“And in that house in the Algedonic Quarter—”

“I am also a criminal... just as you are.”

There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. I, who had always thought myself, though not truly intelligent, at least prudent and quick to learn simple things, who had always counted myself the practical and foreseeing one when I had travelled with Jonas or Dorcas, had never until that instant connected the Autarch’s position at the very apex of the structure of legality with his certain knowledge that I had penetrated the House Absolute as an emissary of Vodalus. At that moment, I would have leaped up and fled from the pavilion if I could, but my legs were like water.

“All of us are—all of us must be who must enforce the law. Do you think your guild brothers would have been so severe with you—and my agent reports that many of them wished to kill you—if they had themselves been guilty of something of the same kind? You were a danger to them unless you were terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted. A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster/alternately purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and nothing.

“So I became a criminal. The violent crimes offended my love of humanity, and I lack the quickness of hand and thought required of a thief. After blundering about for some time... that would be in about the year you were born, I suppose ... I found my true profession. It takes care of certain emotional needs I cannot now satisfy otherwise ... and I have, I really do have, a knowledge of human nature. I know just when to offer a bribe and how much to give, and, the most important thing, when not to. I know how to keep the girls who work for me happy enough with their careers to continue, and discontented enough with their fates.... They’re khaibits, of course, grown from the body cells of exultant women so an exchange of blood will prolong the exultants’ youth. I know how to make my clients feel that the encounters I arrange are unique experiences instead of something midway between dewy-eyed romance and solitary vice. You felt that you had a unique experience, didn’t you?”

“That’s what we call them too,” I said. “Clients.” had been listening as much to the tone of his voice as to his words. He was happy, as I thought he had not been on either of the other occasions on which I had encountered him, and to hear him was like hearing a thrush speak. He almost seemed to know it himself, lifting his face and extending his throat, the Rs in arrange and romance trilled into the sunlight.

“It is useful too. It keeps me in touch with the underside of the population, so I know whether or not taxes are really being collected and whether they’re thought fair, which elements are rising in society and which are going down.”

I sensed that he was referring to me, though I had no idea what he meant. “Those women from the court,” I said.

“Why didn’t you get the real ones to help you? One of them was pretending to be Thecla when Thecla was locked under our tower.”

He looked at me as though I had said something particularly stupid, as no doubt I had. “Because I can’t trust them, of course. A thing like that has to remain a secret.... Think of the opportunities for assassination. Do you believe that because all those gilded personages from ancient families bow so low in my presence, and smile, and whisper discreet jokes and lewd little invitations, they feel some loyalty to me? You will learn differently, you may be sure. There are few at my court I can trust, and none among the exultants.”

“You say I’ll learn differently. Does that mean you don’t intend to have me executed?” I could feel the pulse in my neck and see the scariet gout of blood.

“Because you know my secret now? No. We have other uses for you, as I told you when we talked in the room behind the picture.”

“Because I was sworn to Vodalus.”

At that his amusement mastered him. He threw back his head and laughed, a plump and happy child who had just discovered the secret of some clever toy. When the laughter subsided at last into a merry gulping, he clapped his hands. Soft though they looked, the sound was remarkably loud.

Two creatures with the bodies of women and the heads of cats entered. Their eyes were a span apart and as large as plums; they strode on their toes as dancers sometimes do, but more gracefully than any dancers I have ever seen, with something m their motions that told me it was their normal gait. I have said they had the bodies of women, but that was not quite true, for I saw the tips of claws sheathed in the short, soft fingers that dressed me. In wonder, I took the hand of one and pressed it as I have Sometimes pressed the paw of a friendly cat, and saw the claws barred. My eyes brimmed with tears at the sight of them, because they were shaped like that claw that is the Claw, that once lay concealed in the gem that I, in my ignorance, called the Claw of the Conciliator. The Autarch saw I was Weeping, and told the woman-cats they were hurting me and must put me down. I felt like an infant who has just learned he will never see his mother again.

“We do not harm him. Legion,” one protested in such a voice as I had never heard before.

“Put him down, I said!”

“They have not so much as grazed my skin, Sieur,” I told him.

With the woman-cats’ support I was able to walk. It was morning, when all shadows flee the first sight of the sun; the tight that had wakened me had been the earliest of the new day. Its freshness filled my lungs now, and the coarse grass over which we walked darkened my scuffed old boots with its dew; a breeze faint as the dim stars stirred my hair.