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“Me and my knot,” Auk explicated.
Chenille added, “That’s me. I hope you don’t mind that I stayed to listen, Patera. But when Auk goes, I go too.”
“With my blessing,” Potto chortled. “Oh, yes! Very much so. I’ll be delighted to lose my accuser, and have the enemy lose its airship.”
He turned to Silk. “Will Spider be free to act in any way we choose against your cherished allies? That’s what it sounded like. You didn’t expect me to miss that, did you?”
“No.” Silk’s expression was guarded. “But if you had, I would have mentioned it to him. You may not be aware of it, but Maytera Mint left the tu
“A mystery!” Potto clapped his pudgy hands like a happy child. “I love them!”
“I don’t. I try to clear them up when I can, and I’ve been trying to clear up this one. My first thought was that this man Eland had been killed by some old enemy, most plausibly someone who had attended the sacrifice there the previous night and had seen him. I asked Auk to find out who that enemy might be, and had one of General Skate’s officers inquire as well.”
Silk shifted his attention from Potto to Spider. “The harder they looked, the less probable it appeared. Eland had not been a thief, as I had assumed, but a horse trainer who had killed his employer in a fit of rage. Presumably there was some public sympathy for him, since he was not executed. Auk could find nobody who knew of anyone who bore him a murderous grudge.”
Maytera Mint asked, “Did you consider Urus, Calde?”
“We did, but we quickly dismissed him. Eland had been a useful subordinate in the tu
“Got to protect his sources,” Spider explained. “That’s how it is, Maytera.”
“Most of Eland’s friends and relatives had assumed he was dead long ago,” Silk continued, “yet someone with a needler had quite deliberately climbed into the choir of the Grand Manteion to shoot him. Why? After I’d turned over the question for an hour or two, it occurred to me that someone might have made a mistake — that he might have intended to shoot another person entirely, and mistaken Eland for that person. Chenille here was able to tell me in considerable detail how everyone present had been dressed, and Auk and Spider appeared to be the only possibilities.”
Eyeing Spider, Oreb whistled.
“There were a number of sibyls present. All wore habits, and could be dismissed at once. So could Patera Incus and the body of Patera Jerboa — both were robed in black, as I am. No one could mistake a man for Chenille, and so on. If an error had been made, the intended victim was clearly Auk or Spider.”
Auk said, “I don’t think he was shooting at me.”
“Neither do I,” Silk told him. “You were near the altar, and thus somewhat nearer the killer. Furthermore, you were in a relatively well lit area. Spider and Eland were in a chapel behind the sanctuary, a more distant area as well as a more dimly lit one. I would guess that the killer had been given a verbal description of Spider, and had been told that he was being guarded by soldiers.”
Silk turned back to Spider. “Were you and Eland awake when he was shot?”
Spider nodded.
“Were you standing up?”
Spider shook his head. “We were sittin’ on the floor. That soldier wouldn’t let us get up unless we had a reason.”
“There you have it.” Silk shrugged. “At least, you have as much as I do. Sitting would tend to conceal the difference in size. Slate was guarding both of you, and from what I’ve heard, neither of you had been given an opportunity to wash and change clothes, as General Mint and Patera Remora did. In the dim light of the chapel, the killer may not have seen you at all. Or he may simply have felt that Eland corresponded more closely to the description he had been given.
“The question then became, who would want to kill Spider? Plausibly, the Ayuntamiento or the Trivigauntis. The first because he knows a great deal about its espionage and counterespionage activities, and about the tu
“I’d know about it. I’d have ordered it.” Potto giggled. “I didn’t.”
Silk nodded. “And you could easily have found an assassin who knows Spider by sight, I would think. The Trivigauntis are our allies — but they are Spider’s enemies, and he is said to know a great deal about their spies in Viron.” He fell silent.
Maytera Mint said, “You can’t be sure this is true.”
“No, I can’t; but I believe it very well may be. We stole a prisoner from Generalissimo Siyuf. Is it absurd to suppose that she might try to kill one we had? Since that may have been the case, it would be manifestly unjust to limit Spider’s activities with regard to Siyuf and her horde.”
“They went after me, so I can go after them,” Spider said.
“Exactly.”
Hyacinth touched Silk’s arm. “I don’t understand. Are we for them or against them?”
Maytera Mint was staring at Silk. “I feel this is almost ancient history, but before all this started — before poor Maytera Rose passed on, I felt that I understood you, just as I felt I understood myself. In the past ten days or so you’ve become somebody else, somebody I don’t understand at all, and so have I. You’re married now, I witnessed the ceremony, and I’m thinking about marrying too.”
A change in her expression told Silk that Bison’s hand had found hers.
After a moment of silence she added, “You’ve lost your faith, or most of it, I think. What’s happened to us?”
Potto laughed loudly.
Quetzal, seated between Oosik and Loris at the other end of the table, murmured, “Circumstances have changed, Maytera. That’s all, or nearly all. There is an essential core at the center of each man and woman that remains unaltered no matter how life’s externals may be transformed or recombined. But it’s smaller than we think.”
Silk nodded his agreement.
“If I — ah — permitted.” Remora pushed back the errant lock of lank, black hair. “The General and I were companions in, um, adversity. The — ah — spirit. The inalterable core, as His Cognizance has, um, finely. The spirit that survives even death. It grows when trod upon, like the dandelion. I have learned it, eh? So may you, if you — um — reflect.”
He stared down at his long, bony hands. “Wouldn’t have killed Spider, hey? In those tu
He spoke to Silk. “I, er, necessary that I talk to you about it, eh, Calde? Sun Street. Accounts and so on. When we’re, um, we’ve adjourned.”
Silk managed to say, “Gladly, Patera.”
“Stripped of, er, power. That’s the expression. Smaller, outside, growing, inside. I — ah — feel it.” He held up the gammadion he wore; it was of plain iron.
As much to cover his embarrassment as her own, Maytera Mint asked Silk, “You said everything Siyuf’s done since her horde arrived could be defended, and she’s our ally, and yet you’re letting Spider go? Free to attack her and the rest of the Trivigauntis in any way Potto chooses?”
Potto rocked with merriment. “Be her again, Silk, and you can shoot yourself.”
He shook his head. “I’m not being asked to defend Siyuf’s actions now, but my own. I have changed, I suppose, General, as you say; but I don’t think I’ve changed as much as you may imagine. The faith I had, I had learned as one learns other lessons — from reading and lectures and my mother’s example and conversation. I’m in the process, I believe, of replacing it with new faith gained from experience — from circumstances, as His Eminence says. You have to wreck the old structure, or so it seems to me, before you can build the new one; otherwise, it’s always getting in the way.”