|
Page 6.
 "Think again, Brother Farr. Time stands still for nobody. Together with his advisor, Evoker Voreill, Balesso has plans moving forward. "
I would later learn that three kitchen women, two of them cleaners and one of them a supervisor, had seen us through the plate glass windows inside Level 23 where Timony Eastgarden and I stood on the lowest rung of the ladder where it spills onto the uppermost utility access plaza. Normally, we would have been undetected, but the three women were rising in a work lift to repair clogged intakes to the kitchen stoves. The police file reports that they stood gaping at the sight of a wild Triber with his hands on the shoulders of a pure and dedicated monk, as if converting him to heathenish liberties and false thinking. The women reported seeing the monk reaching up to touch the Tribe’s beard as if in a gesture of friendship or affection.
"What has become of Sudie?" I asked, reaching up to touch his dirty beard as if it might make me believe I was not having a disturbed dream.
"She is as well as one might expect," he said. "My parents have died of grief and despair. My two other siblings have gone to a town on Olympus Mons to become servants, but I am not welcome in any of the domes and towns, and my sister has remained with me until I can find her a husband."
The unthinkable had not yet entered my mind. "Wish her well," I said, imagining her traipsing off with some unwashed brute that resembled Timony, the former Brother Gaunt, or Shan the Tribesman as he now called himself. "What about the Holy Mother?"
"There isn't much time," he said, starting to withdraw up the stairs to the plate he had secretly unbolted from the concrete after flying here in a glider that was now attached, like a butterfly, to the outside wall of the tower. I deduced all that later, of course. "The Holy Mother will be assassinated here in the Granistons when the she comes for the annual Storm ceremonies."
"Why?" I shook my head, trying to imagine anyone murdering the Popess of our culture. It would be like snuffing the sacred Sun Fire itself. The sisterhood of priestesses had kept the flame alive since primordial times, and Graniston was one of the few privileged places to possess such a sacred site. There were six in all, and each year the Popess or Holy Mother performed her all-important Storm rites in a different one of these locations. In a few days, Graniston would once again be favored by this rotation, and we would install colored lights on strings and exchange gifts.
"A duke named Shuatro Balesso was expelled for plotting against his king in the high kingdom of Olympus Mons. He was sent out with his family and servants in the dark of Storm Season some years ago, and they all perished. His wives, his children. Only he survived. Balesso came down among the Tribes and made a new life for himself, but vowed to avenge his family. He entered a monkery far on the edge of the highlands, and quickly worked his way up to be an assistant abbot in the main fire temple out on the shallow seas. He managed to corrupt one of the young, impressionable sisters, who secretly admitted him to the database of knowledge so that he is like a shadow on the Holy Mother's back. He has taken control of the global media, and has attracted a large and fanatical following of dupes who believe anything he says, and will do any dirty work for him."
"But why Graniston? What have we got to do with what goes on in the high kingdoms?"
"Balesso leads a secret group of plotters who want to turn Mars into a single state run by him, a king above both king and Free Domers. They know of a powerful secret buried deep in the ground, which dates to ancient times. With that secret, if they can find it and harness it, Balesso hopes to gain total power on Mars."
Before I could ask another question, and before he could say another word, we were startled by a loud shout. Then a babble of voices broke loose as security men and women came pouring up the stairs. There must have been a dozen of them, half the Dome's force of law and order in dark blue. With them were one or two brown-robed Temple cops. "There he is!" "Grab him!" "Hold the monk!"
So the Temple cops pressed me against the cold stone wall, while the blue-jumps pounded up the stairs after the escaping Timony. He turned and kicked them so that a mass of them fell down in a jumble. Forbidden to fire their phasars in the Dome, they started back up the stairs waving steel-and-rubber saps.
"Wait!" I yelled, pulling the two Temple cops toward me, punching one, kicking the other, and jumping over their stunned bodies to pound up the stairs after the cops. "He has information!"
Timony was too fast for them. He swung outside the open bolt-hole, rappelled a few dozen feet to his glider, and dropped away as the first cops reached the windy, icy opening.
"Wait!" I shouted, but it was too late.
I got there just in time to see him flying by in his plastic-thin glider. He'd put on the kind of round black wind goggles the Tribers wear down in the plains. He glanced toward us with a look I could not decipher—quizzical, frustrated, pondering some further hope of warning us. But the cops started unloading their phasars, and the glider crumpled at 12,000 feet. It took another second for him to start plummeting more than two miles to his death on the broken rusty rocks too far down to clearly see.
The Temple cops seized me from behind. I being a monk, the blues had no right to touch me. My fate would be far more severe in the Temple courts. I made up my mind not to spill what I knew, because it was clear that the first to know would be the traitor of whom Timony had spoken, and then I'd be a dead man. Besides, I hoped to save the Holy Mother, who was due to visit us in ten sols.
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
