Long Sun - Nightside The Long Sun Part 26

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,

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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.

Chapter 6.

NEW WEAPONS.

A whole whorl swam beneath Silk's flying, beclouded eyes-highland and tableland, jungle and dry scrub, savannah and pampa. The plaything of a hundred idle winds, buffeted yet at peace, he sailed over them all, dizzy with his own height and speed, his shoulder nudged by storm cloud, the solitary Flier three score leagues below him a darting dragonfly with wings of lace.

A black dragonfly that vanished into blacker cloud, into distant voices and the odor of carrion . . .

Silk choked on his own spew and spat; terror rose from the wheeling scene to foot him like a falcon, its icy talons in his vitals. He had blinked, and in that single blink the whorl had rolled over like a wind-tumbled basket or a wave-tossed barrel. The drifting skylands were up and the uneven, unyielding surface on which he lay, down. His head throbbed and spun, and an arm and both legs burned.

He sat up.

His mouth was wet with slime, his black robe discolored and stinking. He wiped them clumsily with numbed hands, then wiped his hand on his robe and spat again. The gray stone of the battlement had been crowding his left shoulder. The bird he had fought, the "white-headed one" of Mucor's warning, was nowhere to be seen.

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Or perhaps, he thought, he had only dreamed of a terrible bird. He stood, staggered, and fell to his knees.

His eyes closed of themselves. He had dreamed it all, his tortured mind writhing among nightmares-the horrible bird, the horned beasts with their incandescent stares, the miserable mad girl, his dark rope reaching blindly again and again for new heights, the silent forest, the burly burglar with his hired donkeys, and the dead man sprawled beneath the swinging, hanging lamp. But he was awake now, awake at last, and the night was spent-awake and kneeling beside his own bed in the manse on Sun Street. It was shadeup and today was Sphigxday; already he should be chanting Stabbing Sphigx's morning prayer.

"O divine lady of the swords, of the gathering armies, of the swords . . ."

He fell forward, retching, his hands on the still-warm, rounded tiles.

The second time he was wiser, not attempting to stand until he was confident that he could do so without falling. Before he gained his feet, while he lay trembling beside the battlement, dawn faded and winked out. It was night again, Phaesday night once more-an endless night that had not yet ended and might never end. Rain, he thought, might wash him clean and clear his head, and so he prayed for rain, mostly to Phaea and Pas, but to Scylla as well, remembering all the while how many men (men better than himself) were imploring the G.o.ds as he did, and for better reasons: how long had they been praying, offering such small sacrifices as they could, was.h.i.+ng Great Pas's images in orchards of dying trees and in fields of stunted corn?

It did not rain, or even thunder.

Excited voices drifted to him from somewhere far away; he caught the name Hierax repeated over and over. Someone or something had died.

"Hierax," Feather had replied at the palaestra a week or

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two before, fumbling after some fact a.s.sociated with the familiar name of the G.o.d of Death. "Hierax is right in the middle."

"In the middle of Pas and Echidna's sons, Feather? Or of all their children?"

"Of their whole family, Patera. There's only the two boys in it." Feather, also, was one of a pair of brothers. "Hierax and Tartaros."

Feather had waited fearfully for correction, but he, Patera Silk, had smiled and nodded.

"Tartaros is the oldest and Hierax is the youngest,"

Feather had continued, encouraged.

Maytera's cubit stick tapped her lectern. "The older, Feather. And the younger. You said yourself that there were only two."

"Hierax . . ." said someone far below the other side of the battlement.

Silk stood up. He head still throbbed, and his legs were stiff; but he did not feel as though he were about to gag again. The chimneys (they all looked the same now) and the beckoning trapdoor seemed an impossible distance away. Still reeling and dizzy, he embraced a merlon with both arms and peered over the battlement. As if it belonged to someone else, he noted that his right forearm was oozing blood onto the gray stones.

Forty cubits and more below, three men and two women were standing in a rough circle on the terrace, all of them looking down at something. For a slow half minute at least, Silk could not be certain what it was. A third woman pushed one of the others aside, then turned away as if in disgust. There was more talk until one of the armored guards arrived with a lamp.

The bird, Mucor's white-headed one, lay dead upon the flagstones, appearing smaller than Silk could have imagined, its unequal wings half spread, its long white neck bent

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back at an unnatural angle. He had killed it. Or rather, it had killed itself.

One of the men around the dead bird glanced upward, saw Silk watching him, pointed, and shouted something Silk could not understand. Rather too late (or so he feared), he waved as though he were a member of the household and retreated up the steep slope of the roof.

The trapdoor opened upon the dim and lofty attic he had glimpsed earlier, a cobwebbed cavern more than half filled with musty furniture and splintering crates. Feeble lights kindled at the muted clank of his foot upon the first iron step; he had hardly descended to the second when one winked out. It was a promising place in which to conceal himself, but it would no doubt be the first to be searched should the man on the terrace raise the alarm. Silk had rejected it by the time he reached the bottom of the spiral-ing steps, and with a pang of regret hurried straight to the wider wooden stair and ran down them to the upper floor of the original villa.

Here a narrow, tapestry-covered door opened onto a wide and luxuriously furnished corridor not far from a bal.u.s.traded staircase up which cultured voices floated. A fat, formally dressed man sat in an elaborate red velvet and gilt armchair a few steps from the top of the staircase. His arms rested on a rosewood table, and his head upon his folded arms; he snored softly as Silk pa.s.sed, jerked to wake-fulness, stared uncomprehendingly at Silk's black robe, and lowered his head to his arms again.

The stair was thickly carpeted, its steps broad, and its slant gentle. It terminated in a palatial reception hall, in which five men dressed much like the sleeper stood deep in conversation. Several were holding tumblers, and none seemed alarmed. Some distance beyond them, the reception hall ended with wide double doors-doors that stood open at present, so that the soft autumn night itself ap-

peared as a species of skylit hanging in Blood's hall. Beyond any question, Silk decided, those doors represented the princ.i.p.al entrance to the villa; the portico he had studied from the wall would be on the other side; and indeed when he had surveyed the scene below him for a moment-not leaning across the bal.u.s.trade as he had so unwisely leaned across the battlement to stare down at the flaccid form of the white-headed one, but from the opposite side of the corridor, with his back against the nude, half again life-sized statue of some minor G.o.ddess-he could just make out the ghostly outlines of the pillars.

Unbidden, the manteion's familiar, fire-crowned altar rose before him as he stared at the open doors: the altar, the manse, the palaestra, and the shady arbor where he had sometimes chatted too long with Maytera Marble. Suppose that he were to walk down this staircase quite normally? Stroll through that hall, nodding and smiling to anyone who glanced toward him. Would any of them stop him, or call for guards? It seemed unlikely.

His own hot blood trickling down his right arm wet his fingers and dripped onto Blood's costly carpet. Shaking his bead, Silk strode swiftly past the stair and seated himself in the matching red armchair on the other side. As long as his arm bled, he could be tracked by his blood: down the Spiral stair from the roof, down the attic stair, and along fills corridor.

Parting his robe, he started a tear above the hem of his tunic with his teeth and ripped away a strip.

Could not the blood trail be turned to his advantage? Silk rose and walked rapidly along the corridor, flexing his wrist and clenching his right hand to increase the bleeding, tnd entered the south wing by a short flight of steps; there 'lie halted for a moment to wind the strip about his wound knot it with his teeth just as Gib, the big man in the had. When he had satisfied himself that it would

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remain in place, he retraced his steps, pa.s.sing the chair in which he had sat, the stairhead, the sleeper, and the narrow tapestry-covered door leading to the attic. Here, beyond paired icons of the minor deities Ganymedia and Catami-tus, wide and widely s.p.a.ced doors alternated with elaborately framed mirrors and amphorae overfilled with hothouse roses.