As though by a miracle, the circular panel of deep blue that was the farther end of the room irised wide, revealing a towering talus; its ogre's face was of black metal, and the slender black barrels of buzz guns flanked its gleaming fangs. "You again!" it roared.
The memory of Blood's blade-crowned wall returned-the still and sweltering night, the gate of thick-set bars, and this shouting giant of brass and steel. Silk shook his head as he replaced the wrapping; though it required an effort to keep his voice steady, he said loudly, "I've never been here before."
"I knew you!" Swiftly, the talus's left arm lengthened, reaching for him.
He scrambled up the carpeted stair. "I didn't want to come here! I wasn't trying to get in." "I know you!"
A metal hand as large as a shovel closed on Silk's right forearm, clamping the injuries inflicted by the white-headed one; Silk screamed.
"Does this hurt you!"
"Yes," he gasped. "It hurts. Terribly. Please let me go. I'll do whatever you say."
The steel hand shook him. "You don't care!"
Silk screamed again, writhing in the grasp of fingers as thick as pipes.
"Musk punished me! Humiliated me!"
The shaking stopped. The enormous mechanical arm lifted Silk, and, as he dangled puppylike in midair, contracted. Through chattering teeth, he gasped, "You're Blood's talus. You stopped me at his gate."
The steel hand opened, and he fell heavily to the floor. "I was right!"
The azoth he had carried from the city to the lake was no longer in his waistband. Striving to keep his voice from breaking, he said, "May I stand up?" hoping to feel it slip down his trouser leg.
"Musk sent me away!" the talus roared; grotesquely, its vertical upper body angled forward as it addressed him.
Silk stood, but the azoth was gone; it had been in place when he had admired the lake from the shrine, certainly; so it had presumably been lost in his fall, and might still be near the top of the stair.
He risked a cautious step backward. "I'm terribly sorry-really, I am. I don't have any influence with Musk, who dislikes me much more than he could ever dislike you. But I may have some small amount with Blood, and I'll do whatever I can to get you reinstated."
"No! You won't!"
"I will." Silk essayed another small backward step. "I will, I assure you."
"You soft things!" Noiselessly, and apparently without effort, the talus glided over the carpet on twin dark belts, the crest of its brazen helmet almost scraping the ceiling.
"You look the same because you are the same! Easy to break! No repair! Full of filth!"
Still edging backward, Silk asked, "Were you in the shrine? Up there?"
"Yes! My processor by interface!"
Both the talus's steel hands reached for him this time, extended so swiftly that he escaped them by no more than the width of a finger. He stumbled backward, desperately pushed a heavy armchair into the path of one hand, and dove beneath the table. It was lifted, rotated in the air, and slammed down flat to kill him as a man swats a fly; he rolled frantically to one side and felt the edge of its massive top brush the wide sleeve of his robe, the sudden gust as it crashed down.
Something lay on the floor, not a cubit from his face, a green crystal in a silver setting. He snatched it up as the talus snatched him up, holding him this time by the back of his robe, so that he dangled from its hand like a black moth caught by its sooty wings.
"Musk hurt me!" the talus roared. "Hurt me and made me go! I returned to Potto! He was not pleased!"
"I had nothing to do with that." Silk's voice was as soothing as he could make it. "I'll help you if I can-I swear it."
"You got inside! I was on guard!" It shook him. "In the tunnel the red water won't matter!"
It was backing through the irised wall with him, moving slowly but steadily, its arms retracting to bring him ever closer to its fearsome face.
"I don't want to hurt you," Silk told it. "It's evil-that means very wrong-to destroy chems, as wrong as it is to destroy bios, and you're very nearly a chem."
That halted it momentarily. "Chems are junk!"
"Chems are wonderful constructions, a race that we bios created long ago, our own image in metal and synthetics." "Bios are fish guts!" The backward glide resumed.
Silk held the azoth firmly in his left hand, his thumb on the demon. "Please say that you won't kill me."
"No!"
"Let me return to the surface."
"No!"
"I'll do you no more harm, I swear; and I'll help you if I can."
"I will drop you and crush you!" the talus roared. "One blow.'"The wall irised closed behind them, leaving them in a long, dim passageway, a little more than twice the talus's width, bored through the solid stone of the cliff.
"Don't you fear the immortal gods, my son?" Silk asked in desperation. "I'm the servant of one god and the friend of another."
"I serve Scylla!"
"As an augur, I receive the protection of all the gods, including hers."
The steel fingers shook him more violently than before, then released his robe; he fell, nearly losing his grip on the azoth as he struck the dark and dirty stone floor. Sprawling, half-blind with pain, he looked up into that ogre's mask of a metal face and glimpsed the steel fist lifted higher than its owner's head.
The wings of Hierax roared in his ears; without time to think, reason, threaten, or equivocate, he pressed the demon.
Stabbing out from the hilt, the azoth blade of universal discontinuity caught the talus below the right eye; jagged scraps of incandescent slag burst from the point it struck. The steel fist smashed down but appeared to lose direction as it descended, hammering the stone floor to his left.
Black smoke and crackling orange flames erupted from the mass of wreckage that had been the talus's head, and with them a deafening roar of rage and anguish. The great steel fists swung wildly, pounding flying chips as sharp as flints from the stone sides of the passageway. Eyeless and ablaze, the talus lurched toward him.
A single slash from the azoth severed both the wide dark belts on which it had moved; they lashed the floor, the walls, and the dying talus itself like whips, then fell limp. There was a muffled explosion; flames shot up from the wagonlike body behind the vertical torso.
Scrambling away from the heat and smoke, Silk released the demon, stood, thrust the azoth back into his waistband, dusted off his black robe, and got out his beads. Swinging their voided cross toward the burning talus, he traced the sign of addition again and again. "I convey to you, my son, the forgiveness of all the gods."
His chant was flat and almost mechanical at first, but as the wonder and magnanimity of divine amnesty filled his mind, his voice grew louder and shook with fervor. "Recall now the words of Pas, who said, 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath. Go willingly, and any wrong that you have ever done shall be forgiven you…' "
INCUS RETURNED HYACINTH'S letter to Gulo with a smirk. Its new seal, similar though not identical to the original one, displayed a leaping flame between cupped hands. "Her full name would be Hymenocallis, I expect," Incus remarked. "Very pretty. I've used it a time or two myself."
"I didn't write it," Gulo told him sullenly. "But you're supposed to write to Patera Silk now, telling him to wait upon His Eminence Tarsday. You're to set the hour and mark it on His Eminence's regimen."
The buck-toothed prothonotary nodded. "You'll deliver it for us? I'd rather not have to whistle up another boy just now so old Remora can whip your randy cur to kennel." Pudgy Patera Gulo advanced on him with clenched fists and reddening cheeks. "Patera Silk's a real man, you manse-wife. Whatever he may've done with this woman, he's worth a dozen of you and three of me. Remember that, and the proportion."
Incus grinned up at him. "Why Gully! You're in love!"
Chapter 8
FOOD FOR THE GODS
P
atera Silk took two long steps back from the still tightly closed door and eyed it with the disgust he felt for himself and his failure. It opened in some fashion-the talus had opened it, after all. Open, it would give him access to the stair that led up to the floor of the cliff-top shrine, and from there it might be possible (might even be easy) to open the mouth of the image of Scylla graven in the floor above and so climb out into the shrine and return to Limna.
Commissioners, Silk told himself, and-what else had the woman said?-judges and the like came here, clearly to confer with the Ayuntamiento. Before he had killed it with the azoth (He had to force himself to face those words, although he had told himself repeatedly and with perfect truth that he had killed only to save his own life.)
Before he had killed it, the talus had said that having been discharged by Musk it had returned here to Potto; and by "Potto" it had intended Councillor Potto, surely.
Thus the figure who had entered the shrine and vanished had no doubt been a commissioner, a judge, or something of the sort. Nor was his disappearance at all mysterious: He had entered and been seen, presumably by the talus; possibly he had shown some sort of tessera; Scylla's mouth had opened for him, and he had descended the stair and been conducted to a location that could not be remote, since the talus had been back at its post a half hour later.
It was all perfectly logical and showed clearly that the Ayuntamiento had offices nearby. The realization bowed Silk's shoulders like a burden. How could he, a citizen and an augur, withhold all that he had learned about Crane's activities, even to save the manteion?
Heartsick, he turned back to the door that had opened so smoothly for the talus, but would not open at all for him. It appeared to have no lock, no handle, and in fact no mechanism of any kind to open it. Its irising plates were so tightly fitted that he could scarcely make out the curving lines between them. He had shouted open and a hundred other plausible words at it, without result.
Hoarse and discouraged, he had hewed and stabbed it with the shimmering discontinuity that was the blade of the azoth, scarring and fusing the plates until it was doubtful that even one who knew their secret could cause them to iris as they had for the talus. It had made an earsplitting racket, causing stones enough to drop from the walls and ceiling of the tunnel to have killed him ten times over, and at length it rendered the hilt of the azoth almost too hot to hold-all without opening the door or piercing even a single small hole in one plate.
And now there was, Silk told himself, no alternative but to set off, weary and hungry and bruised though he was, down the tunnel in the faint hope of finding some other place of egress. Ready almost to rage against the Outsider and every other god from sheer frustration, he sat down on the naked rock of the floor and removed Crane's wrapping. Crane, Silk recalled with some bitterness, had instructed him to beat only smooth surfaces with it, instancing his hassock or a carpet. No doubt Crane's recommendation had been intended to preserve the wrapping's soft, leather-like surface from needless wear; the rough floor hardly qualified, and he owed something to Crane, not least because he intended to extort the money Blood demanded from Crane if he could, though Crane had befriended him more than once.
Sighing, Silk took off his robe, folded it, laid it on the floor, and lashed the folded cloth until the wrapping felt hotter than the hilt of the azoth. When it was back in place, he climbed laboriously to his feet, put on his robe again (its warmth was welcome in the cool and ever-soughing air) and set out resolutely, choosing the direction that seemed most likely to bring him nearer Limna.
He began with the idea of counting his steps, so as to know how far he had traveled underground; he counted silently at first, moving his lips and extending a finger from his clenched fist at each hundred. Soon lie found that he was counting aloud, comforted by the faint echo of his voice, and that he was no longer certain whether he had recloscd his fist once for five hundred steps or twice for a thousand.
The tunnel, which had appeared so unchanging, altered in minor ways as he progressed, and these soon became of such interest that he forgot his count in his hurry to examine them. In places the native freestone gave way to shiprock, graduated like a cubit stick by seams at intervals of twenty-three steps. Here and there the creeping sound-kindled lights failed entirely, so that he was forced to advance in the dark; and though he realized how foolish such fears were, he could not entirely dispel the thought that he might fall into a pit, or that another talus or something more fearsome still might await him in the dark. Twice he passed irising doors much like the one that had excluded him from the room beneath Scylla's shrine, both tightly closed; once the tunnel divided, and he followed the left at random; three times side tunnels, dark and somehow menacing, opened from the one he followed.
And always it seemed to him that it descended ever so slightly, and that its air grew cooler and its walls damper.
He prayed his beads as he walked, then tried to reconcile the distance covered during three recitals with his subsequent count of steps, eventually concluding that he had taken ten thousand, three hundred and seventy-or the equivalent of five complete recitals of his beads and an odd decade. To this, add the original five hundred (or possibly one thousand) making…
By that time his ankle was acutely painful; he renewed the wrapping as before and hobbled off down the tunnel again, which oppressed him more with each halting stride.
Frequently he was tormented by an almost uncontrollable urge to turn back. If he had allowed the azoth to cool and attacked the door again, it seemed to him almost certain that it would have given way easily; by now he would have been back in Limna. Auk had recommended eating places there; he tried to recall their names, and those of the ones he had passed while looking for the Juzgado.
No, it. had been the driver of the wagon who had recommended eating places. One, he had said, was quite good but expensive; that had been the Rusty Lantern. He had no fewer than seven cards in his pocket, five from Orpine's rites, plus two of the three that Blood had surrendered to him on Phaesday. His dinner with Auk in an uphill eating house had cost Auk eighteen bits. It had seemed an extravagant sum then, but it was a small one compared to seven cards. A sumptuous dinner in Limna at one of the better inns, a comfortable bed, and a fine breakfast would leave him change from a single card. It seemed foolish not to turn back, when all these things were (or might so easily be made) so near. Half a dozen words that might open the door, all untried, occurred to him in quick succession: free, disengage, separate, loose, dissolve, and cleave.