CALDE OF THE LONG SUN botls-3

by Gene Wolfe

  nearest, feeling for a pulse.

  "Not him. Over here."

  "All of them," Silk said. "I'm going to bring the Pardon of Pas to all of

  them, and I won't do it en masse. There's no justification for that."

  "Most's already had it. He has."

  Silk looked up at the sergeant, but there was no judging his

  truthfulness from his hard, ill-favored face. Silk rose. "This man's

  dead, I believe."

  "All right, we'll get him out of here. Come over here. He's not."

  Eft was standing beside the man who had moaned.

  Silk knelt again. The injured man's skin was cold to his touch.

  "You're not keeping him warm enough, Sergeant."

  "You a doctor, too?"

  "No, but I know something about caring for the sick. An augur must."

  "No hurt." Oreb hopped from Silk's shoulder to the injured man's

  chest. "No blood."

  "Leave him alone, you silly bird."

  "No hurt!" Oreb whistled. "No blood!"

  A bald man no taller than Liana stepped from behind one of the

  empty showcases. Although he held a slug gun, he was not in armor

  or even in uniform. "He--he isn't, Patera. Isn't wounded. At least

  he doesn't--I couldn't find a thing. I think it must be his heart."

  "Get a blanket," Silk told Eft. "Two blankets. Now!"

  "I don't take orders from any shaggy butcher."

  "Then his death will be on your head, Sergeant." Silk took his

  beads from his pocket. "Bring two blankets. Three wouldn't be too

  many. The men watching the rebels can spare theirs, surely. Three

  blankets and clean water."

  He bent over the injured man, his prayer beads dangling in the

  approved fashion from his right hand. "In the names of all the gods

  you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for

  Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Molpe..."

  The names rolled from his tongue, each with its sonorous

  honorific, names empty or freighted with horror. Pas, whose Plan

  the Outsider had endorsed, was dead; Echidna a monster. The

  ghost that haunted Silk's mind now, as he spoke and swung his

  beads, was not Doctor Crane's but that of the handsome, brutal

  chem who had believed himself Councillor Lemur.

  "The monarch wanted a son to succeed him," the false Lemur had

  said. "Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself but female.

  Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many

  others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state

  religion of her own whorl. His queen bore the monarch another

  child, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician,

  but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe.

  The third was male, but no better than the first two because he was

  born blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending

  yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The

  truth is that he cannot see by daylight. Echidna conceived again,

  and bore another male, a healthy boy who inherited his father's

  virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of

  mania. We call him Hierax now--"

  And this boy over whom he bent and traced sign after sign of

  addition was nearly dead. Possibly--just possibly--he might derive

  comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had

  worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone's; but the

  worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some

  scales somewhere, surely. It had to, or else the Whorl was mad.

  "The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for

  him, too." A final sign of addition and it was over. Silk sighed,

  shivered, and put away his beads.

  "The other one didn't say that," the civilian with the slug gun told

  him. "That last."

  He had waited so long in fear of some such remark that it came

  now as an anticlimax. "Many augurs include the Outsider among the

  minor gods," he explained, "but I don't. His heart? Is that what you

  said? He's very young for heart problems."

  "His name's Cornet Mattak. His father's a customer of mine." The

  little jeweler leaned closer. "That sergeant, he killed the other one."

  "The other--?"

  "Patera Moray. He told me his name. We chatted awhile when

  he'd said the prayers of the Pardon, and I--I-- And I--" Tears

  flooded the jeweler's eyes, abrupt and unexpected as the gush from

  a broken jar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose.

  Silk bent over the cornet again, searching for a wound.

  "I said I'd give him a chalice. To catch the blood, you know what I mean?"

  "Yes," Silk said absently. "I know what they're for."

  "He said theirs was yellow pottery, and I said--said--"

  Silk rose and picked up the small traveling bag. "Where is his

  body? Are you certain he's dead?" Oreb fluttered back to his shoulder.

  The jeweler wiped his eyes and nose. "Is he dead? Holy Hierax! If

  you'd seen him, you wouldn't ask. He's out in the alley. That

  sergeant came in while we were talking and shot him. In my own

  store! He dragged him out there afterward."

  "Show him to me, please. He brought the Pardon of Pas to all

  these others? Is that correct?"

  Leading Silk past empty display cases toward the back of the

  shop, the jeweler nodded.

  "Cornet Mattak hadn't been wounded then?"

  "That's right." The jeweler pushed aside a black velvet curtain,

  revealing a narrow hallway. They passed a padlocked iron door and

  stopped before a similar door that was heavily barred. "I said when

  all this is over and things have settled down, I'll give you a gold one.

  I was still emptying out my cases, you see, while he was bringing

  them the Pardon. He said he'd never seen so much gold, and they

  were saving for a real gold chalice. They had one at his manteion, he

  said, before he came, but they'd had to sell it."

  "I understand."

  The jeweler took down the second bar and stood it against the wall.

  "So I said, when this is over I'll give you one to remember tonight by.

  I've got a nice one that I've had about a year, plain gold but not plain

  looking, you know what I mean? He smiled when I said that."

  The iron door swung open with a creak of dry hinges that

  reminded Silk painfully of the garden gate at the manse.

  "I said, you come into the strong room with me, Patera, and I'll

  show it to you. He put his hand on my shoulder then and said, my

  son, don't consider yourself bound by this. You haven't sworn by a

  god, and--and--"

  "Let me see him." Silk stepped outside into the alley.

  "And then the sergeant came in and shot him," the jeweler

  finished. "So don't you go back inside, Patera."

  In the chill evil-smelling darkness, someone was murmuring the

  prayer that Silk himself had just completed. He caught the names of

  Phaea and Sphigx, followed by the conventional closing phrase. The

  voice was an old man's; for an eerie moment, Silk felt that it was

  Patera Pike's.

  His eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the alley by the time the

  kneeling figure stood. "You're in terrible danger he
re," Silk said,

  and bit back the stooped figure's title just in time.

  "So are you, Patera," Quetzal told him.

  Silk turned to the jeweler. "Go inside and bar the door, please. I

  must speak to the--to my fellow augur. Warn him."

  The jeweler nodded, and the iron door closed with a crash,

  leaving the alley darker than ever.

  For a few seconds, Silk assumed that he had simply lost sight of

  Quetzal in the darkness; but he was no longer there. Patera Moray--of

  an age, height, and weight indeterminable without more light--lay

  on his back in the filthy mud of the alley, his beads in his hands

  and his arms neatly folded across his torn chest, alone in the final

  solitude of death.

  Chapter 7 -- Where Thelx Holds Up a Mirror

  Silk stopped to look at Ermine's imposing facade. Ermine's had

  been built as a private house, or so it appeared--built for someone

  with a bottomless cardcase and a deep appreciation of pillars,

  arches, friezes, and cornices and the like; features he had previously

  seen only as fading designs painted on the otherwise stark fronts of

  shiprock buildings were real here in a jungle of stone that towered

  fully five stories. A polished brass plaque of ostentatiously modest

  proportions on the wide green front door announced: "Ermine's

  Hotel."

  Who, Silk wondered almost idly, had Ermine been? Or was he

  still alive? If so, might Linsang be a poor relation--or even a rich

  one who had turned against the Ayuntamiento? And what about

  Patera Gulo? Stranger things had happened.

  Though he felt cold, his hands were clammy; he groped for his

  robe before remembering that it was back in the borrowed traveling

  bag with the borrowed blue tunic, and wiped his hands on the yellow

  one he was wearing instead.

  "Go in?" Oreb inquired.

  "In a minute." He was procrastinating and knew it. This was

  Ermine's, the end of dreams, the shadeup of waking. If he was

  lucky, he would be recognized and shot. If he was not, he would find

  Thelxiepeia's image and wait until Ermine's closed, for even

  Ermine's must close sometime. An immensely superior servant

  would inform him icily that he would have to leave. He would stand,

  and look about him one last time, and try to hold the servant in

  conversation to gain a few moments more.

  After that, he would have to go. The street would be gray with

  morning and very cold. He would hear Ermine's door shut firmly

  behind him, the snick of the bolt and the rattle of the bar. He would

  look up and down the street and see no Hyacinth, and no one who

  could be carrying a message from her.

  Then it would be over. Over and dead and done with, never to

  live again. He would recall his longing as something that had once

  occupied an augur whose name chanced to be his, Silk, a name not

  common but by no means outlandish. (The old calde, whose bust his

  mother had kept at the back of her closet, had been--what? Had he

  been Silk, too? No, Tussah; but tussah was another costly fabric.)

  He would try to bring peace and to save his manteion, fail at both,

  and die.

  "Go in?"

  He wanted to say that they were indeed going in, but found

  himself too dismayed to speak. A man with a pheasant's feather in

  his hat and a fur cape muttered, "Pardon me," and shouldered past.

  A footman in livery (presumably the supercilious servant envisioned

  a few seconds before) opened the door from inside.

  Now. Or not at all. Leave or send a message. Preserve the illusion.

  "Are you coming in, sir?"

  "Yes," Silk said. "Yes, I am. I was wondering about my pet,

  though. If there are objections, I'll leave him outside."

  "None, sir," A faint, white smile touched the footman's narrow

  lips like the tracery of frost upon a windowpane. "The ladies not

  infrequently bring animals, sir. Boarhounds, sir. Monkeys. Your

  bird cannot be worse. But, sir, the door..."

  It was open, of course. The night was chill, and Ermine's would

  be comfortably warm, rebellion or no rebellion. Silk climbed the

  steps to the green door, discovering that Liana's barricade had been

  neither higher nor steeper.

  "This is your first visit to Ermine's, I take it, sir?"

  Silk nodded. "I'm to meet a lady here."

  "I quite understand, sir. This is our anteroom, sir." There were

  sofas and stiff-looking chairs. "It is principally for the removal of

  one's outer garments, sir. They are left in the cloakroom. You may

  check your bag there, if you so desire. There is no hospitality here in

  the anteroom, sir, but one can observe all the guests who enter or depart."

  "Good man?" Oreb studied the footman through one bright, black

  eye. "Like bird?"

  "Tonight, sir," the footman leaned nearer Silk, and his voice

  became confidential, "I might be able to fetch you some refreshment

  myself, however. We've little patronage tonight. The unrest."

  "Thank you," Silk said. "Thank you very much. But no."

  "Beyond the anteroom, sir, is our sellaria. The chairs are rather

  more comfonable, sir, and there is hospitality as well. Some

  gentlemen read."

  "Suppose I go into your seilaria and turn to the right," Silk

  inquired, "where would I be then?"

  "In the Club, sir. Or if one turns less abruptly, in the Glasshouse,

  sir. There are nooks, sir. Benches and settees. There is hospitality,

  sir, but it is infrequent."

  "Thank you," Silk said, and hurried away.

  Strange to think that this enormous room, a room that held fifty

  chairs or more, with half that many diminutive tables and scores of

  potted plants, statues, and fat-bellied urns, should be called by the

  same name as his musty little sitting room at the manse. Swerving to

  his right he wound among them, worrying that he had turned too

  abruptly and feeling that he walked in a dream through a house of

  giants--while politely declining the tray proffered by a deferential

  waiter. All the chairs he saw were empty; a table with a glass top

  scarcely bigger than the seat of a milking stool held wads of

  crumpled paper and a sheet half covered with script, the only signs

  of human habitation.

  A wall loomed before him like the face of a mountain, or more

  accurately, like a fog bank through rents in which might be glimpsed

  scenes of unrelated luxury that were in truth its pictures. He veered

  left, and after another twenty strides caught sight of a marble arch

  framing a curtain of leaves.

  It had been as warm as he had expected in the sellaria; passing

  through the arch he entered an atmosphere warmer still, humid, and

  freighted with exotic perfumes. A moth with mauve-and-gray wings

  larger than his palms fluttered before his face to light on a purple

  flower the size of a soup tureen. A path surfaced with what seemed

  precious stones, narrower even than the graveled path through the

  garden of his manteion, vanished after a step or two among vines

  and dwarfish trees. The music of falling water was everywhere.

  "Good place," Oreb approved.

  I
t was, Silk thought. It was stranger and more dream-like than the

  sellaria, but more friendly and more human, too. The sellaria had

  been a vision of opulence bordering on nightmare; this was a gentler

  one of warmth and water, sunshine and lush fertility, and though

  this glass-roofed garden might be used for vicious purposes, sunshine

  and fertility, water and warmth were things in themselves

  good; their desirability could only be illustrated more clearly by the

  proximity of evil. "I like it," he whispered to Oreb. "Hyacinth must

  too, or she wouldn't have told me to meet her here, where all this

  would surely dim the beauty of a woman less lovely."

  The sparkling path divided. He hesitated, then turned to his right.

  A few steps more, and there was no light save that from the skylands

  floating above the whorl. "His Cognizance would like this as much as

  we do, I believe, Oreb. I've been in his garden at the Palace, and

  this reminds me of it, though that's an open-air garden, and this

  can't be nearly as large."

  Here was a seat for two, masterfully carved from a single block of

  myrtle. He halted to stare at it, longing to sit but restrained by the

  fear that he would be unable to stand again. "We have to find this

  image of Thelxiepeia," he muttered, "and there must be places to sit

  there. Hyacinth won't come. She's at Blood's in the country, she's

  bound to be. But we can rest there awhile."

  A new voice, obsequious and affected, murmured, "I _beg_ your

  pardon, sir."

  "Yes, what is it?" Silk turned.

  A waiter had come up behind him. "I'm rather embarrassed, sir. I

  really don't know quite how to phrase it."

  "Am I not supposed to be in here now?" As Silk asked, he

  resolved not to leave without a fight; they might overwhelm him

  with a mob of waiters and footmen, but they would have to--no

  mere order or argument would suffice.

  "Oh, no, sir!" The waiter looked horrified. "It's quite all right."

  The desperate struggle Silk had visualized faded into the mist of

  unactualized eventualities.

  "There is a gendeman, sir. A very tall gentleman, sir, with a long

  face? Rather a sad face, if I may say so, sir. He's in the Club."

  "No go," Oreb announced firmly.

  "He would not give me his name, sir. He said it was not relevant."

  The waiter cleared his throat. "He would not give your name either,