Long Sun - Nightside The Long Sun Part 22

Scented water, in fact; sniffing the almost motionless air like a hound, Silk caught the fragrance of tea roses. Postponing judgement on Blood's taste, he nodded approvingly at this tangible evidence of pious civic feeling. Perhaps Blood was not really such a bad man after all, no matter what Auk thought. Blood had provided three cards for a sacrifice; it might well be that if Blood were approached in die right way he would be amenable to reason.

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Possibly the Outsider's errand would come to no more than that, in the end. Giving rein to this pleasing line of thought for a second or two, Silk imagined himself comfortably seated in some luxurious chamber of the villa before him, laughing heartily over his own adventures with the prosperous-looking man with whom he had spoken in Sun Street. Why, even a contribution toward necessary repairs might not be entirely out of the question.

On the farther side of the gra.s.sway . . .

The distant roar of an approaching floater made him look around. With running lights blazing through its own dust, it was hurtling along the public road in the direction of the main gate. Quickly he stretched himself flat behind the row of spikes.

As the floater braked, two figures in silvered conflict armor shot away from the portico on highriders. At the same moment, the talus rounded the conservatory (if that was what it was) at full tilt, dodging trees and shrubs as it rolled across the lawn nearly as fast as the highriders; after it bounded half a dozen sinuous, seemingly tailless beasts with bearded faces and horned heads.

While Silk watched fascinated, the thick metal arms of the talus stretched like telescopes, twenty cubits or more to catch hold of a ring high in the wall near the gate. For a second they paused. An unseen chain rattled and creaked. They shrank, drawing the ring and its chain with them, and the gate rose.

The shadow of a drifting cloud from the east veiled the pillars of the portico, then the steps at their bases; Silk murmured a frantic appeal to Tartaros and tried to judge its speect.

There was a faint and strangely lonely whine from the blowers as the floater glided under the gate's rounded arch. One of the horned beasts sprang onto its transparent canopy, appearing to crouch upon empty air until it was

driven off snarling by the armored men, who cursed and brandished their short-tubed slug guns as if to strike it. The drifting shadow had reached Scylla's fountain by the time the horned beast sprang away.

The talus let the heavy gate fall again as the floater swept proudly up the darkening gra.s.sway, escorted by the high-riders and accompanied by all six horned beasts, which rose upon their hind legs again and again to peer inside. It halted and settled onto the gra.s.s before the wide stone steps of the villa, and the talus called die horned beasts from it with a shrill shuddering wail dial could have issued from no human diroat

As the brilliantly dressed pa.s.sengers disembarked, Silk leaped from die wall and dashed across die lawn toward the conservatory, with a desperate effort flung die forked limb over its ornamental batdement, and swarmed up die horsehair rope, over die batdement, and onto die roof.

Chapter j.

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 n.o.body 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

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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. Gla.s.s 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 a.s.sured him that his regard for him was eternal and per-feet, 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 fas.h.i.+on re-

maining. 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 die 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 gra.s.sway was visible from that angle, and with it the gate; but there was no floater on that section of the gra.s.sway, 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

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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 cas.e.m.e.nts were shut, and the rooms that they lighted, dark; yet he felt an undeniable pride in them that was not unrelated to that of owners.h.i.+p. 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 rea.s.sure himself about the construction of the wall.

As he did, the talus rolled into view. He froze until it had pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sumed that it had supplied the low-growing flowers that bordered the gra.s.sway. That had been

an error, now revealed; while examining the plants below, he cautioned himself against making any further unconsid-ered a.s.sumptions about this villa of Blood's.

The panes themselves were set in lead. Silk sc.r.a.ped 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 gla.s.s 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 abat-jour might actually be a more prudent approach.

The third cas.e.m.e.nt 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 sh'ghtest of protests from the neglected hinges. Vaulting with one

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hand upon the sill, he slid headfirst into the light less 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.