“Right!”
Kick
“. . , make clean the well in our village, which is foul with . . .”
“You got it!”
Kick
“. . . every year the locusts come, and . . .”
“I promise, only . . . !”
Kick
“. . . lost upon the seas these five months . . .”
“. . . stop kicking me!”
The tortoise landed, right side up, in a brief, clear space.
Visible . . .
So much of animal life is the recognition of pattern, the shapes of hunter and hunted. To the casual eye the forest is, well, just forest; to the eye of the dove it is so much unimportant fuzzy green background to the hawk which you did not notice on the branch of a tree. To the tiny dot of the hunting buzzard in the heights, the whole panorama of the world is just a fog compared to the scurrying prey in the grass.
From his perch on the Horns themselves, the eagle leapt into the sky.
Fortunately, the same awareness of shapes that made the tortoise so prominent in a square full of scurrying humans made the tortoise's one eye swivel upwards in dread anticipation.
Eagles are single-minded creatures. Once the idea of lunch is fixed in their mind, it tends to remain there until satisfied.
There were two Divine Legionaries outside Vorbis's quarters. They looked sideways at Brutha as he knocked timorously at the door, as if looking for a reason to assault him.
A small gray priest opened the door and ushered Brutha into a small, barely furnished room. He pointed meaningfully at a stool.
Brutha sat down. The priest vanished behind a curtain. Brutha took one glance around the room and-
Blackness engulfed him. Before he could move, and Brutha's reflexes were not well coordinated at the best of times, a voice by his ear said, “Now, brother, do not panic. I order you not to panic.”
There was cloth in front of Brutha's face.
“Just nod, boy.”
Brutha nodded. They put a hood over your face. All the novices knew that. Stories were told in the dormitories. They put a cloth over your face so the inquisitors didn't know who they were working on . . .
“Good. Now, we are going into the next room. Be careful where you tread.”
Hands guided him upright and across the floor. Through the mists of incomprehension he felt the brush of the curtain, and then was jolted down some steps and into a sandy?floored room. The hands spun him a few times, firmly but without apparent ill-will, and then led him along a passageway. There was the swish of another curtain, and then the indefinable sense of a larger space.
Afterward, long afterward, Brutha realized: there was no terror. A hood had been slipped over his head in the room of the head of the Quisition, and it never occurred to him to be terrified. Because he had faith.
“There is a stool behind you. Be seated.”
Brutha sat.
“You may remove the hood.”
Brutha removed the hood.