He cut himself off in mid-sentence and pointed to the left. "What's
_that_?" he asked hoarsely. "Mutant?"
"Yes," the Archbishop said. "There are many of them in Chicago. I think
he plans to make trouble; be ready to defend yourself."
The creature was coming toward them out of a jumble of
clumsily-thatched huts strung in a wobbly circle around a gullied heap
of slag at the extreme left side of the road. It was tall--nearly seven
feet, Kesley estimated--with elongated spidery limbs and a bloated,
almost hydrocephaloid skull, devoid of hair. The mutant wore only a
rag twisted carelessly about its middle; the body thus revealed was
grotesquely piebald in color, blotched and spotted, the purpling skin
lying loosely and peeling away in great leprous flakes.
Kesley had seen mutants before: mutant horses, mutant wolves, other
products of ravaged genes, but he had never before been this close to
a _human_ sport, other than Miguel. Miguel was human in all physical
aspects save his life span; the creature shambling toward them now
could be called "human" only by the loosest of definitions.
As the mutant approached, a musty odor of decay drifted before him.
Kesley shuddered involuntarily.
Once, he knew, the cities of the world had been populated by almost as
many mutants as normals. That had been in the days immediately after
the great blast, before the Dukes had taken command of the world.
But most of these mutants had been sterile, carrying, like the Dukes,
lethal genes. Others carried recessive characteristics only. Gradually,
through the centuries, the mutant population had died out and dwindled
away into scattered groups here and there in the biggest cities--and,
word was, there was one city somewhere in Illinois populated only by
mutants.
This one was blind, Kesley saw now, but it moved with unerring accuracy.
"Archbishop Santana!" the creature called, in a hoarse croak of a
voice. "Wait for me, Archbishop!"
"How does he know you?" Kesley asked.
"Some of them have strange powers," Santana whispered. He nervously
undid the crucifix that hung from the breast of his surplice and held
it before him, as if to ward off the Devil.
The mutant merely chuckled. "Put away your toy, Archbishop. I don't
frighten so easily."
"Stay back," Kesley snapped. "Keep away from us." To Santana he said,
"Let's get out of here. Spur your horse and let's go.
"No. Let's hear him out."
The mutant stationed himself directly in their path and pointed a
twisted, lumpy forefinger at Santana. "Behold the man of God," he
croaked hoarsely. "_Ecce homo!_"
"What do you want?" the Archbishop demanded. Kesley saw that Santana
was sheet-white beneath his outward duskiness.
"I want nothing. I merely came out here to laugh at the Archbishop of
God who has come to Chicago on a mission of _murder_!"
Kesley stiffened in the saddle, but Santana caught his arm just as he
was about to go for his gun. "What is this talk of murder?" Santana
demanded.
Late afternoon clouds were dropping over the city now, and a cool wind
came sweeping in from the lake. Kesley shivered as the mutant grinned,
baring scraggly stumps of yellow teeth.
"Murder? Did I say murder? But there will be no murder, milord. Merely
betrayal--and betrayal again."
* * * * *
That night, in the rooms they had taken near the city's central
marketplace, the image of the mutant haunted Kesley, imposing itself
before his eyes with demonic insistence.
Betrayal? No murder? The paradoxes and cloaked ambiguities the
grotesque creature had uttered ground into Kesley's already sensitive
consciousness, bringing with them the sharp image of the piebald spider
of a man that was the mutant.
Kesley looked across the room to Santana. The plump Archbishop, having
divested himself of his traveling costume, wore a loose cassock without
surplice. He was thumbing the pages of his breviary, flicking rapidly
over matter long since committed to memory.
"Padre?"
"Eh?"
"That mutant this afternoon--"
"Don't speak of him," Santana said.
"But he bothers me, Santana. I can't get him out of my mind, him or
that crazy nonsense he was muttering."
"That was not nonsense," the Archbishop said in a hollow voice. "He
struck at the heart, that man."
"I don't understand."
"You yourself made the same comment earlier, when you remarked that
I, a man of God, am with you to participate in this unholy mission.
Why, you ask. You asked me if I were not risking my immortal soul by
accompanying you."
"And you said--"
"I said that I had little to risk. Strange words, coming from an
Archbishop, but my soul is long since forfeit. God works in strange
ways, and so his servants follow."
"You're still talking in riddles," Kesley complained. "Why did you come
along, then, if you knew it would damn you?"
"I am _already_ damned for serving Miguel!" Santana cried. His doughy
face was taut with sudden animation. "Don't you see that Miguel and his
Dukes have overthrown Rome, have supplanted Christ with themselves? And
we continue to serve them, not because we desire it, but because we
must!"
Kesley frowned. A light of torment, almost of martyrdom, gleamed in the
Archbishop's eyes now.
"What difference does it make," Santana asked, "if I help you kill
Winslow? I cannot be any more damned than I am already--and possibly,
possibly the consequences of your act will--will--do you see?"
"Killing Winslow will topple the whole apple cart," Kesley said softly.
"You're gambling an already assured damnation against the chance that
knocking off one Duke will crush all the rest and restore your religion
to supremacy." He chuckled quietly. "I sometimes wonder just _whose_
catspaw I am," he said.
"Everyone's," the priest remarked. "Poor pawn, you've fallen fair of
everyone's scheming."
The priest continued to read for a while, then uttered a brief prayer
in rapid Spanish--perhaps it was even Latin, Kesley thought--and blew
out his candle. Kesley closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
Sleep would not come. Brooding, he rolled and fidgeted, seeing over and
over again the loose-jointed, hideous figure of the mutant.