they try to put it on top of one of these old tunnels, so there's a place to get rid of the ashes. There's a manteion in Limna, see? We're right under it. Up around the city, there's a lot more places like this, and a lot more gods.'
Silk swallowed. 'I see.'
'Remember those we chased off? They'll be back as soon as we're out of here. We'll hear them laughing and fighting over the good parts.'
Sand had halted some distance ahead. He called, 'Hurry it up, Corporal.'
Silk, who was already walking as fast as he could, tried to go faster still; Hammerstone murmured, 'Don't worry about that, he does it all day. That's how you get stripes.'
They had almost reached Sand before Silk realized that the shapeless gray bundle at Sand's feet was a human being. Sand pointed with his slug gun. 'Have a look, Patera. Maybe you knew him.'
Silk knelt beside the body and lifted one mangled hand, then tried to scrape the caked ash away from the place where a face should have been; there were only shreds of flesh and splinters of bone beneath it. 'It's gone!' he exclaimed.
'Gods can do that. They tear the whole thing off with one bite, the way I'd pull off my faceplate, or maybe you'd bite into a ... What do you call those things?'
Silk rose, rubbing his hands in a desperate effort to get them clean. 'I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.'
'The round red things from the trees. Apples, that's it. Aren't you going to bless him or something?' 'Bring him the Pardon of Pas, you mean. We can do that only before death is complete-before the last cells of the body die, technically. Did you kill him?'
Sand shook his head. 'I won't lie to you, Patera. If we'd seen him and yelled for him to halt, and he had run, we would've shot him. But we didn't. He had a lantern, it's over there someplace. And a needler. I've got that now. So he probably figured he'd be all right. But there must have been gods hanging around here like there always are. It's always pretty dark here, too, because ash gets on the lights. Maybe his lantern blew out, or maybe the gods got extra hungry and rushed him.'
Hammerstone grunted his assent. 'This isn't a good place for bios, Patera, like the sergeant said.'
'He should be buried at least,' Silk told them. 'I'll do it, if you'll let me.'
'If you were to bury him in these ashes, the gods would dig him up as soon as we were gone,' Sand said.
'You could carry him. I've heard that you soldiers are a great deal stronger than we are.'
'I could make you carry him, too,' Sand told Silk, 'but I'm not going to do that, either.' He turned and strode away.
Hammerstone followed him, calling over his shoulder, 'Get going, Patera. You can't help her now, and neither can we.'
Suddenly fearful of being left behind, Silk broke into a limping trot. 'Didn't you say it was a man?'
'The sergeant did, maybe. I went through her pockets, and she seemed like a woman in man's clothes.'
Half to himself, Silk said, 'There was someone in front of me on the Pilgrims' Way, only about half an hour ahead of me then. I stopped and slept awhile-I really can't say how long. She didn't, I suppose.'
Hammcrstonc threw back his head in a grin. 'My last nap was seventy-four years, they tell me. Back at Division, I could show you a couple hundred replacements that haven't ever been awake. Some of you bios, too.'
Recalling the words Mucor had spoken in his dream, Silk said, 'Please do. I'd like very much to see them, my son.' 'Get a move on, then. The major may want to lock you up. We'll see.'
Silk nodded, but stopped for a moment to look behind him. The nameless corpse was merely a shapeless bundle again, its identity-even its identity as the mortal remains of a human being-lost in the darkness that had rushed back even faster than the misshapen animals the soldiers called gods. Silk thought of Patera Pike's death, alone in the bedroom next to his own, an old man's peaceful death, a silent and uncontested cessation of breath. Even that had seemed terrible; how much worse, how unspeakably horrible, to die in this buried maze of darkness and decay, these wormholes in the whorl.
Chapter 9. IN DREAMS LIKE DEATH
'Patera Silk went this way?' Auk asked the night chough on his shoulder. 'Yes, yes!' Oreb fluttered urgently. 'From here! Go shrine!'
'Well, I'm not going,' Chenille told them.
An old woman who happened to be passing the first white stone that marked the Pilgrims' Way ventured timidly, 'Hardly anyone goes out there after dark, dear, and it will be dark soon.'
'Dark good,' Oreb announced with unshakable conviction. 'Day bad. Sleep.'
The old woman tittered.
'A friend of ours went out to the shrine earlier,' Auk explained. 'He hasn't come back.'
'Oh, my! Cenille asked, 'Is there something out there that eats people? This crazy bird says the shrine ate him.'
The old woman smiled, her face breaking into a thousand cheerful creases. 'Oh, no, dear. But you can fall. People do almost every year.'
'See?' Chenille shrilled. 'You can hike half to shaggy Hierax through those godforsaken rocks if you want to. I'm going back to Orchid's.'
Auk caught her wrist and twisted her arm until she fell to her knees.
Awed, Silk stared up at the banked racks of gray steel. Half, perhaps, were empty; the remainder held soldiers, each lying on his back with his arms at his sides, as if sleeping or dead.
'Back when this place was built, it was under the lake,' Corporal Hammerstone told Silk conversationally. 'No going straight down if somebody wanted to take it, see? And pretty tough to figure out exactly where it was. They'd have to come quite a ways through the tunnels, and there's places where twenty tinpots could stand off an army.'
Silk nodded absently, still mesmerized by the recumbent soldiers.
'You'd think the water'd leak inside here, but it didn't. There's lots of solid rock up there. We got four big pumps to send it back if it did, and three of them haven't ever run. I was pretty surprised to find out the lake had gone over the hill on us when I woke up, but it'd still be a dirty job to take this place. I wouldn't want to be one of them.'
'You slept here like this for seventy-five years?' Silk asked him.
'Seventy-four, the last time. All these been awake some time, like me. But if you want to keep going, I'll show you some that never was yet. Come on.'
Silk followed him. 'There must be thousands.'
'About seven thousand of us left now. The way he set it up, see, when we come here from the Short Sun, was for all the cities to be independent. Pas figured that if somebody had too much territory, he'd try to take over Mainframe, the superbrain that astrogates and runs the ship.'
Somewhat confused, Silk asked, 'Do you mean the whole whorl?'
'Yeah, right. The Whorl. So what he did, see-if you ask me, this was pretty smart-was to give every city a heavy infantry division, twelve thousand tinpots. For a big offensive you want armor and air and armored infantry and all that junk. But for defense, heavy infantry and lots of it. Bust the Whorl up into a couple of hundred cities, give each of them a division to defend it, and the whole thing ought to stay put, no matter what some crazy calde someplace tries to do. So far it's held for three hundred years, and like I said, we've still got over half our strength fit for duty.'
Silk was happy to be able to contribute some information of his own. 'Viron doesn't have a calde anymore.' 'Yeah, right.' Hammerstone sounded uneasy. 'I heard. It's kind of a shag-up, because standing orders say that's who we're supposed to get our orders from. The major says we got to obey the Ayuntamiento for now, but
