Lake of the Long Sun by Wolfe Gene

Author:Wolfe, Gene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429966207
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

FOOD FOR THE GODS

Patera Silk took two long steps back from the still tightly closed door and eyed it with the disgust he felt for himself and his failure. It opened in some fashion—the talus had opened it, after all. Open, it would give him access to the stair that led up to the floor of the cliff-top shrine, and from there it might be possible (might even be easy) to open the mouth of the image of Scylla graven in the floor above and so climb out into the shrine and return to Limna.

Commissioners, Silk told himself, and—what else had the woman said?—judges and the like came here, clearly to confer with the Ayuntamiento. Before he had killed it with the azoth—

(He had to force himself to face those words, although he had told himself repeatedly and with perfect truth that he had killed only to save his own life.)

Before he had killed it, the talus had said that having been discharged by Musk it had returned here to Potto; and by “Potto” it had intended Councillor Potto, surely.

Thus the figure who had entered the shrine and vanished had no doubt been a commissioner, a judge, or something of the sort. Nor was his disappearance at all mysterious: He had entered and been seen, presumably by the talus; possibly he had shown some sort of tessera; Scylla’s mouth had opened for him, and he had descended the stair and been conducted to a location that could not be remote, since the talus had been back at its post a half hour later.

It was all perfectly logical and showed clearly that the Ayuntamiento had offices nearby. The realization bowed Silk’s shoulders like a burden. How could he, a citizen and an augur, withhold all that he had learned about Crane’s activities, even to save the manteion?

Heartsick, he turned back to the door that had opened so smoothly for the talus, but would not open at all for him. It appeared to have no lock, no handle, and in fact no mechanism of any kind to open it. Its irising plates were so tightly fitted that he could scarcely make out the curving lines between them. He had shouted open and a hundred other plausible words at it, without result.

Hoarse and discouraged, he had hewed and stabbed it with the shimmering discontinuity that was the blade of the azoth, scarring and fusing the plates until it was doubtful that even one who knew their secret could cause them to iris as they had for the talus. It had made an earsplitting racket, causing stones enough to drop from the walls and ceiling of the tunnel to have killed him ten times over, and at length it rendered the hilt of the azoth almost too hot to hold—all without opening the door or piercing even a single small hole in one plate.

And now there was, Silk told himself, no alternative but to set off, weary and hungry and bruised though he was, down the tunnel in the faint hope of finding some other place of egress.

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