"I will, Wizard. Yet I fear not many of my people will come. Tethys is far from home, the way is full of danger, and my people fear these places. We believe Gaea did not intend for us to come here."
"Then tell them this. Say to them that to each who will come, a baby is granted next Carnival time. Tell them that if they help me in this, I will give them a Carnival the people will sing of for the next thousand megarevs." She switched to English. "Do you think that will get them here?"
Hornpipe shrugged and replied in the same language. "Only as many as the blimps can lift."
Cirocco clapped the Titanide on the shoulder, stood, and tried to help him to his feet. He was slow to rise. She stood looking at him, then stretched up to kiss him.
"I will be waiting here," she sang. "Do you know the whistle of great distress, to call down the sky leviathans?"
"I know it."
"One will pick you up soon. Until then be extremely cautious. Get there safely, and return to me with many workers. Tell them to bring ropes, block and tackle, their best winches, picks, and hammers."
"I will." He looked down. "Rocky," he said, "do you think they are alive?"
"I think there's a chance. If they're trapped down there, Gaby will know what to do. She'll know nothing will stop me from getting her out, and she'll have the others stay at the top of the stairs. It's too dangerous to go down to Tethys without me to hold her in check."
"If you say so, Rocky."
"I say so. Now go with love, my son."
33 Firebrand
"It was Gene," Gaby said in a hoarse whisper. "I could hardly believe it, but it was Gene who jumped out of the buzz bomb before it hit."
"Gaby, you have to take it easy," Chris said.
"I will. I'll sleep in a minute. But I wanted to tell you this first."
There was no way for Robin to tell how long the four of them had been on the stairway. She thought it might have been a full day. She had slept once, only to wake to the sound of Gaby's screams.
Robin could hardly look at her. They had stripped away what was left of her clothing and put her on top of one of their two sleeping bags. Valiha's first-aid kit contained tubes of a salve for the treatment of burns, but they had run out of it long before they had covered all the seared skin. They had not even been able to spare enough water to wash the sand from her adequately, for when the waterskins were empty, there would be no more.
It was merciful that the one lantern, turned low to conserve fuel, cast so little light. Gaby was a mass of second- and third-degree burns, painful to behold. Her entire right side and most of her back were charred black. The skin cracked when she moved and oozed clear liquid. She said she could feel nothing there; Robin knew that meant the nerves had been destroyed. But the reddened areas that surrounded the destruction hurt her terribly. She would doze fitfully for a few minutes, then come to tortured awareness with croaking screams tearing at her throat. She would beg for water, and they would give her a few sips.
But now she seemed calmer, in less pain, more aware of the people around her. She was on her side, legs drawn up, head cradled in Valiha's lap, and she spoke of the minutes before her immolation.
"This was his doing. He contacted the buzz bombs-they're damn intelligent, by the way. He contacted the wraiths, too; only they don't work with outsiders. I knew that, and he knew it, and he tried not to tell me how he got them to cooperate. I persuaded him." She smiled, a terrible sight with half her face ruined.
"I've got to give him credit for one thing. That stunt with the wraiths surprised me completely. He dipped the bastards in plastic. He had them all go through a sprayer that coated them with some gunk, and he marched them out to do battle.
"But then he assumed we were smarter than we actually were, and that's what fouled him up. Remember, halfway to the cable, Rocky pointed out if we'd gone north to the road, doubled back on it, and then struck out for the cable, we'd have had less distance to travel over deep sand? If we had, we'd have run right into his ambush. He had his waterproof army deployed between the road and the cable, and a flotilla of buzz bombs hiding in the north mountains to bomb us to hell after we were pinned down. Where we came through, he had only a small force, not waterproofed. He said the plastic didn't last long, it got worn away in the sand, and he had only the one machine to put it on. He had to station that with his main force."
She coughed, and Robin offered her more water. She shook her head.
"We'll have to make that stuff last," she said. She seemed weakened from talking so long, and Chris again suggested she rest.
"Got to tell this first," she said. "Where was I? Oh. You were right, Chris. We allowed ourselves to get stopped by the small force of wraiths; then we hid when that buzz bomb appeared. That was Gene, looking for us. When he saw us, he radioed his main force to join up with him. If we'd gone then, we'd have been under the cable before the infantry or the air force could have reached us. I don't think Gene would have risked his neck trying to get us from the air, but I could be wrong. He had a pretty powerful motive.
"He was after me," she said, and began to cough again. When she had it under control, she resumed her story. "The whole thing and just about all our troubles on this trip, was Gene trying to kill me. The wraiths and the buzz bombs had orders to go for me first, get the rest later if they could. Cirocco was not to be harmed, but I think Gene had other ideas."
"What do you mean?" Robin asked. "Was he under orders himself?"
"Yes," Gaby said. "Goddamn right. He really didn't want to tell me about that. I told him if he didn't, I'd see to it he lived at least a day and I'd take him apart piece by piece. I had to take off a few pieces to make sure he believed me."
Robin swallowed nervously. She had thought herself no stranger to violence, but the scale of recent events had shaken her. She knew about bloodied noses and broken bones and even death, but war had been just a tale of the forsaken Earth. She did not know if she could have done the things Gaby now described. She could have slit his throat or stabbed him in the heart. Torture was foreign to her, yet she felt the deep current of hatred that flowed in Gaby, with this man Gene as its source. Once again she knew the tremendous gap between her nineteen years in the Coven and Gaby's seventy-five in the great wheel.
"So who was it?" Chris was asking. "Oceanus? Tethys?"
"I wanted it to be Oceanus," Gaby said. "But I didn't expect it to be. Gene was getting his orders from who I suspected all along. It was Gaea who told him I must be killed and Cirocco spared. That's why when Psaltery died, I couldn't help crying out that she had done it to him. I think she heard me and told Gene to step up his efforts. She gave him a source of napalm and explosives."
"Gene was behind that attack, too?"
"You remember what happened? Chris saw the buzz bomb and pushed me off Psaltery. If he hadn't, we both would have been dead. After that Gene had to make it look like an attack on us all because it was necessary that Rocky not know they were after just me." She coughed again, then grabbed Chris by the collar, lifting herself with hysterical strength.
"And that's what you have to tell Rocky when she gets here. She has to know it was Gaea that did it. If I'm asleep when she gets here, tell her the very first thing. Promise me you'll do that. If I'm delirious or too weak to talk, you have to tell her."