"Since I-" Silk fell silent, suddenly glad that the room was dark.
Lemur laughed again; and Silk-heartsick and terrified-nearly laughed with him, and found that he was smiling. "If only you could see yourself, Patera! Or have your likeness taken."
"You . . ."
"You're a trained augur, I'm told. You graduated from the schola with honors. So tell me, can Tartaros see in the dark?"
Silk nodded, and by that automatic motion discovered that he had already accepted the implication that Lemur could see in the dark as well. "Certainly. All gods can, actually."
Crane's voice: "That's what you were taught, anyhow."
Lemur's baritone, so resonant that it made Crane sound thin and scratchy in comparison. "I can, too, no less than they. By waves of energy too long for your eyes, I'm seeing you now. And I hear and see in places where I am not. When you woke, Doctor Crane held up his fingers and required you to count them. Now it's your turn. Any number you choose."
Silk raised his right hand.
"All five. Again."
Silk complied.
"Three. Crane held up three for you. Again."
"I believe you," Silk said.
"Six. You believed Crane as well, when he told you that I plan to kill you both. It's quite untrue, as you've heard. We mean to elevate and honor you both."
"Thank you," Silk said.
"First I shall tell you the story of the gods. Doctor Crane knows it already, or guesses if he does not know. A certain ruler, a man who had the strength to rule alone and so called himself the monarch, built our whorl, Patera. It was to be a message from himself to the universe. You have seen some of the people he put on board it, and in fact you have walked and talked with one."
Silk nodded, then (conscious of Crane) said, "Yes. Her name is Mamelta." "You talked about Mucor. The monarch's doctors tinkered with the minds of the men and women he put into the whorl as Blood's surgeon did with hers. But more skillfully, erasing as much as they dared of their patients' personal lives."
Silk said, "Mamelta told me she had been operated upon before she was lifted up to this whorl."
"There you have it. The surgeons found, however, that their patients' memories of their ruler, his family, and some of his officials were too deeply entrenched to be eliminated altogether. To obscure the record, they renamed them. Their ruler, the man who called himself the monarch, became Pas, the shrew he had married Echidna, and so on. She had borne him seven children. We call them Scylla, Moipe, Tartaros, Hierax, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, and Sphigx."
In the darkness, Silk traced the sign of addition.
"The monarch had wanted a son to succeed him. Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself, but female. It is a law of nature, as concerns our race, that females are subject to males. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. She was hardly more than a child, you understand, and the rest younger even than she."
Silk swallowed and said nothing.
"His queen bore the monarch another, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe."
There was a soft click.
"Nothing useful in your bag, Doctor? We searched it, naturally.
"To continue. Their third child was male, but no better than the first two, because he was bom blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see -by daylight. Am I boring you?" "That wouldn't matter, but you're risking the displeasure of the gods, and endangering your own spirit."
Crane's dry chuckle came out of the darkness.
"I'll continue to do it. Echidna conceived again and bore another male, a boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. You must know, Patera, as we all do, the exquisite pleasure of inflicting pain upon those we dislike. He allowed himself to be seduced by it, to the point that he came to care for nothing else and while still a child slaughtered thousands for his amusement. We call him Hierax now, the god of death.
"Shall I go on? There are three more, all girls, but you know them as well as I. Thelxiepeia with her spells and drugs and poisons, fat Phaea, and Sphigx, who combined her father's fortitude with her mother's vile temper. In a family such as hers, she would be forced to cultivate those qualities or die, unquestionably."
Silk coughed. "You indicated that you intended to return my needler, Councillor. I'd like very much to have it back."
This time the uncanny light wrapped Lemur's entire body, strong enough to glow faintly through his tunic and trousers. "Watch," he said, and held out his right arm. A dark smudge beneath the embroidered satin of his sleeve crept down his arm to the elbow, then down his forearm until Hyacinth's gold-plated needler slid into his open hand. "Here you are."
"How did you do that?" Silk inquired.
"There are thousands of minute circuits in my arms. By flexing certain muscles, I can create a magnetic field, and by tightening them in sequence while relaxing others, I can move the field. Watch."
Hyacinth's needler crept from Lemur's hand to his wrist, and disappeared into his sleeve. "You say you'd like to have it back?"
"Yes, very much."
"And you, Doctor Crane? I have already given you yours, and I plan to make use of your services. Will you count your needler as your fee, paid in advance?"
The light that streamed from Lemur was now so bright that Silk could make out Crane, seated on the cot, as he drew his needler and held it out. "You can have it back, if you want. But give Silk his, and I'll accept that."
"Doctor Crane has already tried to shoot me, you see." Lemur's shining face smiled. "He's playing a cruel trick on you, Patera."
"No, he's being the same kind friend he has been to me since we first met. There are men who are ashamed of their best impulses, because they have come to associate goodness with weakness. Give it to me, please."
It was not Hyacinth's needler but her azoth that crawled like a silver spider into Lemur's open hand. Silk reached for it, but the hand closed about it; Lemur laughed, and they were plunged in darkness again.
Crane's voice: "Silk tells me you captured a woman with him. If you've hurt her badly, I want to see her."
"I could squeeze this hard enough to crush it," Lemur told them. "That would be dangerous even for me."
Silk had succeeded in untangling the silver chain; he put it about his neck and adjusted the position of Pas's gammadion as he spoke. "Then I advise you not to do it."
"I won't. Before I told you the truth about your gods, Patera, I hinted that I'd propose a new god to you, a living god to whom the wisest might kneel. I meant myself, as you must have realized. Are you ready to worship me?"
"I'm afraid we lack an appropriate victim for sacrifice." Lemur's eyes glowed. "You're wasting your tact, Patera. Don't you want to be Prolocutor? When I happened to mention it, I expected you to kiss my rump for the thought. Instead you're acting as if you didn't hear me."
"After the first moment or two, I assumed you intended a subtle torture. To speak frankly, I still do."
"Not at all. I'm completely serious. The doctor said he wished he'd invented you. So do I. If you're what he and his masters required, you suit my purposes even better."
Silk felt as though he were choking. "You want me to tell people that you're a god, Councillor? That you are to be paid divine honors?"
Warm and rich and friendly, Lemur's voice boomed out of the darkness. "More than that. The present Prolocutor could do that, and would in a moment if I told him to. Or I could replace him with any of a hundred augurs who would."