"Oh, you'll find a way."
"You display a gratifying confidence in...” Edward stared at that cryptic, mutilated face. “What do you mean by that?"
Dosh smiled slyly, twisting the crimson railway lines around his eyes. “Nothing, Hordeleader."
"Out with it!"
"The prophecy?” Dosh said reluctantly.
"What prophecy?"
Surprise ... disbelief ... “The long one? The one about the city? The Filoby Testament, about verse five hundred, or four-fifty?"
"Tell me!"
"You don't know? Truly?"
"No, I don't know."
For a moment Dosh seemed to think Edward must be joking. He shook his head in astonishment, thought for a moment, then declaimed: “The first sign unto you shall be when the gods are gathered. For then the Liberator shall come forth in ire and be in sorrow revealed. He shall throw down the gates that the city may fall. Blood in the river shall speak to distant lands, saying; Lo—the city has fallen in slaughter. He shall bring death and exultation in great measure. Joy and lamentation shall be his endowment."
28
TOO MUCH HAPPENED THAT NIGHT. IN RETROSPECT, DOSH WAS NOT to recall ever panicking or disgracing himself. He was never to doubt that he had remained clearheaded during the events themselves. He did what was needed, with far greater courage than he had ever known he possessed.
It was his memory that betrayed him. Terror piled on terror and horror upon horror until his mind could not retain them all. Reality faded like a nightmare, so that afterward he recalled only glimpses, the highlights mostly, but also a few unimportant incidents like incongruous flickers of dream. It was as if the turning point of his life had been written in a precious book and then he had lost all but a fraction of the pages before he could even look at them. Long stretches were evermore blank.
It was a night of quadruple conjunction, a wonder that few mortals ever see, coming only once in generations. Even then, most people will not be alerted in time; it never lasts long. Neither Niol nor Tharg would admit afterward that the great event ever happened. The Niolians insisted that Ysh passed close by Trumb that night, but not actually behind, while the Thargians claimed it was Kirb'l who narrowly failed to cross over Trumb. In Joal the weather was bad and no one noticed anything at all.
Dosh knew better. He witnessed the gathering of the gods that had been prophesied, and his world was changed forever.
As for all the rest ... just pictures on a wall.
The first picture: faces around a campfire at sunset.... He huddles silent on the outskirts, ignored. A dozen or more near-naked Nagians shiver in the dusk, their unpainted faces listening in awe as the Liberator promises a miracle.
He does not mention the word. He does not tell them he is the Liberator; he seems not to believe that himself. In his own mind he has no great faith that he can deliver a miracle—Dosh knows this from what he heard earlier—but certainly no one else around this fire will guess as much from D'ward's manner. He gives orders calmly, with perfect poise. He needs a miracle, so he will attempt one. To profit from it he must have his troops standing by, so he is promising them that he will open the city. If he fails he will have destroyed himself, but he is the Liberator and they believe him. It shows in their wild, childlike eyes. They would follow him into a furnace, these crude peasants. They are all muscle and faith and no brains.
They will be the Warband, the first of all his followers.
Does Dosh sense that, even then?
What says the Liberator in this image by the campfire? Alas, most of that precious speech is written on pages lost. Dosh will recall no words, except a few, right at the end, when the Liberator turns and points at him and all the warriors scream in fury.
Their hordeleader has told them he will take only one man with him to help carry the ropes. A dozen strong voices have cried out, demanding the honor. No, none of them, D'ward has said. Not the troopleaders, for they must lead their men. Nor the prince, nor even Talba and Gospin, although they know the way. No, he will take Dosh Envoy and no one else. Only he ever calls Dosh by name. Everyone else has other terms for the despicable catamite.
This is the second picture—a dozen furious warriors howling in outrage and the Liberator shouting them down. To Dosh his words are to be the beginning of the other miracle, his personal miracle, but he does not know that yet.
"Because you ask,” D'ward is saying in that second picture, “and only because you ask, I will tell you why. I need a man whose courage I cannot doubt. Be silent! Look at those marks on his face! They were made in the dark, while he was bound and gagged. See how close they come to his eyes? See how his throat was slashed? That man endured vile torture, yet did not tell his tormenter what he wanted to know. Will any of you now claim to be this man's better in courage? Will any of you exchange your merit marks for his? I will have Dosh Envoy at my side tonight, for I trust him beyond all others."
Another glimpse: Dosh weeping, as the warriors come, each in turn, to embrace him and beg his forgiveness for past slights.... Some also whisper in his ear that he will die most terribly if he fails D'ward this night, but he ignores that. He is finding the experience very strange, for many reasons. The body contact arouses him, and he knows that will disgust them if they sense it. Their admiration distresses him—why should he care what these bullocks think?
Not the least strangeness is that he knows the Liberator is lying. The Liberator is fully aware that Dosh could not have given Tarion the information he wanted. Dosh does not understand why the Liberator should tell such a falsehood now, nor why he apparently believes his own lie enough to trust Dosh, or why Dosh himself in his present terror is not refusing the suicidal honor. He has not been asked, and he does not refuse.
Do the wonders begin here?
The waiting in the trenches as the sky darkens ... gut-wrenching anxiety. Dosh and D'ward crouch amid timbers and stonework while the weary soldiers trek back to camp for the night. Below an empty sky, the temperature drops by the minute. Trumb's green disk peers between the eastern peaks, huge and ominously perfect. Nights are bright when Trumb is full.
Has the Man already eclipsed? Will he wait for true darkness? The Liberator is counting on those few precious moments of distraction to let him approach the city unobserved. An eclipse of Trumb is a time of dread, when reapers claim souls for Zath. The guards will be watching the sky and praying. It is a time of ill omen, the last time anyone should choose to launch a mission such as this.
Trumb did eclipse, of course. Trumb must have eclipsed. At D'ward's side, Dosh must have sprinted through the darkness under the stars, stumbling up the slope under his burden, forcing legs and straining lungs to greater effort before the brief blessing was withdrawn. He must have reached the base of the walls before the light returned and hence escaped the notice of the watchers above. If he hadn't, he would have died. He must have done.
He just lost the memory somewhere.
Terror.
Fingers scrabbling in dirt for purchase, feet fumbling and slipping, the coiled rope a crushing weight on his back threatening to pull him out into the abyss, a hundred feet of nothing above the rumble of the torrent. His face pressing into the rimy grass.
Why did he not remember sooner how much he hates heights?
His nose against the gritty surface of the masonry as he edges his way along, spread-eagled against the wall ... Nothing below him at all, just a hundred feet of vertical rock in the ghastly green moonlight, and below it the raging cataracts of Lemodwater. How many seconds would a man have to scream as he fell? How often would he bounce on the ledges?