Whatever it is we are, it is a little flesh, breath, and the ruiing part. As if you were dying, despise the flesh; it is blood, bones, and network, a tissue of nerves and veins. See the breath also, what kind of thing it is: air, and never the same, but at every moment sent Out and drawn in. The third is the ruling part. No longer let this part be enslaved, no longer let it be pulled by its strings like a marionette. No longer complain of your lot, nor shrink from the future.
_30th Nemesis 332_Patera Remora composed this, Silk thought; and as though Remora sat before him, he saw Remora's long, sallow, uplifted face, the tip of the quill just brushing his lips as he sought for a complexity of syntax that would satisfy his insatiate longing for caution and precision.
To the Clergy of the Chapter,
Both Severally and Collectively
Greetings in the name of Pas, in the name of Scylla, and in the names of all gods! Know that you are ever in my thoughts, as in my heart. The present disturbed state of Our Sacred City obliges us to be even more conscious of our sacred duty to minister to the dying, not only to those amongst them with whose recent actions we may sympathize, but to all those to whom, as we apprehend, Hierax may swiftly reveal his compassionate power. Thus it is that I implore you this day to cultivate the perpetual and indefatigable--
The perpetual and indefatigable predisposition toward mercy and pardon whose conduit you so frequently must be. Many of you have appealed for guidance in these most disturbing days. Nay, many appeal so still, even hourly. Most of you will have learned before you read this epistle of the lamented demise of the presiding officer of the Ayuntamiento. The late Councillor Lemur was a man of extraordinary gifts, and his passing cannot but leave a void in every heart. How I long to devote the remainder of this necessarily curtailed missive to mourning his passing. Instead, for such are the exactions of this sad whorl, the whorl that passes, my duty to you requires that I forewarn you without delay against the baseless pretexts of certain vile insurgents who would have you to believe that they act in the late Councillor Lemur's name. Let us set aside, my beloved clergy, all fruitless debate regarding the propriety of an intercaldean caesura spanning some two decades. That the press of unhappy events then rendered an interval of that kind, if not desirable, then unquestionably attractive, we can all agree. That it represented, to judgements not daily schooled to the nice discriminations of the law, a severe strain upon the elasticity of our Charter, we can agree likewise, can we not? The argument is wholly historical now. O beloved, let us resign it to the historians. What is inarguable is that this caesura, to which I have had reason to refer above, has attained to its ordained culmination. It cannot, O my beloved clergy, as it should not, survive the grievous loss which it has so recently endured. What, then, we may not illegitimately inquire, is to succeed that just, beneficent and ascendant government so sadly terminated? Beloved clergy, let us not be unmindful of the wisdom of the past, wisdom which lies in no less a vehicle than our own Chrasmologic Writings. Has it not declared, "_Vox poputi, vox dei_"? which is to say, in the will of the masses we may discern words of Pas's. At the present critical moment in the lengthy epic of Our Sacred City, Pas's grave words are not to be mistaken. With many voices they cry out that the time has arrived for a precipitate return to that Charteral guardianship which once our city knew. Shall it be said of us that we stop our ears to Pas's words? Nor is their message so brief, and so less than mistakable. From forest to lake, from the proud crown of the Palatine to the humblest of alleys they proclaim him. O my beloved clergy, with what incommunicable joy shall I do so additionally. For Supreme Pas has, as never previously, espoused for our city a calde from within our own ranks, an anointed augur, holy, pious, and redolent of sanctity. May I name him? I shall, yet surely I need not. There is not one amongst you, Beloved Clergy, who will not know that name prior to mine overjoyed acclamation. It is Patera Silk. Again I say, Patera Silk! How readily here might I inscribe, let us welcome him and obey him as one of ourselves. With what delight shall I inscribe in its place, let us welcome him and obey him, for he is one of ourselves! May every god favor you, beloved clergy. Blessed be you in the Most Sacred Name of Pas, Father of the Gods, in that of Gradous Echidna, His Consort, in those of their Sons and their Daughters alike, this day and forever, in the name of their eldest child, Scylla, Patroness of this, Our Holy City of Viron. Thus say I, Pa. Quetzal, Prolocutor.As Silk refolded the letter, Shell said, "His Cognizance has come down completely on your side, you see, and brought the Chapter with him. You said--I hope you were mistaken in this, Patera, really I do. But you said a minute ago that if the Ayuntamiento knew you were here they'd have you shot. If that's true--" He cleared his throat nervously. "If it's true, they'll have His Cognizance shot too. And--and some of the rest of us." "The coadjutor," Silk said, "he drafted this. He'll die as well, if they can get their hands on him." It was strange to think of Remora, that circumspect diplomatist, tangled and dead in his own web of ink. Of Remora dying for him. "I suppose so, Patera." Shell hesitated, plainly ill at ease. "I'd call you--use the other word. But it might be dangerous for you." Silk nodded slowly, stroking his cheek. "His Cognizance says you're the first augur, ever. That--it came as a shock to--to a lot of us, I suppose. To Patera Jerboa, he said. He says it's never happened before in his lifetime. Do you know Patera Jerboa, Patera?" Silk shook his head. "He's quite elderly. Eighty-one, because we had a little party for him just a few weeks ago. But then he thought, you know, sort of getting still and pulling at his beard the way he does, and then he said it was sensible enough, really. All the others, the previous--the previous--" "I know what you mean, Patera." "They'd been chosen by the people. But you, Patera, you were chosen by the gods, so naturally their choice fell upon an augur, since augurs are the people they've chosen to serve them." "You yourself are in danger, Patera," Silk said. "You're in nearly as much danger as I am, and perhaps more. You must be aware of it." Shell nodded miserably. "I'm surprised they let you in here after this." "They--the captain, Patera. I--I haven't..." "They don't know." "I don't think so, Patera. I don't think they do. I didn't tell them." "That was wise, I'm sure." Silk studied the window as he had before, but as before saw only their reflections, and the night. "This Patera Jerboa, you're his acolyte? Where is he?" "At our manteion, on Brick Street." Silk shook his head. "Near the crooked bridge, Patera." "Way out east?" "Yes, Patera." Shell fidgeted uncomfortably. "That's where we are now, Patera. On Basket Street. Our manteion's that way," he pointed, "about five streets." "I see. That's right, they lifted me into something--into some sort of cart that jolted terribly. I remember lying on sawdust and trying to cough. I couldn't, and my mouth and nose kept filling with blood." Silk's index finger drew small circles on his cheek. "Where's my robe?" "I don't know. The captain has it, I suppose, Patera." "The battle, when General Mint attacked the floaters on Cage Street, was that this afternoon?" Shell nodded again. "About the time I was shot, perhaps, or a little later. You brought the Pardon to the wounded. To all of them? All those in danger of death, I mean?" "Yes, Patera." "Then you went back to your manteion--?" "For something to eat, Patera, a bite of supper." Shell looked apologetic. "This brigade--it's the Third. They're in reserve, they say. They don't have much. Some were going into people's houses, you know, and taking any food they could find. There's supposed to be food coming in wagons, but I thought--" "Of course. You returned to your manse to eat with Patera Jerboa, and this letter had arrived while you were gone. There would have been a copy for you, too, and one for him." Shell nodded eagerly. "That's right, Patera." "You would have read yours at once, of course. My copy--this one--it was there as well?" "Yes, Patera." "So someone at the Palace knew I had been captured, and where I'd been taken. He sent my copy to Patera Jerboa instead of to my own manteion in the hope that Patera Jerboa could arrange to get to me, as he did. His Cognizance was with me when I was shot; there's no reason to conceal that now. While my wounds were being treated, I was wondering whether he had been killed. The officer who shot me may not have recognized him, but if he did..." Silk let the thought trail away. "If they don't know about this already--and I think you're right, they can't know yet, not here at any rate--they're bound to find out soon. You realize that?" "Yes, Patera." "You must leave. It would probably be wise for you and Patera Jerboa to leave your manteion, in fact--to go to a part of the city controlled by General Mint, if you can." "I--" Shell seemed to be choking. He shook his head desperately. "You what, Patera?" "I don't want to leave you as long as I can be of--of help to you. Of service. It's my duty." "You have been of help," Silk told him. "You've rendered invaluable service to me and to the Chapter already. I'll see you're recognized for it, if I can." He paused, considering. "You can be of further help, too. On your way out, I want you to speak to this captain for me. There were two letters in a pocket of my robe. They were on the mantel this morning; my acolyte must have put them there yesterday. I haven't read them, and your giving me this one has reminded me of them." Somewhat tardily, he thrust the letter under his quilt. "One had the seal of the Chapter. It may have been another copy of this, though that doesn't seem very likely, since this one has today's date. Besides, they wouldn't have sent this to Patera Jerboa this evening, in that case." "I suppose not, Patera." "Don't mention them to the captain. Just say I'd like to have my robe--all of my clothes. Ask for my clothes and see what he gives you. Bring them to me, my robe particularly. If he mentions the letters, say that I'd like to see them. If he won't give them to you, try to find out what was in them. If he won't tell you, return to your manteion. Tell Patera Jerboa that I, the calde, order him to get himself and you--are there sibyls, too?" Shell nodded. "There's Maytera Wood--" "Never mind their names. That you and he and they are to lock up the manteion and leave as quickly as possible." "Yes, Patera." Shell stood, very erect. "But I won't go back to our manteion straight away, no matter what the captain says. I--I'm coming back. Back here to see you and tell you what he said, and try to do something more for you, if I can. Don't tell me not to, please, Patera. I'll only disobey." To his surprise, Silk found that he was smiling. "Your disobedience is better than the obedience of many people I've known, Patera Shell. Do what you think right; you will anyway, I feel certain." Shell left, and the room seemed empty as soon as he was out the door. Silk's wound began to throb, and he made himself think of something else. How proudly Shell had announced his intention to disobey, while his lip trembled! It reminded Silk of his mother, her eyes shining with team of joy at some only too ordinary childhood feat. _Oh, Silk! My son, my son!_ That was how he felt now. These boys! Yet Shell was no younger. They had entered the schola together, and Shell had sat at the desk in front of his own when an instructor insisted on alphabetical seating; they had been anointed on the same day, and both had been assigned to assist venerable augurs who were no longer able to attend to all the demands of their manteions. Shell, however, had not been enlightened by the Outsider--or had not had a vein burst in his head, as Doctor Crane would have had it. Shell had not been enlightened, had not hurried to the market, had not encountered Blood... He had been as young as Shell when he had talked to Blood and plucked three cards out of Blood's hand, not knowing that somewhere below a monitor was mad and howling for want of those cards--as young or nearly, because Shell might have done it, too. Again Silk smelled the dead dog in the gutter and the stifling dust raised by Blood's floater, saw Blood wave his stick, tall, red faced, and perspiring. Silk coughed, and felt that a poker had been plunged into his chest. Somewhat unsteadily, he crossed the room to the window and raised the sash to let in the night wind, then surveyed his naked torso in the minor over the bureau, a much larger one than his shaving mirror back at the manse. A dressing half concealed the multicolored bruise left by Musk's hilt. From what little anatomy he had picked up from the victims he had sacrificed, he decided that the needle had missed his heart by four fingers. Still, it must have been good shooting by a mounted man. With his back to the mirror, he craned his neck to see as much as possible of the dressing on his back; it was larger, and his back hurt more. He was conscious of a weak wrongness deep in his chest, and of the effort he had to make to breathe. Clothing in the drawers of the bureau: underwear, tunics, and carelessly folded trousers--under these last, a woman's perfumed scarf. This was a young man's room, a son's; the couple who owned the house would have a bedroom on the ground floor, a corner room with several windows. Chilled, he returned to the bed and drew up the quilt. The son had left without packing, otherwise the drawers would be half empty. Perhaps he was fighting in Maytera Mint's army. Some part of Kypris had entered her, and that fragment had made the shy sibyl a general--that, and Echidna's command. For a moment he wondered what fragment it had been, and whether Kypris herself had known she possessed it. It was the element that had freed Chenille from rust, presumably; they would be part and parcel of the same thing. Kypris had told him she was hunted, and His Cognizance had called it a wonder that she had not been killed long ago. Echidna and her children, hunting the goddess of love, must soon have learned that love is more than perfumed scarves and thrown flowers. That there is steel in love. A young woman had thrown that scarf from a balcony, no doubt. Silk tried to visualize her, found she wore Hyacinth's face, and thrust the vision back. Blood had wiped his face with a peach-colored handkerchief, a handkerchief more heavily perfumed than the scarf. And Blood had said... Had said there were people who could put on a man like a tunic. He had been referring to Mucor, though he, Silk, had not known it then--had not known that Mucor existed, a girl who could dress her spirit in the flesh of others just as he, a few moments before, had been considering putting on the clothes of the son whose room this was. Softly he called, "Mucor? Mucor?" and listened; but there was no phantom voice, no face but his own in the mirror above the bureau. Closing his eyes, he composed a long formal prayer to the Outsider, thanking him for his life, and for the absence of Blood's daughter. When it was complete, he began a similar prayer to Kypris. Beyond the bedroom door, a sentry sprang to attention with an audible clash of his weapon and click of his heels. Shadeup woke Auk, brilliant beams of the long sun piercing his tasseled awnings, his gauze curtains, his rich draperies of puce velvet, and the grimed glass of every window in the place, slipping past his lowered blinds of split bamboo, the warped old boards someone else had nailed up, his colored Scylla, and his shut and bolted shutters; through wood, paper, and stone. He blinked twice and sat up, rubbing his eyes. "I feel better," he announced, then saw that Chenille was still asleep, Incus and Urus both sleeping, Dace and Bustard sound asleep as well, and only big Hammerstone the soldier already up, sitting crosslegged with Oreb on his shoulder and his back against the tunnel wall. "That's good, trooper," Hammerstone said. "Not good," Auk explained. "I don't mean that. Better. Better than I did, see? That feels better than good, 'cause when you're feeling good you don't even think about it. But when you feel the way I do, you pay more attention than when you're feeling good. I'm a dimberdamber nanny nipper." He nudged Chenille with the toe of his boot. "Look alive, Jugs. Time for breakfast!" "What's the matter with _you?_" Incus sat up as though it had been he and not Chenille who had been thus nudged. "Not a thing," Auk told him. "I'm right as rain." He considered the matter. "If it does, I'll go to the Cock. If it don't, I'll do some business on the hill. Slept with my boots on." He seated himself beside Chenille. "You too? You shouldn't do that, Patera. Bad on the feet." Untying their laces, he tugged off his boots, then pulled off his stockings. "Feel how wet these are. Still wet from the boat. Wake up, old man! From the boat and the rain. If we had that tall ass again, I'd make him squirt fire for me so I could dry 'em. Phew!" He hung the stockings over the tops of his boots and pushed them away. Chenille sat up and began to take off her jade earrings. "Ooh, did I dream!" She shuddered. "I was lost, see? All alone down here, and this tunnel I was in kept going deeper both ways. I'd walk one way for a long, long while, and it would just keep going down. So I'd turn around and walk the other way, only that way went down, too, deeper and deeper all the time." "Recollect that the _immortal gods_ are always with you, my daughter," Incus told her. "Uh-huh. Hackum, I've got to get hold of some clothes. My sunburn's better. I could wear them, and it's too cold down here without any." She grinned. "A bunch of new clothes, and a double red ribbon. After that, I'll be ready for ham and half a dozen eggs scrambled with peppers." "Watch out," Hammerstone warned her, "I don't think your friend's ready for inspection." Auk rose, laughing. "Look at this," he told Hammerstone, and kicked Urus expertly, bending up his bare toes so that Urus's ribs received the ball of his foot. Urus blinked and rubbed his eyes just as Auk had, and Auk realized that he himself was the long sun. He had awakened himself with his own light, light that filled the whole tunnel, too dazzlingly bright for Urus's weak eyes. "The way you been carrying the old man," he told Urus, "I don't like it." He wondered whether his hands were hot enough to burn Urus. It seemed possible; they were ordinary when he wasn't looking at them, but when he did they glowed like molten gold. Stooping, he flicked Urus's nose with a forefinger, and when Urus did not cry out, jerked him to his feet. "When you carry the old man," Auk told him, "you got to do it like you love him. Like you were going to kiss him." It might be a good idea to make Urus really kiss him, but Auk was afraid Dace might not like it. "All right," Urus said. "All right." Bustard inquired, How you feelin', sprat? Auk pondered. "There's parts of me that work all right," he declared at length, "and parts that don't. A couple I'm not set about. Remember old Marble?" Sure. "She told us she could pull out these lists. Out of her sleeve, like. What was right and what wasn't. With me, it's one thing at a time." "I can do that," Hammerstone put in. "It's perfectly natural." Chenille had both earrings off, and was rubbing her ears. "Can you put these in your pocket, Hackum? I got no place to carry them." "Sure," Auk said. He did not turn to look at her. "I could get a couple cards for them at Sard's. I could buy a good worsted gown and shoes, and eat at the pastry cook's till I was ready to split." "Like, there's this dimber punch," Auk explained to Urus. "I learned it when I wasn't no bigger than a cobbler's goose, and I always did like it a lot. You don't swing, see? Culls always talk about swinging at you, and they do. Only this is better. I'm not sure it still works, though." His right fist caught Urus square in the mouth, knocking him backward into the shiprock wall. Incus gasped. "You sort of draw your arm up and straighten it out," Auk explained. Urus slumped to the tunnel floor. "Only with your weight behind it, and your knuckles level. Look at them." He held them out. "If your knuckles go up and down, that's all right, too. Only it's a different punch, see?" Not as good, Bustard said. "Only not as good," Auk confirmed. I kin walk, big feller, he don't have to carry me, nor kiss me neither. The dead body at his feet, Auk decided, must be somebody else. Urus, maybe, or Gelada. Maytera Marble tried to decide how long it had been since she had done this, entering _roof_ and when that evoked only a flood of dripping ceilings and soaked carpets, _attic_. A hundred and eighty-four years ago. She could scarcely believe it--did not wish to believe it. A graceful girl with laughing eyes and industrious hands had climbed this same stair, as she still did a score of times every day, walked along this hall, and halted beneath this odd-looking door overhead, reaching up with a tool that had been lost now for more than a century. She snapped her new fingers in annoyance, producing a loud and eminently satisfactory clack, then returned to one of the rooms that had been hers and rummaged through her odds-and-ends drawer until she found the big wooden crochet hook that she had sometimes plied before disease had deprived her of her fingers. Not these fingers, to be sure. Back in the hall, she reached up as the girl who had been herself had and hooked the ring, wondering whimsically whether it had forgotten how to drop down on its chain. It had not. She tugged. Puffs of dust emerged from the edges of the door above her head. The hall would have to be swept again. She hadn't been up there, no one had-- A harder tug, and the door inclined reluctantly downward, exposing a band of darkness. "Am I going to have to swing on you?" she asked. Her voice echoed through all the empty rooms, leaving her sorry she had spoken aloud. Another tug evoked squeals of protest, but brought the bottom of the door low enough for her to grasp it and pull it down; the folding stair that was supposed to slide out when she did yielded to a hard pull. I'll oil this, she resolved. I don't care if there isn't any oil. I'll cut up some fat from that bull and boil it, and skim off the grease and strain it, and use that. Because this _isn't_ the last time. It is _not_. She trotted up the folding steps in an energetic flurry of black bombazine. Just look how good my leg is! Praise to you, Great Pas! The attic was nearly empty. There was never much left when a sibyl died; what there was, was shared among the rest in accordance with her wishes, or returned to her family. For half a minute, Maytera Marble tried to recall who had owned the rusted trunk next to the chimney, eventually running down the whole list--every sibyl who had ever lived in the cenoby--without finding a single tin trunk arnong the associated facts. The little gable window was closed and locked. She told herself that she was being foolish even as she wrestled its stubborn catch. Whatever it was that she had glimpsed in the sky while crossing the playground was gone, must certainly be gone by this time if it had ever existed. Probably it had been nothing but a cloud. She had expected the window to stick, but the dry heat of the last eight months had shrunk its ancient wood. She heaved at it with all her strength, and it shot up so violently that she thought the glass must break. Silence followed, with a pleasantly chill wind through the window. She listened, then leaned out to peer up at the sky, and at last (as she had planned the whole time, having a lively appreciation of the difficulty of proving a negative after so many years of teaching small boys and girls) she stepped over the sill and out onto the thin old shingles of the cenoby roof. Was it necessary to climb to the peak? She decided that it was, necessary for her peace of mind at least, though she wondered what the quarter would say if somebody saw her there. Not that it mattered, and most were off fighting anyhow. It wasn't as noisy as it had been during the day, but you could still hear shots now and then, like big doors shutting hard far away. Doors shutting on the past, she thought. The cold wind flattened her skirt against her legs as she climbed, and would have snatched off her coif had not one hand clamped it to her smooth metal head. There were fires, as she could see easily from the peak, one just a few streets away. Saddle Street or String Street, she decided, probably Saddle Street, because that was where the pawnbrokers were. More fires beyond it, right up to the market and on the other side, as was to be expected. Darkness except for a few lighted windows up on Palatine Hill. Which meant, more surely than any rumor or announcement, that Maytera Mint had not won. Hadn't won yet. Because the Hill would burn, would be looted and burned as predictably as the sixth term in a Fibonacci series of ten was an eleventh of the whole. With the Civil Guard beaten, nothing-- Before she could complete the thought, she caught sight of it, way to the south. She had been looking west toward the market and north to the Palatine, but it was over the Orilla... No, leagues south of that, way over the lake. Hanging low in the southern sky and, yes, opposing the wind in some fashion, because the wind was in the north, was blowing cold out of the north where night was new, because the wind must have come up, now that she came to think of it, only a few minutes before while she had been in the palaestra cutting up the last of the meat and carrying it down to the root cellar. She had come upstairs again and found her hoarded wrapping papers blown all over the kitchen, and shut the window. So this thing--this huge thing, whatever it might be--had been over the city or nearly over it when she had glimpsed it above the back wall of the ball court. And it wasn't being blown south any more, as a real cloud would be; if anything, it was creeping north toward the city again, was creeping ever so slowly down the sky. She watched for a full three minutes to make sure. Was creeping north like a beetle exploring a bowl, losing heart at times and retreating, then inching forward again. It had been here, had been over the city, before. Or almost over it, when the wind had risen--had been taken unawares, as it seemed, and blown away over the lake; and now it had collected its strength to return, wind or no wind. So briefly that she was not sure she had really seen it, something flashed from the monstrous dark flying bulk, a minute pinprick of light, as though someone in the shadowy skylands behind it had squeezed an igniter. Whatever it might be, there was no way for her to stop it. It would come, or it would not, and she had work to do, as she always did. Water, quite a lot of it, would have to be pumped to fill the wash boiler. She picked her way back to the gable, wondering how much additional damage she had done to a roof by no means tight to begin with. She would have to carry wood in, enough for a big fire in the stove. Then she could wash the sheets from the bed she had died in and hang them out to dry. If Maytera Mint came back (and Maytera Marble prayed very fervently that she would) she could cook breakfast for her on the same fire, and Maytera Mint might even bring friends with her. The men, if there were any, could eat in the garden; she would carry one of the long tables and some chairs out of the palaestra for them. Luckily there was still plenty of meat, though she had cooked some for Villus and given more to his family when she had carried him home. She stepped back into the attic and closed the window. Her sheets would be dry by shadeup. She could iron them and put them back on her bed. She was still senior sibyl--or rather, was again senior sibyl, so both rooms were hers, though she probably ought to move everything into the big one. Descending the folding steps, she decided that she would leave them down until she oiled them. She could cut off some fat and boil it in a saucepan while the wash water was getting hot; the boiler wouldn't take up the whole stove. By shadeup, the thing in the air would be back, perhaps; if she stood in the middle of Silver Street she might be able to see it quite clearly then, if she had time. Auk felt sure they had been tramping through this tunnel forever, and that was funny because he could remember when they had turned off the other one to go down this one that they had been going down since Pas built the Whorl, Urus spitting blood and carrying the body, himself behind them in case Urus needed winnowing out, Dace and Bustard so they could talk to him, then Patera with the big soldier with the slug gun who had told them how to walk and made him do it, and last Chenille in Patera's robe, with Oreb and her launcher. Auk would rather have walked with her and had tried to, but it was no good. He looked around at her. She waved friendly, and Bustard and Dace had gone. He thought of asking Incus and the soldier what had become of them but decided he didn't want to talk to them, and she was too far in back for a private chat. Bustard had most likely gone on ahead to look things over and taken the old man with him. It would be like Bustard, and if Bustard found something to eat he'd bring him back some. Pray to Phaea, Maytera Mint instructed him. Phaea is the food goddess. Pray to her, Auk, and you will surely be fed. He grinned at her. "Good to see you, Maytera! I been worried about you." May every god smile upon you, Auk, this day and every day. Her smile turned the cold damp tunnel into a palace and replaced the watery green glow of the crawling light with the golden flood that had awakened him. Why should you worry about me, Auk? I have served the gods faithfully since I was fifteen. They will not abandon me. No one has less reason to worry than I. "Maybe you could get some god to come down here and walk with us," Auk suggested. Behind him, Incus protested, "_Auk_, my son!" He made a rude noise and looked around for Maytera Mint, but she was gone. For a minute he thought she might have run ahead to talk to Bustard, then realized that she had gone to fetch a god to keep him company. That was the way she'd always been. The least little thing you happened to mention, she'd jump up and do it if she could. He was still worried about her, though. If she was going to Mainframe to fetch a god, she'd have to pass the devils that made trouble for people on the way, telling lies and pulling them off the Aureate Path. He should have asked her to go get Phaea. Phaea and maybe a couple pigs. Jugs would like some ham, and he still had his hanger and knife. He could kill a pig and cut it up, and dish up her ham. Shag, he was hungry himself and Jugs couldn't eat a whole pig. They'd save the tongue for Bustard, he'd always liked pig's tongue. It was Phaesday, so Maytera would most likely bring Phaea, and Phaea generally brought at least one pig. Gods generally brought whatever animal theirs was, or anyhow, pretty often. Pigs for Phaea. (You had to get them all right if you wanted to learn the new stuff next year.) Pigs for Phaea and lions or anyhow cats for Sphinx. Who'd eat a cat? Fish for Scylla, but some fish would be all right. Little birds for Molpe, and the old 'un had limed perches for 'em, salted 'em, and made sparrow pie when he'd got enough. Bats for Tartaros, and owls and moles. Moles? Suddenly and unpleasantly it struck Auk that Tartaros was the underground god, the god for mines and caves. So this was his place, only Tartaros was supposed to be a special friend of his and look what had happened to him down here, he had made Tartaros shaggy mad at him somehow because his head hurt, his head wasn't right, something kept sliding and slipping up there like a needler that wouldn't chamber right no matter how much you oiled it and made sure every last needle was as straight as the sun. He reached under his tunic for his, but it wasn't right at all--was so wrong, in fact, that it wasn't there, though Maytera Mint was his mother and in need of him and it. "Poor Auk! Poor Auk!" Oreb circled above his head. The wind from his laboring wings stirred Auk's hair, but Oreb would not settle on his shoulder, and soon flew back to Chenille. It wasn't there any more and neither was she. Auk wept. The captain's salute was much smarter than his torn and soiled green uniform. "My men are in position, My General. My floater is patrolling. To reinforce the garrison by stealth is no longer possible. Nor will reinforcement at the point of the sword be possible, until we are dead." Bison snorted, tilting back the heavy oak chair that was temporarily his. Maytera Mint smiled. "Very good, Captain. Thank you. Perhaps you had better get some rest now." "I have slept, My General, though not long. I have eaten as well, as you, I am told, have not. Now I inspect my men at their posts. When my inspection is complete, perhaps I shall sleep another hour, with my sergeant to wake me." "I'd like to go with you," Maytera Mint told him. "Can you wait five minutes?" "Certainly, My General. I am honored. But..." She looked at him sharply. "What is it, Captain? Tell me, please." "You yourself must sleep, My General, and eat as well. Or you will be fit for nothing tomorrow." "I will, later. Please sit down. We're tired, all of us, and you must be exhausted." She turned back to Bison. "We have a principle in the Chapter, for sibyls like me and augurs like Patera Silk. Discipline, it's called, and it comes from an old word for pupil or student. If you're a teacher, as I am, you must have discipline in the classroom before you can teach anything. If you don't, they'll be so busy talking among themselves that they won't hear a thing that you say, and draw pictures instead of doing the assignment." Bison nodded. Recalling an incident from the year before, Maytera Mint smiled again. "Unless you've _told_ them to draw pictures. If you've told them to draw, they'll write each other notes." The captain smoothed his small mustache. "My General. We have discipline also, we officers and men of the Civil Guard. The word is the same. The practice, I dare say, not entirely different." "I know, but I can't use you to patrol the streets and stop the looting. I wish I could, Captain. It would be very convenient, and no doubt effective. But to many people the Guard is the enemy. There would be a rebellion against our rebellion, and that's exactly what we cannot afford." She turned back to Bison. "You understand why this is needed, don't you? Tell me." "We're robbing ourselves," he said. His beard made it difficult to read his expression, but she tried and decided he was uncomfortable. "What you say is true. The people whose houses and shops are being looted are our people, too, and if they have to stay there to defend them, they can't fight for us. But that isn't all, is it? What else did you want to say?" "Nothing, General." "You must tell me everything." She wanted to touch him, as she would have touched one of the children at that moment, but decided it might be misconstrued. "Telling me everything when I ask you to is discipline as well, if you like. Are we going to let the Guard be better than we are?" Bison did not reply. "But it's really more important than discipline. Nothing is more important to us now than my knowing what you think is important. You and the captain here, and Zoril, and Kingcup, and all the rest." When he still said nothing, she added, "Do you want us to fail, so you won't be embarrassed, Bison? That is what is going to happen if we won't share concerns and information: we will fail the gods and die. All of us, probably. Certainly I will, because I will fight until they kill me. What is it?" "They're burning, too," he blurted. "The burning's worse than the looting, a lot worse. With this wind, they'll burn down the city if we don't stop them. And--and..." "And what?" Maytera Mint nibbled her underlip. "And put out the fires that are raging all around the city already, of course. You're right, Bison. You always are." She glanced at the door. "Teasel? Are you still out there? Come in, please. I need you." "Yes, Maytera." "We're telling one another we should rest, Teasel. It seems to be the convention of this night. You're not exempt. You were quite ill only a few days ago. Didn't Patera Silk bring you the Peace of Pas?" Teasel nodded solemnly; she was a slender, pale girl of thirteen, with delicate features and lustrous black hair. "On Sphixday, Maytera, and I started getting better right away." "Sphixday, and this is Hieraxday." Maytera Mint glanced at the blue china clock on the sideboard. "Thelxday in a few hours, so we'll call it Thelxday. Even so, less than a week ago you were in imminent danger of death, and tonight you're running errands for me when you ought to be in bed. Can you run one more?" "I'm fine, Maytera." "Then find Lime. Tell her where I am, and that I want to see her just as soon as she can get away. Then go home and go to bed. _Home_, I said. Will you do that, Teasel?" Teasel curtsied, whirled, and was gone. "She's a good, sensible girl," Maytera Mint told Bison and the captain. "Not one of mine. Mine are older, and they're off fighting or nursing, or they were. Teasel's one of Maytera Marble's, very likely the best of them." Both men nodded. "Captain, I won't keep you waiting much longer. Bison, I had begun to talk about discipline. I was interrupted, which served me right for being so long-winded. I was going to say that out of twenty boys and girls, you can make eighteen good students with discipline. I can, and you could too. In fact you would probably be better at it than I am, with a little practice." She sighed, then forced herself to sit up straight with her shoulders back. "Of the remaining, two one will never be a good student. He doesn't have it in him, and all you can do is stop him from unsettling the others. The other one doesn't need discipline at all, or at least that's how it seems. Pas's own truth is that he's already disciplined himself before you ever called the class to order. Do you understand me?" Bison nodded. "You're one of those. If you weren't, you wouldn't be my surrogate now. which you are, you know. If I am killed, you must take charge of everything." Bison grinned, big white teeth flashing in the thicket of his black beard. "The gods love you, General. Your getting killed's one thing I don't have to worry about." She waited for a better answer. "Hierax forbid," Bison said at last. "I'll do my best if it happens." "I know you will, because you always do. What you have to do is find others like yourself. We don't have enough time to establish real discipline, though I wish very much that we did. Choose men with needlers, won't need slug guns for this--older men, who won't loot themselves when they're sent to stop looters. Organize them in groups of four, designate a leader for each group, and have to tell-- "Don't forget this, it's extremely important. Have them tell everyone they meet that the looting and burning have to stop, and they'll shoot anyone they find doing either." She rose. "We'll go Captain. I want to see how you've arranged this. I've a great deal to learn and very little time to learn it in." Horn and Nettle, he with a captured slug gun and she with a needler, had stationed themselves outside the street door. "Horn, go in the house and find yourself a bed," Maytera Mint told him. "That is an order. When you wake up, come back here and relieve Nettle if she's still here. Nettle, I'm going around the Alambrera with the captain. I'll be back soon." The wind that chilled her face seemed almost supernatural after so many months of heat; she murmured thanks to Molpe, then recalled that the wind was fanning the fires Bison feared, and that it might--that in some cases it most certainly would--spread fire from shop to stable to manufactory. That there was a good chance the whole city would burn while she fought the Ayuntamiento for it. "The Ayuntamiento. They aren't divine, Captain." "I assure you, I have never imagined that they were, My General." He guided her down a crooked street whose name she had forgotten, if she had ever known it; around its shuttered store fronts, the wind whispered of snow. "Since they aren't," she continued, "they can't possibly resist the will of the gods for long. It is Echidna's will, certainly. I think we can be sure it's Scylla's too." "Also that of Kypris," he reminded her. "Kypris spoke to me, My General, saying that Patera Silk must be calde. I serve you because you serve him, him because he serves her." She had scarcely heard him. "Five old men. Four, if His Cognizance is right, and no doubt he is. What gives them the courage?" "I cannot guess, My General. Here is our first post. Do you see it?" She shook her head. "Corporal!" the captain called. Hands clapped, and lights kindled across the street; a gleaming gun barrel protruded from a second-floor window. The captain pointed. "We have a buzz gun for this post, as you see, My General. A buzz gun because the street offers the most direct route to the entrance. The angle affords us a longitudinal field of fire. Down there," he pointed again, "a step or two more, and we could be fired upon from an upper window of the Alambrera." "They could come down this street, straight across Cage, and go into the Alambrera?" "That is correct, My General. Therefore we will not go farther. This way, please. You do not object to the alley?" "Certainly not." How strange the service of the gods was! When she was only a girl, Maytera Mockorange had told her that the gods' service meant missing sleep and meals, and had made her give that response each time she was asked. Now here she was; she hadn't eaten since breakfast, but by Thelxiepeia's grace she was too tired to be hungry. "The boy you sent off to bed." The captain chuckled. "He will sleep all night. Did you foresee that, My General? The poor girl will have to remain at her post until morning." "Horn? No more than three hours, Captain, if that." The alley ended at a wider steet. Mill Street, Maytera Mint told herself, seeing the forlorn sign of a dark coffee shop called the Mill. Mill Street was where you could buy odd lengths of serge and tweed cheaply. "Here we are out of sight, though not hidden from sentries on the wall. Look." He pointed again. "Do you recognize it, My General?" "I recognize the wall of the Alambrera, certainly. And I can see a floater. Is it yours? No, it can't be, or they'd be shooting at it, and the turret's missing." "It is one of those you destroyed, My General. But it is mine now. I have two men in it." He halted. "Here I leave you for perhaps three minutes. It is too dangerous for us to proceed, but I must see that all is well with them." She let him trot away, waiting until he had almost reached the disabled floater before she began to run herself, running as she had so often pictured herself running in games with the children at the palaestra, her skirt hiked to her knees and her feet flying, the fear of impropriety gone who could say where. He jumped, caught the edge of the hole where the turret had been, pulled himself up and rolled over, vanishing into the disabled floater. Seeing him, she felt less confident that she could do it too. Fortunately she did not have to; when she was still half a dozen strides away, a door opened in its side. "I did not think you would remain behind, My General," the captain told her, "though I dared hope. You must not risk yourself in this fashion." She nodded, too breathless to speak, and ducked into the floater. It was cramped yet strangely roofless, the crouching Guardsmen clearly ill at ease, trained to snap to attention but compressed by circumstance. "Sit down," she ordered them, "all of you. We can't stand on formality in here." That word _stand_ had been unwisely chosen, she reflected. They sat anyway, with muttered thanks. "This buzz gun, you see, My General," the captain patted it, "once it belonged to the commander of this floater. He missed you, so it is yours." She knew nothing about buzz guns and was curious despite her fatigue. "Does it still operate? And do you have," at a loss, she waved a vague hand, "whatever it shoots?" "Cartridges, My General. Yes, there are enough. It was the fuel that exploded in this floater, you see. They are not like soldiers, these floaters. They are like taluses and must have fish oil or palm-nut oil for their engines. Fish oil is not so nice, but we employ it because it is less costly. This floater carried sufficient ammunition for both guns, and there is sufficient still." "I want to sit there." She was looking at the officer's seat. "May I?" "Certainly, My General." The captain scrambled out of her way. The seat was astonishingly comfortable, deeper and softer than her bed in the cenoby, although its scorched upholstery smelled of smoke. Not astonishing, Maytera Mint told herself, not really. To be expected, because it had been an officer's seat, and the Ayuntamiento treated officers well, knowing that its power rested on them; that was something to keep in mind, one more thing she must not forget. "Do not touch the trigger, My General. The safety catch is disengaged." The captain reached over her shoulder to push a small lever. "Now it is engaged. The gun will not fire." "This spider web thing." She touched it instead. "Is it what you call the sight?" "Yes, the rear sight, My General. The little post you see at the end of the barrel, that is the front sight. The gunner aligns the two, so that he sees the top of the post in one or another of the small rectangles." "I see." "Higher rectangles, My General, if the target is distant. To left or right if there is a strong wind, or because the gun favors one side or another." She leaned back in the seat and allowed herself, for no more than a second or two, to close her eyes. The captain was saying something about night vision, short bursts hitting more than long ones, about fields of fire. Fire was eating up somebody's home while he talked, and Lime (if Teasel had found her quickly and she hadn't been far) was looking for her right now, going from sentry post to post to post to post. Looking for her and asking people at each post whether they had seen her, whether they knew where the next one was and whether they would take her there because of the fires, because Bison had known, had rightly known that the fires must be put out but had been afraid to say it because he had known his people couldn't do it, could not, men and women who had fought so long and hard already all day, fight fires tonight and fight again tomorrow. Bison who made her feel so strong and competent, whose thick and curling black beard was longer than her hair. Maytera Mockorange had warned her about going without her coif, which was not just against the rule but stimulating to a great many men who were aroused by the sight of women's hair, particularly if long. She had lost her coif somewhere, had gone without it though her hair was short, though it had been cropped short on the first day, all of it. She fled Maytera Mockorange's anger down dark cold halls full of sudden turnings until she found Auk, who reminded her that she was to bring him the gods. "I am Colonel Oosik, Calde," Silk's visitor informed him. He was a big man, so tall and broad that Shell was hidden by his green-uniformed bulk. "The officer who directs this brigade," Silk offered his hand. "In command. Is that what you say? I'm Patera Silk." "You have familiarized yourself with our organization." Oosik sat down in the chair Shell had carried in earlier. "Not really. Are those my clothes you have?" "Yes." Oosik held them up, an untidy black bundle. "We will speak of them presently, Calde. If you have made no study of our organization charts, how is it you know my position?" "I saw a poster." Silk paused, remembering. "I was going to the lake with a woman named Chenille. The poster announced the formation of a reserve brigade. It was signed by you, and it told anyone who wanted to join it to apply to Third Brigade Headquarters. Patera Shell was kind enough to look in on me a few minutes ago, and he happened to mention that this was the Third Brigade. After he had gone, I recalled your poster." Shell said hurriedly, "The colonel was in the captain's room when I got there, Patera. I told them I'd wait, but he made me come in and asked what I wanted, so I told him." "Thank you," Silk said. "Please return to your manteion at once, Patera. You've done everything that you can do here tonight." Trying to freight the words with significance, he added, "It's already late. Very late." "I thought, Patera--" "Go," Oosik tugged his drooping mustache. "Your calde and I have delicate matters to discuss. He understands that. So should you." "I thought--" "Go!" Oosik had scarcely raised his voice, yet the word was like the crack of a whip. Shell hurried out. "Sentry! Shut the door." The mustache was tipped with white, Silk observed; Oosik wound it about his index finger as he spoke. "Since you have not studied our organization, Calde, you will not know that a brigade is the command of a general, called a brigadier." "No." Silk admitted. "I've never given it any thought." "In that case no explanation is necessary. I had planned to tell you, so that each of us would know where we stand, that though I am a mere colonel, an officer of field grade," Oosik released his mustache to touch the silver osprey on his collar, "I command my brigade exactly as a brigadier would. I have for four years. Do you want your clothes?" "Yes. I'd like to get dressed, if you'll let me." Oosik nodded, though it was not clear whether his nod was meant to express permission or understanding. "You are nearly dead, Calde. A needle passed through your lung." "Nevertheless, I'd feel better if I were up and dressed." It was a lie, although he wished fervently that it were true. "I'd be sitting on this bed then, instead of lying in it; but I've got nothing on." Oosik chuckled. "You wish your shoes as well?" "My shoes and my stockings. My underwear, my trousers, my tunic, and my robe. Please, colonel." The corners of the mustache tilted upward. "Dressed, you might easily escape, Calde. Isn't that so?" "You say I'm near death, Colonel. A man near death might escape, I suppose; but not easily." "We have handled you roughly here in the Third, Calde. You have been beaten. Tortured." Silk shook his head. "You shot me. At least, I suppose that it was one of your officers who shot me. But I've been treated by a doctor and installed in this comfortable room. No one has beaten me." "With your leave." Oosik peered at him. "Your face is bruised. I assumed that we had beaten you." Silk shook his head, pushing back the memory of hours of interrogation by Councillor Potto and Sergeant Sand. "You do not wish to explain the source of your bruises. You have been fighting, Calde, a shameful thing for an augur. Or boxing. Boxing would be permissible, I suppose." "Through my own carelessness and stupidity, I fell down a flight of stairs," Silk said. To his surprise, Oosik roared with laughter, slapping his knee. "That is what our troopers say, Calde," he wiped his eyes, still chuckling, "when one has been beaten by the rest. He says he fell down the barracks stairs, almost always. They don't want to confess that they've cheated their comrades, you see, or stolen from them." "In my case it's the truth." Silk considered. "I had been trying to steal, though not to cheat, two days earlier. But I really did fall down steps and bruise my face." "I am happy to hear you haven't been beaten. Our men do it sometimes without orders. I have known them to do it when it was contrary to their orders, as well. I punish them for that severely, you may be sure. In your case, Calde," Oosik shrugged. "I sent out an officer because I required better information concerning the progress of the battle before the Alambrera than my glass could give me. I had made provisions for wounded and for prisoners. I needed to learn whether they would be sufficient." "I understand." "He came back with you." Oosik sighed. "Now he expects a medal and a promotion for putting me in this very difficult position. You understand my problem, Calde?" "I'm not sure I do." "We are fighting, you and I. Your followers, a hundred thousand or more, against the Civil Guard, of which I am a senior officer, and a few thousand soldiers. Either side may win. Do you agree?" "I suppose so," Silk said. "Let us say, for the moment, that it is mine. I do not intend to be unfair to you, Calde. We will discuss the other possibility in a moment. Say that the victory is ours, and I report to the Ayuntamiento that you are my prisoner. I will be asked why I did not report it earlier, and I may be court-martialed for not having reported it. If I am fortunate, my career will be destroyed. If I am not, I may be shot." "Then report it," Silk told him, "by all means." Oosik shook his head again, his big face gloomier than ever. "There is no right course for me in this, Calde. No right course at all. But there is one that is clearly wrong, that can lead only to disaster, and you have advised it. The Ayuntamiento has ordered that you be killed on sight. Do you know that?" "I had anticipated it." Silk discovered that his hands were clenched beneath the quilt. He made himself relax. "No doubt. Lieutenant Tiger should have killed you at once. He didn't. May I be frank? I don't think he had the stomach for it. He denies it, but I don't think he had the stomach. He shot you. There you lay, an augur in an augur's robe, gasping like a fish and bleeding from the mouth. One more shot would be the end." Oosik shrugged. "No doubt he thought you would die while he was bringing you in. Most men would have." "I see," Silk said. "He'll be in trouble now if you tell the Ayuntamiento that you have me, alive." "_I_ will be in trouble." Oosik tapped his chest with a thick forefinger. "I will be ordered to kill you, Calde, and I will have to do it. If we lose after that, your woman Mint will have me shot, if she doesn't light upon something worse. If we win, I will be marked for life. I will be the man who killed Silk, the augur who was, as the city firmly believes, chosen by Pas to be calde. If it is wise, the Ayuntamiento will disavow my actions, court-martial me, and have me shot. No, Calde, I will not report that I hold you. That is the last thing that I will do." "You said that the Guard and the Army--I've been told there are seven thousand soldiers--are fighting the people. What is the strength of the Guard, Colonel?" Silk strove to recall his conversation with Hammerstone. "Thirty thousand, approximately?" "Less." "Some Guardsmen have deserted the Ayuntamiento. I know that for a fact." Oosik nodded gloomily. "May I ask how many?" "A few hundred, perhaps, Calde." "Would you say a thousand?" For half a minute or more, Oosik did not speak; at last he said, "I am told five hundred. If that is correct, almost all have come from my own brigade." "I have something to show you," Silk said, "but I have to ask you for a promise first. It's something that Patera Shell brought me, and I want you to give me your word that you won't harm him or the augur of his manteion, or any of their sibyls. Will you promise?" Oosik shook his head. "I cannot disobey if I am ordered to arrest them, Patera." "If you're not ordered to." It should give them ample time to leave, Silk thought. "Promise me that you won't do anything to them on your own initiative." Oosik studied him. "You are offering your information very cheaply, Calde. We don't bother you religious, except under the most severe provocation." "Then I have your word as an officer?" Oosik nodded, and Silk took the Prolocutor's letter from under his quilt and handed it to him. He unbuttoned a shirt pocket and got out a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, shifting his position slightly so that the light fell upon the letter. In the silence that followed, Silk reviewed everything Oosik had said. Had he made the right decision? Oosik was ambitious--had probably volunteered to take charge of the reserve brigade as well as his own in the hope of gaining the rank and pay to which his position entitled him. He might be, in fact he almost certainly was, underestimating the fighting capabilities of soldiers like Sand and Hammerstone; but he was sure to know a great deal about those of the Civil Guard, in which he had spent his adult life; and he was considering the possibility that the Ayuntamiento would lose. The Prolocutor's letter, with its implications of increased support for Maytera Mint, might tilt the balance. Or so Silk hoped. Oosik looked up. "This says Lemur's dead." Silk nodded. "There have been rumors all day. What if your Prolocutor is simply repeating them?" "He's dead." Silk made the statement as forceful as he could, fortified by the knowledge that for once there was no need to hedge the truth. "You've got a glass, Colonel. You must. Ask it to find Lemur for you." "You saw him die?" Silk shook his head, saying, "I saw his body, however," and Oosik returned to the letter. Too much boldness could ruin everything; it would be worse than useless to try to make Oosik say or do anything that could be brought up against him later. Oosik put down the letter. "The Chapter is behind you, Calde. I suspected as much, and this makes it very plain." "It is now, apparently." Here was a chance for Oosik to declare himself. "If you suspected it before you read that letter, Colonel, it was doubly kind of you to let Patera Shell in to see me." "I didn't, Calde. Captain Gecko did." "I see. But you'll keep your promise?" "I am a man of honor, Calde." Oosik refolded the letter and put it in his pocket with his glasses. "I will also keep this. Neither of us would want anyone else to read it. One of my officers, particularly." Silk nodded. "You're welcome to." "You want your clothes back. No doubt you would like to have the contents of your pockets as well. Your beads are in there, I think. I imagine you would like to tell them as you lie here." "I would, yes. Very much." "There are needlers, too. One is like the one with which you were shot. There is also a smaller one that seems to have belonged to a woman named Hyacinth." "Yes," Silk said again. "I see I know her, if she is the Hyacinth I'm thinking of. An amiable girl, as well as a very beautiful one. I lay with her on Phaesday." Silk shut his eyes. "I did not set out to give you pain, Calde. Look at me. I'm old enough to be your father, or hers. Do you imagine she sends me love letters?" "Is that...?" "What one of the letters in your pocket is?" Oosik nodded solemnly "Captain Gecko told me the seals had not been broken when he found them. Quite frankly, I doubted him. I see that I should not have. You have not read them." "No," Silk said. "Captain Gecko has, and I. No one else. Gecko can be discreet if I order it, and a man of honor must be a man of discretion, also. Otherwise he is worse than useless. You did not recognize her seal?" Silk shook his head. "I've never gotten a letter from her before." "Calde, I have never gotten one at all." Oosik tugged his mustache. "You would be well advised to keep that before you. Many letters from women over the years, but never one from her. I say again, I envy you." "Thank you," Silk said. "You love her." Oosik leaned back in his chair. "That is not a question. You may not know it, but you do." His voice softened. "I was your age once, Calde. Do you realize that in a month it may be over?" "In a day it may be over," Silk admitted. "Sometimes I hope it will be." "You fear it, too. You need not say so. I understand. I told you I knew her and it gave you pain, but I do not want you to think, later, that I have been less than honest. I am being equally honest now. Brutally honest with myself. My pride. I am nothing to her." "Thank you again," Silk said. "You are welcome. I do not say that she is nothing to me. I am not a man of stone. But there are others, several who are much more. To explain would be offensive." "Certainly you don't have to go into details unless you want me to shrive you. May I see her letter?" "In a moment, Calde. Soon I will give it to you to keep. I think so, at least. There is one further matter to be dealt with. You chanced to mention a woman called Chenille. I know a woman of that name, too. She lives in a yellow house." Silk smiled and shook his head. "That does not pain you at all. She is not the Chenille you took to the lake?" "I was amused at myself--at my stupidity. She told me she had entertained colonels; but until you said you knew her, it had never entered my mind that you were almost certain to be one of them. There can't be a great many." "Seven besides myself." Oosik rummaged in the bundle of clothing and produced Musk's big needler and Hyacinth's small, gold-plated one. After holding them up so that Silk could see them, he laid them on the windowsill. "The little one is hers," Silk said. "Hyacinth's. Could you see that it's returned to her?" Oosik nodded. "I shall send it by a mutual acquaintance. What about the large one?" "The owner's dead. I suppose it's mine now." "I am too well mannered to ask if you killed him, but I hope he was not one of our officers." "No," Silk said, "and no. I confess I was tempted to kill him several times--as he was undoubtedly tempted to kill me--but I didn't. I've only killed once, in self-defense. May I read Hyacinth's letter now?" "If I can find it." Oosik fumbled through Silk's clothes again, then held up both the letters Silk had taken from the mantel in the manse that morning. "This other is from another augur. You have no interest in it?" "Not as much, I'm afraid. Who is it?" "I have forgotten." Oosik extracted the letter from its envelope and unfolded it. "'Patera Remora, Coadjutor.' He wishes to see you, or he did. You were to come to his suite in the Prolocutor's Palace yesterday at three. You are more than a day late already, Calde. Do you want it?" "I suppose so," Silk said; and Oosik tossed it on the bed. Oosik rose, holding out Hyacinth's letter. "This one you will not wish to read while I watch, and I have urgent matters to attend to. I may look in on you again, later this evening. Much later. If I am too busy, I will see you in the morning, perhaps." He tugged his mustache. "Will you think me a fool if I say I wish you well, Calde? That if we were no longer opponents I should consider your friendship an honor?" "I'd think you were an estimable, honorable man," Silk told him, "which you are." "Thank you, Calde!" Oosik bowed, with a click of his booted heels. "Colonel?" "Your beads. I had forgotten. You will find them in a pocket of the robe, I feel sure." Oosik turned to go, but turned back. "A matter of curiosity. Are you familiar with the Palatine, Calde?" Silk's right hand, holding Hyacinth's letter, had begun to tremble; he pressed it against his knee so that Oosik would not see it. "I've been there." By an effort of will, he kept his voice almost steady. "Why do you ask?" "Often, Calde?" "Three times, I believe." It was impossible to think of anything but Hyacinth; he could as easily have said fifty, or never. "Yes, three times--once to the Palace, and twice to attend sacrifice at the Grand Manteion." "Nowhere else?" Silk shook his head. "There is a place having a wooden figure of Thelxiepeia. As an augur, you may know where it is." "There's an onyx image in the Grand Manteion--" Oosik shook his head. "In Ermine's, to the right as one enters the sellaria. One sees an arch with greenery beyond it At the rear, there is a pool with goldfish. She stands by it holding a mirror. The lighting is arranged so that the pool is reflected in her mirror, and her mirror in the pool. It is mentioned in that letter." Oosik turned upon his heel. "Colonel, these needlers--" He paused at the door. "Do you intend to shoot your way to freedom, Calde?" Without waiting for Silk's reply he went out, leaving the door ajar behind him. Silk heard the sentry come to attention, and Oosik say, "You are dismissed. Return to the guardroom immediately." Silk's hands were still shaking as he unfolded Hyacinth's letter; it was on stationery the color of heavy cream, scrawled in violet ink, with many flourishes.
O My Darling Wee Flea: I call you so not only because of the way you sprang from my window, but because of the way you hopped into my bed! How your lonely bloss has longed for a note from you!!! You might have sent one by the kind friend who brought you my gift, you know!That had been Doctor Crane, and Doctor Crane was dead--had died in his arms that very morning.
Now you have to tender me your thanks and so much more, when next we meet! Don't you know that little place up on the Palatine where Thelx holds up a mirror? _Hieraxday_.Silk closed his eyes. It was foolish, he told himself. Utterly foolish. The semiliterate scribbling of a woman whose education had ended at fourteen, a girl who had been given to her father's superior as a household servant and concubine, who had scarcely read a book or written a letter, and was trying to flirt, to be arch and girlish and charming on paper. How his instructors at the schola would have sneered! Utterly foolish, and she had called him darling, had said she longed for him, had risked compromising herself and Doctor Crane to send him this. He read it again, refolded it, and returned it to its envelope, then pushed aside the quilt and got up. Oosik had intended him to go, of course--had intended him to escape, or perhaps to be killed escaping. For a few seconds he tried to guess which. Had Oosik been insincere in speaking of friendship? Oosik was capable of any quantity of double-dealing, if he was any judge of men. It did not matter. He took his clothing from the chair and spread it on the bed. If Oosik intended him to escape, he must escape as Oosik intended. If Oosik intended him to be killed escaping, he must escape just the same, doing his best to remain alive. His tunic was crusted with his own blood and completely unwearable; he threw it down and sat on the bed to pull on his undershorts, trousers, and stockings. When he had tied his shoes, he rose and jerked open a drawer of the bureau. Most of the tunics were cheerful reds and yellows; but he found a blue one, apparently never worn, so dark that it might pass for black under any but the closest scrutiny. He laid it on the pillow beside the letters, and put on a yellow one. The closet yielded a small traveling bag. Slipping both letters into a pocket, he rolled up his robe, stuffed it into the bag, and put the dark blue tunic on top of it. The magazine status pin of the big needler indicated it was loaded; he opened the action anyway trying to recall how Auk had held his that night in the restaurant, and remembering at the last moment Auk's adjuration to keep his finger off the trigger. The magazine appeared to be full of long, deadly-looking needles, or nearly full. Auk had said his needler held how many? A hundred or more, surely; and this big needler that had been Musk's must hold at least as many if not more. It was possible, of course, that it had been disabled in some way. There was no one in the hall outside. Silk closed the door, and after a moment's thought put the quilt against its bottom and shut the window, then sat down on the bed, sick and horribly weak. When had he eaten last? Very early that morning, in Limna, with Doctor Crane and that captain whose name he had never learned or had forgotten, and the captain's men. Kypris had granted another theophany, had appeared to them, and to Maytera Marble and Patera Gulo, and they had been full of the wonder of it, all three of them newly come to religious feeling, and feeling that no one had ever come to it before. He had eaten a very good omelet, then several slices of hot, fresh bread with country butter, because the cook, roused from sleep by a trooper, had popped the loaves that had been rising overnight into the oven. He had drunk hot, strong coffee, too; coffee lightened with cream the color of Hyacinth's stationery and sweetened with honey from a white, blue-flowered bowl passed to him by Doctor Crane, who had been putting honey on his bread. Now Doctor Crane was dead, and so was one of the troopers, the captain and the other trooper most likely dead too, killed in the fighting before the Alambrera. Silk lifted the big needler. Someone had told him that he, too, should be dead--he could not remember whether it had been the surgeon or Colonel Oosik. Perhaps it had been Shell, although it did not seem the sort of thing that Shell would say. The needler would not fire. He tugged its trigger again and returned it to the windowsill, congratulating himself on having resolved to test it; saw that he had left the safety catch on, pushed it off, took aim at a large bottle of cologne on the dresser, and squeezed the trigger. The needler cracked in his hand like a bullwhip and the bottle exploded, filling the room with the clean scent of spruce. He reapplied the safety and thrust the needler into his waistband under the yellow tunic. If Musk's needler had not been disabled, there was no point in testing Hyacinth's small one, too. He made sure its safety catch was engaged, forced himself to stand, and dropped it into his trousers pocket. One thing more, and he could go. Had the young man whose bedroom this was never written anything here? Looking around, he saw no writing materials. What of the owner of the perfumed scarf? She would write to him, almost certainly. A woman who cared enough to drop a silk scarf from her window would write notes and letters. And he would keep them, concealing them somewhere in this room and replying in notes and letters of his own, though perhaps less frequently. The study, if there was one, would belong to his father. Even a library would not be sufficiently private. He would write to her here, surely, sitting--where? There had been no chair in the room until Shell brought one. The occupant could only have sat on the bed or the floor, assuming that he had sat at all. Silk sat down again, imagined that he held a quill, pushed aside the chair Shell had put in front of the little night table, and pulled it over to him. Its shallow drawer held a packet of notepaper, a discolored scrap of flannel, a few envelopes, four quills, and a small bottle of ink. Choosing a quill, he wrote:Hy
Sir, events beyond my control have forced me to occupy your bedchamber for several hours, and I fear I have broken a bottle of your cologne, and stained your sheets. In extreme need, I have, in addition, appropriated two of your tunics and your smallest traveling bag. I am heartily sorry to have imposed on you in this fashion. I am compelled, as I indicated. When peace and order return to our city, as I pray that they soon will, I will endeavor to locate you, make restitution, and return your property. Alternately, you may apply to me, at any time you find convenient. I am Pa. Silk, of Sun StreetFor a long moment he paused, considering, the feathery end of the gray goose-quill tickling his lips. Very well. With a final dip into the ink, he added a comma and the word _Calde_ after "Sun Street," and wiped the quill. Restoring the quilt to the bed, he opened the door. The hall was still empty. Back stairs brought him to the kitchen, in which it appeared at least a company had been foraging for food. The back door opened on what seemed, from what he could see by skylight, to be a small formal garden; a white-painted gate was held shut by a simple hook. Outside on Basket Street, he stopped to look back at the house he had left. Most of its windows were lit, including one on the second floor whose lights were dimming; his, no doubt. Distant explosions indicated the center of the city as well as anything could. An officer on horseback who might easily have been the one who had shot him galloped past without taking the least notice. Two streets nearer the Palatine, a hurrying trooper carrying a dispatch box touched his cap politely. The box might contain an order to arrest every augur in the city, Silk mused; the galloping officer might be bringing Oosik word of another battle. It would be well, might in fact be of real value, for him to read those dispatches and hear the news that the galloping officer brought. But he had already heard, as he walked, the most important news, news pronounced by the muzzles of guns: the Ayuntamiento did not occupy all the city between this remote eastern quarter and the Palatine. He would have to make his way along streets in which Guardsmen and Maytera Mint's rebels were slaughtering each other, return to the ones that he knew best--and then, presumably, cross another disputed zone to reach the Palatine. For the Guard would hold the Palatine if it held anything, and in fact the captain had indicated only that morning that a full brigade had scarcely sufficed to defend it Molpsday night. Combatants on both sides would try to prevent him; he might be killed, and the exertions he was making this moment might kill him as surely as any slug. Yet he had to try, and if he lived he would see Hyacinth tonight. His free hand had begun to draw Musk's needler. He forced it back to his side, reflecting grimly that before shadeup he might learn some truths about himself that he would not prefer to ignorance. Unconsciously, he increased his pace. Men thought themselves good or evil; but the gods--the Outsider especially--must surely know how much depended upon circumstance. Would Musk, whose needler he had nearly drawn a few seconds before, have been an evil man if he had not served Blood? Might not Blood, for that matter, be a better man with Musk gone? He, Silk, had sensed warmth and generosity in Blood beneath his cunning and his greed, potentially at least. Something dropped from the sky, lighting on his shoulder so heavily he nearly fell. "Lo Silk! Good Silk!" "Oreb! Is it really you?" "Bird back." Oreb caught a lock of Silk's hair in his beak and gave it a tug. "I'm very glad--immensely glad you've returned. Where have you been? How did you get here?" "Bad place. Big hole!" "It was I who went into the big hole, Oreb. By the lake, in that shrine of Scylla's, remember?" Oreb's beak clattered. "Fish heads?" Chapter 6 -- The Blind God Oreb had eyed Dace's corpse hopefully when Urus let it fall to the tunnel floor and spun around to shout at Hammerstone. "Why we got to find him? Tell me that! Tell me, an' I'll look till I can't shaggy walk, till I got to crawl--" "Pick it up, you." Without taking his eyes off Urus, Hammerstone addressed Incus. "All right if I kill him, Patera? Only I won't be able to carry them both and shoot." Incus shook his head. "He has a _point_, my son, so let us consider it. _Ought_ we, as he inquires, continue to search for our friend Auk?" "I'll leave it up to you, Patera. You're smarter than all of us, smarter than the whole city'd be if you weren't living there. I'd do anything you say, and I'll see to it these bios do, too." "_Thank_ you, my son." Incus, who was exceedingly tired already, lowered himself gratefully to the tunnel floor. "Sit _down_, all of you. We shall discuss this." "I don't see why." Tired herself, Chenille grounded her launcher. "Stony there does whatever you tell him to, and he could do for me and Urus like swatting flies. You say it and we'll do it. We'll have to." "Sit _down_. My daughter, can't you see how very _illogical_ you're being? You _maintain_ that you're forced to obey in _all things_, yet you will not oblige even the simplest request." "All right." She sat; and Hammemtone, laying a heavy hand on Urus, forced him to sit, too. "Where Auk?" Oreb hopped optimistically across the damp gray shiprock. "Auk where?" Although he could not have put the feeling into words, Oreb felt that he was nearer Silk when he was with Auk than in any other company. The red girl was close to Silk as well, but she had once thrown a glass at him, and Oreb had not forgotten. "_Where_ indeed?" Incus sighed. "My daughter, you invite me to be a _despot_, but what you say is true. I might lord it over you both if I chose. I need not lord it over our friend. _He_ obeys me very willingly, as you have seen. But I am _not_, by inclination, training, or _native character_ inclined toward despotism. A holy augur's part is to lead and to advise, to _conduct_ the laity to rich fields and _unfailing_ springs, if I may put it thus _poetically_. "So _let us_ review our position and take _council_, one with another. Then I will lead us in prayer, a fervent and _devout_ prayer, let it be, to all the Nine, _imploring_ their guidance." "Then we'll decide?" Urus demanded. "Then _I_ will decide, my son." By an effort, Incus sat up straighter. "But _first_, allow me to dispel certain fallacies that have already crept into our deliberations." He addressed himself to Chenille. "_You_, my daughter, seek to accuse me of despotism. It is _impolite_, but courtesy itself must at times give way to the _sacred duty_ of _correction_. May I remind you that _you_, for the space of nearly _two days, tyrannized_ us all aboard that miserable boat? Tyrannized _me_ largely by means of our unfortunate friend, for whom we have already searched, as I would think, for nearly half a day?" "I'm not saying we ought to stop, Patera. That was him." She pointed to Urus. "I want to find him." "Be _quiet_, my daughter. I am not yet finished with _you_. I shall come to _him_ soon enough. _Why_, I inquire, did you so tyrannize us? I say--" "I was possessed! Scylla was in me. You know that." "No, no, my daughter. It won't _do_. It is what you have _maintained_, deflecting all criticism of your conduct with the same _shabby_ defense. It shall serve you no longer. You were _domineering, oppressive_, and _brutal_. Is that characteristic of _Our Surging Scylla?_ I affirm that it is _not_. As we have trudged on, I have reviewed all that is recorded of _her_, both in the _Chrasmologic Writings_ and in our traditions likewise. _Imperious?_ One can but agree. _Impetuous_ at times, perhaps. But _never_ brutal, oppressive, or _domineering_." Incus sighed again, removed his shoes, and caressed his blistered feet. "_Those_ evil traits, I say, my daughter, _cannot_ have been _Scylla's_. They were present _in you_ when she arrived, and so deeply rooted that she found it, I dare say, quite impossible to _expunge_ them. _Some_ there are, or so I have heard it said, who actually _prefer_ domineering women, _unhappy_ men twisted by nature beyond the natural. Our poor friend Auk, with all his manifest excellencies of _strength_ and _manly_ courage, is one of those unfortunates, so it would seem. I am _not_, my daughter, and I thank Sweet Scylla for it! Understand that for _my_ part, and for our tall friend's here, as I dare to say, we have not sought Auk for your sake, but for _his own_." "Talk talk," Oreb muttered. "As for _you_," Incus shifted his attention to Urus, "_you_ appear to believe that it is only because of my loyal friend _Hammerstone_ that you obey me. It that not so?" Urus stared sullenly at the tunnel wall to the left of Incus's face. "You are _silent_," Incus continued. "Talk and more talk, complains our small _feathered_ companion, and again, talk, talk and _talk_. Not impossibly you concur. No, my son, you _deceive_ yourself, as you have deceived yourself throughout what I feel _certain_ must have been a most unhappy life." Incus drew Auk's needler and leveled it at the silent Urus. "I have but little _need_ of my tall friend Hammerstone, where _you_ are concerned, and should this endless _talk_ that you complain of end, you may find yourself less pleased _than ever_ with that which succeeds it. I invite a _comment_." Urus shook his head. Hammerstone clenched his big fists, clearly itching to batter him insensible. "Nothing? In that case, my son, I am going to take the opportunity to tell you something of _myself_ because I have been pondering that, with many other things, while we walked, and it will bear upon what I mean to do, as you will see. "I was born to poor yet _upright_ parents, their _fifth_ and _final_ child. At the time they were _wed_, they had made _solemn pledge_ to Echidna that they would furnish the immortal gods with an augur or a sibyl, the ripest _fruit_ of their union and the most _perfect_ of all _thank offerings_ for it. Of my older brothers and sisters, I shall say nothing. _Nothing_, that is to say, except that there was nothing to be hoped for from _them_. No more _holy piety_ was to be discovered in the four of them than in four of those _horrid beasts_ with which you, my son, proposed to attack us. I was born some _seven years_ after my youngest sibling, Femur. Conceive of my parents' _delight_, I invite you, when the passing _days, weeks, months_, and _years_ showed ever more plainly my _predilection_ for a life of _holy contemplation_, of _worship_ and _ritual_, far from the _bothersome exigencies_ that trouble the hours of most men. The schola, if I may say it, welcomed me with _arms outspread_. Its _warmth_ was no less than that with which I, in my turn, rushed to _it_. I was together _pious_ and _brilliant_, a combination not often found._ Thus endowed_, I gained the friendship of _older men_ of tastes like to _my own_, who were to extend themselves _without stint_ in my behalf following my _designation_. "I was informed, and you may conceive of my _rapture_, my _delight_, that no less a figure than the _coadjutor_ had agreed to make me his prothonotary. With all my heart I entered into my _duties_, drafting and summarizing letters and depositions, stamping, filing, and retrieving files, managing his _calendar of appointments_, and a hundred like tasks." Incus fell silent until Chenille said, "By Thelxiepeia I could sleep for a week!" She leaned back against the tunnel wall and closed her eyes. "Where Auk?" Oreb demanded, but no one paid him the least attention. "We are all _exhausted_, my daughter. I not _less_ than you, and perhaps with more _reason_, because my legs are not so _long_, nor am I, by a decade and _more_, so young, nor so well fed." "I'm not even a little bit well fed, Patera." Chenille did not open her eyes. "I guess none of us are. I haven't had anything but water since forever." "When we were on that _wretched_ little fishing boat, you _appropriated_ to yourself what food you _wished_, and _all_ that you wished, my daughter. You left to _Auk_ and Dace, and even to _me_, an anointed augur, only such _scraps_ as you disdained. But you have _forgotten_ that, or say you have. I wish that I might forget it, too." "Fish heads?" Chenille shrugged, her eyes still closed. "All right, Patera, I'm sorry. I don't suppose we'll ever find any food down here, but if we do, or when we get back home, I'll let you have first pick." "I would _refuse_ it, my daughter. That is the _point_ I am _striving_ to make. I became His Eminence's prothonotary, as I said. I entered the _Prolocutor's Palace_, not as an awestruck _visitor_, but as an _inhabitant_. Each morning I sacrificed _one squab_ in the _Private chapel_ below the reception hall, chanting my prayers to empty chairs. Afterward, I enjoyed that same _bird_ at my luncheon. _Upon a monthly basis_, I shrove Patera Bull, His Cognizance's prothonotary, as _he me_. That was the whole compass of my duties as an augur. "But from time to time, His Eminence assigned to _me_ such errands as he felt, or _feigned_ to feel, overdifficult for a _boy_. One such brought me to that miserable village of _Limna_, as you know. I was to search for _you_, my daughter, and it was my _ill luck_ to succeed. Your own life, I suppose, has been, I will not say _adventurous_, but _tumultuous_. Is that not so?" "It's had its ups and downs," Chenille conceded. "_Mine_ had not, with the result that I had assumed myself _incapable_. Had some god informed me," Incus paused to thrust Auk's needler back into his waistband, then contemplated his scabbed hands, "that I should be forced to serve as the _entire crew_ of a fishing vessel, _bailing, making sail, reefing_, and all the rest, and this during a _tempest_ as severe as any the Whorl has ever seen, I should have called it _quite impossible_, declaring roundly that I should _die_ within an hour. I would have informed this wholly supposititious divinity that I was a man of _intellect_, now largely affecting to be a man of prayer, for my early piety had long since given way to an advancing _scepticism_. Had he suggested that I might _yet_ become a man of action, I would have declared it to be _beneath_ me, and thought myself profound." Urus said, "Well, if you didn't have a needler 'n this big chem, we'd see." Incus nodded his agreement, his round, plump little face serious and his protuberant teeth giving him something of the look of a resolute chipmunk. "We would _indeed_. Therefore, I shall _kill_ you, Urus my son, or order Hammerstone to, whenever it appears that I am liable to lose either." "Bad man!" It was not immediately apparent whether Oreb intended Incus or Urus. Chenille said, "You don't really mean that, Patera." "Oh, but I do, my daughter. Tell them, Corporal. Do I mean what I say?" "Sure, Patera. See, Chenille, Patera's a bio like you, and bios like you and him are real easy to kill. You can't take chances, or him either. You got a prisoner, he's got to toe the line every minute, cause if you let him get away with anything, that's it. If it was up to me, I'd kill him right now, and not chance something happening to Patera." "We need him to show us how to get to the pit, and that door that opens into the cellar of the Juzgado." "Only we're not going to either one now, are we? And I know where the Juzgado is if I can get myself located. So why shouldn't I quiet him down?" As if by chance, Hammerstone's slug gun was pointing in Urus's direction; his finger found its trigger. "We _have not_ been going to the pit, I am happy to say," Incus told them. "It was _Auk_ who wished to go there, for no good reason that _I_ could ever understand. _Unfortunately_, we haven't been going to the Juzgado, _either_, though it was to the Juzgado that Surging Scylla directed us. _I_ am the sole person present who _recollects_ her instructions, possibly. But I _assure you_ it is so." "All right," Chenille said wearily, "I believe you." "As you _ought_, my daughter, because it was _through your mouth_ that Scylla spoke. That very _fact_ brings me to another point. She made Auk, Dace, and _myself_ her prophets, specifying that I am to replace His Cognizance as _Prolocutor_. Dace has _departed_ this whorl, so grievously infected by evil, for the richer life of Mainframe. Succoring Scylla might recall him _if she chose_, perhaps. I _cannot_. If our search for _Auk_ is to be given up, or at least _postponed_, and I confess there is _much_ that appeals to me in that, only _I_ remain of Scylla's three. "Earlier, _bedeviled_ by multiple interruptions, I _strove_ to explain my position. Because neither of you has _patience_ for that explanation, though it would occupy but a _few moments_ at most, I shall _state_ it. Pay _attention_, both of you." Incus's voice strengthened. "I have awakened to _myself_, both as _man_ and as augur. A servant of Men, if you will. A servant of the _gods_, most particularly. You are three. One loves, two _hate_ me. I am not unaware of it." "I don't hate you," Chenille protested. "You let me wear this when I got cold. Auk doesn't hate you either. You just think that." "Thank you, my daughter. I was about to remark that from what I've learned from my brother augurs concerning manteions, the proportion implied is the one most frequently seen, though our _congregation_ is so much less numerous. Very well, _my good people_, I accept it. I shall do my best for each and for all, nonetheless, trusting in a reward from the east." "See?" Hammerstone nudged Chenille. "What'd I tell you? The greatest man in the _Whorl_." Oreb cocked his head at Incus. "Where Auk?" "Nowhere to be found in that shining city we name _Reason_, I fear," Incus told him half humorously. "He hailed someone. _I_ saw him do it, though there was no one to be seen. After saluting this _unseen being_, he dashed away. Our good corporal pursued him, as you saw, but lost him in the _darkness_." "These green lights don't work the way people think, see, Chenille. People think they just crawl around all the time and don't care where they're at, only they're not really like that. If it's bright one way and dark the other, they'll head for the dark, see? Real slow, but that's how they go. It's what keeps them spread out." Chenille nodded. "Urus said something about that." "In a little place, they get everything worked out among themselves after a while and don't hardly move except to get away from the windows in the daytime, but in a big place like this they don't ever settle down completely. Only they don't ever go down much, 'cause if they did, they'd get stepped on and broken real fast." "Lots of these tunnels slope down besides the one Auk ran down," she objected, "and I've seen lights in them." "Depends on how dark it is down there, and how steep the slope is. If it's too steep, they won't go in there at all." "It was pretty steep," Chenille conceded, "and we went down it quite a ways, but later we took that one that went up, remember? It didn't go up as steep as the dark one went down, and it had lights, but it climbed like that for a long time." "I _think_, my daughter--" "So what I've been wondering is would Auk have gone back up like we did? He was kind of out of it." "He was _deranged_," Incus declared positively. "I would hope that condition was only temporary, but temporary or _not_, he was not _rational_." "Yeah, and that's why we took the tunnel that angled back up that I was talking about, Patera. We're not abram and we knew we wanted to get back up to the surface, besides finding Auk. But if Auk was abram... To let you have the lily word, all you bucks seem pretty abram to me, mostly, so I didn't pay much attention. Only if he was, maybe he'd just keep on going down, because that's easier. He was running like you say, and it's pretty easy to run downhill." "There _may_ be something in what you suggest, my daughter. We must keep it in mind, _if_ our discussion concludes that we should continue our pursuit. "Now, may _I_ sum up? The _question_ is whether we are to continue, or to break off our search, _at least temporarily_, and attempt to return to the sufface. Allow me, please, to state both cases. I shall strive for _concision_. If any of you has an _additional point_, you are free to advance it when I have _concluded_. "It would seem to me that there is only one _cogent_ reason to _protract_ our search, and I have touched upon that _already_. It is that Auk is one of the _triune prophets_ commissioned by _Scylla_. As a _prophet_ he is a _theodidact_ of _inestimable_ value, as was Dace. It is for that reason, and for it alone, that I _instructed_ Hammerstone to pursue him following his precipitate departure. It is for that reason _solely_ that I have prolonged the pursuit so far. For _I_, also, am such a prophet. The only such prophet remaining, as I have said." "He's one of us," Chenille declared. "I was with him at Limna before Scylla possessed me, and I remember him a little on the boat. We can't just go off and leave him." "Nor do _I_ propose to do so, my daughter. Hear me out, I beg you. We are _exhausted and famished_. When we return to the _surface_ with Scylla's messages, in _fulfillment_ of her will, we can gain rest and food. _Furthermore_, we can enlist others in the search. We will--" Urus interrupted. "You said we could put in stuff of our own, right? All right, how about me? Do I get to talk, or are you goin' to have the big chem shoot me?" Incus smiled gently. "You must understand, my son, that as your spiritual guide, I _love_ you no less and no more than the others. I have threatened your life only as the _law_ does, for your correction. _Speak_." "Well, I don't love Auk, only if you want to get him back it looks to me like you're goin' about it wrong. He wanted us to go to the pit, remember? So maybe now that he's gone off by himself that's where. We could go 'n see, 'n there's lots of bucks there that know these tunnels as well as me, so why not tell 'em what happened 'n get 'em to look too?" Incus nodded, his face thoughtful. "It is a suggestion worthy of consideration." "They'll eat us," Chenille declared. "Fish head?" Oreb fluttered to her shoulder. "Yeah, like you'd eat a fish head, Oreb. Only we'd have to have fish heads to do it." "They won't eat me," Hammerstone told her. "They won't eat anybody I say not to eat, either, while I'm around." "Now let us _pray_." Incus was on his knees, hands clasped behind him. "Let us petition the _immortal gods_, and Scylla _particularly_, to rescue both Auk and _ourselves_, and to guide us in the ways they would have us go." "I twigged you don't buy that any more." "I have _encountered_ Scylla," Incus told Urus solemnly. "I have seen for myself the _majesty_ and _power_ of that very great goddess. How could I lack belief now?" He contemplated the voided cross suspended from his prayer beads as if he had never seen it before. "I have suffered, too, on that wretched boat and in these _detestable_ tunnels. I have been in terror of my life. It is hunger and fear that direct us toward the gods, my son. I have learned that, and I wonder that _you_, suffering as you clearly have, have not turned to them long ago. "How do you know I haven't, huh? You don't know a shaggy thing about me. Maybe I'm holier than all of you." Tired as she was, Chenille giggled. Incus shook his head. "No, my son. It won't do. I am a _fool_, perhaps. Beyond dispute I have not infrequently been a fool. But not such a fool as that." More loudly he added, "On your _knees_. Bow your heads." "Bird pray! Pray Silk!" Incus ignored Oreb's hoarse interruption, his right hand making the sign of addition with the voided cross. "Behold us, lovely Scylla, _wonderful of waters_. Behold our love and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla!" He took a deep breath, the inhalation loud in the whispering silence. "Your prophet is bewildered and dismayed, Scylla. Wash clear my _eyes_ as I implore you to cleanse my _spirit_. Guide me in this confusion of darkling passages and obscure responsibilities." He looked up, mouthing: "_Cleanse us, O Scylla_." Chenille, Hammerstone, and even Urus dutifully repeated, "Cleanse us, O Scylla." Bored, Oreb had flown up to grip a rough stone protrusion in his red claws. He could see farther even than Hammerstone through the yellow-green twilight that filled the tunnel, and clinging thus to the ceiling, his vantage point was higher; but look as he might, he saw neither Auk or Silk. Abandoning the search, he peered hungrily at Dace's corpse; its half-open eyes tempted him, though he felt sure he would be chased away. Below, the black human droned on: "Behold us, fair Phaea, _lady of the larder_. Behold our love and our need for thee. _Feed_ us, O Phaea! Famished we wander in need of your nurture." All the humans squawked, "Feed us, O Phaea!" "Talk talk," Oreb muttered to himself; he could talk as well as they, but it seemed to him that talking was of small benefit in such situations. "Behold us, fierce Sphigx, _woman of war_. Behold our love and our need for thee. _Lead_ us, O Sphigx! We are lost and dismayed, O Sphigx, hemmed _all about_ by danger. Lead us in the ways we should go." And all the humans, "Lead us, O Sphigx!" The black one said, "Let us now, with heads bowed, put ourselves in _personal communion_ with the Nine." He and the green one and the red one looked down, and the dirty one got up, stepped over the dead one, and trotted softly away. "Man go," Oreb muttered, congratulating himself on having hit on the right words; and because he liked announcing things, he repeated more loudly, "Man go!" The result was gratifying. The green one sprang to his feet and dashed after the dirty one. The black one shrieked and fluttered after the green one, and the red one jiggled after them both, faster than the black one but not as fast as the first two. For as long as it might have taken one of his feathers to float to the tunnel floor, Oreb preened, weighing the significance of these events. He had liked Auk and had felt that if he remained with Auk, Auk would lead him to Silk. But Auk was gone, and the others were not looking for him any more. Oreb glided down to a convenient perch on Dace's face and dined, keeping a wary eye out. One never knew. Good came of bad, and bad of good. Humans were both, and changeable in the extreme, sleeping by day yet catching fish whose best parts they generously shared. And--so on. His crop filled, Oreb meditated on these points while cleaning his newly-bright bill with his feet. The dead one had been good. There could be no doubt about that. Friendly in the reserved fashion Oreb preferred alive, and delicious, dead. There was another one back there, but he was no longer hungry. It was time to find Silk in earnest. Not just look. Really find him. To leave this green hole and its living and dead humans. Vaguely, he recalled the night sky, the gleaming upside-down country over his head, and the proper country below. The wind in trees. Drifting along with it looking for things of interest. It was where Silk would be, and where he could be found. Where a bird could fly high, see everything, and find Silk. Flying was not as easy as riding the red one's launcher, but flying downwind through the tunnel permitted rests in which he had only to keep his wings wide and sail along. There were twinges at times, reminding him of the blue thing that had been there. He had never understood what it was or why it had stuck to him. Downwind along this hole and that, through a little hole (he landed and peered into it cautiously before venturing in himself) and into a big one where dirty humans stretched on the ground or prowled like cats, a hole lidded like a pot with the remembered sky of night. Sword in hand, Master Xiphias stood at the window looking at the dark and empty street. Go home. That was what they'd told him. Go home, though it had not been quite so bluntly worded. That dunce Bison, a fool who couldn't hold a sword correctly! That dunce Bison, who seemed in charge of everything, had come by while he was arguing with that imbecile Scale. Had smiled like friend and admired his sword, and had only pretended--pretended!--to believe him when he had stated (not boasting, just supplying a plain, straightforward answer in response to direct, uninvited questions) that he had killed five troopers in armor in Cage Street. Then Bison had--the old fencing master grinned gleefully--had gaped like a carp when he, Xiphias, had parted a thumbthick rope dangling from his, Bison's, hand. Had admired his sword and waved it around like the ignorant boy he was, and had the gall to say in many sweet words, go home like Scale says, old man. We don't need you tonight, old man. Go home and eat, old man. Go home and sleep. Get some rest, old man, you've had a big day. Bison's sweet words had faded and blown away, lighter and more fragile than the leaves that whirled up the empty street. Their import, bitter as gall, remained. He had been fighting--had been a famous fighting man--when Bison was in diapers. Had been fighting before Scale's mother had escaped her kennel to bump tails with some filthy garbage-eating cur. Xiphias turned his back to the window and sat on the sill, his head in his hands, his sword at his feet. He was no longer what he had been thirty years ago, perhaps. No longer what he had been before he lost his leg. But there wasn't a man in the city--not one!--who dared cross blades with him. A knock at the front door, floating up the narrow stair from the floor below. There would be no students tonight; his students would be fighting on one side or the other; yet somebody wanted to see him. Possibly Bison had realized the gravity of his error and come to implore him to undertake some almost suicidal mission. He'd go, but by High Hierax they'd have to beg first! He picked up his sword to return it to its place on the wall, then changed his mind. In times like these-- Another knock. There had been somebody. A new student down for tonight, came with Auk, tall, left-handed. Had studied with somebody else but wouldn't admit it. Good though. Talented! Gifted, in fact. Couldn't be here for his lesson, could he? With the city like this? A third knock, almost cursory. Xiphias returned to the window and peered out. Silk sighed. The house was dark; when he had been here before, the second floor had blazed with light. He had been foolish to think that the old man might be home after all. He knocked for the last time and turned away, only to hear a window thrown open above him. "It's you! Good! Good!" The window banged down. With speed that was almost comic, the door flew wide. "Inside! Inside! Bolt it, will you? Is that a bird? A pet bird? Upstairs!" Xiphias gestured largely with a saber, his shadow leaping beside him; whipped by the night wind, his wild white hair seemed to possess a life of its own. "Master Xiphias, I need your help." "Good man?" Oreb croaked. "A very good man," Silk assured him, hoping he was right; he caught the good man's arm as he turned away. "I know I was supposed to come tonight for another lesson, Master Xiphias. I haven't. I can't, but I need your advice." "Been called out? Have to fight? What did I tell you? What weapons?" "I'm very tired. Is there a place where we can sit down?" "Upstairs!" The old man bounded up them himself just as he had on Sphixday night. Wearily, Silk followed. "Lesson first!" Lights kindled at the sound of the old man's voice, brightened as he beat the wall with a foil. The traveling bag now held only the yellow tunic, yet it seemed as heavy as a full one; Silk dropped it into a corner. "Master Xiphia--" He snatched down another foil and beat the wall with that as well. "Been fighting?" "Not really. In a manner of speaking I have, I suppose." "Me too!" Xiphias tossed Silk the second foil. "Killed five. Ruins you, fighting! Ruins your technique!" Oreb squawked, "Look out!" and flew as Silk ducked. "Don't cringe!" Another whistling cut, this one rattling on the bamboo blade of Silk's foil. "What do you need, lad?" "A place to sit." He was tired, deadly tired; his chest throbbed and his ankle ached. He parried and parried again, sickened by the realization that the only way to get this mad old man to listen was to defeat him or lose to him; and to lose (it was as if a god had whispered it) tonight was death: the thing in him that had kept him alive and functioning since he had been shot would die at his defeat, and he soon after. Feinting and lunging, Silk fought for his life with the bamboo sword. Its hilt was just long enough for him to grip it with both hands, and he did. Cut right and left and right again, beating down the old man's guard. He was still stronger than any old man, however strong, however active, and he drove him back and again back, slashing and stabbing with frenzied speed. "Where'd you learn that two-handed thrust, lad? Aren't you left-handed?" Dislodged from his waistband, Musk's needler fell to the mat. Silk kicked it aside and snatched a second foil from the wall, parrying with one, then the other, attacking with the free foil, right, left, and right again. A vertical cut, and suddenly Xiphias's foot was on his right-hand foil. The blunt tip of Xiphias's foil thumped his wound, bringing excruciating pain. "What'll you charge, lad? For the lesson?" Silk shrugged, trying to hide the agony that lightest of blows had brought. "I should pay you, sir. And you won." "Silk win!" Oreb proclaimed from the grip of a yataghan. Silk die, Silk thought. So be it. "I learned, lad! Know how long it's been since I had a student who could teach me anything? I'll pay! Food? You hungry?" "I think so." Silk leaned upon his foil; in the same way that faces from his childhood swam into his consciousness, he recalled that he had once had a walking stick with the head of a lioness carved on its handle--had leaned upon it like this the last time he had been here, although he could not remember where he had acquired such a thing or what had become of it. "Bread and cheese? Wine?" "Wonderful." Retrieving the traveling bag, he followed the old man downstairs. The kitchen was at once disorderly and clean, glasses and dishes and bowls, pots and ladles anywhere and everywhere, an iron bread-pan already in the chair Xiphias offered, as if it fully expected to join in their conversation, though it found itself banished to the woodbox. Mismatched glasses crashed down on the table so violently that for a moment Silk felt sure they had broken. "Have some? Red wine from the veins of heroes! Care for some?" It was already gurgling into Silk's glass. "Got it from a student! Fact! Paid wine! Ever hear of such a thing? Swore it was all good! Not so! What do you think?" Silk sipped, then half emptied his glass, feeling that he was indeed drinking from the flask that had dangled from his bedpost, drinking new life. "Bird drink?" He nodded, and when he could find no napkin patted his mouth with his handkerchief. "Could we trouble you for a cup of water, Master Xiphias, for Oreb here?" The pump at the sink wheezed into motion. "You been out? City in an uproar! Dodging! Throwing stones! Haven't thrown stones since I was a sprat! Had a sling! You too? Better armed!" Crystal water rushed forth like the old man's words until he had filled a battered tankard. "This new cull, Silk! Going to show 'em! We'll see... Fighting, fighting! Threw stones, ducked and yelled! Five with my sword. I tell you? Know how to make a sling?" Silk nodded again, certain that he was being gulled but unresentful. "Me too! Used to be good with one!" The tankard arrived with a cracked green plate holding a shapeless lump of white-rinded cheese only slightly smaller than Silk's head. "Watch this!" Thrown from across the room, a big butcher knife buried its blade in the cheese. "You asked whether I'd been out much tonight." "Think there's any real fighting now?" Abruptly, Xiphias found himself siding with Bison. "Nothing! Nothing at all! Snipers shooting shadows to keep awake." He paused, his face suddenly thoughtful. "Can't see the other man's blade in the dark, can you? Interesting. Interesting! Have to try it! A whole new field! What do you think?" The sight and the rich, corrupt aroma of the cheese had awakened Silk's appetite. "I think that I'll have a piece," he replied with sudden resolution. He was about to die--very well, but no god had condemned him to die hungry. "Oreb, you like cheese, too, I know. It was one of the first things you told me, remember?" "Want a plate?" It came with a quarter of what must have been a gargantuan loaf on a nicked old board, and a bread knife nearly as large as Auk's hanger. "All I've got! You eat at cookshops, mostly? I do! Bad now! All shut!" Silk swallowed. "This is delicious cheese and wonderful wine. I thank you for it, Master Xiphias and Feasting Phaea." Impelled by habit, the last words had left his lips before he discovered that he did not mean them. "For my lesson!" The old man dropped into a chair. "Can you throw, lad? Knives and whatnot? Like I just did?" "I doubt it. I've never tried." "Want me to teach you? You're an augur?" Silk nodded again as he sliced bread. "So's this Silk! You know Bison? He told me! Told us all!" Xiphias raised his glass, discovered he had neglected to fill it, and did so. "Funny, isn't it? An augur! Heard about him? He's an augur too!" Although his mouth watered for the bread, Silk managed, "That's what they say." "He's here! He's there! Everybody knows him! Nobody knows where he is! Going to do away with the Guard! Half's on his side already! Ever hear such nonsense in your life? No taxes, but he'll dig canals!" Master Xiphias made a rude noise. "Pas and the rest! Could they do all that people want by this time tomorrow? You know they couldn't!" Oreb hopped back onto Silk's shoulder. "Good drink!" He chewed and swallowed. "You should have some of this cheese, too, Oreb. It's marvelous." "Bird full." Xiphias chortled. "Me too, Oreb! That's his name? Ate when I got home! Ever see a shoat? Like that! All the meat, half the bread, and two apples! Why'd you go out?" Silk patted his lips. "That was what I came to talk to you about, Master Xiphias. I was on the East Edge--" "You walked?" "Walked and ran, yes." "No wonder you're limping! Wanted to sit, didn't you? I remember!" "There was no other way by which I might hope to reach the Palatine," Silk explained, "but there were Guardsmen all along one side of Box Street, and the rebels--General Mint's people--had three times as many on the other, young men mostly, but women and even children, too, though the children were mostly sleeping. I had trouble getting across." "I'll lay you did!" "Maytera--General Mint's people wanted to take me to her when they found out who I was. I had a hard time getting away from them, but I had to. I have an appointment at Ermine's." "On the Palatine? You should've stayed with the Guard! Thousands there! Know Skink? Tried about suppertime! Took a pounding! Two brigades! Taluses, too!" Silk persevered. "But I must go there, without fighting if I can. I must get to Ermine's." Before he could rein in his tongue he added, "She might actually be there." "See a woman, eh, lad?" Xiphias's untidy beard rearranged itself in a smile. "What if I tell old whatshisname? Old man, purple robe?" "I had hoped--" "I won't! I won't! Forget everything anyhow, don't I? Ask anybody! We going tomorrow? Need a place to sleep?" "Day sleep," Oreb advised. "Tonight," Silk told the old man miserably, "and only I am going. But it has to be tonight. Believe me, I would postpone it until morning if I could." "Drinking wine? No more for us!" Xiphias recorked the bottle and set it on the floor beside his chair. "Watch your bird! Watch and learn! Knows more than you, lad!" "Smart bird!" "Hear that? There you are!" Xiphias bounced out of his chair. "Have an apple? Forgot 'em! Still a few." He opened the oven door and banged it shut. "Not in there! Had to move 'em! Cooked the meat! Where's Auk?" "I've no idea, I'm afraid." Silk cut himself a second, smaller piece of cheese. "I hope he's home in bed. May I put that apple you're looking for in my pocket? I appreciate it very much--I feel a great deal better--but I must go. I wanted to ask whether you knew a route to the Palatine that might be safer than the principal street--" "Yes, lad! I do, I do!" Triumphantly, Xiphias displayed a bright red apple snatched from the potato bin. "Good man!" "And whether you could teach me a trick that might get me past the fighters on both sides. I knew there must be such things, and Auk would certainly know them; but it's a long way to the Orilla, and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to find him. It occurred to me that he'd probably learned many from someone else, and that you were a likely source." "Need a teacher? Yes, you do! Glad you know it! Where's your needler, lad?" For a moment Silk was nonplussed. "My--? Right here in my pocket." He held it up much as Xiphias had the apple. "It isn't actually mine, however. It belongs to the young woman I'm to meet at Ermine's." "Big one! I saw it! Fell out of your pants! Left it upstairs! Want me to get it? Eat your cheese!" Xiphias darted through the kitchen door, and Silk heard him clattering up the stair. "We must go, Oreb." He rose and dropped the apple into a pocket of his robe. "He intends to go with us, and I can't permit it." For a second his head spun; the walls of the kitchen shook like jelly and revolved like a carousel before snapping back into place. A dark little hallway beyond the kitchen door led to the stair, and the door by which they had entered the house. He steadied himself against the newel post, half hoping to hear the old man on the floor above or even to see him descending again, but the old house could not have been more silent if he and Oreb had been alone in it; it puzzled him until he recalled the canvas mats on the floor of the salon. Unbolting the door, he stepped into the empty, skylit street. The tunnels through which he had trudged for so many weary hours presumably underlay the Palatine, as they seemed to underlie everything; but they would almost certainly be patrolled by soldiers like the one from whom he had escaped. He knew of no entrance except Scylla's lakeshore shrine in any case, and was glad at that moment that he did not. A big hole, Oreb had said. Was it possible that Oreb, also, had wandered in those dread-filled tunnels? Shuddering at the memories he had awakened, Silk limped away toward the Palatine with renewed determination, telling himself that his ankle did not really hurt half so much as he believed it did. His gaze was on the rutted potholed street, for he knew that despite what he might tell himself, twisting his ankle would put an end to walking; but regardless of all the self-discipline he brought to bear, his thoughts threaded the tunnels once more, and hand-in-hand with Mamelta reentered that curious structure (not unlike a tower, but a tower thrust into the ground instead of rising into the air) that she had called a ship, and again beheld below it emptiness darker than any night and gleaming points of light that the Outsider--at his enlightenment!--had indicated were whorls, whorls outside the whorl, to which dead Pas and deathless Echidna, Scylla and her siblings had never penetrated. You was goin' to get me out. Said you would. Promised. Auk, who could not quite see Gelada, heard him crying in the wind that filled the pitch-black tunnel, while Gelada's tears dripped from the rock overhead. The two-card boots he had always kept well greased were sodden above the ankle now. "Bustard?" he called hopefully. "Bustard?" Bustard did not reply. You had the word, you said. Get me out O' here. "I saw you that time, off to one side." Unable to remember when or where he had said it last, Auk repeated, "I got eyes like a cat." It was not quite true because Gelada had vanished when he had turned his head, yet it seemed a good thing to say. Gelada might walk wide if he thought he was being watched. Auk? That your name? Auk? "Sure. I told you." Where's the Juzgado, Auk? Lot o' doors down here. Which 'uns that 'un, Auk? "I dunno. Maybe the same word opens 'em all." This was the widest tunnel he had seen, except he couldn't see it. The walls to either side were lost in the dark, and he might, for all he knew, be walking at a slant, might run into the wall slantwise with any step. From time to time he waved his arms, touching nothing. Oreb flapped ahead, or maybe it was a bat, or nothing. (Far away a woman's voice called, "_Auk? Auk?_") The tunnel wall was aglow now, but still dark, dark with a peculiar sense of light--a luminous blackness. The toe of one boot kicked something solid, but his groping fingers found nothing. "Auk, my noctolater, are you lost?" The voice was near yet remote, a man's, deep and laden with sorrow. "No, I ain't. Who's that?" "Where are you going, Auk? Truthfully." "Looking for Bustard." Auk waited for another question, but none came. The thing he had kicked was a little higher than his knees, flat on top, large and solid feeling. He sat on it facing the luminous dark, drew up his legs, and untied his boots. "Bustard's my brother, older than me. He's dead now, took on a couple Hoppies and they killed him. Only he's been down here with me a lot, giving me advice and telling me stuff, I guess because this is under the ground and it's where he lives on account of being dead." "He left you." "Yeah, he did. He generally does that if I start talking to somebody else." Auk pulled off his right boot; his foot felt colder than Dace had after Gelada killed him. "What's a noctolater?" "One who worships by night, as you worship me." Auk looked up, startled. "You a god?" "I am Tartaros, Auk, the god of darkness. I have heard you invoke me many times, always by night." Auk traced the sign of addition in the air. "Are you standing over there in the dark talking to me?" "It is always dark where I stand, Auk. I am blind." "I didn't know that." Black rams and lambs, the gray ram when Patera Silk got home safely, once a black goat, first of all the pair of bats he'd caught himself, surprised by day in the dark, dusty attic of the palaestra and brought to Patera Pike, all for this blind god. "You're a god. Can't you make yourself see?" "No." The hopeless negative seemed to fill the tunnel, hanging in the blackness long after its sound had faded. "I am an unwilling god, Auk. The only unwilling god. My father made me do this. If, as a god, I might have healed myself, I would have obeyed very willingly, I believe." "I asked my mother... Asked Maytera to bring a god down here to walk with us. I guess she brought you." "No," Tartaros said again; then, "I come here often, Auk. It is the oldest altar we have." "This I'm sitting on? I'll get off." (Again the woman's voice: "_Auk? Auk?_") "You may remain. I am also the sole humble god, Auk, or nearly." "If it's sacred..." "Wood was heaped upon it, and the carcasses of animals. You profane it no more than they. When the first people came, Auk, they were shown how we desired to be worshiped. Soon, they were made to forget. They did, but because they had seen what they had seen, a part of them remembered, and when they found our altars on the inner surface, they sacrificed as we had taught them. First of all, here." "I haven't got anything," Auk explained. "I used to have a bird, but he's gone. I thought I heard a bat a little while ago. I'll try to catch one, if you'd like that." "You think me thirsty for blood, like my sister Scylla." "I guess. I was with her awhile." Auk tried to remember when that had been; although he recalled incidents--seeing her naked on a white stone and cooking fish for her--the days and the minutes slipped and slid. "What is it you wish, Auk?" Suddenly he was frightened. "Nothing really, Terrible Tartaros." "Those who offer us sacrifice always wish something, Auk. Often, many things. Rain, in your city and many others." "It's raining down here already, Terrible Tartaros." "I know, Auk." "If you're blind..." "Can you see it, Auk?" He shook his head. "It's too shaggy dark." "But you hear it. Hear the slow splash of the falling drops kissing the drops that fell." "I feel it, too," Auk told the god. "Every once in a while one goes down the back of my neck." "What is it you wish, Auk?" "Nothing, Terrible Tartaros." Shivering, Auk wrapped himself in his own arms. "All men wish for something, Auk. Most of all, those who say they wish for nothing." "I don't, Terrible Tartaros. Only if you want me to, I'll wish for something for you. I'd like something to eat." Silence answered him. "Tartaros? Listen, if this's a altar I'm sitting on and you're here talking to me, shouldn't there be a Sacred Window around here someplace?" "There is, Auk. You are addressing it. I am here." Auk took off his left boot. "I got to think about that." Maytera Mint had taught him all about the gods, but it seemed to him that there were really two kinds, the ones she had told about, the gods in his copybook, and the real ones like Scylla when she'd been inside Chenille, and this Tartaros. The real kind were a lot bigger, but the ones in his copybook had been better, and stronger somehow, even if they were not real. "Terrible Tartaros?" "Yes, Auk, my noctolater, what is it you wish?" "The answers to a couple questions, if that's all right. Lots of times you gods answer questions for augurs. I know I'm not no augur. So is it all right for me to ask you, 'cause we haven't got one here?" Silence, save for the ever-present splashings, and the woman's voice, sad and hoarse and very far away. "How come I can't see your Window, Terrible Tartaros? That's my first one, if that's all right. I mean, usually they're sort of gray, but they shine in the dark. So am I blind, too?" Silence fell again. Auk chafed his freezing feet with his hands. Those hands had glowed like molten gold, not long ago; now they were not even warm. "I guess you're waiting for the other question? Well, what I wanted to know is how come I hear words and everything? At this palaestra I went to, Maytera said when we got bigger we wouldn't be able to make sense out of the words if a god ever came to our Sacred Window, just sort of know what he meant and maybe catch a couple of words once in a while. Then when Kypris came, it was just like what Maytera'd said it was going to be. Sometimes I felt like I could practically see her, and there was a couple words she said that I heard just as clear as I ever heard anybody, Terrible Tartaros. She said _love_ and _robbery_, and I knew it. I knew both those words. And I knew she was telling us it was all right, she loved us and she'd protect us, only we had to believe in her. But when you talk, it's like you were a man just like me or Bustard, standing right here with me." No voice replied. Auk let out his breath with a whoosh, and put his freezing fingers in armpits for a moment or two, and then began to wring out his stockings. "You yourself have never seen a god in a Window, Auk my noctolater?" Auk shook his head. "Not real clear, Terrible Tartaros. I sort of saw Kindly Kypris just a little, though, and that's good enough for me." "Your humility becomes you, Auk." "Thanks." Lost in thought, Auk reflected on his own life and character, the limp stocking still in his hand. At length he said, "It's never done me a lot of good, Terrible Tartaros, only I guess I never really had much." "If an augur sees the face and hears the words of a god, Auk, he sees and hears because he has never known Woman. A sibyl, also, may see and hear a god, provided that she has not known Man. Children who have never known either may see us as well. That is the law fixed by my mother, the price that she demanded for accepting the gift my father offered. And though her law does not function as she intended in every instance, for the most part it functions well enough." "All right," Auk said. "The faces we had as mortals have rotted to dust, and the voices we once possessed have been still for a thousand years. No augur, no sibyl in the _Whorl_, has ever seen or heard them. What your augurs and sibyls see, if they see anything, is the self-image of the god who chooses to be seen. You say that you could nearly make out the face of my father's concubine. The face you nearly saw was her own image of herself, her self as she imagines that self to appear. I feel confident that it was a beautiful face. I have never met any woman more secure in her own vanity. In the same fashion, we sound to them as we conceive our voices to sound. Have I made myself clear to you, Auk?" "No, Terrible Tartaros, 'cause I can't see you." "What you see, Auk, is that part of me which can be seen. That is to say, nothing. I came blind from the womb, Auk, and because of it I am incapable of formulating a visual image for you. Nor can I show you the Holy Hues, which are my brother's and my sisters' thoughts before they have coalesced. Nor can I exhibit to you any face at all, whether lovely or terrible. You see the face I envision when I think upon my own. That is to say, nothing. When I depart, you will behold once more the luminous gray you mention." "I'd rather you stayed around awhile, Terrible Tartaros. If Bustard ain't going to come back, I like having you with me." Auk licked his lips. "Probably I oughtn't to say this, but I don't mean any harm by it." "Speak, Auk, my noctolater." "Well, if I could scheme out some way to help you, I'd do it." There was silence again, a silence that endured so long that Auk feared that the god had returned to Mainframe; even the distant woman's voice was silent. "You asked by what power you hear my words as words, Auk, my noctolater." He breathed a sigh of relief. "Yeah, I guess I did." "It is not uncommon. My mother's law has lost its hold on you, because there is something amiss with your mind." Auk nodded. "Yeah, I know. I fell off our tall ass when he got hit with a rocket, and I guess I must've landed on my head. Like, it don't bother me that Bustard's dead, only he's down here talking to me. Only I know it would've in the old days. I don't worry about Jugs, either, like I ought to. I love her, and maybe that cull Urus's trying to jump her right now, but she's a whore anyhow." Auk shrugged. "I just hope he don't hurt her." "You cannot live in these tunnels, Auk, my noctolater. There is no food for you here." "Me and Bustard'll try to get out, soon as I find him," Auk promised. "If I were to possess you, I might be able to heal you, Auk." "Go ahead, then." "We would be blind, Auk. As blind as I. Because I have never had eyes of my own, I could not look out through yours. But I shall go with you, and guide you, and use your body to heal you, if I can. Look upon me, Auk." "There's nothing to see," Auk protested. But there was: a stammering light so filled with hope and pleasure and wonder that Auk would willingly have seen nothing else, if only he could have watched it forever. "If you're actually Patera Silk," the young woman at the barricade told him, "they'll kill you the minute you step out there." "No step," Oreb muttered. And again, "No step." "Very possibly they would," Silk conceded. "As in fact they almost certainly will--unless you're willing to help." "If you're Silk you wouldn't have to ask me or my people for anything." Uneasily she studied the thin, ascetic face revealed by the bright skylight. "If you're Silk, you are our commander and even General Mint must answer to you. You could just tell us, and we'd have to do whatever you said." Silk shook his head. "I am Silk, but I can't prove that here. You would have to find someone you trust who knows me and can identify me, and that would consume more time than I have; so I'm begging you instead. Assume--though I swear to you that this is contrary to fact--that I am not Silk. That I am--this, of course, is entirely factual--a poor young augur in urgent need of your assistance. If you won't help me for my sake, or for that of the god I serve, do so for your own, I implore you." "I can't launch an attack without an order from Brigadier Bison." "You shouldn't," Silk told her, "with one. There's an armored floater behind those sandbags. I can see the turret above them. If your people attacked, they would be advancing into its fire, and I've seen what a buzz gun can do." The young woman drew herself up to her full height, which was a span and a half less than his own. "We will attack if we are ordered to do so, Calde." Oreb bobbed his approbation. "Good girl!" Looking at the sleeping figures behind the barricade, children of fifteen and fourteen, thirteen and even twelve, Silk shook his head. "They're pretty young." (The young woman could not have been more than twenty herself.) "But they'll fight if they're led, and I'll lead them." When Silk said nothing, she added "That's not all. I've got a few men, too, and some slug guns. Most of the women--the other women, I ought to say--are working in the fire companies. You were surprised to find me in command, but General Mint's a woman." "I am surprised at that, as well," Silk told her. "Men want to fight a male officer. Besides, the women of Trivigaunte are famous troopers, and we women of Viron are in no way inferior to them!" Recalling Doctor Crane, Silk said, "I'd like to believe that our men are as brave as theirs, as well." The young woman was shocked. "They're slaves!" "Have you been there?" She shook her head. "Neither have I. Surely then it's pointless for us to discuss their customs. A moment ago you called me Calde. Did you mean that...?" "Lieutenant. I'm Lieutenant Liana now. I used the title as a courtesy, nothing more. If you want my opinion, I think you're who you say you are. An augur wouldn't lie about that, and there's the bird. They say you've got a pet bird." "Silk here," the bird informed her. "Then do as I ask. Do you have a white flag?" "For surrender?" Liana was offended. "Certainly not!" "To signal a truce. You can make one by tying a white rag to a stick. I want you to wave it and call to them, on the other side. Tell them there's an augur here who's brought the pardon of Pas to your wounded. That's entirely true, as you know. Say he wants to cross and do the same for theirs." "They'll kill you when they find out who you are." "Perhaps they won't find out. I promise you that I won't volunteer the information." Liana ran her fingers through her tousled hair; it was the same gesture he used in the grip of indecision. "Why me? No, Calde, I can't let you risk yourself." "You can," he told her. "What you cannot do is maintain that position with even an appearance of logic. Either I am calde or I am not. If I am, it is your duty to obey any order I give. If I'm not, the life of the calde is not at risk." A few minutes later, as she and a young man called Linsang helped him up the barricade, Silk wondered whether he had been wise to invoke logic. Logic condemned everything he had done since Oosik had handed him Hyacinth's letter. When Hyacinth had written, the city had been at peace, at least relatively. She had no doubt expected to shop on the Palatine, stay the night at Ermine's, and return-- "No fall," Oreb cautioned him. He was trying not to. The barricade had been heaped up from anything and everything: rubble from ruined buildings, desks and counters from shops, beds, barrels, and bales piled upon one another without any order he could discern. He paused at the top, waiting for a shot. The troopers behind the sandbag redoubt had been told he was an augur, and might know of the Prolocutor's letter by this time. Seeing Oreb, they might know which augur he was, as well. And shoot. It would be better, perhaps, to fall backward toward Liana and Linsang if they did--better, certainly, to jump that way if they missed. No shot came; he began a cautious descent, slightly impeded by the traveling bag. Oosik had not killed him because Oosik had taken the long view, had been at least as much politician as trooper, as every high-ranking officer no doubt had to be. The officer commanding the redoubt would be younger, ready to obey the orders of the Ayuntamiento without question. Yet here he was. Once invoked, logic was like a god. One might entreat a god to visit one's Window; but if a god came it could not be dismissed, nor could any message that it vouchsafed mankind be ignored, suppressed, or denied. He had invoked logic, and logic told him that he should be in bed in the house that had become Oosik's temporary headquarters--that he should be getting the rest and care he needed so badly. "He knew I'd go, Oreb." Something closed his throat; he coughed and spat a soft lump that could have been mucus. "He'd read her letter before he came in, and he's seen her." Silk found that he could not, even now, bring himself to mention that Oosik had lain with Hyacinth. "He knew I'd go, and take his problem with me." "Man watch," Oreb informed him. He paused again scanning the sandbag wall but unable to distinguish, at this distance, rounded sandbags from helmeted heads. "As long as they don't shoot," he muttered. "No shoot." This stretch of Gold Street had been lined with jewelers, the largest and richest shops nearest the Palatine, the richest of all clinging to the skirts of the hill itself, so that their patrons could boast of buying their bangles "uphill." Most of the shops were empty now, their grills and bars torn from their fronts by a thousand arms, their gutted interiors guarded only by those who had died defending or looting them. Beyond the redoubt, other richer shops waited, still intact. Silk tried and failed to imagine the children over whose recumbent bodies he had stepped looting them. They would not, of course. They would charge, fight, and very quickly die at Liana's order, and she with them. The looters would follow--if they succeeded. This body (Silk crouched to examine it) was that of a boy of thirteen or so; one side of his face had been shot away. He had not been on Gold Street often; but he was certain that it had never been this long, or half this wide. Here a trooper of the Guard and a tough-looking man who might have been the one who had questioned him after Kypris's theophany lay side-by-side, their knives in each other's ribs. "Patera!" It was the rasping voice that had answered Liana's hail. "What is it, my son?" "Hurry up, will you!" He broke into a trot, though not without protest from his ankle. When he had feared a shot at any moment, this lowest slope of the Palatine had been very steep; now he was scarcely conscious of its grade. "Here. Grab my hand." The Guard's redoubt was only half the height of the rebel barricade, although it was (as Silk saw when he had scrambled to the top) rather thicker. Its front was nearly sheer, its back stepped for the troopers who would fire over it. The one who had helped him up said, "Come on. I don't know how long he'll last." Silk nodded, out of breath from his climb and afraid he had torn the stitches in his lung. "Take me to him." The trooper jumped from the sandbag step; Silk followed more circumspectly. There were sleepers here as well, a score of armored Guardsmen lying in the street wrapped in blankets that were probably green but looked black in the skylight. "They going to rush us, over there?" the trooper asked. "No. Not tonight, I'd say--tomorrow morning, perhaps." The trooper grunted. "Slugs'll go right through a lot of that stuff in their fieldwork. I been lookin' it over, and there's a lot of furniture in there. Boards no thicker than your thumb in junk like that. I'm Sergeant Eft." They shook hands, and Silk said, "I was thinking the same thing as I climbed over it, Sergeant. There are heavier things as well, though, and even the chairs and so forth must obstruct your view." Eft snorted. "They got nothin' I want to see." That could not be said of the Guard, as Silk realized as soon as he looked past the floater. A talus had been posted at an intersection a hundred paces uphill, its great, tusked head (so like that of the one he had killed beneath Scylla's shrine that he could have believed them brothers) swiveling to peer down each street in turn. Liana would have been interested in it, he thought, if she did not know about it already. "In here." Eft opened the door of one of the dark shops; his voice and the thump of the door brightened lights inside, where troopers stripped of parts of their armor and more or less bandaged lay on blankets on a terrazzo floor. One moaned, awakened by the noise or the lights; two, it seemed, were not breathing. Silk knelt by the nearest, feeling for a pulse. "Not him. Over here." "All of them," Silk said. "I'm going to bring the Pardon of Pas to all of them, and I won't do it en masse. There's no justification for that." "Most's already had it. He has." Silk looked up at the sergeant, but there was no judging his truthfulness from his hard, ill-favored face. Silk rose. "This man's dead, I believe." "All right, we'll get him out of here. Come over here. He's not." Eft was standing beside the man who had moaned. Silk knelt again. The injured man's skin was cold to his touch. "You're not keeping him warm enough, Sergeant." "You a doctor, too?" "No, but I know something about caring for the sick. An augur must." "No hurt." Oreb hopped from Silk's shoulder to the injured man's chest. "No blood." "Leave him alone, you silly bird." "No hurt!" Oreb whistled. "No blood!" A bald man no taller than Liana stepped from behind one of the empty showcases. Although he held a slug gun, he was not in armor or even in uniform. "He--he isn't, Patera. Isn't wounded. At least he doesn't--I couldn't find a thing. I think it must be his heart." "Get a blanket," Silk told Eft. "Two blankets. Now!" "I don't take orders from any shaggy butcher." "Then his death will be on your head, Sergeant." Silk took his beads from his pocket. "Bring two blankets. Three wouldn't be too many. The men watching the rebels can spare theirs, surely. Three blankets and clean water." He bent over the injured man, his prayer beads dangling in the approved fashion from his right hand. "In the names of all the gods you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Molpe..." The names rolled from his tongue, each with its sonorous honorific, names empty or freighted with horror. Pas, whose Plan the Outsider had endorsed, was dead; Echidna a monster. The ghost that haunted Silk's mind now, as he spoke and swung his beads, was not Doctor Crane's but that of the handsome, brutal chem who had believed himself Councillor Lemur. "The monarch wanted a son to succeed him," the false Lemur had said. "Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself but female. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. His queen bore the monarch another child, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe. The third was male, but no better than the first two because he was born blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see by daylight. Echidna conceived again, and bore another male, a healthy boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. We call him Hierax now--" And this boy over whom he bent and traced sign after sign of addition was nearly dead. Possibly--just possibly--he might derive comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone's; but the worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some scales somewhere, surely. It had to, or else the Whorl was mad. "The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for him, too." A final sign of addition and it was over. Silk sighed, shivered, and put away his beads. "The other one didn't say that," the civilian with the slug gun told him. "That last." He had waited so long in fear of some such remark that it came now as an anticlimax. "Many augurs include the Outsider among the minor gods," he explained, "but I don't. His heart? Is that what you said? He's very young for heart problems." "His name's Cornet Mattak. His father's a customer of mine." The little jeweler leaned closer. "That sergeant, he killed the other one." "The other--?" "Patera Moray. He told me his name. We chatted awhile when he'd said the prayers of the Pardon, and I--I-- And I--" Tears flooded the jeweler's eyes, abrupt and unexpected as the gush from a broken jar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose. Silk bent over the cornet again, searching for a wound. "I said I'd give him a chalice. To catch the blood, you know what I mean?" "Yes," Silk said absently. "I know what they're for." "He said theirs was yellow pottery, and I said--said--" Silk rose and picked up the small traveling bag. "Where is his body? Are you certain he's dead?" Oreb fluttered back to his shoulder. The jeweler wiped his eyes and nose. "Is he dead? Holy Hierax! If you'd seen him, you wouldn't ask. He's out in the alley. That sergeant came in while we were talking and shot him. In my own store! He dragged him out there afterward." "Show him to me, please. He brought the Pardon of Pas to all these others? Is that correct?" Leading Silk past empty display cases toward the back of the shop, the jeweler nodded. "Cornet Mattak hadn't been wounded then?" "That's right." The jeweler pushed aside a black velvet curtain, revealing a narrow hallway. They passed a padlocked iron door and stopped before a similar door that was heavily barred. "I said when all this is over and things have settled down, I'll give you a gold one. I was still emptying out my cases, you see, while he was bringing them the Pardon. He said he'd never seen so much gold, and they were saving for a real gold chalice. They had one at his manteion, he said, before he came, but they'd had to sell it." "I understand." The jeweler took down the second bar and stood it against the wall. "So I said, when this is over I'll give you one to remember tonight by. I've got a nice one that I've had about a year, plain gold but not plain looking, you know what I mean? He smiled when I said that." The iron door swung open with a creak of dry hinges that reminded Silk painfully of the garden gate at the manse. "I said, you come into the strong room with me, Patera, and I'll show it to you. He put his hand on my shoulder then and said, my son, don't consider yourself bound by this. You haven't sworn by a god, and--and--" "Let me see him." Silk stepped outside into the alley. "And then the sergeant came in and shot him," the jeweler finished. "So don't you go back inside, Patera." In the chill evil-smelling darkness, someone was murmuring the prayer that Silk himself had just completed. He caught the names of Phaea and Sphigx, followed by the conventional closing phrase. The voice was an old man's; for an eerie moment, Silk felt that it was Patera Pike's. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the alley by the time the kneeling figure stood. "You're in terrible danger here," Silk said, and bit back the stooped figure's title just in time. "So are you, Patera," Quetzal told him. Silk turned to the jeweler. "Go inside and bar the door, please. I must speak to the--to my fellow augur. Warn him." The jeweler nodded, and the iron door closed with a crash, leaving the alley darker than ever. For a few seconds, Silk assumed that he had simply lost sight of Quetzal in the darkness; but he was no longer there. Patera Moray--of an age, height, and weight indeterminable without more light--lay on his back in the filthy mud of the alley, his beads in his hands and his arms neatly folded across his torn chest, alone in the final solitude of death. Chapter 7 -- Where Thelx Holds Up a Mirror Silk stopped to look at Ermine's imposing facade. Ermine's had been built as a private house, or so it appeared--built for someone with a bottomless cardcase and a deep appreciation of pillars, arches, friezes, and cornices and the like; features he had previously seen only as fading designs painted on the otherwise stark fronts of shiprock buildings were real here in a jungle of stone that towered fully five stories. A polished brass plaque of ostentatiously modest proportions on the wide green front door announced: "Ermine's Hotel." Who, Silk wondered almost idly, had Ermine been? Or was he still alive? If so, might Linsang be a poor relation--or even a rich one who had turned against the Ayuntamiento? And what about Patera Gulo? Stranger things had happened. Though he felt cold, his hands were clammy; he groped for his robe before remembering that it was back in the borrowed traveling bag with the borrowed blue tunic, and wiped his hands on the yellow one he was wearing instead. "Go in?" Oreb inquired. "In a minute." He was procrastinating and knew it. This was Ermine's, the end of dreams, the shadeup of waking. If he was lucky, he would be recognized and shot. If he was not, he would find Thelxiepeia's image and wait until Ermine's closed, for even Ermine's must close sometime. An immensely superior servant would inform him icily that he would have to leave. He would stand, and look about him one last time, and try to hold the servant in conversation to gain a few moments more. After that, he would have to go. The street would be gray with morning and very cold. He would hear Ermine's door shut firmly behind him, the snick of the bolt and the rattle of the bar. He would look up and down the street and see no Hyacinth, and no one who could be carrying a message from her. Then it would be over. Over and dead and done with, never to live again. He would recall his longing as something that had once occupied an augur whose name chanced to be his, Silk, a name not common but by no means outlandish. (The old calde, whose bust his mother had kept at the back of her closet, had been--what? Had he been Silk, too? No, Tussah; but tussah was another costly fabric.) He would try to bring peace and to save his manteion, fail at both, and die. "Go in?" He wanted to say that they were indeed going in, but found himself too dismayed to speak. A man with a pheasant's feather in his hat and a fur cape muttered, "Pardon me," and shouldered past. A footman in livery (presumably the supercilious servant envisioned a few seconds before) opened the door from inside. Now. Or not at all. Leave or send a message. Preserve the illusion. "Are you coming in, sir?" "Yes," Silk said. "Yes, I am. I was wondering about my pet, though. If there are objections, I'll leave him outside." "None, sir," A faint, white smile touched the footman's narrow lips like the tracery of frost upon a windowpane. "The ladies not infrequently bring animals, sir. Boarhounds, sir. Monkeys. Your bird cannot be worse. But, sir, the door..." It was open, of course. The night was chill, and Ermine's would be comfortably warm, rebellion or no rebellion. Silk climbed the steps to the green door, discovering that Liana's barricade had been neither higher nor steeper. "This is your first visit to Ermine's, I take it, sir?" Silk nodded. "I'm to meet a lady here." "I quite understand, sir. This is our anteroom, sir." There were sofas and stiff-looking chairs. "It is principally for the removal of one's outer garments, sir. They are left in the cloakroom. You may check your bag there, if you so desire. There is no hospitality here in the anteroom, sir, but one can observe all the guests who enter or depart." "Good man?" Oreb studied the footman through one bright, black eye. "Like bird?" "Tonight, sir," the footman leaned nearer Silk, and his voice became confidential, "I might be able to fetch you some refreshment myself, however. We've little patronage tonight. The unrest." "Thank you," Silk said. "Thank you very much. But no." "Beyond the anteroom, sir, is our sellaria. The chairs are rather more comfonable, sir, and there is hospitality as well. Some gentlemen read." "Suppose I go into your seilaria and turn to the right," Silk inquired, "where would I be then?" "In the Club, sir. Or if one turns less abruptly, in the Glasshouse, sir. There are nooks, sir. Benches and settees. There is hospitality, sir, but it is infrequent." "Thank you," Silk said, and hurried away. Strange to think that this enormous room, a room that held fifty chairs or more, with half that many diminutive tables and scores of potted plants, statues, and fat-bellied urns, should be called by the same name as his musty little sitting room at the manse. Swerving to his right he wound among them, worrying that he had turned too abruptly and feeling that he walked in a dream through a house of giants--while politely declining the tray proffered by a deferential waiter. All the chairs he saw were empty; a table with a glass top scarcely bigger than the seat of a milking stool held wads of crumpled paper and a sheet half covered with script, the only signs of human habitation. A wall loomed before him like the face of a mountain, or more accurately, like a fog bank through rents in which might be glimpsed scenes of unrelated luxury that were in truth its pictures. He veered left, and after another twenty strides caught sight of a marble arch framing a curtain of leaves. It had been as warm as he had expected in the sellaria; passing through the arch he entered an atmosphere warmer still, humid, and freighted with exotic perfumes. A moth with mauve-and-gray wings larger than his palms fluttered before his face to light on a purple flower the size of a soup tureen. A path surfaced with what seemed precious stones, narrower even than the graveled path through the garden of his manteion, vanished after a step or two among vines and dwarfish trees. The music of falling water was everywhere. "Good place," Oreb approved. It was, Silk thought. It was stranger and more dream-like than the sellaria, but more friendly and more human, too. The sellaria had been a vision of opulence bordering on nightmare; this was a gentler one of warmth and water, sunshine and lush fertility, and though this glass-roofed garden might be used for vicious purposes, sunshine and fertility, water and warmth were things in themselves good; their desirability could only be illustrated more clearly by the proximity of evil. "I like it," he whispered to Oreb. "Hyacinth must too, or she wouldn't have told me to meet her here, where all this would surely dim the beauty of a woman less lovely." The sparkling path divided. He hesitated, then turned to his right. A few steps more, and there was no light save that from the skylands floating above the whorl. "His Cognizance would like this as much as we do, I believe, Oreb. I've been in his garden at the Palace, and this reminds me of it, though that's an open-air garden, and this can't be nearly as large." Here was a seat for two, masterfully carved from a single block of myrtle. He halted to stare at it, longing to sit but restrained by the fear that he would be unable to stand again. "We have to find this image of Thelxiepeia," he muttered, "and there must be places to sit there. Hyacinth won't come. She's at Blood's in the country, she's bound to be. But we can rest there awhile." A new voice, obsequious and affected, murmured, "I _beg_ your pardon, sir." "Yes, what is it?" Silk turned. A waiter had come up behind him. "I'm rather embarrassed, sir. I really don't know quite how to phrase it." "Am I not supposed to be in here now?" As Silk asked, he resolved not to leave without a fight; they might overwhelm him with a mob of waiters and footmen, but they would have to--no mere order or argument would suffice. "Oh, no, sir!" The waiter looked horrified. "It's quite all right." The desperate struggle Silk had visualized faded into the mist of unactualized eventualities. "There is a gendeman, sir. A very tall gentleman, sir, with a long face? Rather a sad face, if I may say so, sir. He's in the Club." "No go," Oreb announced firmly. "He would not give me his name, sir. He said it was not relevant." The waiter cleared his throat. "He would not give your name either, sir, but he described you. He said that I was to say nothing if you were with someone, sir. I was only to offer to bring you and anyone who might be in your company refreshment, for which he would pay. But that if I found you alone, I was to invite you to join him." Silk shook his head. "I have no idea who this gentleman is. Do you?" "No, sir. He is not a regular patron. sir. I don't think I've ever seen him before." "Do you know the figure of Thelxiepela, waiter? Here in the Glasshouse?" "Certainly, sir. The tall gentleman instructed me to look for you there, sir." Colonel Oosik was tall, Silk reflected, though so massive that his height had not been very noticeable; but Oosik could scarcely be called long-faced. Since only he and Captain Gecko had read Hyacinth's letter, the long-faced man was presumably Gecko. "Tell him I can't join him in the Club," Silk said, choosing his words. "Express my regrets. Tell him I'll be at the figure of Thelxiepeia. and I'm alone. He may speak to me there if he chooses." "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. May I get you anything, sir? I could bring it there." Silk shook his head impatiently. "Very well, sir. I will deliver your message." "Wait a moment. What time is it?" The waiter looked apologetic. "I have no watch, sir." "Of course not. Neither do I. Approximately." "I looked at the barman's clock, sir, only a minute or two before I came here. It was five until twelve then, sir." "Thank you," Silk said, and sat down on the carved wooden seat without a thought about the difficulty of getting up. _Hieraxday_, Hyacinth's letter said. He tried to recall her exact words and failed, but he remembered their import. She had mentioned no time, perhaps intending late afternoon, when she would have finished her shopping. The barman's clock was in the Club, no doubt; and the Club would be a drinking place, primarily for men--a rich man's version of the Cock, where he had found Auk. The waiter was unlikely to have glanced at the barman's clock after speaking to the long-faced man, whoever he was; so it had probably been ten minutes or more since he had noticed the time. Hieraxday was past. This was Thelxday, and if Hyacinth had waited for him (which was highly unlikely) he had not come. "Hello, Jugs," Auk said, emerging from the darkness of a side tunnel. "He wants us to work on Pas's Plan." Chenille whirled. "Hackum! I've been looking all over for you!" She ran to him, surprising him, threw her arms around him, and wept. "Now," he said. "Now, now, Jugs. Now, now." She had been unhappy, and he knew it and knew that in some ill-defined and troubling way it was his fault, although he had meant her no harm, had wished her well and thought of her with kindness when he bad thought of her at all. "Excuse," he muttered, and let go of Tartaros's hand to embrace her with both arms. When at last she ceased sobbing, he kissed her as tenderly as he could, a kiss she returned passionately. She wiped her eyes, sniffled, and gulped, "Oh, Hierax! Hackum, I missed you so much! I've been so lonesome and scared. Hug me." This baffled him, because he already was. He tried, "I'm sorry, Jugs," and when it seemed to do no good, "I won't ever leave you again unless you want me to." She nodded and swallowed. "It's all right, as long as you keep coming back." He noticed her ring. "Didn't I give you that?" "Yeah, thanks." Stepping back, she held it up to show it off better, although the bleared greenish lights could never do it justice. "I love it, but you can have it back anytime if you need the gelt." "I'm flush, but I gave it to you?" "You forget, huh?" She looked at him searchingly. "On account of hitting your head. Or maybe a god got you like Kypris did me? It's still pretty hard for me to remember lots of things that happened when she was boss, or Scylla." Auk shook his head, and found that it no longer ached. "I've never had no god bossing me, Jugs, or wanted to either. That's lily. I never even knew about Kypris, but you were a lot different when you were Scylla." "Some of that was me, I think. Hold me tighter, won't you? I'm really cold." "Your sunburn don't hurt any more?" She shook her head. "Not much. I'm starting to peel a little. The bird was pulling on the peels before he left, only I made him stop." Auk looked around. "Where is he?" "With Patera and Stony, I guess. That Urus beat the hoof and they took off after him. Me, too, only we came to a split in the tunnel, you know?" "Sure. I've seen a lot of them." "And then I thought, they're not going to look for Auk anymore, and that's what I want to do. So I sort of slowed down, and when they went one way I went the other. I guess the bird went with them." "That was you I heard calling me." Chenille nodded. "Yeah. I yelled until my pipe gave out. Oh, Hackum, I'm so glad I found you!" "We found you," he told her seriously. "Why I ran off, Jugs..." He fell silent, massaging his big jaw. "You saw somebody, Hackum. Or anyhow you thought you did. I could see that, and Patera said so, too." "Yeah. My brother Bustard. He's dead, see? Only he was down here talking to me. I was going to say he wasn't really, I just sort of dreamed it, only now I'm not so sure. Maybe he was. Know what I mean?" The gray shiprock walls seemed to press in upon her. "I think so, Hackum." "Then he went away, and I missed him a lot, just like when he died. So then when I saw him again, maybe it was a couple, three hours later, I waved and yelled and tried to catch up, only I never did. Then I got lost, but I didn't care because I was looking for Bustard, and he could've been anywhere. Then I ran into this god. Into Tartaros. Mostly I call him Terrible Tartaros, 'cause I can't say the other right." "You met a god, Hackum? Like you'd meet somebody in the street, you mean?" "Sort of." Auk sat down on the tunnel floor. "Jugs, will you sit on my lap, the way you used to do in the old days? I'd like that." "All right." She did, laying her launcher flat, crossing her long legs, and leaning back in his arms "This is really better, Hackum. It's a lot warmer Except I don't do it much any more because I know I'm a pretty good load. Orchid says I'm getting fat. She's been telling me for a couple of months now." He held her closer, reveling in her softness. "She's fat. Real fat. Not you, Jugs." "Thanks. This god you met. Tartaros, right? He's for you like Kypris is for us." "Yeah, except he's one of the Seven." "I know that. Tarsday." "He's got a whole bunch of stuff besides us. The main thing is, he's the night god. Anywhere it's dark, that's a special place for him. Sleep and dreams, too. I mean, any god can send a dream if he wants to, but the regular kind that seem like nobody sent 'em are his. I call him Terrible Tartaros 'cause you had to say terrible or the other, or Maytera'd stomp you. I'd lay he could cut up rough, but he's been a bob cull with me. He came along to show how to find you and get out of here, and all that. He's next to us right now, only you can't see him 'cause he's blind." "You mean he's here with us?" Chenille's eyes were wide. "Yeah, he's sitting right here with me, only I wouldn't try to reach over and feel. Maybe he wouldn't do anything--" She had already, waving her free arm through the empty space on Auk's right. He shook her, not roughly. "Don't, Jugs. I told you." "He's not there. There's nothing there." "All right, there's nothing there. I was shaving you." "You shouldn't do that." She got up. "You don't know how shaggy scared I am down here, or how shaggy hungry." Auk rose too. "Yeah, it wasn't very funny, I guess. I'm sorry, Jugs. I won't do it again. C'mon." "Where are we going?" "Out." "Really, Hackum?" "Sure. You're hungry. So am I. We're going to go out and get a dimber dinner, probably at Pork's or one of those places. After that, we can rent a room and get a little rest. He says I got to rest. After that, maybe we'll do what Scylla said, only I don't know. I'll have to ask him." "Tartaros? That's who you're talking about? You really met him?" "Yeah. It's real dark in there and pretty wet. Water's sort of raining through the roof. If you saw it, you probably didn't go in, but there's nothing in there that'll hurt you. I don't think so, anyhow." "I've still got this lantern that Gelada had, Hackum, only there's no way to light it." "We don't have to," he told her. "It's not very far." "You said we were going out." "It's on our way." He stopped and faced her. "Only we'd be going even if it wasn't, 'cause he's got something to show us. He just told me, see? Now listen up." She nodded, drawing Incus's robe around her. "This's a real god. Tartaros, just like I told you. My head's not right 'cause I got a bruise in there and a big gob of blood, too, he says. He's trying to fix it, and I been feeling better ever since he started. Only we got to do like he says, so you're coming if I got to carry you." "Wood girl," Oreb called. "Here girl!" Silk sat up; the 'girl' might be Hyacinth. If there was the least chance, one in a thousand or ten million--if there was any chance at all--he had to go. He made himself stand, picked up the bag, coughed, spat, and stumbled away. The path wound right then left, dropped into a tiny vale, and forked. White as ghosts, enormous blossoms dripped moisture. "I'm coming, Oreb. Tell her I'm coming." "Here, here!" The bird sounded very near. He stepped off the glittering path, his feet sinking in soft soil, and parted the leaves; the face that stared into his own might have been that of a corpse, hollow-cheeked and dull-eyed. He gasped, and saw its bloodless lips part. Oreb flew to him, becoming two birds. He advanced another step, sparing the crowding plants as much as he could, and found himself standing upon red stones that bordered a clear pool no bigger than a tablecloth, which a path approached from the opposite side. "Here girl!" Oreb hopped to the wooden figure's head and rapped it smartly with his beak. "Yes," Silk said, "that's Thelxiepeia." No other goddess had those tilted eyes, and a carved marmoset perched upon the figure's shoulder. He tapped his reflected face with a finger and clapped his hands, but no monitor appeared in the silvered globe she held. "It's just a mirror," he told Oreb. "I hoped it might be a glass--that Hyacinth might call me on it." "No call?" "No call on this, alas." With help from a friendly tree, he walked the stony rim of the pool to a swinging seat facing the water. Here, as Oosik had said, one saw the pool reflected in Thelxiepeia's mirror, and her mirror reflected in it. Hieraxday had been the day for dying and for honoring the dead. Crane had died; but he, Silk, had done neither. Today, Thelxday, was the day for crystal gazing and casting fortunes, for tricks and spells, and for hunting and trapping animals; he resolved to do none of those things, leaned back in the swing, and closed his eyes. Thelxiepeia was at once the cruelest and kindest of goddesses, more mercurial even than Molpe, though she was said--it would be why her image was here--to favor lovers. Love was the greatest of enchantments; if Echidna and her children succeeded in killing Kypris, Thelxiepeia would no doubt, would doubtless... _Become the goddess of love in a century or less_, said the Outsider, standing not behind Silk as he had in the ball court, but before him--standing on the still water of the pool, tall and wise and kind, with a face that nearly came into focus. _I would claim her in that case, long before the end. As I have so many others. As I am claiming Kypris even now because love always proceeds from me, real love, true love. First romance_. The Outsider was the dancing man on a toy, and the water the polished toy-top on which he danced with Kypris, who was Hyacinth and Mother, too. _First romance_, sang the Outsider with the music box. _First romance_. It was why he was called the Outsider. He was outside-- "I, er, hope and--ah--trust I'm not disturbing you?" Silk woke with a start and looked around wildly. "Man come," Oreb remarked. "Bad man." Oreb was perched on a stone beside Thelxiepeia's pool; when he had concluded his remarks, he pecked experimentally at a shining silver minnow that darted away in terror. "Names are not--um--requisite, eh? I know who you are. You know me, hey? Let that be enough for both of us." Silk recognized his swaying visitor, started to speak, and assimilating what had been said remained silent. "Capital. I--ah--we are taking a risk, you and I. An--ah--rash gamble. Simply by, urp, being where we belong. Here on the hill, eh?" "Won't you sit down?" Silk struggled to his feet. "No. I--ah--no." His visitor belched again, softly. "Thank you. I have been waiting in the--ah--bar. Where, ump, I have been compelled to buy drinks. And--um--drink. Standing's best. Um, at present, eh? I'll just, er, lean on this, if I may. But please--ah--be seated yourself, Pa--" He covered his mouth with his hand. "Seated by all means. It is I who should--and I do. I, um, am. As you see, eh?" Silk resumed his place in the swing. "May I ask--" His visitor raised a hand. "How I knew I should find you here? I did not, Pa--Did not. Nothing of the sort. But while I was--rup!--sitting in that, er, whatchamacallit, I observed you to enter the room. Not the--um--one I sat in, that, ah, darksome and paneled drinking place, hey? The other. The outer room, much bigger." "The sellaria," Silk supplied. "Ah--quite. I, um, went to the door. Spied upon you." The visitor shook his head in self-reproach. "It was excusable, surely, under the circumstances. I have recently done far worse things." "Good of you to say so. I--um--waylaid that waiter. You spoke with him." Silk nodded. "I had, um, observed you to pass under--ah--through the arch. I had never had the, er, pleasure myself, eh? I, ah, apprehended that it was--ah, is--some sort of garden, however. I inquired about it. He, um, indicated that it was--is, I surmise--employed for, um, discussions of a--ah--amorous nature." "You knew that I would be here, at this particular spot." Silk found it extremely inconvenient to be unable to say _Your Eminence_. "You told him to look for me here." "No, no!" His visitor shook his head emphatically. "I, ah, anticipated you might, um, possibly have an appointment. As he had, um, inadverted. But I--ah--in addition, um, however, ah, considered that you might wish to, um, petition the immortal gods. As I, ah, myself. I inquired about such a place in this, um, conservatory. He mentioned the present, ah, xylograph." The visitor smiled "That's the spot, I told him. That's where you'll find him. Would you mind if I, um, sat myself, now? There by you? I'm--ah--quite fatigued." "Please do." Hastily, Silk moved to one side. "Thank you--ah--thank you. Most thoughtful. I have had no supper. Hesitated to order anything in--ah--that place. With the wine. Parsimony. Foolish--ah--imbecile, actually." "Catch fish," Oreb suggested. Silk's visitor ignored him. "I've funds, eh? You?" "No, nothing." "Here, Pa--My boy. Hold out your hands." Golden cards showered into Silk's lap. "No, no! Take them! Others--ah--more. Where they came from, eh? Wait for the waiter. Buy yourself a bit of food. For me, ah, in addition. I am, um, in need. Of help. Of--ah--succor. Such is, um, the long and short of it. I cast myself--um. Ourselves. I--we--cast ourselves upon your--ah--commiseration." Silk looked searchingly at Thelxiepeia, who returned his look with wooden aplomb. Was this enchanted gold that would (figuratively at least) melt at a touch? If not, what had he done to earn her favor? "Thank you," he managed at last. "If I can be of any service to Your--to you, I will be only too happy to oblige you." He counted them by touch: seven cards. "They came to the Palace. To the--ah--Palace itself, if you can, um, credit that." His visitor sat with his head in his hands. "I was, um, dining. At dinner. In came a, ah, page, eh? One of the boys who runs with messages for us, hey? You do that?" "No. I know of them, of course." "Some of us did, eh? I, myself. Many years ago. We--ah--matriculate to schola. Ah--afterwards. Some of us. Fat little boy. Not I. He was. Is. Said they'd arrest me. Arrest His Cognizance! I said, ah, balderdash. Ate my sweet, eh? They--um--arrived. Unannounced. Officer--um--captain, lieutenant, something. Troopers with him, Guardsmen everywhere, eh? Looked everywhere for His Cog--Turned the whole place upside down. Couldn't find him though. Took me. Bound my hands. Me! Hands tied behind me under my robe." "I'm very sorry," Silk said sincerely. "They, er, carried me to the headquarters of the Second Brigade. A temporary headquarters. Do I make myself--ah--intelligible? Brigadier's house. No more--ah--titular generals in the Civil Guard, hey? No generalissimo any more. Only this, er, brigadiers. Quizzed me, eh? Hours and hours. Absolutely. Old Quetzal's letter, hey? You know about it?" "Yes, I've seen it." "I--ah--composed it. I didn't--ah--inform the brigadier, eh? Didn't 'fess up. Would have shot me, eh? We--ah--I'd expected trouble. Labored to phrase it softly. His--He wouldn't hear of it." His visitor looked around at Silk with the expression of a whipped hound, his breath thick with wine. "You apprehend whom I--ah--intend?" "Of course." "He sent it back. Twice. Hadn't happened in years, eh? The third stuck. 'How readily here might I, ah, inscribe--' Yes, inscribe. Ah, 'Let us welcome him and obey him as one of ourselves. With what delight do--shall I inscribe in its place, let us welcome him and, ump, obey him, for he is one of ourselves!" That's what got the third draft past His--ah--past the person known to us both, eh? So I--um--presume. Proud of it, hey? Still am. Still am." "With reason," Silk told him. "But the Civil Guard can't have cared for it. I'm surprised they let you go." He yawned and rubbed his eyes, discovering that he felt somewhat better, refreshed by his few moments of sleep. "Talked my way out, hey? Eloquent. No one speaks of me like that. Dull at the ambion, eh? What they say. I know, I know. Eloquent tonight, though. Swim or sink, and I did Pa--I did. Go between. Peacemaker. End rebellion. Used their glass to talk to Councillor Loris. Harmless, ump! Let him go. Bad feeling in the ranks, hey? Augurs shot, eh? A sibyl, too. The--um--missive. Lay clothing, as you, er, wise. Fearful still. Terribly frightened. Not, er, shamed by the accusation--admission. Still afraid, sitting in there sipping. Looking over my shoulder, hey? Afraid they'd come for me. Sprang up like a rabbit when a porter dropped something in the street." "I suppose that every man is frightened when his life is threatened. It's very much to Your--to your credit that you are willing to admit it." "You will--ah--assist me? If you can?" Oreb looked up from his fishing. "Watch out!" "I'm tired and very weak," Silk said, "but yes, I will. Will we have to walk far?" "Won't have to walk at all." His visitor thrust his hand beneath his cream-colored tunic. "I've, ah, informed you it wasn't me they wanted, eh? After old Quetzal, actually. The Prolocutor. His Cognizance. Signed the letter, hey?" Silk nodded. "They'd have shot him, eh? Earlier. Earlier. When they--ah--constrained me. That was then, hum? This is--er--the present instant. After midnight. Nearly one, eh? Nearly one. Late when they released me. I've said it? Suppertime--after suppertime, really. They know your--um--profession. Vocation, hey? Mint's a sibyl. You take my meaning?" "Of course," Silk said. His visitor produced an elegant ostrich-skin pen case. "On the other side, old Quetzal is, hey? Unmistakable. The letter shows it. And there is that--ah, um--other matter. Vocation, eh? Brigadier thinks he and I might arrange an--urp--hiatus in hostilities. A truce, hey? His word. Been one alread, eh? So why not?" Silk straightened up. "There has? That's wonderful!" "Little thing, eh? Few hundred involved. Didn't last. But an augur--see the connection? This augur, one of our--ah--of the Chapter's own, crossed the lines. One side to the other, eh? Got them to stop shooting so he could. Colonel's son, wounded. Nearly dead. This--ah--holy augur brought him the Pardon. So far so good? Rebels--ah--tendered an extension. Both sides, um, sweep up bodies. Claim their dead, hey? They did. So why not longer? Old Quetzal might do it. Respected by both sides. Man of peace. You follow me?" Silk nodded to himself. "If your, ah, supporters learn the brigadier sent me, eh? What then? Shoot, eh? Possibly. Very possibly. So I require some, um, document from you, Pa--From, ah, you. Signed," the visitor's voice faded to a whisper, "with your--ah--as the--um--your civil title." "I see. Certainly." "Capital!" He took a sheaf of paper from the pen case. "These, um, fanciful leathers are not--ah--conducive to penmanship. But the paper should help, hey? I'll hold the ink bottle for you. Brief, ah, inconsiderable. Concise. The, um, bearer, eh? Respect his--ah--um..." "No shoot," Oreb suggested. He handed Silk a quill. "Point suit you? Not too fine, eh? My prothonotary, Pa--Incus. You know him?" "I met him once when I was trying to see you." "Ah? Hm." The pen case braced on both knees, Silk dipped the quill. "He--ah--Incus. He points them for me. Had him do it, ah, Molpsday. Too fine, though. Hairsplitters. I shall rid myself of Incus, ah, presently. Could be dead this moment. 'Mongst the gods, eh? Haven't laid eyes on him for days. Gave him a--um--errand. Never came back. All this unrest." Bent above the paper, Silk hardly heard him.
To General Mint, her officers and troopers. The bearer, Patera Rernora, is authorized by me and by...Silk looked up. "To whom did you speak? Who was this brigadier who released you?" "Brigadier, er, Erne. Signed for me, too, eh? His side."
Brigadier Erne to negotiate a truce. Please show him every courtesy.The wavering tip of the quill stopped and began to blot; there seemed to be no more to say. Silk forced it to move on.
If the whereabouts of His Cognizance the Prolocutor are known to you, please conduct the bearer to him in order that he may assist His Cognizance in conducting negotiations.Oreb dropped a struggling goldfish and pinned it with one foot. "No shoot," he repeated. "Man hide."
I hold you responsible for the safety of the bearer, and that of His Cognizance. Both are to be permitted to pass unharmed. Their movements are not to be restricted in any fashion. A truce made and kept in good faith is greatly to be desired. I am Pa. Silk, of Sun Street, Calde"Capital! Yes, capital, Pa--Thank you!" With his beak pointed to the glass roof, Oreb gulped down a morsel of goldfish and announced loudly, "Good man!" "There is a--um--dispenser in here someplace." The visitor retrieved his pen case and took out a silver shaker. "If you require sand, eh?" Silk shuddered, added the date, blew upon the paper, then spat congealing blood into the moss at his feet. "I thank you. I have--ah--so expressed myself, um, previously. I, er, recognize. I am, um, in your, ah, books, eh? Your debtor." Silk handed him the safe-conduct. "I, ah, surmise that I can stand now, er, walk. All the rest. Taken a bit dizzy there, eh? For an, er, momentarily." He climbed to his feet, holding tightly to the chain from which their seat was suspended. "I shall partake of an, er, morsel of food, I believe. An, um, collation. Much as I should like--ah--may be imprudent..." "I had a good supper," Silk told him, "and it might be dangerous for us to be seen together. I'll stay here." "I, um, consider it would be best myself." His visitor released the chain and smiled. "Better, hey? Be all right with a bite to eat. Too much wine. I--ah--concede it. More than I ought. Frightened, but the wine made it worse. To think that we, ump, we pay--" He fell silent. Slowly his smile widened to a death's-head rictus. "Hello, Silk," he said. "They made me find you." Silk nodded wearily. "Hello, Mucor." "It's smoky in here. All smoky." For a moment he did not understand what she meant. "Dark, Silk. Like falling down steps." "The fumes of the wine, I suppose. Who made you find me?" "The councillors will burn me again." "Torture, unless you do as they say?" Silk tried to keep the anger he felt out of his voice. "Do you know their names, these councillors who threaten to burn you?" The visitor's grinning head bobbed. "Loris. Tarsier. Potto. My father said not, but the soldier made him go." "I see. His Eminence--the man you're possessing--told me he'd talked with Councillor Loris through a glass. Is that why you possessed him when you were sent to look for me?" "I had to. They burned me like Musk." "Then you were right to obey, to keep from being burned again. I don't blame you at all." "We're going to kill you, Silk." Foliage beside the pool shook, spraying crystal droplets as warm as blood; a white-haired man stepped into view. In one hand be held a silver-banded cane with which he had parted the leaves. The other poised a saber, its slender blade pointed at the visitor's heart. "Don't!" Silk told him. "No stick," Oreb added with the air of one who clarifies a difficult situation. "You're Silk yourself, lad! You're him!" "I'm afraid I am. If you left your place of concealment to protect me, I would be somewhat safer if you didn't speak quite so loudly." Silk turned his attention back to the death-mask that had supplanted his visitor's face. "Mucor, how are you supposed to kill me? This man has Musk's needler now; he followed me here to return it to me, I imagine. Do you--does the man you're possessing have a weapon?" "I'll tell them, and they'll come." "I see. And if you won't, they'll burn you." The visitor's head bobbed again. "It brings me back. I can't stay gone when they burn me." "We must get you out of there." Silk raised the ankle he had broken jumping from Hyacinth's window and rubbed it. "I've said you're like a devil--I told Doctor Crane that, I know. I thought it, too, when I saw the dead sleepers; I forgot that devils, who torment others, are themselves tormented." The saber inched forward. "Shall I kill him, lad?" "No. He's as good a chance for peace as our city has, and I doubt that killing him would ensure Mucor's silence. You can do no good here." "I can protect you, lad!" "Before I left you, I knew that I'd meet Hierax tonight." Silk's face was somber. "But there's no reason for you to die with me. If you've tracked me through half the city to return the needler I dropped, give it to me and go." "This, too!" He held out the silver-banded cane. "Lame, aren't you? Lame when we fought! Take it!" He threw the cane to Silk, then drew Musk's needler and tossed it into Silk's lap as well. "You're the calde, lad? The one they tell about?" "I suppose I am." "Auk told me! How'd I forget that? Gave your name! I didn't know until this augur said it. Councillors! Loris? Going to kill you?" "And Potto and Tarsier." Silk laid Musk's needler aside, thought better of it, and put it into his waistband. "I'm glad that you brought that up. I'd lost sight of it, and it strains probability. Mucor, do you have to return to Loris right away? I'd like you to do me a favor, if you can." "All right." "Thank you. First, did Councillor Loris tell you about the man you're possessing? Did he ask you to find him?" "I know him, Silk. He talks to the man who's not there." "To Pas, you mean. Yes, he does, I'm sure. But Loris told you. Did he say why?" The visitor's head shook. "I have to go soon." "Go to Maytera Mint first--to General Mint, they're the same person." Silk's forefinger traced a circle on his cheek. "Tell her where I am, and that they'll come here to kill me. Then tell Maytera Marble--" "Girl go," Oreb remarked. The corpse-grin was indeed fading. Silk sighed again and rose. "Sheath that sword, please. We've no need of it." "Possession? That's what you call this, lad?" "Yes. He'll come to himself in a moment." Silk's visitor caught hold of the chain to steady himself. "You proferred a comment, Pa--? I was taken, ah, vertiginous again, I fear. Please accept my--um--unreserved apology. This--ah--gentleman is..." "Master Xiphias. Master Xiphias teaches the sword, Your Eminence. Master Xiphias, this is His Eminence Patera Remora, Coadjutor of the Chapter." "Really, ah, Patera, you might be more circumspect, hey?" Silk shook his head. "We're past all that, I'm afraid, Your Eminence. You're in no danger. I doubt that you ever were. My own is already so great that it wouldn't be much greater if you and Master Xiphias were to run up to the first Guardsman you could find and declare that Calde Silk was at Ermine's awaiting arrest." "Really! I--ah--" "You spoke to Councillor Loris, so you told me, through Brigadier Erne's glass." "Why, er, yes." "For a moment--while you were dizzy, Your Eminence--I thought that Loris might have told you where to find me; that a certain person in the household he's visiting had told him that I might be here, or had confided in someone else who did. It could have come about quite innocently--but it can't be true, since Loris sent someone to you in order to locate me. Clearly the information traveled the other way: you knew that I might come here tonight. I doubt that you actually told Loris that you knew where to find me; you couldn't have been that certain I'd be here. You said something that led him to think you knew, however. In his place, I'd have ordered Brigadier Erne to have you followed. Thanks to some careless remarks of mine Tarsday, he didn't need to. Will you tell me--quickly, please--how you got your information?" "I swear--warrant you, Patera--" "We'll have to talk about it later." Silk stood up less steadily than Remora had, leaning on the silver-banded cane. "A moment ago I told Master Xiphias not to kill you; I'm not certain it would have been wrong for me to have told him to go ahead, but I don't have time for questions--we must go before the Guard gets here. You, Master Xiphias, must return home. You're a fine swordsman, but you can't possibly protect me from a squad of troopers with slug guns. You, Your Eminence, must go to Maytera Mint. Don't bother filling your belly. If--" "Girl come!" Oreb flew to Silk's shoulder, fluttered his wings, and added, "Come quick!" For a wasted second, Silk stared at Remora, searching for signs of Mucor in his face. Hyacinth was in sight before he heard the rapid pattering of her bare feet on the path of false gems and saw her, mouth open and dark eyes bright with tears above the rosy confusion of a gossamer dishabille, her hair a midnight cloud behind her as she ran. She stopped. It was as if the sight of him had suspended her in amber. "You're here! You're really here!" By Thelxiepeia's spell she was in his arms, suffocating him with kisses. "I didn't--I knew you couldn't come, but I had to. Had to, or I'd never know. I'd always think--" He kissed her, clumsy but unembarrassed, trying to say by his kiss that he, too, had been forced by something in himself stronger than himself. The pool and the miniature vale that contained it, always dark, grew darker still. Looking up after countless kisses, he saw idling fish of mottled gold and silver, black, white, and red, hanging in air above the goddess's upraised hand, and for the first time noticed light streaming from a lamp of silver filigree in the branches of a stunted tree. "Where did they go?" he asked. "Was--somebody--else here?" She gasped for breath and smiled, giving him sweeter pain than he had ever known. "His Eminence and a fencing master." Silk felt that he should look around him, but would not take his eyes from hers. "They must have done the polite thing," she kissed him again, "and left quietly." He nodded, unable to speak. "So should we. I've got a room here. Did I tell you?" He shook his head. "A suite, really. They're all suites, but they call them rooms. It's a game they play, being simple, pretending to be a country inn." She sank to her knees with a dancer's grace, her hand still upon his arm. "Will you kneel by the pool here with me? I want to look at myself, and I want to look at you, too, at the same time." Abruptly. the tears overflowed. "I want to look at _us_." He knelt beside her. "I knew you couldn't come," a tear fell. creating a tiny ripple, "so I have to see us both. See you beside me." As in the ball court (though perhaps only because he had experienced it there) it seemed that he stood outside time. And when they breathed again and turned to kiss, it seemed to him that their reflections remained as they had been in the quiet water of the pool, invisible but forever present. "We--I have to go," he told her. It had taken an enormous effort to say it. "They know I'm here, or they soon will if they don't already. They'll send troopers to kill me, and if you're with me, they'll kill you, too." She laughed, and her soft laughter was sweeter than any music. "Do you know what I went through to get here? What Blood will do to me if he finds out I took a floater? By the time I got onto the hill, past the checkpoints and sentries--Are you sick? You don't look at all well." "I'm only tired." Silk sat back on his heels. "When I thought about having to run again, I felt... It will pass." He believed it as soon as he had said it, himself persuaded by the effort he had made to compel her belief. She rose, and gave him her hand. "By the time I got to Ermine's, I thought I'd been abram to come at all, drowning in a glass of water. I didn't even look in here," happy again, she smiled, "because I didn't want to see there wasn't anyone waiting. I didn't want to be reminded of what a putt I'd been. I got my room and started getting ready for bed, and then I thought--I thought--" He embraced her; from a perch over the filigree lamp, Oreb croaked, "Poor Silk!" "What if he's there? What if he's _really down there_, and I'm up here? I'd unpinned my hair and taken off my makeup, but I dived down the stairs and ran through the sellaria, and you were here, and it's only a dream but it's the best dream that ever was." He coughed. This time the blood was fresh and red. He turned aside and spat it into a bush with lavender flowers and emerald leaves and felt himself falling, unable to stop. He lay on moss beside the pool. She was gone; but their reflections remained in the water, fixed forever. When he opened his eyes again, she was back with an old man whose name he had forgotten, the waiter who had offered him wine in the sellaria, the one who had told him of Remora, the footman who had opened the door, and others. They rolled him onto something and picked him up, so that he seemed to float somewhere below the level of their waists, looking up at the belly of the vast dark thing that had come between the bright skylands and the glass roof. His hand found hers. She smiled down at him and he smiled too, so that they journeyed together, as they had on the deadcoach in his dream, in the companionable silence of two who have overcome obstacles to be together, and have no need of noisy words, but rest--each in the other. Chapter 8 -- Peace Maytera Marble smiled to herself, lifting her head and cocking it to the right. Her sheets were clean at last, and so was everything else--Maytera Mint's things, a workskirt that had been badly soiled at the knees, and the smelly cottons she had dropped into the hamper before dying. After strenuous pumping, she rinsed them in the sink and wrung them out. Her dipper transferred most of the sink water to the wash boiler before she took out the old wooden stopper and let the rest drain away; when it had cooled, the water in the wash boiler could be given to her suffering garden. With her clever new fingers, she scooped the white bull's congealing fat from the saucepan. A rag served for a strainer; a chipped cup received the semiliquid grease. Wiping her hands on another rag, she considered the tasks that still confronted her: grease the folding steps first, or hang out this wash? The wash, to be sure; it could be drying while she greased the steps. Very likely, it would be dry or nearly dry by the time she finished. Beyond the doorway, the garden was black with storm. That wouldn't do! Rain (though Pas knew how badly they needed it) would spot her clean sheets. Fuming, she put aside the wicker clothes-basket and stepped out into the night. a hand extended to catch the first drops. At least it wasn't raining yet; and the wind (now that she came to think of it, it had been windier earlier) had fallen. Peering up at the storm cloud, she realized with a start that it was not a real cloud at all--that what she had taken for a cloud was in fact the uncanny flying thing she had glimpsed above the wall, and even stared at from the roof. A memory so remote that it seemed to have lain behind her curved metal skull stirred at this, her third view. Dust flew, as dust always does when something that has remained motionless for a long time moves at last. "_Why don't you dust it?" (Laughter.)_ She would have blinked had she been so built. She looked down again, down at her dark garden, then up (but reasonably and prudently up only) at the pale streaks of her clotheslines. They were still in place, though sometimes the children took them for drover's whips and jump ropes. Started upward thus prudently and reasonably, her gaze continued to climb of its own volition. "_Why don't you dust it?_" Laughter filled her as the summer sunshine of a year long past descends gurgling to fill a wineglass, then died away. Shaking her head, she went back inside. It was a trifle windy yet to hang out wash, and still dark anyway. Sunshine always made the wash smell better; she would wait till daylight and hang it out before morning prayer. It would be dry after. When had it been, that sun-drenched field? The jokes and the laughter, and the overhanging, overawing shadow that had made them fall silent? Grease the steps now, and scrub them, too; then it would be light out and time to hang the wash, the first thin thread of the long sun cutting the skylands in two. She mounted the stair to the second floor. Here was that picture again, the old woman with her doves, blessed by Molpe. A chubby postulant whose name she could not recall had admired it; and she, thin, faceless, old Maytera Marble, flattered, had said that she had posed for Molpe. It was almost the only lie she had ever told, and she could still see the incredulity in that girl's eyes, and the shock. Shriven of that lie again and again, she nevertheless told Maytera Betel at each shriving--Maytera Betel, who was dead now. She ought to have brought something, an old paintbrush, perhaps, to dab on her grease with. Racking her brain, she recalled her toothbrush, retained for decades after the last tooth had failed. (She wouldn't be needing _that_ any more!) Opening the broken door to her room... She should fix this, if she could. Should try to, anyhow. They might not be able to afford a carpenter. Yet it seemed tonight that she remembered the painter, the little garden at the center of his house, and the stone bench upon which the old woman (his mother, really) had sat earlier. Posing gowned and jeweled as the goddess with a stephane, the dead butterfly pinned in her hair. It had been embarrassing, but the painter had wonderful brushes, not in the least like this worn toothbrush of hers, whose wooden handle had cracked so badly, whose genuine boar bristles, once so proudly black, had faded to gray. She pushed the old toothbrush down into the bull's soft, white fat, then ran it energetically along the sliding track. She could not have been a sibyl then, only the sibyls' maid; but the artist had been a relative of the Senior Sibyl's, who had agreed to let her pose. Chems could hold a pose much longer than bios. All artists, he had said, used chems when they could, although he had used his mother for the old woman because chems never looked old... She smiled at that, tilting her head far back and to the right. The hinges, then the other track. He had given them the picture when it was done. She had a gray smear on one black sleeve. Dust from the steps, most likely. Filthy. She beat the sleeve until the dust was gone, then started downstairs to fetch her bucket and scrub brush. Had the bull's grease done what it was supposed to? Perhaps she should have paid for real oil. She lifted the folding steps tentatively. The grease had certainly helped. All the way up! Grafifyingly smooth, so she had saved three cardbits at least, perhaps more. How had she gotten them down? With the crochet hook, that was it. But if she did not push the ring up she would not need it. The steps would have to come down again anyway when she scrubbed them, and she itched to see them work as they should. An easy tug on the ring, and down they slid with a puff of dust that was hardly noticeable. "_Why don't you dust it?_" Everyone had laughed, and she had too, though she had been so shy. He had been tall and--what was it? Five-point-two-five times stronger than she, with handsome steel features that faded when she tried to see them again. All nonsense, really. Like believing she had posed, after she had told Maytera over and over that she had lied. She would never have taken these new parts if... Though they were hers, to be sure. One more time up the steps. One final time, and here was her old trunk. She opened the gable window and climbed out onto the roof. If the neighbors spied her, they would be shocked out of their wits. _Trunk_ evoked only her earlier search for its owner. _Footlocker_, that was it. Here was a list of the dresses she had worn before they had voted to admit her. Her perfume. The commonplace book that she had kept for the mere pleasure of writing in it, of practicing her hand. Perhaps if she went back into the attic and opened her footlocker, she would find them all, and would never have to look at the thrumming thing overhead again. Yet she did. Enormous, though not so big you couldn't see the skylands on each side of it. Higher up and farther west now, over the market certainly and nosing toward the Palatine, its long axis bisected by Cage Street, where convicts were no longer exposed in cages. Its noise was almost below her threshold of hearing, the purr of a mountain lion as big as a mountain. She should go back down now. Get busy. Wash or cook--though she was dead, and Maytera Betel and the rest dead, too, and Maytera Mint gone only Pas knew where, and nobody left to cook for unless the children came. Enormous darkness high overhead, blotting the sun-drenched field, the straggling line of servants in which she had stood, and the soldiers' precise column. She had seen it descend from the sky, at first a fleck of black that had seemed no bigger than a flake of soot; had said, "It looks so dirty." A soldier had overheard her and called, "Why don't you dust it?" Everyone had laughed, and she had laughed, too, though she had been humiliated to tears, had tears been possible for her. Angry and defiant, she had met his eyes and sensed the longing there. And longed. How tall he had been! How big and strong! So much steel! Winged figures the size of gnats sailed this way and that below the vast, dark bulk; something streaked up toward them as she watched--flared yellow, like bacon grease dripping into the stove. Some fell. "Here we are," Auk told Chenille. It was a break in the tunnel wall. "This leads into the pit?" "That's what he says. Let me go first, and listen awhile. Beat the hoof if it sounds a queer lay." She nodded, resolving that she and her launcher would have something to say about any queer lay, watched him worm his way through (a tight squeeze for shoulders as big as his), listened for minutes that seemed like ten, then heard his booming laugh, faint and far away. It was a tight squeeze for her as well, and it seemed her hips would not go through. She wriggled and swore, recalling Orchid's dire warnings and that Orchid's were twice--at least twice!--the size of hers. The place she was trying so hard to get into was a pit in the pit, apparently--as deep as a cistern, with no way to go higher, though Auk must have found one since he was not there. Her hips scraped through at last. Panting as she knelt on the uneven soil, she reached back in and got her launcher. "You coming, Jugs?" He was leaning over the edge, almost invisible in the darkness. "Sure. How do I get out of here?" "There's a little path around the sides." He vanished. There was indeed--a path a scant cubit wide, as steep as a stair. She climbed cautiously, careful not to look down, with Gelada's lantern rattling on the barrel of her launcher. Above, she heard Auk say, "All right, maybe I will, but not till she gets here. I want her to see him." Then her head was above the top and she was looking at the pit. a stade across, its reaches mere looming darkness, its sheer sides faced with what looked like shiprock. A wall rose above it on the side nearest her. She stared up at it without comprehension. turned her head to look at the shadowy figures around Auk, and looked up at it again before she recognized it as the familiar, frowning wall of the Alambrera, which she was now seeing from the other side for the first time. Auk called, "C'mere, Jugs. Still got that darkee?" A vaguely familiar voice ventured, "Might be better not to light it, Auk." "Shut up." She took Gelada's lantern off the barrel of her launcher and advanced hesitantly toward Auk, nearly falling when she tripped over a roll of rags in the darkness. Auk said, "You do it, Urus. Keep it pretty near shut," and one of the men accepted the lantern from her. The acrid smell of smoke cut through the prevailing reek of excrement and unwashed bodies; a bearded man with eyes like the sockets in a skull had removed the lid of a firebox. He puffed the coals it held until their crimson glow lit his face--a face she quickly decided she would rather not have seen. A wisp of flame appeared. Urus held the lantern to it, then closed the shutter, narrowing the yellow light to a beam no thicker than her forefinger. "You want it, Auk?" "I got no place to put it," Auk told him; and Chenille, edging nearer, saw that he had his hanger in his right hand and a slug gun in his left. The blade of the hanger was dark with blood. "Show her Patera first," he said. On legs as thin as sticks, the shadowy figures parted; a pencil of light settled on a dark bundle that stared up at her with Incus's agonized eyes. A rag covered his mouth. "Looks cute, don't he?" Auk chuckled. She ventured, "He really is an augur..." "He shot a couple of 'em with my needler, Jugs. It got 'em mad, and they jumped him. We'll cut him loose in a minute, maybe. Urus, show her the soldier." Hammerstone was bound as well, though no rag had been tied over his mouth; she wondered whether it would work on a chem anyway, and decided that it might not. "I'm sorry, Stony," she said. "I'll get you out of this. Patera, too." "They were going to stab him in the throat," Hammerstone told her. "They'd grabbed him from behind." He spoke slowly and without rancor, but there was a whorl of self-loathing in his voice, "I got careless." "Those ropes are made out of that muscle in the back of your leg," Auk told her conversationally. "That's what they got him tied up with. They're pretty strong, I guess." Neither she nor Hammerstone replied. "Only I don't think they'd hold him. Not if he really tried. It'd take chains. Big ones, if you ask me." "Hackum, maybe I shouldn't say this--" "Go ahead." "What if they jump you and me like they did Patera?" "I was going to tell you why Hammerstone here don't break loose. Maybe I ought to do that first." "Because you've got his slug gun?" "Uh-huh. Only they had it then, see? They got hold of Incus, and they made Hammerstone give it to 'em. It takes a lot to kill a soldier, but a slug gun'll do it. So'll that launcher you got." She scarcely heard him. When she had struggled through the narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, the deep humming from above had so merged with the rush of blood in her ears that she had assumed it was one with it; now she realized that it actually proceeded from the dark bulk in the sky that she (like Maytera Marble) had thought a cloud. She peered up at it, astonished. "We'll get to that in a minute," Auk told her, looking upward too. "Terrible Tartaros says it's a airship. That's a thing kind of like the old man's boat, see? Only it sails through the air instead of water. The Rani of Trivigaunte's invaded Viron. That's another reason for us to do like he showed us down there--" Hammerstone heaved himself upright, throwing aside four stick-limbed men who tried to hold him down. The sinews that bound his wrists and ankles broke in a rattattoo of poppings, like the burning of a string of firecrackers. Almost casually, Auk thrust his hanger into the ground at his feet and leveled the slug gun. "Don't try it." "We got to fight," Hammerstone told him. "Patera and me. We got to defend the city." Reluctantly, Chenille trained the launcher Hammerstone had taught her to load and fire at his broad metal chest. He knelt to tear off Incus's gag, snapping the cords that had secured Incus's hands and feet between his fingers. "Look! Look!" Urus shouted and pointed, then futilely directed the beam of Gelada's lantern upward. Others around him shouted and pointed, too. Another voice, remote but louder than the loudest merely human voice silenced them, filling the pit with its thunder: "_Convicts, you are free! Viron has need of every one of you. In the name of all the--in the Outsider's name, forget your quarrel with the Civil Guard, which now supports our Charter. Forget any quarrel you may have with your fellow citizens. Most of all, forget every quarrel among yourselves!_" Chenille grasped Auk's elbow. "That's Patera Silk! I recognize his voice!" Auk could only shake his head, unbelieving. Something--a tumbling, flying thing that appeared, incredibly, to have a turret and a buzz gun--had cleared the parapet on the wall and was drifting into the pit, dropping lower and lower, an armed floater blown upwind by a wind that was none, hundreds of cubits above the Alambrera. Chenille's launcher was snatched from her hands and fired as soon as it had left them, Hammerstone aiming at the immense shape far above the floater, directing a single missile at it (or perhaps at the winged figures that streamed from it like smoke), and watching it expectantly to observe the strike and correct his aim. "_There Auk!_" thundered a hoarse voice from the floater tumbling slowly overhead. "_Here girl!_" A second missile, and Auk was firing the slug gun that had been Hammerstone's, too, shooting winged troopers who swooped and soared above the pit firing slug guns of their own. A minute dot of black fell from the vast flying thing Auk had called an airship. She saw it streak through the milling cloud of winged troopers. An instant later, the dark wall of the Alambrera exploded with a force that rocked the Whorl. Silk stood in his boyhood bedroom, looking down at the boy who had been himself. The boy's face was buried in his pillow; by an effort of will he made it look toward him; each time it turned, its features dissolved in mist. He sat down on the sill of the open window, conscious of the borage growing under it and of lilacs and violets beyond it. A copybook lay open, waiting, on the sleeping boy's small table; there were quills beside it, their ends more or less chewed. He ought to write, he knew--tell this boy who had been himself that he was taking his blue tunic, and leave him advice that would be of help in the troubles to come. Yet he could not settle upon the right words, and he knew that the boy would soon wake. It was shadeup, and he would be late at his palaestra; already Mother approached the bed. What could he say that would have meaning for this boy? That this boy might recall more than a decade later? Mother shook his shoulder, and Silk felt his own shoulder touched; it was strange she could not see him. _Fear no love_, he wrote; and then: _Carry out the Plan of Pus_. But Mother's hand was shaking him so hard that the final words were practically unreadable; _of Pas_ faded from the soft, blue-lined paper as he watched. Pas was, after all, a thing of the past. Like the boy. Xiphias and the Prolocutor were standing at the foot of the boy's bed, which had become his own. He blinked. As if to preside over a sacrifice at the Grand Manteion, the Prolocutor wore mulberry vestments crusted with diamonds and sapphires, and held the gold baculus that symbolized his authority; Xiphias had what appeared to be an augur's black robe folded over his arm. It seemed the wildest of dreams. His blankets were pushed away; and the surgeon, standing next to his bed beside Hyacinth, rolled him onto his side and bent to pull off the bandages he had applied earlier. Silk managed to smile up at Hyacinth, and she smiled in return--a shy, frightened smile that was like a kiss. From the other side of the bed, Colonel Oosik inquired, "Can you speak, Calde?" He could not, though it was his emotions that kept him silent. "He talked to me last night before he went to sleep," Hyacinth told Oosik. "Silk talk!" Oreb confirmed from the top of a bedpost. "Please don't sit up." The surgeon laid his hand--a much larger and stronger one than the hand that had awakened him--upon Silk's shoulder to prevent it. "I can speak." he told them. "Your Cognizance. I very much regret having subjected you to this." Quetzal shook his head and told Hyacinth, "Perhaps you'd better get him dressed." "No time to dawdle, lad!" Xiphias exclaimed. "Shadeup in an hour! Want them to start shooting again?" Then the surgeon who had held him down was helping him to rise, and Hyacinth (who smelled better than an entire garden of flowers) was helping him into a tunic. "I did this for you last Phaesday night, remember?" "Do I still have your azoth?" he asked her. And then, "What in the Whorl's going on?" "They sent Oosie to kill you. He just came back and he doesn't want to." Silk was looking, or trying to look, into the corners of the room. Gods and others who were not gods waited there, he felt certain. watching and nearly visible, their shining heads turned toward him. He remembered climbing onto Blood's roof and his desperate struggle with the whiteheaded one, Hyacinth snatching his hatchet from his waistband. He groped for it, but hatchet and waistband had vanished alike. Quetzal muttered, "Somebody will have to tell him what to tell them. How to make peace." "I don't expect you to believe me, Your Cognizance--" Hyacinth began. "Whether I believe you or not, my child, will depend on what you say." "We didn't! I swear to you by Thelxiepeia and Scalding Scylla--" "For example. If you were to say that Patera Calde Silk had violated his oath and disgraced his vocation, I would not believe you." Standing upon the arm of his mother's reading chair, he had studied the calde's head, carved by a skillful hand from hard brown wood. "Is this my father?" Mother's smile as she lifted him down, warning him not to touch it. "No, no, that's my friend the calde." Then the calde was dead and buried, and his head buried, too--buried in the darkest reaches of her closet, although she spoke at times of burning it in the big black kitchen stove and perhaps believed eventually that she had. It was not well to have been a friend of the calde's. "I know our Patera Calde Silk too well for that," Quetral was telling Hyacinth. "On the other hand, if you were to say that nothing of the kind had taken place, I would believe you implicitly, my child." Xiphias helped Silk to his feet, and Hyacinth pulled up a pair of unbicached linen drawers that had somehow appeared around his ankles and were new and clean and not his at all, and tied the cord for him. "Calde--" At that moment, the title sounded like a death sentence. He said, "I'm only Patera--Only Silk. Nobody's calde now." Oosik stroked his drooping, white-tipped mustache. "You fear that because my men and I are loyal to the Ayuntamiento, we will kill you. I understand. It is undoubtedly true, as this young woman has said--" In the presence of the Prolocutor, Oosik was pretending he did not know Hyacinth, exactly as he himself had tried to pretend he was not calde;; Silk found wry amusement in that. "--and already you have almost perished in this foolish fighting," Oosik was saying. "Another dies now, even as we speak. On our side or yours, it does not matter. If it was one of us, we will kill one of you soon. If one of you, you will kill one of us. Perhaps it will be me. Perhaps my son, though he has already--" Xiphias interrupted him. "Couldn't get home, lad! Tried to! Big night attack! Still fighting! Didn't think they'd try that. You don't mind my coming back to look out for you?" Kneeling with his trousers, Hyacinth nodded confirmation. "If you listen at the window, you can still hear shooting." Silk sat on the rumpled bed again and pushed his feet into the legs. "I'm confused. Are we still at Ermine's?" She nodded again. "In my room." Oosik had circled the bed to hold his attention. "Would it not be a great thing, Calde, if we--if you and I, and His Cognizance--could end this fighting before shadeup?" With less confidence in his legs than he tried to show, Silk stood to pull up and adjust his waistband. "That's what I'd hoped to do." He sat as quickly as he could without loss of dignity. "We will--" Quetzal interposed, "We must strike fast. We can't wait for you to recover, Patera Calde. I wish we could. You were startled to see me vested like this. My clothes always shock you. I'm afraid." "So it seems, Your Cognizance." "I'm under arrest, too, technically. But I'm trying to bring peace, just as you are." "We've both failed, in that case, Your Cognizance." Oosik laid his hand upon Silk's; it felt warm and damp. thick with muscle. "Do not burden yourself with reproaches, Calde. No! Success is possible still. Who had you in mind as commander of your Civil Guard?" The gods had gone, but one--perhaps crafty Thelxiepeia. whose day was just beginning--had left behind a small gift of cunning. "If anyone could put an end to this bloodshed, he would surely deserve a greater reward than that." "But if that were all the reward he asked?" "I'd do everything I could to see that he obtained it." "Wise Silk!" Oreb cocked a bright black eye approvingly from the bedpost. Oosik smiled. "You are better already, I think. I was greatly concerned for you when I saw you." He looked at the surgeon. "What do you think, Doctor? Should our calde have more blood?" Quetzal stiffened, and the surgeon shook his head. "Achieving peace, Calde, may not be as difficult as you imagine. Our men and yours must be made to understand that loyalty to the Ayuntamiento is not disloyalty to you. Nor is loyalty to you disloyalty to the Ayuntamiento. When I was a young man we had both. Did you know that?" Xiphias exclaimed, "It's true, lad!" "There is a vacancy on the Ayuntamiento. Clearly it must be filled. On the other hand, there are councillors presently in the Ayuntamiento. Their places are theirs. Why ought they not retain them?" A compromise; Silk thought of Maytera Mint, small and heartrendingly brave upon a white stallion in Sun Street. "The Alambrera--?" "Cannot be permitted to fall. The morale of your Civil Guard would not survive so crushing a humiliation." "I see." He stood again, this time with more confidence; he felt weak, yet paradoxically strong enough to face whatever had to be faced. "The poor, the poorest people of our quarter especially, who began the insurrection, are anxious to release the convicts there. They are their friends and relatives." Quetzal added, "Echidna has commanded it." Oosik nodded, still smiling. "So I have heard. Many of our prisoners say so, and a few even claim to have seen her. I repeat, however, that a successful assault on the Alambrera would be a disaster. It cannot be permitted. But might not our calde, upon his assumption of office, declare a general amnesty? A gesture at once generous and humane?" "I see," Silk repeated. "Yes, certainly, if it will end the fighting--if there's even the slightest chance that it will end it. Must I come with you, Generalissimo?" "You must do more. You must address both the insurgents and our own men, forcefully. It can be begun here, from your bed. I have a means of transmitting your voice to my troops, defending the Palatine. Afterward we will have to put you in a floater and take you to the Alambrera, in order that both our men and Mint's may see you, and see for themselves that there is no trickery. His Cognizance has agreed to go with you to bless the peace. Many know already that he has sided with you. When it is seen that my brigade has come over to you as a body, the rest will come as well." Oreb crowed, "Silk win!" from the bedpost. "I'm coming, too," Hyacinth declared. "You must understand that there is to be no surrender, Calde. Viron will have chosen to return to its Charter. A calde--yourself--and an ayuntamiento." Oosik turned ponderously to Quetzal. "Is that not the system of government stipulated by Scylla. Your Cognizance?" "It is, my son, and it is my fondest desire to see it reinstated." "If we're paraded through the city in this floater," Silk said, "many of the people who see us are certain to guess that I've been wounded." In the nick of time he remembered to add, "Generalissimo." "Nor will we attempt to conceal it, Calde. You yourself have played a hero's part in the fighting! I must tell Gecko to work that into your little speech." Oosik took two steps backward. "Now someone must attend to all these things, I fear, and there is no one capable of it but myself. Your pardon, my lady." He bowed. "Your pardon, Calde. I will return shortly. Your pardon, Your Cognizance." "Bad man?" mused Oreb Silk shook his head. "No one who ends murder and hatred is evil, even if he does it for his own profit. We need such people too much to let even the gods condemn them. Xiphias, I sent you away last night at the same time that I sent away His Eminence. Did you leave at once?" The old fencing master was shamefaced. "Did you say at once, lad?" "I don't think so. If I did, I don't recall it." "I'd brought you this, lad, remember?" He bounded to the most remote corner of the room and held up the silver-banded cane. "Valuable!" He parried an imaginary opponents's thrust. "Useful! Think I'd let them leave it behind in that garden?" Hyacinth said, "You followed when we carried him up here, didn't you? I saw you watching us from the foot of the stairs, but I didn't know you from a rat then." "I understand." Silk nodded almost imperceptibly. "His Eminence left at once, I imagine. I had told him to find you if he could, Your Cognizance. Did he?" "No," Quetzal said. With halting steps, he made his way to a red velvet chair and sat, laying the baculus across his knees. "Does it matter, Patera Calde?" "Probably not. I'm trying to straighten things out in my mind, that's all." Silk's forefinger traced pensive circles on his beard-rough cheek. "By this time, His Eminence may have reached Maytera Mint--reached General Mint, I should say. It's possible they have already begun to work out a truce. I hope so, it could be helpful. Mucor reached her in any event; and when General Mint heard Mucor's message, she attacked the Palatine hoping to rescue me--I ought to have anticipated that. My mind wasn't as clear as it should be last night, or I would never have told her where I was." Hyacinth asked, "Mucor? You mean Blood's abram girl? Was she here?" "In a sense." Silk found that by staring steadfastly at the yellow goblets and chocolate cellos that danced across the carpet, it was possible to speak to Hyacinth without choking, and even to think in a patchy fashion about what he said. "I met her Phaesday night, and I talked to her in the Glasshouse before you found me. I'll explain about her later, though, if I may--it's appalling and rather complex. The vital point is that she agreed to carry a message to General Mint for me, and did it. Colonel Oosik's brigade was being held in reserve when I spoke to him earlier; when the attack came, it must have been brought up to strengthen the Palatine." Hyacinth nodded. "That's what he told me before we woke you. He said it was lucky for you because Councillor Loris ordered him to send somebody to kill you, but he came himself instead and brought you a doctor." "I operated on you yesterday, Calde," the surgeon told Silk, "but I don't expect you to remember me. You were very nearly dead." He was horse-faced and balding; his eyes were rimmed with red, and there were bloodstains on his rumpled green tunic. "You can't have had much sleep, Doctor." "Four hours. I wouldn't have slept that much, if my hands hadn't started to shake. We have over a thousand wounded." Hyacinth sat on the bed next to Silk. "That's about what we got, too--four hours, I mean. I must look a hag." He made the error of trying to verify it, and discovered that his eyes refused to leave her face. "You are the most beautiful woman in the Whorl," he said. Her hand found his, but she indicated Quetzal by a slight tilting of her head. Quetzal had been dozing--so it appeared--in the red chair; he looked up as though she had pronounced his name. "Have you a mirror, my child? There must be a mirror in a suite like this." "There's a glass in the dressing room, Your Cognizance. It'll show you your reflection if you ask." Hyacinth nibbled at her full lower lip. "Only I ought to be in there getting dressed. Oosie will come back in a minute, I think, with a speech for Patera and one of those ear things." Quetzal rose laboriously with the help of his baculus, and Silk's heart went out to him. How feeble he was! "I've had four hours sleep, Your Cognizance; Hyacinth less than that, I'm afraid, and the doctor here about the same; but I don't believe Your Cognizance can have slept at all." "People my age don't need much, Patera Calde, but I'd like a mirror. I have a skin condition. You've been too well bred to remark upon it, but I do. I carry paint and powder now like a woman, and fix my face whenever I get the chance." "In the balneum, Your Cognizance." Hyacinth rose, too. "There's a minor, and I'll dress while you're in there." Quetzal tottered away. Hyacinth paused with one hand on the latch-bar, clearly posing but so lovely that Silk could have forgiven her things far worse. "You men think it takes women a long while to get dressed, but it won't take me long this morning. Don't go without me." "We won't," Silk promised, and held his breath until the boudoir door closed behind her. "Bad thing," Oreb muttered from a bedpost. Xiphias displayed the silver-banded cane to Silk. "Now I can show you this, lad! Modest? Proper? Augur can't wear a sword, right? But you can carry this! Had a stick first time you came, didn't you?" "Bad thing!" Oreb dropped down upon Silk's shoulder. "Yes, I had a walking stick then. It's gone now, I'm afraid. I broke it." "Won't break this! Watch!" Between Xiphias's hands, the cane's head separated from its brown wooden shaft, exposing a straight, slender, double-edged blade. "Twist, and pull them apart! You try it!" "I'd much rather put them back together." Silk accepted the cane from him; it seemed heavy for a walking stick, and somewhat light for a sword. "It's a bad thing, as Oreb says." "Nickel in that steel! Chrome, too! Truth! Could parry an azoth! Believe that?" Silk shuddered. "I suppose so. I had an azoth once and couldn't cut through a steel door with it." The azoth reminded him of Hyacinth's gold-plated needler; hurriedly, he put his hand in his pocket. "Here it is. I've got to return this to her. I was.afraid that it would be gone, somehow, though I can't imagine who might have taken it, except Hyacinth herself." He laid it on the peach-colored sheet. "I gave your big one back, lad. Still got it?" Silk shook his head, and Xiphias began to prowl around the room, opening cabinets and examining shelves. "This cane will be useful, I admit," Silk told him, "but I really don't require a needler." Xiphias whirled to confront him, holding it out. "Going to make peace, aren't you?" "I hope to, Master Xiphias, and that's exactly--" "What if they don't like the way you're making it, lad? Take it!" "Here you are, Calde." Oosik bustled in with a sheet of paper and a black object that seemed more like a flower molded from synthetic than an actual ear. "I'll turn it on before I pass it to you, and all you'll have to do is talk into it. Do you understand? My loudspeakers will repeat everything that you say, and everyone will hear you. Here's your speech." He handed Silk the paper. "It would be best for you to read it over first. Insert some thoughts of your own if you like. I would not deviate too far from the text, however." Words crawled across the sheet like ants, some bearing meaning in their black jaws, most with none. _The insurgent forces. The Civil Guard. The rebellion. The commissioners and the Ayuntamiento. The Army. The arms in the Alambrera. The insurgents and the Guard. Peace_. There it was at last. _Peace_. "All right." Silk let the sheet fall into his lap. Oosik signaled to someone in the outer room, waited for a reply that soon came, cleared his throat, and held the ear to his lips. "This Is Generalissimo Oosik of the Calde's Guard. Hear me all ranks, and especially you rebels. You're fighting us because you want to make Patera Silk Calde, but Calde Silk is with us. He is with the Guard, because he knows that we are with him. Now you soldiers. Your duty is to obey our calde. He is sitting here beside me. Hear his instructions." Silk wanted his old chipped ambion very badly; his hands sought it blindly as he spoke, rattling the paper. "My fellow citizens, what Generalissimo Oosik has just told you is true. Are we not--" The words seemed predisposed to hide behind his trembling fingers. "Are we not, every one of us, citizens of Viron? On this historic day, my fellow citizen--" The type blurred, and the next line began a meaningless half sentence. "Our city is in great danger," he said. "I believe the whole Whorl's in great danger, though I can't be sure." He coughed and spat clotted blood on the carpet. "Please excuse me. I've been wounded. It doesn't matter, because I'm not going to die. Neither are you, if only you'll listen." Faintly, he heard his words re-echoed in the night beyond Ermine's walls: "_You'll listen_." The loudspeakers Oosik had mentioned, mouths with stentorian voices, had heard him in some fashion, and in some fashion repeated his thoughts. The door of the balneum opened. Framed in the doorway, Quetzal gave him an encouraging nod, and Oreb flew back to his post on the bedpost. "We can't rebel against ourselves," Silk said. "So there is no rebellion. There is no insurrection, and none of you are insurgents. We can fight among ourselves, of course, and we've been doing it. It was necessary, but the time of its necessity is over. There is a calde again--I am your calde. We needed rain, and we have gotten rain." He paused to look across the room at the rich smoke-gray drapes. "Master Xiphias, will you open that window for me, please? Thank you." He drew a deep and somewhat painful breath of cool, damp air. "We've had rain, and if I'm any judge of weather, we'll get more. Now let's have peace--it's a gift we can provide ourselves, one more precious than rain. Let's have peace." (What was it the captain had said whole ages ago in that inn?) "Many of you are hungry. We plan to buy food with city funds and sell it to you cheaply. Not free, because there are always people who will waste anything free. But very cheaply, so that even beggars will be able to buy enough. My Guard will release the convicts from the pits. Generalissimo Oosik, His Cognizance the Prolocutor, and I are going to the Alambrera this morning, and I'll order it. All convicts are pardoned as of this moment--I pardon them. They'll be hungry and weak, so please share whatever food you have with them." He recalled his own hunger, hunger at the manse and worse hunger underground, gnawing hunger that had become a sort of illness by the time Mamelta located the strange, steaming meals of the underground tower. "We had a poor harvest this year." he said. "Let us pray, every one of us, for a better one next year. I've prayed for that often, and I'll pray for it again; but if we want to have enough to eat for the rest of our lives, we must have water for our fields when the rains fail. "There are ancient tunnels under the city. Some of you can confirm that because you've come upon them while digging foundations. They reach Lake Limna--I know that, because I've been in them. If we can break through near the lake--and I'm sure we can--we can use them to carry water to the farms. Then we'll all have plenty of food, cheaply, for a long time." He wanted to say, until it's time for us to leave this whorl behind us, but he bit the words back, pausing instead to watch the gray drapes sway in the breeze and listen to his own voice through the open window. "If you have been fighting for me, don't use your weapons again unless you're attacked. If you're a Guardsman, you have sworn that you'll obey your officers." (He could not be sure of that, but it was so probable that he asserted it boldly.) "Ultimately, that means Generalissimo Oosik, who commands both the Guard and the Army. You've already heard what he has to say. He's for peace. So am I." Oosik pointed to himself, then to the ear; and Silk added, "You'll hear him again, very soon." He felt that the shade should be up by now--indeed that it was past that time, the hour of first light, and time for the morning prayer to Thelxiepeia; yet the city beyond the gray drapes was still twilit. "To you whose loyalty is to the Ayuntamiento, I have two things to say. The first is that you're fighting--dying, many of you--for an institution that needs no defense. Neither I nor Generalissimo Oosik nor General Mint desires to destroy it. So why shouldn't there be peace? Help us make peace! "The second is that the Ayuntamiento was created by our Charter. Were it not for our Charter, it would have no right to exist, and wouldn't exist. Our Charter grants to you--to you, the people of Viron, and not to any official--the right to choose a new calde whenever the position is vacant. It then makes the Ayuntamiento subject to the calde you have chosen. I need not tell you that our Charter proceeds from the immortal gods. All of you know that. Generalissimo Oosik and I have been consulting His Cognizance the Prolocutor on this matter of the calde and the Ayuntamiento. He is here with us, and if I have misinformed you he will correct me, I feel certain." With his left hand Quetzal accepted the ear; his right traced a trembling sign of addition. "Blessed be you in the Most Sacred Name of Pas, the Father of the Gods, in that of Gracious Echidna, His consort, in those of the Sons and their Daughters alike, this day and forever, in the name of their eldest child, Scylla, Patroness of this--" He continued to speak, but Silk's attention deserted him; the door of the dressing room had opened. Hyacinth stepped through it, radiantly lovely in a flowing gown of scarlet silk. In a low voice she said, "The glass in there just told me the Ayuntamiento's offering ten thousand to anybody who kills you and two thousand each for Oosie and His Cognizance. I thought you should know." Silk nodded and thanked her; Oosik muttered, "It was only to be expected." "Consider, my children," Quetzal was saying, "how painful it must be to Succoring Scylla to see the sons and daughters of the city that she founded clawing one another's eyes. She has provided everything we require. First of all our Charter, the foundation of peace and justice. If we wish to regain her favor we need only return to it. If we wish to reclaim the peace we have lost, again we need only return to her Charter. We wish justice, I know. I wish it myself, and the wish for it has been planted in every bosom by Great Pas. Even the worst of us wish to live in holiness, too. Perhaps there are a few ingrates who don't, but they are very few. We wish all these things, and we can make them ours by one simple act. Let us return to our Charter. That is what the gods desire. Let us accept this anointed augur, Patera Calde Silk. The gods desire that, too. To conform to Sustaining Scylla's Charter, we must have a calde, and the smallest of our children know on whom the choice has fallen. If you have any doubts on these topics, my children, I beg you to consult the anointed augur into whose care you are given. There is one, you know, in every quarter. Or you may consult the next you see, or any holy sibyl. They will tell you that the path of duty is not difficult but simple and plain." Quetzal paused, exhaling with a slight hiss. "Now, my children, a most painful matter. Word has come to me that devils in human shape are seeking our destruction. Falsely and evilly. they promise money they have not got and will not pay, for our blood. Do not believe their lies. Their lies offend the gods. Anyone who slays good men for money is worse than a devil, and anyone who slays for money he will never see is a fool. Worse than a fool, a dupe." Oosik reached for the ear, but Quetzal shook his head. "My children, it will soon be shadeup. A new day. Let it be a day of peace. Let us stand together. Let us stand by the gods, by their Charter, and by the calde they have chosen for us. I bid you farewell for the present, but soon I hope to talk to you face-to-face and bless you for the peace you've given our city. Now I believe Generalissimo Oosik wants to speak to you again." Oosik cleared his throat. "This is the Generalissimo. Operations against the rebels are canceled, effective at once. Every officer will be held responsible for his obedience to my order and for the actions of his troopers or soldiers, as the case may be. Calde Silk and His Cognizance are going through the city on one of our floaters. I expect every officer, every trooper, and every soldier to receive them in a manner fully in accordance with loyalty and good discipline. "My Calde, have you anything further to say?" "Yes, I do." Silk leaned toward him, speaking into the ear. "Please stop fighting. It was needful, as I said; but it's become senseless. Stop them if you can, Maytera Mint. General Mint, please stop them. Peace is within our grasp--from the moment we accept it, all of us have won." He straightened up, savoring the wonder of the ear. It really does look like a black flower, he thought, a flower meant to bloom at night; and because it's bloomed, shadeup is on the way, even if the night looks nearly as dark as ever. To the ear he added, "We'll be with you in a few minutes, on the floater Generalissimo Oosik told you about. Don't shoot us, please. We certainly won't shoot you. No one will." He turned to Oosik for confirmation, and Oosik nodded vigorously. "Not even if you shoot me. I'll stand up if I can, so you can see me." He paused. Was there more to say? Attenuated like distant thunder, his words flew back to him through the window, an ebbing storm: "_Can see me_." "Those who fought for Viron will be rewarded, regardless of the side on which they fought. Maytera Marble, if you can hear this, please come to the floater. I need you badly, so please come. Auk, too, and Chenille." Had Kypris possessed Hyacinth, rendering her irresistible? Could she possess two women simultaneously? For a second he pondered the question among the remembered faces of his teachers at the schola. He ought to end this, he thought, by invoking the gods; but the time-worn honorifics caught in his throat. "Until I see you," he said at last, "please pray for me--for our city, and for all of us. Pray to Kind Kypris, who is love. Pray especially to the Outsider, because he is the god whose time is coming and I am the help he's sent us." He let the hand that held the ear fall, and Oosik took it from him. "For which we all give thanks," Oosik said, and Oreb muttered, "Watch out." No one spoke after that. Although Oosik and his surgeon, Xiphias, and Quetzal were all present, the bedroom felt empty. Beyond the window, a hush hung over the Palatine. No street vendor hawked his wares and no gun spoke. Peace. Peace here, at least; for those on the Palatine and those surrounding it, there was peace. Incredible as it seemed, hundreds--thousands--had ceased fighting, merely because he, Silk, had told them to. He felt better; perhaps peace, like blood, made one feel better. He was stronger, though he was still not strong. The surgeon had poured blood--more blood--into him while he slept, and that sleep must have been something akin to a coma, because the needle had not awakened him. Another's blood--another's life--had let him live, though he had been certain the night before that he would die that night. Premonitions born of weakness could be frustrated, clearly; he would have to remember that. With friends to help, a man could make his own fate. Chapter 9 -- Victory Xiphias, it transpired, had gone to the Palace, bringing back one of Remora's fine robes. It fit Silk surprisingly well, although it carried in its soft fabric a suggestion of somber luxury he found detestable. "They won't know you outside of this, lad," Xiphias said. He, shaking his head, wondered how they could possibly know him in it. Oosik returned. "I have had more lights mounted on your floater, Calde. There will be a flag on its antenna as well. Most will be on you, two on the flag." Without waiting for a reply, he asked the surgeon, "Is he ready?" "He shouldn't walk far," the surgeon said. "I can walk around the city if need be," Silk told them. Hyacinth declared, "He should lie down again till it's time to go," and to please her, he did. Within half a minute, it seemed, Xiphias and the surgeon were lowering him into a litter. Hyacinth walked beside him as she had when the waiters had carried him out of the Glasshouse, and it seemed to him that his mother's garden walked with her; from the other side, Quetzal asperged him with benedictions, his robe of mulberry velvet contributing the mingled smells of frankincense and something else to the cool and windy dark. At his ears, the _frou-frou-frou_ of Hyacinth's skirt and the _whish-shish_ of Quetzal's robe sounded louder than the snap of Oosik's flag. Troopers saluted, clicking their heels. One knelt for Quetzal's blessing. "It would be better," Oosik said, "if you did not have to be carried into the floater, Calde. Can you do it?" He could, of course, rising from the litter with the help of Xiphias's cane. A volley of shots crackled in the distance; it was followed by a faint scream, rarefied and unreal. "Men fight," Oreb commented. "Some do," Silk told him. "That's why we're going." The entry port let spill a sallow light; the surgeon was crouching inside to help him in. "Blood's floater was open," Silk remarked, remembering. "There was a transparent canopy--a top that you could see through almost as well as air--but when it was down, you could stand up." "You can stand in this, too," the surgeon said, "right here." He steered Silk toward the spot. "See? You're under the turret here." Straightening up, Silk nodded. "I rode in one of these yesterday--on the outside, when the rain stopped. It wasn't nearly as roomy as this." Corpses, including Doctor Crane's, had taken up most of the space inside. "We took out a lot of ammo, Calde," the trooper at the controls told him. Silk nearly nodded again, although the trooper could not see his head. He had found the ladder he recalled, a spidery affair of metal rods, and was climbing cautiously but steadily toward the open hatch at the top of the turret. "Bad thing," Oreb informed him nervously. "Thing shine." To his own astonishment Silk smiled. "This buzz gun, you mean?" It was dull black, but the open breech revealed bright steel. "They won't shoot us with it, Oreb. They won't shoot anyone, I hope." The surgeon's voice floated up from below. "There's a saddle for the gunner, Calde, and things to put your feet in." "Stirrups." That voice had been Oosik's, surely. Silk swung himself onto the leather-covered seat, almost but not quite losing his grip on Xiphias's cane. There were officers on horseback around the floater, and what seemed to be a full company of troopers standing at ease half a street behind it. The footman who had admitted him to Ermine's was watching everything from his station by the door; Silk waved to him with the cane, and he waved in return, his grin a touch of white in the darkness. It's going to rain again, Silk thought. I don't believe we've had a morning this dark since spring. Quetzal's head rose at his elbow. "I'm going to be besides you, Patera Calde. They're finding a box for me to stand on." With as much firmness as he could muster, Silk said, "I can't possibly sit while your Cognizance stands." A hatch opened at the front of the floater; Oosik's head and shoulders emerged, and he spoke to someone inside. Quetzal touched Silk's hand with cold, dry fingers that might have been boneless. "You're wounded, Patera Calde, and weaker than you think. Stay seated. That is my wish." His head rose to the level of Silk's own. "As Your Cognizance desires." With both hands on the rim of the hatch, Silk heaved up his unwontedly uncooperative body. For an instant the effort seemed too great; his heart pounded and his arms shook; then one foot found a corner of the box on which Quetzal stood, and he was able to hoist himself up enough to sit on the coaming of the open turret hatch. "The gunner's seat remains for Your Cognizance," he said. The floater lifted beneath them, gliding forward. Louder than the roar of its engine, Oosik's voice seemed to reach into every street in the city: "_People of Viron! Our new calde is coming among you as we promised. At his side is His Cognizance the Prolocutor, who has confirmed that Calde Silk has the favor of all the gods. Hail him! Follow him!_" Brilliant white lights glared to left and right, less than an arm's length away, more than half blinding him. "Girl come!" Oreb exclaimed. A black civilian floater had nosed between their floater and the troopers, and was pushing through the mounted officers. Hyacinth stood on its front seat beside the driver; and while Silk watched open mouthed, she stepped over what seemed to be a low invisible barrier, and onto the waxed and rounded foredeck. "Your stick!" she called. Silk tightened the handle, leaned as far back as he dared, and held it out to her; the civilian floater advanced until its cowling touched the back of the floater upon which he rode. And Hyacinth leaped, her scarlet skirt billowing about her bare legs in the updraft from the blowers. For an instant he was certain she would fall. Then she had grasped the cane and stood secure on the sloping rear deck of his floater, waving in triumph to the mounted officers, most of whom waved in return or saluted. As the floater in which she had come turned away and vanished into the twilight beyond the lights on their own, Silk recognized the driver who had returned him to his manse Phaesday night. Hyacinth gave him a mischievous grin. "You look like you've seen a ghost. You didn't expect company, did you?" "I thought you were inside. I should've--I'm sorry, Hyacinth. Terribly sorry." "You ought to be." He had to put his ear to her lips to hear her, and she nipped and kissed it. "Oosie sent me away. Don't tell him I'm up here." Lost in the wonder of her face, Silk could only gasp. Quetzal raised the baculus to bestow a benison, although Silk could see no one beyond the glare that enveloped the three of them except the mounted officers. The roar of their floater was muted now; an occasional grating hesitation suggested that its cowling was actually scraping the cobbles. "You said you took a floater," Silk told Hyacinth. "I thought you meant that you just, well, took it." "I wouldn't know how to make one go." Sitting, she edged nearer, grasping the coaming of the turret hatch. "Would you? But that driver's my friend, and I gave him a little money." They rounded a corner, and innumerable throats cheered from the dimness beyond the lights. Someone shouted, "We've gone over to Silk!" A thrown chrysanthemum brushed his cheek, and he waved. Another voice shouted, "Live the calde!" It brought a storm of cheering, and Hyacinth waved and smiled as if she herself were that calde, evoking a fresh outburst. "Where are we going? Did Oosie tell you?" "To the Alambrera." Silk had to shout to make himself heard. "We'll free the convicts. The Juzgado afterward." A jumble of boxes and furniture opened to let them pass--Liana's barricade. Beside him, Quetzal invoked the Nine: "In the name of Marvelous Molpe, you are blessed. In the name of Tenebrous Tartaros..." They trust the gods, Silk thought, all these wretched men; and because they do, they have made me their leader. Yet I feel I can't trust any god at all, not even the Outsider. As if they had been chatting over lunch, Quetzal said, "Only a fool would, Patera Calde." Silk stared. "Didn't I tell you that I've done everything I could to prevent theophanies? Those we call gods are nothing more than ghosts. Powerful ghosts, but only because they entailed that power to themselves in life." "I--" Silk swallowed. "I wasn't aware that I had spoken aloud, Your Cognizance. I apologize; my remark was singularly inappropriate." Oreb stirred apprehensively on his shoulder. "You didn't, Patera Calde. I saw your face, and I've had lots of practice. Don't look at me or your young woman. Look at the people. Wave. Look ahead. Smile." Both waved, and Silk tried to smile as well. His eyes had adjusted to the lights well enough now for him to glimpse indistinct figures beyond the mounted officers, many waving slug guns just as he waved the cane. Through clenched teeth he ventured, "Echidna told us Pas was dead. Your Cognizance confirmed it." "Dead long ago," Quetzal agreed, "whoever he really was, poor old fellow. Murdered by his family, as was inevitable." Deftly he caught a bouquet. "Blessings on you, my children. Blessings, blessings... May Great Pas and the immortal gods smile upon you and all that you own, forever!" "Silk is calde! Long live Silk!" Hyacinth told him happily, "We're getting a real tour of the city!" He nodded, feeling his smile grow warm and real. "Look at them, Patera Calde. This is their moment. They have bled for this." "Peace!" Silk called to the shadowy crowds, waving the cane. "Peace!" "Peace!" Oreb confirmed, and hopped up onto Silk's head flapping his wings. The day was brightening at last, Silk decided, in spite of the storm-black cloud hanging over the city. How appropriate that shadeup should come now--peace and sunlight together! A cheering woman waved an evergreen bough, the symbol of life. He waved in return, meeting her eyes and smiling, and she seemed ready to swoon with delight. "Don't start throwing flowers to yourself," Hyacinth told him with mock severity. "They'll be blaming you soon enough." "Then let's enjoy this while we can." Seeing the woman with the bough had recalled one of the ten thousand things the Outsider had shown him--a hero riding through some foreign city while a cheering crowd waved big fan-like leaves. Would Echidna and her children kill the Outsider too? With a flash of insight, he felt sure they were already trying. "Look! There's Orchid, throwing out the house." A light directed at the flag showed her plainly, leaning so far from the second-story window through which Kypris had called to him that it seemed she might fall any moment. They were floating down Lamp Street, clearly; the Alambrera could not be far. As Hyacinth blew Orchid a kiss, something whizzed past Silk's ear, striking the foredeck like a gong. A high whine and a booming explosion were followed by the rattle of a buzz gun. Somebody shouted for someone to come down, and someone inside the floater caught his injured ankle and pulled. He looked up instead, to where something new and enormous that was not a cloud at all filled the sky. Another whine, louder, mounting ever higher, until Lamp Street exploded in front of them, peppering his face and throwing something solid at his head. Oosik shouted, "Faster!" and disappeared down his hatch, slamming it behind him. "Inside, Patera Calde!" He scooped Hyacinth into his arms instead, dropping the cane into the floater. It was racing now, careering along Lamp Street and scattering people like chaff. She shrieked. Here was Cage Street, overlooked by the despotic wall of the Alambrera. Hanging in the air in front of it was a single trooper with wings--a female trooper, from the bulge at her chest--who leveled a slug gun. He slid off the coaming and dropped, still holding Hyadnth, onto the men below. They sprawled in a tangle of arms and legs, like beetles swept into a jar. Someone stepped on his shoulder and swarmed up the spidery ladder. The turret hatch banged shut. At the front of the floater Oosik snapped, "Faster, Sergeant!" "We're getting a vector now, sir." Silk tried to apologize, to tug Hyacinth's scarlet skirt (about which Hyacinth herself seemed to care not a cardbit) over her thighs, and to stand in a space in which he could not possibly have stood upright, all at once. Nothing succeeded. Something struck the floater like a sledge, sending it yawing into something else solid; it rolled and plunged and righted itself, its straining engine roaring like a wounded bull. Reeking of fish, a wisp of oily black smoke writhed through the compartment. "_Faster!_" Oosik shouted. The turret gun spoke as if in response, a clatter that went on and on, as though the turret gunner were intent on massacring the whole city. Scrambling across Xiphias and the surgeon, Silk peered over Oosik's shoulder. Fiery red letters danced across his glass: VECTOR UNACCEPTABLE. Something banged the slanted foredeck above their heads, and the thunder of the engine rose to a deafening crescendo; Silk felt that he had been jerked backwards. Abruptly, their motion changed. The floater no longer rocked or raced. The noise of the engine waned until he could distinguish the high-pitched song of the blowers. It ascended to an agonized scream and faded away. A red light flared on the instrument panel. For the second time in a floater, Silk felt that he was truly floating; it was, he thought, like the uncanny sensation of the moving room in which he had ridden with Mamelta. Behind him, Hyacinth gasped. A strangely-shaped object had risen from Oosik's side. Before Silk recognized it, it had completed a leisurely quarter revolution, scarcely a span in front of his nose. It was a large needler, similar to the one in his own waistband; and it had bobbed up like a cork, unimpelled, from Oosik's holster. "Look! Look! They're picking us up!" Hyacinth's full breasts pressed his back as she stared at the glass. He plucked Oosik's needler out of the air and returned it to its holster. When he looked at the glass again, it showed a sprawling pattern of crooked lines, enlivened here and there by crimson sparks. It looked, he decided, like a city in the skylands, except that it seemed much closer. Intrigued, he undogged the hatcheover over Oosik's seat and threw it back. As he completed the motion, both his feet left the floor; he snatched at the hatch dog, missed it by a finger, and drifted up like Oosik's needler until someone inside caught his foot. The pattern he had seen in the glass was spread before him without limit here: a twilit skyland city, ringed by sunbright brown fields and huddled villages; and to one side, a silver mirror anchored by a winding, dun-colored thread Oreb fluttered from his shoulder as he gaped and disappeared into the twilight. "We're flying." Incredulity and dismay turned the words to a sigh that dwindled with the black bird. Silk coughed, spat congealed blood, and tried again. "We are flying upside down. I see Viron and the lake, even the road to the lake." Quetzal spoke from inside the floater. "Look behind us, Patera Calde." They were nearer now, so near that the vast dark belly of the thing roofed out the sky. Beneath it, suspended by cables that appeared no thicker than gossamer, dangled a structure like a boat with many short oars; Silk's lungs had filled and emptied before he realized that the oars were the barrels of guns, and half a minute crept by before he made out the blood-red triangle on its bottom. "Your Cognizance..." "You don't understand why they're not shooting at us." Quetzal shook himself. "I imagine it's only that they haven't noticed us yet. A wind is forcing them to hold their airship parallel to the sun, so they're peering down at a dark city. At the moment our floater's presenting its narrowest aspect to them. But we're turning, and soon they'll be looking straight down at us. Let's duck inside and shut the hatch." The glass showed Lake Limna now. Watching its shoreline creep from one corner to the other, Silk thought of Oosik's needler; their floater seemed to be tumbling through the sky in the same dilatory fashion. Clinging to him, Hyacinth whispered, "You're not afraid at all, are you? Are we up terribly high?" She trembled. "Of course I am; when I was out there, I was terrified." He examined his emotional state. "I'm still badly frightened; but thinking about what's happening--how it can possibly have come about except by a miracle--keeps my mind off my fear." Watching the glass, he tried to describe the airship. "Pulling us up, lad! That's what she said! Think we could cut it?" "There's nothing to cut; if there were, they'd know where we were and shoot us, I believe. This is something else. Was it you who held my foot, by the way? Thank you." Xiphias shook his head and indicated the surgeon. "Thank you," Silk repeated. "Thank you very much indeed, Doctor." He grasped the operator's shoulder. "You said we were getting a vector. Exactly what does that mean?" "It's a message you get if you float too fast, My Calde, either north or south. You're supposed to slow down. The monitor's supposed to make you if you don't, but that doesn't work any more on this floater." "I see." Silk nodded, encouragingly he hoped. "Why are you supposed to slow down?" Oosik put in, "Going too fast north makes you feel as if someone were shoveling sand on you. It is not good for you, and makes everyone in the floater slow to react. Going south too fast makes you giddy. It feels like swimming." Almost too softly to be heard, Quetzal inquired, "Do you know the shape of the whorl, Patera Calde?" "The whorl? Why, it's cylindrical, Your Cognizance." "Are we on the outside of the cylinder, Patera Calde? Or on the inside?" "We're inside, Your Cognizance. If we were outside, we'd fall off." "Exactly. What is it that holds us down? What makes a book fall if you drop it?" "I can't remember the name, Your Cognizance," Silk said, "but it's the tendency that keeps a stone in a sling until it is thrown." Hyacinth had released him; now her hand found his, and he squeezed it. "As long as the boy keeps twirling his sling, the stone in it can't fall out. The Whorl turns--I see! If the stone were a--a mouse and the mouse ran in the direction the sling was going, it would be held in place more securely, as though the sling were being twirled faster. But if the mouse were to run the other way, it would be as if the sling weren't twirling fast enough. It would fall out." "Gunner!" Oosik was staring at the glass. "Your gun should bear." As he flicked off his own buzz gun's safety, the red triangle crept into view. "Trivigaunte," Hyacinth whispered. "Sphigx won't let them make pictures of anything. That mark's on their flag." Auk stood, unable for a moment to recall where he was or why he had come. Had he fallen off a roof? Salt blood from his lips trickled into his mouth. A man with arms and legs no thicker than kindling and a face like a bearded skull dashed past him. Then another and another. "Don't be afraid," the blind god whispered. "Be brave and act wisely, and I will protect you." He took Auk's hand, not as Hyacinth had put her own hand into Silk's a few minutes before, but as an older man clasps a younger's at a crisis. "All right," Auk told him. "I ain't scared, only kind of shook up." The blind god's hand felt good in his own, big and strong, with long powerful fingers; he could not think of the blind god's name and was embarrassed by his failure. "I am Tartaros, and your friend. Tell me everything you see. You may speak or not, as you wish." "There's a big hole with smoke coming out in the middle of the wall," Auk reported. "That wasn't there before, I'm pretty sure. There's some dead culls around besides the ones Patera killed and the one I killed. One's a trooper, like, only a mort it looks like. Her wings broke, I guess, maybe when she hit the ground. Everything's brown, the wings and pants and a kind of a bandage, like, over her boobs." "Brown?" Auk looked more closely. "Not exactly. Yellowy-brown, more like. Dirt color. Here comes Chenille." "That is well. Comfort her, Auk my noctolater. Is the airship still overhead?" "Sure," Auk said, implying by his tone that he did not require a god to coach him in such elementary things. "Yeah, it is." Chenille rushed into his arms. "It's all right, Jugs," he told her. "Going to be candy. You'll see. Tartaros is a dimber mate of mine." To Tartaros himself, Auk added, "There's this hoppy floater that's falling in the pit, only slow, while it shoots. That's up there, too. And there's maybe a couple hundred troopers like the dead mort flying around, way up." The blind god gave his hand a gentle tug. "We emerged from a smaller pit into this one, Auk. If you see no other way out, it would be well to return to the tunnel. There are other egresses, and I know them all." "Just a minute. I lost my whin. I see it." Releasing Chenille, Auk hurried over, jerked his hanger from the mire, and wiped the blade on his tunic. "_Auk_, my son--" He shooed Incus with the hanger. "You get back in the tunnel, Patera, before you get hurt. That's what Tartaros says, and he's right." The floater was descending faster now, almost as though it were really falling. Watching it, Auk got the feeling it was, only not straight down the way other things fell. Until the last moment, it seemed it might come to rest upright; but it landed on the side of its cowling and tumbled over. Something much higher was falling much faster, a tiny dot of black that seemed almost an arrow by the time it struck the ruined battlement of the Alambrera's wall, which again erupted in a gout of flame and smoke. This time masses of shiprock as big as cottages were flung up like chaff. Auk thought it the finest sight he had seen in his life. "Silk here!" Oreb announced proudly, dropping onto his shoulder. "Bird bring!" A hatch opened at the front of the fallen floater. "Hackum!" Chenille shouted. "Hackum, come on! We're going back in the tunnel!" Auk waved to silence her. The wall of the Alambrera had taken its death blow. As he watched, cracks raced down it to reappear as though by magic in the shiprock side of the pit. There came a growl deeper than any thunder. With a roar that shook the ground on which he struggled to stand, the wall and the side of the pit came down together. Half the pit vanished under a scree of stones, earth, and shattered slabs. Coughing at the dust, Auk backed away. "Hole break," Oreb informed him. When he looked again, several men and a slender woman in scarlet were emerging from the overturned floater; its turret gun, unnaturally canted but pointing skyward, was firing burst after burst at the flying troopers. "Return to the woman," the blind god told him. "You must protect her. A woman is vital. This is not." He looked for Chenille, but she was gone. A few skeletal figures were disappearing into the hole from which he and she had emerged into the pit. Men from the floater followed them; through the billowing dust he could make out a white-bearded man in rusty black and a taller one in a green tunic. "Silk here!" Oreb circled above two fleeing figures. Auk caught up with them as they started down the helical track; Silk was hobbling fast, helped by a cane and the woman in scarlet. Auk caught her by the hair. "Sorry, Patera, but I got to do this." Silk's hand went to his waistband, but Auk was too quick--a push on his chest sent him reeling backward into the lesser pit. "Listen!" urged the blind god beside Auk; he did, and heard the rising whine of the next bomb a full second before it struck the ground. Silk looked down upon the dying augur's body with joy and regret. It was--had been--himself, after all. Quetzal and a smaller, younger augur knelt beside it, with a woman in an augur's cloak and a third man nearly as old as Quetzal. Beads swung in sign after sign of addition: "I convey to you, Patera Silk my son, the forgiveness of all the gods." "Recall now the words of Pas--" It was good; and when it was over, he could go. Where? It didn't matter. Anywhere he wished. He was free at last, and though he would miss his old cell now and then, freedom was best. He looked up through the shiprock ceiling and saw only earth, but knew that the whole Whorl was above it, and the open sky. "I pray you to forgive us, the living," the smaller augur said, and again traced the sign of addition, which could not--now that he came to think of it--ever have been Pas's. A sign of addition was a cross; he remembered Maytera drawing one on the chalkboard when he was a boy learning to do sums. Pas's sign was not the cross but the voided cross. He reached for his own at his neck, but it was gone. The older augur: "I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla." The younger augur: "For Marvelous Molpe, for Tenebrous Tartaros, for Highest Hierax, for Thoughtful Thelxiepeia, for Fierce Phaea, and for Strong Sphigx." The older augur: "Also for all lesser gods." The shiprock gave way to earth, the earth to a clearer, purer air than he had ever known. Hyacinth was there with Auk; in a slanting mass of stones, broken shiprock rolled and slid to reveal a groping steel hand. Glorying, he soared. The Trivigaunti airship was a brown beetle, infinitely remote, the Aureate Path so near he knew it could not be his final destination. He lighted upon it, and found it a road of tinsel down a whorl no bigger than an egg. Where were the lowing beasts? The spirits of the other dead? There! Two men and two women. He blinked and stared and blinked again. "Oh, Silk! My son! Oh, son!" She was in his arms and he in hers, melting in tears of joy. "Mother!" "Silk, my son!" The Whorl was filth and stink, futility and betrayal; this was everything--joy and love, freedom and purity. "You must go back, Silk. He sends us to tell you." "You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur's had been a species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his mother's closet. "We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed. "Your fathers and your mothers." The other woman did not speak, but her eyes spoke truth. "You were my mother," he said. "I understand." He looked down at his own beautiful mother. "You will always be my mother. Always!" "We'll be waiting, Silk my son. All of us. Remember." * * * Something was fanning his face. He opened his eyes. Quetzal was seated beside him, one long, bloodless hand swinging as regularly and effortlessly as a pendulum. "Good afternoon, Patera Calde. I would guess, at least, that it may be afternoon by now." He lay on dirt, staring up at a shiprock ceiling. Pain stabbed his neck; his head, both arms, his chest, both legs, and his lower torso ached, each in its separate, painful way. "Lie quietly. I wish I had water to offer you. How are you feeling?" "I'm back in my dirty cage." Too late, he remembered to add _Your Cognizance_. "I didn't know it was a cage, before." Quetzal pressed down on his shoulder. "Don't sit up yet, Patera Calde. I'm going to ask a question, but you are not to put it to the test. It is to be a matter for discussion only. Do you agree?" "Yes, Your Cognizance." He nodded, although nodding took immense effort. "This is my question. We are only to speak of it. If I were to help you up, could you walk?" "I believe so, Your Cognizance." "Your voice is very weak. I've examined you and found no broken bones. There are four of us besides yourself, but--" "We fell, didn't we? We were in a Civil Guard floater, spinning over the city. Did I dream that?" Quetzal shook his head. "You and I and Hyacinth. And Colonel Oosik and Oreb. And..." "Yes, Patera Calde?" "A trooper--two troopers--and an old fencing master that someone had introduced me to. I can't remember his name, but I must have dreamed that he was there as well. It's too fantastic." "He is some distance down the tunnel now, Patera Calde. We have been troubled by the convicts you freed." "Hyacinth?" Silk struggled to sit up. Quetzal held him down, his hands on both shoulders. "Lie quietly or I'll tell you nothing." "Hyacinth? For--for the sake of all the gods! I've got to know!" "I dislike them, Patera Calde. So do you. Why should either of us tell anyone anything for their sake? I don't know. I wish I did. She may be dead. I can't say." "Tell me what happened, please." Slowly, Quetzal's hairless head swung from side to side. "It would be better, Patera Calde, for you to tell me. You've been very near death. I need to know what you've forgotten." "There's water in these tunnels. I was in them before, Your Cognizance. In places there was a great deal." "This is not one of those places. If you have recovered enough to grasp how ill you are and keep a promise, I'll find some. Do you remember blessing the crowds with me? Tell me about that." "We were trying to bring peace--peace to Viron. Blood had bought it--Musk, but Musk was only a tool of Blood's." "Had bought the city, Patera Calde?" Silk's mouth opened and closed again. "What is it, Patera Calde?" "Yes, Your Cognizance, he has. He, and others like him. I hadn't thought of that until you asked. I'd been confusing the things." "What things, Patera Calde?" "Peace and saving my manteion. The Outsider asked me to save it, and then the insurrection broke out, and I thought I would have saved it if only I could bring peace, because the people made me calde, and I would save it by an order." For a second or two, Silk lay silent, his eyes half closed. "Blood--men like Blood--have stolen the city, every part of it except the Chapter, and the Chapter has resisted only because you are at its head, Your Cognizance. When you're gone..." "When I die, Patera Calde?" "If you were to die, Your Cognizance, they'd have it all. Musk actually signed the papers. Musk was the owner of record--the man whose body we burned on the altar, Your Cognizance. I remember thinking how horrible it would be if Musk were the real owner and clenching my teeth--puffing myself up with courage I've never really had and telling myself over and over that I couldn't allow it to happen." "You're the only man in Viron who doubts your courage, Patera Calde." Silk scarcely heard him. "I was wrong. Badly mistaken. Musk wasn't the danger, was never the danger, really. There are scores of Musks in the Orilla, and Musk loved birds. Did I tell you that, Your Cognizance?" "No, Patera Calde. Tell me now, if you wish." "He did. Mucor told me he liked birds, and he'd brought her a book about the cats she carried for Blood. When he saw Oreb, he said I'd gotten him because I wanted to be friends, which wasn't true, and threw his knife at him. He missed, and I believe he intended to miss. Blood, with his money and his greed for more, has done Viron more harm than all the Musks. Everything I've done has been trying to pry bits of the city from Blood. I was trying to save my manteion, I said; but you can't save just one manteion--I can't save our quarter and nothing else. I see that now. And yet I like Blood, or at least I would like to like him." "I understand, Patera Calde." "Little pieces--the manteion, and Hyacinth and Orchid, and Auk, because Auk matters so much to Maytera Mint. Auk..." "Yes, Patera Calde?" "Auk pushed me, Your Cognizance. We had been together in the floater, Hyacinth and I. Your Cognizance, too, and--and others. We were coming down, and Colonel Oosik--" "You've made him Generalissimo Oosik," Quetzal reminded Silk gently. "Yes. Yes, I did. He passed me the ear, and I talked to the convicts, telling them they were free, and then we hit the ground. We opened a hatch and Hyacinth and I climbed out--" "I'm satisfied, Patera Calde. Promise me you won't try to stand until I come back, and I'll look for water." Silk detained him, clasping one boneless, bloodless hand. "You can't tell me what's happened to her, Your Cognizance?" Again Quetzal's head swung from side to side, a slow and almost hypnotic motion. "Then Auk has her, I don't know why, and I must get her back from him. What happened to me, Your Cognizance?" "You were buried alive, Patera Calde. When the floater crashed, some of us climbed out. I did, as you see, and you and your young woman, as you say. The fencing master, too, and your physician. I'm sure of those. The convicts were running to a hole in the ground to escape the shooting and explosions. Do you remember them?" This time Silk was able to nod without much difficulty, although his neck was stiff and painful. "There was a ramp down the side of the hole, and a break in this tunnel at the bottom. The fencing master and I ducked through. Almost at once there was another explosion, and the hole fell in behind us. We were lucky to have gotten in. Do you know my coadjutor's prothonotary, Patera Calde?" "I've met him, Your Cognizance. I don't know him well." "He's here. I was surprised to see him, and he to see me. There is a woman with him called Chenille who says she knows you. They went into the tunnel yesterday, at Limna. They had been trying to reach the city." "Chenille, Your Cognizance? A tall woman? Red hair?" "Exactly so. She's an extraordinary woman. Soon after the explosion, the convicts attacked us. They were friendly at first, but soon demanded we give them Patera and the woman. We refused, and Xiphias killed four. Xiphias is the fencing master. Am I making myself clear?" "Perfectly, Your Cognizance." "We tried to dig our way out and found you. We thought you were dead, and Patera and I brought you the Peace of Pas. Eventually we stopped digging, having realized that the effort was hopeless. For a dozen men with shovels and barrows, two days might be enough." "I understand, Your Cognizance. "By then I was exhausted, though I had dug less than the woman. The others left to look for another way out. She and Patera are famished, and they have a tessera that they believe will admit them to the Juzgado. They promised to return for your body and me. I prayed for you after they had gone." "Your Cognizance distrusts the gods." "I do." Quetzal nodded, his hairless head bobbing on its long neck. "I know them for what they are. But consider. I believe in them. I have faith. You mentioned your quarter. How many there really believe in the gods? Half?" "Less than that, I'm afraid, Your Cognizance." "What about you, Patera Calde? Look into your heart." Silk was silent. "I'll give you my thoughts, Patera Calde. This young man believes, and he loves the gods even after seeing Echidna. I too believe, though I distrust them. He would want me to pray for him, and that's my office. I've done it often, hoping I wouldn't be heard. This time it's possible one will restore him, to prove she's not at bad as I think." Faint yet unmistakable, the crack of a needler echoed down the tunnel. "That will be Patera, Patera Calde. We've been lucky in the matter of weapons. Xiphias has a sword, and had a small needler he said was yours. You left it on your bed, and he took charge of it for you. He gave it to the woman. We found a large one in your waistband. Patera took it, surprising me again. Our clergy have hidden depths." In spite of pain and weakness, Silk smiled. "Some do, perhaps, Your Cognizance." "Last night before you saw me in the alley, Patera Calde. I met your acolyte, young Gulo. He is most embarrassed." "I'm sorry to hear that, Your Cognizance." "You shouldn't be. His uncle is a major in the Second Brigade. One uncle of many. Were you aware of it?" "No, Your Cognizance. I don't know much about Patera." "Neither do I, though he was one of our copyists until my coadjutor sent him to you. He commands several thousand now. It's a great responsibility for someone so young. More join every hour, he tells me, because they know he's your acolyte." Silk managed to swallow. "I hope he won't waste their lives, Your Cognizance." "So do I. I asked if it was hard. He said he discussed each operation with those who would have to fight. He finds them sensible, and he knows something of war from his uncle's table talk. He fights in the front rank afterward, he says." "Your Cognizance mentioned that he was embarrassed." "So he is, Patera Calde." Quetzal shook himself, lifting one corner of his mouth by the thickness of a thread. "He has captured his uncle. Our clergy have hidden depths. The older man is humiliated. It's an awkward situation, I'm afraid, but I was amused." "So am I, Your Cognizance. Thank you." Quetzal rose. "We'll find our own amusing, when we find our way out. May I look for water?" "Of course, Your Cognizance." "You won't try to stand until I'm back? Give me your word, Patera Calde." Silk sat up. "Please, Patera--" "I have to go with you, Your Cognizance. I have to find water, wash, and drink, so I can do whatever I can for Viron and Hyacinth. You've got nothing to carry water in, and all four of you couldn't possibly carry me far." "You've been suffocated, Patera Calde," Quetzal bent over him. "We merely thought you dead, and I shouldn't have hinted at a miracle. No god can turn back death, and if they could, no god would to please us. You were still alive when we dug you out. You revived naturally--" Unaided, Silk staggered to his feet. "I had a cane, Your Cognizance. Master Xiphias gave it to me. I didn't need it then, or at least not much. Now I do." Quetzal offered him the baculus. "Use this." "Never, Your Cognizance. Councillor Lemur called me--No, I won't." The tunnel behind them was nearly choked with earth; a trampled path led Silk to an opening in the wall. "Is this where you found me, Your Cognizance? In there?" "Yes, Patera Calde. But if your young woman is in there, she is surely dead by now." "I realize that." Silk put his head through the opening, "and I believe she's in the pit with Auk, anyway; but Master Xiphias values that cane, I need it, and it's probably very close to the place where you found me." He began to work his shoulders through. "Be careful, Patera Calde." The wall was shiprock, little more than a cubit thick. Beyond it lay a cavity hollowed from the tumbled soil that seemed utterly dark. When Silk tried to stand, he found his head capped by a rough dome; earth and small stones showered him invisibly. "This could collapse any moment," he told the swaying figure in the tunnel. "So it could, Patera Calde. Come out, please." His questing fingers had come upon stubby protuberances he assumed were roots. Exploring his pockets, he discovered the cards Remora had given him and used one to scrape away the soil. One root wore a ring. He cleared away more soil until he could get a firm grip on the hand, tugged, dug farther, and tugged again. "There are new sounds in this tunnel, Patera Calde. You had better leave that place." "I've found someone, Your Cognizance. Somebody else." Silk hesitated, unwilling to trust his judgement. "I don't think it's Hyacinth. The hand is too big." "Then it doesn't matter whose it is. We must go." Getting a firm grip on the arm, Silk heaved with all the strength that remained to him, and was rewarded by a cataract of earth and a dead man's embrace. I'm robbing a grave, he thought, spitting grit and wiping his eyes. Robbing this man's grave from below--stealing his grave as well as his body. It should have been at least as amusing as Gulo's uncle the major, but was not. Holding onto the jagged edge of the opening in the tunnel wall, he succeeded in pulling his own partially buried body free. Back in the tunnel (suddenly very glad of its cold, sighing airs and watery lights) he was able to extract the corpse from the loose soil that had reclaimed it. Quetzal was nowhere to be seen. "He's gone to look for water," Silk muttered. "Perhaps water could revive you the way something revived me," but the dead man's ears were stopped with earth. As he cleaned the pitiful face, Silk added, "I'm sorry, Doctor." He searched his pockets again; his beads were not there, left behind with his own worn and dirty robe at Ermine's. It seemed a very long time ago. He wriggled back into the dark cavity beyond the tunnel wall. Hyacinth had bathed him in their bedroom at Ermine's, undressing him, and scrubbing and drying him bit by bit. He ought to have been embarrassed (he told himself); but he had been too exhausted to feel anything beyond vague satisfaction, a weak pleasure at finding himself the object of so beautiful a woman's attention. Now all her concern had been undone, and Remora's fine robe, scarcely worn, ruined. "You returned me to life, Outsider," Silk murmured as he resumed digging, "I wish you'd cleaned me up, too." But the Outsider had doubtless been, as Doctor Crane had maintained, no more than a vein's bursting. Or had Doctor Crane--who had thought himself, or at any rate called himself, an agent of the Rani--been in truth an agent of the Outsider? Doctor Crane had made it possible for him to proceed in his attempt to save the manteion despite his broken ankle; and Doctor Crane had freed him when he had been taken by the Ayuntamiento. It was conceivable, even likely, that Doctor Crane's scepticism had been a test of faith. Had he passed? Weighing that question, he dug harder than ever, making the dark, evil-smelling earth fly. If he had, he would almost certainly be tested again, after this surrender to doubt. The card struck something hard. At first he assumed it was a stone, but it was too smooth; another half minute's work bared the new find: a slender hook. As soon as he grasped it to pull it free, he knew that he had found the silver-banded cane Xiphias had brought to Ermine's for him. Without warning, brilliant light flooded the cavity. He turned away from it, covering his eyes. "I see you in there. Come on out." There was something familiar about the harsh voice, but it was not until its owner said, "Put your hands where I can see them," that Silk recognized it as Sergeant Sand's. Sitting the white stallion in the middle of Fisc Street, Maytera Mint surveyed the advancing ranks. Every one of those soldiers would be worth three of her best, but they were few. Hearteningly few, and the troopers from Trivigaunte had come. Just a few hundred now, but thousands more were on the way. "Fire and fall back," she called softly, adding under her breath, "Gracious Echidna, grant that I be heard by our people but not by those soldiers." Then, a trifle louder, "Not too quickly. But not too slowly, either. This isn't the time to impress me. Don't get yourselves killed." The first level metal rank was practically within slug-gun range. She wheeled her stallion and cantered off, hearing the firing break out behind her, the _whiz...bang!_ of missiles and the dull booming of slug guns. Someone cried out. I told them to, she reminded herself. I emphasized it in the briefing. Yet she knew the wound had been real. She reined in the stallion and turned to look again: behind the soldiers, Rook's blocking force was straggling into position. Too early, she thought. Far too early. You never appreciated men like Bison and the captain--men who helped you make plans and carried them out--until you got something like this. One long cable had been looped around each pillar of the Corn Exchange; it was not taut yet, nor should it have been. She risked a glance up at the towering facade, another at Wool and his bullock men, motionless in the shadows half a street away. He and they stood ready beside their animals, waiting for her signal. The bullock men trusted her. So did the ragged men and women who were shooting and retreating as she had taught them. Shooting and dying, because they had trusted a weak woman--trusted her because Brocket had taught her to ride when she was a child. She clapped heels to the stallion's sides. He had been used long and hard yesterday, yet he surged forward, a foaming wave of strength. Patera Silk's azoth was in her hand; she thumbed the demon. Seeing its terrible blade split the sky, Wool's bullock men prodded their animals. The cable tightened, a slithering monster of steel and silence, Echidna's greatest serpent. The soldiers halted and faced about at a loud command, their officer having seen Rook's force and detected the trap. They would have to attack in earnest now, but her own voice (she told herself) was incapable of launching troops against the enemy. Her voice would not inspire anyone, so her person must. She neck-reined the stallion, and the silver trumpet that was her voice in fact echoed from every wall. Five chains away, the blade of the azoth wrecked a fusion generator, and the soldier whose heart it had been died. Forward! Past her own disorderly line. Another soldier down, and another! Forward! The stallion stumbled, crying out like a man in pain. A half-dozen soldiers dashed forward. The stallion fell, too weak to stand; it seemed to her that the street itself had struck her, casting all its clods and ridges at her at once. Steel hands laid hold of her, and bios wrestled with chems in a desperate foolish fight. A woman three times her size swung a wrecking bar. The soldier she struck, struck her with the butt of his slug gun; she fell backward and did not rise. Maytera Mint struggled in a soldier's grasp. The azoth was gone-- No! Was under her shoe. He lifted her, his arms clamping her like tongs; she stamped on the azoth with all her strength, and its lancing point sheared off his foot. Smoking black fluid spurted from the stump of his leg, slippery as so much grease. They fell, and his grip weakened. She tore herself away, stooping for the azoth, and ran, nearly falling again, pursued with terrifying speed until the facade of the Corn Exchange frowned above her and she whirled to cut down a soldier whose blazing, arcing halves tumbled at her feet. "Run! Run! Save yourselves!" Her people streamed past in full flight, though to her, her voice was a powerless wail. "Hierax, accept my spirit." The azoth blade struck the first pillar, and it shattered like glass. Another, and the facade seemed to hang in air, an ominous cloud of grimy brick. A soldier leveled his slug gun, firing an instant before her blade split his skullplate. She felt the slug tear her habit, smelled the powder smoke, and fled, slashing wildly at a third pillar without breaking stride--stopped and turned back, hot tears streaming. "You gods, for _twenty years!_ Now let me go!" The weightless, endless blade came up. The weightless, endless blade came down. And the facade of the Corn Exchange was coming down too, falling like a picture, nearly whole and almost maintaining its graceless design as it fell, its stone sills falling neither faster nor slower than its tons of brick and timber. Her right hand, still clutching the azoth, had begun the sign of addition when Rock grabbed her from behind and dashed away with her. Chapter 10 -- Calde Silk "Let me go," Maytera Marble insisted Phaesday morning. "They won't shoot me." Generalissimo Oosik regarded her through his left eye alone; his right was concealed by a patch of surgical gauze. He shrugged. General Saba, the commander from Trivigaunte, pursed pendulous lips. "We've wasted a shaggy hole too much time on this country house already, when nobody can say--" "You're quite wrong, my daughter," Maytera Marble told her firmly. "Mucor can and does. Our Patera Silk is a prisoner in there, just as the Ayuntamiento claims." "Spirits!" "Only hers, really. I'd never seen anyone possessed until she began doing it to our students. I find it very upsetting." She beckoned Horn. "You've made me a white flag? Wonderful! Such a nice long stick, too. Thank you!" General Saba snorted. "You don't like my bringing our boys and girls." "Children shouldn't have to fight." "Certainly not." Maytera Marble nodded solemn agreement. "But they were, and some have been killed. They'd run off with General Mint, you see, almost all of them. I tried to think who might help me after Mucor left, and our students were the only ones I could think of. Horn and a few others are really mature enough already, more grown up than a great many adults. It got them away from the city, too, where the worst fighting was." She looked to Oosik for support, but found none. "Where it still is," General Saba snapped. "Where the troops we've got out here are badly needed." "They were fighting your girls, some of them, as well as our Army, and some are dead. Have I told you that? Some are dead, some hurt very badly. Ginger's had her hand blown off, I'm told. No doubt some of your girls are hurt as well." "Which is why--" "You said we're wasting time." Maytera Marble sniffed; she had acquired a devastating sniff. "I couldn't agree more. It will only take a minute to shoot me, if they do. Then you can attack at once. But if they don't, I may be able to talk to the councillors in there. They can order the Army and the Guards who are still fighting you--" "The Second," Oosik supplied. "Yes, the Second Brigade and our Army." Maytera Marble bowed in humble appreciation of his information. "Thank you, my son. The councillors could order them to give up, but no one knows whether there are really councillors in the Juzgado." Without waiting for a reply, she accepted the flag from Horn. "I'm coming with you, Sib." "You are not!" He followed her nearly as far as the shattered gate just the same, ignoring a pterotrooper who shouted for him to stay back, and watched unhappily as she picked her way through its tumbled stones and twisted bars, somberly clad but conveniently short-skirted in Maytera Rose's best habit. Two dead taluses smoked and guttered on the close-mown grassway between the gate and the villa. A few steps past the first, General Saba's adjutant sprawled face down beside her own flag of truce. Disregarding all three, Maytera Marble cut across the lush lawn toward the porticoed entrance, keeping well clear of the fountain to avoid its windblown spray. This was Bloody's house, she reminded herself, this grand place. This was where the little man with oily hair had come from, the one she and Echidna had offered to her. It had been practically impossible, for a time, for her to remember being Echidna; now the image of the little man's agonized face had returned, framed by flame as she forced him down onto the altar fire. Would Divine Echidna help her now, in gratitude for that sacrifice? The Echidna she had pictured at prayer over so many years might have condemned her because of it. But there had been no shot yet. No missile. No sounds at all, save the soughing of the wind and the snapping of the rag on the stick she held. How young she felt, and how strong! If she stopped here, if she looked back at Horn, would they shoot, killing her and waking the children? The children were asleep, most of them. Or at least they were supposed to be, back there beneath the leafless mulberries. The summer's unrelenting heat, the desert heat that she had hated so much, had deserted just when the children needed it, leaving them to sleep in the deepening chill of an autumn already half spent, to shiver huddled together like piglets or puppies in unroofed houses with broken windows and slug-pocked, fire-scarred walls, though most of them had liked that better than their studies, they said: had preferred killing Ayuntamientados and pillaging their dead. A mottled green face appeared at the window next to the big door. Only the face, Maytera Marble noted with a little shiver of relief. No slug gun, and no launcher. "I've come to see my son, my son," she called. "My son Bloody. Tell him his mother's here." Shallow stone steps led up to a wide veranda. Before she put her foot on the last, the door swung back. Through it she saw soldiers, and bios in silvered armor. (Bios got up like chems, as she put it to herself, because chems were braver.) Behind them stood another bio, tall and red-faced. "Good morning, Bloody," she said. "Thank you for bringing those white bunnies. May Kypris smile upon you." Blood grinned. "You've changed a little, Mama." Some of the armored men laughed. "Yes, I have. When we can talk in private, I'll tell you all about it." "We thought you wanted to cut a deal for Hoppy." "I do." Maytera Marble surveyed the hall; though she knew little about art, she suspected that the misty landscape facing her was a Murtagon. "I want to talk about that. We've knocked down a good deal of your wall, I'm afraid, Bloody, and I'd like to see your beautiful house spared." Two soldiers stood aside, and Blood came to meet her. "So would I, Mama. I'd like to see us spared, too." "Is that why you didn't shoot? You killed that poor woman General Saba sent, so why not me? Perhaps I shouldn't ask." Blood glanced to his right. "A shag-up over there. _We_ didn't shoot the fussock with the flag, and I want that settled right now. If there's a question about it, there's no point in talking. I didn't shoot her, and didn't tell anybody to. None of the boys did, either, and they didn't get anybody to do it. Is that clear? Will you say Pas to that, nothing back?" Maytera Marble cocked and lifted her head, thus raising an eyebrow. "Someone shot her from a window of your house, Bloody. I saw it." "All right, you saw it, and Trivigaunte's going to make somebody pay. I don't blame them. What I'm saying is that it shouldn't be me or the boys. We didn't do it, and that's not open to argument. I want that settled before the cut." Maytera Marble put a hand on his shoulder. "I understand, Bloody. Do you know who did? Will you point them out to us?" Blood hesitated, his apoplectic face growing redder than ever. "If..." His eyes shifted toward a soldier almost too swiftly to be seen. "Yes, absolutely." Several of the armored men muttered agreement. "In that case it's accepted by our side," Maytera Marble told him. "I'll report to my principals, Generalissimo Oosik and General Saba, that you had nothing to do with it and are anxious to testify against the guilty parties. Who are they?" Blood ignored the question. "Good. Fine. They won't attack while I'm talking to you?" "Of course not." Silently, Maytera Marble prayed that she was being truthful. "You'd probably like to sit. I know I would. Come in here, and I think we can settle this." He showed her into a paneled drawing room and shut the door firmly. "My boys are getting edgy," he explained, "and that gets me edgy around them." "They're my grandchildren?" Maytera Marble sank into a tapestry chair too deep and too soft for her. "Your sons?" "I don't have any. You said you were my mother. I guess you meant you came to talk for her." "I am your mother, Bloody." Maytera Marble studied him, finding traces of her earlier self in his heavy, cunning face, as well as far too many of his father. "I suppose you've seen me since you found out who I was or had somebody look at me and describe me, and now you don't recognize me. I understand. You're my son, just the same." He grasped the advantage by reflex. "Then you wouldn't want to see me killed, or would you?" "No. No, I wouldn't." She let her stick and white flag fall to the carpet. "If I had been willing to have you die, everything would have been a great deal easier. Don't you see that? You should. You, of all people." She paused, considering. "I was an old woman before you found out who I was, and I think I must have looked older. I was already forty when you were born. That's terribly old for a bio mother." "She came a few times when I was little. I remember her." "Every three months, Bloody. Once in each season, if I could get away alone that often. We were supposed to go out out in pairs. and usually we had to." "She's dead? My mother?" "Your foster mother? I don't know. I lost track of her when you were nine." "I mean y--! Rose. Maytera Rose, my real mother." "Me." Maytera Marble tapped her chest, a soft click. "It was her funeral sacrifice. The other sibyl said so." "We burned parts of her," Maytera Marble conceded. "But mostly those were parts of me in her coffin. Of Marble, I mean, though I've kept her name. It makes things easier, with the children particularly. And there's still a great deal of my personality left." Blood rose and went to the window. The dull green turret of a Guard floater showed above a half-ruined section of wall. "You mind if I open this?" "Certainly not. I'd prefer it." "I want to hear if they start shooting, so I can stop it." She nodded. "My thought exactly, Bloody. Some of the children have slug guns, and nearly all the rest have needlers. Perhaps I should have taken them, but I was afraid we'd need them on the walk out." She sighed, the weary _hish_ of a mop across a terazzo floor. "The worst would have hidden theirs anyway, though none of the children are really bad." "I remember when she lost her arm," Blood told her. "She used to pat me on the head and say, you know, my, he's getting big. One day it was a hand like your--" "It was this one." Maytera Marble displayed it. "So I asked her what happened. I didn't know she was my mother then. She was just a sibyl that came sometimes. My mother would have tea and cookies." "Or sandwiches." Maytera Marble supplemented his account. "Very good sandwiches, too, though I was always careful not to eat more than a fourth of one. Bacon in the fall, cheese in winter, pickled burbot and chives on toast in spring, and curds and watercress in summer. Do you remember, Bloody? We always gave you one." "Sometimes it was all I got," Blood said bitterly "I know. That's why I never ate more than a founh." "Is that really the same hand?" Blood eyed it curiously. "Yes, it is, It's hard to change hands yourself, Bloody, because you have to do it one-handed. It was particularly hard for me, because by then I already had a great many new parts. Or rather, I had reclaimed a great many old ones. They worked better, that was why I wanted them, but I wasn't used to the new assembly yet, which made changing hands harder. It would have been wasteful to burn them, though. They were in much better condition than my old ones." "Even if it is, I'm not going to call you Mother." Maytera Marble smiled, lifting her head and inclining it to the right as she always did. "You have already, Bloody. Out there. You called me Mama. It sounded wonderful." When he said nothing, she added, "You said you were going to open that window. Why don't you?" He nodded and raised the sash. "That's why I bought your manteion, do you know about that? I wasn't just a sprat nobody wanted any more. I had money and influence, and I got word my mother was dying. I hadn't spoken to her in fifteen, twenty years, but I asked Musk, and he said if I really wanted to get even it might be my last chance. I saw the sense in that, so we went, both of us." "To get even, Bloody?" Maytera Marble lifted an eyebrow. "It doesn't matter. I was sitting with her, see, and she needed something, so I sent Musk. Then I said something and called her Mom, and she said your mother's still alive, I tried to be a mother to you, Blood, and I swore I wouldn't tell." Turning from the window to face Maytera Marble, he added, "She wouldn't, either. But I found out." "And bought our manteion to torment me, Bloody?" "Yeah. The taxes were in arrears. I'm real close to the Ayuntamiento. I guess you know that already or you wouldn't have come out here shooting." "You have councillors here, staying with you. Loris, Tarsier, and Potto. That was one reason I wanted to talk." Blood shook his head. "Tarsier's gone. Who told you?" "Like your foster mother, I've sworn not to tell." "One of my people? Somebody in this house?" "My lips are sealed, Bloody." "We'll get into that later, maybe. Yeah, I've got them staying here. It's not the first time, either. When I found out about you--if you're who you say you are--I talked to Loris, just one friend to another, and he let me have it for taxes. Know how much it was? Twelve hundred and change. I was going to leave you hanging, keep talking about tearing the whole thing down. Then Silk came out here. The great Calde Silk himself! Nobody would believe that now, but he did. He solved my house like a thief. By Phaea, he was a thief." Maytera Marble sniffed. It was at once a devastating and a confounding sniff, the sniff of a destroyer of cities and a confronter of governments; Blood winced, and she enjoyed it so much that she sniffed again. "So are you, Bloody." "Lily." Blood swallowed. "Only your Silk's no better, is he? Not a dog's right better. So I saw a chance to turn a few cards and have a little fun by making the whole wormy knot of you squirm. I'd got your manteion for twelve hundred like I told you, just a little thankyou from Councillor Loris, and I was going to tell Silk thirteen hundred, then double that." Blood crossed the room to an inlaid cabinet, opened it, and poured gin and water into a squat glass. "Only when I'd talked to him a little, I made it thirteen _thousand_, because he really thought those old buildings in the middle of that slum were priceless. And I said I'd sell them back to him for twenty-six thousand." Blood chuckled and sat down again. "I'm not really a bad host, Mama. If I thought that you'd drink it, I'd stand you a drink, even after you called me a thief." "I was speaking of fact, Bloody, not calling names. Here in private you may call me a trull or a trollop any other such filthy sobriquet. That is what I am, or at any rate what I've been, although no man but your father ever touched me." "Not me," Blood told her. "I'm above all that." "But not above defrauding that poor boy because he valued the things given to his care, and was so foolish as to imagine you wouldn't lie to an angur." Blood grinned. "If I were above that, Mama, I'd be as poor as he is. Or as he was, anyhow. I don't remember how much time I gave him to come up with the gelt. A couple of weeks, maybe, or something like that. Then when I had him crawling, I said that if he brought me something next week or whatever, I might let him have a little more time. Then after a couple days, I sent Musk to tell him I had to have it all right away. I figured he'd come out here again and beg me for more time, see? It looked like it was going to be a nice little game, the kind I like best." Maytera Marble nodded sympathetically. "I understand. I suppose all of us play wicked little games like that from time to time. I have, I know. But yours is over, Bloody. You've won. You have him here, a prisoner in your house. The person who told me that the councillors were here told me that, too. You have me as well. You say you wanted to avenge yourself on the foster mother we found for you, and you bought our manteion so you could avenge yourself on me, because I gave you life and tried to see that you were taken care of." Blood stared at her and licked his lips. "You've won both games. Perhaps all three. So go ahead, Bloody. A single shot should kill me, and I saw a lot of slug guns out there in your foyer. Then the Trivigauntis can kill you for killing General Saba's adjutant, or Generalissimo Oosik can shoot you for shooting me. Possibly you'll be given your choice. Would you rather die justly? Or unjustly?" When Blood did not reply, she added, "Perhaps you ought to ask your friend Musk about it. He advises you, from what you've said. Where is he, anyway?" "He stayed behind after we brought the doves. He said he had a couple things to take care of, and he doesn't get into town very often. I thought maybe your side picked him up when he tried to come home. Maytera Marble shook her head. Blood took a liberal swallow from his glass. "I wasn't going to shoot you, Mama, and I didn't shoot her. You agreed to that already. Let's pin it down. In about an hour, the Guard could knock this house down and kill everybody. I know that. They're not doing it because they know we've got Silk in here. Isn't that right?" Maytera Marble nodded. "Free him, turn him over to me, Bloody, and we'll go away and leave you alone." "It's not that easy. He's here all right, right here in my house. But it's the councillors and their soldiers who've got him, not me." "Then I must speak with them. Take me to them." "I'll bring them in here," Blood told her, "they're all over." Under his breath he added, "It's still my hornbussing house, by Phaea's feast!" Potto opened the door at the top of the cellar steps and crooked his finger at Sand. "Bring him up, Sergeant. We're getting them all together." Sand saluted with a crash of titanium heels, his slug gun vertical before his face. "Yes, Councillor!" He nudged Silk with the toe of his right foot, and Silk rose. He fell as he attempted to mount from the second step to the third, and again halfway up. "Here," Sand told him, and returned Xiphias's stick. "Thank you," Silk murmured. And then, "I'm sorry. My legs feel a trifle weak, I'm afraid." Potto said cheerfully, "We're going to try to give you back to your friends, Patera, if we can get them to take you." Grabbing the front of Remora's ruined robe, he jerked Silk up the remaining step. "You'd like to lie down again, wouldn't you? Get in a little nap? Maybe something to eat? Help us, and you'll get it." He released Silk so suddenly that he fell a third time. "Has he tried to escape again, Sergeant?" Silk did not hear Sand's reply; he was thinking about a great many things. Among them, names. His own and Sand's were similar--each had four letters, each contained a single vowel, and each began with an S. They could not be related, however, because Sand was a chem and he a bio. Yet they were related by the similarity of their names. Not inconceivably (he found it a tantalizing idea). Sand was a cognate, a version of himself in some whorl of a higher order. Many things the Outsider had shown him seemed to imply that there were such whorls. Sand prodded him from behind with the barrel of his slug gun, and he staggered against a wall. Since chems were never augurs, it could not be that Sand had been meant to be an augur. Was it possible then, that he, Silk, had been meant to be a Guardsman? If he were a Guardsman instead of a failed augur, the many correspondences (already so marked) linking them would be much more perfect, and thus this inferior whorl they inhabited more perfect, too. But, no his mother had wanted him to enter the Juzqado, to become a clerk there like Hyacinth's father and perhaps rise to commissioner. How glowingly she had spoken of a political career, almost up until the day he left for the schola. "This way," Potto told him, and pushed him through a door and into a gorgeous room full of lounging soldiers and armored men. "Is that the calde?" one of the men asked another; the second nodded. He was in politics at last, as his mother had wished. He had pulled a chair over to her closet and stood on the seat to examine the calde's bust on its dark, high shelf; and she, finding him there intent upon it, had lifted it down for him, dusted it, and set it on her dressing table where he could see it better--wonder at the wide, flat cheeks, the narrow eyes, the high, rounded forehead, and the generous mouth that longed to speak. The calde's carved countenance rose again before his mind's eye, and it seemed to him that he had seen it someplace else only a day or two before. Streaming sunlight, and cheeks that were not smooth wood but blotched and lightly pocked. Was it possible he had once seen the calde in person, perhaps as an infant? "Now listen to me." Potto was standing before him, his plump, pleasant face half a head lower than Silk's own. ...had seen the calde outside, because even without his lost glasses he had noticed the powder on the cheeks and the flaws that the powder tried to cover--had seen him, in that case, under the auspices of the Outsider, in a sense. Blood and Maytera Marble were sitting side-by-side when Potto shoved Silk into the room; he was so surprised to see her that for a moment he failed to notice Chenille, Xiphias, and a drooping augur lined up against the wall. A still handsome elderly man standing by the fireplace said, "I'm Councillor Loris. I take it you're Silk?" "Patera Silk. His Cognizance the Prolocutor has not yet accepted my resignation. May I sit down?" Loris ignored the last. "You're the insurgent calde." "Others have called me calde, but I'm not involved in an insurrection." Potto pushed him to the wall beside Chenille. Loris smiled, his blue eyes glinting like chips of ice; and the seduction of his craggy wisdom was so great that even a mocking smile made it almost irresistible. "You killed my Cousin Lemur, did you, Calde?" Silk shook his head. Maytera Marble said, "I don't know these others, except Chenille. Shouldn't I introduce myself?" "I'll do it," Blood told her, "it's my house." With a slight start, Silk realized that Blood was in the chair he had occupied a week earlier, and that this was the same room. "This is Councillor Loris," Blood began unnecessarily, "the new presiding officer of the Ayuntamiento. This other councillor's Councillor Potto." "Calde Silk and Councillor Potto are old acquaintances," Loris purred. "Isn't that right, Calde?" "I don't know this soldier myself," Blood continued, and paused to sip his drink. "It probably doesn't matter." "Sergeant Sand," Silk told him. "He and Councillor Potto interrogated me Tarsday. It was very painful, and I suppose it's quite possible they're going to do it again." Sand came to attention and appeared about to speak, but Silk stopped him with a gesture. "You were only doing your duty. Sergeant. I understand. In justice to you, I ought to add that you had treated me well earlier." Potto said, "We won't need you here, Sergeant. You know what to do." Sand looked at Silk, saluted, executed an about-face, and left, shutting the door behind him. "A very handsome young man," Maytera Marble remarked. "I was sorry to hear that he behaved badly toward you, Patera." Blood indicated her with his glass. "This holy sibyl's Maytera Rose--" Chenille tittered nervously. Maytera Marble said, "I'm Maytera Marble, Bloody. Remember? I explained about that. Chenille and I have met, and naturally Patera knows me well." "Patera _Silk_, she means," elucidated the small augur in the corner. "I, _too_, am entitled to the honorific, as well as my more customary ones. Calde, I have been appointed the new _Prolocutor_ of _Viron_ by _Subleviating Scylla_, who during that same _theophany_ confirmed _you_ as its calde. Am _I_, as I _dare hope_, the first to--" Silk managed to smile. "It's a pleasure to see you again, Patera." Chenille blurted, "Why weren't you dead? I've just been standing here... We couldn't, none of us--" Xiphias cackled. "He's a tough one! Student of mine, too! Truth!" Silk said, "Maytera, do you know Master Xiphias? Master Xiphias is teaching me to fence. Master Xiphias, this holy sibyl is Maytera Marble. She's the senior sibyl now at my-- Of the manteion on Sun Street." Maytera Marble added softly, "I'm also the representative of our Generalissimo Oosik and the Trivigauntis' General Saba, Patera. I've come to arrange your release." His voice thick with mock sincerity, Loris said, "We hold the key to the crisis now, you see, the generous gods having flung the ring into our laps. How foolish are those who scorn the power of the immortal gods!" A black shape darted through the open window, landing with a thump on Silk's shoulder. "Bird back!" "Oreb!" Silk looked around at him, surprised and more pleased than he would have been willing to admit. "_Scourging Scylla_," ignoring Oreb, Incus had leveled his forefinger at Loris, "has given _you_ nothing." "In that case, we have gained our present advantage by merit." Loris smiled. "We thank the undying, ever-generous gods for our talents." Oreb cocked an inquiring head. "Good gods?" "She will _destroy_ all of you, should you harm _either_ of the holy augurs present, or this _sibyl_. We are _sacred_." "We'll risk her wrath if need be. Old man, stop reaching for your sword. It's gone. Were you thinking of overpowering us?" Xiphias shook his head. "You think I don't know there's soldiers out there?" "You could not even if there were none." Loris took a bookend from the mantle; it shattered between his fingers with a sharp report and an explosion of snowy chips. The door flew open, revealing Sand and two other soldiers with leveled slug guns. Oreb whistled. Potto told them, "It's all right. Shut it." "Calde Silk is a strong young man, but he's been severely wounded. You are an old one, unarmed, and not as strong as you suppose. Our new Prolocutor's not physically imposing. Need I continue?" Silk said, "I can understand how you came to be in the tunnel, Master Xiphias--both you and His Cognizance. You ran for cover just as Hyacinth and I did--" Blood interrupted. "You've got her? Where is she?" "I don't. I had her, if you like. We were separated." Turning back to Xiphias, Silk continued, "After you dug me out of the loose soil, you went down the tunnel to look for water with Chenille and Patera, leaving His Cognizance with me--with my body, as you thought. Is that right?" Xiphias nodded. "Only we didn't think your body," Chenille told Silk, "We knew you were alive. His Cognizance said there was a pulse, only we didn't understand how you could be alive after getting buried like that." Loris rattled what remained of the bookend in his hand. "What puzzles me--excuse my interrupting your conference--is your mention of His Cognizance. I take it you don't refer to our friend, but to the actual head of the Chapter? Was he in the tunnel with you, Calde?" "Yes, he was. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it." Potto said happily, "He's an old man. One of the patrols will pick him up, Cousin." "A clever old man." Loris looked grim. "A troublemaker." Privately, Silk was trying to reconcile Quetzal's telling Chenille that he, Silk, was alive with his saying that they had thought him dead. He had lied in one or the other, but why? "Bad thing!" Oreb told everyone. Silk ventured, "A patrol headed by Sergeant Sand--one like the patrol that arrested me originally, I suppose--must have come across Master Xiphias, Patera Incus, and Chenille. I was surprised to see them here, but I believe I understand now. Sand must have sent the other man back here with them and gone on alone until he found me, perhaps because he'd heard my voice--I'd been talking to His Cognizance. Is that correct?" "Where is this tunnel, Patera?" Maytera Marble asked. "Are you talking about a tunnel underneath the house?" Potto grinned at her, displaying gleaming teeth. Blood put down his drink. "Yeah, we're right over it, Mama, and it hooks up with a bunch of others." Loris told her, "That's the first item you ought to pass on to your principals, Maytera. They think they have us like rats in a cauldron. Nothing could be further from the truth. We can leave this house, and them, whenever we wish." Blood added, "Only I don't want to. It's my house." She looked thoughtful, a finger pressed to her cheek. "Bad hole." Oreb ruffled his feathers apprehensively. Chenille whispered, "Your bird was down there with us. Auk had him on the boat." "You're sunburned!" Inwardly, Silk reproached his own stupidity. "I've been looking at you--gaping actually, I suppose. I hope you'll excuse it, but I couldn't imagine how your face had gotten so red, so close to the red-brown color of a wood-carving my mother used to have." "She wore _nothing_ on the boat," Incus interposed. "Then my robe. Maytera _forced_ them to give her that gown." Loris snapped, "Is this germane?" "Perhaps not," Silk admitted. "It's just that Chenille has reminded me of a childhood incident, Councillor." Loris waved aside Chenille's sunburn, tossing the largest fragment of the bookend onto the rosewood end table at Maytera Marble's elbow. "Marble? Isn't that your name, Maytera? The calde just reminded us of that." "It is." "That was what this knickknack was, I'd say. Real marble from the Short Sun Whorl, precisely like you." For an instant, Loris's face was no longer attractive. "I'll leave that chunk there so you don't forget it." "I shan't," Maytera Marble promised. "It would be wise for you to keep in mind that you're surrounded by thousands of well-armed troops, Councillor. I suppose most people in my position would be inclined to exaggerate their numbers, but I won't. I'll tell you the truth, so you won't be able to say that you were deceived, or even misled, afterward. There are two companies of Trivigaunti pterotroopers, almost the entire Third Brigade of the Civil Guard, and elements of the Fourth. I asked Generalissimo Oosik what he meant by 'elements' and he said four floaters and the heavy weapons company. Besides all those, there are about five thousand of Maytera Mint's people, with more arriving from the city all the time. They've heard that Patera Silk's in here, and they want to charge the house. When I left, General Saba and Generalissimo Oosik were afraid they might not be able to prevent them without using Guardsmen and creating more friction." "Fight now?" Oreb inquired. Smiling, Maytera Marble turned to Silk. "That's the bird I saw hopping into your kitchen when Doctor Crane was treating you, isn't? Later on my glass, and on your shoulder like that in the garden. I knew I'd seen him before. "No, little bird, no fighting. Not now, or not yet. But Generalissimo Oosik told me quite frankly that if there's no way to stop Maytera Mint's insurgents from attacking short of firing on them, he'll stand back and let them do it. You see, I confided to the children that your master was in here. They seem to have told a great many other people before we left the city, so the whole thing's my fault. I feel very badly indeed about that, and I'm trying to make amends." Blood added, "But she won't say who told her. Or have you changed your mind about that, Mama?" "Certainly not. I gave my word." Loris, who had been leaning against the mantel, left it to stand in front of Maytera Marble. "This little conference has already run too long. Allow me to tell you what we want, Maytera. Then you can go back out there and repeat it to the Trivigauntis and Mint's five thousand rioters, if there are actually that many, which I am ungentlemanly enough to doubt. Our position is not negotiable. You accept our terms or we'll kill these prisoners, Silk included, and crush the rebellion." Incus stood again. "You have _no_ authority--" Potto's fist striking Incus's cheek sounded almost as loud as the breaking of the bookend. "So, we've come to that." Maytera Marble smoothed the black skirt covering her metal thighs. "It will be needlers and knives next, no doubt." Silk said, "I warn you, Councillor Potto, not to do that again." "Or you'll break my neck?" Potto's smile was that of a fat boy contemplating a stolen pie. "Beat little butcher, big butcher bark? We've had some games of strength already. If you've forgotten them, I can teach you the rules again." Incus spat blood. "The just _gods_ avenge the wrongs of _augurs_. A doom..." Potto lifted his hand, and Incus fell silent. "No hit," Oreb suggested. "The gods may or may not," Silk murmured. "I don't know, and if I were forced to choose, I'd probably say that they did nothing of the sort." Loris applauded with a sardonic smile; a half-second too late, Potto joined him. Abruptly Silk's voice dominated the room. "The law does, however. Maytera told you how many troops Generalissimo Oosik has, saying--very fairly and reasonably, I thought--that she didn't want you to feel you'd been tricked when all this is over. You should have listened more carefully." "Tell 'em!" Xiphias put in. "I'm attempting to." Silk nodded, mostly (it appeared) to himself. "Because it will be over soon. There will be a trial, and you, Councillor Potto, and you, Councillor Loris, will hear Maytera, Chenille, Master Xiphias, and Patera Incus testify to what they saw and heard--and felt, as well--to a judge who will no longer be afraid of you." Potto giggled and glanced at Loris. "Is this what they picked to replace us?" Surprising everyone, Blood said, "Yeah, I didn't get it at first, but I'm starting to." Maytera Marble told Potto, "All human things wear out and must be replaced eventually, Councillor." "Not me!" "I'd think you'd welcome it. How long have you toiled, worrying and planning, for our ungrateful city? Fifty years? Sixty?" "Longer!" Potto dropped into a gilt settee. Silk inquired, "Councillor, do you--not the authentic Potto down in your underwater boat, but you yourself to whom I speak--recall the Short Sun Whorl? Councillor Loris implied that marble could be quarried there. I don't know anything about antiques, but I've heard that it is a stone that's never found in its natural state in our whorl." "I'm not that old." Loris snapped, "I was about to outline our demands. I'd like to get on with it." Maytera Marble left her chair to stand beside Silk. "Do, Councillor, please." "As I said, they're not negotiable. The following five conditions embody them, and we're prepared to accept nothing less." Loris fished a square of paper from an inner pocket and unfolded it with a snap. "First, Silk must declare publicly, without reservation, that he is not and has never been calde, that Viron has none, and that the Ayuntamiento alone is its sole governing body." To bring peace I'll be happy to, Silk told him; and only when he had completed the final word realized that he had not spoken aloud. "Second, there must be no new election of councillors. Vacant seats are to remain vacant, and the present members of the Ayuntamiento are to remain in office. "Third, the Rani of Trivigaunte must withdraw her troops from Vironese territory and furnish us with hostages--whom we will name--against further interference in our affairs. "Fourth, the Civil Guard must surrender its treasonous officers to us, the Ayuntamiento, for trial and punishment. "Fifth and last, the rioters must surrender their arms, which will be collected by the Army." Through bruised lips, Incus muttered, "I suggest you _pray_ long and hard over this, my son, and _sacrifice_. The _wisdom_ of the gods has not enlightened your _councils_." "We don't need it," Potto told him. "When _Splenetic Scylla_ learns--" Maytera Marble interrupted. "What have you to offer the Rani, the rioters, as you call them, and the Guard in return?" "Peace and a general amnesty. The captives you see here, including Silk, will be released unharmed." "I see." Maytera Marble laid a hand on Silk's shoulder. "I'm very disappointed. It was I who persuaded General Saba and Generalissimo Oosik that you were reasonable men. They listened because of the courage of my sib General Mint. And because of her victories, of which we're all very proud, if I don't offend the good gods who gave them to her by saying so. Now I find that by interceding for you I've squandered all the credit she's earned us." Loris began, "If you think us unreasonable now--" "I do. You say Patera Silk isn't really calde. What good is his declaration then? What do you want him to tell the people? That the augur of the Sun Street manteion says that your Ayuntamiento is to continue to govern the city? You'll only make yourselves ridiculous." Potto snapped, "Why didn't you laugh?" "Calde?" Loris smiled. "Those are our demands. The Prolocutor hasn't freed you from your vows, you said, the implication being that you want him to. Are you willing to resign this caldeship you've never really had as well?" "Yes, I'd like nothing better." Silk had been leaning on Xiphias's silver-banded cane; he straightened up as he spoke. "I did not choose to become involved in politics, Councillor. Politics chose me." "Good Silk," Oreb explained. Loris returned his attention to Maytera Marble. "You heard that. You'll want to tell Oosik what you heard." "Unfortunately," Silk continued, "the remainder of your terms are not feasible. Take the second. The people demand that government return to our Charter, the foundation of the law; and the law requires elections to fill the empty seat in the Ayuntamiento." "We ought to kill you," Potto told him."I will." "In which case you would no longer hold the calde. The people--the rioters, as you call them--will choose a new one, no doubt a much better and more effective one than I am, since they could hardly do worse." He waited for someone else to speak, but no one did; at length he added, "I'm not an advocate, Councillors--I wish I were. If I were, I could easily imagine myself defending you on nearly every charge that could be brought against you thus far. You suspended the Charter, but I believe there was some uncertainty regarding the wishes of the old calde, and it was long ago in any case. You tried to put down the riots, but in that you were doing your duty. You questioned Mamelta and me when we were detained for violating a military area, which could easily be justified." "He _hit_ me!" Incus exclaimed. "An _augur!_" Silk nodded. "That is an individual matter, concerning Councillor Potto alone, and I was considering the Ayuntamiento as a whole--or rather, what remains of that whole. But what you say, Patera, is quite right; and it's an indication of the road along which this Ayuntamiento is traveling. I'd like to persuade Councillor Loris, its presiding officer, to turn back before it's too late." Loris fixed him with a malevolent stare. "Then you won't to our demands? I can call in the soldiers at once and get this over with." Silk shook his head. "I can't accede. Nor can I speak for the Rani of Trivigaunte, obviously; but I can and do speak for Viron; and for Viron all of your demands, except the one for my resignation, are out of the question." "Nevertheless," Maytera Marble put in, "General Mint and Generalissimo Oosik may accede to them, in part at least, to save Patera Silk. May I speak to him in private?" "Don't be ridiculous!" "It isn't ridiculous, I must. Don't you see that General Mint and Generalissimo Oosik and all the rest of them are only acting on the authority of Patera Silk? When I report that I've seen him and tell them you've recognized him as calde, they will certainly want to know whether he's willing to agree to your terms. They'll have to know what he wants them to do, but they won't pay the least attention to it unless I can say that he told me in private. Let me talk to him, and I'll go back and talk to Generalissimo Oosik and General Saba. Then, if we're lucky, we'll have real peace in place of this truce." "We have not recognized him as calde," Loris told her coldly. "I invite you to retract that." "But you have! You've called him Calde several times in my presence, and I could see you congratulating yourselves on having the calde. You even called him the key to the crisis. You're threatening to shoot him because he won't agree to your precious five demands. If he's the calde, that's only cruel. If he isn't, it's idiotic." She raised her hands and time-smoothed face to Loris in supplication. "He's terribly weak. I've been watching him while the rest of us were talking, and if it weren't for his stick I think he would have fallen. Can't you let him sit down? And tell everyone else to leave? A quarter of an hour should be enough." Blood rose, swaying a little. "Over here, Patera. Take my seat. This's a good chair, better than the one you had in here that other time." "Thank you," Silk said. "Thank you very much. I owe you a great deal, Blood." Chenille, next to him, took his arm; he wanted to assure her he did not need her help, but stumbled on the carpet before he could speak, eliciting an unhappy squawk from Oreb. "Get the rest of them out," Loris told Potto. Xiphias paused in the doorway, showing Silk both his hands, then twisting one slightly and separating them. Chenille kissed his forehead, the brush of her lips the silken touch of a butterfly's wing--and was gone, violently pulled away by Potto, who left with her and shut the door. Maytera Marble reoccupied the chair beside the one that had been Blood's. "Well," she said. Silk nodded. "Well indeed. You did very well, Maytera. Much better than I. But before we talk about--all of the things we'll have to talk about, I'd like to ask a question. One foolish question, or perhaps two. Will you indulge me?" "Certainly, Patera. What is it?" Silk's forefinger traced small circles on his cheek. "I know nothing about women's clothes. You must know a great deal more--at least, I hope you do. You got Councillor Loris to bring Chenille her gown?" "She was naked under that augur's robe," Maytera Marble explained, "and I refused to talk about anything else until they got her dressed. Bloody called in one of the maids, and she and Chenille went with a soldier to find her some clothes. They weren't gone long." Silk nodded, his face thoughtful. "It's too small for her, but the maid said it was the largest in the house, and it's only a little bit too small." "I see. I was wondering whether it belonged to a woman I met here." "You and Bloody were talking about her, Patera." Maytera Marble sounded ill at ease. "He asked you where she was, and you said you'd gotten separated." Silk nodded again. "I don't want to pry into your personal affairs." "I appreciate that. Believe me, Maytera, I appreciate it very much." He hesitated, staring through the open window at the wind-rippled green lawn before he spoke again. "I thought it might be one of Hyacinth's, as I said. In fact, I rather hoped it was; but it couldn't be. It almost fits Chenille, as you say, and Hyacinth's much smaller." The circles, which had ceased to spin, reappeared. "What do you call that fabric?" "It's chen... Why, I see what you're getting at, and you're right, Patera! That gown's chenille, exactly like her name!" "Not silk?" Maytera Marble snapped her fingers. "I know! She must have told the maid her name, and it suggested the gown." "She kissed me as she left," he remarked. "I certainly didn't invite it, but she did. You must have seen it." "Yes, Patera. I did." "I suppose she wanted to signal that she was with us--that she supported us. Master Xiphias made a gesture of the same sort, probably something to do with swordplay. Anyway, her kiss made me think of silk, of the fabric I mean, for some reason. It seemed strange, but I thought perhaps her skirt had brushed my hand. You say it's actually called chenille?" "Chenille _is_ silk, Patera. Or anyway the best chenille is, and the other is something else that's supposed to look like silk. Chenille is a kind of yarn, made of silk, that's furry-looking like a caterpillar. If they weave cloth of it, that's called chenille too. It's a foreign word that means caterpillar, and silk threads are spun by silkworms, which are a kind of caterpillar. But I'm sure you know that." "I must speak to her!" he said. "Not now, but when we're alone, and as soon as I can." "Good girl!" "Yes, Oreb. Indeed she is." Silk returned his attention to Maytera Marble. "A moment ago when you spoke to Loris, you didn't want us to leave this room. Would you mind telling me why?" "Was I as transparent at that?" "No, you weren't transparent at all; but I know you, and if you'd really been so worried about me, you would have asked him to let us talk in a bedroom where I could lie down, and to send for a doctor. I don't suppose Blood's got one, now that Doctor Crane's dead; but Loris might have been able to supply one, or to send someone for one of the Guard's doctors under a flag of truce, like that white flag next to your chair." Maytera Marble looked grave. "I should have asked him to do that. I can still ask, Patera. I'll go out and find him. It won't take a moment." "No, I'm fine. By Phaea's favor--" It was too late to call back the conventional phrase. "I'll recover. Why did you want to stay here?" "Because of this window." Maytera Marble waved a hand at it. "Bloody had opened it while we were in here by ourselves, and I worried the whole time that someone would get cold and shut it. You must know Mucor, Patera. She said you sent her to me." Silk nodded. "She's Blood's adopted daughter." "Adopted? I didn't know that. She said she was Bloody's daughter. That was Hieraxday night, terribly late... Do you know Asphodella, Patera?" Silk smiled. "Oh, yes. A lively little thing." "That's her. I'd done the wash, you see, and I wanted to pour the dirty water on my garden. Plants actually like dirty water with soapsuds in it better than clean. It sounds wrong, I know, but they do." "If you say so, I'm sure it must be true." "So I was pouring out the water, so much for each row, when Asphodella pulled my skirt. I said what are you doing out so late, child? And she told me she'd gone with the others to fight, but Horn had sent her back--" "Cat come!" Oreb warned. Silk looked for it, seeing none. "Horn had sent her home, and quite right, too, if you ask me, Patera. So now she wanted to know if there'd be palaestra on Thelxday." "Then," Silk said slowly, "her face changed. Is that it, Maytera?" "Yes. Exactly. Her face became, well, horrible. She saw I was frightened, as I certainly was, and said don't be afraid, Grandmother. My name's Mucor, I'm Blood's daughter." Maytera Marble paused, not certain that he understood. "Have I told you Bloody's my son, Patera? Yes, I know I did, right after we sacrificed in the street." "He was Maytera Rose's," Suk said carefully. "You, I know, are also Maytera Rose--at least, at times." "All the time, Patera." Maytera Marble laughed. "I've integrated our software. As far as we sibyls are concerned, I'm your best friend and worst enemy, all in one." He stirred uncomfortably in Blood's comfortable chair. "I was never Maytera Rose's enemy, I hope." "You thought I was yours, though, Patera. Perhaps I was, a little." He leaned toward her, his hands folded over the crook of Xiphias's cane. "Are you now, Maytera? Please be completely frank with me." "No. Your friend and well-wisher, Patera." Oreb applauded, flapping his wings. "Good girl!" She added, "Even if I were entirely Maytera Rose, I'd do all I could to get you out of this." Silk let himself fall back. It was astonishing how soft these chairs of Blood's were. He remembered (vividly now) how badly he had wanted to rest in his chair, to sleep in it, when he had talked with Blood in this very room. Yet this one was better, just as Blood had promised: yielding where it should, firm where firmness was desirable. He stroked one wide arm, its maroon leather as smooth as butter beneath his touch. "They let me lie down after I was captured," he confided to Maytera Marble. "Sand did. I'd had to walk all the way to this house, and it was a very long way. It had seemed long when Auk and I rode donkeys; and walking with Sand's gun at my back, it seemed a great deal longer; but once we arrived, once we'd climbed up through the hatch into the cellar, he let me lie down on the floor. He isn't a bad man, really--just a disciplined soldier obeying bad men. There's good in Loris, too, and even in Potto. I know you must sense it, just as I do, Maytera; otherwise you'd never have spoken to Potto as you did. That's why--one reason, anyway--I don't feel that this situation from which you're trying to rescue me is as bad as it appears, though I'll always be grateful." "Cat! Cat!" Oreb flew from Silk's shoulder to the head of an alabaster bust of Thelxiepeia. Maytera Marble smiled. "There's no cat in here, you pretty bird." "You were telling me about this room," Slik reminded her, "and meeting Mucor. I wish you'd continue with that. It may be significant." "I--Patera, I want to tell you first about meeting you. It won't take long. and it may be more important, maybe a lot more important. You still think about the day you came to our manteion, I know. You've mentioned it several times." He nodded. "Patera Pike was there, and you loved and respected him, but a man wants a woman to talk to. Most men do, anyway, and you did. You'd been raised by your mother, and we could see how you missed her." "I still do," Silk admitted. "Don't feel bad about that, Patera. No one should ever be ashamed of love." Maytera Marble paused to collect her thoughts; her rapid scan was back, and she reveled in it. "We were three sibyls, I was about to say. Maytera Mint was still young and pretty, but so shy that she ran from you whenever she could. When she couldn't, she would hardly speak. Maybe she guessed what had happened to me long ago. I've sometimes thought that, and you were young and good-looking, as you still are." He began a question, but thought better of it. "I won't tell you who Bloody's father was, Patera. I've never told anybody and I won't tell now. But I will tell you this. He never knew. I don't think he even suspected." Silk filled his lungs with the cool, clean breeze from the window. "I slept with a woman last night, Maytera. With Hyacinth, the woman Blood asked about." "I'm sorry you told me." "I wanted to. I've wanted--I want so badly, still, to tell people who don't know, although a great many people know already. His Cognizance and Master Xiphias and Generalissimo Oosik." "And me." Maytera Marble's forefinger tapped her metal chest through her habit. "I knew. Or rather, I guessed, as anybody would, and I wish that you'd left it like that. Some things aren't improved by talking about them." Oreb broke off his inverted examination of Thelxiepeia's features to applaud Maytera Marble. "Smart girl!" "We were three sibyls, as I said. But Maytera Mint wasn't there for you Patera, so I was the only ones left. I was old. I don't think you ever grasped how old. My faces had gone long before you were born. You never realized they weren't there, did you?" "What are you talking about? Your face is where it ought to be, Maytera. I'm looking at it." "This?" She drummed her fingers on it, a quick metallic _tap-tap-tap_. "This is my faceplate, really. I used to have a face like yours. I would say like Dahlia's, but she was before your time. Like Teasel's or Nettle's, and there were things in it, little bits of alnico, that let me really smile or frown when I moved them with the coils behind my faceplate. But all that's gone except for the coils." "It's a beautiful face," Silk insisted, "because it's yours." "My other face wasn't, and what it was showed in your own every time you saw it. I resented that, and you resented my resentment and turned to me to ease your loneliness. But we were much more alike than you realized, not that I've ever cared, myself, for machines like this. I never thought they could be people, really, no matter how many times they said they were. Now I'm just a message written on those teeny gold doodads you see in cards. But I'm still me, a person, because I always was." Silk fumbled Remora's ruined robe for a handkerchief, and finding none blotted his eyes on his sleeve. "I didn't tell you that to make you feel sorry for me, Patera. Neither of me were easy to love, no more than I am now. You were able to love one just the same, and not very many men could have, not even many augurs. I thought that if you knew how you came to love and not like me, it might help you some other time with some other woman." "It will, I know." Silk sighed. "Thank you, Maytera. With myself, most of all." "Let's not talk about it any more. What do you think of the Ayuntamiento's terms? Still what you told Loris?" Silk made a last dab at his eyes, feeling the grit in the cloth, knowing that he was dirtying his already-soiled face and not caring. "I suppose so." Maytera Marble nodded. "They're perfectly hopeless. Not a single thing for Trivigaunte, and why should the Guard hand over its senior officers, why should Generalissimo Oosik allow it? But if we offered trials, regular ones with judges--" "Man back!" A big hand glittering with rings had appeared on the windowsill. It was followed by a yellow-sleeved arm and a whiff of musk rose. "That's why you wanted to stay here." Silk stood up a trifle unsteadily, helped by the cane, and crossed the room to the window. "So your son could join us." "Why no, Patera. Not at all." Leaning over the sill, Silk spoke to Blood. "Here, hold onto my hand. I'll help you up." "Thanks," Blood said. "I should have brought a stool or something." "Take mine, too, Bloody." Maytera Marble braced one foot on the sill in imitation of Silk. Flushed redder than ever with exertion, Blood's face rose on the other side of the window. With a grunt and a heave, he tumbled into the room. "Now for my granddaughter. She'll be easy after Bloody." Bending over the sill again, Maytera Marble clasped skeletally thin hands and lifted in an emaciated young woman with a seared cheek. "Poor girl!" Silk nodded his agreement as he returned to his chair. "Hello, Mucor. Sit down, please, so that I may sit. We're neither of us strong." "Needlers're no good 'gainst the soldiers," Blood puffed. He brushed off the front of his tunic and reached beneath it. "So I'm giving you this, Calde Silk." "This" was an azoth, its long hilt rough with rubies and chased with gold; its sharply curved guard was more elaborate than that of the one Doctor Crane had given him at Hyacinth's urging, and diamonds ringed its pommel. Silk resumed his seat. "I should have anticipated that. Doctor Crane told me you had two." "Don't you want it?" Blood did not trouble to hide his surprise. "No. Not now, at least." "It's worth--" "I know what it's worth, and how effective a weapon it can be in a strong hand like yours. At the moment, I don't have one, though that's the least of my reasons for refusing." Silk settled back in his chair. "I asked your daughter to sit down, and she was good enough to oblige me. I can't invite you to sit in your house, and I'm very aware that I'm occupying your former seat; but there are many others." Blood sat. "Thank you. Maytera--" "Cat come!" It did, almost before Oreb's agitated whoop, springing lightly over the windowsill to land noiselessly in the middle of the room and glare at Blood with eyes like burning amber. Maytera Marble gathered her skirts as if it were a mouse; Silk asked, "Is that Lion? I seem to remember him." The lynx turned its glare on him and nodded. "Patera's been making everybody sit," Maytera Marble told Mucor. "It would be nicer if you had your big kitty sit too, Darling. I wouldn't mind him so much then." Lion lay down obediently, dividing his attention between Blood and Oreb. "Sphigx bless you." Maytera Marble traced the sign of addition. "I--it's rather amusing now that I come to think of it, the sort of thing the children enjoy. Patera thought I wanted this window open so your Papa could come in, and I said, no, I hadn't even thought of it, which was the plain truth. I wanted it opened because you told me the first time, Darling, not to stay in rooms with the doors and windows shut, because you might have to drop in again, and that would make it harder. So I was happy when he opened this one, and now you've come in through it, and your long-legged kitty, too." "I didn't know she could take over an animal like that." Blood had his thumb on the demon. "We didn't know she had any power left till Lemur taped the calde talking to Crane, but it sounds like she's been paying visits to both of you." "Sneaking outside the window, Bloody? You shouldn't do that." "I didn't." "A listening device." Silk sighed. "I'm disappointed. I'd thought there might be a secret door behind one of these big paintings. When I was a sprat, boys' books were full of them, but I've never actually seen one." "You knew I'd come?" "I surmised you might. Do you want the entire thing?" Maytera Marble sniffed loudly. "I do, Patera." "I wish you wouldn't make that noise," he told her. "Then I won't, or at least not very often. But Bloody's my son, and I meant I have a right to know." "All right, the entire thing." Silk leaned back in his chair, eyes half closed. "On Hieraxday, I walked some distance through the city with His Cognizance, and from the East Edge to Ermine's; it was about evenly divided between Maytera Mint's insurgents and the Guard. I slept at Ermine's for a few hours, as I told you; when I woke up, half the Guard seemed to have gone over to Maytera Mint." Maytera Marble said, "All of it but the Second, I'm told." "Good. Before I was brought here, I was in the tunnels or in the cellar, so I didn't see much; but there were councillors here. It seemed likely they were directing their forces in person, and I didn't think they'd do that unless the situation was critical. Then too, you told me you'd walked out here with the children and mentioned a general from Trivigaunte--" "General Saba. A very good woman at heart, from what I saw of her, though quite large and rather prone to obstinacy." "I assume it was her airship that attacked us when His Cognizance and I were riding in Oosik's floater." "Her airship's been over the city, certainly. It's been shooting and dropping explosives. It's huge." "Your Doctor Crane was a spy from Trivigaunte," Silk told Blood. "You must know that by now. He told me once, joking, that if I were in need of rescue all I'd have to do was kill him. He had a device in his chest that let others find him and told them whether his heart was beating. He was shot Rieraxday morning, due to a misunderstanding. I imagine the attack on us resulted from a similar mix-up--the Trivigauntis had been told the Guard was opposing us. When they saw a Guard floater surrounded by officers on horseback, they attacked it." "I don't see what this has to do with me," Blood grunted. "It has everything to do with you," Silk told him, "and I was right about it, too--the only thing I've been completely right about. You were fighting in a losing cause; this house was about to be destroyed, and you might easily be wounded or killed. You knew about the tunnels, and no doubt you've been down there. So have I, as I've said--more than I like. I couldn't imagine your leaving this house in flames and trudging off underground unless there were no alternative." "I worked shaggy hard to get this place." "Don't swear, Bloody. It doesn't become you." "I did! Your kind thinks it's easy. One wrong move and you're packed for Mainframe, day after day, and nobody to help me I could trust till I found Musk, nobody at all. It'd kill both of you in a week. Shag yes, it would! Twelve years I did it before I ever took my first crap in this place." "Bloody!" "It's only a guess," Silk admitted, "and I can't pretend an intimate familiarity with your mental processes; but I'd imagine you've been looking for an opportunity to change sides since sometime last night." "What's the shaggy Ayuntamiento ever done for me? Worked me for payoffs and favors every month. Shut me down to make themselves look good. What the shag do I owe them?" "I've no idea. Then--about an hour ago, perhaps--your mother entered the picture, ostensibly and no doubt principally to help me, but clearly with influence on the other side and eager to save you as well. So when I realized Maytera wanted us to stay in this room, I expected you to step from behind a picture." Silk smiled and shrugged apologetically. Mucor surprised them all by asking, "Would you like me to see what they're doing?" "I'd rather have you eat something," Silk told her, "but I don't suppose there's anything in here. Go ahead, if Lion will behave himself." He waited for her reply, but none came. "Girl go." Oreb's croak was scarcely audible. "No here." Lion stretched himself on the floor and closed his eyes. "Actually, I was surprised you didn't come sooner," Silk told Blood conversationally, "but of course you had to fetch Mucor and get her dressed--perhaps even clean her up a bit with the help of one of your maids, and I hadn't allowed for that. The point that puzzles me is that Mucor seems to have felt it necessary to send Lion ahead of her." "Did she?" Blood eyed his adopted daughter curiously. "So it seems. Oreb--my bird, up there--must have glimpsed him or, more likely heard him, because he told us several times that there was a cat about." "She probably didn't realize that the soldiers wouldn't be afraid of him," Maytera Marble suggested. "Bad cat," Oreb muttered. "Not too loud," Silk cautioned him, "he might hear you." "It was nice of you to join us, Bloody." Maytera Marble smoothed her skirt. "It's to your advantage, no doubt, just as Patera says. But you're taking a big risk just the same." Blood stood. "I know it. You don't think much of me, do you, Calde?" "I think a great deal of your shrewdness," Silk told him. "I'd be glad to have your cunning mind on our side. I'm aware that you have no morals." "Colonel Oosik," Blood gestured with the azoth. "He's your man, from what I've heard. This General Saba's there for the Rani, Colonel Oosik for you." "Generalissimo Oosik." Blood snorted. "You trust him and you won't trust me, but I've had him in my pocket for years." Maytera Marble said, "Sit down, Bloody. Or are you going to do something?" "I want a drink, but since the calde doesn't want it, I think I'll hang onto my azoth as long as that cat's in here. Will you fix me one, Mama?" "Certainly." She rose. "A little more gin, I imagine?" Silk began, "If it's not too much trouble, Maytera--" "And ice. There's ice behind the big doors underneath." "I'll be happy to. Brandy, or--" she examined bottles. "Here's a nice red wine, Patera." "Just water and ice, please. The same for Mucor, I think." Blood shook his head. "No ice, Mama. She'll throw it. Believe me,I know." "Poor bird!" "A cup of plain water for Oreb, if you would, Maytera. I believe he'll come down to drink it if you leave it on top of the cabinet." "Plain water for Oreb." Revealing two fingers' width of silvery leg as she stood on tiptoe, she put a brimming tumbler on the cabinet. "Soda water and ice for Patera, and ice, gin. and soda water for you, Bloody. Soda water without ice for my granddaughter. It's nice and cool, though." As she placed the final tumbler before Mucor, she added, "I must say she doesn't look as if you've been taking good care of her." Blood picked up his drink. "We've got to force-feed her, mostly, and she tears off her clothes." "Who was her mother?" Silk asked. "She never had one." Blood sipped his drink and eyed it with disfavor. "You know about frozen embryos? You can buy them now and then if you want them, but you don't always get what you paid for." Recalling dots of rotting flesh, Silk shuddered. "The old calde, Tussah his name was, was supposed to have done it. That leaked out after he died. So I decided to give it a try. Buy myself an embryo with spooky powers. I got one of the girls to carry it." "And you were actually able to purchase such a thing? An embryo that would develop into someone with Mucor's powers?" Blood nodded unhappily. "Like I said, you don't always get what you pay for, but I was careful and I did. She's got the stuff, but she's crazy. Always has been." "You engaged a specialist to operate on her brain." "Sure, trying to cure her, only it didn't work. If it had, I'd be calde." "She's been my friend," Silk told him, "a difficult one, perhaps, but helpful just the same. She likes me, I believe, and the good god knows I'd like to help her in return." Oreb caught at the phrase. "Good god?" "The Outsider, I ought to have said." Mucor herself said, "They're arguing about you." Her voice sounded faint and far away; the tumbler Maytera Marble had filled for her waited untouched on the low table before her. Silk sipped from his own, careful not to drink too much too fast. "Men and women breed children from their bodies on impulse. We augurs rail against it; but although inexcusable, it is at least understandable. They are swept away by the emotions of the moment; and if they weren't, perhaps the whole whorl would stand empty. Adoption, on the other hand, is a considered act, consummated only with the assistance of an advocate and a judge. Thus an adoptive parent cannot say, 'I didn't know what I was doing,' or 'I didn't think it would happen.' Worthless though those protestations are, he has no claim to them." "You think I knew she'd turn out like this? She was a baby." Blood glared at his daughter. "I'm twice your age, Patera, maybe more. When you're as old as I am, maybe you'll have a few little things that you regret too." "There are many already." "You think there are. Women, you mean. My. Oh shag it, what's the use?" Blood set his drink aside and wiped his damp left hand on his thigh. "I don't care much for them. Neither would you, if you'd been in my business as long as I have. I started when I was seven or eight, just a dirty little sprat going up to men in the market. Anyhow, Mucor's the only child I'll ever have, probably." Maytera Marble told him, "She's the only granddaughter I'll ever have, too, Bloody. If you won't take proper care of her, I will." Blood looked angrier than ever. "Like you did me?" "It would be better if we kept our voices down," Silk said. "You're not supposed to be here." "I wish I wasn't." A smile twisted Blood's mouth. "That would be the elephant, wouldn't it? Shot for trying to pick up a couple bits down at the market. Hey, Patera, you want to meet my sister? She'll give you some hot mutton." "Bloody, don't!" "It's pretty late to tell me that, Mama. Or don't you think so?" Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Silk. "I'm going to outline a deal. If you take it, I'm in, and I'll do everything I can to get you out of here in one piece." Silk opened his mouth to speak. "When I say you, that's you and the other augur, the old man, Mama here, and that big piece from Orchid's. Even your bird. All of you. All right?" "Certainly." "If you don't take it, I'm out the window, understand? No hard feelings, but no deal either." "You could be shot going out the window, too, Bloody," Maytera Marble warned him. "I'm surprised that you weren't, you and my granddaughter, before you got back inside." Blood shook his head. "There's a truce, remember? And I'll stick the azoth back under my tunic. They aren't going to shoot an unarmed man and a girl that never even come close to the wall." "As good as a secret passage." Maytera Marble's eyes gleamed with amusement. "Right, it is." Blood went to the window. "Now here's what I say, Calde. I'll come over to you and Mint, gun, goat, and gut, and try to see to it that all of us get clear. When we do, I'll sign over your manteion to you for one card and other considerations, as we say, and you can owe me the card." He waited for Silk to speak, but Silk said nothing. "After we get out, I'm still your bucky. I've done plenty of favors for the Ayuntamiento, see? I can help you too, and I will, everything that I can. I've got Mucor, remember," Blood nodded toward her, "and I know what she can do now. Lemur's crowd never got anything half as good as that." Silk sipped from his tumbler. "More talk," Oreb muttered; it was not clear whether it was a suggestion or a complaint. "Here's all I want from you, Calde. No gelt, just three things. Firstly, I get to hang onto my other property. That means my real estate, my accounts at the fisc, and the rest. Number two, I stay in business. I'm not asking you to make it legal. I don't even want you to. Only you don't shut me down, see? Last, I don't have to pay anybody anything above regular taxes. I'll open my books to you, but no more payoffs on top of that. You understand what I'm telling you?" Blood leaned against the window frame. "Look it over, and you'll see I'm making you as good a deal as anybody could ask for. I'm giving you my complete, unlimited support, plus some valuable property, and all I want from you is that you leave me alone. Let me keep what's mine and earn my living, and don't come down on me any harder than you do on anybody else. What do you say?" For a few seconds, Silk did not say anything. The tramp of rubber-shod metal feet came faintly from the wide foyer on the other side of the carved walnut door, punctuated by Potto's strident tones; embroidered hangings stirred, whispering, in the cool wind from the window. "I've been expecting to be tested." Silk glanced at his tumbler, surprised to find that he had drunk more than half his soda water. "Tested by the Outsider. He's been testing me physically, and I felt quite confident that he would soon take my measure morally as well. When you began, I was certain this was it. But this is so easy!" Lion raised his head to look at him inquiringly, then rose, stretched, and padded over to rub his muscled, supple body against Silk's knees. Maytera Marble shook her finger at her son. "What you've been doing is very wrong, Bloody. You sell rust, don't you? I thought so." "To begin," Silk told Blood, "you must turn my manteion over to me--you're going to do that right now. If you didn't bring along the deed, you can go out that window and get it. I'll wait." "I brought it," Blood admitted. He fished a folded paper from an inner pocket of his tunic. "Good. My manteion, for three cards." Blood crossed the room to an inlaid escritoire; after a time, Mucor stood as well, her mouth working silently as though she were pronouncing the labored scratchings of Blood's pen. "I'm not much of a scholar," he said at length, "but here you are, Patera. I had to sign for Musk, but it should be all right. I've got his power of advocacy." The ink was not yet dry; Silk waved the deed gently as he read. "Fine." He took three of Remora's cards from his pocket and handed them to Blood. "You're to do everything in your power to end the fighting without further loss of life," he told Blood, "and so am I. If I'm calde when it's over, as you obviously expect, you will be prosecuted for any crimes you may have committed, in accordance with the law. No unfair advantage will be taken beyond that which I just took. That's a large concession, but I make it. I warn you, however, that nothing that you may have done will be overlooked, either. If you're found guilty on any charge, as I expect that you will be, I'll ask the court to take into consideration whatever assistance you've rendered our city in this time of crisis. Am I making myself clear?" Blood glowered. "You extorted that property from me. You took it under false pretences." "I did." Silk nodded agreement. "I committed a crime to right the wrong done to the people of our quarter by an earlier one. Why should men like you be free to do whatever you wish whenever you wish, guaranteed that you yourself will never be victimized? You may, if you choose, complain about what I've done when peace has been restored. You have a witness in the person of your mother." He gave the lynx a last pat before pushing him away. "I wouldn't advise you to call your adopted daughter, however. She's not competent to testify, and she might tell the court about the nativity of her pets." "You had better not ask me to testify, either, Bloody," Maytera Marble told him. "I'd have to tell the judge that you tried to bribe our calde." "They're coming," Mucor announced to Silk. "Councilior Loris has finished talking to Councillor Tarsier through the glass. They've decided to kill you and send your body back with the woman that killed Musk." Silk froze, his eyes on Blood. Oreb squawked, "Watch out!" Instinctively, Maytera Marble reached out to her son, a plea for forgiveness and understanding. His grip on the azoth tightened, and the shimmering horror that was its blade divided the cosmos, leaving Maytera Marble on one side and the hand she had held out to him on the other. It dropped to the carpet as the hideous discontinuity swung up, showering them with plaster and sundered lath. Silk shouted a warning; absurdly, he tried to shield her from Blood's downward cut with Xiphias's cane. Its thin wooden casing exploded in blazing splinters; but the azoth's blade sprang back from the double-edged steel blade the casing had concealed, having notched it to the spine. It seemed to Silk then that his arm moved of itself--that he merely watched it, a spectator fully as horrified as she, and fully as separated from his arm's acts. As the door flew in with a crash, that arm swung the ruined blade. From behind Sergeant Sand and a second soldier equally soldier large, Potto barked, "_Shoot him?_" The notched blade slid forward, penetrating Blood's throat as readily as the manteion's old bone-handled sacrificial knife had ever entered that of a ram. "Shoot the calde?" Sand's hand caught the other soldier's slug gun. Blood's knees buckled as the light left his eyes. The double-edged blade, scarlet to within a hand's breadth of the notch with Blood's own blood, retreated from his throat. "Yes, the calde!" For a moment it seemed to Silk that Maytera Marble should have knelt to catch Blood's blood; perhaps it seemed so to her as well, for she crouched, her remaining hand extended to her son as he fell. Silk turned, the sword still in his hand. Sand's slug gun was no longer pointed at him, if it had ever been. Sand fired, and the second soldier a fraction of a second after him. Potto fell, his cheerful face slack with surprise. "Take this, Patera." Maytera Marble was pressing Blood's azoth into his free hand. "Take it before I kill you with it." He did, and she took Xiphias's ruined sword from him, and with its crook wedged between her small black shoes, contrived to wipe its blade with a big handkerchief that she shook from her sleeve. There was a clash of heels and a crash of weapons as Sand and the second soldier saluted. Soldiers and men in silvered armor peering around them began to salute as well. Silk nodded in response, and when that seemed inadequate traced the sign of addition the air. Epilogue It had been hastily erected, Calde Silk reflected, studying the triumphal arch that spanned the Alameda--very hastily. But surely this new generalissimo from Trivigaunte would understand the situation, would realize the difficulties they had labored under in organizing a formal welcome in a city still at war with what remained of its Ayuntamiento, and make allowances. Now, this wind. It stirred yellow dust from the gutters, whistled among the chimneys, and shook the ramshackle arch until it trembled like an aspen. Flowers covering the arch would have been nice, but that moment of searing heat on Hieraxday had made flowers out of the question. So much the better, Silk thought; this wind would surely have stripped off every petal an hour ago. Even as he watched, a long streamer of colored paper pulled free, becoming a flying jade snake that mounted to the sky. There the Trivigaunte airship fought its straining tether, so high that its vast bulk appeared, if not festive, at least unthreatening. From that airship, it should be simple to gauge the advance of Generalissimo Siyuf's troops. Silk wished that there had been time to arrange for signals of some sort: a flag hung from the gondola when she entered the city, for example, or a smoke pot lit to warn that she had been delayed. Rather to his own surprise, he discovered that he was eager to go up in the airship himself, to see Viron like the skylands again, and travel among the clouds as the fliers did. There were a lot of them out today, riding this cold wind. More, he decided, than he had ever seen before. A whole flock, like a flight of storks, was just now appearing from behind the airship. What city sent them forth to patrol the length of the sun, and what good did those patrols do? Speculation about the Fliers had been dismissed as bootless at the schola, until the Ayuntamiento had condemned them as spies. Had the Ayuntamiento known? Did Councillor Loris, who wielded what authority remained to it, know now? Might it not be possible to track Fliers in the airship, anchor at last at that fabled city, learn its name, and offer whatever assistance in its sacred labor Viron and Trivigaunte could provide? (Buried, he had been wherever he had thought to be.) A fresh gust, colder and wilder than any before it, roared up the Alameda, shaking its raddled poplars like rats. To his right General Saba stiffened, while he himself shivered without shame. He was wearing the Cloak of Lawful Governance over his augur's robe; it fell to his shoe-tops and was of the thickest tea-colored velvet, stiff with gold thread. He ought to have been awash in his own perspiration; he found himself wishing ardently for some sort of head-covering instead. General Saba had a dust-colored military cap and Generalissimo Oosik beyond her a tail helmet of green leather topped with a plume, but he had nothing. He recalled the broad-brimmed straw hat he had worn while repairing the roof of the manteion--which would be missing more shingles, surely, thanks to this wind. He had pulled that hat down so that Blood's talus could not identify him later, and it had known him by that. (Dead by his hand, Blood and the talus both.) He had lost that recollected hat somehow. Might not this wind return it to him? All sorts of rubbish was blowing about, and stranger things had happened. His wound throbbed. Mentally he pushed it aside, forcing himself to fill his lungs with cold air. The shade had not climbed far yet, but what should have been a bright streak of purest gold seemed faint, and flushed with brownish purple. The Aureate Path was empty and failing visibly, signally the end of mankind's dream of paradise, of some inconceivable fraternity with its gods. For one vivid instant he remembered Iolar, the dying Flier. But no doubt the sun was merely dimmed at the moment, stained and darkened by dust. Winter was long overdue in any event. Was Maytera Mint, who would be so conspicuously absent from this, her victory parade, cold too? Wherever she was? Was Hyacinth? Silk shivered again. Far away, a band struck up, and ever so faintly he heard, or seemed to hear, the sound of bugles, the tramp of marching feet, and the clatter of cavalry. That was a good sign, surely.