'He stayed behind after we brought the doves. He said he had a
couple things to take care of, and he doesn't get into town very
often. I thought maybe your side picked him up when he tried to
come home.
Maytera Marble shook her head.
Blood took a liberal swallow from his glass. 'I wasn't going to
shoot you, Mama, and I didn't shoot her. You agreed to that
already. Let's pin it down. In about an hour, the Guard could knock
this house down and kill everybody. I know that. They're not doing
it because they know we've got Silk in here. Isn't that right?'
Maytera Marble nodded. 'Free him, turn him over to me, Bloody,
and we'll go away and leave you alone.'
'It's not that easy. He's here all right, right here in my house. But
it's the councillors and their soldiers who've got him, not me.'
'Then I must speak with them. Take me to them.'
'I'll bring them in here,' Blood told her, 'they're all over.' Under
his breath he added, 'It's still my hornbussing house, by Phaea's
feast!'
Potto opened the door at the top of the cellar steps and crooked his
finger at Sand. 'Bring him up, Sergeant. We're getting them all together.'
Sand saluted with a crash of titanium heels, his slug gun vertical
before his face. 'Yes, Councillor!' He nudged Silk with the toe of his
right foot, and Silk rose.
He fell as he attempted to mount from the second step to the
third, and again halfway up. 'Here,' Sand told him, and returned
Xiphias's stick.
'Thank you,' Silk murmured. And then, 'I'm sorry. My legs feel a
trifle weak, I'm afraid.'
Potto said cheerfully, 'We're going to try to give you back to your
friends, Patera, if we can get them to take you.' Grabbing the front
of Remora's ruined robe, he jerked Silk up the remaining step.
'You'd like to lie down again, wouldn't you? Get in a little nap?
Maybe something to eat? Help us, and you'll get it.'
He released Silk so suddenly that he fell a third time. 'Has he
tried to escape again, Sergeant?'
Silk did not hear Sand's reply; he was thinking about a great many
things. Among them, names.
His own and Sand's were similar--each had four letters, each
contained a single vowel, and each began with an S. They could not
be related, however, because Sand was a chem and he a bio. Yet
they were related by the similarity of their names. Not inconceivably
(he found it a tantalizing idea). Sand was a cognate, a version of
himself in some whorl of a higher order. Many things the Outsider
had shown him seemed to imply that there were such whorls.
Sand prodded him from behind with the barrel of his slug gun,
and he staggered against a wall.
Since chems were never augurs, it could not be that Sand had
been meant to be an augur. Was it possible then, that he, Silk, had
been meant to be a Guardsman? If he were a Guardsman instead of
a failed augur, the many correspondences (already so marked)
linking them would be much more perfect, and thus this inferior
whorl they inhabited more perfect, too.
But, no his mother had wanted him to enter the Juzqado, to
become a clerk there like Hyacinth's father and perhaps rise to
commissioner. How glowingly she had spoken of a political career,
almost up until the day he left for the schola.
'This way,' Potto told him, and pushed him through a door and
into a gorgeous room full of lounging soldiers and armored men. 'Is
that the calde?' one of the men asked another; the second nodded.
He was in politics at last, as his mother had wished.
He had pulled a chair over to her closet and stood on the seat to
examine the calde's bust on its dark, high shelf; and she, finding him
there intent upon it, had lifted it down for him, dusted it, and set it
on her dressing table where he could see it better--wonder at the
wide, flat cheeks, the narrow eyes, the high, rounded forehead, and
the generous mouth that longed to speak. The calde's carved
countenance rose again before his mind's eye, and it seemed to him
that he had seen it someplace else only a day or two before.
Streaming sunlight, and cheeks that were not smooth wood but
blotched and lightly pocked. Was it possible he had once seen the
calde in person, perhaps as an infant?
'Now listen to me.' Potto was standing before him, his plump,
pleasant face half a head lower than Silk's own.
...had seen the calde outside, because even without his lost
glasses he had noticed the powder on the cheeks and the flaws that
the powder tried to cover--had seen him, in that case, under the
auspices of the Outsider, in a sense.
Blood and Maytera Marble were sitting side-by-side when Potto
shoved Silk into the room; he was so surprised to see her that for a
moment he failed to notice Chenille, Xiphias, and a drooping augur
lined up against the wall.
A still handsome elderly man standing by the fireplace said, 'I'm
Councillor Loris. I take it you're Silk?'
'Patera Silk. His Cognizance the Prolocutor has not yet accepted
my resignation. May I sit down?'
Loris ignored the last. 'You're the insurgent calde.'
'Others have called me calde, but I'm not involved in an
insurrection.' Potto pushed him to the wall beside Chenille.
Loris smiled, his blue eyes glinting like chips of ice; and the
seduction of his craggy wisdom was so great that even a mocking
smile made it almost irresistible. 'You killed my Cousin Lemur, did
you, Calde?'
Silk shook his head.
Maytera Marble said, 'I don't know these others, except Chenille.
Shouldn't I introduce myself?'
'I'll do it,' Blood told her, 'it's my house.' With a slight start, Silk
realized that Blood was in the chair he had occupied a week earlier,
and that this was the same room.
