Small Gods

Brutha in the eye for a moment and then said softly:
    “Thrash him within an inch of his life and burn him the rest of the way.”
    An Iam began to speak, but stopped when he saw Vorbis’s expression.
    “Do it now .”

    A world of silence. No sound up here, except the rush of wind through the feathers.
    Up here the world is round, bordered by a band of sea. The viewpoint is from horizon to horizon, the sun is closer.
    And yet, looking down, looking for shapes……down in the farmland on the edge of the wilderness…
    …on a small hill……a tiny moving dome, ridiculously exposed…
    No sound but the rush of wind through feathers as the eagle pulls in its wings and drops like an arrow, the world spinning around the little moving shape that is the focus of all the eagle’s attention.
    Closer and…
    …talons down…
    … grip ……and rise…

    Brutha opened his eyes.
    His back was merely agonizing. He’d long ago got used to switching off pain.
    But he was spread-eagled on a surface, his arms and legs chained to something he couldn’t see. Sky above. The towering frontage of the temple to one side.
    By turning his head a little he could see the silent crowd. And the brown metal of the iron turtle. He could smell smoke.
    Someone was just tightening the shackles on his hand. Brutha looked over at the inquisitor. Now, what was it he had to say? Oh, yes.
    “The Turtle Moves?” he mumbled.
    The man sighed.
    “Not this one, friend,” he said.

    The world spun under Om as the eagle sought for shell-cracking height, and his mind was besieged by the tortoise’s existential dread of being off the ground. And Brutha’s thoughts, bright and clear this close to death…
    I’m on my back and getting hotter and I’m going to die …
    Careful, careful. Concentrate, concentrate . It’ll let go any second…
    Om stuck out his long scrawny neck, stared at the body just above him, picked what he hoped was about the right spot, plunged his beak through the brown feathers between the talons, and gripped .
    The eagle blinked. No tortoise had ever done that to an eagle, anywhere else in history.
    Om’s thoughts arrived in the little silvery world of its mind:
    “We don’t want to hurt one another, now do we?”
    The eagle blinked again.
    Eagles have never evolved much imagination or fore-thought, beyond that necessary to know that a turtle smashes when you drop it on the rocks. But it was forming a mental picture of what happened when you let go of a heavy tortoise that was still intimately gripping an essential bit of you.
    Its eyes watered.
    Another thought crept into its mind.
    “Now. You play, uh, ball with me, I’ll play…ball with you. Understand? This is important. This is what I want you to do…”
    The eagle soared on a thermal off the hot rocks, and sped towards the distant gleam of the Citadel.
    No tortoise had ever done this before. No tortoise in the whole universe. But no tortoise had ever been a god, and knew the unwritten motto of the Quisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum .
    When you have their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.

    Urn pushed his way through the crowds, with Fergmen trailing behind. That was the best and the worst of civil war, at least at the start—everyone wore the same uniform. It was much easier when you picked enemies who were a different color or at least spoke with a funny accent. You could call them “gooks” or something. It made things easier.
    Hey, Urn thought. This is nearly philosophy. Pity I probably won’t live to tell anyone.
    The big doors were ajar. The crowd was silent, and very attentive. He craned forward to see, and then looked up at the soldier beside him.
    It was Simony.
    “I thought—”
    “It didn’t work,” said Simony, bitterly.
    “Did you—?”
    “We did everything! Something broke!”
    “It must be the steel they make here,” said Urn. “The link pins on—”
    “That doesn’t matter now,” said Simony.
    The flat tones of his voice made Urn follow the eyes of the crowd.
    There was another iron turtle there—a proper model of a turtle, mounted on a sort of open gridwork of metal bars in which a couple of inquisitors were even now lighting a fire. And chained to the back of the turtle—
    “Who’s that?”
    “Brutha.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know what happened. He hit Vorbis, or didn’t hit him. Or something. Enraged him anyway. Vorbis stopped the ceremony, right there and