Nightside the Long Sun

As Auk had indicated, there was a central building of two stories, with wings whose rows of windows showed them to be three, although the original structure was nearly as tall as they. Both the original structure and its wings appeared to be of the same smooth, grayish stone as the wall, and all three were so high that throwing the limb onto the roof of any appeared quite impossible. To enter them directly, he would have to discover an unbolted door or force one of the ground-floor casements, exactly as he and the other boys had broken into the deserted house a few years before he left home to attend the schola. He winced at the thought.

On the farther end of the wing on the right, however (the structure most remote from his old vantage point), was a more modest addition whose decorative merlons appeared to stand no more than a scant ten cubits above the lawn; the size and close spacing of its numerous windows suggested that it might be a conservatory. Silk noted it for future use and turned his attention to the grounds.

The broad grassway that curved so gracefully up to the pillared portico of Blood’s villa was bordered with bright flower beds. Some distance in front of that entrance, a fine porcelain Scylla writhed palely among the sprays of an ostentatious fountain, spewing water alike from her woman’s mouth and her upraised tentacles.

Scented water, in fact; sniffing the almost motionless air like a hound, Silk caught the fragrance of tea roses. Postponing judgement on Blood’s taste, he nodded approvingly at this tangible evidence of pious civic feeling. Perhaps Blood was not really such a bad man after all, no matter what Auk thought. Blood had provided three cards for a sacrifice; it might well be that if Blood were approached in the right way he would be amenable to reason. Possibly the Outsider’s errand would come to no more than that, in the end. Giving rein to this pleasing line of thought for a second or two, Silk imagined himself comfortably seated in some luxurious chamber of the villa before him, laughing heartily over his own adventures with the prosperous-looking man with whom he had spoken in Sun Street. Why, even a contribution toward necessary repairs might not be entirely out of the question.

On the farther side of the grassway …

The distant roar of an approaching floater made him look around. With running lights blazing through its own dust, it was hurtling along the public road in the direction of the main gate. Quickly he stretched himself flat behind the row of spikes.

As the floater braked, two figures in silvered conflict armor shot away from the portico on highriders. At the same moment, the talus rounded the conservatory (if that was what it was) at full tilt, dodging trees and shrubs as it rolled across the lawn nearly as fast as the highriders; after it bounded half a dozen sinuous, seemingly tailless beasts with bearded faces and horned heads.

While Silk watched fascinated, the thick metal arms of the talus stretched like telescopes, twenty cubits or more to catch hold of a ring high in the wall near the gate. For a second they paused. An unseen chain rattled and creaked. They shrank, drawing the ring and its chain with them, and the gate rose.

The shadow of a drifting cloud from the east veiled the pillars of the portico, then the steps at their bases; Silk murmured a frantic appeal to Tartaros and tried to judge its speed.

There was a faint and strangely lonely whine from the blowers as the floater glided under the gate’s rounded arch. One of the horned beasts sprang onto its transparent canopy, appearing to crouch upon empty air until it was driven off snarling by the armored men, who cursed and brandished their short-tubed slug guns as if to strike it. The drifting shadow had reached Scylla’s fountain by the time the horned beast sprang away.

The talus let the heavy gate fall again as the floater swept proudly up the darkening grassway, escorted by the highriders and accompanied by all six horned beasts, which rose upon their hind legs again and again to peer inside. It halted and settled onto the grass before the wide stone steps of the villa, and the talus called the horned beasts from it with a shrill shuddering wail that could have issued from no human throat.

As the brilliantly dressed passengers disembarked, Silk leaped from the wall and dashed across the lawn toward the conservatory, with a desperate effort flung the forked limb over its ornamental battlement, and swarmed up the horsehair rope, over the battlement, and onto the roof.

THE WHITE-HEADED ONE