436: The Illusion

Ziggurat #351

"How did you do that?" Lamont asked as the doors of the lift snapped shut in front of them. They were unaccompanied; the projection sphere had remained outside, and for all they knew, it would remain there for a hundred years. "How did you exert control over the tower?"

Constance looked exhausted beyond words. Her eyes, still crystal-hard as they gazed into empty space, were puffy with tears. Her jaw was set firmly, but her shoulders slumped. "I didn't," she said flatly. "The attendants did it to themselves. All I had to do was give 'em a little nudge."

"But that thing represented the attendants," Lamont objected. "Why would it turn the cloud of witnesses against itself?"

"It didn't, not consciously," Constance explained. "But fear and doubt are lousy building materials, Monty. It don't matter how high you stack 'em, or how deep they go. They'll always crumble when the time is right. The attendants kept trying to tell themselves that they were doing the right thing, that as long as they could succeed in bringing back what they'd lost, no sacrifice was too great. But the only way they could keep up the illusion was to sacrifice their humanity. At least, they tried."

"What illusion?" Lamont asked.

Pulling away from the wall for a moment, Constance reached down to pick up her helmet. From the small speakers inside it, a tiny cacophony of voices echoed around the plastic dome. "Something Abner and me realized when we came up here a while back. The attendants told us that these voices were prayers, supplication, adoration. But they're not, at least not most of them. They're lamentations. The voices of millions of people, mourning what they've lost."

"Good God," Lamont whispered.

Constance shrugged, dropping the helmet and pressing herself against the wall again. She appeared to be letting its magnetic force support her weight.

How much did she know, he wondered, when she was trying unsuccessfully to explain her situation in a lift just like this a few weeks ago? When she was negotiating with the captain to leave them behind. How much had she seen then?

Lamont set himself beside her, and a moment later the chrome navigation sphere descended from its nest. Its mindless predictability felt strangely out of place now, as Lamont wondered exactly what Constance had managed to accomplish. The map looked the same as it always had, showing their location as a red beacon in the dome-shaped tip of the tower. They had survived their ordeal, escaped a life-threatening menace, learned the tower's dark secrets—at least some of them—and returned, it would seem, to where they had started.

"Now what?" He asked out loud.

"Back to the—what was it called? The seminary." She made a brief, tenuous smile. "I've got to hold up my end of the bargain."

"Bargain? Is that what you were whispering about before the thing let us go?"

Constance nodded, not looking at him.

"Bloody hell, Constance, what did you agree to?"

"One more communion," Constance said, reaching out a hand to touch the representation of the garden level on the map. "For old time's sake."