Killeen remembered the huge desk which His Supremacy had lounged behind the first time Killeen saw him. No doubt it had been abandoned by the baggage train. Even the commandeered mech transports had trouble getting up the mountainside, and no team of men could have pushed the desk so far uphill. Still less likely was the possibility that anyone could be induced to try.
“I shall direct the main body, of course. After the Bishops have diverted the enemy, I shall strike the final, mortal blow.” The man stopped, stamped his feet, and looked searchingly at his officers. “Understood?”
Jocelyn, standing beside Killeen, said, “We Bishops are honored at being given first chance at the enemy.”
His Supremacy’s face, which had been compressed with concentration, smoothed. “You are being accorded an opportunity to make up for your regrettable performance in the most recent action.”
“Rest assured we’ll do well,” Jocelyn answered, bowing her head slightly.
His Supremacy’s eyes showed pleasure at this. Then the eyes went blank as a rapt look came over him. “This is the opportunity we have awaited. The foul Cyber demons are concentrated in the broad valley to the east, as our scouts have shown. With their attention directed down the valley, they will certainly bunch up as they move to attack the Bishops. At that moment we can mass our fire. Once we make a breach, all the Tribe can flow through it. The Bishops can then disengage and join us in the next valley, beyond the eastern ridge.”
The Cap’n of the Sebens said, “How we know we can hit ’em hard enough? Could be plenty Cybers there, and we’d—”
“The more the better,” His Supremacy said vehemently. “They will be dense on the ground and vulnerable to directed fire. We can hit them even more easily from the mountain as we come down.”
“Yeasay!” another Cap’n called. “More we hit them, fewer we have to fight through later.”
The entire tent rocked with the shouted assent of the other officers. His Supremacy nodded, rewarding them with a thin smile. “We do not know their numbers, but we know our cause is holy. We shall win through!”
Killeen could not stop himself from saying, “There’re twenty-eight.”
Complete silence. His Supremacy’s eyebrows arched. “Oh? You have patrolled the valley?”
“Naysay. But I… I can tell how many there are.”
“You see through Divine revelation?” His Supremacy seemed to be asking a genuine question, as though this was a plausible source of knowledge.
Killeen caught a significant look from the sharp-nosed woman who was Cap’n of the Sebens. She shook her head very slightly.
“No, I’ve gotten a good count by watchin’ the valley.”
Killeen saw now the fixed look in His Supremacy’s eyes and guessed its cause. Of course—the man believed himself God, and so any other person who claimed a direct line to the infinite would be a rival. Killeen thought of the men and women spitted and left in the sun. Perhaps some of them had claimed a special role, to their misfortune.
“Very good. But I should think that even a person of your little experience and lack of battlefield skills could see the error in your statement. You count only the enemy who reveal themselves. We know that the demons often burrow below ground, as doctrine says they must, since they are agents of the underworld Therefore, you have counted only a fraction of them.”
“Ah, yeasay, Your Supremacy,” Killeen said.
“I apologize for this officer’s outburst,” Jocelyn put in.
“We understand,” His Supremacy said grandly.
“Be assured, Supremacy, that we Bishops shall carry the fight hard and sure,” Jocelyn added firmly.
“Very good. There is no need to stay here, caged in by these demons. Skysower will not soon return to this mountaintop, my computational Aspects tell me. It spreads its sacred wealth around the girdle of our globe, a hundred descents in a single day. Our nourishment complete, we now fulfill our exalted mission.”
The man lectured as though speaking to children, his eyes focused up into the tent top.
“Supremacy, we wish your battle benediction,” the Cap’n of the Niners said in a closing ritual.
Killeen kneeled with the rest and received the windy, singsong speech. It contained references to battles lost and cities fallen long ago, all meaningless to him but somehow ringing with the same sad truth that he had heard in the orations at Citadel Bishop as a boy. No matter that this Tribe had clutched at this queer little man in their desperation—their pain was perhaps even greater than those on Snowglade had suffered. Here humanity had enjoyed what it thought was a kind of victory over the mechs, actually destroying cities—only to have the more deadly Cybers arrive and finish the job. To be lifted and then dashed again did double damage. Perhaps this finding refuge in religion, and in one tyrannical Elder, was understandable.
As Killeen left the tent he caught the sidelong glances of others and understood what a close call he had survived. His Supremacy brooked no competition.
He had felt the urge to tell them of the odd perceptions that shot through him incessantly now. It was like being swallowed whole, gripped in a moist mucous cloud. In lacy filaments he saw shifting dun-colored terrain. Huge Cybers ran quickly through it, their shiny skins sprouting projections. Snatches of percussive talk came in a hollow, staccato language.
Killeen knew the valley they would try to cross, knew it in a deep, skin-tingling sense. He could close his eyes even now and feel the taste of Cybers moving through it. But how?
He thought he knew. What the answer implied, though, he could not guess.
No doubt if he had spoken of this in the tent the proper interpretation would have been quite clear to His Supremacy. Divine revelation, yes. And by now Killeen would have been groaning out his last on a stake atop this barren mountain.
TWELVE
Quath knew she should remain fixed in the present, moored in the reality of craggy reaches and massive buttresses. She had to keep watch on the podia Beq’qdahl led in the plains below. They kept slipping nearer. Only Quath’s ranging shots kept them at bay.
But the tangled world within beckoned….
She had found the one Nought, she was sure of that now. Edging closer, lightly touching the tiny pale spheres of their separate selfhoods, Quath had finally pressed against one who had the tang and bite she recognized. The earlier Nought that she had invaded, yes, she saw the resemblance—but not the same. This property in itself was intriguing, but she had no time to inspect the myriad rivulets of meaning in these sublattices.
Quath now saw that with each close encounter she was learning a different pathway into Noughts. Each entrance brought fresh perspectives. And pitfalls. The portals of her own Nought had ushered Quath into a miasma.
At first it had been like dusky radiance descending through murky memories, creaky with age. Yellowed filigrees rotted and fell away, lace parted, cobwebs lifted from glinting, brass-hard facts… which themselves dissolved like singing dust beneath the rub of remorseless time.
Inside the Nought, yes… But where?
Quath had felt herself walking through a broad courtyard like that which gave onto the Hive’s great hall of worship. The walls cast an embroidery of shadow on stones—only the floor was not rock at all, but bones, white skulls, worn red carapaces, skeletal cages of ribs and abdomens. They snapped as she clumped over them, making her way back into a wide, gloomy past. Empty eyesockets seemed to follow her wobbly progress. Whispers and words bubbled from the street of bones. Some were sharp and bitter, ripped from throats which still longed and yearned. She could not understand these twisted, clangorous sounds. Abruptly she saw that they came from the podia past, stitching blood and marrow and desire and history into a tight sound-knot.