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doubt in pursuit of the lounging youth he had noticed earlier.
    â€œThis bird’s stolen property, too, isn’t he?” Silk said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been keeping him under your table with the catachrest. You talked of threatening the poor wretch who sold you that. Roll him over to Hoppy, isn’t that what you said, my son?”
    The seller would not meet Silk’s eyes.
    â€œI’m no flash cull, but I’ve learned a little cant since I’ve been at my manteion. It means you threatened to inform on him to the Guard, doesn’t it? Suppose that I were to threaten you in the same way now. That would be no more than just, surely.”
    The seller leaned closer to Silk, as he had before, his head turned to one side as if he himself were a bird, though possibly he was merely conscious of the garlic that freighted his breath. “It’s just to make ’em think they’re gettin’ a bargain, Patera, I swear. Which you are.”
    *   *   *
    The hour for the palaestra’s assembly was striking when Silk returned with the night chough. A hurried sacrifice, he decided, might be worse than none, and the live bird would be a ruinous distraction. The manse had doors on Sun and Silver Streets, but he kept them bolted, as Patera Pike had. He let himself in by the garden gate, and trotted down the graveled path between the west wall of the manteion and the sickly fig tree, swung left between the grape arbor and Maytera Marble’s herb garden, and took the manse’s disintegrating steps two at a time. Opening the kitchen door, he set the birdcage on the shaky wooden table, pumped vigorously until the water gushed forth clear and cold, and left a full cup within easy reach of the big bird’s crimson beak. By then he could hear the students trooping into the manteion. Smoothing his hair with a damp hand, he darted off to address them at the conclusion of their day.
    The low door at the rear of the manteion stood open for ventilation. Silk strode through it, up a short stair whose treads had been sloped and hollowed by the hastening feet of generations of augurs, and into the dim sanctum behind the Sacred Window. Still thinking of the market and the morose black bird he had left in the kitchen of the manse, fumbling mentally for something of real significance that he might say to seventy-three students whose ages ranged from eight to almost sixteen, he verified power and scanned the Sacred Window’s registers. All were empty. Had Great Pas actually come to this very Window? Had any god, ever? Had Great Pas, as Patera Pike had averred so often, once congratulated and encouraged him, urging him to prepare, to stand ready for the hour (soon to come, or so Pas had appeared to intimate) when this present whorl would vanish, would be left behind?
    Such things seemed impossible. Testing connections with an angled arm of the voided cross he wore, Silk prayed for faith; and then—stepping carefully across a meandering primary cable whose insulation was no longer to be relied upon—drew a deep breath, stepped from behind the Window, and took his place at the chipped ambion that through so many such assemblies had been Patera Pike’s.
    Where slept Pike now, that good old man, that faithful old servant who had slept so badly, who had nodded off for a moment or two—only a moment or two—at each meal they had shared? Who had both resented and loved the tall young acolyte who had been thrust upon him after so many years, so many slow decades of waiting alone, who had loved him as no one had except his mother?
    Where was he now, old Patera Pike? Where did he sleep, and did he sleep well there at last? Or did he wake as he always had, stirring in the long bedroom next to Silk’s own, his old bed creaking, creaking? Praying at midnight or past midnight, at shadeup with the skylands fading, praying as Viron extinguished its bonfires and its