In Green's Jungles (27 page)

"When we were lying under the thornbushes, Fava, I wanted desperately to be warm, and I must have thought of that room up there, one of the warmest places that I have ever been in. Do you understand me? I want to you to think now of the Duko's palace in Soldo-of his bedroom, if you've ever been there. He's probably in bed by now."

"I haven't." Looking up at me, Fava closed her eyes, her broad, smooth brow wrinkling with concentration.

My first impression was that nothing was happening, my second that the sewer had become larger, or perhaps that it had always been bigger than I thought.

"A window!" Valico pointed a trembling finger (I shall never forget this) toward the other side of the sewer. "Look! I can see the stars!"

"So can I," I told him. "Go over there, Lieutenant, and open it. I don't think you're going to get your feet wet." My voice cannot have been as joyful as I felt at that moment-no voice could be.

Gingerly, Valico tried to step off the slimy walkway; but there was no walkway. The slime had become wax, the filthy stone slabs beneath it a figured floor of gemwood and singing oak.

"Good place?" Oreb sounded doubtful.

"Perhaps not. But you may open your eyes, Fava. We're here."

She did, looked around her, then clutched my arm. "There are guards."

"No doubt."

Valico threw up the sash of one large window in a long row of large windows. From outside the palace, I heard excited voices and the rattle of sling swivels, then the unmistakable snick-snack of the bolt of a slug gun opening and closing on a fresh cartridge.

"There's some sort of disturbance out there," I told Fava, "one that we almost certainly shouldn't become involved in."

Seeing an elaborate chair upon a dais at the other end of the room, I asked her whether this was where the Duko held court, and she nodded.

"Where does he sleep?"

She shook her head. "I have no idea."

"It will be on this floor, I feel sure."

While we had been speaking, Oreb had flown to the end of the room, circling behind the throne. "Bird find! Here door!"

He was correct, and the door unlocked. We discovered a reception hall, and a library with a very high ceiling and very few books, and eventually a door protected by a sentry who challenged us.

I stepped forward and offered him my sword (which he had no way to take, since he was holding his slug gun) hilt first. "We are from Blanko," I explained. "We have come at the request of the Duko to sue for peace."

"His Grandeur is sleeping!"

"I'm Fava," Fava said. "You must remember me, Marzo. Duko Rigoglio charged me strictly to report to him as soon as I got here, day or night."

There was a good deal more arguing, which would certainly have roused the Duko if he had in fact been asleep. Eventually the sentry went in to consult him, with me at his heels and Oreb sailing over both our heads to land upon the foot of the ducal bed.

"What is this!" The Duko was middle-aged and clean-shaven; for some reason I had expected a thick mustache.

Fava curtsied.

"That man has a slung gun! Take it from him!"

I told Valico to give the sentry his slug gun, which he did, and added my sword, suggesting that he put them in some safe place from which he could return them when we left. The new sword I created for myself as soon as his back was turned had a straight blade like Pig's. It also had gold chasing, which looked very nice against its black steel.

"Who are you?"

Fava looked demure. "This is Incanto, Your Grandeur. Inclito's sorcerer? I've told you about him, and I thought you might want to talk to him."

"I do." The Duko had recovered from his surprise. His full, round face was without expression, and his eyes reminded me unpleasantly of a sacred serpent that I had at first believed a part of Echidna's image in Gaon.

I said, "And this is Lieutenant Valico, of the Horde of Blanko."

Valico bowed.

Duko Rigoglio ignored him. "You gave my guard your sword. Now you've got another one. I do not permit anyone weapons in my presence."

"Then you should have taken your guard's slug gun," I told him.

Fava said, "This isn't going to get any of us anywhere, Your Grandeur. It's just like locking me up for telling you the truth, can't you see that? You'll take Incanto's sword again, and he'll make another one, or something worse."

Oreb added, "Silk talk!"

"He means me," I explained to the Duko. " `Incanto' is a bit long for him, so he calls me Silk."

"Good bird!"

Duko Rigoglio said, "Your child companion, whose status here is that of an escaped criminal as I should warn you, has described your pet to me. She indicated something a good deal smaller, however. A more conventional bird."

I acknowledged that Oreb's present appearance puzzled me as well.

"He is fat. He looks as if he were about to burst."

"No cut!" Oreb retreated to a windowsill.

"Is he the source of your occult power, Incanto?" The Duko studied him. "He seems to have very little himself. I don't suppose I could persuade you open him with your sword?"

Employing the feathers at the tips of his wings as a boy would have used his fingers, Oreb unfastened the window catch and pushed out the swinging casement, admitting a gust of icy wind.

"Certainly not." I explained that Oreb had been intended as a sacrifice, but that Patera Silk has spared his life-if indeed this was the same Oreb.

The Duko's eyes glittered. "You failed repeatedly to honor the gods as is their right."

"No doubt."

"You wakers on the Whorl. In Nessus the gods walked among us, lords and ladies of Urth, even unto Shining Pas."

"Scylla!" Oreb croaked angrily. "No god!" (Or perhaps it was "Know god!" I should ask him.) "Wet god!"

I said that if he meant that the gods and goddesses we had known in the Whorl were figures of clay, I quite agreed with him; and Fava wanted to know whether "Nessus" had been the same as the Short Sun Whorl.

"Nessus is our city," He fixed her with that glassy, unblinking gaze. "A city larger than the whorl on which it stands."

"He's mad," Fava told me matter-of-factly.

"No, never!" He sprang from his bed with agility surprising in so massive a man of middle age. "My child! My child! Hear me."

Startled, Oreb fled through the window.

"Hear me." Duko Rigoglio crouched before Fava in his embroidered nightshirt, his big face intent. "A whorl, my child… A whorl, any whorl, is only flat. Don't you see that? So much land and so much water?" His hands molded a plain around them. "Here on Blue, I'm going to claim it all. In time, hmm? In time. But it's really not so much, now is it? Not so great an area. You must have…

"No, you, sir. The sorcerer. Incanto? That's your name?"

I said that he might call me Incanto or Horn, as he wished.

"But you were in the void, the emptiness between the stars, the mirror sphere? You looked down, down upon this Blue whorl, and you saw it all, didn't you? The seas, the continents and islands, just we looked down on Urth from the Loganstone. We saw land and Ocean, as we had seen green Lune in the night sky. And it was not so very big."

He turned back to Fava, taking her by the shoulder. "Also we beheld Nessus, the undying city. But we did not see Nessus. No one save Pas, whose true name was known to us all in those glorious days, could behold Nessus."

"We came hoping to make peace," she whispered.

"Exactly," the Duko whispered in return. "Precisely so. Listen now, while I explain. There were many buildings there, countless houses of one and two and three and even four stories, and countless towers of twenty and thirty and three hundred. Of three thousand. Do you grasp it? Why, no one ever succeeded in counting the towers in the Citadel alone. That's what they say, though I never tried, or met anyone who had, and the Citadel itself… I lived near it. Did I tell you?"

Fava shook her head.

"I did, near the river, south of the Necropolis, which was unfortunate because its infinite dead polluted the water after each rain, a sort of sticky black, like tar, that might float or sink. We used to say the women floated and the men sunk, but that was a joke. Only a sort of joke. I doubt that it was true at all."

Valico touched my arm and pointed to the open window, from which a clamor as of contending voices issued. I nodded and put a finger to my lips.

"But one could have walked all around the Citadel in three days, or four," the Duko was saying. "It was only a small area, really so small that people from distant parts of the city, of which there were many thousands, actually doubted that it existed at all. Then underneath all our buildings were cellars and sub-cellars, dungeons and caverns and tunnels without end. The wall around the city, which was taller than its tallest towers, was honeycombed with passages, chambers, gun rooms, barracks, shelters, galleries, armories, cells, chapels, retiring rooms, and compartments of a hundred other sorts. One has only to sum the areas of all these, and the damp mines under Gyoll. But no one could."

I said, "We had hoped, Your Grandeur, to reach some mutually satisfactory arrangement by which our Corpo, while acknowledging your supremacy, might retain some local control over strictly local matters. That, coupled with your guarantee that property rights would be respected, might be the basis of a lasting peace advantageous to both parties."

The Duko laughed, rose, and walked over to lay a hand as clean and well groomed as any woman's on my arm. "Do you know the definition of peace, my friend?"

"Not the one you are about to quote, I'm sure."

Beyond the Duko, I saw Oreb flash past the windows-and heard him, too: "Here Silk! Silk here!"

"Peace, as you intend peace, is but the slice of cheese in a sandwich, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. Your peace would endure only until Blanko felt strong enough to throw us off, probably when we were deeply committed elsewhere. No, my friend, Pas would agree to no such peace, and neither will I. Would your Blanko consent to surrender all its weapons, every big gun, every slug gun, every needler, every sword and every knife?"

I said that I did not know, but that I felt sure the Corpo would at least consider such a demand.

"Then I make it. I make it because after you have complied with it, I can do whatever I wish."

Soon there was a hubbub in the hallway outside, over which I heard the voice of the sentry, followed by four or five shots.

"It's time for us to leave," I told Fava urgently. "Think of the hillside, of the snow. Concentrate!"

She closed her eyes, and I would have closed mine as well; but the door burst open, admitting Oreb and a dozen wild-eyed troopers I did not at first recognize as Kupus's mercenaries. One leveled his slug gun at the Duko, and fired. The slug struck the slime-draped wall across the creeping stream of fetid filth into which about a third of the mercenaries had fallen, and ricocheted again and again, echoing and re-echoing up and down the sewer as it screamed through the reeking air.

* * *

When Inclito sent me here, I expected to face a great many difficulties; but never the worst that I have encountered, which is simply that the mercenaries themselves are not here. Because they are not, I am unable to ask them, either collectively or individually, what they might be willing to accept in place of the promised silver. By forming my own auxiliary corps, I have raised a good deal of money. A fortune, although it may seem that I am boasting.

But what confusion! Much of it is in silver-of various grades and alloyed with a variety of other stuffs, generally nickel. Some of it is gold, more or less alloyed with copper and lead. It ranges in hardness from a buttery little ingot contributed by Cantoro (may the Outsider smile upon him, now and forever), to three broad disks as hard as flints.

Nor is that all. There are real cards, too, such as we used to use in the Whorl. How much silver is a card worth? How much gold? I have asked half a dozen merchants, bankers, and moneylenders thus far, and received a full dozen replies. That is scarcely to be wondered at, and not all the cards in circulation here are in serviceable condition. (To think that we used to chop them up into a hundred cardbits, never once considering that they could never be reassembled!)

And how good is the silver you want to change them for, Incanto? Let me see it.

Well, I would if I could.

I've jumped far ahead of myself, however. Let me say here quickly what our situation is. Then I will write more about all that befell Fava, Oreb, and me on Green, and how Kupus's mercenaries discovered the corpse hatch and followed us to Soldo. I still do not understand why they did not disappear into some dream of their own when Fava and I left, or why all of us returned to the sewer we hoped to have left behind us forever; but I find so many other mysteries there that I am scarcely troubled by that one. (Why did not the Duko accompany us? And was he shot, and what was the result of that shot, a visionary slug fired by an unreal trooper from an equally chimerical slug gun.)

It is only too easy to ask whether we were actually on GreenI should know, since I have been asking it ever since I returned. But what is meant by actually? Our physical bodies were not there: Valico saw them asleep in the snow. Equally, something else was or imagined it was. Our minds? Our spirits? Both, and some third and fourth things as well? At what point did Fava (I cannot, will not, write "poor Fava") die?

When I arrived, I had little idea how I might raise the large sum we require. Inclito had suggested that I assemble the leading men of the town, and provided me with a list. I did; but the topic of our deliberations was quickly changed to how we might best cheat the mercenaries of the money Inclito and I had promised them, in spite of all that I could do to prevent it.

At last I rose and slammed the table with my staff. "You are thieves," I told them. "I had thought you worthy of respect. The more fool I! You have made yourselves rich by robbing your fellow citizens-"

They protested this so loudly that it was a full minute at least until I could continue. Doubtless that was for the best; I felt my hot rage turn icy cold while they shouted and pounded the table.