It was raining lightly outside -- not exactly a shock since it was early in Sea Season. I suppose a poet would say that the rain matches my mood, thought Gim Gim. Glorantha, it seemed to him, was an uninspiring place. When he had been young, he thought that the sacrifice of sex to ambition was important, and the sacrifice of humor a mere bagatelle. Now he knew better -- he regretted the sacrifice of sex not at all -- being rid of sex was being rid of a monster, but he regretted the loss of humor, for it was quite possible that only humor made life bearable at all.
The long and essentially boring struggle in Pavis was going on. Recently, things in the City had been disturbed, first, by the arrival of the Lunar Coders, a rarity in the Empire, five people of Honor devoted to stamping out crime. The fools had no idea that, by now, the difference between stamping out crime and destroying the Empire was not exactly obvious.
To some degree all Empires were criminal enterprises, most especially on their fringes. He remembered the words of a once-popular prophet in the Homelands: "Not all rich men are thieves. Some are the grandsons of thieves." Of course, the man had been impaled for treason, not because he was lying, but because he was speaking Truth too directly.
Despite the presence of the Coders, the "Frees" had made an attempt to take over the Orlanth temple. The result was something of a draw. While the Coders had defeated the rebels and then protected most of them from the consequences of their folly, the rebel priest Orvast Tintalker had gasped out his last on a Lunar Cross. Unfortunately, the rebels had gotten away with the regalia of Orlanth, which meant that Faltikus, the "tame" Orlanthi installed by the Lunars still had no legitimacy.
At least, it had been possible to get the Coders out of town, on a wild-goose chase after the regalia. With any luck, they would be out there for months.
Gim Gim turned his mind to his adventures in the Rubble over the last few seasons. He had discovered something very important -- if he could find any use for what he had learned. So far, he had not reported it to the Lunar authorities, because he had no idea what they would do with the discovery. He knew enough about the tangled structure above him to know that each level had a different idea of what was going on. He had long since concluded that the Red Goddess Herself had no more enlightened Her followers as to Her ultimate purposes than Krarsht had Hers. Indeed, he had long understood that neither the Gods nor their followers knew what the entire purpose of this world was.
The Cacodemon cultists had at least known that the Eye of Wakboth was beneath them. What this Eye was, how it appeared to what Gim Gim knew was his own limited senses, and what would happen to any mere human who came too close to it, were matters about which even Gim Gim did not care to speculate.
Luckily, now that he knew what was going on, he did not have to chance the Eye himself, even assuming that the ogres ever got there. Things would have to be much worse than they now were for him to risk so close a view of such a thing. Illumination had its limits, surely, and Gim Gim thought that Wakboth would test those limits.
He would tell Krarsht of the presence of the Eye at Her next religious ceremony. He suspected that She might already know of the Eye, but since The Mother Mouth had arrived on Her own, and, unlike the other Chaotic Gods, had no relation to Wakboth at all, whether He was released or not was undoubtedly not a concern of Hers. If anything, the theology Her priests taught implied the opposite. She would want Wakboth released only when She was ready to devour the Universe, and that time lay at least two more Ages in the future. Assuming, of course, that She, or rather her Priests, knew what She was talking about. As a member of six other faiths, Gim Gim had heard too many different views of the future to take any of them entirely seriously.
Nonetheless, he was more at ease informing Krarsht of the presence of this piece of the Devil than informing the Lunar bureaucracy. Krarsht, like him, was a creature of the shadows. But if he informed the Lunar bureaucracy, he could just imagine the arrival of dozens of high-level Lunar priests and officials, all engaged in planning a giant excavation project. Such a project would involve multiple levels of new corrupt officialdom, who would prove their "honesty" by demolishing his existing networks, not to mention uncovering the Chaos nests in the Big Rubble, and probably wrecking all the world-lines converging here.
Of course, he thought wearily, maybe the converging world lines here meant that he SHOULD be informing the bureaucrats. But his natural instinct for dissimulation argued against such a risky course.
Gim Gim sighed. None of his adventures in the Rubble had advanced him an inch closer to the goal of finding the identity of the Bull in the Painting. Or for that matter, the cradle or the dragon cloud.
At least the rain had stopped, and the dawn breaking to the East implied that today, Fire Day of Harmony week, was going to live up to its name. Gim Gim yawned and stretched, determined to spend the first part of the day sound asleep. It was time to relax, he thought. It really would be helpful if there was anyone in this town, or this world, worthy to talk to. He thought of the old joke: "I talk to myself because I always talk to the most intelligent person present."
His reverie was interrupted by two unheard-of events -- first, a pounding on the door, and then, before he could say anything, one of his agents burst into the room. "Upstream," the man gasped. "There is a cradle, a CRADLE."
End -- Chapter I
Jim Chapin
Powered by hypermail