Merwen hoped that others would keep as calm as Usha, as she watched her sisters gather. Tension ran as high as when the Great Unspeaking occurred, years before. But this time they would have to stick together and chart a single course.
If only Nisi would come back to help, instead of hiding on Leni-el in fear of her death-mad lovesharer. Merwen loathed secretiveness, but Nisi had pleaded for freedom above truth: a harsh choice, and perhaps a false one in the long run.
Trurl raised both hands above the confusion of voices. “All right, let’s get things straight from the start. First goal: to retrieve our vanished sisters, in good time and good health. Overall goal: to heal this Valan plague. Any constructive suggestions are welcome.” Trurl glared fleetingly, a rare lapse.
Someone shouted, “Let the Valan-lovers go talk with them. We all know what good that does.”
A few laughed; others turned icily still.
Yinevra said, “Let’s talk sense, before half of us walk out and the other half go Unspoken. The simplest solution is to share a strain of breathmicrobe that the Valans can’t get rid of. It won’t hurt a bit but will do the trick: they’ll all scurry out the Ocean Door.”
Heads nodded like airblossoms bobbing in the wind.
“A good start,” Trurl agreed. “But how does that get our sisters back?”
“Would our sisters wish to see us all stay like this, with incurable rag-tied psychotics blundering through our homes? We’ll all share their madness, before long.”
Merwen’s heart pulsed faster. Suppose we already share their madness, she wondered. We are one species, only one, she thought, as other Doorclosers shouted support for Yinevra’s call.
Lalor asked, “What if it doesn’t work? Some Valans get used to breathmicrobes. Others will be crazier than before.”
That exasperated Yinevra. “Anything can go wrong, but how will we know if we don’t try something? Who’s got a better idea?”
Now might be her last chance. Merwen rose, and Trurl’s finger lifted toward her. “Valans may be mad, some of them, but they are stubborn as we are. I believe the only end to the ‘plague’ will be to share cure of their madness.”
“And how will that happen?” Yinevra asked. “Did it work with Virien?”
The blow shocked Merwen, until she saw that others took it not as an affront but as an intensely serious question: What can be done with the incurably ill?
“Consider this,” Merwen said at last. “It may be that we can dispel the Valan plague by sharing force, as Yinevra suggests. I hesitate to guess what force the Valans will share in turn. It may be too late, afterward, to try to share mindhealing instead.” Merwen scanned the Gathering to guess how many had understood.
Yinevra was still standing. “If we waste time now, it may soon be too late to gather our strength. Force is what Valans understand.”
Trurl said, “Enough, let’s hear from someone else,” and she nodded to Lystra.
Lystra rose with her back not quite straight and a surly expression that marked her diffidence. “Excuse me, but certain Valans have been known to understand other things, even to share the life of our raft. Traders didn’t start to respect us until we went there, where they lived, to share our concern. Perhaps the new Valans want us to do this, now. Could that be why they wished our sisters to join them?”
“That’s it,” someone called out. “They are like sick children—how else could they touch a sister in whitetrance? It’s not good to ignore a sick child.”
Yinevra said, “Their sickness is surely beyond healing. Nevertheless, I’m willing enough to share with them what we shared with traders. We’ll sit at their door until shame drives them out.”
A murmur of agreement swept the Gathering.
Merwen was watching Lystra through half-closed eyes. Perhaps, she thought, Lystra’s friendship with Spinel had not been a total disaster after all.
12
A WARM BREEZE blew into Chrysoport. Winter rain clouds were giving way to softer puffs of white, and herringbones ribbed the sky. Sun pierced the cold air with rays that brought an unexpected preview of spring. Spinel recalled that the morning had felt just like this when that little houseboat with the Hyalite sign had pulled up at the wharf with two of the most outlandish strangers the town had ever seen. He paused at the netleaf tree just long enough to imagine the shape of Merwen there, drawing him in among its shadows. Nowadays, a line of Dolomites led past the tree into the firemerchant’s shop.
Spinel wore at last a genuine stonesign, the star sapphire of a Spirit Caller. Yet whenever he tried to imagine this “Spirit” that he must hear, either Merwen or Lystra would enter his mind. You are still a Sharer…even as a shaper of stone. Yes, Merwen’s spell held him still.
Whatever the Spirit was, there was no end of work for a Spirit Caller in Chrysoport. Uriel wandered more and more on his own, nowadays, so the villagers turned to Spinel with their problems and questions. One had lost an entire harvest to the hailstones, another had a halfwit child who would never learn his letters—there seemed no end of souls in search of sublime healing for their daily miseries.
Spinel soon came to suspect that most of his clients would find their own answers, if any, in whatever he had to say. What they actually craved was someone to listen, if only for a moment. It amazed him to realize how many people led parched lives, thirsting for the faintest drop of empathy. For himself or anyone else to fill all that need was as hopeless as filling an ocean.
Still, Spinel hung on to the belief that some kinds of suffering were more evil than others and ought to be done away with. The Dolomite garrison was an entity apparently designed for the sole purpose of creating human misery. The Dolomite Protector levied endless taxes now: freight taxes, house taxes, taxes on vendors in the market square. To be sure, the curfew was still relaxed, a victory which Spinel kept pointing out. It dismayed him to discover that the villagers shrugged off their own achievement, forgetting in so little time.
“The goatheads were planning to let up on us anyway,” said Ahn. “Not worth the trouble.”
“But that’s the point, Ahn. We made it too much trouble.”
“What trouble is an unarmed rabble?”
Spinel leaned his elbows on the vegetable stand. “Suppose we all stopped paying taxes, every one. What could they do about it?”
“Listen to the almsman! As if you ever paid a hundredth solidus of tax in your life. Go tell the High Protector; he knows what the Patriarch intends for us.”
Spinel leaned closer. “Listen, Ahn,” he whispered. “There’s a different ‘Patriarch,’ not the one on Torr, but a ‘Patriarch’ here, all around us, a Spirit anyone can hear—”
Ahn shrieked and shoved his arms off the edge. “You’re madder than the old one! Get away from me, do you hear? I’ve got one good eye and a sound bit of mind left, and by Torr I intend to keep both.”
Undaunted, Spinel pressed his idea of tax refusal among the villagers. He hoped to enlist Uriel again, but the old Spirit Caller seemed to be wandering more in the countryside lately, with the breath of warm weather. Spinel argued with Melas, and he even pestered Picrite in the barbershop. “I’d lose my Dolomite customers,” Picrite said between snips of the shears. “I get twice as much business as I used to.”
Spinel even tried to convert his father, who pounded and chiseled all day in the basement. One day Cyan threw down his chisel and pushed up his shield of protective glass. His stern gaze leaped past his blunt nose and focused on his son. “So you know better than the Protector what’s good for us, do you? All from that pretty trinket around your neck?”
“Protectors don’t give a fishhead for you or anyone, except a few nobles and traders.”
“Son, think about this—just think of it. Where would we be without the Torran Envoy to keep space safe, the High Protector to keep provincials from sacking our town when they take over, and police to keep order in street and market? Where would we get firecrystals if not from the firemerchants of Iridis, a
nd who would produce them safely? Now just hold on, my words have been a long time coming.”
Spinel shifted his feet, as the lecture discomfited him.
“Every ruler has his purpose, or he wouldn’t be one.” Cyan’s workshirt hung loose, its creases vibrating as he spoke. “For traders, that goes double. Hyalite got where he is because who else dared to dig in on an unknown world, before your time, when the Ocean Moon was just another bauble in the sky? Hyalite made a profit, despite the huge risks, because millions of customers wanted what he got, herbs and things you’ll not find here. For every thousand stonecutters like me, there’s maybe one man with a vision like that.
“You think only Spirit Callers have visions. Listen: where would your Spirit Callers be without plain, dependable folk to put up with you? You’ve yet to make a home for yourself. And whose home did Uriel stay in, all those cold nights, with the firecrystal in the stove? Answer me that.” Cyan paused for breath. “So if the High Protector puts us under Dolomoth, he has his reasons. He does his job, just as I do mine.” Cyan pulled down his glasses and returned to his work.
Spinel frowned and opened his mouth, but no simple answer came to mind. The clang of the chisel muddled his head, so he skipped upstairs and outdoors. He sat on the doorstep and scraped his toe between cracks in the old stained bricks.
The more he thought, the more puzzled he became. It was true that Valedon would be in chaos without someone to lay down the law. Yet on Shora, things worked just the opposite: no one person could set a law for anyone else, and even if they tried, it would only create chaos, not curb it. Were people just different, on different planets?
Yet even his father had stood with him that night in the market square, when Uriel had led the Calling and dared the Dolomites to crush them.
Uriel would know what to say. Where had Uriel got to? Spinel ducked into the kitchen to ask his sister. “You seen Uriel lately?”
“Oh, didn’t you hear?” Beryl’s cheeks had regained color, and her gestures had recovered much of the liveliness she had lost. Oolite was into running: she plodded back and forth across the kitchen and caught the wall each time with a delighted yell. “They took him away,” Beryl said. “To a home. He was—well, a bit touched.”
“But…I don’t understand.”
“He’s better off, you know. He barely made it through this winter.”
“But how—who took him, Beryl?”
“Other Spirit Callers, of course. I heard it straight from the baker’s delivery girl, who saw them. They were foreign-like, with hoods of mountain wool, but very kind and dignified. Spinny, would you shell some peas for me? Keep Oolite’s fingers out of them.”
So Uriel was gone, just like that. Vague resentment pricked Spinel, as if Uriel had let him down, somehow, by changing without notice from a mysterious hero into an ordinary old man. Spinel cocked his head quizzically, as if he expected a better answer. Around the tiled wainscoting, figures chased each other as always in endless circles.
He let his feet wander back to the shore, where Uriel had given him the starstone. The water foamed and its chill stung his toes; farther out it was a hard, rippling blue, just calm enough to mirror the trace of an Iridian jet high above the sky. He remembered that other day, last spring, when Uriel had made him angry, just why he could not recall, and he had run down here to the shore where the waves whispered merwenmerwen…He listened closely again, trying to block out the clatter of a farm wagon on the road behind. After all, if he listened long enough, any name would come from the sea.
The next morning, the market was alive with the news. “Did you hear about your moon friends?” Melas said. “They defied the Patriarch, so Talion sent in the Guard.”
“Nuts to you,” said Spinel.
“I swear by every skull on Trollbone Point! It was a month ago, in fact, only the Palace just let it out.”
“But—but why?”
“To teach those moonwomen a lesson, that’s why. I told you no good would come of them. It’s one thing to tweak the nose of a firemerchant, but the Patriarch—they had it coming.”
Spinel spent his last few coins on a newscube, the cheap kind that you had to squint into until your eyes hurt. There were a bunch of High Councilors calling for destruction of the Purple Menace. Would a war be declared? Then the High Protector came in with the new Guard Commander, urging calm; it was all under control, they said. Then the ocean switched in, and a raft with a blurred group of Sharers whose silkhouse was being searched for “planet-threatening weapons.” The face of Merwen leaped out at him; startled, he dropped the cube and had to snatch it up again before it ran out. “Planet-threatening weapons” in Merwen’s house?
And that was a month ago…Merwen could be dead by now. Troublesharer, you’ll go now. Because there is no other hope for us. But how could Spinel help at all? A few Dolomites were nothing compared to the Protectoral Guard.
His hand wrapped the cube, squeezing it until the points bit into his palm. His money for the market was gone, so he walked straight home.
“Father, I’m going back to Shora,” Spinel announced.
“Between the Guard and the Purple Menace? Nonsense,” said Cyan.
“So what? What was it like here, when I arrived?”
“We did not urge you home.”
“And where would I be if I had stayed? Look, I’m still signed to Merwen and I have to go, that’s all.”
“You’re signed to Uriel, with a stonesign so it’s proper. Why not follow him to the old folk’s home?”
Blood rushed to Spinel’s face; he clenched and unclenched his fists. “I’m going, that’s all,” he said sullenly. “Just give me the travel fare and that’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”
“Should I give you money to die a fool?”
Spinel shouted, “It’s my money too! Every coin I get for Spirit Calling, I chip in for the family. Every day I run to the market or cut tiles for you or whatever.”
“Son, when you grow into a sensible man I’ll make you a partner in the business. Until then—no.”
Spinel was enraged. He wanted to crush his father’s head into the workbench. He could do it, too; he was the taller and stronger, now, and he had grown up outdoors while his father withered away in a basement. Yet something froze his hand, that same part of himself that had recoiled after he shoved Melas into the produce cart, the day the Sharers first appeared. That part of him had fed and grown alarmingly since he passed the Door into Ocean.
Spinel pounded upstairs to his mother’s study, where she sat hunched over account books as usual. “Just one ticket to the Ocean Moon, Mother, that’s all I’ll ever ask, ever again.”
“Listen to your father,” she said, without looking up at him.
That night Spinel slept fitfully among twisted dreams. He dreamed that he found himself on a barren island, alone except for mountains of bleached trollbones. For some reason he grew angry, incredibly angry at Uriel, so that he tore off his starstone and threw it out to sea. But instead of falling, the stone paused at its zenith, just long enough for the sky to darken, then it settled gently among the stars, a sapphire moon.
He sat up, wide awake. A hint of dawn lit the horizon. If he were to leave now, he could catch the first steamer. Perhaps they would let a Spirit Caller aboard without charge.
Before he reached the door, his mother came downstairs. Her voluminous nightgown flapped around her. “Take this.” She thrust a purse into his hand.
Spinel roughly pushed it back.
“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered fiercely. “You’re too good for us now? Is that what they teach you up there—to despise your own people?”
“No, Mother.” He embraced his mother then, and they held close for what might be the last time. Spinel wanted to cry, but it was bottled up inside. He wanted to say, It’s you folks who despise yourselves. But he could never make them understand. He would leave for good now, go to the Iridis spaceport and then, somehow, he would make it back
to Shora.
Part V
NIGHT
OF
CINNABAR
1
TWO DAYS AFTER the first prisoners were taken, natives at another raft system a hundred kilometers away appeared at a garrison asking after their “sisters.” Visitations soon spread to other bases, halfway around the globe. Even more annoying, the natives would not leave when put off, but grew in numbers and stayed by day and night until guards hauled them out to sea.
Realgar was stumped, on several counts. Why should natives risk life and limb just for a few “sisters” off a raft somewhere across the globe? For that matter, how the devil did they find out in the first place? By insects, as that trader claimed? If that was it, insecticides would wipe every insect off the planet.
He simply could not permit this widespread response, especially to such a minor incident. If he imprisoned all the visitors at his eighty garrison bases, it would be enough to fill the main penitentiary of Iridis.
Worst of all, five natives from Raia-el appeared outside the main base at Per-elion. These five, including Merwen, could not simply be put off. Not only was Merwen the “Protector,” her mate was the one practitioner of forbidden science who would assist Siderite without coercion.
So Realgar decided to receive them in his office at the Per-elion garrison. A conference with the local Protector—at least he could get a good press clipping out of the deal.
Two aides ushered in the natives, whose broad feet gently slapped the floor as they walked. One was visibly pregnant. Their nakedness jarred with the polished angular setting of the office; it disturbed Realgar more than it had in their own home. Acutely aware of his officers, he realized that any incident could easily make him look foolish.
With a hum of unseen gears, five chairs rose out of the floor. Realgar gestured, “Have a seat, ladies.”
The natives casually sat on the floor in front of the chairs and crossed their legs. The press footage would require some touchup, he decided, in order to pass the palace censor. Fig leaves, at least.
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