'It's all right, Jugs,' he told her. 'Going to be candy. You'll see.
Tartaros is a dimber mate of mine.' To Tartaros himself, Auk
added, 'There's this hoppy floater that's falling in the pit, only slow,
while it shoots. That's up there, too. And there's maybe a couple
hundred troopers like the dead mort flying around, way up.'
The blind god gave his hand a gentle tug. 'We emerged from a
smaller pit into this one, Auk. If you see no other way out, it would
be well to return to the tunnel. There are other egresses, and I know
them all.'
'Just a minute. I lost my whin. I see it.' Releasing Chenille, Auk
hurried over, jerked his hanger from the mire, and wiped the blade
on his tunic.
'_Auk_, my son--'
He shooed Incus with the hanger. 'You get back in the tunnel,
Patera, before you get hurt. That's what Tartaros says, and he's
right.'
The floater was descending faster now, almost as though it were
really falling. Watching it, Auk got the feeling it was, only not
straight down the way other things fell. Until the last moment, it
seemed it might come to rest upright; but it landed on the side of its
cowling and tumbled over.
Something much higher was falling much faster, a tiny dot of
black that seemed almost an arrow by the time it struck the ruined
battlement of the Alambrera's wall, which again erupted in a gout of
flame and smoke. This time masses of shiprock as big as cottages
were flung up like chaff. Auk thought it the finest sight he had seen
in his life.
'Silk here!' Oreb announced proudly, dropping onto his shoulder.
'Bird bring!' A hatch opened at the front of the fallen floater.
'Hackum!' Chenille shouted. 'Hackum, come on! We're going
back in the tunnel!'
Auk waved to silence her. The wall of the Alambrera had taken
its death blow. As he watched, cracks raced down it to reappear as
though by magic in the shiprock side of the pit. There came a growl
deeper than any thunder. With a roar that shook the ground on
which he struggled to stand, the wall and the side of the pit came
down together. Half the pit vanished under a scree of stones, earth,
and shattered slabs. Coughing at the dust, Auk backed away.
'Hole break,' Oreb informed him.
When he looked again, several men and a slender woman in
scarlet were emerging from the overturned floater; its turret gun,
unnaturally canted but pointing skyward, was firing burst after burst
at the flying troopers.
'Return to the woman,' the blind god told him. 'You must protect
her. A woman is vital. This is not.'
He looked for Chenille, but she was gone. A few skeletal figures
were disappearing into the hole from which he and she had emerged
into the pit. Men from the floater followed them; through the
billowing dust he could make out a white-bearded man in rusty
black and a taller one in a green tunic.
'Silk here!' Oreb circled above two fleeing figures.
Auk caught up with them as they started down the helical track;
Silk was hobbling fast, helped by a cane and the woman in scarlet.
Auk caught her by the hair. 'Sorry, Patera, but I got to do this.'
Silk's hand went to his waistband, but Auk was too quick--a push
on his chest sent him reeling backward into the lesser pit.
'Listen!' urged the blind god beside Auk; he did, and heard the
rising whine of the next bomb a full second before it struck the
ground.
Silk looked down upon the dying augur's body with joy and regret.
It was--had been--himself, after all. Quetzal and a smaller,
younger augur knelt beside it, with a woman in an augur's cloak and
a third man nearly as old as Quetzal.
Beads swung in sign after sign of addition: 'I convey to you,
Patera Silk my son, the forgiveness of all the gods.'
'Recall now the words of Pas--'
It was good; and when it was over, he could go. Where? It didn't
matter. Anywhere he wished. He was free at last, and though he
would miss his old cell now and then, freedom was best. He looked
up through the shiprock ceiling and saw only earth, but knew that
the whole Whorl was above it, and the open sky.
'I pray you to forgive us, the living,' the smaller augur said, and
again traced the sign of addition, which could not--now that he
came to think of it--ever have been Pas's. A sign of addition was a
cross; he remembered Maytera drawing one on the chalkboard
when he was a boy learning to do sums. Pas's sign was not the cross
but the voided cross. He reached for his own at his neck, but it was
gone.
The older augur: 'I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna,
for Scalding Scylla.'
The younger augur: 'For Marvelous Molpe, for Tenebrous Tartaros,
for Highest Hierax, for Thoughtful Thelxiepeia, for Fierce
Phaea, and for Strong Sphigx.'
The older augur: 'Also for all lesser gods.'
The shiprock gave way to earth, the earth to a clearer, purer air
than he had ever known. Hyacinth was there with Auk; in a slanting
mass of stones, broken shiprock rolled and slid to reveal a groping
steel hand. Glorying, he soared.
The Trivigaunti airship was a brown beetle, infinitely remote, the
Aureate Path so near he knew it could not be his final destination.
He lighted upon it, and found it a road of tinsel down a whorl no
bigger than an egg. Where were the lowing beasts? The spirits of the
other dead? There! Two men and two women. He blinked and
stared and blinked again.
'Oh, Silk! My son! Oh, son!' She was in his arms and he in hers,
melting in tears of joy. 'Mother!' 'Silk, my son!'
The Whorl was filth and stink, futility and betrayal; this was
everything--joy and love, freedom and purity.
