'We live in the hour of the great upheaval. There will be more things to occupy your time than just this threat.'
'That's hardly a comfort.'
'You didn't come here looking for comfort, Minstrel Boy.'
'I didn't? So what did I come in here for?'
Reave muttered under his breath. 'That's the first intelligent question you've come up with.'
The soothsayer ignored Reave. 'You came in here looking for understanding, and now you understand.'
'I do?'
'You will.'
Reave snorted contemptuously. 'This is double-talk.'
The Minstrel Boy was thinking. 'I have one more question.'
'Ask it.'
'How can it be that all these old gods are suddenly expected to materialize? I mean, we've already had brushes with the kali-rouge and now this Abraxas. And it all seems to be hooked in to the Presence. What's going on?'
Reave sighed. 'You're asking some freak who lives in a bath of saline solution to explain what's going on?'
Again he was ignored.
'These are the final days of man. It is natural that some should turn to the old gods and the ancient unseen forces.'
'The final days of man?'
'That's what I said.'
'These are the final days of man?'
'Do you doubt that?'
Before the Minstrel Boy could reply, the soothsayer's eyes started to swivel. He had clearly had his money's worth.
There would appear to be little doubt that in the period right before the Final Cataclysm, a noticable percentage of the human population sought refuge in archaic and, all too often, bloodily chaotic religions and attempted to invoke the dark, ancient gods of their savage ancestors. As with so much of this era's human history, the truth is lost in the destruction, and all that remains is speculation and debate. The most popular theory, although never thoroughly borne out by the surviving evidence, is that the flock to the gods was a simple, latter-day crowd madness, most probably a panic reaction to the situation being created by the metaphysicians. Another school of thought argues that, sensing the imminent Final Cataclysm, large numbers of human beings retreated into a snarling atavism. The ironic part of this debate is that by far the majority of the contemporary accounts suggest that these ancient deities were present entities somehow loosed on the Damaged World. Even Yeovil himself, normally the most rationally secular of observers, at one point in The Trouble with Titans appears to imply that the forces that would ultimately produce catastrophe gave material life to these arcane fantasy figments and made it possible for them to stalk reality as a prelude to the eventual and absolute terror. Even in these singularly confusing times this idea seems far too fanciful to be anything but the momentary aberration of a great mind.
CHAPTER NINE
Billy Oblivion waited in the lobby of the Leader Hotel. Billy hated to wait for anything. Patience was not among his virtues. The other two were well overdue, and for what had to be the seventy-third time, he was asking himself where the hell they were. A waitress approached. Billy eyed her balefully. The waitresses at the Leader Hotel were too goddamn clone-perfect. They had no blemishes. In fact, they looked practically sterile. A fantasy of her torrid degradation flashed in front of his inner eye, but he was too tense and anxious to pursue it. When he had first arrived in Krystaleit, he had felt considerably better than he had in a very long time. The waiting, however, was getting to him. Something was slipping back. There were scrabblings in his mind.
The waitress was standing over him. 'Can I get you something, sir?'
Billy stared up at the woman's outstanding breasts. There was something gravity-defying about the way they swelled against the stretch silk of her formal cheongsam. He imagined ripping away the material, but then he sighed and nodded. 'You can get me the same again.'
Reave and the Minstrel Boy had been gone for more than twelve hours and were probably lying drunk in some whorehouse down in the Bluecat. Their absence was creating a problem. Renatta had vanished, and if they did not put in an appearance soon, he would have to deal with her disappearance on his own. He was not sure that he was in any shape to be going out solo to look for the woman. Waiting in the lobby was enough of a strain. He was starting to twitch at shadows. On the other side of the lobby, right by the gilt check-in desk, a gray middle-aged man and an attractive young woman seemed to be staring in his direction. He startedto curl down into his chair. His memory had deteriorated so badly over the last couple of years that he could no longer trust himself to recognize faces before they recognized him.
The serious damage to Billy's nervous system, as opposed to the routine recreational damage, had started back in that room in the Pale Rooster, back there in Stowellberg when Haun Geep and the Griddling brothers had caught up with him. They had tied him down on the bed and shot lyrnphane straight in through his eye sockets. The convulsions had lasted for fifty-four hours, and after that he had never again been able to perceive the color green. Grass was now a wholly new color that did not have a name and, as far as he could tell, was known only to him. The times he had wandered in the nothings with no guidance, no sense of time, and loaded to the gills on cyclatrol had compounded the mess inside his head, and the varying levels of spiritual stress that had been inflicted on him during his sojourn at the Sanctuary had set the ruins of his mind into bizarre and disturbing patterns. It could only be a matter of time before the other two realized just how bad his condition really was. And where the hell were they, anyway?
To his relief, he spotted two figures stumbling through the main revolving doors. He quickly stood up and went to meet them.
'We have a problem,' he announced,
Reave and the Minstrel Boy were leaning on each other for support. They stared at him, blank and drunk.
'We do? Tha's terrible.'
Reave began vehemently shaking his head. 'We don't have no problems. We drunk, which is exactly how we wants to be.'
Billy noticed that the Minstrel Boy had a brand-new knife belt strapped across his hips. One of the knives was already missing. A hotel houseman in gold and white livery was drifting in their direction, and some of the other guests were giving the three of them nervous looks. With Reave as drunk as he was, with pistols jutting aggressively from his belt, the situation had the potential for an explosion. Billy decided to give it to them straight.
'Renatta's gone.'
Reave and the Minstrel Boy looked at him with blank alcoholic eyes. They did not seem in the least concerned.
'So?'
'So she went out three hours ago and hasn't come back.'
'So she's gone. So what?'
The Minstrel Boy nodded solemnly. 'She's had all three of us, and now she's moved on. Shit happens. She's
