Epiphany of the Long Sun (77 page)

"It would take an hour to explain it all." Silk shrugged. "I'll try to be brief. I love you very, very much."

"I love you, too!"

"Because I do, I have something to lose, someone-you-I must protect. Most men live their entire lives like this, I suppose, but I'm not accustomed to it."

"I'm sorry. I'll try to help. I really will."

"I know you will. You'll put yourself at risk, and that worries me more than anything else."

There was a tap on the canopy.

"You see, I've forgotten some of my obligations already. I promised Chenille I'd help her find Auk, and Auk took you from me. Do you know where he is, or where this Corporal is? Patera Incus is anxious to locate him, I know."

Xiphias interjected, "Don't you think that's that Willet outside knocking, lad?"

"Let him in, please."

"I don't know how to work this soggy door!"

"Then that will give us a little more time. You'll solve it soon, I'm sure."

Hyacinth giggled. "You've been around people like me too much. That's what Auk says about houses. And I know where he is, too, or anyway I know where he was, at a reedy old manteion on Sun Street. Was that yours? That's what somebody said when we were going over there."

"It was." Silk found that he was smiling. "It's old and run down, just as you say; but I used to love it, or thought I did. In a way I suppose I still do."

Scarcely visible on the other side of the darkened canopy, Hossaan tapped again. This time his taps were followed by a series of sharper ones.

"That's where Kypris came to your Window? Orchid told me. It was at Orpine's funeral, she said. I knew Orpine, and I wish I'd been there. I've got a shrine for Kypris…" Hyacinth paused, teeth nibbling her full lower lip. "Or I did. Is the house really wrecked? That's what Orchid said."

Silk recalled Blood's villa as he had seen it during his rescue. "It's badly damaged, certainly."

"If it was just damaged we've got to go there!"

He gestured toward the canopy. "Even with Willet outside knocking? Willet used to be one of Blood's drivers. You must know him-he drove you to the city so that you could meet me at Ermine's."

"That's wonderful! He can take us."

Xiphias exclaimed. "Think I've got it! Want me to let him in, lad?"

Silk nodded, and the door opened. Hossaan reached through it to unlatch the one in front, and Oreb shot past him to land upon Silk's shoulder, a-flutter with excitement and indignation. "Bad cat! Cut cat!"

Hossaan slid into the driver's seat as the orange-and-white animal he held spat, "Add word!"

"He led us quite a chase, Hy," Hossaan said, "but we got him in the alley trying to wriggle through a hole."

"You're bleeding!"

"He put up a fight. If somebody else will hold him, I'll get out the aid kit."

"Add, add word!" the little orange-and-white catachrest reiterated. "Pack! Itty laddie, peas dun lit am kilt may!"

"She won't, for an hour or two at least," Silk told him. "Willet, I want you to take us out to Blood's and help us collect Hyacinth's belongings." For a moment, Silk paused to gaze upon Hyacinth. "Then to the Prolocutor's Palace." As the floater slid forward, he added, "We may well need weapons, but we'd have to go back to the Caldé's Palace, and we can't afford that. I'd never get away."

Xiphias accepted the small catachrest from Hossaan. "I've my sword, lad!"

Silk nodded absently as the song of the blowers strengthened to a muted roar. "Let's hope it will suffice."

"We might have these drinks I wish in the bar, perhaps," Siyuf told Chenille, "but in my lodging would be more nice, do you not think also?"

"I had three with dinner." By intent, Chenille spoke too loudly. "If I'm going to start falling down and taking off my clothes, I'd a whole lot rather do it in private." She. looked around Ermine's sellaria with interest. "Only we've got to get a room, don't you?"

"My staff has arrange this for me while I watch our parade with your friend the Caldé." Siyuf stopped a liveried waiter. "My lodging will be up the big stairs, I think? Number seventy-nine?"

He shook his head. "We don't have a room seventy-nine at Ermine's, General."

"Generalissimo. Wait, I will show you." While Chenille smiled and strove to appear innocent, Siyuf fished a key from her pocket.

"Ah!" The waiter nodded. "Number seven nine. That's a double room, we call it the Lyrichord Room, Generalissimo. On your right at the top of the Grand Staircase. You can't miss it."

"A room you say. More, I understood."

The waiter lowered his voice confidentially. "Our suites are four, five, or six rooms, depending. We call them rooms for convenience. Your room, the Lyrichord Room on account of the instrument in the music room, is a double suite with eleven rooms and three baths, besides balconies and so forth. Three bedrooms, sellaria, cenatiuncula for formal dining, breakfast cosy, drawing room-"

She waved him to silence. "You have here a wine waiter, one good and knowing?"

"The sommelier, Generalissimo. He's at the Caldé's Palace just now, I believe."

"I come from there. He too, I think. Send him to me when he arrive."

Siyuf turned away, motioning to Chenille. "Men are so stupid, do you think also? It is what renders them less than attractive, even the most fine. One thing, better I had say, one thing from many. Men are duty. So we are taught in my home. Girls are pleasure."

Chenille nodded meekly, blinking to show that she was assimilating this information. "In Trivigaunte, you mean? That's where your home is? I still can't get used to liking somebody from someplace so far away."

"This is natural. I have a house there bigger than this Ermine of your Viron's, the house which was my mother's. Also outside our city, a farmhouse made large for rest and educating my horses. For the hunt two houses also, one in a cave where is more cool. Do you perhaps hunt? I will show it to you. You will be very delighted I think, but there are places where you could not stand so straight, perhaps."

"I'd like to learn. Only I thought all of you were east of here. The Caldé, I call him Patera, said something about tents out there. Anyway, it's really nice you've got this suite too, only I never would have guessed."

Arms linked, they started up the broad staircase. "I have my tent outside your city, and my headquarters, which I bring closer soon. Also this is convenient, as we see. I have good hunting there, so perhaps I will not have to take you home to teach. Already we kill three wing people and catch one also."

"Four Fliers?" In her astonishment Chenille forgot to sound admiring. "I didn't think anybody could."

Siyuf laughed. "Nine years in Trivigaunte another kill a wing person, but she does not catch the round thing on the back that push forward. I forget this word."

"I have no idea."

"By this we put wings on my pterotroopers. This time it is me that kill and I have catch the things that push also, but he does not yet tell me how it go."

Siyuf moistened her lips, and for the first time Chenille felt frightened. "Not yet he will not tell. But soon. He is like all men stupid, and not fine even but small and thin. We take his clothes and do other things until he is our friend. This is not confusing to you, I hope?"

"I think I get it."

"We take the clothes, and look, he is nothing. I have five husbands, all are more fine. Perhaps you would like him? When we have finish, I will give him to you."

"Oh, no! I don't want him, Siyuf."

"Good."

"I really don't like men at all, except Petera and one other one."

They had reached the top of Ermine's sweeping and richly carpeted Grand Staircase. Siyuf glanced to her right and down at her key. "My husbands I like sometimes, but so one like a hound. For me, tall girls and strong over all else. I enjoy, you see, at first a certain resistance."

Maytera Marble paused to stare at the strange procession crossing Manteion Street; although it was some distance away, Maytera Rose's legacy had improved her eyes out of reckoning. In the streetlights' glow, she saw a large and rough-looking man, accompanied by a smaller man so thin that he seemed a mere assemblage of sticks. After them, three soldiers, large and handsome like all soldiers, two of whom appeared to be carrying a fourth. Behind the soldiers, a tall augur and-and…

"Sib! Oh, sib! General, General Mint! It's me, sib!" In her joy Maytera Marble actually sprang into the air. The diminutive sibyl walking beside the tall augur looked around, and her mouth dropped open.

Maytera's eyes were not the only things Maytera Rose's legacy had improved; Maytera Marble dashed up Manteion Street as though winged, and Oreb himself could not have covered the distance more rapidly. Her good hand clutching her coif, she shot between the rough men, collided with the leading soldier with a clang and a fluster of elided apologies, and threw her arms about Maytera Mint.

"It's you, it's really you! We've been so worried! You don't know! You can't, and when Patera said you were all right I thought that's just when it happens, when everyone's saying the danger's over, that's when they get killed, and, and-oh, Hierax! Oh, Scylla! Oh, Thelxiepeia! I simply couldn't stand it. You were the light of my existence, sib. I know I never told you but you were, you were! If I'd had to live by myself in the cenoby with just Maytera Rose and that chem I couldn't have stood it. We'd have gone mad!"

Maytera Mint was laughing and hugging her and trying to lift her off the ground, which was so ridiculous that Maytera Marble exclaimed, "Stop, sib, before you hurt yourself!" But it really did not matter at all. Maytera Mint was right there, laughing, and was the same dear Maytera Mint but better because she was the Maytera Mint who had come back from Tartaros knew where and there was no mother and daughter, no grandmother and granddaughter half so close as they, and no child or grandchild half so dear.

"I'm happy to be back, Maytera," Maytera Mint declared when she could stop laughing. "I hadn't really known how happy till now."

"Where have you been? Dear, dear sib, dear girl! Patera said they'd got you, they had you in some horrible place under the city, and then they didn't, you were with soldiers, but the generalissimo, not the fat one, the other one, said you were dead and-oh, sib! I missed you so much! I wanted you to meet Chenille. I still do, because Chenille's been a second granddaughter to me, but nobody, nobody in the whole whorl can ever mean as much to me as you!"

The tall augur said, "The-ah-all Viron. Feels as you do, eh, Maytera? Just look at them."

Already heads were turning and people pointing.

"You-ah-speak to them, General? Or, um, I myself-"

Maytera Mint waved both hands and blew the onlookers half a dozen kisses; then the silver trumpet sounded, the trumpet that Maytera Marble had heard in Sun Street on that never to be forgotten Hieraxday when the Queen of the Whorl had manifested during her final sacrifice, ringing from every wall and cobble like a call to battle: "I am General Mint! His Eminence and I have been down in the tunnels where the Ayuntamiento's hiding, and Pas himself has given us instructions. We're going to the Grand Manteion! All of you are going there, too, aren't you?" She pointed with a wide gesture that was like the unsheathing of a sword.

There were cheers, and several voices shouted,
"Yes!
"

"Lord Pas's prophet, Auk, will be there. We know, because Lord Pas told us. Please! Do any of you know him?"

A giant, taller even than Remora, waved. He held a ram under his left arm, and a tame baboon trotted after him as he pushed through the crowd; Maytera Marble thought that she had never seen so big a bio, a bio nearly as big as a soldier.

"I do." His voice was like the thudding of a bass drurn. "I know you, too, General. Know you a dog's right, anyhow, but me an' Auk's a old knot." Legs like two pillars devoured the distance between them with swinging strides.

For a second time, Maytera Mint's small face went blank with surprise. "Gib! You're Gib! We charged the floaters on Cage Street together!"

"Pure quill, General." The giant dropped to one knee, eliciting an enraged bleat from the ram. "I'm Gib from the Cock, an' I was tryin' to stick by you, but that sham horse couldn't keep up. Too much weight's what Kingcup says. Then he took a slug an' down we went." He held up his free arm to show a cast, then touched the ridge above his eyes with the fingertips protruding from it. "So I can't salute like I'd like to, but Bongo here can. Salute the General lady, Bongo. Salute!"

The baboon rose on his hind legs, his forepaw seeming to shade startlingly human eyes.

Maytera Mint demanded, "But you know Auk, Gib? I mean Pas's prophet named Auk?"

Maytera Marble sensed her uncertainty. "She knows a man called Auk who went to our palaestra; but I don't believe she's sure he's the one Pas-Pas told you about this Auk, sib?"

"Yes!" Maytera Mint nodded so hard her short brown hair danced. "Just now, a few minutes ago, down in a chapel under the Palace. He came to the Window there, Maytera, and all of us could see him, even Spider and Eland. It was wonderful!"

The soldier carrying the feet of the fourth soldier said, "He talked about our sergeant. We gave him to Pas."

The third soldier objected, "He gave himself, that's how it was. Now Pas wants him fixed. Not 'cause he don't want him but 'cause we need him. Pas don't want to scrap him."

The augur tossed back a lock of lank black hair. "It-ah-gave. Sense of the word, hey? I myself-"

Maytera Mint was not to be distracted. "Do you know Auk the Prophet, Gib? Yes or no!"

"Sure do, General."

"Describe him!"

"He's part owner in my place, he's maybe forgot but he is. Pretty big cully." Gib waved his cast toward the larger of the rough-looking men. "Bout like him, only not so old. Got more hair than he needs an' ears that stick out of it anyhow."

"A strong, forthright jaw!" She was fairly dancing with anxiety and impatience.

"That's him, General. You could hang your washing on it." Gib chuckled, the laughter of a happy ogre hiding in his barrel chest. "I was wantin' to say he looks like Bongo here. Auk's my ol' knot an' wouldn't mind. Maybe you would of, though, an' maybe the god that's tapped him. Tartaros is what he says."