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“So Patera told them not to bunch up, but scatter and start asking people all over, and bring him to Auk when they got him. Then he told Auk the Chapter’s got records about all this stuff, where every augur’s at and what he’s doing there, and they’re in the Palace, and Patera knows where and how to read them. He’s worked with them for years, right Patera? So him and Auk and me started off to take a look, and here we are.”
“The majesty of diction was lacking, Hammerstone, my son, yet the matter was in attendance.” Incus regarded Linsang and his troopers. “What of you? We seek to obey the dictates of the Father of the Seven. Can you assist us? No holy augur can know every other. We are far too numerous. Do you know of a Patera Jerboa? Any of you? Speak.”
No one did.
Shots woke Maytera Mint. At first, as she lay blinking in the darkness, she did not know what the sounds had been; she was hungry and thirsty, vaguely conscious of the cold, and conscious that she had been cold for a long time, shivering as she slept. Her buttocks and shoulder blades, pressed by her slight weight to unyielding shiprock, were numb, her feet freezing.
She sat up. Her room had been the smallest and meanest in the old cenoby on Silver Street, with a ceiling that dripped at every shower; yet it had not been too small or too mean for a window past whose threadbare drape wisps of light crept on even the darkest nights.
Three sharp bangs, unevenly spaced. Pictures falling? She recalled an incident from her childhood: an old watercolor had fallen when its yellowed string rotted through at last, and had taken another picture and a small vase down with it. Once she had heard a horse trying to kick its way out of its stall. The shots had sounded like that.
“Ah, General?”
The voice had been Remora’s; his nasal tones brought it all back to her. “Yes, Your Eminence.”
“You have, um, familiar with the sound of gunfire, hey? During the past — ah — fighting.”
“Yes, Your Eminence. Tolerably so.” Against her will, she found herself wondering how many Remoras there had been, how many augurs and sibyls who had responded to Echidna’s theophany by going to the safest place they could find and staying there. Patera Silk had not. (But then, he wouldn’t.) Patera Silk had been shot in the chest, had been captured, and had contrived, somehow, to turn Oosik and the whole Third Brigade, the act that had done more than any other to determine the course of their insurrection. But how many more -
“Er, General?”
“Yes, Your Eminence. I was considering the matter. The door is thick and rather tightly fitted, and these walls are shiprock. Those factors must have affected the quality of the shots as we heard them.”
“You — ah — believe them shots, eh?”
“I’m putting on my shoes, Your Eminence.” She groped for them in the dark. “If we’re to be taken somewhere—”
“Quite right.” Remora sounded cheerful. “Quetzal, eh? Old Quetzal. His Cognizance, I ought to say.”
More thirsty than ever, Maytera Mint licked her dry lips. “His Cognizance, Your Eminence?”
“Rescue, eh? He’s come for me, er, we. Or — ah — sent somebody. Shrewd, eh? Plays a deep game, old Quetzal. Card sense in both — um — the applicable senses.”
She tried to imagine the elderly Prolocutor fighting, slug gun in hand, against Spider and his spy-catchers, and failed utterly. “I would think Bison’s sent scouts into the tu
Another shot, and it was definitely a shot.
“They will notice it, General. I — um — my word on it. My gammadion, eh?”
“Your gammadion, Your Eminence?”
“Not you, ah, sibyls. But we augurs. Holy augurs, eh? Wear Pas’s voided cross. Comes apart. Use to test a Window, hey? Tighten co
“I’m familiar with them, Your Eminence.”
“I’ve — ah — slipped it beneath the door, Maytera. Push it out, eh? Pull it back in. Moving object, hum? Catches the light, ah, attracts the eye.”
She went to the door (almost tripping over Remora) and rapped it sharply with the heel of one shoe.
“Admirable — ah — admirable. Crude, eh? Yet it — ah!”
The latch outside rattled and the door swung in, impeded by Remora. The burly Spider growled, “What’s that noise?”
The lights in the tu
“Come on.” Spider gestured with the barrel of his needler.
“We, um’ require food,” Remora ventured. “Water or — ah similar, er, potable.”
“You won’t if you don’t get movin’.”
“You don’t dare shoot us,” Maytera Mint declared. “We’re valuable hostages. What would you tell—”
He caught her arm and jerked her through the doorway. “I’m strong, see?”
“I never doubted it.” She tested her shoulder, fearing he had dislocated it.
“Strong as a chem. Not one of them soldiers, maybe, but a regular chem. You with me, sib? So I don’t have to shoot you. There’s twenty, thirty things I could do.” One of Spider’s men was lounging in the tu
“I’m delighted to hear it.” Maytera Mint had feared that she would not be allowed to resume her shoe; she tightened the bow and straightened up with an odd little thrill of triumph.
“I learned a lot, workin’ on them. I never seen one so tough I couldn’t get him to tell me anythin’ I wanted to know. That way, and keep movin’.”
“I, er, weak. Thirsty, eh? What one physically — ow!”
Remora had been prodded from behind by the man with the slug gun, who said, “I kicked a dead cull once till he got up and ran.”
“The gods — ah — Pas. Tartaros, eh?” Remora progressed with rapid, unsteady strides, outdistancing Maytera Mint.
“Slow up!”
“I — ah — prayed. Beads. eh? The, um’ general slept.”
“You should have awakened me,” she protested, and got a shove from Spider.
“Never! Wouldn’t, um, consider—” Remora froze until he was prodded from behind. Somewhat nearsighted, Maytera Mint blinked as she tried to peer ahead through the watery light.
“Dead cull,” Spider told her. “One of mine.”
“Was that the shooting we heard?”
Spider pushed her forward. “Yeah.” Another push. “He was watchin’ your door. Sib, you better shaggy learn to drive your shaggy ass or you’re going to learn a shaggy bunch you don’t want to know.”
She whirled, facing him. “I’ve already learned something, but it was something I wanted to know. That I wanted very much to know, in fact.”
He struck her face with the flat of his hand, spi
Remora did, carrying her like a child as he staggered down the tu
“I am. I shouldn’t,” she wiped her eyes, “because I know our hour will come. Perhaps I should cry for you instead, but that will come later if it comes at all.”
Remora had knelt beside the corpse; he rose shaking his head. “The spirit has, ah, dispensed with its house of flesh.”
The man with the slug gun asked, “You were going to say the words over him?”
“I — ah — so intended. It is too late.”