Two landers were parked on either side of the chimney, anchored to it, to a couple of trees, and to a spread of boulders.
“I think,” said Digger, “they’re safe from rising water up here.”
“We thought so,” she said, without a trace of a smile.
They released the cables and tossed them into the vehicles. Digger climbed inside each and uploaded the disk.
The third lander was in the shelter of a buttress, well down the side of the mountain. They were in the weather by then, lightning walking about, rain hammering down. It was secured to five trees. The fourth was in a clutch of forest in a saddle.
They piled out of the AV3 at the saddle and climbed into the lander. Julie activated the vehicle’s lightbender, while Digger inserted the final disk.
They were ready to go looking for broadcast locations.
SANIUSAR WAS EFFECTIVELY isolated in the northwest, and needed a site of its own. They picked out a ridge in a remote area, and Bill started one of the landers forward. It turned out to be an unnerving experience because the storm kept loosening Bill’s grip on the unmanned vehicle, and they almost lost it altogether while he was setting it down.
They settled on a second site midway across the Intigo, from which they could reach Mandigol and Sakmarung on the west coast, and Hopgop and Roka to the east. It had grown dark when they established a similar location farther south, which provided access to Kulnar, Brackel, Avapol, and Kagly. Finally, in the late evening, they took the AV3 to a mountaintop, where the broadcast range covered Savakol and T’Mingletep.
LONG BEFORE THE landers were in place near Brackel and T’Mingletep, Digger had activated the programs in the north. Unlike Saniusar, which was a sprawling collection of towers and ornate houses and bridges and public buildings spread across several urban areas, Hopgop was a modest town with about a tenth the population and an inclination toward the austere. Where the western city was flamboyant and almost baroque, the New York of its world, Hopgop liked to think of itself as casual, informal, no-nonsense. Another Moscow. Its architecture was purely utilitarian; its literature (as the translators were already learning) was lucid, uncontrived, vigorous. Sometimes lurid. And often powerful. Hopgop was the intellectual center of the Intigo.
When Digger started the transmission, which occurred shortly after the torches were lit in both cities, anyone passing before the cutlery shop on Hopgop’s main avenue, or in any of the major parks of Saniusar, would have been startled to see a luminous apparition appear apparently from nowhere.
Macao had been in Hopgop for three days. She’d been performing, visiting relatives, attending shows. The real reason she was there was that she had not forgotten Digger’s prediction. The timing was incorrect. The previous day had been the ninety-third day, the day it was all supposed to happen. She’d even talked her cousins and her brother into clearing out, into sitting on a nearby ridge under animal skins, while the rain came down and the sky remained in its accustomed place.
Still, she wondered if she might have misunderstood something. Whatever the truth might be, they had clearly fallen on ominous days, and, if Digger turned out to be belatedly right, she wanted to be with her family.
It was impossible to know what to make of events. Suddenly it seemed she lived in a world of zhokas and levitation and lights in the sky. A zhoka had been seen just a few days ago in Avapol. Of course, they had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.
She wondered about the three ships, out in the night somewhere, on the wide ocean while terrible things were happening. She tried to console herself with the possibility that they were beyond the sunrise, and beyond the reach of the thing that seemed to be coming at them out of the night.
She was in her brother’s villa on the southern edge of town, near Klaktik Square. They had been at dinner when the next-door neighbor came pounding on the door. “Something’s in the sky,” he roared. And then ran off, leaving them gaping.
They opened the shutters and looked out at the storm, which had consisted only of gray rain all day. But now there was a downpour, and the evening was full of lightning. “I don’t see anything,” said her brother.
But Macao had a feeling, and she remembered Digger Dunn, would never forget Digger Dunn. She went outside and looked up. And she saw it in the flickering light: a giant bird, but not a bird, a thing that moved somehow independent of the wind, that did not seem to use its wings. She watched it vanish into a cloud.
Then she went back into the house and told her brother what she’d seen. “It’s hard to see in the storm,” he said. “Maybe it was something else.”
But it had been something not of this world. She knew that as surely as she knew the children were in bed.
AFTER ABOUT AN hour, the rain let up, and the thunder subsided. Macao was still wondering whether she should suggest they get the children and go out into the storm. Repeat the fiasco of the previous night.
Was it even possible the ocean could overflow the shoreline? Could such a thing happen?
She was thinking about it when a fresh commotion started in the street. Voices. Shouts. Running.
They hurried out, into the courtyard.
People were moving past. Toward Klaktik Square. “Miracle!” someone said. And another: “Have mercy on us.”
Klaktik was a large park, with shops and a children’s pool and a meeting house.
The street was full of shouts: “I don’t know, but it’s her.”
“What’s happening?”
“The goddess.”
“Lykonda.”
“Worst weather I’ve ever seen.”
The commotion quieted as they approached the square. There were a hundred people standing in the rain. More than a hundred. And they were coming in from all directions.
Macao stood on her tiptoes, trying to make out what was happening. There was a glow in the trees. People were crowding toward the children’s pool. Toward the light.
She couldn’t make out what it was. The night grew quieter, and everything seemed to be slowing down, the people around her, the rain, the wind. Even the children.
A woman stood within the light. Incredibly, her feet rested on the air, unsupported.
It was hard to breathe.
The woman surveyed the crowd. She seemed utterly serene, sometimes solid, sometimes as insubstantial as the clouds.
She was dressed for the forest, in green leggings and a loose yellow blouse. And she carried a blazing torch.
People in front of Macao were removing their hats, whimpering, falling to their knees.
She was the most beautiful woman Macao had ever seen. And there was something eerily familiar about her.
The power that ran through the night, that brightened the skies, ran into Macao’s mind. And she knew who the woman was.
Lykonda.
Goddess of the hunt. Patroness of the arts. Protector of Brackel.
Another being who should not exist.
But in that moment of darkness and confusion and fear, Macao welcomed her into her heart.
THE GODDESS SEEMED detached from the physical world. The wind pulled at the trees, but her garments remained unruffled. The rain sparkled when it touched her aura, but never seemed to touch her.
In all that assemblage, no one spoke.
Macao heard the boom of the distant surf and somewhere behind her the brief cackle of an oona. And she realized this was the supreme moment of her life. For the first time, she embraced the faith of the Intigo, and knew the joy that came with it.