Silk shook his head. "I doubt it. But even if you're correct, they would not be believed."
"Precisely. But you would be. His Cognizance is old. His Cognizance will die, tomorrow perhaps. In a surprising but hugely popular development, it will be discovered that he has named you as his successor, and you will explain to the people that Pas has withheld his rains out of consideration for me. They need only pay me proper honors to be forgiven. Eventually they will come to understand that I am, as I am, a greater god than Pas. After all that I've told you, do you retain some loyalty to him? And Echidna and their brats?"
Silk sighed. "I realized as you spoke how little I have ever had. Your blasphemies ought to have outraged me. I was merely shocked instead, like a maiden aunt who overhears her cook swearing; but you see, I've encountered a real god, the Outsider-"
Crane whooped with laughter.
"And Kypris, a real goddess. Thus I know wliat divinity is, the look and the sound and the true texture of it. You said something else that I ignored, Councillor."
For the first time, Lemur sounded dangerous and even deadly. "Which was . . . ?"
"You said that you were not a chem. I'm not one of those ignorant and prejudiced bios who consider themselves superior to chems, but I know-"
"You lie!" Doubly terrifying in the darkness, the blade of the azoth tore the plane of existence like so much paper, shooting past Silk's ear, manifest to every cell in his body, and horrible as nothing the universe contained could be. From the other side of the room, Crane shouted, "You'll sink us!" and the vessel lurched and shook as he spoke. Chips of burning paint and flakes of incandescent steel showered Silk with fire; he backed away in horror.
"One bom a biological man did that, Patera. A man who has become more." Something rang in the darkness as a hammer rings against an anvil. "I am a biological man and a god." The harrowing discontinuity that had wounded the very fabric of the universe was gone.
"Thank you," Silk said. He gasped for breath. "Thank you every much. Please don't do that again."
As the violence of the vessel's motion abated to steady thrumming, Lemur's luminous arm reappeared; his hand opened, and the hilt of the azoth slid smoothly into its sleeve.
There was a thump as Crane dropped his medical bag. "Are you inside there?"
Lemur's voice was warm again. "Why do you ask?"
"Just curious. I was wondering if it might not be like conflict armor, but better."
"Which would be of some interest to your masters in the government of . . . ?"
"Paluslria."
"No. Not Paluslria. We have eliminated certain cities, and thai is one of them. Like Patera Silk, you'll soon come to serve Viron, and when you do, you must be more forth- right. Meanwhile, let it be enough for you that I am in another part of this boat. Perhaps I'll show you when we're done with the business at hand."
"Serve you, you mean."
"We gods have many names.
"Patera, you needn't concern yourself about your paramour from the past. She's nursing Doctor Crane's patient even as I speak, and worrying about you."
Crane's voice: "You use some old-fashioned words.How old are you, Councillor?"
"How old would you say I am?" Lemur extended his shining hand. "You doctors like to speak of pronounced tremors. Can you pronounce upon that one?"
"You've held office under two caldes, and for twenty-two years since the death of the last. Naturally we wondered."
"In Palustria. Yes, in Palustria, naturally you did. When you see me elsewhere you can formulate an estimate of your own, and I'll be interested to learn it.
"Patera, doesn't all this astound you?"
"I can understand how you could be a bio with prosthetic parts; our Maytera Rose is like that." Silk discovered that his own hands were trembling and pushed them into his pockets. "Not how you could be in another part of this boat."
"In the same way that a glass conveys to you the image of a room at, the opposite end of the city. In the same way that your Sacred Window showed you the tricked-out image of a woman dead three hundred years and convinced you that you had spoken with a minor goddess." Lemur chuckled. "But I've wasted too much time already, while Doctor Crane's patient lies dying. I trust he'll forgive me, I was enjoying myself." The luminous hand held up Hyacinth's needler. "Here's Doctor Crane's fee, as specified by him. Doctor, I wish you to look at a patient. To earn this fee, you need only examine him and tell him the truth. Is it a violation of medical ethics to tell a patient the truth?"
"No."
"There have been times when I've thought that it must be. This fourth prisoner of mine's a spy, too. Will you do it? He's badly injured."
"After which you'll kill Silk and me." Crane snorted. "All right, I've lived as a quacksalver. Since I've got to die, I'll die as one, too."
"Both of you will live," Lemur told him, "because you will both become admirably cooperative. I could have you so now, if I wished, but for the present you serve me better as opponents. I will not say foes. You see, I have told this fourth prisoner that the doctor who will examine him and the augur who will shrive him are no friends of mine. That they have, in fact, seen fit to intrigue against the government I direct."
The luminosity of Lemur's hand and arm brightened, and Hyacinth's engraved, gold-plated, little needler slithered like a living animal into his open palm. "Your Cognizance? Here you are." He handed the needler to Silk. "Will you, as an anointed augur, administer the Pardon of Pas to Doctor Crane's patient, if Crane judges him in imminent danger of death?"
"Of course," Silk said.
"Then let's go. I know you'll find this interesting." Lemur threw open the door. Blinking and wiping their eyes, they followed him along a narrow corridor floored with steel grating, and down a flight of steel stairs almost as steep as a ladder.
"I'm taking you all the way down to the keel," Lemur lold them. "I hope you weren't expecting this boat to rock, by the way. We've put out-I gave the order while we were playing with that azoth-and we're cruising beneath the surface now, where there's no wave action."
He led them to a heavy door set into the floor, spun two handwheels,'and threw it back. "Down here. I'm about to show you the hole in our bottom."
Silk went first. The vibration that had shaken the boat since Lemur had threatened him with the azoth was stronger liere, almost an audible sound; there was a cool freshness to the air, and the iron railing of the steps he descended felt damp beneath his hand. Green lights that seemed imitations of the ancient lights provided the first settlers by Pas, and an indefinable odor that might have been no more than the absence of any other, made him feel for the first time that he was actually beneath the waters of Lake Limna.
The flier's broken wings were the first things he saw. They had been laid out, with scraps of the nearly invisible fabric that had covered them, on the transparent canopy of a sizable yawl-shattered spars of a material that might have been polished bone, less thick than his forefinger.
"Wait there a moment, Your Cognizance," Lemur called. "I want to show you these. You and Doctor Crane both. It will be well worth your while."
"You got one after all," Crane said. "You've brought down a flier."
There was a note of defeat in his voice that made Silk turn to stare back at him.
"They'd all gone," Crane explained. "Blood and his thugs and most of the male servants. I thought this might be it, but I lioped .. ." He left the sentence incomplete and shrugged.
Lemur had picked up an oddly curved, almost tear-drop-shaped grid of the cream-colored material. "We have, Doctor. And this is the secret. Simple, yet infinitely precious. Don't you want to examine it? Wouldn't you like to provide your masters with the secret of flight? The key that opens the sky? This is its shape. Pick it up if you wish. See how light it is. Run your fingers over it, Doctor."