Doctor, take this.'
A thump.
'Pick it up.'
Crane's voice: 'This is my medical bag. How did you get it?'
Lemur laughed. (Silk, rising, felt an irrational longing to join in that laughter, so compellingly agreeable and good-natured was it.) 'You think we're in the middle of the lake? We're still in the cave, but we'll be putting out shortly. I spoke to Blood and one of his drivers brought it, that's all. 'Patera, I have some little presents for you, too. Take them, they're yours.'
Silk held out both hands and received his prayer beads and the gammadion and silver chain his mother had given him, the beads and chain in a single, tangled mass. 'Thank you,' he said.
'You're a bold man, Patera. An extremely bold man, for an augur. Do you consider that you and the doctor, acting in concert, might overpower me?'
'I don't know.'
'But not so bold now that you've lost your god. Doctor, what about you? You and the augur, together?'
Crane's voice, from the direction of the cot, 'No.' As he spoke, Silk heard the soft snap of a catch.
'I have your needler in my waistband. And yours, Patera. It's in my sleeve. In a moment I'm going to give them back to you. With your needlers back in your possession, do you think you and your friend the doctor could kill me in the dark?'
Silk said, 'May all the gods forbid that I should ever kill you, or anyone, or even wish to.'
Lemur laughed again, softly. 'You wanted to kill Potto, didn't you, Patera? He questioned you for hours, according to what he told me. I've known Potto all my life, and there is no more objectionable man in the whorl, even when he's trying to ingratiate himself.'
'It is true that I could not like him.' Silk chose his words. 'Yet I respected him as a member of the Ayuntamiento, and thus one of the legitimate rulers of our city. Certainly I did not wish to harm him.'
'He hit you repeatedly, and eventually so hard that you were in a coma for hours. The whorl would be well rid of my cousin Potto. Don't you want your needler back?'
'Yes. Very much.' Silk extended his hand blindly.
'And you'll try to kill me?'
'Hammerstone challenged me in the same way,' Silk said. 'I told Councillor Potto about it, and he must have told you; but you're not a soldier.'
'I'm not even a chem.'
Crane's voice: 'He's never seen you.'
'In that case, look at me now, Patera.'
A faint glow, a nebulous splotch of white phosphorescence near the ceiling, appeared to relieve the utter darkness. As Silk stared in fascination, the closely shaven face of a man of sixty or thereabouts appeared. It was a noble face, with a lofty brow surmounted by a mane of silver hair, an aquiline nose, and a wide mobile-looking mouth; staring up at it, Silk realized that Councillor Lemur had to be taller even than Gib.
The face spoke: 'Aren't you going to ask how I do this? My skin is self-luminescent. Even my eyes. Watch.'
Two more faintly glowing splotches appeared and became Lemur's hands. One held a needler as large as Auk's by the barrel. 'Take it, Doctor. It's your own.'
Crane's voice, from the darkness beyond Lemur's hands: 'Silk's not impressed.'
Leaving Lemur, the needler vanished.
'He's a man of the spirit.' Crane chuckled.
'As am I, Patera. Very much so. You've lost your god. May I propose another?'
'Tartaros? I was praying to him before you came in.'
'Because of the dark, you mean.' Lemur's face and hands faded, replaced by a blackness that now seemed blacker still.
'And because it's his day,' Silk said. 'At least, I'd assume that it's Tarsday by now.'
'Tartaros and the rest are only ghosts, Patera. They've never been anything more, and ghosts fade. With the passing of three hundred years, Pas, Echidna, Tartaros, Scylla, and the rest have faded almost to invisibility. The Prolocutor knows it, and since you're going to succeed him, you should know it, too.'
'Since I-' Silk fell silent, suddenly glad that the room was dark.
Lemur laughed again; and Silk-heartsick and terrified-nearly laughed with him, and found that he was smiling. 'If only you could see yourself, Patera! Or have your likeness taken.'
'You . . .'
'You're a trained augur, I'm told. You graduated from the schola with honors. So tell me, can Tartaros see in the dark?'
Silk nodded, and by that automatic motion discovered that he had already accepted the implication that Lemur could see in the dark as well. 'Certainly. All gods can, actually.'
Crane's voice: 'That's what you were taught, anyhow.'
Lemur's baritone, so resonant that it made Crane sound thin and scratchy in comparison. 'I can, too, no less than they. By waves of energy too long for your eyes, I'm seeing you now. And I hear and see in places where I am not. When you woke, Doctor Crane held up his fingers and required you to count them. Now it's your turn. Any number you choose.'
Silk raised his right hand.
'All five. Again.'
Silk complied.
'Three. Crane held up three for you. Again.'
'I believe you,' Silk said.
'Six. You believed Crane as well, when he told you that I plan to kill you both. It's quite untrue, as you've heard. We mean to elevate and honor you both.'
'Thank you,' Silk said.
'First I shall tell you the story of the gods. Doctor Crane knows it already, or guesses if he does not know. A certain ruler, a man who had the strength to rule alone and so called himself the monarch, built our whorl, Patera. It was to be a message from himself to the universe. You have seen some of the people he put on board it, and in fact you have walked and talked with one.'
Silk nodded, then (conscious of Crane) said, 'Yes. Her name is Mamelta.' 'You talked about Mucor. The monarch's doctors tinkered with the minds of the men and women he put into the whorl as Blood's surgeon did with hers. But more skillfully, erasing as much as they dared of their patients' personal lives.'
Silk said, 'Mamelta told me she had been operated upon before she was lifted up to this whorl.'
'There you have it. The surgeons found, however, that their patients' memories of their ruler, his family, and some of his officials were too deeply entrenched to be eliminated altogether. To obscure the record, they renamed them. Their ruler, the man who called himself the monarch, became Pas, the shrew he had married Echidna, and so on. She had borne him seven children. We call them Scylla, Moipe, Tartaros, Hierax, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, and Sphigx.'
In the darkness, Silk traced the sign of addition.
'The monarch had wanted a son to succeed him. Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself, but female. It is a law of nature, as concerns our race, that females are subject to males. 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. She was hardly more than a child, you understand, and the rest younger even than she.'
Silk swallowed and said nothing.
'His queen bore the monarch another, 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.'
There was a soft click.
'Nothing useful in your bag, Doctor? We searched it, naturally.
'To continue. Their third child was male, but no better than the first two, because he was bom 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. Am I boring you?' 'That wouldn't matter, but you're risking the
