"Sun's come around," someone said. "Everybody move one place."

Shade.

At evening one let out a light he had brought, but the air drew it away toward Service City, and one by one they followed it there. We lay together as the moon rose and remade our shade house all different.

"Do you think," she said then, moving away from me by a series of slow changes of posture, "that there are four doors along your spine? And how do you think they open?"

"I don't know," I said, following her.

"Neither do I."

There was a faint rumble of thunder, like someone huge, over the horizon, grumbling in his sleep; and as we lay together our moon house too gradually moved away from under us, leaving us splashed with still, cold light.

And September's tile shown at the time table made eight in one pile, four in the other.

"I know her," I said when I saw it, "and now I know those two as well."

"How could you know them?" she asked.

"Because you showed them to me. Look: there's the old one, who comes out when it's dark; and see? she waits now, inside, in this month, and the two children are out…"

"No, you're wrong."

"And in the next months she'll be out, and they'll be hid."

"They won't," she said. "They're just two, like any two…"

"Dark and light," I said, "just as you said, don't you remember…"

"No!" she shouted, to silence me.

The tile we looked at showed a golden engine-summer day. The two children walked together with shining faces; slung over his shoulder by a strap was some Book, and she carried proudly a bright September apple. In all this it was like every other tile, he and she, she in her dress of blue, in a day just the color of the month it pictured, as though squeezed from the month as from a fruit. But in this month only, there was somebody else: the children walked smiling toward a tiny red house with a peaked roof, in whose door could just be seen a small and aged woman.

And yes, it would grow dark, though it was nice now; the old woman would come out, and the two children must retire to wherever they could, to wait out the dark months, isn't that right? The angels, even in their covered cities without weather, would not have forgotten that, that in warm perfect engine summer the old woman waited…

"No!" she said, and ran from me.

"I want to understand," I said, when I found her amid her pillows on the mezzanine. "You have to speak truthfully to me. There was the house on the wall you showed me, where St. Roy's leg was kept. The children came out when it was light, and the old woman when it was dark. In between were the four dead men, who never changed. It was about the weather. So are the tiles."

"Yes. About the weather."

"Yes. But, when we saw it, a cloud passed overhead, and the old woman didn't come out; and the last time I saw it, on the day you left, it was spring, and yet the old woman stood there..

She lay face down away from me, her head on her arms like a cat; now she turned her face to see me. "Then," she said, "was it about the weather?"

"I don't know. What else was it about? Why can't I hear it in what you say?"

She turned her face away again. "The tiles are about the weather. The angels made them to tell the months, and they are very true. That's all."

"Then why did you run from me?"

She said nothing, and though she lay still I felt her run from me further. I wanted to pursue her where she ran, and I took her shoulders in my hands as though to stop her, restrain her: but she had fled.

There's a certain kind of dream, the kind where you set off to do an urgent errand, or a task, and directions are given you, but as you go on the places you have been sent to are not the places you intended to go, and the nature of the task changes; the person you set out to find becomes the one who sent you; the thing you were to do turns into a place, and the place into a box of treasure or a horrid rumor; and the goal can never be reached because it's never the same goal; and yet you search on, never surprised by these changes, only persistent, only endlessly trying to do the changing thing set before you.

Until you wake, and there is no search after all.

"Once a Day," I said, and laid my cheek against her hair, which hid her face; "Once a Day, tell me there's no winter; tell me winter never comes, and I'll believe you."

Second Facet

On a blowing, rain-swept day which I would have called the first day of November but which the calendar called the twentieth of September, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors, summoned by Zhinsinura. She sat at the time table with September's tile before her.

"Did you wonder who they are?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Just two," she said. "Like any two in this month. The other is an old woman, to whom in this month they go for counsel." She smiled at me. Her big solemn head was made bigger by her wide gray hair, and her eyes were many-pouched and always sad; but her smile was quick and real. "And how do you get on, now, warren boy?"

"Fine," I said, and would have said nothing more, but that Zhinsinura wouldn't hear in my speech just what I meant, what was fine and what not. "Can you tell me, though, what a letter from Dr. Boots is?"

There were others there, working and sitting, some I knew. I had got used to being stared at around Service City; I would have preferred now to be alone with Zhinsinura, but that's not the List's way. The others looked at me with great interest.

"It's a letter," she said. "And it's from Dr. Boots."

I felt their eyes on me. I looked down at Zhinsinura's long hands feeling the smooth edges of the tile. "There's something," I said carefully, "a thing, that I don't know."

"Always, I should hope."

"That's what she seems to mean. Your dark and light, you know, it's not an easy thing to understand. I thought I'd seen a path, that it was about winter coming; but that was only another riddle; and she seems to say the riddles are answers."

"Every riddle is its own answer," said Zhinsinura. "That's easy. But how could a riddle know its own answer? Don't think I mock you. I don't mean to, a bit. It is a secret thing. The truthful speakers haven't much believed in such secrets, is all. You ask for her secret, though you may not know that's what you're about; and she can't tell you without learning it herself. And she wants not to learn that secret."

"How can you have a secret you don't know?"

The others there looked away now. They didn't like this conversation, not the younger ones; the older weren't listening any more; but Zhinsinura only laced her fingers together and leaned toward me smiling. "Well, how do you speak truthfully?" she asked. "Let's both tell a secret."

"That's not a secret," I said. "It's something you learn so well you forget you know it."

"Well then," she said, opening her hands, "there it is."

Painted Red had said: for Whisper cord a secret isn't something you won't tell, but something that can't be told. "There's something," I said slowly, like someone stupid, "I don't know. I want to know it. There must be a way to learn it, because you all know it. If it can't be told, I'll learn it any way there is."

Zhinsinura's steady eyes seemed hooded and pouched from so much seeing. "Do you know what you ask?" she said gently. "You know, a thing about secrets is that once you learn one, you know it for good. It's your secret. You don't go back out and stand outside again not knowing. There's no way back Out."