And whose problem was the Scapula?
Well, it was everybody’s, of course, but I was the one on the spot with the possibility of doing something about him, if I could figure out just what Favored had pulled together here with his cross-rigging and counter-forcing and spaghetti-weaving. I’d already shut down the in-room intruder defenses on the system, true, so Favored couldn’t be another one to stab me in the back with my own knife, but I didn’t dare pull the plug on the Scapula until I had some idea which plug it was, and what else might be side-linked and deadfall booby-trapped to the same components. The more I tried to trace his work the more convoluted it became, and me still running more on instinct than with a firm grounding in fact. I did have the advantage that I knew I had once known everything about this place. I also knew that an ideal of any sort of engineering was that final crystalline clarity to any elegant design. When you had the key, everything laid itself out logically and rationally, in clear order.
Unfortunately, I now knew as well that Favored-of-the-Gods was a tinkerer of the first rank. Here he’d been building on the accretion of the ages to boot, and on elements he didn’t fully understand in the first place. He hadn’t been looking for elegance, he’d been after something that worked. “I ain’t telling you a thing,” he was spouting now, as he watched me goggle at the monitoring readouts and try to put myself in his head. Then his glance - which I was watching myself out of the corner of my eye - slid off me and roved up to one of the live-video feed matrices on the panel above our heads. I looked in that direction myself, and saw Favored wince as he realized he’d called my attention to something he’d rather have left hidden.
So what was it? The images were coming from the Stadium of State where the Knitting was in progress, that was obvious enough, but then who was that monstrous and apparently solid figure planted in the middle of the parade ground with his hands raised? The one with -
- with the Scapula’s face.
I grabbed Favored by the collar, lifted him off the floor, and shook him. Fortunately my own injuries were healing themselves more rapidly than was humanly possible; not surprising, actually, but it was nice to know my nanodocs were still on the job. They hadn’t been able to fix the residual nausea and more than a touch of hangover from shedding Iskendarian, but I was happy to have the better part of my stamina and the use of all limbs back. I didn’t bother to let Favored’s teeth stop clattering against each other, though, before leaning into his face and shouting, “This has gone far enough! I want him shut down now! Either you do it, or I’m going to take down everything I can reach myself and damn the consequences! You hear me?”
But he was gazing past my shoulder at another panel, which he’d remapped to show what I’d figured to be the vital status indicators of the Scapula’s captive gods, and the spreading Iskendarian virus within them.
“Hey, will you look at that!” Favored said. “He’s draining them down to the dregs - he’s really going for it! There’s gotta be gods dropping dead from terminal exhaustion all over town.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Why? What’s he need all that power for, that he’s gonna let it loose all in one binge? He -” He wouldn’t do that, would he? But it was a Knitting, and it was time for the traditional Emperor’s Gift, and the manifestation of the Corpus was in the hands of the Scapula rather than the Emperor whether or not the people realized it, and -
“Uh-oh,” said Favored. “I didn’t think he’d do that.”
“Of that sound like do I not,” I heard Haddo mumbling from beyond the glass. No question, I agreed with him.
“What?” I demanded.
“He’s cast loose,” Favored said. “He dropped out of the web.”
“Does that mean -”
Favored looked at me, chewing his lip. “Even if I wanted to, yeah, I don’t know what I could do any more to shut him down.”
“Look at that mob,” said Jurtan Mont. “How we ever going to get in there?”
“Leave that to me,” Pod Dall said.
Did you bring a pry-bar? Jurtan thought. And it was scarcely clear either just what Pod Dall’s goal would be if they did gain access to the overstuffed Stadium of State and its ongoing Knitting. What his goal would be - or whom. Pod Dall had listened to their recounting of current events and the active danger posed by the running-amok Scapula, but had been noncommittal. He had wanted to know about Gashanatantra. It was not clear whether their lack of information on that score had helped them or merely placed them on the list of expendables with no particular reason to live.
Pod Dall had seemed to have something of a soft spot for Dortonn, though, even if it hadn’t been soft enough to help him out when he’d finally keeled over in a dead faint as they’d prepared to leave Vladimir’s lair.
“He is a more hardy fighter than I had expected,” Svin had said, eyeing Dortonn’s body where it had slumped down the stairs from the carpeted dais. “I expected him to fall down hours ago.”
Pod Dall had made them carry Dortonn back up to the longest couch and lay him out there, anyway, and indeed he had still been breathing, although he had not appeared to be any longer for this world than at the outset of the escapade. But Pod Dall’s revenge would clearly not be stayed, so off they had gone.
“Who’s that?” Jurtan said now, his music sense giving him such a symphonic blare of imminent warning that he could barely hear the outside world. It had been mounting as they’d approached the Stadium, but he’d had the feeling that any danger up ahead would pale against the hazard represented by Pod Dall himself if his immediate wishes were thwarted. If this guy was the peacemaker of the gods, Jurtan already knew he’d sure hate to meet whoever planned their fights.
But perhaps he was about to encounter that entity anyway, whatever his feelings in the matter. Svin and Pod Dall followed Jurtan’s pointing finger, up, up, over the rim of the stadium, where the head and shoulders and upraised arms of a ferociously huge human figure were clearly visible, lit from below by torches and spotlights.
Pod Dall’s eyes widened and he began muttering to himself under his breath, mutterings that included more than one discernible reference to the Scapula. It occurred to Jurtan to wonder how much of the mind of the original occupant of Pod Dall’s current body was still hanging around; at the moment he was hearing more than a trace of the music that had accompanied the guy before, on their several meetings. What dealings had the man had with the Scapula, himself?
All told, it was looking like a pretty good time to get out of the vicinity, a time that might not last long, either. Between the giant haranguing the crowd and the nearer half of the city, Pod Dall with his steely-eyed glare, and Svin, who was simultaneously examining the colossus with a professional air, as though looking for critical points of vulnerability, and fingering the edge on his sword, Jurtan was definitely in the company of a crew of maniacs whose lunacy was clearly about to boil over. Then Pod Dall had him by the arm and was marching him resolutely forward. “You,” said Pod Dall, “will listen, then play.”
The manifestation of his brother had taken a few steps in the direction of the Emperor’s tower in the course of its speech, Shaa noted, picking his way through the broken-field rubble left in its wake. That was probably just as well; Shaa wasn’t sure at all he actually wanted to catch up with the thing, or what he would do if he did. Gnaw on its toe? In any case, the Corpus had to be a decoy; it would be quite surprising if Arznaak was actually inside. Parade around in public where he could be a target no one could miss? Not Arznaak, not bloody likely.