your manteion for twelve hundred like I told you, just a little
thankyou from Councillor Loris, and I was going to tell Silk thirteen
hundred, then double that." Blood crossed the room to an inlaid
cabinet, opened it, and poured gin and water into a squat glass.
"Only when I'd talked to him a little, I made it thirteen _thousand_,
because he really thought those old buildings in the middle of that
slum were priceless. And I said I'd sell them back to him for
twenty-six thousand."
Blood chuckled and sat down again. "I'm not really a bad host,
Mama. If I thought that you'd drink it, I'd stand you a drink, even
after you called me a thief."
"I was speaking of fact, Bloody, not calling names. Here in private
you may call me a trull or a trollop any other such filthy sobriquet.
That is what I am, or at any rate what I've been, although no man
but your father ever touched me."
"Not me," Blood told her. "I'm above all that."
"But not above defrauding that poor boy because he valued the
things given to his care, and was so foolish as to imagine you
wouldn't lie to an angur."
Blood grinned. "If I were above that, Mama, I'd be as poor as he
is. Or as he was, anyhow. I don't remember how much time I gave
him to come up with the gelt. A couple of weeks, maybe, or
something like that. Then when I had him crawling, I said that if he
brought me something next week or whatever, I might let him have
a little more time. Then after a couple days, I sent Musk to tell him
I had to have it all right away. I figured he'd come out here again
and beg me for more time, see? It looked like it was going to be a
nice little game, the kind I like best."
Maytera Marble nodded sympathetically. "I understand. I suppose
all of us play wicked little games like that from time to time. I
have, I know. But yours is over, Bloody. You've won. You have
him here, a prisoner in your house. The person who told me that the
councillors were here told me that, too. You have me as well. You
say you wanted to avenge yourself on the foster mother we found
for you, and you bought our manteion so you could avenge yourself
on me, because I gave you life and tried to see that you were taken
care of."
Blood stared at her and licked his lips.
"You've won both games. Perhaps all three. So go ahead, Bloody.
A single shot should kill me, and I saw a lot of slug guns out there in
your foyer. Then the Trivigauntis can kill you for killing General
Saba's adjutant, or Generalissimo Oosik can shoot you for shooting
me. Possibly you'll be given your choice. Would you rather die
justly? Or unjustly?"
When Blood did not reply, she added, "Perhaps you ought to ask
your friend Musk about it. He advises you, from what you've said.
Where is he, anyway?"
"He stayed behind after we brought the doves. He said he had a
couple things to take care of, and he doesn't get into town very
often. I thought maybe your side picked him up when he tried to
come home.
Maytera Marble shook her head.
Blood took a liberal swallow from his glass. "I wasn't going to
shoot you, Mama, and I didn't shoot her. You agreed to that
already. Let's pin it down. In about an hour, the Guard could knock
this house down and kill everybody. I know that. They're not doing
it because they know we've got Silk in here. Isn't that right?"
Maytera Marble nodded. "Free him, turn him over to me, Bloody,
and we'll go away and leave you alone."
"It's not that easy. He's here all right, right here in my house. But
it's the councillors and their soldiers who've got him, not me."
"Then I must speak with them. Take me to them."
"I'll bring them in here," Blood told her, "they're all over." Under
his breath he added, "It's still my hornbussing house, by Phaea's
feast!"
Potto opened the door at the top of the cellar steps and crooked his
finger at Sand. "Bring him up, Sergeant. We're getting them all together."
Sand saluted with a crash of titanium heels, his slug gun vertical
before his face. "Yes, Councillor!" He nudged Silk with the toe of his
right foot, and Silk rose.
He fell as he attempted to mount from the second step to the
third, and again halfway up. "Here," Sand told him, and returned
Xiphias's stick.
"Thank you," Silk murmured. And then, "I'm sorry. My legs feel a
trifle weak, I'm afraid."
Potto said cheerfully, "We're going to try to give you back to your
friends, Patera, if we can get them to take you." Grabbing the front
of Remora's ruined robe, he jerked Silk up the remaining step.
"You'd like to lie down again, wouldn't you? Get in a little nap?
Maybe something to eat? Help us, and you'll get it."
He released Silk so suddenly that he fell a third time. "Has he
tried to escape again, Sergeant?"
Silk did not hear Sand's reply; he was thinking about a great many
things. Among them, names.
His own and Sand's were similar--each had four letters, each
contained a single vowel, and each began with an S. They could not
be related, however, because Sand was a chem and he a bio. Yet
they were related by the similarity of their names. Not inconceivably
(he found it a tantalizing idea). Sand was a cognate, a version of
himself in some whorl of a higher order. Many things the Outsider
had shown him seemed to imply that there were such whorls.
Sand prodded him from behind with the barrel of his slug gun,
and he staggered against a wall.
Since chems were never augurs, it could not be that Sand had
been meant to be an augur. Was it possible then, that he, Silk, had
been meant to be a Guardsman? If he were a Guardsman instead of
a failed augur, the many correspondences (already so marked)
linking them would be much more perfect, and thus this inferior
whorl they inhabited more perfect, too.
But, no his mother had wanted him to enter the Juzqado, to
become a clerk there like Hyacinth's father and perhaps rise to
commissioner. How glowingly she had spoken of a political career,
almost up until the day he left for the schola.
"This way," Potto told him, and pushed him through a door and
into a gorgeous room full of lounging soldiers and armored men. "Is
that the calde?" one of the men asked another; the second nodded.
He was in politics at last, as his mother had wished.
He had pulled a chair over to her closet and stood on the seat to
examine the calde's bust on its dark, high shelf; and she, finding him
there intent upon it, had lifted it down for him, dusted it, and set it
on her dressing table where he could see it better--wonder at the
wide, flat cheeks, the narrow eyes, the high, rounded forehead, and
the generous mouth that longed to speak. The calde's carved
countenance rose again before his mind's eye, and it seemed to him
that he had seen it someplace else only a day or two before.
Streaming sunlight, and cheeks that were not smooth wood but
blotched and lightly pocked. Was it possible he had once seen the
calde in person, perhaps as an infant?
"Now listen to me." Potto was standing before him, his plump,
pleasant face half a head lower than Silk's own.
...had seen the calde outside, because even without his lost
glasses he had noticed the powder on the cheeks and the flaws that