“Yes,” said Jarre, brushing her chin with the end of the feather quill. “I think that will be most satisfactory. You know that we are likely to draw our biggest crowd yet. They say that some scrifts are even talking of walking off the job-a thing absolutely unprecedented in the history of Drevlin!”
Limbeck was startled enough by the tone of her voice to lift his myopic gaze from his paper and stare vaguely in her general direction. In reality, all he could see of her was a squarish blur surmounted by a lump that was her head. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew her well enough to envision them sparkling with pleasure.
“My dear, is that wise?” he said, holding his pen poised above the paper and unconsciously allowing a large drop of ink to splat right in the center of his text. “It’s certain to anger the High Froman and the clarks-“
“I hope it does!” Jarre stated emphatically, much to Limbeck’s consternation. Nervously he set his elbow in the ink splot.
“Let him send his coppers to break up our meeting,” Jarre continued. “We’ll gain hundreds more followers!”
“But there could be trouble!” Limbeck was aghast. “Someone could get hurt!”
“All in the name of the cause.” Jarre shrugged and returned to her work.
Limbeck dropped another ink blot. “But my cause has always been peace. I never meant for people to get hurt!”
Rising to her feet, Jarre cast a swift meaningful glance at Haplo, reminding Limbeck that the god-who-wasn’t was listening. Limbeck flushed and bit his lip, but shook his head stubbornly, and Jarre moved over to his side. Lifting up a rag, she wiped away a particularly large ink spot on the end of his nose.
“My dear,” she said, not unkindly, “you’ve always talked about the need for change. How did you think it would happen?”
“Gradually,” said Limbeck. “Gradually and slowly, so that everyone has time to get used to it and comes to see that it is for the best.”
“That is so like you!” sighed Jarre.
A WUPPer stuck his head through the hole in the wall, seeking to attract Jarre’s attention. She frowned at him severely and the Geg appeared slightly daunted but held his ground, waiting. Turning her back on the WUPPer, Jarre smoothed Limbeck’s wrinkled brow with a hand rough and callused from hard work.
“You want change to come about nicely and pleasantly. You want to see it just sort of slip up on people so that they don’t notice it until they wake up one morning and realize that they’re happier than they were before. Isn’t that true, Limbeck?”
Jarre answered her own question. “Of course it is. And it’s very wonderful and very thoughtful of you and it’s also very naive and very stupid.” Leaning down, she kissed him on the crown of the head, to rob her words of their sting. “And it’s just what I love about you, my dear. But haven’t you been listening to Haplo, Limbeck? Give part of your speech now, Haplo.”
The WUPPer who had been waiting to see Jarre turned to shout to the crowd, “Haplo’s going to give his speech!”
The Gegs standing in the street broke into rousing cheers and as many as could possibly fit squeezed heads, arms, legs, and other body parts in through the hole in the wall. This somewhat alarming sight caused the dog to leap to its feet. Haplo patted the dog down and obligingly began to orate, speaking loudly in order to be heard above the crunch, whiz, bang of the Kicksey-Winsey.
“You Gegs know your history. You were brought here by those you call the ‘Mangers.’ In my world, they are known as the Sartan and they treated us as they did you. They enslaved you, forced you to work on this thing that you know as the Kicksey-Winsey. You consider it to be a living entity, but I tell you that it’s a machine! Nothing more! A machine kept running by your brains, your brawn, your blood!
“And where are the Sartan? Where are these so-called gods who claimed that they brought you-a gentle, peaceful people-here to protect you from the Welves? They brought you here because they knew they could take advantage of you!
“Where are the Sartan? Where are the Mangers? That is the question we must ask! No one, it seems, knows the answer. They were here and now they’re gone and they’ve left you to the mercy of the minions of the Sartan, those Welves you were taught to believe were gods! But they’re not gods, either, any more than I am a god-except for the fact that they live like gods. Live like gods because you are their slaves! And that’s how the Welves think of you!
“It’s time to rise up, throw off your chains, and take what is rightfully yours! Take what has been denied you for centuries!”
Wild applause from the Gegs peering through the hole cut off. Jarre, eyes shining, stood with clasped hands, her lips moving to the sound of the words, which she had memorized. Limbeck listened, but his eyes were downcast, his expression troubled. Though he, too, had heard Haplo’s speech often, it seemed that only now was he really hearing it for the first time. Words such as “blood,” “rise up,” “throw off,” “take,” leapt up, growling, like the dog at Haplo’s feet. He had heard them, perhaps even said them himself, but they had been only words. Now he saw them as sticks and clubs and rocks, he saw Gegs lying in the streets or being herded off to prison or being made to walk the Steps of Terrel Fen.
“I never meant this!” he cried. “Any of this!” Jarre, her lips pressed tightly together, strode over and, with a vicious jerk, flung down the blanket that had been hung up over the hole in the wall. There were disappointed murmurings from the crowd whose view inside was cut off.
“Whether you did or you didn’t, Limbeck, it’s gone too far now for you to stop it!” she snapped. Seeing the harried expression on her beloved’s face, she softened her voice. “There are pain and blood and tears at every birth, my dear. The baby always cries when it leaves its safe, quiet prison. Yet if it stayed in the womb, it would never grow, never mature. It would be a parasite, feeding off another body. That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve become! Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?”
“No, my dear,” said Limbeck. The hand holding the pen was shaking. Ink drops were flying everywhere. He laid it down across the paper on which he’d been writing and slowly rose to his feet. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Jarre. “The crowds-” Limbeck blinked. “Oh, yes. Of course. You’re right.” “You’re exhausted. All this traveling and excitement. Go lie down and take a nap. I’ll finish your speech. Here are your spectacles,” Jarre said briskly, plucking them from the top of Limbeck’s head and popping them onto his nose. “Up the stairs and into bed with you.”
“Yes, my dear,” said Limbeck, adjusting the spectacles that Jarre had, with well-meaning kindness, stuck on lopsided. Looking through them that way-with one eyeglass up and the other down-made him nauseous. “I … think that would be a good idea. I do feel … tired.” He sighed and hung his head. “Very tired.”
Walking to the ramshackle stairs, Limbeck was startled to feel a wet tongue lick across his knuckles. It was Haplo’s dog, looking up at him, wagging its tail.
“I understand,” the animal seemed to say, its unspoken words startlingly clear in Limbeck’s mind. “I’m sorry.”
“Dog!” Haplo spoke to it sharply, calling it back.
“No, that’s all right,” said Limbeck, reaching down to give the animal’s sleek head a gingerly pat. “I don’t mind.”
“Dog! Come!” Haplo’s voice had an almost angry edge to it. The dog hurried back to its master’s side, and Limbeck retired up the stairs.
“He’s so very idealistic!” said Jarre, gazing after Limbeck in admiration mixed with exasperation. “And not at all practical. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Keep him around,” suggested Haplo. He stroked the dog’s long nose to indicate that all was forgiven and forgotten. The animal lay down, rolled over on its side, and closed its eyes. “He gives your revolution a high moral tone. You’ll need that, when blood starts to flow.”
Jarre looked worried. “You think it will come to that?”
“Inevitable
,” he said, shrugging. “You said as much yourself, to Limbeck.”
“I know. It seems, as you say, that it is inevitable, that this is the natural end of what we began long ago. Yet it has seemed to me lately” - she turned her eyes to Haplo - “that we never seriously turned our thoughts to violence until you came. Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t really a god.”
“Why is that?” Haplo smiled.
“Your words have a strange power over us. I hear them and I keep hearing them, not in my head, but in my heart.” She placed her hand on her breast, pressing it as if it pained her. “And because they’re in my heart, I can’t seem to think about them rationally. I just want to react, to go out and do … something! Make somebody pay for what we’ve suffered, what we’ve endured.”
Haplo rose from the chair and came over to Jarre, kneeling down so that he put himself at eye level with the short, stocky Geg. “And why shouldn’t you?” he said softly, so softly that she couldn’t hear over the whumping, whooshing of the Kicksey-Winsey. Yet she knew what he said, and the pain in her heart increased. “Why shouldn’t you make them pay? How many of your people have lived and died down here, and all for what? To serve a machine that eats up your land, that destroys your homes, that takes your lives and gives nothing to you in return! You’ve been used, betrayed! It’s your right, your duty to strike back!”
“I will!” Jarre was caught, mesmerized by the man’s crystal blue eyes. Slowly the hand over her heart clenched into a fist.
Haplo, smiling his quiet smile, rose and stretched. “I think I’ll join our friend in a nap. It’s liable to be a long night.”
“Haplo,” called Jarre, “you said you come from below us, from a realm that we … that no one knows is down there.”
He did not reply, merely looked at her.
“You were slaves. You told us that. But what you haven’t told us is how you came to crash on our isle. You weren’t”-she paused and licked her lips, as if to make the words come more easily-“running away?”
One corner of the man’s mouth twitched. “No, I wasn’t running. You see, Jarre, we won our fight. We are slaves no longer. I’ve been sent to free others.”
The dog raised its head, turning to stare sleepily at Haplo. Seeing him leaving, the dog yawned and got up, hind end first, stretching out its front legs luxuriously. Yawning again, it rocked forward, stretching the back legs, then lazily accompanied its master up the stairs.
Jarre watched, then shook her head, and was sitting down to finish Limbeck’s speech when a thumping against the curtain recalled her to her duties. There were people to meet, pamphlets to be delivered, the hall to be inspected, parades to be organized.
The revolution just wasn’t much fun anymore.
Haplo mounted the stairs carefully, keeping to the inside against the wall. The knobwood boards were cracked and rotting. Large snaggletoothed gaps waited to snare the unwary and send them crashing down to the floor below. Once inside his room, he lay down on the bed, but not to sleep. The dog jumped up on the bed next to him and rested its head on the man’s chest, bright eyes fixed on his face.
“The woman is good, but she won’t serve our purpose. She thinks too much, as my lord would say, and that makes her dangerous. What we need in this realm to foment chaos is a fanatic. Limbeck would be ideal, but he must have that idealistic bubble of his burst. And I’ve got to leave this place, to carry on with my mission-investigate the upper realms and do what I can to prepare the way for the coming of my lord. My ship is destroyed. I have to find another. But how…how?”
Musing, he fondled the dog’s soft ears. The animal, sensing the man’s tension, remained awake, lending its small support, and slowly Haplo relaxed. Opportunity would come. He knew it. He had only to watch for it and take advantage of it. The dog closed its eyes with a contented sigh and slept, and after a few moments, so did Haplo.
CHAPTER 31
WOMBE, DREVLIN, LOW REALM
“ALFRED.”
“Sir?”
“Do you understand what they’re saying?”
Hugh motioned to Bane, chatting with the Geg, the two of them scrambling across the coralite. Storm clouds gathered at their backs and the wind was rising and keened eerily among the bits and pieces of lightning-blasted coralite. Ahead of them was the city Bane had seen. Or rather, not a city but a machine. Or perhaps a machine that was a city.
“No, sir,” said Alfred, looking directly at Bane’s back and speaking more loudly than was usual for him. “I do not speak the language of these people. I do not believe that there are many of our race, or the elves either, for that matter, who do.”
“A few of the elves speak it-those who captain the waterships. But if you don’t speak it, and I assume that Stephen didn’t, then where did His Highness learn it?”
“How can you ask, sir?” said Alfred, glancing significantly toward the heavens.
He wasn’t referring to the storm clouds. Up there, far above the Maelstrom, was the High Realm, where dwelt the mysteriarchs in their self-imposed exile, living in a world said by legend to be wealthy beyond the dreams of the greediest man and beautiful beyond the imagining of the most fanciful.
“Understanding the language of a different race or culture is one of the simpler of the magical spells. I wouldn’t be surprised if that amulet he wears-Oh!”
Alfred’s feet decided to take a side trip down a hole and took the rest of Alfred with them. The Geg stopped and looked around in alarm at the man’s cry. Bane said something, laughing, and he and the Geg continued on their way. Hugh extricated Alfred and, keeping his hand on his arm, guided him rapidly over the rough ground. The first raindrops were falling out of the sky, hitting the coralite with loud splatters.
Alfred cast an uneasy sidelong glance at Hugh, and the Hand read the unspoken appeal to keep his mouth shut. In that appeal, Hugh had his answer, and it wasn’t the one Alfred had given for Bane’s benefit. Of course Alfred spoke the Gegs’ language. No one listened intently to a conversation he couldn’t understand. And Alfred had been listening intently to Bane and the Geg. What was more interesting-to Hugh’s mind-was that Alfred was keeping his knowledge secret from the prince.
Hugh thoroughly approved spying on His Highness, but that opened the other nagging question. Where-and why-had a chamberlain learned to speak Geg? Who-or what-was Alfred Montbank?
The storm broke in all its deadly fury and the humans and the Gegs made for the city of Wombe at a dead run. Rain fell in a gray wall in front of them, partially obscuring their vision. But the noise made by the machine was, fortunately, so loud that they could hear it over the storm, feel its vibrations underfoot, and knew they were headed in the right direction.
A crowd of Gegs were waiting by an open doorway for them and hustled them all inside the machine. The sounds of the storm ceased, but the sounds of the machine were louder, clanking and banging above, around, below, and beyond. Several Gegs, who appeared to be armed guards of some sort, plus a Geg dressed up to look like an elflord’s footman, were waiting-somewhat nervously-to greet them.
“Bane, what’s going on?” Hugh demanded loudly, shouting to be heard above the racket made by the machine. “Who is this guy and what does he want?”
Bane looked up at Hugh with an ingenuous grin, obviously highly pleased with himself and his newfound power. “He’s the king of his people!” shouted Bane.
“What?”
“King! He’s going to take us to some sort of judgment hall.”
“Can’t he take us somewhere quiet?” Hugh’s head was beginning to throb.
Bane turned to the king with the question. To Hugh’s amazement, all the Gegs stared at him in horror, shaking their heads emphatically.
“What the hell is the matter with them?”
The prince began to giggle.
“They think you’ve asked for a place to go to die!”
At this juncture, the Geg dressed in silk hose, knee breeches, and a worn velvet doublet was introduced to Bane by
the Geg king. The velvet-clad Geg threw himself to his knees. Taking Bane’s hand, he pressed it against his forehead.
“Who do they think you are, kid?” Hugh asked.
“A god,” Bane answered airily. “One they’ve been looking for, it seems. I’m going to pass judgment on them.”
The Gegs led their newly discovered gods through the streets of Wombe-streets that ran up, under, and straight through the Kicksey-Winsey. Hugh the Hand was not awed by many things in this world-not even death impressed him much-but he was awed by the great machine. It flashed, it glittered, it sparkled. It whumped and thwanged and hissed. It pumped and whirled and shot out blasts of searing hot steam. It created arcs of sizzling blue lightning. It soared higher than he could see, delved deeper than he could imagine. Huge gears engaged, huge wheels revolved, huge boilers boiled. It had arms and hands and legs and feet, all made of shining metal, all busily engaged in going somewhere other than where they were. It had eyes that shed a blinding light and mouths that screeched and hooted. Gegs crawled over it, climbed up it, clambered down into it, turned it, tapped it, and tended it with obvious loving care and devotion.
Bane, too, was overwhelmed. He gazed with wide-open eyes, his mouth gaping in ungodlike wonder.
“This is amazing!” breathed the boy. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”
“You haven’t, Your Wurship?” exclaimed the High Froman, looking at the child-god in astonishment. “But you gods built it!”
“Oh, er, yes,” Bane stammered. “It’s just that I meant I’d never seen … anything like the way you’re taking care of it!” he finished with a rush, exhaling the words in relief.
“Yes,” said the high dark with dignity, his face glowing with pride. “We take excellent care of it.”
The prince bit his tongue. He wanted very much to ask what this wondrous machine did, but it was obvious that this little king fellow expected him to know everything-not an unreasonable assumption in a god. Bane was on his own in this too, his father having imparted to him all the information he had on the great machine of the Low Realm. This being a god wasn’t as easy as it had first appeared, and the prince began regretting he’d agreed to it so fast. There was this judgment thing. Who was he judging, and why? Would he be sending anyone to the dungeons? He really needed to find out, but how?
Dragon Wing (The Death Gate Cycle #1) Page 25
