'Figure you might walk some?'
'It's all right, I'll carry him,' Bustard declared, and by the timbre
of his harsh baritone revealed Hammerstone the soldier. 'Patera
said I could.'
'I don't want to get it on your clothes,' Auk said, and Hammerstone
laughed, his big metal body shaking hardly at all, the slug gun
slung behind his shoulder rattling just a little against his metal back.
'Where's Jugs?'
'Up there. Up ahead with Patera.'
Auk raised his head and tried to see, but saw only a flash of fire, a
thread of red fire through the green distance, and the flare of the
exploding rocket.
The white bull fell, scarlet arterial blood spilling from its immaculate
neck to spatter its gilded hooves. Now, Silk thought, watching
the garlands of hothouse orchids slide from the gold leaf that
covered its horns.
He knelt beside its fallen head. Now if at all.
She came with the thought. The point of his knife had begun the
first cut around the bull's right eye when his own glimpsed the Holy
Hues in the Sacred Window: vivid tawny yellow iridescent with
scales, now azure, now dove gray, now rose and red and thunderous
black. And words, words that at first he could not quite distinguish,
words in a voice that might almost have been a crone's, had it been
less resonant, less vibrant, less young.
'Hear me. You who are pure.'
He had assumed that if any god favored them it would be Kypris.
This goddess's unfamiliar features overfilled the Window, her
burning eyes just below its top, her meager lower lip disappearing
into its base when she spoke.
'Whose city is this, augur?' There was a rustle as all who heard her
knelt.
Already on his knees beside the bull, Silk contrived to bow. 'Your
eldest daughter's, Great Queen.' The serpents around her face--thicker
than a man's wrist but scarcely larger than hairs in proportion
to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and pallid, hollow cheeks--identified
her at once. 'Viron is Scalding Scylla's city.'
'Remember, all of you. You most of all, Prolocutor.'
Silk was so startled that he nearly turned his head. Was it possible
that the Prolocutor was in fact here, somewhere in this crowd of
thousands?
'I have watched you,' Echidna said. 'I have listened.'
Even the few remaining animals were silent.
'This city must remain my daughter's. Such was the will of her
father. I speak everywhere for him. Such is my will. Your remaining
sacrifices must be for her. For no one else. Disobedience invites
destruction.'
Silk bowed again. 'It shall be as you have said, Great Queen.'
Momentarily he felt that he was not so much honoring a deity as
surrendering to the threat of force; but there was no time to analyze
the feeling.
'There is one here fit to lead. She shall be your leader. Let her
step forth.'
Echidna's eyes, hard and black as opals, had fastened on Maytera
Mint. She rose and walked with small, almost mincing steps toward
the awful presence in the Window, her head bowed. When she
stood beside Silk, that head was scarcely higher than his own,
though he was on his knees.
'You long for a sword.'
If Maytera Mint nodded, her nod was too slight to be seen.
'You are a sword. Mine. Scylla's. You are the sword of the Eight
Great Gods.'
Of the thousands present, it was doubtful if five hundred had
been able to hear most of what Maytera Marble, or Patera Gulo, or
Silk himself had said; but everyone--from men so near the canted
altar that their trouser legs were speckled with blood, to children
held up by mothers themselves scarcely taller than children--could
hear the goddess, could hear the peal of her voice and to a limited
degree understand her, Great Echidna, the Queen of the Gods, the
highest and most proximal representative of Twice-Headed Pas. As
she spoke they stirred like a wheatfield that feels the coming storm.
'The allegiance of this city must be restored. Those who have
suborned it must be cast out. This ruling council. Kill them. Restore
my daughter's Charter. The strongest place in the city. The prison
you call the Alambrera. Pull it down.'
Maytera Mint knelt, and again the silver trumpet sounded. 'I will,
Great Queen!' Silk could hardly believe that it had emanated from
the small, shy sibyl he had known.
At her reply the theophany was complete. The white bull lay dead
beside him, one ear touching his hand; the Window was empty
again, though Sun Street was still filled with kneeling worshippers,
their faces blank or dazed or ecstatic. Far away--so distant that he,
standing, could not see her--a woman screamed in an agony of rapture.
He raised his hands as he had when he had stood upon the
floater's deck. 'People of Viron!'
Half, perhaps, showed some sign of having heard.
'We have been honored by the Queen of the Whorl! Echidna
herself--'
The words he had planned died in his throat as a searing
incandescence smashed down upon the city like a ruinous wall. His
shadow, blurred and diffused as shadows had always been under the
beneficent radiance of the long sun, solidified to a pitch-black
silhouette as sharp as one cut from paper.
He blinked and staggered beneath the weight of the white-hot
glare; and when he opened his eyes again, it was no more. The dying
fig (whose upper branches could be seen above the garden wall) was
on fire, its dry leaves snapping and crackling and sending up a
column of sooty smoke.
A gust fanned the flames, twisting and dissolving their smoke
