and they jumped him. We'll cut him loose in a minute, maybe.
Urus, show her the soldier."
Hammerstone was bound as well, though no rag had been tied
over his mouth; she wondered whether it would work on a chem
anyway, and decided that it might not. "I'm sorry, Stony," she said.
"I'll get you out of this. Patera, too."
"They were going to stab him in the throat," Hammerstone told
her. "They'd grabbed him from behind." He spoke slowly and
without rancor, but there was a whorl of self-loathing in his voice, "I
got careless."
"Those ropes are made out of that muscle in the back of your leg,"
Auk told her conversationally. "That's what they got him tied up
with. They're pretty strong, I guess."
Neither she nor Hammerstone replied.
"Only I don't think they'd hold him. Not if he really tried. It'd
take chains. Big ones, if you ask me."
"Hackum, maybe I shouldn't say this--"
"Go ahead."
"What if they jump you and me like they did Patera?"
"I was going to tell you why Hammerstone here don't break loose.
Maybe I ought to do that first."
"Because you've got his slug gun?"
"Uh-huh. Only they had it then, see? They got hold of Incus, and
they made Hammerstone give it to 'em. It takes a lot to kill a
soldier, but a slug gun'll do it. So'll that launcher you got."
She scarcely heard him. When she had struggled through the
narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, the deep humming from
above had so merged with the rush of blood in her ears that she had
assumed it was one with it; now she realized that it actually
proceeded from the dark bulk in the sky that she (like Maytera
Marble) had thought a cloud. She peered up at it, astonished.
"We'll get to that in a minute," Auk told her, looking upward too.
"Terrible Tartaros says it's a airship. That's a thing kind of like the
old man's boat, see? Only it sails through the air instead of water.
The Rani of Trivigaunte's invaded Viron. That's another reason for
us to do like he showed us down there--"
Hammerstone heaved himself upright, throwing aside four stick-limbed
men who tried to hold him down. The sinews that bound his
wrists and ankles broke in a rattattoo of poppings, like the burning
of a string of firecrackers.
Almost casually, Auk thrust his hanger into the ground at his feet
and leveled the slug gun. "Don't try it."
"We got to fight," Hammerstone told him. "Patera and me. We got
to defend the city."
Reluctantly, Chenille trained the launcher Hammerstone had
taught her to load and fire at his broad metal chest. He knelt to tear
off Incus's gag, snapping the cords that had secured Incus's hands
and feet between his fingers.
"Look! Look!" Urus shouted and pointed, then futilely directed
the beam of Gelada's lantern upward. Others around him shouted
and pointed, too.
Another voice, remote but louder than the loudest merely human
voice silenced them, filling the pit with its thunder: "_Convicts, you
are free! Viron has need of every one of you. In the name of all the--in
the Outsider's name, forget your quarrel with the Civil Guard,
which now supports our Charter. Forget any quarrel you may have
with your fellow citizens. Most of all, forget every quarrel among
yourselves!_"
Chenille grasped Auk's elbow. "That's Patera Silk! I recognize his voice!"
Auk could only shake his head, unbelieving. Something--a
tumbling, flying thing that appeared, incredibly, to have a turret and
a buzz gun--had cleared the parapet on the wall and was drifting
into the pit, dropping lower and lower, an armed floater blown
upwind by a wind that was none, hundreds of cubits above the Alambrera.
Chenille's launcher was snatched from her hands and fired as
soon as it had left them, Hammerstone aiming at the immense shape
far above the floater, directing a single missile at it (or perhaps at
the winged figures that streamed from it like smoke), and watching
it expectantly to observe the strike and correct his aim.
"_There Auk!_" thundered a hoarse voice from the floater tumbling
slowly overhead. "_Here girl!_"
Hammerstone's, too, shooting winged troopers who swooped and
soared above the pit firing slug guns of their own.
A minute dot of black fell from the vast flying thing Auk had
called an airship. She saw it streak through the milling cloud of
winged troopers. An instant later, the dark wall of the Alambrera
exploded with a force that rocked the Whorl.
Silk stood in his boyhood bedroom, looking down at the boy who
had been himself. The boy's face was buried in his pillow; by an
effort of will he made it look toward him; each time it turned, its
features dissolved in mist.
He sat down on the sill of the open window, conscious of the
borage growing under it and of lilacs and violets beyond it. A
copybook lay open, waiting, on the sleeping boy's small table; there
were quills beside it, their ends more or less chewed. He ought to
write, he knew--tell this boy who had been himself that he was
taking his blue tunic, and leave him advice that would be of help in
the troubles to come.
Yet he could not settle upon the right words, and he knew that the
boy would soon wake. It was shadeup, and he would be late at his
palaestra; already Mother approached the bed.
What could he say that would have meaning for this boy? That
this boy might recall more than a decade later?
Mother shook his shoulder, and Silk felt his own shoulder
touched; it was strange she could not see him.
_Fear no love_, he wrote; and then: _Carry out the Plan of Pus_.
But Mother's hand was shaking him so hard that the final words were
practically unreadable; _of Pas_ faded from the soft, blue-lined paper
as he watched. Pas was, after all, a thing of the past. Like the boy.
Xiphias and the Prolocutor were standing at the foot of the boy's
bed, which had become his own.
He blinked.
As if to preside over a sacrifice at the Grand Manteion, the
Prolocutor wore mulberry vestments crusted with diamonds and
sapphires, and held the gold baculus that symbolized his authority;
Xiphias had what appeared to be an augur's black robe folded over
his arm. It seemed the wildest of dreams.
His blankets were pushed away; and the surgeon, standing next to
his bed beside Hyacinth, rolled him onto his side and bent to pull off
the bandages he had applied earlier. Silk managed to smile up at
Hyacinth, and she smiled in return--a shy, frightened smile that was
like a kiss.
From the other side of the bed, Colonel Oosik inquired, "Can you
speak, Calde?"
He could not, though it was his emotions that kept him silent.
"He talked to me last night before he went to sleep," Hyacinth told Oosik.
"Silk talk!" Oreb confirmed from the top of a bedpost.
"Please don't sit up." The surgeon laid his hand--a much large
r
and stronger one than the hand that had awakened him--upon Silk's
shoulder to prevent it.
"I can speak." he told them. "Your Cognizance. I very much regret
having subjected you to this."
Quetzal shook his head and told Hyacinth, "Perhaps you'd better
get him dressed."
"No time to dawdle, lad!" Xiphias exclaimed. "Shadeup in an hour!
Want them to start shooting again?"
Then the surgeon who had held him down was helping him to rise,
and Hyacinth (who smelled better than an entire garden of flowers)
was helping him into a tunic. "I did this for you last Phaesday night,
remember?"
"Do I still have your azoth?" he asked her. And then, "What in the
Whorl's going on?"
"They sent Oosie to kill you. He just came back and he doesn't
want to."
Silk was looking, or trying to look, into the corners of the room.
Gods and others who were not gods waited there, he felt certain.
watching and nearly visible, their shining heads turned toward him.
He remembered climbing onto Blood's roof and his desperate
struggle with the whiteheaded one, Hyacinth snatching his hatchet
from his waistband. He groped for it, but hatchet and waistband had
vanished alike.
Quetzal muttered, "Somebody will have to tell him what to tell
them. How to make peace."
"I don't expect you to believe me, Your Cognizance--" Hyacinth began.
"Whether I believe you or not, my child, will depend on what you say."
"We didn't! I swear to you by Thelxiepeia and Scalding Scylla--"
"For example. If you were to say that Patera Calde Silk had
violated his oath and disgraced his vocation, I would not believe you."
Standing upon the arm of his mother's reading chair, he had
studied the calde's head, carved by a skillful hand from hard brown
wood. "Is this my father?" Mother's smile as she lifted him down,
warning him not to touch it. "No, no, that's my friend the calde."
Then the calde was dead and buried, and his head buried, too--buried
in the darkest reaches of her closet, although she spoke at
times of burning it in the big black kitchen stove and perhaps
believed eventually that she had. It was not well to have been a
friend of the calde's.
"I know our Patera Calde Silk too well for that," Quetral was
telling Hyacinth. "On the other hand, if you were to say that nothing
of the kind had taken place, I would believe you implicitly, my child."
Xiphias helped Silk to his feet, and Hyacinth pulled up a pair of
unbicached linen drawers that had somehow appeared around his
ankles and were new and clean and not his at all, and tied the cord
for him.
"Calde--"
At that moment, the title sounded like a death sentence. He said,
"I'm only Patera--Only Silk. Nobody's calde now."
Oosik stroked his drooping, white-tipped mustache. "You fear
that because my men and I are loyal to the Ayuntamiento, we will
kill you. I understand. It is undoubtedly true, as this young woman
has said--"
In the presence of the Prolocutor, Oosik was pretending he did
not know Hyacinth, exactly as he himself had tried to pretend he
was not calde;; Silk found wry amusement in that.
"--and already you have almost perished in this foolish fighting,"
Oosik was saying. "Another dies now, even as we speak. On our side
or yours, it does not matter. If it was one of us, we will kill one of
you soon. If one of you, you will kill one of us. Perhaps it will be me.
Perhaps my son, though he has already--"
Xiphias interrupted him. "Couldn't get home, lad! Tried to! Big
night attack! Still fighting! Didn't think they'd try that. You don't
mind my coming back to look out for you?"
Kneeling with his trousers, Hyacinth nodded confirmation. "If
you listen at the window, you can still hear shooting."
Silk sat on the rumpled bed again and pushed his feet into the
legs. "I'm confused. Are we still at Ermine's?"
She nodded again. "In my room."
Oosik had circled the bed to hold his attention. "Would it not be a
great thing, Calde, if we--if you and I, and His Cognizance--could
end this fighting before shadeup?"
With less confidence in his legs than he tried to show, Silk stood
to pull up and adjust his waistband. "That's what I'd hoped to do."
He sat as quickly as he could without loss of dignity.
"We will--"
Quetzal interposed, "We must strike fast. We can't wait for you to
recover, Patera Calde. I wish we could. You were startled to see me
vested like this. My clothes always shock you. I'm afraid."
"So it seems, Your Cognizance."
"I'm under arrest, too, technically. But I'm trying to bring peace,
just as you are."
"We've both failed, in that case, Your Cognizance."
Oosik laid his hand upon Silk's; it felt warm and damp. thick with
muscle. "Do not burden yourself with reproaches, Calde. No!
Success is possible still. Who had you in mind as commander of your
Civil Guard?"
The gods had gone, but one--perhaps crafty Thelxiepeia. whose
day was just beginning--had left behind a small gift of cunning. "If
anyone could put an end to this bloodshed, he would surely deserve
a greater reward than that."
"But if that were all the reward he asked?"
"I'd do everything I could to see that he obtained it."
"Wise Silk!" Oreb cocked a bright black eye approvingly from the
bedpost.
Oosik smiled. "You are better already, I think. I was greatly
concerned for you when I saw you." He looked at the surgeon.
"What do you think, Doctor? Should our calde have more blood?"
Quetzal stiffened, and the surgeon shook his head.
"Achieving peace, Calde, may not be as difficult as you imagine.
Our men and yours must be made to understand that loyalty to the
Ayuntamiento is not disloyalty to you. Nor is loyalty to you
disloyalty to the Ayuntamiento. When I was a young man we had
both. Did you know that?"
Xiphias exclaimed, "It's true, lad!"
"There is a vacancy on the Ayuntamiento. Clearly it must be
filled. On the other hand, there are councillors presently in the
Ayuntamiento. Their places are theirs. Why ought they not retain them?"
A compromise; Silk thought of Maytera Mint, small and
heartrendingly brave upon a white stallion in Sun Street. "The
Alambrera--?"
"Cannot be permitted to fall. The morale of your Civil Guard
would not survive so crushing a humiliation."
"I see." He stood again, this time with more confidence; he felt
weak, yet paradoxically strong enough to face whatever had to be
faced. "The poor, the poorest people of our quarter especially, who
began the insurrection, are anxious to release the convicts there.
They are their friends and relatives."
Quetzal added, "Echidna has commanded it."
Oosik nodded, still smiling. "So I have heard. Many of our
prisoners say so, and a few even claim to have seen her. I repeat,
however, that a successful assault on the Alambrera would be a
&
nbsp; disaster. It cannot be permitted. But might not our calde, upon his
assumption of office, declare a general amnesty? A gesture at once
generous and humane?"
"I see," Silk repeated. "Yes, certainly, if it will end the fighting--if
there's even the slightest chance that it will end it. Must I come with
you, Generalissimo?"
"You must do more. You must address both the insurgents and
our own men, forcefully. It can be begun here, from your bed. I
have a means of transmitting your voice to my troops, defending
the Palatine. Afterward we will have to put you in a floater and
take you to the Alambrera, in order that both our men and Mint's
may see you, and see for themselves that there is no trickery. His
Cognizance has agreed to go with you to bless the peace. Many
know already that he has sided with you. When it is seen that my
brigade has come over to you as a body, the rest will come as well."
Oreb crowed, "Silk win!" from the bedpost.
"I'm coming, too," Hyacinth declared.
"You must understand that there is to be no surrender, Calde.
Viron will have chosen to return to its Charter. A
calde--yourself--and an ayuntamiento."
Oosik turned ponderously to Quetzal. "Is that not the system of
government stipulated by Scylla. Your Cognizance?"
"It is, my son, and it is my fondest desire to see it reinstated."
"If we're paraded through the city in this floater," Silk said, "many
of the people who see us are certain to guess that I've been
wounded." In the nick of time he remembered to add, "Generalissimo."
"Nor will we attempt to conceal it, Calde. You yourself have
played a hero's part in the fighting! I must tell Gecko to work that
into your little speech."
Oosik took two steps backward. "Now someone must attend to all
these things, I fear, and there is no one capable of it but myself.
Your pardon, my lady." He bowed. "Your pardon, Calde. I will
return shortly. Your pardon, Your Cognizance."
"Bad man?" mused Oreb
Silk shook his head. "No one who ends murder and hatred is evil,
even if he does it for his own profit. We need such people too much
to let even the gods condemn them. Xiphias, I sent you away last
night at the same time that I sent away His Eminence. Did you leave
at once?"
The old fencing master was shamefaced. "Did you say at once, lad?"
"I don't think so. If I did, I don't recall it."