He and the short, plump student left the cenoby. It was raining, a hard, cold, pounding rain that chilled him to the bone. A litter with six bearers was waiting in the street, and they discussed its ownership though he felt certain that it was Maytera Marble's. The bearers were all old, one was blind, and the dripping canopy was old, faded, and torn. He was ashamed to ask the old men to carry them, so they went, up the street to a large white structure without walls whose roof was of thin white slats set on edge a hand's breadth apart; in it there was so much white furniture that there was scarcely room to walk. They chose chairs and sat down to wait. When the Prelate came, he was Mucor, Blood's mad daughter.
They sat in the rain with her, shivering, discussing the affairs of the schola. She spoke about a difficulty she could not resolve, blaming him for it.
He sat up cold and stiff, and crossed his arms to put his freezing fingers in his armpits. Mucor told him, "It's drier farther on. Meet me where the bios sleep." She was sitting cross-legged on the water, and like the water, transparent. He wanted to ask her to guide him to the surface; at the sound of his voice she vanished with the rest of his dream, leaving only a shimmer of greenish light like slime on the water. If that still, clear water had receded while he slept, the change was not apparent. He took off his stockings, tied his shoes together by their laces and hung them around his neck, and stuffed the wrapping into the pocket of his robe. He knotted the corners of his robe about his waist and rolled his trousers legs as high as he could while promising himself that exercise would soon warm him, that he would actually be more comfortable once he entered the water and began to walk.
It was as cold as he had feared, but shallow. It seemed to him that its very frigidity, its icy slapping against his injured ankle, should numb it; each time he put his weight on it, a needle stabbed deep into the bone nevertheless.
The faint splashings of his bare feet woke more lights, enabling him to see a considerable distance down the tunnel, which was flooded as far as the light reached. He did not actually know that water would harm the wrapping, and in fact he did not really believe it likely-people clever enough to build such a device would surely be able to protect it from an occasional wetting. But the wrapping was Crane's and not his, and though he would steal Crane's money if he had to in order to preserve the manteion, he would not risk ruining Crane's wrapping to save himself a little pain.
He had walked some distance when it occurred to him that he could warm himself somewhat by re-energizing the wrapping and returning it to his pocket. He tried the experiment, slapping the wrapping against the wall of the tunnel. The result was eminently satisfactory.
He thought of Blood's lioness-headed walking stick with nostalgia; if he had it now, it would take some weight off his injured ankle. Half a day ago (or a little more, perhaps) he had been ready to throw it away, calling his act of contempt a sacrifice to Scylla. Oreb had been frightened by that, and Oreb had been right; the goddess had engaged and defeated that walking stick (and thus her sister Sphigx) when he had brought it into her shrine.
His feet disturbed a clump of shining riparial worms, which scattered in all directions flashing tidings of fear in pale, luminous yellow. The water was deeper here, the gray shiprock walls dark with damp.
On the other hand, the talus he had killed had professed to serve Scylla; but that boast presumably meant no more than that it served Viron, Scylla's sacred city-as did he, for that matter, since he hoped to end Crane's activities. More realistically, the talus had unquestionably been a servant of the Ayuntamicnto. It had been Councillor Lemur who had built the shrine; and thus, almost certainly, it was the councillors who met with commissioners and judges in the room below it. This though they must surely come to the Juzgado (the real one in Viron, as Silk thought of it) from time to time. He had seen a picture of Councillor Loris addressing a crowd from the balcony not long ago.
And the talus had said that it had returned to Potto.
Silk halted, balancing himself on his sound foot, and slapped the wrapping against the wall of the tunnel again. If, however, the talus served the Ayuntamiento (and so by a permissible exaggeration Scylla), what had it been doing at Blood's villa? Mucor had indicated not only that it was his employee, but that it might be corrupted. This time Silk wound the wrapping around his chest under his tunic, finding that it did not constrict sufficiently to make it difficult for him to breathe.
At first Silk thought the flashes of pain from his ankle had somehow affected his hearing. The roar increased, and a pinpoint of light appeared far down the tunnel. There was no place to run, even if he had been capable of running, no place to hide. He flattened himself as much as he could against the wall, Hyacinth's azoth in his hand.
The point of light became a glare. The machine racing toward him held its head low, like that of an angry dog. It roared past, drenching him with icy water, and vanished in the direction from which he had come.
He fled, splashing through water that grew deeper and deeper, and saw the steeply rising side tunnel at the same moment that he heard a roar and clatter behind him.
A hundred long and exquisitely painful strides carried him clear of the water; but he did not sit down to rewrap his ankle and resume his shoes and stockings until distance had taken him out of sight of the tunnel he had left. He heard something-he assumed it was the same machine- roar along it once more and listened fearfully, half-convinced that it would turn down this new tunnel. It did not, and soon its clamor faded away.
Now, he told himself, his luck had changed. Or rather, some gracious god had decided to favor him. Perhaps Scylla had forgiven him for bringing her sister's walking stick into her shrine and for proposing to cast it into the lake as a sacrifice to herself. This tunnel could not go far, rising as it did, before it must necessarily reach the surface; and it seemed certain to do so near Limna, if not actually within the village itself. Furthermore, it was above the level of the water, and seemed likely to remain so.
Having put the azoth back into his waistband, he rolled down his trousers legs and untied his robe.
He was no longer counting steps, but he had not gone far before his nose detected the unmistakable tang of wood smoke. It couldn't really be (he told himself) the odor of sacrifice, the fragrant smoke of cedar blended with the pungent smells of burning flesh, fat, and hair. And yet-he sniffed again-it was uncannily like it, so much so that for a moment or two he wondered whether there might not be an actual sacrifice in progress here in these ancient tunnels.
As he approached the next bleared and greenish light, he noticed footprints on the tunnel floor. The tracks of a man, shod as he was, left in a faint, gray deposit that his fingers easily wiped away.
Was it possible that he had been walking in a circle? He shook his head. This tunnel had been climbing steeply from its beginning; and as he scanned the footprints and compared them to his own, he saw that it could not be true: the steps were shorter than his, this walker had not limped, and the shoes that had made them had been somewhat smaller; nor were their heels badly worn at the outside like his own.