Brother Nhumrod raised his head.
“Brother Nhumrod?” said Brutha.
“What?”
“Er . . . Brother Nhumrod?”
“What?”
Brother Nhumrod unplugged his ears.
“Yes?” he said testily.
“Um. There's something you ought to see. In the . . . in the garden. Brother Nhumrod?”
The master of novices sat up. Brutha's face was a glowing picture of concern.
“What do you mean?” Brother Nhumrod said.
“In the garden. It's hard to explain. Um. I found out . . . where the voices were coming from, Brother Nhumrod. And you did say to be sure and tell you.”
The old priest gave Brutha a sharp look. But if ever there was a person without guile or any kind of subtlety, it was Brutha.
Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
The Citadel had a lot of underground. There were the pits and tunnels of the Quisition. There were cellars and sewers, forgotten rooms, dead ends, spaces behind ancient walls, even natural caves in the bedrock itself.
This was such a cave. Smoke from the fire in the middle of the floor found its way out through a crack in the roof and, eventually, into the maze of uncountable chimneys and light-wells above.
There were a dozen figures in the dancing shadows. They wore rough hoods over nondescript clothes-crude things made of rags, nothing that couldn't easily be burned after the meeting so that the wandering fingers of the Quisition would find nothing incriminating. Something about the way most of them moved suggested men who were used to carrying weapons. Here and there, clues. A stance. The turn of a word.
On one wall of the cave there was a drawing. It was vaguely oval, with three little extensions at the top-the middle one slightly the largest of the three-and three at the bottom, the middle one of these slightly longer and more pointed. A child's drawing of a turtle.
“Of course he'll go to Ephebe,” said a mask. “He won't dare not to. He'll have to dam the river of truth, at its source.”
“We must bail out what we can, then,” said another mask.
“We must kill Vorbis!”
“Not in Ephebe. When that happens, it must happen here. So that people will know. When we're strong enough.”
“Will we ever be strong enough?” said a mask. Its owner clicked his knuckles nervously.
“Even the peasants know there's something wrong. You can't stop the truth. Dam the river of truth? Then there are leaks of great force. Didn't we find out about Murduck? Hah! 'Killed in Ephebe,' Vorbis said.”
“One of us must go to Ephebe and save the Master. If he really exists.”
“He exists. His name is on the book.”
“Didactylos. A strange name. It means Two-Fingered, you know.”
“They must honor him in Ephebe.”
“Bring him back here, if possible. And the Book.”
One of the masks seemed hesitant. His knuckles clicked again.
“But will people rally behind . . . a book? People need more than a book. They're peasants. They can't read.”