In Green's Jungles: The Second Volume of 'The Book of the Short Sun' by Gene Wolfe by Gene Wolfe

Author:Gene Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: &WORKING
Published: 2011-03-11T16:49:49+00:00

14

DUKO RIGOGLIO

opened my eyes. The blade was somewhat darker, if anything; its curve may have been a shade less pronounced.

Sfido was goggling at me, his mouth gaping. "You have your needler," I told him, "and these troopers of yours, slug guns. Surely you won't begrudge me a mere sword."

Pushing past him, I began to tap the mottled gray flagstones with the point, willing one to sound hollow. "Here," I said at the third, "lift it for me, please, Fava. Help her, Oreb."

Together they did, struggling with its weight until Sergeant Gorak stepped forward to add his much greater strength to theirs. At once the stink of rotting flesh seemed to fill the whole chamber. Steep stairs, narrow and treacherous with slime, descended from the opening. I told Fava, "You had better precede me. It may be dangerous down there, but it would be worse for you to remain up here alone."

She nodded, hesitated, and at length took the first step, shuddering.

"You too, Oreb. Take care of her."

"Bird go?" he croaked doubtfully. (His voice was exactly as it had always been, though he had come to seem a sort of clumsy, feathered dwarf, and I had seen undulant arms wrestling with the flagstone as well as his now-armlike wings.) "Bird save?"

"Yes," I told him firmly. "Bird save. Protect her as much as you can. Go on, Oreb."

Fava's head sank out of sight below the level of the floor. Oreb started forward, flinched in a way I found very human, then dove after her, spreading his stubby wings almost before they were clear of the rectangular opening.

"Good-bye," I told the mercenary troopers peering into it. "This is a hard road and a dangerous one, but in the end it may lead us home. You will be safe here, I believe, until you die."

"Rajan!" Twenty hands at least reached out to stop me.

Kupus pushed his men aside, aiming his needier at my head. "You are our prisoner."

"No." I stepped down. "There cannot be a prisoner of a prisoner, Captain. We are prisoners, you and I-the prisoners of the inhumi who rule this whorl. But I intend to escape them, if I can."

Fava's voice reached me, distant and hollow. "Incanto! There's a man down here!"

Thinking that she had come upon the blind man I remembered, I nodded and went down into the opening.

Querulously, a voice behind me ventured, "Rajan ... ?"

Recognizing it as Sfido's, I turned. "Yes? What is it, Captain?"

"May I ... ? May we come with you?" He was crouching at the edge of the opening.

"No," I told him. "But they may go with you, to the place to which you go. You're their leader. You are Duko Rigoglio's representative, and their commanding officer."

Oreb sailed past, his tubby body and stubby wings suggesting an airship in miniature. "Man come!"

I stepped off the narrow stair, which disappeared as my foot left it.

"Rajan!"

It was Sfido again; I stopped and looked back up at him. "I thought I'd asked you not to call me that.

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