She was no longer paying attention. 'Do you-know why this-place is-so high?' She gestured toward the domed ceiling. 'So that fliers-could fly-over it without-having to-walk.' She pointed to a jumbled heap of bones, hair, and blackened flesh at the bottom of a cylinder on the second level. 'I was her-once. She-remembered.'
'To me you're the devil who possessed that poor woman's daughter,' Silk told her angrily. 'The devil who possessed Orpine.' He saw a flash of fear in her eyes. 'I am a bad man, granted-a lawless man, and often less than pious. Yet I am a holy augur, consecrated and blessed. Is there no name that you respect?'
'I will not be afraid, Silk.' She backed away from him as she spoke.
'In the name ofPhaea, go! In the name of Thelxiepeia, go! In the name of Moipe, whose day this is, and in those of Scylla and Sphigx. Be gone in the names of these gods!'
'I wanted to help. ...'
'Be gone in the names of Tartaros and Hierax!'
She raised her hands, as he had to ward off Hammerstone's blow; and Silk, seeing her fear, remembered that Hierax had been the name that Musk had given the white-headed one, the griffon vulture on Blood's roof. With that memory, Phaesday night returned: his frantic dash across Blood's lawn in the shadow of a racing cloud; the thump of his forked branch on the roof of the conservatory; and the blade of his hatchet wedged between the casement of Mucor's window and its frame, the window that had supplied the threat he had used the next day to banish her from Orchid's.
Almost kindly he told her, 'I will close your window, Mucor, so that it can never be opened again, if you don't leave me alone. Go.'
As though she had never been present, she abandoned the tall, raven-haired woman who faced him; he had seen nothing and heard nothing, but he knew it as surely as if there had been a flash of fire or a gale of wind.
The woman blinked twice, her eyes unfocused and without comprehension. 'Go? Where?' She drew his robe about her.
'Praise Great Hierax, the Son of Death, the New Death, whose mercy is terminal and infinite,' Silk said feelingly. 'Are you all right, my daughter?'
She stared at him, a hand between her breasts. 'My- heart?'
'It's still racing from Mucor's exertions, I'm sure; but your pulse should slow in a few minutes.' She trembled, saying nothing. In the silence he heard the pounding of steel feet.
He closed the double doors that Hammerstone had opened, reflecting that Hammerstone had specified the back of the armory. It might be some time before the hurrying soldiers realized that he had actually meant to summon them to this vast hall beyond it. 'Perhaps if we walk a little,' he suggested. 'We may be able to find a place of comfort, where you can sit down. Do you know a way out?'
The woman said nothing but offered no objection as Silk led her along an aisle he chose at random. The bases of the crystal cylinders, as he now saw, were black with print. By rising on his toes, he was able to examine one on the second tier, reading the name (Olive) of the woman in the cylinder, her age (twenty-four), and what he took to be a precis of her education.
'I ought to have read yours.' He spoke to her as he had to Oreb, to give form to his thoughts. 'But we'd better not go back. If I had when I had the opportunity, I'd know your name, at least.'
'Mamelta.'
He looked at her curiously. 'Is that your name?' It was one that he had never heard. 'I think so. I can't ...'
'Remember?' he suggested gently.
She nodded.
'It's certainly not a common name.' The greenish lights overhead were dimming now; in the twilight that remained, he glimpsed Hammerstone running down an intersecting aisle half the hall away and asked, 'Can you walk just a little faster, Mamelta?'
She did not reply.
'I'd like to avoid him,' he explained, 'for reasons of my own. You don't have to be afraid of him, however-he won't hurt you or me.'
Mamelta nodded, although he could not be sure that she understood.
'He won't find what he's searching for, I'm afraid, poor fellow. He wants to find the person who energized all these lights, but I'm reasonably sure that it was Mucor, and she's gone.'
'Mucor?' Mamelta indicated herself, both hands at her face.
'No,' Silk told her, 'you are not Mucor, although Mucor possessed you for a short time. It woke you, I think, while you were still in your glass tube. I don't believe that was supposed to happen. Can we walk a bit faster now?'
'All right.'
'It wouldn't do to run. He might hear, and it would make him suspicious, I'm sure; but if we walk, we may be able to get away from him. If we don't, and he finds us, he'll think you energized the lights, no doubt. That should satisfy him, and we'll have lost nothing.' Under his breath Silk added, 'I hope.'
'Who is Mucor?'
He looked at Mamelta in some surprise. 'You're feeling better now, aren't you?'
She stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the distant wall, and did not appear to have heard his question.
'I suppose-no, I know-that you're morally entitled to an answer, the best I can provide; but I'm afraid I can't provide a very good one. I don't know nearly as much about her as I'd like, and at least two of the things I think I know are conjectural. She is a young woman who can leave her body-or to put it another way, send forth her spirit. She's not well mentally, or at least I felt that she wasn't on the one occasion when I met her face-to- face.
Now that I've had time to think about her, I believe she may be less disturbed than I assumed. She must see the whorl very differently from the way that most of us see it.'
'I feel I am Mucor. . . .'
He nodded. 'This morning-though I suppose it may be yesterday morning by now-I conferred with-' Words failed him. 'With someone I'll call an extraordinary woman. We were talking about possession, and she said something that I didn't give as much attention as I should have. But I was thinking about our conversation as I walked out to the shrine-I'll tell you about that later, perhaps- and I realized that it might be extremely important. She had said, 'Even then, there would be something left behind, as there always is.' Or words to that effect. If I under- stood her, Mucor must leave a part of her spirit behind when she leaves a person, and must take a small part of that person's spirit with her when she goes. We usually think of spirits as indivisible, I'm afraid; but the Writings compare them to winds again and again. Winds aren't indivisible. Winds are air in motion, and air is divided each time we shut a door or draw a breath.'
Mamelta whispered, 'So many dead.' She was looking at a crystalline cylinder that held only bones, what appeared to be black soil, and a few strands of hair.
'Some of that must be Mucor's doing, I'm afraid.' Silk fell silent for a moment, tortured by conscience. 'I said I'd tell you about her, but I haven't told you one of the most important things-to me, at any rate. It is that I betrayed her. She's the daughter of a man named Blood, a powerful man who treats her abominably. When I talked with her, I told her that whenever I had a chance to see her father I'd remonstrate with him. Later I had a lengthy conversation with him, but I never brought up his treatment of his daughter. I was afraid he'd punish her if he knew she'd spoken to me; but now I feel it was a betrayal nonetheless. If she were shown that others value her, she might-' 'Patera!' It was Hammerstone's voice.
Silk looked around for him. 'Yes, my son?'
'Over this way. Couple rows, maybe. You all right?'
'Oh, yes, I'm fine,' Silk told him. 'I've been, well, more or less touring this fascinating warehouse or whatever you call it, and looking at some of the people.'
'Who were you talking to?'
'To tell you the truth, to one of these women. I've been lecturing her, I'm afraid.'
Hammerstone chuckled, the same dry, inhuman sound Silk had heard from Sergeant Sand in the tunnel. 'You see anybody?'
