Nightside the Long Sun

He tried to hurry across the intervening tiles to the trapdoor, but their glazed, convex, and unstable surfaces hindered him, quite literally at every stride. Twice tiles cracked beneath his impatient feet; and when he had nearly reached the trapdoor, he slipped unexpectedly and fell, and saved himself from rolling down the roof only by clutching at the rough masonry of the third chimney.

It was reassuring to note that this roof, like those of the wings and the conservatory, was walled with ornamental battlements. He would have had a bad time of it if it had not been for the chimney; he was glad he had escaped it. He would have been shaken and bruised, and he might well have made enough noise to attract the attention of someone inside the villa. But at the end of that ignominious fall he would not have dropped from the edge of the roof to his death. Those blessed battlements (which had been of so much help to him ever since he had dashed from the wall across the grounds) were, now that he came to think of it, one of the recognized symbols in art of Sphigx, the lion-goddess of war; and Lion had been the name of Mucor’s horned cat—of the animal she called her lynx, which had not harmed him. Taking all that into account, who could deny that Fierce Sphigx favored him also?

Silk caught his breath, made sure of his footing, and let go of the chimney. Here, not a hand’s breadth from the toe of his right shoe, was the thing that he had slipped on—this blotch on the earthen-red surface of the roof. He stooped and picked it up.

It was a scrap of raw skin, an irregular patch about as large as a handkerchief from the pelt of some animal, still covered with coarse hair on one side and slimy with rotting flesh and rancid fat on the other, reeking with decay. He flung it aside with a snort of disgust.

The trapdoor lifted easily; below it was a steep and tightly spiraled iron stair. A more conventional stairway, clearly leading to the upper floor of the original villa, began a few steps from the bottom of the iron one. Briefly he paused, looking down at it, to savor his triumph.

He had been carrying his horsehair rope in an untidy coil, and had dropped it when he slipped. He retrieved it and wound it around his waist beneath his robe, as he had when he had set out from the manteion that evening. It was always possible, he reminded himself, that he would need it again. Yet he felt as he had during his last year at the schola, when he had realized that final year would actually be easier than the one before it—that his instructors no more wished him to fail after he had studied so long than he himself did, and that he would not be permitted to fail unless he curtailed his efforts to an almost criminal degree. The whole villa lay open before him, and he knew, roughly if not precisely, where Blood’s bedchamber was located. In order to succeed, he had only to find it and conceal himself there before Blood retired. Then, he told himself with a pleasant sensation of virtue, he would employ reason, if reason would serve; if it would not …

It would not, and the fault would be Blood’s, not his. Those who opposed the will of a god, even a minor god like the Outsider, were bound to suffer.

Silk was pushing the long handle of his hatchet through the rope around his waist when he heard a soft thump behind him. Dropping the trapdoor, he whirled. Leaping so that it appeared taller than many men, a huge bird flapped misshapen wings, shrieked like a dozen devils, and struck at his eyes with its hooked bill.

Instinctively, he threw himself backward onto the top of the trapdoor and kicked. His left foot caught the white-headed bird full in the body without slowing its attack in the least. Vast wings thundering, it lunged after him as he rolled away.

By some prodigy of good luck he caught it by its downy neck; but the carpels of its wings were as hard as any man’s knuckles, and were driven by muscles more powerful than the strongest’s. They battered him mercilessly as both tumbled.

The edge of the crenel between two merlons was like a wedge driven into his back. Still struggling to keep the bird’s cruel, hooked beak from his face and eyes, he jerked the hatchet free; a carpal struck his forearm like a hammer, and the hatchet fell to the stone pavement of the terrace below.

The white-headed one’s other carpal struck his temple and the illusory nature of the world of the senses was made manifest: it narrowed to a miniature, artificially bright which Silk endeavored to push away until it winked out.

NEW WEAPONS

A whole whorl swam beneath Silk’s flying, beclouded eyes—highland and tableland, jungle and dry scrub, savannah and pampa. The plaything of a hundred idle winds, buffeted yet at peace, he sailed over them all, dizzy with his own height and speed, his shoulder nudged by storm cloud, the solitary Flier three score leagues below him a darting dragonfly with wings of lace.