Litany of the Long Sun (73 page)

"No."

"There have been times when I've thought that it must be. This fourth prisoner of mine's a spy, too. Will you do it? He's badly injured."

"After which you'll kill Silk and me." Crane snorted. "All right, I've lived as a quacksalver. Since I've got to die, I'll die as one, too."

"Both of you will live," Lemur told him, "because you will both become admirably cooperative. I could have you so now, if I wished, but for the present you serve me better as opponents. I will not say foes. You see, I have told this fourth prisoner that the doctor who will examine him and the augur who will shrive him are no friends of mine. That they have, in fact, seen fit to intrigue against the government I direct."

The luminosity of Lemur's hand and arm brightened, and Hyacinth's engraved, gold-plated, little needler slithered like a living animal into his open palm. "Your Cognizance? Here you are." He handed the needler to Silk. "Will you, as an anointed augur, administer the Pardon of Pas to Doctor Crane's patient, if Crane judges him in imminent danger of death?"

"Of course," Silk said.

"Then let's go. I know you'll find this interesting." Lemur threw open the door. Blinking and wiping their eyes, they followed him along a narrow corridor floored with steel grating, and down a flight of steel stairs almost as steep as a ladder.

"I'm taking you all the way down to the keel," Lemur lold them. "I hope you weren't expecting this boat to rock, by the way. We've put out-I gave the order while we were playing with that azoth-and we're cruising beneath the surface now, where there's no wave action."

He led them to a heavy door set into the floor, spun two handwheels,'and threw it back. "Down here. I'm about to show you the hole in our bottom."

Silk went first. The vibration that had shaken the boat since Lemur had threatened him with the azoth was stronger liere, almost an audible sound; there was a cool freshness to the air, and the iron railing of the steps he descended felt damp beneath his hand. Green lights that seemed imitations of the ancient lights provided the first settlers by Pas, and an indefinable odor that might have been no more than the absence of any other, made him feel for the first time that he was actually beneath the waters of Lake Limna.

The flier's broken wings were the first things he saw. They had been laid out, with scraps of the nearly invisible fabric that had covered them, on the transparent canopy of a sizable yawl-shattered spars of a material that might have been polished bone, less thick than his forefinger.

"Wait there a moment, Your Cognizance," Lemur called. "I want to show you these. You and Doctor Crane both. It will be well worth your while."

"You got one after all," Crane said. "You've brought down a flier."

There was a note of defeat in his voice that made Silk turn to stare back at him.

"They'd all gone," Crane explained. "Blood and his thugs and most of the male servants. I thought this might be it, but I lioped…" He left the sentence incomplete and shrugged.

Lemur had picked up an oddly curved, almost tear-drop-shaped grid of the cream-colored material. "We have, Doctor. And this is the secret. Simple, yet infinitely precious. Don't you want to examine it? Wouldn't you like to provide your masters with the secret of flight? The key that opens the sky? This is its shape. Pick it up if you wish. See how light it is. Run your fingers over it, Doctor."

Crane shook his head.

"Then you, Your Cognizance. When your followers have installed you as Caldé, it could prove a most useful thing to know."

"I'll never be Caldé," Silk told him, "and I have never wished to be." He accepted the almost weightless grid, and stared at its fluid lines. "This is what lets a flier fly? This shape?"

Lemur nodded. "With the material from which it's made. Tarsier's analyzing that. When you broke into Blood's villa Phaesday night-I know all about that, you see. When you broke in, didn't you wonder why Crane's city had sent him to watch Blood?"

"I didn't realize he was a spy then," Silk explained. He put down the grid and fingered the swelling that Potto's fist had left on the side of his head. He felt weak and a little dizzy.

"To keep his masters appraised of Blood's progress with the eagle," Lemur told him. "More than twenty-five years ago, I realized the possibilities of flight. I saw that if our troopers could fly as fliers did, enemy troop movements would be revealed at once, that picked bodies of men could land behind an enemy's lines to disrupt communications, and all the rest of it. As soon as I was free to act, I backed various experimenters whose work appeared promising. None developed a device capable of carrying a child, much less a trooper."

Recalling Hammerstone, Silk asked, "Why not a soldier?"

Crane grunted. "They're too heavy. Lemur there weighs four times as much as you and me together."

"Ah!" Lemur turned to Crane. "You've looked into the matter, I see.".

Crane nodded. "Fliers are actually a bit smaller than most troopers. I'm small, as everybody keeps reminding me. But I'm bigger than most fliers."

"You sound as though you've seen some close up."

"Through a telescope," Crane said. "Want to object that I had nothing to compare them to?"

"To oblige you, yes."

"I didn't need anything. A small man isn't proportioned like a big one, and as a small physician I'm very much aware of that. A small man's head is bigger'in proportion to his shoulders, for instance."

Silk fidgeted. "If someone may be dying…"

"That someone could be you, Your Cognizance." Lemur laid a heavy hand upon Silk's shoulder. "Purely as an hypothesis, let's say that I plan to pull your head off as soon as you've conveyed the Pardon of Pas to this unfortunate. If that were the case, shortening our discussion would materially shorten your life."

"As a citizen I'm entitled to a public trial, and to an advocate. As an augur-"

The pressure of Lemur's fingers increased. "It's too bad you're not an advocate yourself, Your Cognizance. If you were you'd realize that there's a further, unwritten provision. It is that the urgent needs ofViron must be served. As we speak a mendacious and malcontented radical faction is attempting to overthrow our lawfully constituted Ayuntamiento and substitute for it the rule of one inexperienced-but deep, and I admit that freely-augur, stirring up the populace by alleging a lot of superstitious taradiddle about enlightenment and the supposed favor of the gods. Am I crushing your shoulder?" "It is certainly very painful."

"It can easily become more so. Did you really speak to a goddess in a house of ill repute? Say no, or I'll crush it."

"A goddess in the sense that the god who enlightened me is a god? Doctor Crane insists that there is no such being. Whether he's right or not, I'm inclined to doubt that there are any more such gods."

Lemur tightened his grip, so that Silk would have fallen to his knees if he could. "I want to tell you in some detail, Your Cognizance, how I hit upon the notion of using a bird of prey to bring down a flier for our examination. How I saw a hawk take a merganser at twilight and conceived the idea. How I combed Viron, with the utmost secrecy, for the right man to carry it out. And how I found him."

Silk moaned, and Crane said, "And so on and so forth. Let him go, and I'll tell you how we learned of it."

"Let him go!" It was Mamelta, dashing out of the dimness and throwing herself on Silk. "You damned robot! You THING!" She was naked save for a blood-smeared rag knotted about her waist, her full breasts and rounded thighs trembling, her bare skin the color of old ivory.

Lemur released Silk and cuffed her almost casually; white bone gleamed where his long nails had torn her forehead, until blood streamed forth to cover it.

Crane crouched beside her and snapped open his brown bag.

"Very good, Doctor," Lemur said. "Patch her up by all means. But not here." He threw her over his shoulder and stalked away.

"Come on." Agilely for a man of his age, Crane mounted the steps to the trapdoor Lemur had opened for them and tugged at one of its wheels.

"We can't leave her," Silk said. He moved his shoulder experimentally and decided no bones had been broken.

"We can't help her while we're prisoners ourselves."

Lemur's mocking voice echoed from the other end of the hold. "A man is dying, and this woman is bleeding like a stuck pig. Don't either of you care?"

"I do," Silk called, and hobbled in the direction of the voice.

Beyond the bow of the yawl, the flier lay on a blanket spread on the steel floor, his sun-browned face twisted in agony. Beside him stretched a second trapdoor, far larger than the one through which they had come-large enough, as Silk realized with some astonishment, to admit the yawl. An instrument panel stood against the bulkhead at the end of the compartment.

Lemur dropped Mamelta next to the flier. In a deafening roar that reminded Silk of the talus, he called, "Rejoin us, Doctor. You can't open that hatch." To Silk he added, "I tightened those locking screws, you see. And I'm a great deal stronger than both of you together, as well as a great deal heavier."

Silk had already knelt at the flier's head. "I convey to you, my son, the forgiveness of all the gods. Recall now the words of Pas, who-"

"That's enough." Lemur took him by the shoulder again. "We want the doctor first, I think. If he won't come, you must bring him."

"I'm here," Crane announced.

"This is our flier," Lemur said. "His name's Iolar. He has told us a little, you sec, though nothing of value, not even the name of his city. I would have to agree that he's scarcely taller than you, and he may well be a trifle lighter. Yet he is flier enough, or almost enough."

Crane did not reply. After a moment he took scissors from his bag and began to cut away the flightsuit. Silk tore a strip from his robe, wound it twice about Mamelta's head, and tied it.

Lemur nodded approvingly. "She will live to be grateful for your efforts, I'm sure, Patera. So will.lolar, I hope. Are you listening, Doctor Crane?"

Crane nodded without looking up. "I'm going to have to roll you over. Put your arms above your head. Don't try to roll yourself. Let me do it."

"You see," Lemur continued conversationally, "Iolar came down right here, in the lake. In one way, that was extremely convenient for us. We sent our little boat to the surface and scooped up him and his wings without help from the Civil Guard. Or from Blood, I should add, and very much to the discomfiture of them both." Lemur chuckled.

"That was early yesterday morning. As it chanced, I was ashore at the time, so Loris directed the recovery. Whether I could've managed things better, I can't say. Loris is not Lemur, but then who is? In any event one vital part was not retrieved, although the flier himself was, with most of the wings and harness and so on that permitted him to fly. He calls it a propulsion module, or PM. Isn't that so, Iolar?"

Crane glanced up at Lemur, then looked quickly back to his patient.

"Precisely so, Doctor. Without the device, our troopers will still be able to fly in a manner of speaking. But only to glide, as a gull does when it rides the breeze without moving its wings. It should be possible for such a trooper to launch himself from a cliff or a tower and fly a great distance, given a strong and favoring wind. Only under the most extraordinary conditions, liowcver, could lie take off from a level field. Under no conceivable conditions could he fly into the eye of any wind, even the weakest. Is this too technical for you, Patera? Doctor Crane's following me, I believe."

Silk said, "So am I, I think."

"At first the deficiency appeared only temporary. Iolar had a propulsion module-he admitted as much. Presumably it was torn free by the impact when he struck the water. We could fish it up, which we tried to do all that day, or he could tell us how to make them. This last, I am sorry to say, he refuses to do."

Crane said, "You must have some sort of medical facility on this boat. Something better than this."

"Oh, we do," Lemur assured him. "In fact, we had him there for a while. But. he didn't repay our kindness, so we brought him back here. Is he conscious?"

"Didn't you hear me talking to him a minute ago? Of course he is."

"Fine. Iolar, listen to me. I'm Councillor Lemur, and I am speaking to you. I may never do this again, and what I'm about to say will be more important to you than anything you've ever heard before, or that you're ever apt to hear. Do you hear me now? Say something or move your head."

The flier lay face down, his face turned toward the long steel hatch in the deck. His voice, when it came, was weak and strangely accented. "I hear."

Lemur smiled and nodded. "You've found me to be a man of my word, haven't you? Very well, I'm giving you my word that everything I'm about to say is true. I'm not going to try to trick you again, and I'm not inclined to be patient with you any longer. These are the men Potto and I told you about. This doctor is an admitted spy, just like you. Not a spy of ours, you may be sure. A spy from Palustria, or so he says. This augur is the leader of the faction that has been trying to seize control of our city. If Doctor Crane says you're going to die, you've won our argument. I'll let the augur bring you Pas's Pardon, and that's that. But if Doctor Crane says you'll live, you'll be surrendering your life if you continue to refuse. Have I made myself clear? I'm not going to waste any more of my time, or Potto's, in trying to force the facts we need from you. We're building new equipment to find your propulsion module on the bottom. We'll get it, and you'll have died for nothing. If we don't find it, we still have the eagle. She knows her business now, and all we'll have to do to get a propulsion module is send her after the next flier we see."

Lemur pointed a finger at Crane. "No threats, Doctor. No promises. Truth will cost you nothing, and a lie gain you nothing. Is he going to live?"

"I don't know," Crane said levelly. "He's got a couple of broken ribs-they haven't punctured the lung, or he might be dead already. At least four thoracic vertebrae are in pretty bad shape. There's damage to the spinal cord, but I don't think it's been severed, although I can't be sure. Given proper care and a first-rate surgeon, I'd say he might have a good chance."