“Obedience and obeisance!” The chiliarch jerked erect, and he and his guardsmen saluted. For a moment all of us stood like so many images.
When that voice was not heard again, the vingtner freed my hands. The chiliarch whispered, “When you leave this place you will say nothing of what you may have heard or seen. Otherwise you will die.”
“You are mistaken,” I told him. “It is you that will die.” There was sudden fear in his eyes. I had been reasonably sure he would not dare signal the vingtner to strike me there, under the unseen gaze of his monarch. Nor was I wrong; for the space of a heartbeat we stared at each other, slayer and slain by both accounts.
The vingtner barked a command, and his squad turned their backs to the curtain. When the chiliarch had assured himself that none of the guardsmen would be able to see what lay beyond the curtain when it parted, he told me, “Go through.”
I nodded and advanced to it; it was of crimson triple silk, luxurious to the touch. As I pushed it aside, I saw the faces I had expected. Seeing them, I bowed to their owner.
Chapter XXXIX — The Claw of the Conciliator Again
THE TWO-HEADED man lounging upon the divan beyond the crimson curtain raised his cup to acknowledge my bow. “I see you know to whom you come.” It was the head on the left that spoke.
“You’re Typhon,” I said. “The monarch — the sole ruler, or so you think — of this ill-starred world, and of others as well. But it wasn’t to you I bowed, but to my benefactor, Piaton.”
With a mighty arm that was not his, Typhon brought the cup to his lips. His stare across its golden rim was the poisoned regard of the yellowbeard. “You have known Piaton in the past?”
I shook my head. “I’ll know him in the future.”
Typhon drank and set his cup upon a small table. “What is said of you is true, then. You maintain that you are a prophet.”
“I hadn’t thought of myself in that way. But yes, if you like. I know that you’ll die on that couch. Does that interest you? That body will lie among the straps you no longer need to restrain Piaton and the implements you no longer need to force him to eat. The mountain winds will dry his stolen body until it is like the leaves that now die too young, and whole ages of the world will stride across it before my coming reawakens you to life.”
Typhon laughed, just as I had heard him laugh when I bared Terminus Est. “You’re a poor prophet, I fear; but I find that a poor prophet is more amusing than a true one. If you had merely told me that I would lie — should my death ever occur, which I’ve begun to doubt — among the funeral breads in the skull cavity of this monument, you would only have told me what any child could. I prefer your fantasies, and it may be that I can make use of you. You’re reported to have performed amazing cures. Have you true power?”
“That’s for you to say.”
He sat up, the muscular torso that was not his swaying. “I am accustomed to having my questions answered. A call from me, and a hundred men of my own division would be here to cast you” — he paused and smiled to himself — “from my sleeve. Would you enjoy it? That’s how we treat workmen who won’t work. Answer me, Conciliator! Can you fly?”
“I can’t say, having never tried.”
“You may have an opportunity soon. I will ask twice.” He laughed again. “It suits my present condition, after all. But not thrice. Do you have power? Prove it, or die.”
I allowed my shoulders to rise a finger’s width, and fall again. My hands were still numb from the gyves; I rubbed my wrists as I spoke. “Would you allow that I have power if I could kill a certain man who had injured me just by striking this table before us?”
The unfortunate Piaton stared at me, and Typhon smiled. “Yes, that would be a satisfactory demonstration.”
“Upon your word?”
The smile grew broader. “If you like,” he said. “Prove it!”’
I drew the dirk and drove it into the tabletop.
I doubt that there were provisions for the confinement of prisoners on the mountain; and as I considered those made for me, it occurred to me that my cell in the vessel that would soon be our Matachin Tower must have been a makeshift as well, and a shift made not very long ago. If Typhon had merely wished to confine me, he might easily have done it by emptying one of the solidly built sheds and locking me inside. It was clear he wished to do more — to terrify and suborn me, and thus win me to his cause.
My prison was a spur of rock not yet cut from the robe of the giant figure that already bore his face. A little shelter of stones and canvas was set up for me on that windswept spot, and to it were brought meat and a rare wine that must have been stored for Typhon himself. As I watched, a timber nearly as thick as the Alcyone’s mizzenmast, though not so high, was set into the rock where the spur left the mountain, and a smilodon chained to its base. The chiliarch hung from the top of this timber on a hook passed between his hands, which were manacled as my own had been.
For as long as the light lasted I watched them, though I soon realized that a battle raged at the foot of the mountain. The smilodon appeared to have been starved. From time to time it sprang up and sought to grasp the chiliarch’s legs. Always he lifted them so it fell a cubit short; and its great claws, though they grooved the wood like chisels, would not support it. In that one afternoon I had as much vengeance as I wish ever to have. When night came I carried food to the smilodon.
Once on my journey to Thrax with Dorcas and Jolenta, I had freed a beast bound much as the chiliarch was now; it had not attacked me, perhaps because I bore the gem called the Claw of the Conciliator, perhaps only because it had been too weak to do so. Now this smilodon ate from my hands and licked them with its broad, rough tongue. I touched its curving tusks, like the ivory of the mammoths; and I scratched its ears as I would have Triskele’s, saying, “We have borne swords. We know, do we not?”
I do not believe the beasts can comprehend more than the simplest and most familiar phrases, yet I felt the massive head nod.
The chain was fastened to a collar with two buckles as wide as my hand. I loosed it and set the poor creature free, but it remained at my side.
The chiliarch was not so readily released. I was able to climb the timber easily enough, locking my knees around it as I once had locked them around the pines in the necropolis as a boy. By then the horizon had dropped far below my star, and I could easily have lifted him free from his hook and flung him into the gulf below; but I dared not drop him for fear he would fall into it, or that the smilodon would attack him. Although the light was too faint for me to see it, its eyes gleamed as it stared up at us.
In the end I looped his hands about my neck and clambered down as well as I could, nearly slipping and half choking, but reaching the safety of the rock at last. When I carried him to the shelter, the smilodon followed and lay at our feet.
By morning, when seven guardsmen arrived with food, water, and wine for me and torches lashed to poles with which to drive back the smilodon, their chiliarch was fully conscious and had eaten and drunk. The consternation on the soldiers’ faces when they saw that he and the smilodon were gone entertained us; but it was nothing compared to their expressions when they discovered both in my shelter.
“Come ahead,” I told them. “The beast won’t harm you, and your chiliarch will discipline you only if you have been false to your duty, I feel sure.”
They advanced, though hesitantly, eyeing me with almost as much fear as the smilodon.
I said, “You saw what your monarch did to your chiliarch because he permitted me to retain a weapon. What will he do to you when he learns you’ve permitted your chiliarch to escape?”