Nightside the Long Sun

“No,” Silk told him. “And I don’t care. You’re going to make a profit of thirteen thousand cards on my manteion. You can use a fraction of it to replace what I’ve destroyed, if you choose. I don’t advise it.”

Blood kicked the pile of canvas. “None of the others did anything like this.”

“Nor were their exorcisms effective. Mine will be—or so I have reason to believe.” With the triptych centered between the lamps to his satisfaction, Silk turned to face Blood. “You are afflicted by devils, or one devil at least. I won’t bother to explain just who that devil is now, but do you know how a place or a person—any person—falls into the power of devils?”

“Pah! I don’t believe in them, Patera. No more than I do in your gods.”

“Are you serious?” Silk bent to retrieve the walking stick Blood had given him. “You said something of the sort yesterday morning, but you have a fine effigy of Scylla in front of your villa. I saw it.”

“It was there when I acquired the property. But if it hadn’t been, I might have put up something like that anyway, I admit. I’m a loyal son of Viron, Patera, and I like to show it.” Blood stooped to examine the triptych. “Where’s Pas?”

Silk pointed.

“That whirlwind? I thought he was an old man with two heads.”

“Any representation of a god is ultimately a lie,” Silk explained. “It may be a convenient lie, and it may even be a reverent one; but it’s ultimately false. Great Pas might choose to appear as your old man, or as the spiraling storm which is his eldest representation. Neither image would be more nearly true than the other, or more true than any other—merely more appropriate.”

Blood straightened up. “You were going to tell me about devils.”

“But I won’t, not at present at least. It would take some time, and you wouldn’t believe me in any case. You’ve saved me a decidedly unwelcome walk, however. I want you to assemble every living person in this house in this theater. Yourself, Musk if he’s come back, Crane, Orchid, Chenille, the bald man, all the young women, and anyone else who may be present. By the time you get them in here, I will have completed my preparations.”

Blood mopped his sweating face with a handkerchief. “I don’t take orders from you, Patera.”

“Then I will tell you this much about devils.” Silk freed his imagination and felt it soar. “They are here, and one person has died already. Once they have tasted blood, they grow fond of it. I might add that it is by no means unusual to find them acting upon merely verbal resemblances, notions that you or I might consider only puns. It’s apt to occur to them that if ordinary blood is good, the blood of Blood should be much better. You’d be wise to keep that in mind.”

* * *

The women arrived by twos and threes, curious and more or less willingly driven by Musk and the muscular bald man, whose name seemed to be Bass; soon they were joined by Loach and Moorgrass from Silk’s own manteion, both frightened and very glad to see him. Eventually Crane and a dry-eyed, grim Orchid took seats in the last row. Silk waited for Blood, Bass, and Musk to join them before he began.

“Let me describe—”

His words were drowned by the chattering of the women.

“Quiet!” Orchid had risen. “Shut up, you sluts!”

“Let me describe,” Silk began again, “what has happened here and what we will be trying to accomplish. The entire whorl was originally under the protection of Great Pas, the Father of the Gods. Otherwise it could never have existed.”

He paused, studying the faces of the twenty-odd young women before him intently, and feeling rather as if he were addressing Maytera Mint’s class in the palaestra. “Great Pas planned every part of it, and it was constructed by his slaves under his direction. In that way were the courses of all our rivers charted, and Lake Limna itself dug deep. In that way were the oldest trees planted, and the manteions through which we are to know him built. You are sitting, of course, in one such manteion. When the whorl was complete, Pas blessed it.”

Silk paused again, counting silently to three, as he so often had at the ambion, while he searched the faces of his audience for one that had come to resemble the mad girl’s, however subtly. “Even if you’re inclined to dispute what I’ve said, I require that you accept it for the present, for the sake of this exorcism. Is there anyone here who cannot accept it? If so, please stand.” He stared hard at Blood, but Blood did not rise.

“Very well,” Silk continued. “Please understand that it was not merely the whorl as a whole that received Pas’s blessing and with it his protection. Each individual part received it as well, and most have it still.

“At times, however, and for good reasons, Pas withdraws his protection from certain parts of this whorl he created. It may be a tree, a field, an animal, a person, or even an entire city. In this instance, it is surely a building—the one we are in now, the one that has since become a part of this house, so that Pas’s protection has departed from the entire house.”