Epiphany of the Long Sun (31 page)

"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.

Where Thelx Holds Up a Mirror

S
ilk 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 Caldé, 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."