Ben said, “Sia, I am not going.” She answered him in the other language, and he turned away and stood staring at the fading walls.
Sia turned her head to find Julie in the dimness. She said, “You are very brave and merciful. Kannon will always come to you in your need.” Aiffe stood quietly in Julie’s grasp, her eyes terribly tranquil, frowning as if at a pointless question. Only her mouth shivered just a bit—a fishing line taken and run out by something far too massive and wild for its strength.
Julie said, “I don’t want her. I don’t want the gods ever to help me. I hate the gods.”
Sia nodded seriously, even approvingly. “Of course, that is only sensible. We are a terrible lot, we have no fairness, no honor, no sense of proportion. How could you not hate us?” Julie looked away in her turn, and Sia grinned then, momentarily youthful with mockery. “But we do have charm, and most of us are very good social dancers.” Julie did not answer her.
“And sometimes we grant wishes that people never know they have made,” the old woman went on. She took a ring from her finger and held it out to Farrell. It was gold, the color of new bread, fashioned in the shape of a thick, soft, drowsily coiled serpent with a suggestion of a woman’s breasts. The one visible eye was long and empty, a slash of a darkness that Farrell had seen before. Sia said, “It is not magic, it has absolutely no useful powers. It will do nothing at all for you but remind you of me.”
“Thank you,” Farrell said. He put the golden snake carefully on his left forefinger, where it fitted perfectly. Sia spoke to Ben a second time in her own tongue, but he kept his back turned to her. She beckoned to Aiffe, who stumbled when Julie let her go, but then came forward obediently. Sia took the empty, fearless face between her hands.
“Well,” she said, “Let’s see. You have conspired against me with my son, you have tried twice to destroy me, and the second time you had visions of stealing my immortality, which is probably the worst kind of blasphemy, when I think about it. In addition to that, you have used your beautiful little gift for nothing but stupid nastiness. You have caused one man’s death, another’s madness and possession, and you have done worse damage that you do not even know about to people you dragged back and forth across time for the sake of your pride, your play, your revenge. And I am expected to pardon you for no reason but to show off to a friend whose idea of interceding is to tell me that she hates the gods.” She began to laugh again, quietly and truly helpless with mortal amusement. “What have I come to, indeed, for my last act in this world?”
Briseis trembled against Farrell’s leg. When he turned, he saw that the corner where she had been cowering no longer existed. The door was still visible, but white dissolution prowled on the other side. Sia’s voice seemed to be coming more and more from the same void. “This house is falling, and you have no business here. I cannot protect you—if you die before you get out, you really die. Go, go on, this minute.”
Julie started to speak, but Sia would not let her. “The girl stays with me, I will do what I can do. What are you waiting for, good-bye kisses? I am done with hellos and good-byes, done with this place, done with you. Get out of my house now!”
Each of them looked back once. Julie said later that she heard Sia say Ben’s name, but by the time Farrell stood in the doorway he could barely discern Aiffe in that room where even the darkness was going out. He did see the two steel engravings blink off together and thought absurdly, oh, that’s a pity, she likes those. Then he was staggering after Ben and Julie down a corridor that was disappearing faster than they could run, knowing with the most casual, distant kind of certainty that they would never find their way in time.
Briseis took the lead, or they never would have found it. They followed her waving gray tail, calling aloud to keep in contact; and though the dog fled before them with unlikely surefootedness, she was constantly forced to double back and double again, as a silent wind of forgetting tore away floors and stairways beneath their feet. Once Julie caught Farrell as he strode off into nothing at all, and once he had to carry Ben in a steep place for a while.
The serpent ring glimmered on his finger with what must have been its own light, but it was not the least help when he pointed it at the oblivion swirling on every side and whimpered, “Avaunt, get thee gone, let us be.” Oh, Sia, remember us another moment, keep us in yourself yet a little. At the last, they were each running alone, no longer calling, gone from each other as completely as if they had truly vanished. Would we know? How would we know?
They never did agree on the exact point where they crossed from Sia’s true house into the one they knew. By the time they were even aware of having burst up like divers through hallway, kitchen, and living room, they were out on the sidewalk, gasping and crying and falling down in the wet grass. They huddled together for a long while, the three of them, tending to one another under the casually curious eyes of neighbors come out to enjoy the soft twilight after Aiffe’s squall. It was Julie who stood up first to face the odd old house with the roof almost like a widow’s walk and the front door missing.
Farrell had known perfectly well that it was not the visible house falling around them, and he knew also that it was silly to expect brick to boil and wood and shingle to convulse with mourning for a struggle and a passing that had taken place so far from them. Even so, he realized that he was vainly, ridiculously angry with the house, in a way that he had never been angry with Aiffe or Nicholas Bonner. “What day is it?” he asked vaguely, and did not hear if anyone answered, but went on staring at the house, waiting stubbornly to see it slump just a little, settling into the shaded ordinariness that it would wear from now on, now that a goddess no longer lived there.
Chapter 20
The real problem was the dog.
Aiffe turned out never to have left the Whalemas Tourney at all, but to have accompanied her father to the traditional feast and dance which followed it. Any number of League members could vouch for her presence there, as well as for the fact that she had led the dances all night long, come down with flu the next day, and remained bedridden, feverish and quarantined. Farrell asked Julie, “Do simulacra get the flu? Then who was it who stayed in that room with Sia?” Julie answered only, “She said she’d do what she could do.”
In the following days—every one astonishingly warm and lingeringly generous, as early fall often is in Avicenna—a number of small things happened. Madame Schumann-Heink got a new engine, new windows, and her first paint job in a decade, all more or less acquired in a graveyard at midnight. Julie’s BSA got two new forks, and Farrell’s lute got an entire set of strings and gut frets as the price of its sojourn in a place that was not good for stringed instruments. Farrell himself got Briseis.
That part happened later, just after he resigned from the League for Archaic Pleasures. A certain amount of regret was expressed, mostly by the members of Basilisk and the Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Hamid ibn Shanfara and Lovita Bird were sympathetic and slightly awkward, since they had not resigned after all. Lovita told him, “Honey, you have no idea just how much weird shit I will endure for the sake of having someplace to dress up. I’m sorry, I got to be somebody besides that damn bus driver now and again.”
Hamid said wryly, “Little bit addictive, the griot business. Down at the post office, they don’t have much room for a person wants to be an entire group memory all by himself.”