Read The Cellar Beneath the Cellar (Bell Mountain) for Free Online Page B

hands braced on the marble parapet. “Down there by the bootmaker’s shop,” said the judge.
    Reesh saw her then, a scrawny old woman capering along the cobblestones. She was shouting something that they couldn’t hear over the rattle and thud of marching feet. As Reesh watched, two burly men emerged from the crowd, each seized her by an elbow, and before you knew it, all three were gone. The people watching the parade glanced around uneasily for a moment, then gave their attention back to the troops.
    “Very nicely done,” Reesh said.
    “We can’t grab them all, of course,” Tombo said. “But I think we’ll do well just to take them when we can, without my making any official statement about it whatsoever. As you saw, my men were out of uniform. Soon enough, people will understand that now is not a good time to play at being a prophet. It won’t stop the fanatics, but it might prompt others to avoid them instead of standing around listening to them.”
    Reesh nodded his assent.
    “I’ve sent out agents to look for those two children you’re so worried about,” Tombo said. “They’ll try to find out what happened to your man Martis, too. It’ll be a difficult task in wartime, but we’ll do our best. Then again, if the world suddenly comes to an end, it won’t matter.”
    What was there to be done, Reesh wondered, about religious delusions that affected even nonbelievers like Judge Tombo?
    “Don’t worry about me, Reesh. I don’t listen to the prophets.”
    “The Old Books are obscure, my lord judge,” said Reesh. “No one knows what half the verses mean, or if they mean anything at all. If there is a God, He delights in mystifying us.
    “But the past mystifies us, too! So little is left of it. Just enough to tantalize! Men talking to each other miles apart; crossing the sea in great ships; even flying through the air in conveyances too fabulous to imagine; destroying enemy cities in the blink of an eye … and nothing left of it but tantalizing fragments. Little scraps of rusted metal.
    “And yet the muddled story these tell must be true. Men did do all those things, once upon a time. They were so infinitely wiser than we, so infinitely more powerful.”
    “Infinitely more wicked, too, from what I’ve heard,” said the judge.
    Reesh waved the words away. “Rubbish,” he said.
    “But isn’t that why God destroyed the Empire? Isn’t that what the Temple teaches? You only have to look across the river to see the ruins of Old Obann. And those are thousand-year-old ruins. Imagine how much greater a city it was than ours! The ruins of the Old Temple alone are half as big as our entire city.”
    “But they were great!” Reesh said, suddenly gripping the parapet so hard his knuckles whitened. “And their greatness is our birthright, if we have but the endurance and the courage to pursue it.
    “People were no more wicked in those days than they are today. Human nature doesn’t change. Who knows what destroyed the Empire? Maybe it destroyed itself.
    “But I refuse to believe in a God who speaks to us in parables and riddles in the mouths of lunatics, who remains aloof for ages, and then, when the spirit moves Him, wrecks our world. I cannot know what will happen now that the bell on Bell Mountain has been rung. Scripture doesn’t say what will happen. All we can do is to go on as we have done, to pursue what we have always pursued, and let our achievements speak for us.”
    “Always providing that we win the war,” said Tombo.
     

CHAPTER 7
The Mardar and a Boy Named Gik
    The big camp on the east side of the mountains was a mass of Heathen of all nations, a sprawling jumble of conical tents, round felt yurts, the low black tents of Wallekki chieftains, and the rickety lean-tos of the Abnaks. It covered a great area, and Obst couldn’t guess how many fighting men were there. Along with their women, slaves, and camp followers, he supposed there were enough to populate a good-sized