Tours of the Black Clock

161

MY NAME IS BANNING Jainlight, a voice says to her fifteen years later; but it’s only a voice in her head, after all, and she herself gave him that name. No dead man lies at her feet now. When she turns to the doorway and sees her son there, as she did fifteen years before, she has no reason to believe the voice she hears in her head speaks in his head as well. When the whitehaired rivermonk sees that the girl in the blue dress is not in his mother’s room as he’d expected to find her, he bolts from the doorway just as he did the time before, his second such lapse, though this one cannot be said to interrupt a life of innocence. He runs back out into the street, stepping on the glass from the windows he broke in his evening’s rampage. Greek Judy stands watching him from the doorway of her tavern. When Marc arrives at the boat, the passengers are still huddled in terror, waiting to be delivered back to shore; the journey is furious. At her tavern, Judy can hear the tourists’ screams from out of the river’s fog. Business is going to be off awhile, she thinks, or perhaps even says out loud, though no one else is there to say for sure.