Nightside the Long Sun

THE WHITE-HEADED ONE

For what seemed to him the greater part of an hour, Silk lay behind the battlement trying to catch his breath. Had he been seen? If the talus or one of the armored men had seen him, they would have come at once, he felt certain; but if one of Blood’s guests had, it might easily be ten minutes or even longer before he decided that he should report what he had seen, and reached the appropriate person; it might be that he would not so much as try until prompted by another guest to whom he mentioned the incident.

Overhead the skylands sailed serenely among broad bars of sterile cloud, displaying countless now-sunlit cities in which nobody at all knew or cared that one Patera Silk, an augur of faraway Viron, was frightened almost to death and might soon die.

The limb, too, might have given him away. He was sure that he, on the ground, had heard it thump down on the warm, tarred surface of the roof; and anyone in the conservatory below must have heard it very distinctly. As he sought to slow the pounding of his heart by an effort of will, and to force himself to breathe through his nose, it seemed to him that anyone who had heard that thump would realize at once that it had been made by an intruder who had climbed onto the roof. As the thunder of his own pulse faded away, he listened intently.

The music he had heard so faintly from the wall was louder now. Through it, over it, and below it, he heard the murmur of voices—the voices of men, mostly, he decided, with a few women among them. That piercing laugh had been a woman’s, unless he was greatly mistaken. Glass shattered, not loudly, followed by a moment of silence, then a shout of laughter.

His black rope was still hanging over the battlement. He felt that it was almost miraculous that it had not been seen. Without rising from his back, he hauled it in hand over hand. It would be necessary, in another minute or two, to throw the limb again, this time onto the roof of the wing proper. He was not at all sure he could do it.

An owl floated silently overhead, then veered away to settle on a convenient branch at the edge of the forest. Watching it, Silk (who had never considered the lives of Echidna’s pets before) suddenly realized that the building of Blood’s wall, with the cleared strip on its forest side and the closely trimmed lawn on the other, had irrevocably altered the lives of innumerable birds and small animals, changing the way in which woodmice foraged for food and hawks and owls hunted them. To such creatures, Blood and his hired workmen must have seemed the very forces of nature, pitiless and implacable. Silk pitied those animals now, all the while wondering whether they did not have as much right, and more reason, to pity him.

The Outsider, he reflected, had swooped upon him much as the owl would stoop for a mouse; the Outsider had assured him that his regard for him was eternal and perfect, never to be changed by any act of his, no matter how iniquitous or how meritorious. The Outsider had then told him to act, and had withdrawn while in some fashion remaining. The memory, and the wonder of the Outsider’s love and of his own new, clean pride in the Outsider’s regard, would make the rest of his life both more meaningful and more painful. Yet what could he do, beyond what he was doing?

“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you anyway, even if you never speak to me again. You have given me the courage to die.”

The owl hooted from its high branch above the wall, and the orchestra in Blood’s ballroom struck up a new tune, one Silk recognized as “Know I’ll Never Leave You.” Could that be an omen? The Outsider had indeed warned him to expect no help, but had never (as well as Silk could remember, at any rate) actually told him that he would never be vouchsafed omens.

Shaking himself, his self-possession recovered and his sweat dried, he lifted his knees and rolled into a crouch behind one of the merlons, peering through the crenel on its left. There was no one on that part of the grounds visible to him. He readjusted the long handle of the hatchet while changing position slightly in order to look out through the crenel on the right. Half the grassway was visible from that angle, and with it the gate; but there was no floater on that section of the grassway, and the talus and the horned beasts that had come at its call had gone elsewhere. The skylands were brightening as the trailing edge of the cloud that had favored him left Viron for the west; he could make out the iron ring the talus had pulled to raise the gate, to the left of the arch.

He stood then and looked about him. There was nothing threatening or even extraordinary about the roof of Blood’s conservatory. It was level or nearly so, a featureless dark surface surrounding an abatjour for the illumination of the conservatory, itself enclosed on three sides by chest-high battlements. The fourth was defined by the south wall of the wing from which the conservatory extended; the sills of its second-story windows were three cubits or a trifle less above the conservatory roof.

Silk felt a thrill of triumph as he studied the windows. Their casements were shut, and the rooms that they lighted, dark; yet he felt an undeniable pride in them that was not unrelated to that of ownership. Auk had predicted that he would get roughly this far before being captured by Blood’s guards—and now he had gotten this far, doing nothing more than Auk, who clearly knew a great deal about such things, had expected. The manteion had not been saved, or even made appreciably safer. And yet …

Boldly, he leaned over the nearest battlement, his head and shoulders thrust beyond the merlons. One of the horned beasts was standing at the base of the conservatory wall, directly below him. For an instant he was acutely conscious of its amber stare; it snarled, and cat-like padded away.

Could those fantastic animals climb onto the roof? He decided that though possible it was unlikely—the walls of the villa were of dressed stone, after all. He leaned out farther still, his hands braced on the bottom of the crenel, to reassure himself about the construction of the wall.

As he did, the talus rolled into view. He froze until it had passed. There was a chance, of course, that it had concealed, upward- or rearward-directed eyes; Maytera Marble had once mentioned such features in connection with Maytera Rose. But that, too, seemed less than probable.

Leaving his limb and horsehair rope where they lay, he walked gingerly across the roof to the abatjour and crouched to peer through one of its scores of clear panes.

The conservatory below apparently housed large bushes of some sort, or possibly dwarfed trees. Silk found that he had unconsciously assumed that it had supplied the low-growing flowers that bordered the grassway. That had been an error, now revealed; while examining the plants below, he cautioned himself against making any further unconsidered assumptions about this villa of Blood’s.

The panes themselves were set in lead. Silk scraped the lead with the edge of his hatchet, finding it as soft as he could wish. With half an hour’s skillful work, it should be possible, he decided, to remove two panes without breaking them, after which he could let himself down among the lush, shining leaves and intertwined trunks below—perhaps with an undesirable amount of noise, but perhaps also, unheard.

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.”

“This is close enough.”

As if it had understood, the lynx wheeled. A single bound carried it to the top of the battlement surrounding the conservatory roof, from which it dived as though into a pool.

“Isn’t he pretty?”

Silk nodded reluctantly. “I found him terrifying, but you’re right. I’ve never seen a lovelier animal, though all Sabered Sphigx’s cats are beautiful. She must be very proud of him.”

“So am I. I told him not to hurt you.” Mucor squatted on her heels, folding like a carpenter’s rule.

“By standing beside me and talking to me, you mean.” Gratefully, Silk seated himself on the windowsill. “I’ve known dogs that intelligent. But a—lynx? Is that the singular? It’s an odd word.”

“It means they hunt in the daytime,” Mucor explained. “They would, too, if my father’d let them. Their eyes are sharper than almost any other animal’s. But their ears are good, too. And they can see in the dark, just like regular cats.”

Silk shuddered.

“My father traded for them. When he got them they were just little chips of ice inside a big box that was little on the inside. The chips are just like little seeds. Do you know about that, Silk?”

“I’ve heard of it,” he said. For an instant he thought that he felt the hot yellow gaze of the lynx behind him; he looked quickly, but the roof was bare. “It’s supposed to be against the law, though I don’t think that’s very strictly enforced. One could be placed inside a female animal of the correct sort, a large cat I’d imagine, in this case—”

“He put them inside a girl.” Mucor’s eerie titter came again. “It was me.”

“In you!”

“He didn’t know what they were.” Mucor’s teeth flashed in the darkness. “But I did, a long while before they were born. Then Musk told me their name and gave me a book. He likes birds, but I like them and they like me.”

“Then come with me,” Silk said, “and the lynxes won’t hurt either of us.”

The skull nodded, still grinning. “I’ll fly beside you, Silk. Can you bribe the talus?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It takes a lot of money.”

There was a soft scraping from the back of the room, followed by a muffled thump. Before the door swung open, Silk realized that what he had heard was a bar being lifted from it and laid aside. Nearly falling, he slid over the sill, and crouched as Mucor’s window shut silently above his head.

For as long as it took him to run mentally through the formal praises of Sphigx, whose day was about to dawn (or so at least he felt), he waited, listening. No sound of voices reached him from the room above, though once he heard what might have been a blow. When he stood at last and peeped cautiously through the glass, he could see no one.

The panes that Lion had raised with his head yielded easily to Silk’s fingers; as they rose, a moist and fragrant exhalation from the conservatory below invaded the dry heat of the rooftop. He reflected that it would be simple now—much easier than he had thought—to enter the conservatory from above, and the trees there had clearly supported Lion’s considerable weight without damage.

Silk’s fingertips described slow circles on his cheek as he considered it. The difficulty was that Blood slept in the other wing, if Mucor was to be believed. Entering here, he would have to traverse the length of the villa from south to north, finding his way though unfamiliar rooms. There would be bright lights and the armored guards he had seen in Auk’s glass and on the highriders, Blood’s staff and Blood’s guests.

Regretfully Silk let down the movable section of the abatjour, retrieved his horsehair rope, and untied the rough limb that had served him so well. The merlons crowning the roof of the south annex would not have cutting edges, and a noose would make no dangerous noise. Three throws missed before the fourth snared a merlon. He tugged experimentally at the rope; the merlon seemed as solid as a post; drying his hands on his robe, he started up.

He had reached the roof of the wing and was removing his noose from the merlon when Mucor’s spectral voice spoke, seemingly in his ear. There were words he could not quite hear, then, “… birds. Watch out for the white-headed one.”

“Mucor?”

There was no reply. Silk looked over the battlement just in time to see the window close.

Although it was twenty times larger, this roof had no abatjour, and was in fact no more than a broad and extremely long expanse of slightly sloping tar. Beyond the parapet at its northern end, the lofty stone chimneys of the original structure stood like so many pallid sentries in the glimmering skylight. Silk had enjoyed several lively conversations with chimney sweeps since arriving at the manteion on Sun Street, and had learned (with many other things) that the chimneys of great houses were frequently wide enough to admit the sweep employed to clean and repair them, and that some had interior steps for his use.

Walking softly and keeping near the center so that he could not be seen from the ground, Silk walked the length of the roof. When he was near enough to look down on it, he saw that the more steeply pitched roof of the original structure was tiled rather than tarred. Its tall chimneys were clearly visible now; there were five, of which four appeared to be identical. The fifth, however—the chimney farthest but one from him—boasted a chimney pot twice the height of the rest, a tall and somewhat shapeless pot with a pale finial. For a moment, Silk wondered uneasily whether it could be the “white-headed one” Mucor had warned him against, and resolved to examine it only if he could not gain entry to any of the others.

Then another, more significant, detail caught his eye. The corner of some low projection, dark and distinct, could be seen beyond the third chimney, its angular outline in sharp contrast to the rounded contours of the tiles, and its top a cubit or so higher than theirs. He moved a few steps to his left to see it better.

It was, beyond question, a trapdoor; and Silk murmured a prayer of thanks to whatever god had arranged a generation ago that it should be included in the plan of the roof for his use.

Looping his rope around a merlon, he scrambled easily down onto the tiles and pulled the rope down after him. The Outsider had indeed warned him to expect no help; yet some other god was certainly siding with him. For a moment Silk speculated happily on which it might be. Scylla, perhaps, who would not wish her city to lose a manteion. Or grim and gluttonous Phaea, the ruler of the day. Or Molpe, since—No, Tartaros, of course. Tartaros was the patron of thieves of every kind, and he had prayed fervently to Tartaros (as he now remembered) while still outside Blood’s wall. Moreover, black was Tartaros’s color; all augurs and sibyls wore it in order that they might, figuratively if not literally, steal unobserved among the gods to overhear their deliberations. Not only was he himself clothed entirely in black, but the tarred roofs he had just left behind had been black as well.

“Terrible Tartaros, be thanked and praised most highly by me forever. Now let it be unlocked, Tartaros! But locked or not, the black lamb I pledged shall be yours.” Recalling the tavern in which he had met Auk, he added in a final burst of extravagance, “And a black cock, too.”

And yet, he told himself, it was only logical that the trapdoor should be precisely where it was. Tiles must break at times—must be broken fairly frequently by the violent hailstorms that had ushered in every winter for the past few years; and each such broken tile would have to be replaced. A trapdoor giving access to the roof from the attic of the villa would be much more convenient (as well as much safer) than a seventy-cubit ladder. A ladder of that size would very likely require a whole crew of workmen just to get it into place.

He tried to hurry across the intervening tiles to the trapdoor, but their glazed, convex, and unstable surfaces hindered him, quite literally at every stride. Twice tiles cracked beneath his impatient feet; and when he had nearly reached the trapdoor, he slipped unexpectedly and fell, and saved himself from rolling down the roof only by clutching at the rough masonry of the third chimney.

It was reassuring to note that this roof, like those of the wings and the conservatory, was walled with ornamental battlements. He would have had a bad time of it if it had not been for the chimney; he was glad he had escaped it. He would have been shaken and bruised, and he might well have made enough noise to attract the attention of someone inside the villa. But at the end of that ignominious fall he would not have dropped from the edge of the roof to his death. Those blessed battlements (which had been of so much help to him ever since he had dashed from the wall across the grounds) were, now that he came to think of it, one of the recognized symbols in art of Sphigx, the lion-goddess of war; and Lion had been the name of Mucor’s horned cat—of the animal she called her lynx, which had not harmed him. Taking all that into account, who could deny that Fierce Sphigx favored him also?

Silk caught his breath, made sure of his footing, and let go of the chimney. Here, not a hand’s breadth from the toe of his right shoe, was the thing that he had slipped on—this blotch on the earthen-red surface of the roof. He stooped and picked it up.

It was a scrap of raw skin, an irregular patch about as large as a handkerchief from the pelt of some animal, still covered with coarse hair on one side and slimy with rotting flesh and rancid fat on the other, reeking with decay. He flung it aside with a snort of disgust.

The trapdoor lifted easily; below it was a steep and tightly spiraled iron stair. A more conventional stairway, clearly leading to the upper floor of the original villa, began a few steps from the bottom of the iron one. Briefly he paused, looking down at it, to savor his triumph.

He had been carrying his horsehair rope in an untidy coil, and had dropped it when he slipped. He retrieved it and wound it around his waist beneath his robe, as he had when he had set out from the manteion that evening. It was always possible, he reminded himself, that he would need it again. Yet he felt as he had during his last year at the schola, when he had realized that final year would actually be easier than the one before it—that his instructors no more wished him to fail after he had studied so long than he himself did, and that he would not be permitted to fail unless he curtailed his efforts to an almost criminal degree. The whole villa lay open before him, and he knew, roughly if not precisely, where Blood’s bedchamber was located. In order to succeed, he had only to find it and conceal himself there before Blood retired. Then, he told himself with a pleasant sensation of virtue, he would employ reason, if reason would serve; if it would not …

It would not, and the fault would be Blood’s, not his. Those who opposed the will of a god, even a minor god like the Outsider, were bound to suffer.

Silk was pushing the long handle of his hatchet through the rope around his waist when he heard a soft thump behind him. Dropping the trapdoor, he whirled. Leaping so that it appeared taller than many men, a huge bird flapped misshapen wings, shrieked like a dozen devils, and struck at his eyes with its hooked bill.

Instinctively, he threw himself backward onto the top of the trapdoor and kicked. His left foot caught the white-headed bird full in the body without slowing its attack in the least. Vast wings thundering, it lunged after him as he rolled away.

By some prodigy of good luck he caught it by its downy neck; but the carpels of its wings were as hard as any man’s knuckles, and were driven by muscles more powerful than the strongest’s. They battered him mercilessly as both tumbled.

The edge of the crenel between two merlons was like a wedge driven into his back. Still struggling to keep the bird’s cruel, hooked beak from his face and eyes, he jerked the hatchet free; a carpal struck his forearm like a hammer, and the hatchet fell to the stone pavement of the terrace below.

The white-headed one’s other carpal struck his temple and the illusory nature of the world of the senses was made manifest: it narrowed to a miniature, artificially bright which Silk endeavored to push away until it winked out.