Pas—”
“He’s not dead, cully. You an augur?” It was the big man with the scarred face. His right arm was bleeding, dark blood oozing through a soiled rag he pressed tightly against the cut.
“In the name of all the gods you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for—”
“Get him out of here,” someone snapped; Silk could not tell whether he meant the dead man or himself. The dead man was bleeding less than the big man, a steady, unspectacular welling from his right temple. Yet he was surely dead; as Silk chanted the Final Formula and swung his beads, his left hand sought a pulse, finding none.
“His friends’ll take care of him, Patera. He’ll be all right.”
Two of the dead man’s friends had already picked up his feet.
“… and for Strong Sphigx. Also for all lesser gods.” Silk hesitated; it had no place in the Formula, but would these people know? Or care? Before rising, he finished in a whisper: “The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, no matter what evil you did in life.”
The tavern was nearly empty. The man who had been hit with the skittlepin groaned and stirred. The drunken woman was kneeling beside him just as Silk had knelt beside the dead man, swaying even on her knees, one hand braced on the filthy floor. There was no sign of the needier that had flown into the air, nor of the knife that the injured man had drawn.
“You want a red ribbon, Patera?”
Silk shook his head.
“Sure you do. On me, for what you done.” The big man wound the rag about his arm, knotted it dexterously with his left hand, and pulled the knot tight with his left hand and his teeth.
“I need to know something,” Silk said, returning his beads to his pocket, “and I’d much rather learn it than get a free drink. I’m looking for a man called Auk. Was he in here? Can you tell me where I might find him?”
The big man grinned, the gap left by two missing teeth a little cavern in his mirth. “Auk, you say, Patera? Auk? There’s quite a few with that name. Owe him money? How’d you know I’m not Auk myself?”
“Because I know him, my son. Know him by sight, I should have said. He’s nearly as tall as you are, with small eyes, a heavy jaw, and large ears. I would guess he’s five or six years younger than you are. He attends our Scylsday sacrifices regularly.”
“Does he now.” The big man appeared to be staring off into the dimness of the darkest corner of the room; abruptly he said, “Why, Auk’s still here, Patera. Didn’t you tell me you’d seen him go?”
“No,” Silk began. “I—”
“Over there.” The big man pointed toward the corner, where a solitary figure sat at a table not much larger than his chair.
“Thank you, my son,” Silk called. He crossed the room, detouring around a long and dirty table. “Auk? I’m Patera Silk, from the manteion on Sun Street.”
“Thanks for what?” the man called Auk inquired.
“For agreeing to talk with me. You signaled to him somehow—waved or something, I suppose. I didn’t see it, but it’s obvious you must have.”
“Sit down, Patera.”
There was no other chair. Silk brought a stool from the long table and sat.
“Somebody send you?”
Silk nodded. “Maytera Mint, my son. But I don’t wish to give you the wrong impression. I haven’t come as a favor to her, or as a favor to you, either. Maytera was doing me a favor by telling me where to find you, and I’ve come to ask you for another one, shriving.”
“Figure I need it, Patera?” There was no trace of humor in Auk’s voice.
“I have no way of knowing, my son. Do you?”
Auk appeared to consider. “Maybe so. Maybe not.”
Silk nodded—understandingly, he hoped. He found it unnerving to talk with this burly ruffian in the gloom, unable to see his expression.
The big man with the wounded arm set an astonishingly delicate glass before Silk. “The best we got, Patera.” He backed away.
“Thank you, my son.” Turning on his stool, Silk looked behind him; the injured man and the drunken woman were no longer beneath the lampion, though he had not heard them go.
“Maytera Mint likes you, Patera,” Auk remarked. “She tells me things about you sometimes. Like the time you got the cats’ meat woman mad at you.”
“You mean Scleroderma?” Silk felt himself flush, and was suddenly glad that Auk could not see him better. “She’s a fine woman—a kind and quite genuinely religious woman. I was hasty and tactless, I’m afraid.”
“She really empty her bucket over you?”
Silk nodded ruefully. “The odd thing was that I found a scrap of—of cats’ meat, I suppose you’d call it, down my neck afterward. It stank.”
Auk laughed softly, a deep, pleasant laugh that made Silk like him.
“I thought it an awful humiliation at the time,” Silk continued. “It happened on a Thelxday, and I thanked her on my knees that my poor mother wasn’t alive to hear about it. I thought, you know, that she would have been terribly hurt, just as I was myself at the time. Now I realize that she would only have teased me about it.” He sipped from
