The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,83
you.” The creature scowled. “Few enough people leave us live presents any more.”
Out of the darkness came others. A centaur, once powerfully built but now sunken around the chest. A dryad with tired eyes and peeling skin, wilting ivy in her hair. A naiad, wearing pondweed and holding a double-handled jug with a broken side. A faun came last. In her arms was Giulietta’s son.
“Give me Leo . . .”
“So that’s his name. Thank you.” The creature turned to the faun and said, “His name’s Leo.” She nodded as if Tycho had never spoken and whispered in the infant’s ear. She began to raise Leo to her teat.
“No,” Tycho said.
“He’s ours. You left him.”
“I didn’t leave him with you.”
“Yes, you did. You just didn’t know it.”
“I will kill you.” Tycho’s voice was hard. “All of you.”
“This modern world is grey and old, and what remains to thee of us? If we could be killed don’t you think we’d already be dead?”
There were faces behind the faces he could see. Shadowy glares and even sympathy. A boy so graceful his beauty could light the night edged forward, only to be cuffed back by a thickset blacksmith. Lady Giulietta would have known who they were, these tired gods and fallen heroes.
“Where am I?”
“The womb of the world. Well, that’s what the polite ones call it. The new ones, the ones who came after. We’re in the world’s cunt. The slit of the elder goddess. A Sybil lived here for a thousand years. Always the same, always changing. Kings came, and princes, demigods and heroes. Always the questions, always the misunderstood answers. Ask us a question. Any question. I promise we will answer.”
“Who am I?”
The creature rubbed its hands. “Ah,” it said. “An oldie but a goodie. I like that. Who am I? So simple to ask. So easy to misunderstand the answer. Has it occurred to you that your fear of daylight is simply that, a fear? As false and unreal as your memories before Venice? That you are ordinary?”
“Are you saying that’s true?”
The creature stared at him. “In any situation the simplest answer is usually the right one.”
“Are you saying it’s true?”
“Not at all. I’m saying you should have considered it.”
Tycho caught a memory then and wondered if it was his.
“It might as well be. If not this you, then the yous that came before.”
Ahead of him was cold space and stars in different shapes in a darker deeper sky that contained swirling discs that trailed the fluorescent wakes of a million maybe worlds. He could feel wings, visible and invisible, spreading to catch particles of light that lifted him above the disc and carried him through a void of the earliest days of creation. He was a god. One of hundreds, one of thousands.
Split into warring camps and his faction was losing, had already lost to the larger, to the stronger, to the brighter. Most of his troop was falling through a rift into a different darkness beyond. His generals hurled from the high heavens, the others simply following blindly after.
He should go after them.
They were his, where they went was where he belonged. All the same, he hesitated on the edge of going, refusing to accept blind obedience was necessary. There were others who hovered on the edge of doubt. A few, a handful, condemned to fall and yet refusing. In the darkness of a coalescing outer rim there was suddenly light and a pinprick of a sun and half a dozen, depending on how you counted them, worlds slung like beads around it.
It was a small sun.
A meagre and narrow collection of possible worlds. Small worlds around a small sun on the thin edge of a ring smaller and meaner than those around it. He accepted the choice all the same. Spreading wings to catch the light and stepping off into the darkness, he fell, but gently . . .
“Was that me?” Tycho demanded.
“Like enough to make no difference.”
“It makes a difference to me,” Tycho said crossly.
“The Sibyls were the same. Always protesting they were different. Always identical in every way . . .” The goat-heeled creature plucked at the air and pulled two fat candles into being. “If I light this from that is it the same flame?” He tossed away the fattest candle and produced a thinner one from the air. “And if I light this from that? And this, and this . . .?” The candles got smaller. The flame remained.