It was a chant he had not heard for over seven centuries: a hymn of praise to the great god Axona. He bit his lip. Virgil Jones looked at him, but said nothing.
They were standing by their bicycles at the water’s edge when Flapping Eagle saw the boat. A crude coracle with this name painted on a board tied to its side: Skid-Blade. Flapping Eagle, the master of the knife, felt his spirits sink still lower, and realized that he had read an omen into the name. Where the blade skids, there skid I. He climbed into the boat, motioning Virgil Jones to stay behind; and helplessly, weightily, Mr Jones subsided to the ground as Flapping Eagle paddled out to the stone shrine which was the voice of his past, claiming him. Their bicycles lay crookedly, uselessly, beside Virgil on the empty shore.
It was the votary flame that produced the second illusion. When Flapping Eagle, on his guard, passed through the open door of the shrine, he saw, in light once again dirty and yellow, the forms of two giants shadowed on the far wall. Vast forms: an Axona chieftain in his full headdress sitting in erect profile on a ceremonial stool as a supplicant knelt chanting at his feet; the whole tableau some twenty feet high.
It was, however, the votary flame that had done it. It burned in its stone bowl immediately below the small platform where the scene was actually taking place and cast huge shadows on the distant wall. But even when he deciphered the trick his eyes had played, Flapping Eagle found no relief; partly because, now twice-bitten by illusion, he expected a third; but mostly because he felt in himself both an absolute certainty and a crippling fear that this old, dark, hawknosed, feathered chief was the incarnation of the god Axona himself. And, the dimension being what it was, the truth was as he believed it to be.
The god Axona rose from his stool; his devotee continued his chanting until the chief cut it short with a gesture. He was quite a small man, but the glare in his fierce, heavy-lidded eyes pierced even the temple’s stygian gloom.
– So Born-From-Dead has come at last to his god, said Axona, and the words struck a new chill into Flapping Eagle’s heart, because they revealed what the darkness and ceremonial garments had hidden.
The god Axona was an old, dark, hawknosed, feathered woman.
– Born-From-Dead.
The god mouthed his name (ignoring his self-given brave’s name in calculated insult) in tones of overweening disgust.
– All that is Unaxona is Unclean, said the god. Unclean. Had you forgotten, miserable defiled whelp that you are, what that commandment means? Is it to commit sacrilege upon this holy place that you come, whiteskin, paleface, mongrel among the pure, traitor to your race, is it to commit your supreme act of defilement that you come? Born-From-Dead has no patience with Axona; he cannot have come to worship. In death you were born and destruction is your doom. Whatsoever you touch, is soiled; whatsoever you grasp, you break; any person you love is stifled by your love; any person you hate is purified by your loathing. Is it the god Axona herself you seek to destroy? Is it this far that the worm in you has stretched?
She had touched the roots of Flapping Eagle’s own self-doubts; he could barely speak, yet he forced the words from his dry lips. They rustled weakly in the half-light.
– If I can, said Flapping Eagle. I will break you if I can.
Axona laughed, and her cachinnation rang around the room.
– From your own mouth you are condemned, Born-From-Dead, she cried; and it is by your own hand you shall die.
As she sat down once more upon her stool, the devotee, who had lain silent while they spoke, whirled round and cast off his cloak. Again Flapping Eagle’s self-control received a body-blow.
He was gazing into his own eyes.
His own eyes: but a vilely altered representation of himself. The body was the same; and, like Flapping Eagle, the creature wore a single feather in its hair; but the rest of its garnishings were utterly different. He wore a striped single-breasted jacket over a bare chest. The skin was deathly white. Around his waist was a string of beads, from which hung two squares of cloth, a yellow square covering his genitals, a blue square flapping at his buttocks. Otherwise he was quite naked. There were women’s earrings in his ears, women’s redness in his cheeks, women’s lipstick on his lips. His eyebrows were plucked into slender arches and his eyelashes were long and drooping.
And that voice: the unbroken, high, eunuch’s voice, a travesty of his own.
– Come, Born-From-Dead, it said. Come.
In the creature’s right hand was a light axe, or tomahawk. In its left hand was a rifle. Flapping Eagle had no doubt that it was loaded. He also knew that he was helplessly unarmed.
– Come, Born-From-Dead, mocked the voice of Axona, Will you not face my champion? They say you are a great warrior. Come.
Flapping Eagle sighed and came slowly forward.
He was gambling on his surrogate behaving as he would in such a situation, and using the tomahawk before falling back on the simplicity of the rifle. He had always been more at home with the throwing, infighting instruments. So he sauntered in, almost insolently, and thrust his hands into his pockets casually, to irritate his opponent.
His right hand closed over a hard, rounded object. He pulled it out, wondering. It was the Bone of K! The very same Bone that Bird-Dog had flung to him before she disappeared down the tunnel of herself.
The Bone of K: Flapping Eagle lost no time in speculation. He could have thought: where did that come from after all this time? Would it not have been noticed before now? But none of that mattered. He had a weapon, and that changed the nature of the contest. It was now probable that his surrogate would decide on safety and use the rifle. So he had only a few seconds, the brief “freeze” his opponent would undergo when he saw the unexpected object.
Flapping Eagle hurled the Bone, in a single, fluid movement, like throwing a large, ungainly dart. It hit the rifle at the point where his enemy’s hand gripped it. A shriek of pain and the rifle fell to the floor. So did the Bone; it shattered, with results that froze both Flapping Eagle and his alter ego in their tracks.
It was only afterwards that Virgil Jones decoded for Flapping Eagle the secret meaning of the name. It was a cypher whose key was the sound of its secret name:
Os, a bone. K, a place. Hence K-os, the Bone of K. Or, alternatively: Chaos.
At the time Flapping Eagle saw only the terrifying effect of the breaking of tibe Bone.
The shards and splinters rose like a spinning mist from the floor where they shattered and formed a cloud in the centre of the arena of combat. The rifle disappeared completely. It simply ceased to be. So did everything else.
What was left was a hole. A turbulent disarrangement in the structure of the dimension. Chaos.
Flapping Eagle came out of shock a fraction faster than his alter ego; probably because he was further from the hole. He rushed at his adversary head-first and hit him full-tilt in the belly. The surrogate Flapping Eagle staggered, stepped backwards and sideways.
And was gone in the hole, decomposed into chaos, into not-being.
Axona was on her feet, eyes blazing with wrath; but Flapping Eagle knew that behind that anger she was afraid. The Bone, the random element, had foiled her perfect plan; and now she was at his mercy. He advanced upon her with slow deliberation.
– Stay where you are, Unclean, she said, but her voice betrayed her.
– I don’t know what you are, said Flapping Eagle as he walked forward, but when I defile you, I am cleansed of my past. Cleansed of the guilt and shame that possessed some hidden part of my mind, of which your presence is the proof. To free myself, I must render Axona unclean. Do you understand?