He himself turned then and strode rapidly away, the bare wooden tip of his staff striking at the rutted surface of the street with every step, rapping stones and splattering mud over his shoes and the cuffs of his ragged brown trousers.

Here the children had played, taking Maytera's clotheslines for jump ropes. They had jumped to Blue some time ago, the sad, halfstarved little girls with the black bangs, with the long black pigtails braided with scraps of bright yarn. To Blue, and some to Green; and those would be, largely, dead.

This fire-blackened shiprock wall, these empty, staring windows, had been the cenoby's once. While the whorl slept Maytera had knelt, not to pray but to scrub this stone step so black with ash indistinguishable from mud. Maytera Mint had dressed and undressed in there, in a darkened room behind a locked door and drawn blinds, had mended worn underclothes and covered her virginal bed with an old oilcloth tablecloth, knowing that the merest shower would lend new waters to the sagging belly of her ceiling.

That ceiling would sag no more; the leaking roof on which Maytera had climbed to watch the Trivigaunti airship was all leak now, and the broad, dark door of sturdy oak that Maytera Rose had barred each night before the last thread of sun vanished had been burned long ago-whether for firewood or in the fire that had swept the quarter when the war with Trivigaunte began scarcely mattered. Anyone might go into the cenoby now, and no one wanted to.

The stone wall that had separated the garden from the street was largely intact, though the gate and rusted padlock were gone. Inside, weeds and blackberry brambles, and-yes-a straggling grape vine climbing the blackened stump of the fig tree. Enough of their arbor remained to sit on. He sat, leaned back, and shut his eyes; and in time a youthful sibyl sat down across from him, extracted a recorder from one of the voluminous pockets of her black bombazine habit, and began to play.

Sun Street had taken him to the market, and Manteion Street to the Palatine. Here was the Calde's Palace, its fallen wall repaired with new mortar and stones that almost matched.

"Patera… Patera?" The voice was soft yet thick-oddly wrong. He looked around, not so much to find the woman who spoke as to locate the augur she addressed.

"Patera… Patera Silk?"

He stepped back and scanned the windows. The shadow of a head and shoulders showed at one on the topmost floor. "Mucor?" He tried to keep his voice low, while making it loud enough to be heard fifty or sixty cubits overhead.

"She's not here… She's not here, Patera."

It's the bird, he thought. The bird makes her think I'm Silk. He realized even as he formed the thought that Oreb was gone, that he had sent Oreb away with Pig.

"Please… "

He had not heard the rest, yet he knew what he had been asked to do. The massive doors were locked. He banged them with the heavy brass knocker, each blow as loud as the report of a slug gun.

There was no answering sound from within the palace; and at last he turned away, tramping wearily down the balustraded steps to the street. The high window was empty now, and the thick, soft voice (female but not feminine) silent. He squinted up at the motionless sun. The shade was almost down; the market would be closing. He had told-had promised-Pig that he would rejoin him in Ermine's before evening, but Ermine's was only two or three streets away.

He had just crossed the first when fingers, thin but hard and strong, closed on his elbow. He turned to see a slight, stooped figure no larger than a child, muffled in what appeared to be sacking. "Please… Please, Patera. Please, won't you talk to… Please won't you talk to me?"

"I'm not an augur. You're thinking of somebody else."

"You've forgotten… You've forgotten me." The muffled sound that followed might or might not have been a sob. "Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine… Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine, Patera?"

There was something amiss in the angle of her head, and the high, hunched shoulders. Pity almost choked him. "No," he said, "I haven't forgotten you, Olivine." It was not a lie, he told himself fiercely; one could not forget what one had not known.

"You'll bless… You'll bless me?" There was joy in the voice from the sackcloth. "Sacrifice, the way you used… Sacrifice, the way you used to? Father's gone… Father's gone away. He's been gone a long, long time… He's been gone a long, long time, Patera." She was drawing him after her, back toward the Calde's Palace. "There's a… There's a woman? In the north… In the north, Patera."

Someone who might help her, obviously. Someone who might be able to cure whatever disease afflicted the pathetic figure before him. "A wise woman," he hazarded.

"Oh… Oh, yes! Oh, I hope… Oh, I hope so!"

They dodged down a side street. The wall of the Calde's Palace, elegantly varied with high narrow windows in elaborate stone frames, gave way to the almost equally imposing, windowless wall of the Calde's Garden, a wall of heroic stones, rough and misshapen yet fitted like the pieces of a puzzle.

The diminutive, limping figure drew him on far faster than he would willingly have walked. Leprosy? It had been only a word in the Writings to him. There were running sores, or pus oozing from the skin-something disgusting. Good people in the Writings, theodidacts such as Patera Silk particularly, were exceedingly kind to those who suffered this dread disease, which he had heard was rare-had heard from an augur, probably. From someone such as Patera Remora, who had attended the schola.

Abruptly they stopped. A door of iron so low that he would almost have to crawl through like Pig was deeply set between mammoth stones, in a dark little recess that also held an empty bottle and brown, wind-blown leaves. From some recess equally dark within her sackcloth, Olivine produced a brass key bruised with verdigris; there was a dim flash, as of polished steel. Thrust into the iron door, the key rattled and squealed. A bolt thumped solidly, and Olivine whispered, "Quadrifons…

The iron door swung back.

Ducking through the doorway, he had to bend lower still to pass beneath the massive limbs of an ancient oak. Beyond was a bed of bright chrysanthemums, glorious in the last flickering sunshine. Somewhere a fountain played. "I didn't know there were doors like that," he said, sounding inane even to himself. "I mean doors that had to have a word, and a key as well." And then, "That is a sacred name. So sacred that it's hardly ever used. I'm surprised you know it."

She stopped and looked back him. He thought he caught the gleam of thick spectacles between the rough cloth that covered her head and the fold of rough cloth that masked her face. "It's just a… It's just a word. The one for the… The one for the door. My… My mother." (Something deeply pathetic had entered her voice.) "I don't remember… I don't remember her. She was a… She was a sibyl? That's what my father… That's what my father says. She was a… She was a sibyl."

"Would you like to me to tell you about Quadrifons?"

Olivine nodded, the motion almost imperceptible beneath the shadowing oak limbs and the folds of cloth. "Would you… Would you, Patera?"

"I'm not Patera Silk," he said. "You're wrong about that. But I'll tell you what I know, which isn't much."

His back felt as though it might break; kneeling was a great relief. "Quadrifons is the most holy of the minor gods. I mean, he's called that in the Chrasmologic Writings. If it were left to me-as plainly it is not-I'd say that the Outsider is the most holy god, and indeed that he's the only god, major or minor, who's really holy at all." He laughed, a trifle nervously. "So you see why I'm not an augur, Olivine. But the Writings say it's Quadrifons, and the Chapter says that his name is so holy that it should hardly ever be used, so it won't be profaned."