perhaps. Something like that.” Recalling certain classroom embarrassments, he forced himself to breathe deeply so that he would not yawn; the faint throbbing in his foot seemed very far away, driven beyond the fringes of the most remote Vironese lands by the kindly sorcery of the squat tumbler. “I would have given it to one of my—to another augur, one I know well. I was going to seal it, and make him promise to deliver it to the Juzgado if anything happened to me. Something like that.”
“Not too bad.” Blood took Hyacinth’s little needler from his waistband, thumbed off its safety catch, and aimed it carefully at Silk’s chest.
Musk frowned and touched Blood’s arm.
Blood chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry. I only wanted to see how he’d behave in my place. It doesn’t seem to bother him much.” The needler’s tiny, malevolent eye twitched to the right and spat, and the squat tumbler exploded, showering Silk with shards and pungent liquor.
He brushed himself with his fingers. “What would you like me to sign over to you? I’ll be happy to oblige. Give me the paper.”
“I don’t know.” Blood dropped Hyacinth’s gold-plated needler on the stand that had held his drink. “What have you got, Patera?”
“Two drawers of clothing and three books. No, two; I sold my personal copy of the Writings. My beads—I’ve got those here, and I’ll give them to you now if you like. My old pen case, but it’s still in my robe up in that woman’s room. You could have somebody bring it, and I’ll confess to climbing onto your roof and entering your house without your permission, and give you the pen case, too.”
Blood shook his head. “I don’t need your confession, Patera. I have you.”
“As you like.” Silk visualized his bedroom, over the kitchen in the manse. “Pas’s gammadion. That’s steel, of course, but the chain’s silver and should be worth something I also have an old portable shrine that belonged to Patera Pike. I’ve set it up on my dresser, so I suppose you could say it’s mine now. There’s a rather attractive triptych, a small polychrome lamp, an offertory cloth, and so on, with a teak case to carry them in. Do you want that? I had hoped—foolishly no doubt—to pass it on to my successor.”
Blood waved the triptych aside. “How’d you get through the gate?”
“I didn’t. I cut a limb in the forest and tied it to this rope.” Silk pointed to his waist. “I threw the limb over the spikes on your wall and climbed the rope.”
“We’ll have to do something about that.” Blood glanced significantly at Musk. “You say you were up on the roof, so it was you that killed Hierax.”
Silk sat up straight, feeling as if he had been wakened from sleep. “You gave him the name of the god?”
“Musk did. Why not?”
Musk said softly, “He was a griffon vulture, a mountain bird. Beautiful. I thought I might be able to teach him to kill for himself.”
“But it was no go,” Blood continued. “Musk got angry with him and was going to knife him. Musk has the mews out back.”
Silk nodded politely. Patera Pike had once remarked to him that you could never tell from a man’s appearance what might give him pleasure; studying Musk, Silk decided that he had never accorded Patera Pike’s sagacity as much respect as it had deserved.
“So I said that if he didn’t want him, he could give him to me,” Blood continued, “and I put him up there on the roof for a pet.”
“I see.” Silk paused. “You clipped his wings.”
“I had one of Musk’s helpers do it,” Blood explained, “so he wouldn’t fly off. He wouldn’t hunt anyhow.”
Silk nodded, mostly to himself. “But he attacked me, I suppose because I picked up that scrap of hide. We were next to the battlement, and in the excitement of the moment he—I will not call him Hierax, Hierax is a sacred name—forgot that he could no longer fly.”
Blood reached for the needler. “You’re saying I killed him. That’s a shaggy lie! You did it.”
Silk nodded. “He died by misadventure while fighting with me; but you may say that I killed him if you like. I was certainly trying to.”
“And you stole this needler from Hyacinth before she drove you through the window with her azoth—must be about a thirty-cubit drop. Why didn’t you shoot her?”
“Would you have,” Silk inquired, “if you had been in my place?”
Blood chuckled. “And fed her to Musk’s birds.”
“What I have done to you already is surely much worse than anything that Hyacinth did to me; I say nothing of what I intended to do to you. Are you going to shoot me?” If he lunged, Silk decided, he might be able to wrestle the little needler from Blood in spite of his injured leg; and with the muzzle to Blood’s head, he might be able to force them to let him go. He readied himself, calculating the distance as he edged forward in his chair.
“I might. I might at that, Patera.” Blood toyed with the needler, palming it, flipping it over, and weighing it in his hand; he seemed nearly sober now. “You understand—or I hope you do, anyway—that we haven’t committed any kind of a crime, not a one of us. Not me, not Musk here, not any of my people.”
Silk started to speak, then decided against it.
“You think you know about something? All right, I’ll guess. Tell me if I’m wrong. You’ve been talking with Hy, and so you think she’s a whore. One of our guests tonight gave her that azoth. Quite a little present, plenty good enough for a councillor. Maybe she bragged on some of her other presents, too. Have I hit the target?”
Silk nodded guardedly, his eyes on the needler. “She’d had several … Visitors.”
Blood chuckled. “He’s blushing, Musk. Take a look at him Yes, Patera, I know. Only they didn’t pay, and that’s what matters to the law. They were my guests, and Hy’s one of my houseguests. So if she wants to show somebody a good time, that’s her business and mine, but none of yours. You came out here to get back your
