'I can understand how you could be a bio with prosthetic parts; our Maytera Rose is like that.' Silk discovered that his own hands were trembling and pushed them into his pockets. 'Not how you could be in another part of this boat.'
'In the same way that a glass conveys to you the image of a room at, the opposite end of the city. In the same way that your Sacred Window showed you the tricked-out image of a woman dead three hundred years and convinced you that you had spoken with a minor goddess.' Lemur chuckled. 'But I've wasted too much time already, while Doctor Crane's patient lies dying. I trust he'll forgive me, I was enjoying myself.' The luminous hand held up Hyacinth's needler. 'Here's Doctor Crane's fee, as specified by him. Doctor, I wish you to look at a patient. To earn this fee, you need only examine him and tell him the truth. Is it a violation of medical ethics to tell a patient the truth?'
'No.'
'There have been times when I've thought that it must be. This fourth prisoner of mine's a spy, too. Will you do it? He's badly injured.'
'After which you'll kill Silk and me.' Crane snorted. 'All right, I've lived as a quacksalver. Since I've got to die, I'll die as one, too.'
'Both of you will live,' Lemur told him, 'because you will both become admirably cooperative. I could have you so now, if I wished, but for the present you serve me better as opponents. I will not say foes. You see, I have told this fourth prisoner that the doctor who will examine him and the augur who will shrive him are no friends of mine. That they have, in fact, seen fit to intrigue against the government I direct.'
The luminosity of Lemur's hand and arm brightened, and Hyacinth's engraved, gold-plated, little needler slithered like a living animal into his open palm. 'Your Cognizance? Here you are.' He handed the needler to Silk. 'Will you, as an anointed augur, administer the Pardon of Pas to Doctor Crane's patient, if Crane judges him in imminent danger of death?'
'Of course,' Silk said.
'Then let's go. I know you'll find this interesting.' Lemur threw open the door. Blinking and wiping their eyes, they followed him along a narrow corridor floored with steel grating, and down a flight of steel stairs almost as steep as a ladder.
'I'm taking you all the way down to the keel,' Lemur lold them. 'I hope you weren't expecting this boat to rock, by the way. We've put out-I gave the order while we were playing with that azoth-and we're cruising beneath the surface now, where there's no wave action.'
He led them to a heavy door set into the floor, spun two handwheels,'and threw it back. 'Down here. I'm about to show you the hole in our bottom.'
Silk went first. The vibration that had shaken the boat since Lemur had threatened him with the azoth was stronger liere, almost an audible sound; there was a cool freshness to the air, and the iron railing of the steps he descended felt damp beneath his hand. Green lights that seemed imitations of the ancient lights provided the first settlers by Pas, and an indefinable odor that might have been no more than the absence of any other, made him feel for the first time that he was actually beneath the waters of Lake Limna.
The flier's broken wings were the first things he saw. They had been laid out, with scraps of the nearly invisible fabric that had covered them, on the transparent canopy of a sizable yawl-shattered spars of a material that might have been polished bone, less thick than his forefinger.
'Wait there a moment, Your Cognizance,' Lemur called. 'I want to show you these. You and Doctor Crane both. It will be well worth your while.'
'You got one after all,' Crane said. 'You've brought down a flier.'
There was a note of defeat in his voice that made Silk turn to stare back at him.
'They'd all gone,' Crane explained. 'Blood and his thugs and most of the male servants. I thought this might be it, but I lioped .. .' He left the sentence incomplete and shrugged.
Lemur had picked up an oddly curved, almost tear-drop-shaped grid of the cream-colored material. 'We have, Doctor. And this is the secret. Simple, yet infinitely precious. Don't you want to examine it? Wouldn't you like to provide your masters with the secret of flight? The key that opens the sky? This is its shape. Pick it up if you wish. See how light it is. Run your fingers over it, Doctor.'
Crane shook his head.
'Then you, Your Cognizance. When your followers have installed you as calde, it could prove a most useful thing to know.'
'I'll never be calde,' Silk told him, 'and I have never wished to be.' He accepted the almost weightless grid, and stared at its fluid lines. 'This is what lets a flier fly? This shape?'
Lemur nodded. 'With the material from which it's made. Tarsier's analyzing that. When you broke into Blood's villa Phaesday night-I know all about that, you see. When you broke in, didn't you wonder why Crane's city had sent him to watch Blood?'
'I didn't realize he was a spy then,' Silk explained. He put down the grid and fingered the swelling that Potto's fist had left on the side of his head. He felt weak and a little dizzy.
'To keep his masters appraised of Blood's progress with the eagle,' Lemur told him. 'More than twenty-five years ago, I realized the possibilities of flight. I saw that if our troopers could fly as fliers did, enemy troop movements would be revealed at once, that picked bodies of men could land behind an enemy's lines to disrupt communications, and all the rest of it. As soon as I was free to act, I backed various experimenters whose work appeared promising. None developed a device capable of carrying a child, much less a trooper.'
Recalling Hammerstone, Silk asked, 'Why not a soldier?'
Crane grunted. 'They're too heavy. Lemur there weighs four times as much as you and me together.'
'Ah!' Lemur turned to Crane. 'You've looked into the matter, I see.'.
Crane nodded. 'Fliers are actually a bit smaller than most troopers. I'm small, as everybody keeps reminding me. But I'm bigger than most fliers.'
'You sound as though you've seen some close up.'
'Through a telescope,' Crane said. 'Want to object that I had nothing to compare them to?'
'To oblige you, yes.'
'I didn't need anything. A small man isn't proportioned like a big one, and as a small physician I'm very much aware of that. A small man's head is bigger'in proportion to his shoulders, for instance.'
Silk fidgeted. 'If someone may be dying ...'
'That someone could be you, Your Cognizance.' Lemur laid a heavy hand upon Silk's shoulder. 'Purely as an hypothesis, let's say that I plan to pull your head off as soon as you've conveyed the Pardon of Pas to this unfortunate. If that were the case, shortening our discussion would materially shorten your life.'
'As a citizen I'm entitled to a public trial, and to an advocate. As an augur-'
The pressure of Lemur's fingers increased. 'It's too bad you're not an advocate yourself, Your Cognizance. If you were you'd realize that there's a further, unwritten provision. It is that the urgent needs ofViron must be served. As we speak a mendacious and malcontented radical faction is attempting to overthrow our lawfully constituted Ayuntamiento and substitute for it the rule of one inexperienced-but deep, and I admit that freely- augur, stirring up the populace by alleging a lot of superstitious taradiddle about enlightenment and the supposed favor of the gods. Am I crushing your shoulder?' 'It is certainly very painful.'
'It can easily become more so. Did you really speak to a goddess in a house of ill repute? Say no, or I'll crush it.'
'A goddess in the sense that the god who enlightened me is a god? Doctor Crane insists that there is no such being. Whether he's right or not, I'm inclined to doubt that there are any more such gods.'
Lemur tightened his grip, so that Silk would have fallen to his knees if he could. 'I want to tell you in some detail, Your Cognizance, how I hit upon the notion of using a bird of prey to bring down a flier for our examination. How I saw a hawk take a merganser at twilight and conceived the idea. How I combed Viron, with the utmost secrecy, for the right man to carry it out. And how I found him.'
Silk moaned, and Crane said, 'And so on and so forth. Let him go, and I'll tell you how we learned of it.'
'Let him go!' It was Mamelta, dashing out of the dimness and throwing herself on Silk. 'You damned robot! You THING!' She was naked save for a blood-smeared rag knotted about her waist, her full breasts and rounded thighs trembling, her bare skin the color of old ivory.
