"Why, that's wonderful!"
Sand cocked his head. "What is? Finding out that you came down here for nothing?"
"No, no! It's not that." For the first time since Oreb had left him, Silk smiled. "That it won't be my fault. That it isn't. I felt it was my duty to tell somebody everything I'd learned-someone in authority, who could take action. I knew Crane would suffer as a result. That he'd probably die, in fact."
Sand said almost gently, "He's just a bio, Patera. You get built inside each other, so there's millions of you. One more or less doesn't matter." He started back up the hill of ash, sinking deeply at every step but making steady progress in spite of it. "Fetch him along, Corporal."
Hammerstone prodded Silk with the barrel of his slug gun. "Get moving."
One of the doglike creatures lay bleeding in the ash less than a chain from the point at which the soldiers had found Silk, too weak to stand but not too weak to snarl. Silk asked, "What is that?"
"A god. The things that eat you bios down here."
Staring down at the dying animal, Silk shook his head. "The impious harm no one but themselves, my son."
"Get going, Patera. You're an augur, don't you sacrifice to the gods every week?"
"More often, if I can." The ash made it increasingly difficult to walk.
"Uh-huh. What about the leftovers? What do you do with them?"
Silk glanced back at him. "If the victim is edible-as most are-its flesh is distributed to those who have attended the ceremony. Surely you've been to at least one sacrifice, my son."
"Yeah, they made us go." Shifting his slug gun to his left hand, Hammerstone offered Silk his right arm. "Here, hang on. What about the other stuff, Patera? The hide and head and so forth, and the ones you won't eat?"
"They are consumed by the altar fire," Silk told him.
"And that sends them to the gods, right?"
"Symbolically, yes."
Another doglike animal lay dead in the ash; Hammerstone kicked it as he passed. "Your little fires aren't really up to it, Patera. They're not big enough or hot enough to bum up the bones of a big animal. Sometimes they don't even burn up all the meat. All that stuff gets dumped down here with the ashes. When they build a manteion, they try to put it on top of one of these old tunnels, so there's a place to get rid of the ashes. There's a manteion in Limna, see? We're right under it. Up around the city, there's a lot more places like this, and a lot more gods."
Silk swallowed. "I see."
"Remember those we chased off? They'll be back as soon as we're out of here. We'll hear them laughing and fighting over the good parts."
Sand had halted some distance ahead. He called, "Hurry it up, Corporal."
Silk, who was already walking as fast as he could, tried to go faster still; Hammerstone murmured, "Don't worry about that, he does it all day. That's how you get stripes."
They had almost reached Sand before Silk realized that the shapeless gray bundle at Sand's feet was a human being. Sand pointed with his slug gun. "Have a look, Patera. Maybe you knew him."
Silk knelt beside the body and lifted one mangled hand, then tried to scrape the caked ash away from the place where a face should have been; there were only shreds of flesh and splinters of bone beneath it. "It's gone!" he exclaimed.
"Gods can do that. They tear the whole thing off with one bite, the way I'd pull off my faceplate, or maybe you'd bite into a ... What do you call those things?"
Silk rose, rubbing his hands in a desperate effort to get them clean. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."
"The round red things from the trees. Apples, that's it. Aren't you going to bless him or something?" "Bring him the Pardon of Pas, you mean. We can do that only before death is complete-before the last cells of the body die, technically. Did you kill him?"
Sand shook his head. "I won't lie to you, Patera. If we'd seen him and yelled for him to halt, and he had run, we would've shot him. But we didn't. He had a lantern, it's over there someplace. And a needler. I've got that now. So he probably figured he'd be all right. But there must have been gods hanging around here like there always are. It's always pretty dark here, too, because ash gets on the lights. Maybe his lantern blew out, or maybe the gods got extra hungry and rushed him."
Hammerstone grunted his assent. "This isn't a good place for bios, Patera, like the sergeant said."
"He should be buried at least," Silk told them. "I'll do it, if you'll let me."
"If you were to bury him in these ashes, the gods would dig him up as soon as we were gone," Sand said.
"You could carry him. I've heard that you soldiers are a great deal stronger than we are."
"I could make you carry him, too," Sand told Silk, "but I'm not going to do that, either." He turned and strode away.
Hammerstone followed him, calling over his shoulder, "Get going, Patera. You can't help her now, and neither can we."
Suddenly fearful of being left behind, Silk broke into a limping trot. "Didn't you say it was a man?"
"The sergeant did, maybe. I went through her pockets, and she seemed like a woman in man's clothes."
Half to himself, Silk said, "There was someone in front of me on the Pilgrims' Way, only about half an hour ahead of me then. I stopped and slept awhile-I really can't say how long. She didn't, I suppose."
Hammcrstonc threw back his head in a grin. "My last nap was seventy-four years, they tell me. Back at Division, I could show you a couple hundred replacements that haven't ever been awake. Some of you bios, too."
Recalling the words Mucor had spoken in his dream, Silk said, "Please do. I'd like very much to see them, my son." "Get a move on, then. The major may want to lock you up. We'll see."
Silk nodded, but stopped for a moment to look behind him. The nameless corpse was merely a shapeless bundle again, its identity-even its identity as the mortal remains of a human being-lost in the darkness that had rushed back even faster than the misshapen animals the soldiers called gods. Silk thought of Patera Pike's death, alone in the bedroom next to his own, an old man's peaceful death, a silent and uncontested cessation of breath. Even that had seemed terrible; how much worse, how unspeakably horrible, to die in this buried maze of darkness and decay, these wormholes in the whorl.
Chapter 9. IN DREAMS LIKE DEATH
"Patera Silk went this way?" Auk asked the night chough on his shoulder. "Yes, yes!" Oreb fluttered urgently. "From here! Go shrine!"
"Well, I'm not going," Chenille told them.
An old woman who happened to be passing the first white stone that marked the Pilgrims' Way ventured timidly, "Hardly anyone goes out there after dark, dear, and it will be dark soon."
"Dark good," Oreb announced with unshakable conviction. "Day bad. Sleep."
The old woman tittered.
"A friend of ours went out to the shrine earlier," Auk explained. "He hasn't come back."
"Oh, my! Cenille asked, "Is there something out there that eats people? This crazy bird says the shrine ate him."
The old woman smiled, her face breaking into a thousand cheerful creases. "Oh, no, dear. But you can fall. People do almost every year."
"See?" Chenille shrilled. "You can hike half to shaggy Hierax through those godforsaken rocks if you want to. I'm going back to Orchid's."
Auk caught her wrist and twisted her arm until she fell to her knees.
Awed, Silk stared up at the banked racks of gray steel. Half, perhaps, were empty; the remainder held soldiers, each lying on his back with his arms at his sides, as if sleeping or dead.
"Back when this place was built, it was under the lake," Corporal Hammerstone told Silk conversationally. "No going straight down if somebody wanted to take it, see? And pretty tough to figure out exactly where it was. They'd have to come quite a ways through the tunnels, and there's places where twenty tinpots could stand off an army."