knelt.
Already on his knees beside the bull, Silk contrived to bow. "Your
eldest daughter's, Great Queen." The serpents around her face--thicker
than a man's wrist but scarcely larger than hairs in proportion
to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and pallid, hollow cheeks--identified
her at once. "Viron is Scalding Scylla's city."
"Remember, all of you. You most of all, Prolocutor."
Silk was so startled that he nearly turned his head. Was it possible
that the Prolocutor was in fact here, somewhere in this crowd of
thousands?
"I have watched you," Echidna said. "I have listened."
Even the few remaining animals were silent.
"This city must remain my daughter's. Such was the will of her
father. I speak everywhere for him. Such is my will. Your remaining
sacrifices must be for her. For no one else. Disobedience invites
destruction."
Silk bowed again. "It shall be as you have said, Great Queen."
Momentarily he felt that he was not so much honoring a deity as
surrendering to the threat of force; but there was no time to analyze
the feeling.
"There is one here fit to lead. She shall be your leader. Let her
step forth."
Echidna's eyes, hard and black as opals, had fastened on Maytera
Mint. She rose and walked with small, almost mincing steps toward
the awful presence in the Window, her head bowed. When she
stood beside Silk, that head was scarcely higher than his own,
though he was on his knees.
"You long for a sword."
If Maytera Mint nodded, her nod was too slight to be seen.
"You are a sword. Mine. Scylla's. You are the sword of the Eight
Great Gods."
Of the thousands present, it was doubtful if five hundred had
been able to hear most of what Maytera Marble, or Patera Gulo, or
Silk himself had said; but everyone--from men so near the canted
altar that their trouser legs were speckled with blood, to children
held up by mothers themselves scarcely taller than children--could
hear the goddess, could hear the peal of her voice and to a limited
degree understand her, Great Echidna, the Queen of the Gods, the
highest and most proximal representative of Twice-Headed Pas. As
she spoke they stirred like a wheatfield that feels the coming storm.
"The allegiance of this city must be restored. Those who have
suborned it must be cast out. This ruling council. Kill them. Restore
my daughter's Charter. The strongest place in the city. The prison
you call the Alambrera. Pull it down."
Maytera Mint knelt, and again the silver trumpet sounded. "I will,
Great Queen!" Silk could hardly believe that it had emanated from
the small, shy sibyl he had known.
At her reply the theophany was complete. The white bull lay dead
beside him, one ear touching his hand; the Window was empty
again, though Sun Street was still filled with kneeling worshippers,
their faces blank or dazed or ecstatic. Far away--so distant that he,
standing, could not see her--a woman screamed in an agony of rapture.
He raised his hands as he had when he had stood upon the
floater's deck. "People of Viron!"
Half, perhaps, showed some sign of having heard.
"We have been honored by the Queen of the Whorl! Echidna
herself--"
The words he had planned died in his throat as a searing
incandescence smashed down upon the city like a ruinous wall. His
shadow, blurred and diffused as shadows had always been under the
beneficent radiance of the long sun, solidified to a pitch-black
silhouette as sharp as one cut from paper.
He blinked and staggered beneath the weight of the white-hot
glare; and when he opened his eyes again, it was no more. The dying
fig (whose upper branches could be seen above the garden wall) was
on fire, its dry leaves snapping and crackling and sending up a
column of sooty smoke.
A gust fanned the flames, twisting and dissolving their smoke
column. Nothing else seemed to have changed. A brutal-looking
man, still on his knees by the casket before the altar, inquired,
"W-was that more word from the gods, Patera?"
Silk took a deep breath. "Yes, it was. That was word from a god
who is not Echidna, and I understand him."
Maytera Mint sprang to her feet--and with her a hundred or
more; Silk recognized Gayfeather, Cavy, Quill, Aloe, Zoril, Horn
and Nettle, Holly, Hart, Oont, Aster, Macaque, and scores of
others. The silver trumpet that Maytera Mint's voice had become
summoned all to battle. "Echidna has spoken! We have felt the
wrath of Pas! To the Alambrera!"
The congregation became a mob.
Everyone was standing now, and it seemed that everyone was
talking and shouting. The floater's engine roared. Guardsmen,
some mounted, most on foot, called, "To me, everyone!" "To me!"
"To the Alambrera!" One fired his slug gun into the air.
Silk looked for Gulo, intending to send him to put out the burning
tree; he was already some distance away, at the head of a hundred
or more. Others led the white stallion to Maytera Mint; a man
bowed with clasped hands, and she sprang onto its back in a way
Silk would not have thought possible. It reared, pawing the wind, at
the touch of her heels.
And he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. "Maytera! _Maytera!_"
Shifting the sacrificial knife to his left hand and forsaking the dignity
augurs were expected to exhibit, he ran to her, his black robe
billowing in the wind. "Take this!"
Silver, spring-green, and blood-red, the azoth Crane had given
him flashed through the air as he flung it over the heads of the mob.
The throw was high and two cubits to her left--yet she caught it, as
he had somehow known she would.
"Press the bloodstone," he shouted, "when you want the blade!"
A moment later that endless aching blade tore reality as it swept
the sky. She called, "Join us, Patera! As soon as you've completed
the sacrifices!"
He nodded, and forced himself to smile.
The right eye first. It seemed to Silk that a lifetime had passed
between the moment he had first knelt to extract the eye from its
socket and the moment that he laid it in the fire, murmuring Scylla's
short litany. By the time he had completed it, the congregation had
dwindled to a few old men and a gaggle of small children watched by
elderly women, perhaps a hundred persons in all.
In a low and toneless voice, Maytera Marble announced, "The
tongue for Echidna. Echidna has spoken to us."
Echidna herself had indicated that the remaining victims were to
be Scylla's, but Silk complied. "Behold us, Great Echidna, Mother
of the Gods, Incomparable Echidna, Queen of this Whorl--" (Were
there others, where Echidna was not Queen? All that he had
learned in the schola argued against it, yet he had altered her
conventional compliment because he felt that it might be so.)
"Nurture us, Echidna. By fire set us free."
The bull's head was so heavy that he could lift it only with
difficulty; he had expected Maytera Marble to help, but she did not.
Vaguely he wondered whether the gold leaf on the horns would
merely melt, or be destroyed by the flames in some way. It did not
seem likely, and he made a mental note to make certain it was
salvaged; thin though gold leaf was, it would be worth something. A