him, too.' A final sign of addition and it was over. Silk sighed,
shivered, and put away his beads.
'The other one didn't say that,' the civilian with the slug gun told
him. 'That last.'
He had waited so long in fear of some such remark that it came
now as an anticlimax. 'Many augurs include the Outsider among the
minor gods,' he explained, 'but I don't. His heart? Is that what you
said? He's very young for heart problems.'
'His name's Cornet Mattak. His father's a customer of mine.' The
little jeweler leaned closer. 'That sergeant, he killed the other one.'
'The other--?'
'Patera Moray. He told me his name. We chatted awhile when
he'd said the prayers of the Pardon, and I--I-- And I--' Tears
flooded the jeweler's eyes, abrupt and unexpected as the gush from
a broken jar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose.
Silk bent over the cornet again, searching for a wound.
'I said I'd give him a chalice. To catch the blood, you know what I mean?'
'Yes,' Silk said absently. 'I know what they're for.'
'He said theirs was yellow pottery, and I said--said--'
Silk rose and picked up the small traveling bag. 'Where is his
body? Are you certain he's dead?' Oreb fluttered back to his shoulder.
The jeweler wiped his eyes and nose. 'Is he dead? Holy Hierax! If
you'd seen him, you wouldn't ask. He's out in the alley. That
sergeant came in while we were talking and shot him. In my own
store! He dragged him out there afterward.'
'Show him to me, please. He brought the Pardon of Pas to all
these others? Is that correct?'
Leading Silk past empty display cases toward the back of the
shop, the jeweler nodded.
'Cornet Mattak hadn't been wounded then?'
'That's right.' The jeweler pushed aside a black velvet curtain,
revealing a narrow hallway. They passed a padlocked iron door and
stopped before a similar door that was heavily barred. 'I said when
all this is over and things have settled down, I'll give you a gold one.
I was still emptying out my cases, you see, while he was bringing
them the Pardon. He said he'd never seen so much gold, and they
were saving for a real gold chalice. They had one at his manteion, he
said, before he came, but they'd had to sell it.'
'I understand.'
The jeweler took down the second bar and stood it against the wall.
'So I said, when this is over I'll give you one to remember tonight by.
I've got a nice one that I've had about a year, plain gold but not plain
looking, you know what I mean? He smiled when I said that.'
The iron door swung open with a creak of dry hinges that
reminded Silk painfully of the garden gate at the manse.
'I said, you come into the strong room with me, Patera, and I'll
show it to you. He put his hand on my shoulder then and said, my
son, don't consider yourself bound by this. You haven't sworn by a
god, and--and--'
'Let me see him.' Silk stepped outside into the alley.
'And then the sergeant came in and shot him,' the jeweler
finished. 'So don't you go back inside, Patera.'
In the chill evil-smelling darkness, someone was murmuring the
prayer that Silk himself had just completed. He caught the names of
Phaea and Sphigx, followed by the conventional closing phrase. The
voice was an old man's; for an eerie moment, Silk felt that it was
Patera Pike's.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the alley by the time the
kneeling figure stood. 'You're in terrible danger here,' Silk said,
and bit back the stooped figure's title just in time.
'So are you, Patera,' Quetzal told him.
Silk turned to the jeweler. 'Go inside and bar the door, please. I
must speak to the--to my fellow augur. Warn him.'
The jeweler nodded, and the iron door closed with a crash,
leaving the alley darker than ever.
For a few seconds, Silk assumed that he had simply lost sight of
Quetzal in the darkness; but he was no longer there. Patera Moray--of
an age, height, and weight indeterminable without more light--lay
on his back in the filthy mud of the alley, his beads in his hands
and his arms neatly folded across his torn chest, alone in the final
solitude of death.
Chapter 7 -- Where Thelx Holds Up a Mirror
Silk stopped to look at Ermine's imposing facade. Ermine's had
been built as a private house, or so it appeared--built for someone
with a bottomless cardcase and a deep appreciation of pillars,
arches, friezes, and cornices and the like; features he had previously
seen only as fading designs painted on the otherwise stark fronts of
shiprock buildings were real here in a jungle of stone that towered
fully five stories. A polished brass plaque of ostentatiously modest
proportions on the wide green front door announced: 'Ermine's
Hotel.'
Who, Silk wondered almost idly, had Ermine been? Or was he
still alive? If so, might Linsang be a poor relation--or even a rich
one who had turned against the Ayuntamiento? And what about
Patera Gulo? Stranger things had happened.
Though he felt cold, his hands were clammy; he groped for his
robe before remembering that it was back in the borrowed traveling
bag with the borrowed blue tunic, and wiped his hands on the yellow
one he was wearing instead.
'Go in?' Oreb inquired.
'In a minute.' He was procrastinating and knew it. This was
Ermine's, the end of dreams, the shadeup of waking. If he was
