'You want it, Auk?'
'I got no place to put it,' Auk told him; and Chenille, edging
nearer, saw that he had his hanger in his right hand and a slug gun in
his left. The blade of the hanger was dark with blood. 'Show her
Patera first,' he said.
On legs as thin as sticks, the shadowy figures parted; a pencil of
light settled on a dark bundle that stared up at her with Incus's
agonized eyes. A rag covered his mouth.
'Looks cute, don't he?' Auk chuckled.
She ventured, 'He really is an augur...'
'He shot a couple of 'em with my needler, Jugs. It got 'em mad,
and they jumped him. We'll cut him loose in a minute, maybe.
Urus, show her the soldier.'
Hammerstone was bound as well, though no rag had been tied
over his mouth; she wondered whether it would work on a chem
anyway, and decided that it might not. 'I'm sorry, Stony,' she said.
'I'll get you out of this. Patera, too.'
'They were going to stab him in the throat,' Hammerstone told
her. 'They'd grabbed him from behind.' He spoke slowly and
without rancor, but there was a whorl of self-loathing in his voice, 'I
got careless.'
'Those ropes are made out of that muscle in the back of your leg,'
Auk told her conversationally. 'That's what they got him tied up
with. They're pretty strong, I guess.'
Neither she nor Hammerstone replied.
'Only I don't think they'd hold him. Not if he really tried. It'd
take chains. Big ones, if you ask me.'
'Hackum, maybe I shouldn't say this--'
'Go ahead.'
'What if they jump you and me like they did Patera?'
'I was going to tell you why Hammerstone here don't break loose.
Maybe I ought to do that first.'
'Because you've got his slug gun?'
'Uh-huh. Only they had it then, see? They got hold of Incus, and
they made Hammerstone give it to 'em. It takes a lot to kill a
soldier, but a slug gun'll do it. So'll that launcher you got.'
She scarcely heard him. When she had struggled through the
narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, the deep humming from
above had so merged with the rush of blood in her ears that she had
assumed it was one with it; now she realized that it actually
proceeded from the dark bulk in the sky that she (like Maytera
Marble) had thought a cloud. She peered up at it, astonished.
'We'll get to that in a minute,' Auk told her, looking upward too.
'Terrible Tartaros says it's a airship. That's a thing kind of like the
old man's boat, see? Only it sails through the air instead of water.
The Rani of Trivigaunte's invaded Viron. That's another reason for
us to do like he showed us down there--'
Hammerstone heaved himself upright, throwing aside four stick-limbed
men who tried to hold him down. The sinews that bound his
wrists and ankles broke in a rattattoo of poppings, like the burning
of a string of firecrackers.
Almost casually, Auk thrust his hanger into the ground at his feet
and leveled the slug gun. 'Don't try it.'
'We got to fight,' Hammerstone told him. 'Patera and me. We got
to defend the city.'
Reluctantly, Chenille trained the launcher Hammerstone had
taught her to load and fire at his broad metal chest. He knelt to tear
off Incus's gag, snapping the cords that had secured Incus's hands
and feet between his fingers.
'Look! Look!' Urus shouted and pointed, then futilely directed
the beam of Gelada's lantern upward. Others around him shouted
and pointed, too.
Another voice, remote but louder than the loudest merely human
voice silenced them, filling the pit with its thunder: '_Convicts, you
are free! Viron has need of every one of you. In the name of all the--in
the Outsider's name, forget your quarrel with the Civil Guard,
which now supports our Charter. Forget any quarrel you may have
with your fellow citizens. Most of all, forget every quarrel among
yourselves!_'
Chenille grasped Auk's elbow. 'That's Patera Silk! I recognize his voice!'
Auk could only shake his head, unbelieving. Something--a
tumbling, flying thing that appeared, incredibly, to have a turret and
a buzz gun--had cleared the parapet on the wall and was drifting
into the pit, dropping lower and lower, an armed floater blown
upwind by a wind that was none, hundreds of cubits above the Alambrera.
Chenille's launcher was snatched from her hands and fired as
soon as it had left them, Hammerstone aiming at the immense shape
far above the floater, directing a single missile at it (or perhaps at
the winged figures that streamed from it like smoke), and watching
it expectantly to observe the strike and correct his aim.
'_There Auk!_' thundered a hoarse voice from the floater tumbling
slowly overhead. '_Here girl!_'
A second missile, and Auk was firing the slug gun that had been
Hammerstone's, too, shooting winged troopers who swooped and
soared above the pit firing slug guns of their own.
A minute dot of black fell from the vast flying thing Auk had
called an airship. She saw it streak through the milling cloud of
winged troopers. An instant later, the dark wall of the Alambrera
exploded with a force that rocked the Whorl.
Silk stood in his boyhood bedroom, looking down at the boy who
had been himself. The boy's face was buried in his pillow; by an
effort of will he made it look toward him; each time it turned, its
features dissolved in mist.
He sat down on the sill of the open window, conscious of the
borage growing under it and of lilacs and violets beyond it. A
copybook lay open, waiting, on the sleeping boy's small table; there
were quills beside it, their ends more or less chewed. He ought to
write, he knew--tell this boy who had been himself that he was
