So I became, in appearance at least, a pilgrim bound for some vague northern shrine. Have I said that time turns our lies into truths?
18. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ALTAR
The hush of early morning had vanished while I was in the rag shop. Wains and drays rumbled by in an avalanche of beasts, wood, and iron; the shopkeeper’s sister and I had no more than stepped out of the door than I heard a flier skimming among the towers of the city. I looked up in time to see it, sleek as a raindrop on a windowpane.
“That’s probably the officer who called you out,” she remarked. “He’ll be on his way back to the House Absolute. A hipparch of the Septentrion Guard—isn’t that what Agilus said?”
“Is that your brother? Yes, something like that. What is your own name?”
“Agia. And you know nothing of monomachy? And have me for an instructor? Well, high Hypogeon help you. We’ll have to go to the Botanic Gardens to begin with and cut you an avern. Fortunately they’re not too far from here. Do you have enough money for us to take a fiacre?”
“I suppose so. If it is necessary.”
“Then you’re really not an armiger in costume. You’re a—whatever you are.”
“A torturer. Yes. When am I supposed to meet the hipparch?”
“Not until late afternoon, when the fighting begins at the Sanguinary Field and the avern opens its flower. We’ve plenty of time, but I think we’d better use it in getting you one and teaching you how to fight with it.” A fiacre drawn by a pair of onegars was dodging toward us, and she waved to it. “You’re going to be killed, you know.”
“From what you say, it seems very likely.”
“It’s practically certain, so don’t worry about your money.” Agia stepped out into the traffic, looking for a moment (so finely chiseled was that delicate face, so graceful the curve of her body as she lifted an arm) like a memorial statue to the unknown woman on foot. I thought she was certain to be killed herself. The fiacre drew up to her with the skittish animals dancing to one side as though she were a thyacine, and she vaulted in. Light as she was, her weight made the little vehicle rock. I climbed in beside her, where we sat with our hips pressed together. The driver glanced back at us, Agia said, “The landing for the Botanic Gardens,” and we jolted off. “So dying doesn’t bother you—that’s refreshing.”
I braced myself with a hand on the back of the driver’s bench. “Surely that’s not unusual. There must be thousands, and perhaps millions of people like me. People accustomed to death, who feel that the only part of their lives that really mattered is over.”
The sun was now just above the tallest spires, and the flooding light that turned the dusty pavement to red gold made me feel philosophical. In the brown book in my sabretache there was the tale of an angel (perhaps actually one of the winged women warriors who are said to serve the Autarch) who, coming to Urth on some petty mission or other, was struck by a child’s arrow and died. With her gleaming robes all dyed by her heart’s blood even as the boulevards were stained by the expiring life of the sun, she encountered Gabriel himself. His sword blazed in one hand, his great two-headed ax swung in the other, and across his back, suspended on the rainbow, hung the very battle horn of Heaven. “Where wend you, little one,” asked Gabriel, “with your breast more scarlet than the robin’s?”
“I am killed,” the angel said, “and I return to merge my substance once more with the Pancreator.”
“Do not be absurd. You are an angel, a pure spirit, and cannot die.”
“But I am dead,” said the angel, “nevertheless. You have observed the wasting of my blood—do you not observe also that it no longer issues in straining spurtings, but only seeps sluggishly? Note the pallor of my countenance. Is not the touch of an angel warm and bright? Take my hand and you will imagine you hold a horror new dragged from some stagnant pool. Taste my breath—is it not fetid, foul, and nidorous?” Gabriel answered nothing, and at last the angel said, “Brother and better, even if I have not convinced you with all my proofs, I pray you stand aside. I would rid the universe of my presence.”
“I am convinced indeed,” Gabriel said, stepping ftom the other’s way. “It is only that I was thinking that had I known we might perish, I would not at all times have been so bold.”
To Agia I said, “I feel like the archangel in the story—if I had known I could spend my life so easily and so soon, I would not—probably—have done it. Do you know the legend? But I have made my decisions now, and there’s nothing more to say or do. This afternoon the Septentrion will kill me with what? A plant? A flower? In some way I don’t understand. A short time ago, I thought I could go to a place called Thrax and live there whatever life there was to be lived. Well, last night I roomed with a giant. One is not more fantastical than the other.”
She did not reply, and after a time I asked, “What is that building over there? The one with the vermilion roof and the forked columns? I think there’s allspice pounded in the mortar. At least, I smell something of that sort from it.”
“The mensal of the monachs. Do you know you are a frightening man? When you entered our shop, I thought you only another young armiger in motley. Then when I found you really were a torturer, I thought it couldn’t really be so bad after all—that you were only a young man like other young men.”
“And you have known a great many young men, I imagine.” The truth was that I was hoping she had. I wanted her to be more experienced than I; and though I did not for an instant think myself pure, I wished to think her less pure still. “But there is something more to you after all. You have the face of someone who stands to inherit two palatinates and an isle somewhere I never heard of, and the manners of a shoemaker, and when you say you’re not afraid to die, you think you mean it, and under that you believe you don’t. But you do, at the very bottom. It wouldn’t bother you a bit to chop off my head either, would it?” Around us swirled traffic of every sort: machines, wheeled and wheelless vehicles pulled by animals and slaves, walkers, and riders on the backs of dromedaries, oxen, metamynodons, and hackneys. Now an open fiacre like our own drew up beside us. Agia leaned toward the couple it carried and shouted, “We’ll distance you!”
“Where bound?” the man called back, and I recognized Sieur Racho, whom I had once met when I had been sent to Master Ultan for books. I gripped Agia by the arm. “Are you mad, or is he?”
“The Garden Landing, for a chrisos!”
The other vehicle tore away with ours behind it. “Faster!” Agia shouted to our driver. Then to me: “Have you a dagger? It’s best to put the point to his back, so he can say he drove under threat of annihilation if we’re stopped.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“As a test. No one will believe your disguise. But everyone will believe you’re an armiger in fancy dress. I’ve just proved it.” (We careened about a dray loaded with sand.) “Besides, we’ll win. I know this driver and his team’s fresh. The other’s been carting that whore for half the night.” I realized then that I would be expected to give Agia the money if we won, and that the other woman would claim my (nonexis tent) chrisos from Racho if they did. Yet how sweet to humble him! Speed and the nearness of death (for I felt certain I would indeed be slain by the hipparch) made me more reckless than I had ever been in my life. I drew Terminus Est, and thanks to the length of her blade I could reach the onegars easily. Their flanks were already soaked with sweat, and the shallow cuts I made there must have burned like flames. “That’s better than any dagger,” I told Agia.