As a swimmer bursts from a wave and discovers himself staring at an object he has not chosen—at the summer sun, perhaps, or a cloud or the top of a tree—Silk found that he was looking at Musk’s mouth, lips as feverishly red and fully as delicate as any girl’s.
To damp his fear, he told himself that he was waiting for Musk to speak; and when Musk did not, he forced himself to speak instead. “My name is Patera Silk, my son.” His chin was trembling; before he spoke again, he clenched his teeth. “Mine is the Sun Street manteion. Or I should say it isn’t, which is what I must see Blood about.”
The handsome boy in the glass said nothing and gave no sign of having heard. In order that he might not be snared by that bright and savage stare again, Silk inventoried the room in which Musk stood. He could glimpse a tapestry and a painting, a table covered with bottles, and two elaborately inlaid chairs with padded crimson backs and contorted legs.
“Blood has purchased our manteion,” he found himself explaining to one of the chairs. “By that I mean he’s paid the taxes, I suppose, and they have turned the deed over to him. It will be very hard on the children. On all of us, to be sure, but particularly on the children, unless some other arrangement can be made. I have several suggestions to offer, and I’d like—”
A trooper in silvered conflict armor had appeared at the edge of the glass. As he spoke to Musk, Silk realized with a slight shock that Musk hardly reached the trooper’s shoulder. “A new bunch at the gate,” the trooper said.
Hurriedly, Silk began, “I’m certain for your sake—or for Blood’s, I mean—that an accommodation of some sort is still possible. A god, you see—”
The handsome boy in the glass laughed and snapped his fingers, and the glass went dark.
NIGHTSIDE
It had been late already when they had left the city. Beyond the black streak of the shade, the skylands had been as clear and as bright as Silk (who normally retired early and rose at shadeup) had ever seen them; he stared at them as he rode, his thoughts drowned in wonder. Here were nameless mountains filling inviolate valleys to the rim with their vast, black shadows. Here were savannah and steppe, and a coastal plain ringing a lake that he judged must certainly be larger than Lake Limna—all these doming the gloomy sky of night while they themselves were bathed in sunlight.
As they had walked the dirty and dangerous streets of the Orilla, Auk had remarked, “There’s strange things happen nightside, Patera. I don’t suppose you know it, but that’s the lily word anyhow.”
“I do know,” Silk had assured him. “I shrive, don’t forget, so I hear about them. Or at least I’ve heard a few very strange stories that I can’t relate. You must have seen the things as they occurred, and that must be stranger still.”
“What I was going to say,” Auk had continued, “was that I never heard about any that was any stranger than this, what you’re going to do, or try to do. Or seen anything stranger, either.”
Silk had sighed. “May I speak as an augur, Auk? I realize that a great many people are offended by that, and Our Gracious Phaea knows I don’t want to offend you. But this once may I speak?”
“If you’re going to say something you wouldn’t want anybody to hear, why, I wouldn’t.”
“Quite the contrary,” Silk had declared, perhaps a bit too fervently. “It’s something that I wish I could tell the whole city.”
“Keep your voice down, Patera, or you will.”
“I told you a god had spoken to me. Do you remember that?”
Auk had nodded.
“I’ve been thinking about it as we walked along. To tell the truth, it’s not easy to think about anything else. Before I spoke to—to that unfortunate Musk. Well, before I spoke to him, for example, I ought to have been thinking over everything that I wanted to say to him. But I wasn’t, or not very much. Mostly I was thinking about the Outsider; not so much what he had said to me as what it had been like to have him speaking to me at all, and how it had felt.”
“You did fine, Patera.” Auk had, to Silk’s surprise, laid a hand on his shoulder. “You did all right.”
“I don’t agree, though I won’t argue with you now. What I wanted to say was that there is really nothing strange at all about what I’m doing, or about your helping me to do it. Does the sun ever go out, Auk? Does it ever wink out as you or I might snuff out a lamp?”
“I don’t know, Patera. I never thought about it. Does it?”
Silk had not replied, continuing in silence down the muddy street, matching Auk stride for stride.
“I guess it don’t. You couldn’t see them skylands up there nightside, if it did.”
“So it is with the gods, Auk. They speak to us all the time, exactly as the sun shines all the time. When the dark cloud that we call the shade gets between us and the sun, we say it’s night, or nightside, a term I never heard until I came to Sun Street.”
“It don’t really mean night, Patera. Not exactly. It means … All right, look at it like this. There’s a day way of doing, see? That’s the regular way. And then there’s the other way, and nightside’s when you do this other way— when everything’s on the night side of the shade.”
“We’re on the night side of the shade for only half the day,” Silk had told him. “But we are on the night side of whatever it is that bars us from the gods almost constantly, throughout our whole lives. And we really shouldn’t be. We weren’t meant to be. I got that one small ray of sunshine, you see, and it shouldn’t be strange at all. It should be the most ordinary thing in the whorl.”
He had expected Auk to laugh, and was surprised and pleased when he did not.
