The Buttoned Sky Part 14

In the stables, Lady Nirea ordered her second best horse, another roan stallion, saddled and laden with the portmanteau on a special rack attached to the rear of the cantle. The usual trappings, the fancy reins and broidered saddlecloths, she had the stableman leave off; she didn't want to call attention to the fact that she was Ewyo's daughter.

When the roan was ready, she mounted, and turning to the stableman, a young rucker with shifty eyes and a shy, retiring chin, she asked steadily, "Are you a rebel?"

"Me? No, Lady! Do I look crazy?"

"You look sneaky, but smart enough." She leaned over the saddlebow toward him. "Tell me the truth. Don't be afraid, you fool. I am the Lady of the Mink." It was a t.i.tle she uttered proudly now. Nirea of Dolfya had been forced to think this day, and it had changed her greatly.

The stableman backed off a little, his pasty face writhing with tics.

"My Orb, Lady, I don't know what you're thinking of! You, Ewyo's girl, calling yourself such a name--"

Her roan was trained to the work she now put him to; a number of times she'd used him for it in the streets of Dolfya, just for sport, out of boredom. Now she p.r.i.c.ked his ribs with the point of her sharp-toed shoes, just behind the foreleg joints, and said, "At 'em, boy!" The tall beast reared up and danced forward, hoofs thrashing the air. The stableman shrieked, took a step back, and threw up his arms as one iron-shod hoof smashed into his face. Then the roan was doing a kind of quick little hop on his body, and red blood ran out over the packed-earth floor.

"If you were a rebel, you were too craven about it to be much good to your people," Nirea said, looking at the body. "If you weren't, then your mouth is shut concerning me." She wheeled the roan and trotted out of the stable.

By the gate in the wall a tall figure waited, white in the early moon's light.

"Jann!" said Nirea, with surprise and fear. Her older sister had always bullied her; Nirea was unable to wholly conquer the dread of this amber-eyed, sharp-eared woman. Jann stood with one hand on the gate, her high b.r.e.a.s.t.s and lean aristocrat's profile outlined against the dark black-green of the woods behind her. Now she turned her head to look up at Nirea.

"What in the seven h.e.l.ls are you doing in that rucker's outfit? Where are you going?"

"None of your business. Get out of my way."

Jann stepped forward and grasped the bridle at the roan's mouth. "Get down here, you young whelp. I'm going to beat you--and then hand you over to Ewyo to see what's to be done with you."

Nirea never knew, though afterwards she thought of it often, whether she touched her horse's ribs deliberately or by accident. All she knew was that suddenly he had thrown his forequarters up into the air, that Jann was screaming, twisting aside, that the roan was smashing down....

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Jann lay on the gra.s.s, and her profile was no longer aristocratic; nor were her b.r.e.a.s.t.s smooth and sleek and inviolate.

Nirea sobbed, dry-eyed, turned the roan away, leaned over to push open the gate, and cantered off down the silent road, numb with horror, yet conscious of a small thrill of gratification, somewhere deep in her feral gentrywoman's soul. Nineteen years of knuckling under to Jann, of taking insults and cuffs and belittling, were wiped out under the flashing hoofs of her roan stallion.

Now where should she ride? She was a rebel herself, molded into one by her father's actions and her memories of the Mink. If he were dead, that great chocolate-haired brute, then she would simply ride straight away from Dolfya until she found a place to live, and there plan at leisure.

But if he were alive, then she would be his woman.

She touched the horse to a gallop, and sped toward the only place she could think of where she might get news of him: the mines.

Someone scuttled off the road before her; she reined in, peered unsuccessfully into the darkness, and called softly, insistently, "If you're a rucker, please come out! Please come here!"

A rustle in dry brush was her answer. She tried a bolder tack. "It's the Lady of the Mink who commands it!"

After a moment a man stepped onto the road from a clump of bracken. Red were his hair and beard in the moon, and the white walleye stared blindly. Fate, chance, the G.o.ds--no, not the false, horrible globes, but whatever G.o.ds there might be elsewhere--had crossed her path with Rack, the giant whom she trusted more than any other rucker.

"Rack!" she called quietly. "Come here, man."

He was at her stirrup. "What are you doing, Lady?" His voice was anxious:

"I'm joining the rebels, big man. Where can I find the Mink?"

"I don't know. Lady, are you mad? The rebels are saying that the G.o.ds are overthrown and there will be gentry blood running all over Dolfya by noon tomorrow. They're out of their heads."

"No, Rack, they're honest men fighting a hideous corruption." She told him rapidly what she'd seen in her father's room. "I don't know exactly what it means, 'but it's bad--degrading, horrible! I don't want to be a gentrywoman any longer. I--I'm the Mink's girl. Listen," she said, leaning over to him, "he took me two days ago, and Revel is my man, h.e.l.l or orbs notwithstanding. Now where is he?"

"I've heard he's alive," said Rack slowly. "I thought he would be; he's too tough to kill. Where he is, no one knows."

"Do the rebels trust you?"

"No." His face turned up to hers, honest and bewildered. "I'm of two minds.... I serve the G.o.ds, as any sane man must, but I have seen things...."

"So have I. Rack, come with me. We must find the Mink."

He bit his lip. Then he took hold of her stirrup. She thought he was going to pull her off, and edged her toes forward toward the signal points of her roan; but he merely said, "I'll hang on to this and run.

Go ahead, Lady."

She tapped the horse to a canter, feeling better than she had in hours.

Rack was a servant (say rather an ally) worth four other men.

"Head for the mines," grunted Rack. Her own idea. Surely it must be worth something. Soon they were coming into the coal valley. G.o.d-guards shone with an eerie and now-abominable golden light at the various entrances. "Which is Revel's?" she asked.

"Up there. He wouldn't be there, but if I can get past the guard, and there's no reason I should be stopped, there are men on our level, the fourth down, who might know about him. There's no other place to check.

I don't know the meeting places. I have never been a rebel." He seemed to brood darkly for a minute, then added, "Before!"

They hobbled the horse in a nook of upended rocks, and she hid the portmanteau under some brush. They walked to the mine, she now remembering the location by certain landmarks, and Rack said, "There's no G.o.d showing. That's strange."

"I'll go with you as far as I can. If we do meet a G.o.d, I can explain myself mentally; after all, I'm of the gentry. I'm not in danger."

"I hope not." He helped her up the shelf, and they walked furtively into the tunnel. No sign of anything--till Rack stumbled over the corpse of a zanph. Bending, Nirea saw beyond it the sack and draining ichor of a globe.

"The rebels have been here!"

"Aye." He straightened, his white eye shining in the light of a distant lantern. "How can a G.o.d die?" he asked, in a child's puzzled tone.

"Lady, no G.o.d ever died before. They don't die--'tis in the Credo. How can these rebels slay them?"

"Maybe no one ever tried before. Come on." She hurried to the ladders.

Blue-tinged, mouth agape and eyes upturned without sight, there lay a priest, half over the lip of the shaft. He had been de-throated by a pickax.

"This looks like Revel's ferocious work," said Rack. "I hope he's alive.

Yes, I do hope so."

"When I last saw him, riding off h.e.l.l-for-leather on my nag, he was extremely alive, mother-naked and covered with blood but as alive as I am this instant." She went down the ladder hand under hand past three levels, swung off at the fourth. Another dead man lay at her feet; this was a squire, a youngish man in plum and scarlet, very brutally slain by a pick-slash in the brain. It was a man she knew, and momentarily she felt herself a traitor to her kind; then she thought of Ewyo's vices, corruptions, and she snorted defiantly. His gun, its stock remounted and a sh.e.l.l rammed home, was in her hand. She went forward, striding like a man ... and a man who knew what he meant to do.

The end of the tunnel was illuminated vividly by many blue lanterns, and presented to their startled eyes an horrific scene of carnage. The dead lay in piles, in one and twos and fours, their brains splashed on the walls, their guts smeared across the floor, their skulls cloven and their bodies rent. Ruckers lay here, miners and gentry-servants. Squires wallowed lifeless in pools of their highborn blood. Snake-headed zanphs clawed in their rigor at the dead flesh of priests, of rebels, of squires. Here and there lay the vacant sacks that had been G.o.ds. At Nirea's feet stretched a man built like Revel, who might _be_ Revel, for his face was gone, burnt away by the touch of the terrible orb-aura at full strength. No, she realized even as she swayed back, it was not he, for this man's body was unscarred, and Revel must be looking like a skinned hare if he yet lived.

What a brawl this must have been! She was about to speak to Rack when she heard a familiar voice, booming brazenly out in the silence of the mine. It came from the black hole at the end of the tunnel.