Wolfe, Gene - Solar Cycle 12 - Return to the Whorl by Wolfe Gene

Author:Wolfe, Gene [Wolfe, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction - Adventure, Fiction - Science Fiction, Interplanetary voyages, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312873646
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2002-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

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'veforgotten 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.

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