Free Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers Page A

dug up inside his sleeve and tugged slightly on the knife grip so that an inch of blade was free of the sheath, and then he pressed the nail of his thumb up against the bottom edge. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
    “Merge with the Lord.” Gasp, Thud.
    As he heard the jaybush’s boots scuff to directly in front of him, Rivas exhaled…
    …and then drove his thumb up against the blade edge, which split the nail and grated against the bone. The pain was a bright, hot flare that brought a metallic taste to his mouth, and he forced his mind to cling to the agony and focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.
    He didn’t even hear the jaybush say, “Merge with the Lord.”
    There was a silent, stunning impact and then he was falling through an abyss so frigid that what lived and moved here—and he knew something did—partook of an animation below freezing, as he’d read that liquid helium was said by the ancients to begin to crawl at temperatures approaching absolute zero; his own warmth was being violently wrung out of him, but more kept on coursing into him through his left hand—specifically through his thumb.
    He was being stretched both toward the bottomless cold and toward the heat, and though he sensed a tearing in himself, in his mind, he willed himself to move in the direction of the heat; then he seemed to be rushing upward, though whatever had been on the other side of the rip in his soul had now broken free of him and, alive but separate, was pacing him. It became more distant and soon he wasn’t aware of it anymore, nor of the sentience in the black cold below.
    What he was aware of was an aching hip and pebbly, damp dirt against his cheek. He sat up and looked around—the jaybush was gone, though the crowd around the field’s periphery was still out there, and all of them were still kneeling; then he let his gaze fall onto his fellow communicants.
    Only a couple had regained, or kept, consciousness, and they were blinking around stupidly like people lately roused from sodden sleep. Most were still stretched out on the dirt, several of them twitching, the rest limp and conceivably dead. Of the ones near enough to see closely, quite a few were bleeding from injuries sustained during falls or fits; his gashed thumb probably wouldn’t excite any comment.
    And then he realized that he was still clear-headed—as alert as he ever was, and with his memory and personality intact. This new-found pain defense worked even better than the drunk defense, for though the latter insulated him from the sacrament, it did leave him drunk.
    The thought of drink reminded him of the pint of Malk whiskey concealed behind a flap in his knapsack, and brought him to his feet. He walked across the field to his own Jaybird group, being careful to act dopey and clumsy.
    Sister Sue watched him approach, but the shepherd kept his back turned until Rivas paused a few feet away—then he turned around, and he was holding the pint of whiskey.
    “You recover fast,” the shepherd said.
    Rivas put on a foolish grin and brushed some stray strands of hair off his forehead, leaving a smear of blood over one eyebrow. “Murphy’s still playing in the yard,” he said thickly, “even though Mom told him to come in.” It was the sort of thing people said when recovering from the sacrament.
    “You’re bleeding, Brother Boaz,” said Sister Sue in a concerned tone, at the same time giving the shepherd a hand signal that Rivas didn’t catch.
    “Yeah?” Rivas stared at his split thumb with what he hoped looked like foolish astonishment. “Gee.”
    “Piece of old glass, probably, out there that he fell on,” said the shepherd. “Say, brother, what’s this?” he asked Rivas, holding up the flat bottle.
    Rivas peered at it. “Whiskey,” he said finally. “I think it’s mine.”
    “It was yours.”
    The shepherd let it fall. It didn’t break when it hit the ground, but it did when the man stamped on it. Rivas forced