Hammerstone stood at rigid attention, his right hand raised in a salute.
For a time that might have been long or short, after the voice spoke no more and the half-formed colors had gone, all was silence; the congregation might have been so many statues, there in the old manteion on Sun Street, statues with starting eyes and gaping mouths.
Then the noise began. Men who had been sitting sprang to their feet; men who had been kneeling jumped up to dance upon the pews. Some howled as though in agony. Some shrieked as if in ecstasy. A woman fell in a fit, thrashing, contorted as a swatted fly, belching bloody foam as her teeth tore her tongue and lips; no one noticed her, or cared.
“He’s gone.” Auk rose slowly, still staring at the now-empty Window. More loudly, loudly enough to make himself heard by Hammerstone, he said, “He ain’t here, not any more. That was him, wasn’t it? That was Pas.”
Hammerstone’s steel arm crashed to his steel side, a sound like the clash of swords.
“Did anybody… You understand him, Patera? It sounded like he was talking about — about—” A man Auk did not know reached out and touched Auk’s coat as he might have touched the Sacred Window.
“He liked me,” Auk concluded weakly. “Kind of like he liked me, that was what it sounded like.” No one heard him.
Incus was on his feet. He tottered to the ambion; although his mouth opened and shut and his lips appeared to shape words, no words could be heard above the din. At last he motioned to Hammerstone, and Hammerstone thundered for silence.
“It is my task—” Incus’s voice had risen to a squeak; he cleared his throat. “My task to explicate for you the utterance of the god.” The recurrence of something near his accustomed singsong restored his confidence. “To gloss upon his message and relay his commands.”
A man in the second row shouted, “It was Pas, wasn’t it?”
Incus nodded, his cheeks trembling. “It was. Lord Pas, the Father of the whorl and the Builder of the Gods.” Neither he nor his hearers noticed his mistake.
“He talked to me,” Hammerstone told Auk. His voice held a dawning joy. “I seen him once, way off, reviewing the parade. This time he talked to me. Like I’m talking to you, and he gave me a order.”
Auk nodded numbly.
“Patera will have heard, won’t he? Sure he will. We’ll talk about this years from now, how Pas talked to us and gave me the order. Me and Patera.”
“Ere I commence my exegesis,” his voice was stronger, and carried an authority that stilled the congregation, “I shall confide to you something not generally known, which I myself learned only today. There has been no announcement, but I was not sworn to secrecy. On Molpsday Great Pas granted a theophany to the — the aged worthy augur who has for innumerable decades served us as Prolocutor. His office has been attorned to me by Saving Scylla, who would doubtless see his protracted devotion rewarded with that freedom from concerns which is the perfumed ointment of superannuity. It was that, I confess, which sent me in search of tranquility, as I have related. The disquieting intelligence that the Father of the Seven had manifested himself to one whom I have been only too ready to reckon a rival.”
“Did he say something about me?” Half pleading and half threatening, Auk closed upon the ambion. “He said something, didn’t he? What was it?” Hammerstone interposed himself.
“I prayed to Pas,” Incus continued, wondering. “I urged the justice of my cause with tears. Now how clearly do I see this lesser plan, the plan that is to set in motion his greater Plan! First he bestowed his benefaction upon the Prolocutor that was, then upon the new.” Incus indicated his own stomach. “It is the hallmark of the actions of the gods that, however unanticipated they may be, once done they are seen to be both perfect and inevitable.
“And now I confide the divine utterance that Great Pas has vouchsafed to us.”
High above the mummy-colored bead that was General Saba’s airship, but five hundred cubits below the low winter clouds, Fliers whom Calde Silk was just then likening to a flight of storks rode the blustering north wind.
From their center, Sciathan studied his companions. Their eyes were on the clouds, as he had expected, or else the sere brown fields, the silver threads of streams, or the shrinking lake; no mere emergency could overcome the habits of years, no urging — not even a god’s — bring them to consider the teeming Cargo below relevant.
Sciathan himself glanced up at the clouds and scanned his instruments before abandoning both. A long yellow-brown column of marchers was approaching the city from the south. He had glimpsed similar parades often, giving little thought to them and what they might portend; soldiers and troopers could be halted by avalanches, turned aside by floods and forest fires, and dispersed by storms not much less readily than flotillas. No host had ever succeeded in crossing the Mountains That Look At Mountains; and in all likelihood, none ever would. Here in the hold, hordes like the one below would be a different matter.
Chapter 4 — Swords of Sphigx
Standing stiffly in his official cloak of tea-colored velvet, Calde Silk cursed himself mentally for not providing chairs — or rather, for not seeing to it that chairs were provided. He had supposed (such, he told himself, had been his lamentable innocence, his utter unfitness for the position thrust upon him) that he, with Quetzal, Oosik, and Saba — and Maytera Mint, if she could be found — would take their places on this platform, at which the force dispatched by Trivigaunte to the aid of Viron would appear.
The fact, of course, was otherwise. The fact was that even Generalissimo Siyuf’s highly disciplined horde of seventy-five thousands remained a mass of seventy-five thousand women and men — to say nothing of thousands of horses and none but the Nine knew how many camels.
Camels!
As a precociously pious boy, he had considered Sphigx the least attractive goddess, a tawny-maned virago, more lioness than woman. Now it appeared that real lions had nothing to do with real warfare; horses, mules, and camels were the pets of Stabbing Sphigx, and he would have accepted them happily (or even gerbils, guinea pigs, and geese) if only they would appear in reality.
A freezing gust shook the triumphal arch. It had been hastily erected, and would almost certainly collapse if this winter wind blew even a trifle harder; indeed, it was liable to collapse in any event if Siyuf’s troopers did not put in an appearance soon.
Surely there ought to be somebody in the crowd around the platform who could and would fetch chairs. First, he decided, he would ask that a chair be provided for Quetzal, who was of advanced years and had been standing for the better part of an hour; then, as if it were an afterthought, he could order chairs for Oosik and Saba, and himself as well. Five minutes more and he would leave the platform, collar a commissioner, and demand chairs. He must and he would — that was all there was to it.
The wind rose again, and he clenched his teeth. Yellow dust gave it a score of visible bodies, whirling devils that skated over the Alameda. A streamer of green paper tore free of the arch to mount the wind in sinuous curves, vanishing in a few seconds against the heaving bulk of the tethered airship.