“You know who you are now, sir, don’t you,” Wroclaw interrupted. There was no chance he and Haddo could escape their current cell, much less make it to the tunnel or whatever other entrance the man had used. Although the man wasn’t dry, he looked more as though a bucket of water had been poured over his head and clothes in an effort to accomplish a quick bath, rather than appearing soaked and be-mossed as swimming the moat and the length of the underwater shaft would have left him. Judging from the story of the destruction of the Karlini laboratory, there was similarly little chance of warding off an attack if that was what he had in mind. No, if this man had it in for them they might as well find it out now, and if not -
“Yeah,” the man sighed, “I’d say that’s pretty obvious, wouldn’t you? Now let’s see just what kind of mess you’ve all gotten up to in here.”
CHAPTER 20
“It is a picturesque sight,” said Max, “I’ll give them that.” The maneuvers on the field were complete. Stretched out along the turf with flying banners and darting wizard-lights, the details of its anatomy outlined by floating strips of cold-fire and accentuated by the contrasting colors of clothing and patterns of heraldry in the ranks of Nerves and Muscles and Bones and other assorted viscera and glands, was the grand figure of a human, its feet almost at the base of the Emperor’s tower, its head at the far end of the field, its left hand now raising itself to its brow in salute. The Emperor-designate, mere moments away from losing his hyphenate status, had risen from his seat and ascended to the commanding top-roost, his arms raised, garbed now in his robe of white with flame edgings.
Then the Emperor-designate was looking back over his shoulder, and down at them. “Phlinn?” he mouthed.
Phlinn Arol sighed and climbed to his feet. “Even if there wasn’t the Scapula, I’d still hate this,” he muttered. “My lines are so overwritten.”
Max was still standing, too, and as Phlinn’s head drew level with his own, Max reminded him, in a low whisper, “If worse comes to worse, just jump.”
Phlinn said “Urr,” walked around to the front of the Emperor’s dais, and planted his hands on his hips. A golden disk materialized above his head, then descended over his body, leaving him radiant and glowing.
“Should we bow?” said Leen.
“Might get you out of the line of fire, I suppose,” said Max. “Just -”
But now Phlinn Arol had begun to preach. Through some feat of legerdemain, his voice was echoing around the stadium, louder even than the ongoing roar of the crowd, yet the sound level of his pronouncement was still not entirely deafening here close to hand. “I AM PHLINN AROL!” he proclaimed. “I SPEAK HERE FOR THE GODS! BY THE SACRED COMPACT OF THE AGES, WE HONOR YOUR NEW MASTER! HERE IS THE SYMBOL OF OUR GLORY AND OUR FAVOR VESTED NOW IN THE HANDS OF YOUR EMPEROR!” Then he turned and pointed up behind him at the Emperor-designate. The golden radiance came off his outstretched finger in a stream and showered over the Emperor, leaving him shimmering as well.
The Emperor raised his arms in a wide “V”, basking in the adulation of the crowd. “Any idea what kind of goodies he’s got in mind to give out to the audience?” Max said to the half-kneeling Leen. Cementing the goodwill of the hometown constituency with large-scale Knitting gifts was another custom of the ages. Some poor country of indentured indigenes in some remote part of the continent would pay for it, to be sure, but of course the Empire was scarcely a believer in full citizenship, much less suffrage. Too, there were always the Living Mines to help equalize the balance sheets.
“I just hope it’s not books,” she told him.
The Emperor was now into his own peroration, a nimbus of lightning bolts crackling around him amid a stench of ozone that was causing coughing fits to break out in several spots around the platform. Phlinn Arol, in undoubted violation of some protocol, was edging back from the brink, his burnished aura dulling as he did so to make his retreat less obvious. He caught Max’s eye with a quick glance over his shoulder, and shrugged; Max jiggled the pauldron of his plate mail in response. But indeed, Arznaak had apparently let the moment pass. That moment, anyway.
Now the Emperor was getting around to his own big payoff, the part where he’d demonstrate he was really the chosen of the gods and the elect of the Empire by performing the traditional prodigy. He lowered his arms, the electricity crackling out along his skin and balling around his hands, lowered them until he was encompassing the vast body of the Corpus of the Empire laid out on the parade ground floor, laid out so that if you squinted at it just right you’d stop seeing thousands of heads in matching costumes and start to perceive instead the prostrate figure of a perfectly proportioned colossus... a colossus that was now unmistakably starting to glow.
And then even if you stopped squinting, you still might see the same reclining giant, its eyes closed, its chest rising and falling a good twenty feet as it inhaled and expired. And then no one in the stadium was squinting - or doing anything but putting their full attention on the Corpus - for the person-mountain’s eyes had now opened.
Twin light beams the equal of any lighthouse’s beacon stabbed up into the sky, then swiveled down to fix in their glare the Emperor’s stand as the apparition raised its head. The Emperor stared down the field at the hugely magnified reflection of his own visage and proclaimed, “I GIVE YOU THE LIVING EMPIRE!” and with a rumbling THUDD! that shook the stadium, raised a cloud of dust that obscured the field, and set the reviewing tower to swaying disconcertingly, the giant planted a hand behind itself for leverage and sat up at the waist.
“I thought this was supposed to be an apparition,” said Shaa, his voice totally inaudible beneath the echoes crashing around the arena and the avalanche-style collapse of a section of interior retaining wall not far from his and the two gods’ current position. He considered and quickly dismissed the idea of trying to get himself off the track and back to his feet; the ground was still rolling up and down, and from as much as could be seen through the rising dust cloud the manifest figure of the Imperial corpus had not yet achieved its own standing posture. Once up and ambulatory, of course, who knew what the Emperor had in mind for it.
The Corpus moved again and Shaa flew into the air, flipped end-over-end like a fried egg on the receiving end of an expert skillet-wielding chef playing to an audience, and came down flat on his back as the earth slammed up again to meet him. A shower of pebbles and small rocks cascaded over him from above. Was the adjacent section of seats seriously considering collapse? He could barely even see Gashanatantra, sprawled in similarly piscine fashion next to him, much less the bleachers, but if this latest seismic shock was the Corpus getting one foot beneath it, it was clear what would follow - another foot, and then ambulation. If there was any doubt about the structure now, these coming events would replace that with dead certainty. Of course, attempting to flee in the direction away from the potentially collapsing stands would lead one to the center of the parade field, which was not unoccupied itself, but then the Corpus would likely not be particularly concerned about eradicating every gnat rushing about beneath its feet.
He managed to grab Gashanatantra by the shoulder - a familiarity he hoped the god would not hold against him, under the circumstances - hollered, “Away from the wall!”, and then, without waiting to see whether he was being followed, set off in a rubber-legged lope over the bounding field. Shaa figured he would only be able to proceed a short distance before running into the first of the massed legions of human corpus-constituents, no doubt disarranged from their ceremonial order... but actually, of course, that represented a larger and scarcely hypothetical question on its own.