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
Patera 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.
Far worse was the unfounded feeling that he had already turned back, that he was walking not north toward Limna but south again, that at any minute, around any slight curve or turning, he would catch sight of the dead talus.
Of the talus he had killed; but the talus had, or so it seemed, sent him to the grave.'It was dead, he buried. Soon, he felt, he would encounter Orpine, old Patera Pike, and his mother, each in the appropriate state of decay. He and they would lie down together on the floor of the tunnel, perhaps, one place being as good as another here, and they would tell him the many things he would need to know among the dead, just as Patera Pike had instructed him (when he had arrived at Sun Street) concerning the shops and people of the quarter, the necessity of buying one's tunics and turnips from those few shopkeepers who attended sacrifice with some regularity, and the need to beware of certain notorious liars and swindlers. Once he heard a distant tittering, a lunatic laughter without humor or merriment or even humanity: the laughter of a devil devouring its own flesh in the dark.
After what seemed half a day or more of weary, frightened walking, he reached a point at which the floor of
