"That would have been earlier than this."
A falling drop of water darkened the hair of the white donkey's neck; another splashed Silk's own rather less tidy hair, wet but astonishingly warm.
"Good thing this didn't come a little earlier," Crane said, "not that I like it anytime."
Silk heard the rattle of shots an instant after he saw Crane stiffen. Behind him, the captain shouted, "Get down!" and something else, words drowned by the boom of a trooper's slug gun.
The rope about Silk's wrists, which had been about to fall off a moment before, seemed to tighten as soon as he tried to free his hands from it.
"Calde! Get down!"
He dove from the saddle into the dust of'the road. By a seeming miracle, one hand was free. The roar of a floater was followed by a longer coarse, dry rattles, the sound of an immense child hurrying a lath along the bars of a cage.
He scrambled to his feet. Crane's hands were free, too; he put them about Silk's neck as Silk helped him off his donkey. More shots. The captain's charger screamed-a horrible sound-reared and plunged into them, knocking them both into the ditch.
"My left lung," Crane muttered. Blood trickled from his mouth.
"All right." Silk pushed up Crane's tunic and tore it in a single motion.
"Azoth."
The booms of slug guns were followed by the greater boom of thunder, as if the gods were firing and dying too. Pale drops the size of pigeons' eggs splattered the dust.
"I'm going to bandage you," Silk said. "I don't think it's fatal. You're going to be all right."
"No good." Crane spat blood. And then, "Pretend you're my father." A torrent of rain engulfed them like a wave.
"I am your father, Doctor." Silk pushed a wadded rag into the hot and pulsing cavity that was Crane's wound and tore a long strip from Crane's tunic to hold it in place.
"Calde. Take the azoth." Crane put it into his hands, and died. "All right."
Bent above him, the useless strip of rag in his hands, Silk watched him go, saw the shudder that convulsed him and the upward rolling of his eyes, felt the final stiffening of his limbs and the relaxation that followed, and knew that life had gone, that the great and invisible vulture that was Hierax at such moments had swooped through the driving rain to sei/.e Crane's spirit and tear it free from Crane's body-that he himself, kneeling in the mud, knelt in the divine substance of the unseen god. As he watched, Crane's wound ceased to throb with blood; in a second or two, the rain had washed it white.
He put Crane's azoth into his own waistband and took out his beads. "I convey to you, Doctor Crane, the forgiveness of all the gods. Recall now the words of Pas, who said, 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath.' "
Yet Pas's seal had been disturbed many times; he him- self had scraped up the remains of one such seal. Embryos, mere flecks of rotten flesh, had lain among the remains of another. Was Pas's seal to be valued more than the things it had been intended to protect? (Thunder crashed.) Pas's wrath had been loosed upon the whorl.
" 'Go willingly,' " (Where?) " 'and any wrong that you have ever done shall be forgiven.' "
The floater was nearer, the roar of its blowers audible above the roaring of the storm.
"O Doctor Crane, my son, know that this Pas and all the lesser gods have empowered me to forgive you in their names. And I do forgive you, remitting every crime and wrong. They are expunged." Streaming water, Silk's beads traced the sign of subtraction. "You are blessed."
There was no more shooting. Presumably the captain and both troopers were dead. Would the Guard let him bring them the Pardon of Pas before he was taken away?
"I pray you to forgive us, the living." Silk spoke as quickly as he could, racing words his teachers at the schola would never have approved. "I and many another have wronged you often, Doctor, committing terrible crimes against you. Do not hold them in your heart, but begin the life that follows life in all innocence, all these\wrongs forgiven."
A slug gun boomed three times in rapid succession, very near. The buzz gun rattled again, and mud erupted a hand's breadth from Crane's head.
The effectual point: "In the name of all the gods you are forgiven forever, Doctor Crane. I speak here for Great Pas-" So many in the Nine, each with an honorific. Silk was seized by the feeling that none of them really mattered, not even Hierax, though Hierax was surely present. "And for the Outsider and all lesser gods."
He stood.
A muddy figure crouching behind a dead horse shouted, "Run, My Calde! Save yourself!" then turned to fire again at the Guard floater bearing down on them.
Silk raised his hands, the rope that had not bound him still dangling from one wrist. "I surrender!" The azoth in his waistband seemed a lump of lead. He limped forward as fast as he could, slipping and sliding in the mud while rain pelted his face. "I'm Calde Silk!" Lightning flared across the sky, and for an instant the advancing floater seemed a talus with tusks and staring, painted eyes. "If you have to shoot someone, shoot me!"
The mud-smeared figure dropped its slug gun and raised its hands as well.
The floater halted, the air blasting from its blowers raising a secondary rain of muddy water.
"They fired upon us from ambush, My Calde." As though by a trick, the muddy figure spoke with the captain's voice. "We die for you and for Viron."
A hatch below the turret opened, and an officer whose uniform was instantly soaked with rain vaulted out.
"I know," Silk said. "I'll never forget you." He tried to recall the captain's name, but if he had ever heard it, it was gone, like the name of the trooper with the long, serious brown face, the one whose father's pond had gone dry.
The officer strode toward them, halted, and drew his sword with a flourish. Heels together and head erect, he saluted with it as though upon the drill field, holding it vertically before his face. "Calde! Thank Hierax and all the gods that I was able to rescue you!"