Before Silk could protest, Hammerstone had slammed the butt of his slug gun against, the seal, which shattered into coarse black dust. As Silk recoiled in horror, Hammerstone jerked open both doors and charged into the enormous hall beyond them.
Silk knelt, collected as much of the black dust as he could, and, lacking any more suitable receptacle, folded it into his remaining sheet of paper and deposited it in his pen case.
By the time that he had closed the case and returned it to the pocket of his robe, the imprisoned woman's hands were clutching her throat and her eyes starting from her head. He scrambled to his feet, hobbled into the brilliantly lit hall, and wasted precious seconds trying to discover some means of broaching the transparent cylinder that confined her before snatching Hyacinth's needler-from his pocket and striking the almost invisible crystal with its butt.
It shattered at the first blow. At once the atmosphere within it darkened to the blue-black of ripe grapes, swirling and spiraling as it mixed with air, then vanished as abruptly as Mucor in the aftermath of his dream. With somnambulistic slowness the naked woman's hands returned to her sides.
She gasped for breath.
Silk averted his eyes and untied the bands of his robe. "Will you put this. on, please?"
"We'll be lovers," the woman told him loudly, her voice breaking at the penultimate syllable. Her hair was as black as Hyacinth's, her eyes a startling blue deeper than Silk's own.
"Do you know this place?" Silk asked her urgently. "Is there another way out?"
"Everything." Moving almost normally, she stepped from the rack.
"I must get away." Silk spoke as quickly as he could, wondering whether she would understand him even if he had spoken as slowly as he would have to a child. "There must be another way out, because there was someone in here who hadn't come through these doors. Show me, please."
"That way."
He risked a glance at her face, careful not to let his gaze stray below her long and graceful neck; there was something familiar-something horrible that he struggled to deny-in her smile. With cautious hands, he draped his robe about her shoulders. "You'll have to hold it closed in front."
"Tie it for me?"
He hesitated. "It would be better . . ."
"I don't know how."
She stepped toward him. "Please?" Her voice was under better control now, and almost familiar.
He fumbled the bands; it seemed unfair that something he did automatically each morning should be so difficult to do for someone else.
"Now I can fly!" With outstretched arms she spread the robe wide, running slowly and clumsily down the aisle until she nearly disappeared from view at the distant wall. There she turned and dashed back, sprinting without wasted motion. "I-really-can!" She gulped for air, breasts heaving. "But-you-can't-see-me-then." Still gasping, she smiled proudly, her head thrown back like Hammerstone's; and in her smile, the grinning rictus of a corpse, Silk knew her.
"You have no right to this woman, Mucor!" He traced the sign of addition. "In the name of Pas, Master of the Whorl, be gone!"
"I-am-a-woman. Oh-yes!"
"In the name of Lady Echidna, be gone!"
"I-know-her. She-likes-me."
"In the names of Scylla and Sphigx! In the most sacred name of the Outsider!"
She was no longer paying attention. "Do you-know why this-place is-so high?" She gestured toward the domed ceiling. "So that fliers-could fly-over it without-having to-walk." She pointed to a jumbled heap of bones, hair, and blackened flesh at the bottom of a cylinder on the second level. "I was her-once. She-remembered."
"To me you're the devil who possessed that poor woman's daughter," Silk told her angrily. "The devil who possessed Orpine." He saw a flash of fear in her eyes. "I am a bad man, granted-a lawless man, and often less than pious. Yet I am a holy augur, consecrated and blessed. Is there no name that you respect?"
"I will not be afraid, Silk." She backed away from him as she spoke.
"In the name ofPhaea, go! In the name of Thelxiepeia, go! In the name of Moipe, whose day this is, and in those of Scylla and Sphigx. Be gone in the names of these gods!"
"I wanted to help. ..."
"Be gone in the names of Tartaros and Hierax!"
She raised her hands, as he had to ward off Hammerstone's blow; and Silk, seeing her fear, remembered that Hierax had been the name that Musk had given the white-headed one, the griffon vulture on Blood's roof. With that memory, Phaesday night returned: his frantic dash across Blood's lawn in the shadow of a racing cloud; the thump of his forked branch on the roof of the conservatory; and the blade of his hatchet wedged between the casement of Mucor's window and its frame, the window that had supplied the threat he had used the next day to banish her from Orchid's.
Almost kindly he told her, "I will close your window, Mucor, so that it can never be opened again, if you don't leave me alone. Go."
As though she had never been present, she abandoned the tall, raven-haired woman who faced him; he had seen nothing and heard nothing, but he knew it as surely as if there had been a flash of fire or a gale of wind.
The woman blinked twice, her eyes unfocused and without comprehension. "Go? Where?" She drew his robe about her.
"Praise Great Hierax, the Son of Death, the New Death, whose mercy is terminal and infinite," Silk said feelingly. "Are you all right, my daughter?"
She stared at him, a hand between her breasts. "My- heart?"
"It's still racing from Mucor's exertions, I'm sure; but your pulse should slow in a few minutes." She trembled, saying nothing. In the silence he heard the pounding of steel feet.
He closed the double doors that Hammerstone had opened, reflecting that Hammerstone had specified the back of the armory. It might be some time before the hurrying soldiers realized that he had actually meant to summon them to this vast hall beyond it. "Perhaps if we walk a little," he suggested. "We may be able to find a place of comfort, where you can sit down. Do you know a way out?"
The woman said nothing but offered no objection as Silk led her along an aisle he chose at random. The bases of the crystal cylinders, as he now saw, were black with print. By rising on his toes, he was able to examine one on the second tier, reading the name (Olive) of the woman in the cylinder, her age (twenty-four), and what he took to be a precis of her education.
"I ought to have read yours." He spoke to her as he had to Oreb, to give form to his thoughts. "But we'd better not go back. If I had when I had the opportunity, I'd know your name, at least."
"Mamelta."
He looked at her curiously. "Is that your name?" It was one that he had never heard. "I think so. I can't ..."
"Remember?" he suggested gently.
She nodded.
"It's certainly not a common name." The greenish lights overhead were dimming now; in the twilight that remained, he glimpsed Hammerstone running down an intersecting aisle half the hall away and asked, "Can you walk just a little faster, Mamelta?"
She did not reply.
"I'd like to avoid him," he explained, "for reasons of my own. You don't have to be afraid of him, however-he won't hurt you or me."
Mamelta nodded, although he could not be sure that she understood.
"He won't find what he's searching for, I'm afraid, poor fellow. He wants to find the person who energized all these lights, but I'm reasonably sure that it was Mucor, and she's gone."
"Mucor?" Mamelta indicated herself, both hands at her face.
"No," Silk told her, "you are not Mucor, although Mucor possessed you for a short time. It woke you, I think, while you were still in your glass tube. I don't believe that was supposed to happen. Can we walk a bit faster now?"
"All right."
"It wouldn't do to run. He might hear, and it would make him suspicious, I'm sure; but if we walk, we may be able to get away from him. If we don't, and he finds us, he'll think you energized the lights, no doubt. That should satisfy him, and we'll have lost nothing." Under his breath Silk added, "I hope."