The drone of Remora’s prayer reminded her of the singsong voices of children in the classroom, recifing the multiplication table, memorizing prayers for meals, for betrothals, for the dead. Had she taught girls this year? Or boys? She could not remember.

We would have kissed and held hands, and done what men and women do, and I would have borne you a child, perhaps, my own child. But when I met Bison…

“All right, General, let him go. I got to fold this over him.” Suddenly Hyrax was no longer a dead man, but a statue or a picture, still visible but blurred and faintly blue through the synthetic.

“His knife.” She rose, dusting loose earth from her black skirt by reflex. “You’ll need his knife for the paper.”

“I already got it. You want to help, Patera? I could do it alone, but it’ll be easier with two.” They crouched, one on either side, and Spider said, “Lift when I do, see? A-one and a-two and a-three!”

Raising the shrouded corpse to waist level, they slid it into its grave; and he began shovelling earth after it, pausing from time to time to tamp the damp dark face of death with the handle of his spade. He said, “You’re wonderin’ why we don’t dig them down the way you usually do, I guess.”

“The, um, papers,” Remora ventured. “Stepped upon, eh? Trodden.”

“There’s that. But mostly it’s easier to dig here. Then too, we’d have to walk on the old ones to bury the new ones.”

As they were leaving the guardroom with Guan stretched on a fresh sheet of poly, laughter, faint and mad, echoed in the main tunnel. “Wait!” Maytera Mint told Remora. “Did you hear that? You must have!”

He shuddered. “I — ah — possibly.”

“Will you do me a favor, Your Eminence?” She did not wait for his assent. “Go back in there and get two packages of that dried meat. One for yourself, and one for me. We can put them in our pockets.”

“That — ah — merriment…”

“I have no idea, Your Eminence. I have a feeling, a presentiment, if you will, that we may need food.”

“If we — er — never mind.” Remora vanished into the guardroom.

When he returned, Maytera Mint handed him a needler.

“But I am — er — better, perhaps, with you, eh, General? Your, um, forte.”

“That isn’t Spider’s, it’s Guan’s,” she told him. “Spider said a needler was what he usually used, remember? It didn’t really make much of an impression at the time, but afterward, thinking about that poor man who dressed as a woman, it struck me that the other spy-catchers must have done the same thing. They would want some sort of a weapon, and before the rebellion nobody but a Guardsman could walk around the city carrying a slug gun. Then I wondered — this was while we were bringing Hyrax — what they did with them when they got their slug guns. It seemed likely that most of them had simply put them in their waistbands, under their tunics, where they were accustomed to carrying them.”

“Most, um, sagacious.”

“Thank you, Your Eminence. Anyway, whatever that was we heard wasn’t a soldier. Do you agree?”

“I, um, indubitably.” Remora stared down at the needler in his hand.

“Or a chem at all, any kind of chem. So a needler should work, and we may need them, just as we may need this meat, for which I haven’t yet thanked you. Thank you very much, Your Eminence. It was a great condescension for you to oblige me as you have.”

“You must know how to, um, operate? Manage this?” Remora might not have heard her.

“It’s not difficult. Push that down,” she pointed to the safety catch, “when you wish to shoot. Point it, and pull the trigger. If you want to shoot a second needle, pull it again. I won’t show you how to reload now. There isn’t time, and we don’t have any more needles anyway.”

Remora gulped and nodded.

“In your waistband under your robe, perhaps. I believe that’s where our calde must carry his.”

“I — ah. It would be, er, inadvisable, hey? When we return to the — ah — up there.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” Maytera Mint stooped for a corner of the sheet of synthetic on which Guan’s body lay. “We’d better go now, and quickly, or Spider will wonder what delayed us.”

At the end of the side tunnel she knelt as she had before, trying to keep her mind upon appropriate petitions to the gods. Guan had kicked her shortly before Spider had locked her away with Remora so that he and his men could sleep; the right side of her thigh was still sore and stiff. She had scarcely given it a thought since it had happened, or so she had convinced herself. Now that Guan was dead, now that Guan lay before her, she found she could not free her mind from the memory of that kick. It was easy to mouth I forgive you, and to ask the gods, Echidna particularly, not to hold the kick against him; yet she felt that her forgiveness did not reach her heart, however hard she tried to bring it there.

The transparent sheet covered Guan as a sister sheet from the parent roll had covered Hyrax, and Maytera Mint got to her feet. What was the third man’s name? He had been the quietest of their captors; she had thought him sullen and marked him as potentially the most dangerous. She would never know, now, whether she had been correct.

“How ’bout if you dig for Sewellel, Patera? I’ll go back with General Mint here and fetch him.”

“Why, ah—”

She saw Remora assure himself that his needler was in place with a touch of his forearm, and said, “He’s not going to attack me, Your Eminence. He would like to speak to me in private, I imagine.”

Remora managed to smile. “In that, um, circumstances, I shall — ah — comply. With all good will.”

“What it really is,” Spider told him, “is I want to see if you can do it right. You’ll have to dig for me, see? You seen me do it. Now you do for Sewellel and Paca, and that’ll be two for each of us. Let’s move out, General.”

Obediently, she followed him down the side tunnel. “What I told Patera’s lily,” Spider said as they walked. “You know that word? Means the truth.”

“Yes, I do, though I’ve always considered it children’s slang. My pupils use it sometimes.”

“But that you said, General. That was the lily too.”

She nodded, striving to make her nod sympathetic.

“I’m sorry about the way I talk. Sometimes I swear when I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I always do.”

“I understand, believe me.”

He stopped abruptly. “Thing is, I don’t believe you. Or him, back there. Patera What’shisface.

“Remora.”

Spider waved aside Remora’s identity. “Echidna made you a general? She talked to you about it?”

“She certainly did.”

“Could you see her like you’re seein’ me now? Could you make out what she was sayin’? She talked to you out of one of those big glasses they got in manteions?”

“Exactly. I can repeat everything she said, if you wish. I’d be happy to.” This was a return to familiar ground, and Maytera Mint felt more confident than she had since she and Remora had passed through the ruined gate of Blood’s villa.

“I know somebody that says he couldn’t really hear the words. He just knew what she meant.”

“He had known woman,” Maytera Mint explained, hoping that Spider would understand what she intended by known. “Or else he had… Excuse this, please. The indelicacy.”

“Sure thing.”

“He had known another man, or a boy, as men know women. That man you told us about? Titi? I should imagine—”

“Yeah, so do I, and the other way, too. Sure he did. Is that the only reason?”

“It is. By Echidna’s will, those who have enjoyed carnal knowledge of others may not behold the gods. Nor may they hear them distinctly, though in most cases they understand them. It varies between individuals, and several reasons have been put forward for that. If you don’t mind, I won’t explain those in detail. They concern the frequency and the specific natures of various sexual relations. You can readily construct them, or similar theories, for yourself.”