imagined, its unequal wings half spread, its long white neck bent back at an unnatural angle. He had killed it. Or rather, it had killed itself.
One of the men around the dead bird glanced upward, saw Silk watching him, pointed, and shouted something Silk could not understand. Rather too late (or so he feared), he waved as though he were a member of the household and retreated up the steep slope of the roof.
The trapdoor opened upon the dim and lofty attic he had glimpsed earlier, a cobwebbed cavern more than half filled with musty furniture and splintering crates. Feeble lights kindled at the muted clank of his foot upon the first iron step; he had hardly descended to the second when one winked out. It was a promising place in which to conceal himself, but it would no doubt be the first to be searched should the man on the terrace raise the alarm. Silk had rejected it by the time he reached the bottom of the spiraling steps, and with a pang of regret hurried straight to the wider wooden stair and ran down them to the upper floor of the original villa.
Here a narrow, tapestry-covered door opened onto a wide and luxuriously furnished corridor not far from a balustraded staircase up which cultured voices floated. A fat, formally dressed man sat in an elaborate red velvet and gilt armchair a few steps from the top of the staircase. His arms rested on a rosewood table, and his head upon his folded arms; he snored softly as Silk passed, jerked to wakefulness, stared uncomprehendingly at Silk’s black robe, and lowered his head to his arms again.
The stair was thickly carpeted, its steps broad, and its slant gentle. It terminated in a palatial reception hall, in which five men dressed much like the sleeper stood deep in conversation. Several were holding tumblers, and none seemed alarmed. Some distance beyond them, the reception hall ended with wide double doors—doors that stood open at present, so that the soft autumn night itself appeared as a species of skylit hanging in Blood’s hall. Beyond any question, Silk decided, those doors represented the principal entrance to the villa; the portico he had studied from the wall would be on the other side; and indeed when he had surveyed the scene below him for a moment— not leaning across the balustrade as he had so unwisely leaned across the battlement to stare down at the flaccid form of the white-headed one, but from the opposite side of the corridor, with his back against the nude, half again life-sized statue of some minor goddess—he could just make out the ghostly outlines of the pillars.
Unbidden, the manteion’s familiar, fire-crowned altar rose before him as he stared at the open doors: the altar, the manse, the palaestra, and the shady arbor where he had sometimes chatted too long with Maytera Marble. Suppose that he were to walk down this staircase quite normally? Stroll through that hall, nodding and smiling to anyone who glanced toward him. Would any of them stop him, or call for guards? It seemed unlikely.
His own hot blood trickling down his right arm wet his fingers and dripped onto Blood’s costly carpet. Shaking his head, Silk strode swiftly past the stair and seated himself in the matching red armchair on the other side. As long as his arm bled, he could be tracked by his blood: down the spiral stair from the roof, down the attic stair, and along this corridor.
Parting his robe, he started a tear above the hem of his tunic with his teeth and ripped away a strip.
Could not the blood trail be turned to his advantage? Silk rose and walked rapidly along the corridor, flexing his wrist and clenching his right hand to increase the bleeding, and entered the south wing by a short flight of steps; there he halted for a moment to wind the strip about his wound and knot it with his teeth just as Gib, the big man in the Cock, had. When he had satisfied himself that it would remain in place, he retraced his steps, passing the chair in which he had sat, the stairhead, the sleeper, and the narrow tapestry-covered door leading to the attic. Here, beyond paired icons of the minor deities Ganymedia and Catamitus, wide and widely spaced doors alternated with elaborately framed mirrors and amphorae overfilled with hothouse roses.
As Silk approached the entrance to the north wing, an officer in the uniform of the Guard emerged from an archway at the end of the corridor. The door nearest Silk stood half open; he stepped inside and shut it softly behind him.
He found himself facing a windowless pentagonal drawing room furnished in magnificent chryselephantine. For a moment he waited with his back to the corridor door, listening as he had listened so often that night. When he heard nothing, he crossed the thick carpet and opened one of the drawing room’s ivory-encrusted doors.
This was a boudoir, larger and even more oddly shaped. There were wardrobes, two chairs, a rather tawdry shrine of Kypris whose smoldering thurible filled the room with the sweetness of frankincense, and a white dressing table before a glass whose pearlescent glow appeared to intensify as he entered. When he shut the door behind him, a swirl of colors danced across the glass. He fell to his knees.
“Sir?”
Looking up, Silk saw that the glass held only the gray face of a monitor. He traced the sign of addition. “Wasn’t there a god? I saw…”
“I am no god, sir, merely the monitor of this terminal. What may I do to serve you, sir? Would you care to critique your digitally enhanced image?”
Disconcerted, Silk stood. “No. I—No, thank you.” He struggled to recall how Auk had addressed the monitor in his glass. “I’d like to speak to a friend, if it isn’t too much trouble, my son.” That had not been it, surely.
The floating face appeared to nod. “The friend’s name, please? I will attempt it.”
“Auk.”
“And this Auk lives where?”
“In the Orilla. Do you know where that is?”
“Indeed I do, sir. However, there are … fifty-four Auks resident there. Can you supply the street?”
“No, I’m afraid I have no idea.” Suddenly weary, Silk drew out the dressing table’s somewhat soiled little stool and sat down. “I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble. But if you’re—”
“There is an Auk in the Orilla with whom my master has spoken several times,” the monitor interrupted. “No doubt he is the Auk you want. I will attempt to locate him for you.”
“No,” Silk said. “This Auk lives in what used to be a shop. So it must be on a shopping street, I suppose, with a lot of other stores and so on. Or at least on a street that used to have them.” Remembering it, he recalled the thunder of the cartwheels. “A street paved with cobblestones. Does that help?”
“Yes. That is the Auk with whom my master speaks, sir. Let us see whether he is at home.”
The monitor’s face faded, replaced by Auk’s disordered bed and jar of slops. Soon the image swelled and distorted, becoming oddly rounded. Silk saw the heavy wooden chair from which he had shriven Auk and beside which he had knelt when Auk shrived him. He found it heartening, somehow, to know that the chair was still
