She came slowly but without reluctance. Her body had none of the tension that was her usual armor.
Now Jolle’s voice was low, barely audible. His black hair mixed with Tatja’s red. “First first: information?”
“Hmm.” Tatja seemed half asleep, but after a moment of thought her voice came muffled against Jolle’s chest. “Something like the log inverse probability of the signal.”
“Okay. What about noisy, ah, channels? It’s possible to reduce the error rate to arbitrarily low levels with clever coding. True?”
A long silence. She appeared more interested in his neck than the question. Finally her voice came, so low pitched it hardly seemed her own. She was obviously thinking of more important things. “Yes, though it’s more complicated than that. I never thought about that before…”
Svir came near groaning aloud. The conversation had passed beyond intelligibility just when he thought he might be able to follow it. He looked at the door that had opened so conveniently for him. Perhaps there was some clue as to why it had done so. There was. The door could be locked from the inside by a heavy wooden bar. In a way this was ridiculous, since anyone with a sharp knife could have cut through the silk screen. On the other hand, when the tent was not set up, there was probably a wooden panel fitted over the screen. One end of the bar was enclosed in a metallic collar—an expensive and wasteful ornament. Touching this collar was an (iron?) bar. Around the bar were wound several hundred turns of yellow wire sheathed in transparent resin. There was a fortune in metals here—to what purpose? The wires led away from the bar to a large wooden chest. If he were going to search the wagon, this was the place to start.
He glanced back through the silk screen. The high-powered conversation was over. He couldn’t see Tatja at all, but now her blouse was draped over the back of the couch. He looked away from the screen, blushing. Being a snoop in a good cause didn’t hurt his conscience, but voyeurism was out of his league. No wonder Tatja was so dense when it came to discussing the possibility that Jolle was a bastard. When a goddess is in love, she’s just as irrational as anyone else.
Svir turned and followed the yellow wires to the chest. It was an expensive Sdan piece. He felt the ghoulish hardwood faces, hunting for the tongue-catch the Sdan carpenters worked into their designs. There was a faint buzzing near the box, but he couldn’t see the bug that made the noise. His searching fingers found the catch and the lid came up with silent, counterbalanced precision.
A blue glow radiated from that opening. For an instant he was frozen by the flickering, actinic gleam. He leaned forward. His first impression was that the box was filled with treasure: glowing jewels. The colors and intensities were constantly changing, so it was hard to know the exact size and shape of the gems. Silver boxes were set along the inside walls. The shifting reflections made them seem almost transparent. After a moment, he noticed that the copper wires from the wagon door were connected to one of those little boxes. He looked deep into the pile of “jewels.” Though they were motionless, the changing colors made the pile shimmer like foam on an island shore.
The buzzing sound was louder now. An alarm! The buzz reached a crescendo and became a screeching, inhuman wail. “Master! Help me! I will be stolen!” From the tent, he heard Tatja’s surprised exclamation and the sounds of rapid movement. Svir scrambled to the other end of the wagon. From the inside it was easy to flip the crossbar up and push the door open. As he plunged into the blinding daylight, he heard Jolle enter the wagon.
By luck Svir landed on his feet. As he fell forward, he dug long legs into the ground and sprinted away. Ancho clung to his shoulder and radiated for all he was worth. The nearest guards were more than forty feet away. They knew something strange was happening, but Ancho’s efforts kept them from taking effective action. Even so, a couple of crossbow bolts zipped by him as he fled into the forest. He could hear no pursuers. Apparently Jolle was still in the wagon, inspecting his—slave?
Soon he was deep in the grove, the looproots an arched hallway before him. Only dim and shifting pencils of light penetrated the branches and leaf needles above. The ground was covered with a deep, resilient layer of white fungus. The shouting behind him had faded. He was still in the bivouac area—that was more than two thousand feet across—and could see occasional tents and wagons. Ancho protected him from the sentries. It took him fifteen minutes to circle back to his own sleeping area.
Now he moved cautiously. If Jolle had identified him, there would be a welcoming committee here. He stayed in the forest shadows and looked out at the sun-dappled cots. Cor was lying on her cot—next to someone else! He did a double take, and examined the figure beside her. It didn’t move. In fact, its face was a brown piece of cloth.
Good girl! When she discovered that Tatja was going with Jolle to his tent, she had done the only thing possible—return to their sleeping area and construct an alibi. He moved quickly out of the shadows, pulled the netting aside, and lay down beside his wife. She jerked with surprise. Her hands were clenched white, and there were tears on her cheeks. Together they disassembled the crude dummy, and Svir told her what he had seen, what had happened.
I hey lay in each other’s arms, and whispered their fears. “He’ll kill us, Svir. We’ve got to talk to Tatja.”
They needed protection, but, “We can’t talk to her yet. She’s probably still with Jolle. And—she’s not herself. She’s worse than this morning. We’ll have to wait until we can get her alone.”
“I can convince her; I know I can.”
“Look, I don’t think Jolle saw me. We’ll be safe as long as we play innocent.” Ancho wormed his way between them, and Svir petted him. There was really nothing more to say.
Twenty
“—and you can be sure we understand all this, Observer Reynolt. I have no desire to hold your hands under my direct control.” The Tatja that spoke was the Tatja of old: composed, persuasive, tactful. She had made no attempt to use her ostensible position as the absolute ruler of all the Continent to overawe the Doomsdayman confronting her.
And every bit of her diplomacy would be required to mollify the angry Doomsday priest. In the starlit darkness, his triplepointed mitre made him look more a seven-foot obelisk than a human being. He spoke with the sarcastic servility of a subordinate who thinks he has the upper hand. “Your Majesty must know that we Doo’d’en would never ascribe such motives to Your Sacred Person. But in our ignorance, we beg to know why you destroyed parts of the Riverside Road, why you razed Kotta-svo-Picchiu, why you destroyed the sacred eye there, and why you now set an army on the farmlands beneath our capital.”
Tatja was a vague shadow by the low field table, but her voice was clear and distinct. “Observer, for all four incursions we tender our apologies, and for the first three we offer reparations. However, when you understand the situation, I believe you will thank us. You reprove us for acts of war, committed to protect your most holy places from the Rebel army, which even now masses below us. Do you realize what will happen if the Rebels are not defeated? They are the ones who first invaded your territories. They are the ones who desecrated the Kotta Eye before it was destroyed. Though I cannot present proof now, the Rebels’ ultimate goal is the destruction of the High Eye itself.”
The priest had no immediate answer to this. He turned to the window-hole of the stone farmhouse that was Tatja’s command post. From outside came the creak and crunch of Doo’d’en wagons carrying bombs and men to their positions, but there was very little for Observer Reynolt to see. Somewhere above them was O’rmouth, capital of Doomsday, and thousands of feet above that, the observatory itself. Two thousand feet below the farmhouse was the Picchiu River, and the mouth of the glacier that fed it. And somewhere down there were twenty-three thousand Loyalists and an unknown number of Rebels.
The crown’s generals stood uneasily behind their queen. Cor heard Haarm Wechsler whispering indignantly
