upon his arm, walking so close that her thigh brushed his. "Wha's your name? Mine's Chenille. I oughta know yours too, course I should, only I got this queer head an' we're at the lake, aren't we?" She blew her nose in her fingers. "All that water, I seen it down one of these streets, Bucko, only I ought to get back to Orchid's for dinner an' the big room after that, you know? She'll get Bass to winnow me out if I'm not lucky."

  Auk had been watching her eyes from the corner of his own; as they entered the Full Sail, he said, "That's the lily word, ain't it, Jugs? You don't remember."

  She nodded dolefully as she sat down, her fiery curls trembling. "An' I'm reedy, too-real reedy. You got a pinch for me?"

  Auk shook his head.

  "Just a pinch an' all night free?"

  "I'd give it to you if I had it," Auk told her, "but I don't."

  A frowning barmaid stopped beside their table. "Take her someplace else."

  "Red ribbon and water," Chenille told the barmaid, "and don't mix them."

  The barmaid shook her head emphatically. "I gave you more than I should've already."

  "An' I gave you all my money!"

  He laid a card on the table. "You start a tab for me, darling. My name's Auk."

  The barmaid's frown vanished. "Yes, sir."

  "And I'll have a beer, the best. Nothing for her."

  Chenille protested.

  "I said I'd buy you one in the street. We're not in the street." Auk waved the barmaid away.

  "That's your name!" Chenille was triumphant. "Auk. I told you I'd think of it."

  He leaned toward her. "Where's Patera?"

  She wiped her nose on her forearm.

  "Patera Silk. You come out here with him. What'd you do with him?"

  "Oh, I remember him. He was at Orchid's when-when Auk, I need a pinch bad. You've got money. Please?"

  "In a minute, maybe. I ain't got my beer. Now you pay attention to what I say. You sat in here awhile lapping up red ribbon, didn't you?"

  Chenille nodded. "I felt so-"

  "Up your flue." He caught her hand and squeezed hard enough to hurt. "Where were you before that?"

  She belched softly. "I'll tell you the truth, the whole thing. Only it isn't going to make any sense. If I tell you, will you buy me one?"

  His eyes narr
owed. "Talk fast. I'll decide after I hear it."

  The barmaid set a sweating glass of dark beer in front of him. "The best and the coldest. Anything else, sir?" He shook his head impatiently.

  "I got up shaggy late," Chenille began, " 'cause we'd had a big one last night, you know? Real big. Only you weren't there, Hackum. See, I remember you now. I wished you would have been."

  Auk tightened his grip on her hand again. "I know I wasn't. Get naked."

  "An' I had to dress up 'cause it was the funeral today an' Orchid wanted everybody to go. 'Sides, I'd told that long augur I would." She belched again. "Wha's his name, Hackum?"

  "Silk," Auk said.

  "Yeah, that's him. So I got out my good black dress, this one, see? An', you know, fixed up. There was a lot going together, only they'd already gone so I had to go by myself. Can't I have just one li'l sippy of that, Hackum? Please?"

  "All right."

  Auk pushed the sweating glass across the table to her, and she drank and wiped her mouth on her forearm. "You're not s'posed to mix them, are you? I better be careful."

  He took back the glass. "You went to Orpine's funeral. Go on from that."

  "That's right. Only I had a big pinch first, the last I had. Really sucked it up. I wish I had it back now."

  Auk drank.

  "Well, I got to the manteion, an' Orchid and everybody was already there an' they'd started, but I got a place an' sat down, an', an'-"

  "And what?" Auk demanded.

  "An' then I got up, but they were all gone. I was just looking at the Window, you know? But it was just a Window, and there wasn't anybody else in there hardly at all, only a couple old ladies, an' nobody or nothing anymore." She had started to cry, hot tears spilling down the broad flat cheeks. Auk pulled out a not-very-clean handkerchief and gave it to her. "Thanks." She wiped her eyes. "I was so scared, an' I still am. You think I'm scared of you, but it's just so nice to be with somebody an' have somebody to talk to. You don' know."

  Auk scratched his head.

  "An' I went outside, see? An' I wasn't in the city at all, not on Sun Street or any other place. I was way down here where we used to go when I was little, an' everybody gone. I found this place where they had awnings an' tables under them an' I had maybe three or four, and then this big black bird came, it kept hopping around and talking almost like a person till I threw this one little glass at it an' they made me get out."