“Tell me about the coins,” murmured Vorbis.
“Three of them were Citadel cents,” said Brutha promptly. "Two were showing the Horns, and one the sevenfold-?crown. Four of the coins were very small and golden. There was lettering on them which . . . which I could not read, but which if you were to give me a stylus I think I could-
“This is some sort of trick?” said the fat man.
“I assure you,” said Vorbis, “the boy could have seen the entire room for no more than a second. Brutha . . . tell us about the other coins.”
“The other coins were large. They were bronze. They were derechmi from Ephebe.”
“How do you know this? They are hardly common in the Citadel.”
“I have seen them once before, lord.”
“When was this?”
Brutha's face screwed up with effort.
"I am not sure- he said.
The fat man beamed at Vorbis.
“Hah,” he said.
“I think . . .” said Brutha “. . . it was in the afternoon. But it may have been the morning. Around midday. On Grune 3, in the year of the Astounded Beetle. Some merchants came to our village.”
“How old were you at that time?” said Vorbis.
“I was within one month of three years old, lord.”
“I don't believe this,” said the fat man.
Brutha's mouth opened and shut once or twice. How did the fat man know? He hadn't been there!
“You could be wrong, my son,” said Vorbis. “You are a well?grown lad of . . . what . . . seventeen, eighteen years? We feel you could not really recall a chance glimpse of a foreign coin fifteen years ago.”
any of the inquisitors liked the old ways best.
After a while, Om very slowly hauled himself up to the grille, neck muscles twitching. Like a creature with its mind on something else, the tortoise hooked first one front leg over a bar, then another. His back legs waggled for a while, and then he hooked a claw on to the rough stonework.
He strained for a moment and then pulled himself back into the light.
He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet. He had no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly because he was thinking. Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.
Anyone could go to the Place of Lamentation. It was one of the great freedoms of Omnianism.
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.
But there were always the improvident, the stupid, and those who, because of some flaw or oversight in this life or a past one, were not even able to afford a pinch of incense. And the Great God, in His wisdom and mercy as filtered through His priests, had made provision for them.
Prayers and entreaties could be offered up in the Place of Lamentation. They would assuredly be heard. They might even be heeded.
Behind the Place, which was a square two hundred meters across, rose the Great Temple itself.
There, without a shadow of a doubt, the God listened.
Or somewhere close, anyway . . .
Thousands of pilgrims visited the Place every day.