“By whom is this said?”
“Why, by Yando himself.”
A portly man with a patchy beard whispered in his ear and Ido said, “To clarify. Yando often appears as a man of burning silver and in this guise he does not speak. But of late he sends his avatar, who confides in us Yando’s truth.”
Derwe Coreme, who had relaxed from her defensive posture, laughed derisively and started to speak, but Thiago intervened.
“Lately, you say? Did the appearance of the avatar predate Sylgarmo’s Proclamation?”
“On the contrary,” said Ido. “It was not long after the Proclamation that Yando sent him to instruct us so we might be saved by the instrumentality of his disciple, Pandelume.”
Thiago gave the matter a turn or two. “This avatar…does he bear some resemblance to me? Does, for instance, his hair come down in a peak over his forehead? Like so?”
Ido examined Thiago’s hair. “There is a passing similarity, but the avatar’s hair is black and of a supreme gloss.”
Derwe Coreme hissed a curse. Thiago laid a hand on her arm. “What form did the avatar’s instruction take?”
All the men whispered together and after they had done, Ido said, “Am I to understand that you wish to undergo purification?”
Thiago hesitated, and Derwe Coreme sprang forward, putting her knife to Ido’s throat.
“We wish access to the tower,” she said.
“Sacrilege!” cried the portly man. “The Red Hat is assaulted! Alert the village!”
Two men ran back toward the village, giving shouts of alarm. Derwe Coreme pressed on the blade and blood trickled from its edge.
“Grant us immediate access,” she said. “Or die.”
Ido closed his eyes. “Only through purification can one gain entrance to the tower and the salvation that lies beyond.”
Derwe Coreme might have sliced him open then and there, but Thiago caught her wrist and squeezed, forcing her to relinquish the knife. Ido stumbled away, rubbing his neck.
Thiago sought to pacify Ido and the portly man, but they refused to listen to his entreaties — they huddled together, lips moving silently, offering ornate gestures of unknown significance to the heavens. At length, giving up on reason, he asked Derwe Coreme, “Can you persuade them to instruct us in the rite of purification?” She had retrieved her knife and was testing the edge with her thumb, contemplating him with a brooding stare.
“Well,” he said. “Can you do so? Preferably without a fatality? I would consider it a personal favor if we could avoid a pitched battle with the villagers.”
She walked over to Ido and held up the blade stained with his blood to his eyes. He loosed a pitiable wail and clutched the portly man more tightly.
“Without interference, I can work wonders,” she said.
At darkest dusk, Derwe Coreme and Thiago stood alone and shivering in the boulder-strewn field beneath the tower. They wore a twin harness of wood and withe that culminated in a great loop above their heads — this, Ido explained, would allow Yando’s winged servant to lift them on high and bring them to salvation. Except for a kind of diaper, designed so as to prevent the harness from cutting into their skin, they were naked and their bodies were festooned with painted symbols, the purpose of which had also been explained in excruciating detail.
Though no more risible than the tenets of other religions, the rites and doctrines of Yando as dictated by the avatar revealed the workings of a dry, sardonic wit. Thiago had no doubt they were his cousin’s creation.
“Consider the green blotch currently being applied,” Ido had said. “By no means is its placement arbitrary. When Yando was summoned from the Uncreate to protect us, he woke to discover that he had inadvertently crushed a litter of copiropith whelps beneath his left thigh. The blotch replicates the stain left by those gentle creatures.”[3]
A last blush of purple faded from the sky. Thiago could barely make out Derwe Coreme beside him, hugging herself against the chill. He cleared his throat and launched into a hymn of praise to Yando, stopping when he noticed that Derwe Coreme remained silent.
“Come,” he said. “We must sing.”
“No, I will not,” she said sullenly.
“The winged servant may not appear.”
“If by ‘winged servant’ you refer to the pelgrane, hunger will bring her to us. I refuse to play the fool for Cugel.”
“In the first place, that the pelgrane and the winged servant are one is merely my hypothesis. Granted, it seems the most likely possibility, but the winged servant may prove to be another agency, one with a discriminating ear. Secondly, if the pelgrane is the winged servant and notices that we are less than enthusiastic in our obedience to ritual, this may arouse its suspicions and cause it to deviate from its routine. I feel such a deviation would not be in our best interests.”
Derwe Coreme was silent.
“Do you agree?” Thiago asked.
“I agree,” she said grudgingly.
“Very well. On the count of three, may I suggest you join me in rendering with brio, ‘At Yando’s Whim, So We Ascend In Gladness’.”
They had just begun the second chorus when the oily reek of a pelgrane filled Thiago’s nostrils. Great wings buffeted the air and they were dragged aloft. The harness swayed like a drunken bell, making it difficult to sustain the vocal, yet they persevered even when the pelgrane spoke.
“Ah, my lunchkins!” it said merrily. “Soon one of you will rest in my belly. But who, who, who shall it be?”
Thiago sang with greater fervor. The pelgrane’s egg sac, a vague white shape, depended from its globular abdomen. He pointed this out to Derwe Coreme and she reached into her diaper. He shook his head violently and added urgency to his delivery of the words “not yet” in the line, “…though not yet do we glimpse the heights…” Scowling, she withdrew her hand.
A pale nimbus of light bulged from the sloping summit of the tower. As they were about to land, Derwe Coreme unhitched herself from the harness. She clung to the loop by one hand, slashed open the sac with the knife that had been hidden in herd diaper, and spilled the eggs into the dark below, drawing an agonized shriek from the pelgrane. Thiago also unhitched. The moment his feet touched stone, he made a leap, grabbed a wing strut and sawed at it with one of Derwe Coreme’s knives. With a wing nearly severed from its body, the pelgrane lost its balance, toppled onto its side and slid toward the abyss, gnashing its tusks and tossing its great stag-beetle head in pain. It hung at the edge, frantically beating its good wing and clawing at the stone.
Breathing heavily, Thiago sat down amongst the bones that littered the summit and watched it struggle. “Why only one of us?” he asked.
The pelgrane continued to struggle.
“You are doomed,” Thiago said. “Your arms will not long support your weight and you will fall. Why not answer my question? You said that soon one of us would be in your belly. Why just one?”
The pelgrane achieved an uneasy equilibrium, a claw hooked on an imperfection in the stone. “He only wanted the women. The men provided me with sustenance.”
“By ‘he’, do you mean Cugel?”
Drool fettered the pelgrane’s tusks. “My time was near and it was onerous for me to hunt. I struck a bargain with the devil!”
“Was it Cugel? Tell me!”
The pelgrane glared at him, loosed its hold on the edge and slipped away into the darkness without a sound.
At the apex of the summit, pale light that emanated from no apparent source spilled from a shaft enclosing a spiral staircase. With her prey close at hand, Derwe Coreme lost all regard for modesty. She ripped off the diaper and, a knife in each hand, began her descent. Thiago’s diaper caught on the railing and he, too, rid himself of the
