'What is it, my son?'
'Hurry up, will you!'
He broke into a trot, though not without protest from his ankle.
When he had feared a shot at any moment, this lowest slope of the
Palatine had been very steep; now he was scarcely conscious of its grade.
'Here. Grab my hand.'
The Guard's redoubt was only half the height of the rebel
barricade, although it was (as Silk saw when he had scrambled to the
top) rather thicker. Its front was nearly sheer, its back stepped for
the troopers who would fire over it.
The one who had helped him up said, 'Come on. I don't know
how long he'll last.'
Silk nodded, out of breath from his climb and afraid he had torn
the stitches in his lung. 'Take me to him.'
The trooper jumped from the sandbag step; Silk followed more
circumspectly. There were sleepers here as well, a score of armored
Guardsmen lying in the street wrapped in blankets that were
probably green but looked black in the skylight.
'They going to rush us, over there?' the trooper asked.
'No. Not tonight, I'd say--tomorrow morning, perhaps.'
The trooper grunted. 'Slugs'll go right through a lot of that stuff in
their fieldwork. I been lookin' it over, and there's a lot of furniture
in there. Boards no thicker than your thumb in junk like that. I'm
Sergeant Eft.'
They shook hands, and Silk said, 'I was thinking the same thing as
I climbed over it, Sergeant. There are heavier things as well,
though, and even the chairs and so forth must obstruct your view.'
Eft snorted. 'They got nothin' I want to see.'
That could not be said of the Guard, as Silk realized as soon as he
looked past the floater. A talus had been posted at an intersection a
hundred paces uphill, its great, tusked head (so like that of the one
he had killed beneath Scylla's shrine that he could have believed
them brothers) swiveling to peer down each street in turn. Liana
would have been interested in it, he thought, if she did not know
about it already.
'In here.' Eft opened the door of one of the dark shops; his voice
and the thump of the door brightened lights inside, where troopers
stripped of parts of their armor and more or less bandaged lay on
blankets on a terrazzo floor. One moaned, awakened by the noise
or the lights; two, it seemed, were not breathing. Silk knelt by the
nearest, feeling for a pulse.
'Not him. Over here.'
'All of them,' Silk said. 'I'm going to bring the Pardon of Pas to all of
them, and I won't do it en masse. There's no justification for that.'
'Most's already had it. He has.'
Silk looked up at the sergeant, but there was no judging his
truthfulness from his hard, ill-favored face. Silk rose. 'This man's
dead, I believe.'
'All right, we'll get him out of here. Come over here. He's not.'
Eft was standing beside the man who had moaned.
Silk knelt again. The injured man's skin was cold to his touch.
'You're not keeping him warm enough, Sergeant.'
'You a doctor, too?'
'No, but I know something about caring for the sick. An augur must.'
'No hurt.' Oreb hopped from Silk's shoulder to the injured man's
chest. 'No blood.'
'Leave him alone, you silly bird.'
'No hurt!' Oreb whistled. 'No blood!'
A bald man no taller than Liana stepped from behind one of the
empty showcases. Although he held a slug gun, he was not in armor
or even in uniform. 'He--he isn't, Patera. Isn't wounded. At least
he doesn't--I couldn't find a thing. I think it must be his heart.'
'Get a blanket,' Silk told Eft. 'Two blankets. Now!'
'I don't take orders from any shaggy butcher.'
'Then his death will be on your head, Sergeant.' Silk took his
beads from his pocket. 'Bring two blankets. Three wouldn't be too
many. The men watching the rebels can spare theirs, surely. Three
blankets and clean water.'
He bent over the injured man, his prayer beads dangling in the
approved fashion from his right hand. 'In the names of all the gods
you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for
Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Molpe...'
The names rolled from his tongue, each with its sonorous
honorific, names empty or freighted with horror. Pas, whose Plan
the Outsider had endorsed, was dead; Echidna a monster. The
ghost that haunted Silk's mind now, as he spoke and swung his
beads, was not Doctor Crane's but that of the handsome, brutal
chem who had believed himself Councillor Lemur.
'The monarch wanted a son to succeed him,' the false Lemur had
said. 'Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself but female.
Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many
others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state
religion of her own whorl. His queen bore the monarch another
child, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician,
but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe.
The third was male, but no better than the first two because he was
born blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending
yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The
truth is that he cannot see by daylight. Echidna conceived again,
and bore another male, a healthy boy who inherited his father's
virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of
mania. We call him Hierax now--'
And this boy over whom he bent and traced sign after sign of
addition was nearly dead. Possibly--just possibly--he might derive
comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had
worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone's; but the
worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some
scales somewhere, surely. It had to, or else the Whorl was mad.
'The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for
