Small Gods

rest. He doubled up and then sagged backwards against one of the weights.
    What happened next happened in frozen time. Deacon Cusp grabbed at the weight for support. It sank down, ponderously, his extra poundage adding to the weight of the water. He clawed higher. It sank further, dropping below the lip of the pit. He sought for balance again, but this time it was against fresh air, and he tumbled on top of the falling weight.
    Urn saw his face staring up at him as the weight fell into the gloom.
    With a lever, he could change the world. It had certainly changed it for Deacon Cusp. It had made it stop existing.
    Fergmen was standing over the guard, his pipe raised.
    “I know this one,” he said. “I’m going to give him a—”
    “Never mind about that!”
    “But—”
    Above them linkage clanked into action. There was a distant creaking of bronze against bronze.
    “Let’s get out of here,” said Urn. “Only the gods know what’s happening up there.”

    And blows rained on the unmoving Moving Turtle’s carapace.
    “Damn! Damn! Damn!” shouted Simony, thumping it again. “Move! I command you to move! Can you understand plain Ephebian! Move!”
    The unmoving machine leaked steam and sat there.

    And Om pulled himself up the slope of a small hill. So it came to this, then. There was only one way to get to the Citadel now.
    It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.

    And Brutha stood in front of the huge doors, oblivious to the crowd and the muttering guards. The Quisition could arrest anyone, but the guards weren’t certain what happened to you if you apprehended an archbishop, especially one so recently favored by the Prophet.
    Just a sign, Brutha thought, in the loneliness of his head.
    The doors trembled, and swung slowly outwards.
    Brutha stepped forward. He wasn’t fully conscious now, not in any coherent way as understood by normal people. Just one part of him was still capable of looking at the state of his own mind and thinking: perhaps the Great Prophets felt like this all the time .
    The thousands inside the temple were looking around in confusion. The choirs of lesser Iams paused in their chant. Brutha walked on up the aisle, the only one with a purpose in the suddenly bewildered throng.
    Vorbis was standing in the center of the temple, under the vault of the dome. Guards hurried toward Brutha, but Vorbis raised a hand in a gentle but very positive movement.
    Now Brutha could take in the scene. There was the staff of Ossory, and Abbys’s cloak, and the sandals of Cena. And, supporting the dome, the massive statues of the first four prophets. He’d never seen them. He’d heard about them every day of his childhood.
    And what did they mean now? They didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything, if Vorbis was Prophet. Nothing meant anything, if the Cenobiarch was a man who’d heard nothing in the inner spaces of his own head but his own thoughts.
    He was aware that Vorbis’s gesture had not only halted the guards, although they surrounded him like a hedge. It had also filled the temple with silence. Into which Vorbis spoke.
    “Ah. My Brutha. We had looked for you in vain. And now even you are here…”
    Brutha stopped a few feet away. The moment of…whatever it had been…that had propelled him through the doors had drained away.
    Now all there was, was Vorbis.
    Smiling.
    The part of him still capable of thought was thinking: there is nothing you can say. No one will listen. No one will care. It doesn’t matter what you tell people about Ephebe, and Brother Murduck, and the desert. It won’t be fundamentally true.
    Fundamentally true. That’s what the world is, with Vorbis in it.
    Vorbis said, “There is something wrong? Something you wish to say?”
    The black-on-black eyes filled the world, like two pits.
    Brutha’s mind gave up, and Brutha’s body took over. It brought his hand back and raised it, oblivious to the sudden rush forward of the guards.
    He saw Vorbis turn his cheek, and smile.
    Brutha stopped, and lowered his hand.
    He said, “No, I won’t.”
    Then, for the first and only time, he saw Vorbis really enraged. There had been times before when the deacon had been angry, but it had been something driven by the brain, switched on and off as the need arose. This was something else, something out of control. And it flashed across his face only for a moment.
    As the hands of the guards closed on him, Vorbis stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder. He looked