Nightside the Long Sun (15 page)

Nodding thoughtfully to himself, he rose and walked quietly across the conservatory roof to examine the dark windows of the wing overlooking it.

The first two he tested were locked in some fashion. As he tugged at each, he was tempted to wedge the blade of his hatchet between the stile and casing to pry them open. The latch or bolt would certainly break with a snap, however, if it gave at all; and it seemed only too likely that the glass would break instead. He decided that he would try to throw the limb onto the roof two stories above him (diminished by a third, that throw no longer appeared nearly as difficult as it had when he had reconnoitered the villa from the top of its surrounding wall) and explore that roof as well before attempting anything quite so audacious. Circuitous though it seemed, removing panes from the abatjour might actually be a more prudent approach.

The third casement he tried gave slightly in response to his tentative pull. He pushed it back, wiped his perspiring palms on his robe and tugged harder. This time the casing moved a trifle farther; it was only jammed, apparently, not locked. A quick wrench of the hatchet forced it open enough for him to swing it back with only the slightest of protests from the neglected hinges. Vaulting with one hand upon the sill, he slid headfirst into the lightless room beyond.

The gritty wooden floor was innocent of carpet. Silk explored it with his fingertips, in ever-wider arcs, while he knelt, motionless, alert for any sound from within the room. His fingers touched something the size of a pigeon's egg, something spherical, hard, and dry. He picked it up—it yielded slightly when squeezed. Suspicious, he lifted it to his nostrils and sniffed.

Excrement.

He dropped it and wiped his fingers on the floor. Some animal was penned in this room and might be present now, as frightened of him as he was of it—if it was not already stalking him. Not one of the horned cats, surely; they were apparently freed to roam the grounds at night. Something worse, then. Something more dangerous.

Or nothing. If there was an animal in the room, it was a silent one indeed. Even a serpent would have hissed by now, surely.

Silk got to his feet as quietly as he could and inched along the wall, his right hand grasping his hatchet, the fingers of his left groping what might have been splintered paneling.

A corner, as empty as the whole room seemed to be. He took a step, then another. If there were pictures, or even furniture, he had thus far failed to encounter them.

Another step; pull up the right foot to the left now. Pausing to listen, he could detect only his own whistling breath and the faint tinklings of the distant orchestra.

His mouth felt dry, and his knees seemed ready to give way beneath him; twice he was forced to halt, bracing his trembling hands against the wall. He reminded himself that he was actually in Blood's villa, and that it had not been as difficult as he had feared. The task to follow would be much harder: he would have to locate Blood without being discovered himself, and speak with him for some time in a place where they could talk without interruption. Only now was he willing to admit that it might prove impossible.

A second corner.

This vertical molding was surely the frame of a door; the pale rectangle of the window he had opened was on the opposite side of the room. His hand sought and found the latch. He pushed it down; it moved freely, with a slight rattle; but the door would not open.

“Have you been bad?”

He jerked the hatchet up, about to strike with deadly force at whatever might come from the darkness—about to kill, he told himself a moment later, some innocent sleeper whose bedchamber he had entered by force.

“Have you?” The question had a spectral quality; he could not have said whether it proceeded from a point within arm's reach or wafted through the open casement.

“Yes.” To his own ears, the lone syllable sounded high and frightened, almost tremulous. He forced himself to pause and clear his throat. “I've been bad many times, I'm afraid. I regret them all.”

“You're a boy. I can tell.”

Silk nodded solemnly. “I used to be a boy, not so long ago. No doubt Maytera R—No doubt some of my friends would tell you that I'm a boy still in many respects, and they may well be right.”

His eyes were adjusting to the darker darkness of the room, so that the skylight that played across the roof of the conservatory and the grounds in the distance, mottled though it was by the diffused shadows of broken clouds, made them appear almost sunlit. The light spilling through the open window showed clearly now the precise rectangle of flooring on which he had knelt, and dimly the empty, unclean room to either side. Yet he could not locate the speaker.

“Are you going to hurt me with that?”

It was a young woman's voice, almost beyond question. Again Silk wondered whether she was actually present. “No,” he said, as firmly as he could. He lowered the hatchet. “I will do you no violence, I swear.” Blood dealt in women, so Auk had said; now Silk felt that he had a clearer idea of what such dealings might entail. “Are you being kept here against your will?”

“I go whenever I want. I travel. Usually I'm not here at all.”

“I see,” Silk said, though he did not, in either sense. He pushed down the latchbar again; it moved as readily as it had before, and the door remained as stubborn.

“I go very far, sometimes. I fly out the window, and no one sees me.”

Silk nodded again. “I don't see you now.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes you must go out through this door, though. Don't you?”

“No.”

Her flat negative bore in its train the illusion that she was standing beside him, her lips almost brushing his ear. He groped for her, but his hand found only empty air. “Where are you now? You can see me, you say. I'd like to see you.”

“I'll have to get back in.”

“Get back in through the window?”

There was no reply. He crossed the room to the window and looked out, leaning on the sill; there was no one on the roof of the conservatory, no one but the talus in sight on the grounds beyond. His rope and limb lay where he had left them. Devils (according to legends no one at the schola had really credited) could pass unseen, for devils were spirits of the lower air, presumably personifications of destructive winds. “Where are you now?” he asked again. “Please come out. I'd like to see you.”

Nothing. Thelxiepeia provided the best protection from devils, according to the Writings, but this was Phaea's day, not hers. Silk petitioned Phaea, Thelxiepeia, and for good measure Scylla, in quick succession before saying, “I take it you don't want to talk to me, but I need to talk to you. I need your help, whoever you are.”

In Blood's ballroom, the orchestra had struck up “Brave Guards of the Third Brigade.” Silk had the feeling that no one was dancing, that few if any of Blood's guests were even listening. Outside, the talus waited at the gate, its steel arms unnaturally lengthened, both its hands upon the ring.

Turning his back on the window, Silk scanned the room. A shapeless mass in a corner (one that he had not traversed when he had felt his way along the walls to the door) might conceivably have been a huddled woman. With no very great confidence he said, “I see you.”

“To fourteen more my sword I pledged,”
sang the violins with desperate gaiety. Beardless lieutenants in brilliant green dress uniforms, twirling smiling beauties with plumes in their hair—but they were not there, Silk felt certain, no more than the mysterious young woman whom he himself was trying to address was here.

He crossed to the dark shape in the corner and nudged it with the toe of his shoe, then crouched, put aside his hatchet, and explored it with both hands—a ragged blanket and a thin, foul-smelling mattress. Picking up his hatchet again, he rose and faced the empty room. “I'd like to see you,” he repeated. “But if you won't let me—if you won't even talk to me any more—I'm going to leave.” As soon as he had spoken, he reflected that he had probably told her precisely what she wanted to hear.

He stepped to the window. “If you require my help, you must say so now.” He waited, silently reciting a formula of blessing, then traced the sign of addition in the darkness before him. “Good-bye, then.”

Before he could turn to go, she rose before him like smoke, naked and thinner than the most miserable beggar. Although she was a head shorter, he would have backed away from her if he could; his right heel thumped the wall below the window.

“Here I am. Can you see me now?” In the dim skylight from the window her starved and bloodless face seemed almost a skull. “My name's Mucor.”

Silk nodded and swallowed, half afraid to give his own, not liking to lie. “Mine's Silk.” Whether he succeeded or was apprehended, Blood would learn his identity. “Patera Silk. I'm an augur, you see.” He might die, perhaps; but if he did his identity would no longer matter.

“Do you really have to talk with me, Silk? That's what you said.”

He nodded. “I need to ask you how to open that door. It doesn't seem to be locked, but it won't open.”

When she did not reply, he added. “I have to get into the house. Into the rest of it, I mean.”

“What's an augur? I thought you were a boy.”

“One who attempts to learn the will of the gods through sacrifice, in order that he may—”

“I know! With the knife and the black robe. Lots of blood. Should I come with you, Silk? I can send forth my spirit. I'll fly beside you, wherever you go.”

“Call me Patera, please. That's the proper way. You can send forth your body, too, Mucor, if you want.”

“I'm saving myself for the man I'll marry.” It was said with perfect (too perfect) seriousness.

“That's certainly the correct attitude, Mucor. But all I meant was that you don't have to stay here if you don't wish to. You could climb out of this window very easily and wait out there on the roof. When I've finished my business with Blood, we could both leave this villa, and I could take you to someone in the city who would feed you properly and—and take care of you.”

The skull grinned at him. “They'd find out that my window opens, Silk. I wouldn't be able to send my spirit any more.”

“You wouldn't be here. You'd be in some safe place in the city. There you could send out your spirit whenever you wanted, and a physician—”

“Not if my window was locked again. When my window is locked, I can't do it, Silk. They think it's locked now.” She giggled, a high, mirthless tittering that stroked Silk's spine like an icy finger.

“I see,” he said. “I was about to say that someone in the city might even be able to make you well. You may not care about that, but I do. Will you at least let me out of your room? Open your door for me?”

“Not from this side. I can't.”

He sighed. “I didn't really think you could. I don't suppose you know where Blood sleeps?”

“On the other side. Of the house.”

“In the other wing?”

“His room used to be right under mine, but he didn't like hearing me. Sometimes I was bad. The north addition. This one's the south addition.”

“Thank you,” Silk stroked his cheek. “That's certainly worth knowing. He'll have a big room on the ground floor, I suppose.”

“He's my father.”

“Blood is?” Silk caught himself on the point of saying that she did not resemble him. “Well, well. That may be worth knowing, too. I don't plan to hurt him, Mucor, though I rather regret that now. He has a very nice daughter; he should come and see her more often, I think. I'll mention it forcefully, if I get to talk with him.”

Silk turned to leave, then glanced back at her. “You really don't have to stay here, Mucor.”

“I know. I don't.”

“You don't want to come with me when I leave? Or leave now yourself?”

“Not the way you mean, walking like you do.”

“Then there's nothing I can do for you except give you my blessing, which I've done already. You're one of Molpe's children, I think. May she care for you and favor you, this night and every night.”

“Thank you, Silk.” It was the tone of the little girl she had once been. Five years ago, perhaps, he decided; or perhaps three, or less than three. He swung his right leg over the windowsill.

“Watch out for my lynxes.”

Silk berated himself for not having questioned her more. “What are those?”

“My children. Do you want to see one?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do, if you want to show him to me.”

“Watch.”

Mucor was looking out the window, and Silk followed her gaze. For half a minute he waited beside her, listening to the faint sounds of the night; Blood's orchestra seemed to have fallen silent. Ghost-like, a floater glided beneath the arch, its blowers scarcely audible; the talus let down the gate smoothly behind it, and even the distant rattle of the chain reached them.

A section of abatjour pivoted upward, and a horned head with topaz eyes emerged from beneath it, followed by a big, soft-looking paw.

Mucor said, “That's Lion. He's my oldest son. Isn't he handsome?”

Silk managed to smile. “Yes, he certainly is. But I didn't know you meant the horned cats.”

“Those are their ears. But they jump through windows, and they have long teeth and claws that can hurt worse than a bull's horns.”

“I imagine so.” Silk made himself relax. “Lynxes? Is that what you call them? I've never heard of the name, and I'm supposed to know something about animals.”

The lynx emerged from the abatjour and trotted over to stand beneath the window, looking up at them quizzically. If he had bent, Silk could have touched its great, bearded head; he took a step backward instead. “Don't let him come up here, please.”

“You said you wanted to see them, Silk.”