Nightside the Long Sun

“All of them good and thick,” Auk said, answering the question Silk had not asked, “and so’s the door. This was the Alambrera back in the old days. What do you like?”

Silk scanned the neatly lettered slate. “I’ll have the chops, I think.” At eighteen cardbits, the chops were the least expensive meal; and even if there were in fact only a single chop, this dinner would be his most bountiful meal of the week.

“How’d you get over the wall?” Auk asked when the host had gone. “Have any trouble?”

And so Silk told the whole story, from the cutting of his horsehair rope by a spike to his ride back to the city in Blood’s floater. Auk was roaring with laughter when the waiter brought their dinners, but he had grown very serious by the time Silk reached his interview with Blood.

“You didn’t happen to mention me any time while you were talking to him?”

Silk swallowed a luscious mouthful of chop. “No. But I very foolishly tried to speak with you through the glass in Hyacinth’s boudoir, as I told you.”

“He may not find out about that.” Auk scratched his chin thoughtfully. “The monitors lose track after a while.”

“But he may,” Silk said. “You’ll have to be on guard.”

“Not as much as you will, Patera. He’ll want to know what you wanted to talk to me about, and since you didn’t, he can’t get it from me. What are you going to tell him?”

“If I tell him anything at all, I’ll tell him the truth.”

Auk laid down his fork. “That I helped you?”

“That I knew you were concerned about my safety. That you had warned me about going out so late at night, and that I wanted to let you know I had not come to harm.”

Auk considered the matter while Silk ate. “It might go, Patera, if he thinks you’re crazy enough.”

“If he thinks I’m honest enough, you mean. The best way to be thought honest is to be honest—or at any rate that’s the best that I’ve ever found. I try to be.”

“But you’re going to try to steal twenty-six thousand for him, too.”

“If that’s what I must do to save our manteion, and I can get it in no other way, yes. I’ll be forced to choose between evils, exactly as I was last night. I’ll try to see that no one is hurt, of course, and to take the money only from those who can well afford to lose it.”

“Blood will take your money, Patera. And have a good laugh over it.”

“I won’t let him take it until he furnishes safeguards. But there’s something else I ought to tell you about. Did I mention that Blood wanted me to exorcise the yellow house?”

“Orchid’s place? Sure. That’s where that girl Orpine lived, only I never knew she was Orchid’s daughter.”

“She was.” There was butter and soft, fresh bread in the middle of the table; Silk took a slice and buttered it, wishing that he might take the whole loaf home to the manse. “I’m going to tell you about that, too. And about Orpine, who died possessed.”

Auk grunted. “That’s your lay, Patera, not mine.”

“Possession? It’s really no one’s now. Perhaps there was a time when most augurs believed in devils, as Patera Pike certainly did. But I may be the only augur alive who believes in them now, and even now I’m not certain that I believe in them in the same sense he did—as spirits who crept into the whorl without Pas’s permission and seek to destroy it.”

“What about Orpine? Was she really Orchid’s daughter?”

“Yes,” Silk said. “I spoke to Orchid about her and she admitted it. Practically boasted of it, in fact. What was Orpine like?”

“Good-looking.” Auk hesitated. “I don’t feel right talking about this stuff to you, Patera. She could be a lot of fun, because she didn’t care what she did or what anybody thought about it. You know what I mean? She would’ve made more money if she’d been better at making people think she liked them.”

Silk chewed and swallowed. “I understand. I wanted to know because I’ve been wondering about personalities, and so on—whether there’s a particular type of person who’s more prone to be possessed than another—and I never saw Orpine alive. I had been talking to her mother; we heard a scream and hurried outside, and found her lying there on the stair. She had been stabbed. Someone suggested that she might have stabbed herself. Her face—Have you ever seen a possessed person?”

Auk shook his head.

“Neither had I until this morning, shortly before I saw Orpine’s body.” Silk patted his lips with his napkin. “At any rate, she was dead; but even in death it seemed that her face was not quite her own. I remember thinking that there was something horrible about it, and a good deal that was familiar, as well. At first, the familiar part seemed quite easy. After I’d thought about it for a moment—the eyes and the shape of her nose and lips and so on—I realized that she looked rather like Orchid, the woman I’d just been speaking to. I asked her about it afterward, and she told me that Orpine had been her daughter, as I said.”

“Maybe I should’ve known, too,” Auk said, “but I never guessed. Orpine was a lot younger.”