Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

What are they afraid might be revealed?

«Merge with the Lord .» A scream, then a rattling thud.

Rivas wondered where Sister Windchime had wound up. Some of the new recruits were crying—the sacrament was a fairly scary spectacle to someone not used to it—and he wondered how deeply that vein of worried doubt ran in her, and what would be the effects on her of today's events and conversations. He looked around as much as he could without turning his head but didn't see her. Oh well, he thought. She's not my responsibility. He closed his eyes as if in a trance and waited for the jaybush to get to him.

When he opened his eyes again and blinked around, he was startled to see that considerable time had passed. In front of him was a circular clearing littered with bodies, some limp and some twitching and huffing as if with bad dreams; a few people were on their feet out there, gaping around in a sort of drugged bewilderment. The jaybush was only two people away to Rivas's left, and he wished he'd stayed in his nap or trance or whatever it had been just a minute longer, so that he wouldn't have seen the sacrament coming.

«Merge with the Lord.» A young man jackknifed forward, and the tremendous crack as his head hit the hard-packed dirt made Rivas guess he was killed. He tried to concentrate on how he wanted to fall himself—bending the knees so he'd sit down first, try to get the arms up around the head—but a woman behind him was crying so loudly that he could hardly make his drink-fogged mind work.

The jaybush stepped up to the boy next to Rivas. «Merge with the Lord,» spoke the white-robed figure, extending a hand. The boy hissed sharply as the touch was made, seemed to struggle to remain upright, then blew out a noseful of blood and went down like a dropped armload of firewood. Some of the red spray dotted the jaybush's robe, but there was already some drying blood spattered on the hem.

«No,» wept the woman behind Rivas. «I don't want to go to the Holy City. Not so soon.»

Something about her voice struck the drunken Rivas as familiar, and he turned to look at her. She was about thirty, a bit overweight, and tangled black hair hung over her reddened eyes.

He heard the jaybush step in front of him at the same moment that he recognized the woman as Urania Barrows, and even as he opened his mouth to say something to her the jaybush's cold, bony finger touched the back of his neck.

He wasn't drunk now, though he was vaguely aware that he had been recently and would be again soon, as soon as he got back into his body. In the meantime it was pleasant to be able to see in the dark and move without using any muscles . . . though he was careful not to move too fast or too far, for he knew it would be easy to scoot right up into the sky and forget the way back.

The big tent was far below him. He was level with the hilltop where he and the girl had paused earlier this evening, and he was still rising—must have bounced hard off the ground back there—but so slowly now that he knew there was no cause for alarm. It was nice to be alone up here, distantly aware of all the others way off there to the southeast. They were linked now to the cold, sentient thing that couldn't reach him; every few seconds he perceived yet another of them going there . . . no, more like becoming there, and stopping being in the tent . . . and much more distantly there were a few isolated awarenesses in the darkness to north and east . . .one fairly conspicuous one, as a matter of fact. . . .

Suddenly he was certain that something out there in those miles of darkness was aware of him, was watching him. And he knew he could see it if he cared to, for he wasn't seeing with his eyes now . . . .

But he was frightened, and was willing himself down, trying to put some hills between himself and that awareness out there in the dark; it was all he could do to move, and it occurred to him that fright in its pure state, without the hormones and reflexes of a physical body, was paralyzing, and that if he hadn't just been in a body recently he probably wouldn't have been capable of any motion at all.

The thing out there knew he was retreating, and he could feel its amusement.

Soon, it said, though without words. It's always been me you loved best. Only.

He didn't choose to see it, but he realized that it didn't matter, for he knew precisely what it looked like. It looked like himself.

And just before the hill rose up and blocked the night sky in front of him, he caught a faint hint, more an attitude than a thought, of the thing's ambition: below him, in the tent, was a physical body steadily deteriorating; out there in the hills was a physical body steadily solidifying. Was there a link, was there some sort of transference at work that was only symbolized by the transfer of blood? Was that thing becoming him? Would it one day complete itself and walk off, leaving him in a mindless little cellophanelike bag sharing the wind currents with dandelion seeds?

Just as he was about to be swallowed up by the tent that had been growing nearer and nearer beneath him, he realized that he had picked up another half thought from the distant thing: it was glad he had used the drunk defense rather than the pain one, because the thing didn't want any . . . any . . . what word, he wondered, expressed the flavor of the concept? Something like brothers, he decided as, inside the smoky tent now, he let himself be drawn down to his body; something like . . . rivals.

Sound crashed back in on him so abruptly that he jumped like a startled cat, and his brandy-fouled digestive system rebelled at the sudden movement; he rolled to his feet and with clenched teeth and sweat-cold forehead sprinted out of the tent without looking at anything, and on the dirt track outside rid himself of a lot of the brandy and a surprising amount of wild anise. Fortunately it wasn't an uncharacteristic response to the sacrament.

After a while he walked back, dug his heels into the dirt and leaned his weight back against the fabric of the tent. It gave a little, and he wound up resting comfortably at a twenty-degree angle, facing east. Well, he thought, at least I didn't get down on my hands and knees this time and go woof woof woof. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths of the dawn-chilly air.

Suddenly it stuck him— dawn air? And yes, the sky behind the black hill was a little paler than black. Christ, he thought with instant panic, was I out all night? Has Uri's band left?

He floundered back upright and looked around. A few hooded figures were still hunching back and forth across the clearing in front of the tent, and he made himself walk swayingly over to one of them.

He grabbed the person by the shoulder. «Listen,» he babbled, «I . . . was supposed to be . . . I'm a member of that band that was supposed to go to the Holy City, you understand, but I just now recovered from the goddamn communion. They haven't left yet, have they?»

The person—Rivas couldn't tell in the dimness if it was a man or a woman—yanked its shoulder free of his hand. He couldn't see tears on the blur of the face but he could hear them in the voice as the person choked, «I—don't know. Ask the ones there by the entrance.» The figure hurried away from him and was almost instantly enveloped in the shadows of the eastern hill.

Not feeling at all reassured, Rivas reeled to the tent entrance, which was still brightly lit from within. «Has the band heading for the Holy City left yet?» he croaked at the half-dozen people clustered there. «I'm, uh, supposed to be, like, with them, all right?» He glared around belligerently.

Dark hoods turned toward him, but against the light from inside the tent he couldn't see faces. «They left hours ago, brother,» a man said in not a very friendly tone. «And their shepherd oversaw the loading of them all into a wagon, and he made sure he had every one of them, even the unconscious ones.» The man took a step closer. «What's your name, brother? Trying to get into the Lord's city by lying is a pretty serious sin.»