‘I was told so. Pamra had been unlike herself recently. She was seen making frequent trips to the house where the old woman had lived. I sent Threnot to find out why. Threnot found a sister living there. Prender, her name was. She told my servant that the old woman had gone east. Pamra, it seems, was deeply grieved.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Ilze was puzzled. It would not have been his job to follow Pamra or inquire about her, unless the girl’s work had suffered. Why this note of accusation in the Superior’s voice?
‘Since Pamra was naive enough to cause you amusement, Ilze, would it not have been prudent to watch her? Just in the event the old woman showed up in the pits?’ There was a tone in the Superior’s voice he did not recognize, one he had never heard before.
‘It would have been, certainly, Superior. Had I known the old woman was gone …’
‘Perhaps if you had paid less attention to Pamra’s body and more to her emotions, you would have known?’ The Superior sighed, and Ilze dared look up, just for a moment. The other figure was a flier. A Servant of Abricor. He dropped his eyes, gulping. Here. In the Superior’s own rooms. A Servant. Nausea roiled in him. He had not known this was possible.
‘Have you heard of Rivermen, Ilze?’
For a moment he could not hear her voice, could not understand her words. Rivermen. What was she talking about? ‘Yes, of course, Superior. Those who bring cargoes on the boats … ‘ Suddenly he knew what it was in her voice that so cut at him. Fear. Nothing but fear.
‘No. Rivermen have nothing to do with boats. Rivermen are members of an heretical sect who place their dead in the River. They do not trust in the Holy Sorters. A cult of apostates, Ilze. Had you heard that Pamra’s mother was a Riverman?’
‘I knew she was a madwoman, Your Patience. A sick woman. A heretic, if you like. I had never heard she was a member of any cult.’ He gulped, heard only the silence, went on. ‘The initiation master told me Pamra was deeply shamed by her mother’s behavior. It was probably her mother’s heresy which brought Pamra to the Tower in the first place. Her dedication had some redemptive quality to it. So he said.’
‘So I thought. So you thought… perhaps. But now she is gone, with a pitful of workers. And the… Talkers have sent for you, Ilze. And me. They have questions about our orthodoxy.’
Talkers? In this context the word didn’t make sense. He opened his mouth to ask – to ask anything that would help him out of this confusion …
‘I think you had best let me speak with him for a moment alone,’ she said to the Servant of Abricor, her voice wheedling and groveling. ‘He is totally ignorant of your existence. As naive, in his way, as Pamra was in hers.’
‘And did you find this amusing?’ croaked a strange voice, not a human voice, though using human words. ‘Was he amusing to you?’
‘No. He knew as much as any senior. Seniors are not privy to the decisions of the Chancery, Uplifted One. May I appeal in the name of the Protector?’
‘The Talons do not recognize the Protector.’
‘Surely you jest, Winged One.’ There was a note of desperation in her voice. ‘Your treaty is with the Protector, and through him with the Chancery and with the Towers. How can you have a treaty with an office you do not recognize?’
Ilze had heard the Superior’s voice for years, leading the observances, reciting the litany, directing, assigning. He had never heard it as it sounded now, tight as a harp string, aching with strain, almost with panic.
‘We do not recognize the Protector in this instance, human. Still, we do not desire further disruption of your duties. I will give you not long,’ the inhuman voice croaked again. ‘Other Talkers await you on the aerie. You will not attempt escape.’ There were sounds, wings, clacking of beak, a harsh scrape of talons upon the floor.
‘Ilze?’
He breathed deeply, trying not to vomit. ‘Superior.’
‘You must help me in this, Ilze. I am depending upon your strong sense of self-preservation.’
‘What was it?’ he grated, furious at himself for this loss of control.
‘A Talker. A leader among the Servants of Abricor. One of their Superiors, I suppose you could say. Though this one seems rather higher in rank among its people than I consider myself among mine.’
‘Talking?’
‘They talk, yes. Though not to us. Never to us. This is the first time I have heard one talk. I have been told that only a few of the Servants can talk. The ordinary fliers do not. Only these, these others. Or perhaps only these are allowed to talk. That also is possible.’
‘What does it want?’
‘It expects to take us to one of the Talons. The closest one is east of here in a tall mountain range near the Straits of Shfor. The Talons are where their leaders live, as the Chancery is where our leaders live. They want to take us for questioning.’ Where I cannot go, she thought. Where I must not be taken. For they will certainly learn what I know, in time, and I know too much. ‘They want to take you, Ilze. And me, me as well. This is not the way it should happen, Ilze. Listen now. In the northlands, the Protector of Man dwells with his people, his retinue, the officers of the Chancery. You know of the Protector. You have seen him.’
‘During the Progressions. Of course. I saw the golden ship. Everyone does. The last Progression was years ago.’
‘So long ago that the next Progression is almost due. Once each eighteen years the Protector makes the trip, taking six or seven years to visit Northshore, allowing himself to be seen at every township. You have seen him!’
‘I’ve seen him.’ He was sharply attentive. Why was she telling him this? ‘All citizens are required to observe the Progression.’
‘I remind you of that so you will remember it. The Protector exists. He lives in the northland. He heads the Chancery. He is my Superior, as I am yours. I work at his command.’ She reached for the man before her, reached into him. By all the gods, this unworthy tool must bend to her purpose – for all their sakes.
‘I understand.’ He did not understand, though his hard, clever mind was beginning to chill, beginning to listen attentively. He had accepted that his life might depend upon that. She smiled at him approvingly.
‘There is a treaty between the Protector and the Servants of Abricor. It is the treaty which prohibits the Servants from … from troubling us. It prohibits our troubling them as well. If the Servants are troubled by men, the treaty requires them to report to the Chancery. This Rivermen business, this heresy … if there is something like that going on, if they think we have something to do with it, we should be summoned by the Chancery, not by the Servants themselves. Do you understand that?’ She was begging him, and for the first time he came out of his own bewilderment to hear her. He thought she was frightened for herself, and this focused his attention.
‘I… yes. Yes. If this Servant is disturbed by something we’ve done, something it thinks we’ve done, it should have gone to the Chancery about it. And they would have questioned us.’
‘Yes. Exactly. And our one chance of coming out of this alive is to get to the Chancery. Not go with this one to the Talons. We go to the Talons and we’re dead.’
He did not ask her how she knew. It did not seem to matter. His heart was drumming, and he felt the blood rush to his fingers, making them tingle. ‘Can we escape from the Tower?’
‘They will see us. They see well at night, and there are dozens of them.’
There were dozens, of course. All around the Tower top, the bone pits, here and there in the forests. Ilze himself had counted up to twenty of them in the air over Baris at one time, as many over the neighboring towns. ‘Stay inside where they can’t get at us? Send a messenger? Ask for help?’
‘We could not live locked inside the Tower that long. The Chancery is half a year away, through the Teeth of the North by way of the Split River Pass. It is how the Protector comes down to make the Progression. By the Split River. We could walk there in a year or two if we stopped for nothing.’
&nbs
p; ‘And the Talons?’
‘Not so far. East instead of north.’
‘How do they plan to get us there?’
‘In a basket, the leader said. In a basket, carried by two or three of them. Through the air. For four or five days. He spoke of flying without stopping. He spoke of a “tailwind.” I can guess what that is.’
He had looked at the Talker only briefly, but it had not looked unlike the usual Servants. The long, almost human-looking legs with their feathered, two-taloned feet. The folded wings, tips almost dragging the floor, three-fingered hands of the wrist joined. The face, not long-beaked like the small fliers but flat-beaked, so that in profile it did not look unlike his own except for the absence of a nose. Ear tufts. Wide-set, round-orbed eyes surrounded by plumed circles. The chest, protruding at the center like the keel of a boat. And the neck. Not really long, but it would be stretched out in flight. He thought on that, anger moving him now, a well-known kind of anger. So, they would misuse and mock him, would they? They would break the rules of respect. Well then.
‘When you were senior, lady, did you use the whip?’ he asked, whispering. ‘And have you whips here still?’
When she nodded, he whispered again, and she sped to find the things he suggested. She knew then she had guessed aright in choosing the tool to save her life and in saving that to save more than that. She took a moment to speak to Threnot, dictating a message to be sent to Tharius Don, Propagator of the Faith, at the Chancery, in case they did not arrive there themselves.
‘Enough,’ croaked a voice from behind her. ‘Enough time spent enlightening your lackeys. We will go now.’
‘Of course,’ said Lady Kesseret of the Tower of Baris, as though she were going for an afternoon walk into the parklands. ‘We will go now.’
7
In a monstrous fanged circle halfway between the River and the pole, the Teeth of the North gaped at the swollen sun, their peaks thrust eight miles or more into the glittering sky. Here, driven deep into the frozen stone, were the only mines on this metal-poor planet, icy tunnels plunging into the heart of the towering range, warmed only by the feeble lamps of the slaves who dug the ore, the mines incessant in their demand for new flesh, for few men lived long in these frigid, airless holes.
The wall of the Teeth was riven in only one place. High against the southern light the jagged jaw of Split River Pass snarled at either side of the sky-filled notch, bared now and briefly, before the snows came again. There black rock tumbled from black rock down an ogre’s stair to the loess of the slopes and taiga of the plain with the river lunging over it in frantic starts and sorties, like a drunken man-at-arms waked suddenly from dreams of battle.
Within the lofty circle of the mountains stretched an enormous basin, taiga and grassy plains, dotted here and there with a few tens of migratory weehar and thrassil. When the Teeth leaned toward the sun, the lands of the northern basin bloomed and burgeoned toward a hasty harvest. While the people along the River shivered in the chill rains that separated their first and second summers, above the Teeth the sun rolled up from the north around the circle of the sky like a swollen fruit upon the sides of a bowl, never setting, and the Chancery folk walked out of doors in their shirt-sleeves to smell the flowers while the woodsmen piled thick fortresses of firewood along the walls. Axes, axes on the height! Oh, yes, the summer sound in Chancery lands was the crack of the axe and the creak of wagon wheels behind the plodding feet of weehar oxen.
In the winter, when the Teeth turned from the sun after months of lengthening autumn dusk, the long night came down to drown Highstone Lees under a cold cataract of stars. Then the weehar and thrassil dug deep into ice caverns to sleep the three-month night away, and the residents of the Chancery retired to their tunnels and rooms burrowed into the rock below while they made other tunnels into the mighty walls-stacks of wood, carrying it inside load by load, leaving snow-covered, canvas-roofed tunnels behind, widening as the winter went on until the outside walls could be taken in to be burned in the half sun of early summer.
And it was summer yet, though there were few flowers left and evenings brought chill winds to curl at the corners of buildings and rattle the fastenings of windows. The broad leaves of the mime trees in the ceremonial plaza were beginning to roll into tight cylinders, fronds of papery green sheets becoming brushes of fine needles, black as jet. The fountain in the plaza still played, but plaintively, and North Split River rattled a shallow complaint upon its black stones beneath a hundred high-backed bridges. There would be little more melt from the heights to feed it and then no more at all until spring came again.
It was the time some people of the Chancery liked best, after summer’s labor and before the cozy hibernation of the snow time. The High Lodge of the Jarb Mendicants preferred the season, the fading sun of autumn, the needling of leaves, the plaint of water. The Mendicants moved abroad to draw into their pores each scant ray of the slowing sun, drug pipes hanging cold in their lax hands, for a time unpossessed by oracular visions. And the Mendicants were not alone in their enjoyment.
To the palace garden, tippy-toe with tiny mandarin steps, sweet as a leaping lamb upon the grass, came the Protector of Man, Lees Obol, in his padded robes, one Jondarite at either arm, half carried, half escorted in his gentle perambulation of the cloisters. Such an old, old man, Lees Obol, beneficiary of the fliers’ Payment for almost five hundred years, all the youthful passion spilled away over the centuries to leave this vague contentment in its stead. Not that all that youthful urgency leaked away unremembered and unremarked. At the center of him was an ache sometimes, a feeling of vacancy, as though an essential vessel had been drained, an important room left untenanted. This hollowness echoed occasionally, a dim seashell sound, the susurrus of his blood, perhaps; or a thudding like the boots of armed men come to rob a temple of all its valuables, only to find it empty and the worshippers gone.
So he quivered once in a while, shaking with a memory of passion, knowing he had cared once and unable to think of any reason he should not care now, but too frail to hold the notion for long. So he moved on the strong arms of his guards in the pale sun of polar summer, stopping to sniff at the brilliant northern blooms in the carefully tended gardens, easing through the muslin veils that clouded the doors, flung open now to the sweet airs and the sound of water, when it could be heard over the sound of chopping.
Still, at this noon hour the axes had fallen silent and the fountains could be enjoyed by the Protector of Man, held aloft and protected from harm like a little doll, by the strong arms of his keepers. So he was held up during the last Progression; so he would be held during the next one if the Payment proved efficacious and he lived still longer. Though, said those who performed the functions of the Chancery, there was little enough left now to work with. An occasional spark was all, like the last glow of a fire banked against the morning and left too long without fuel. A fugitive gleam, without heat, consuming itself in the instant.
He stood on the gently curved span that crossed Split River, his old eyes seeking a gleam of golden fishes in the complaining flow. There was no peace in Split River. From the cold white heights it ran north into the Chancery lands, and from those same heights it ran south across the steppes of the Noor, and from there through Ovil-po township to the World River. Once each eighteen years a caravan carried the Protector through the pass and down the other side as far as Ovil-po, where the Progression ship was docked, its gold and gems wrapped against the harsh winds of early first summer. Six or seven years later, the Progression done, he returned to be met by the caravan and taken home to the Chancery, home to the warm familiarity of near five hundred years.
‘Looky,’ said the Protector, staring up at the distant mountains in senescent surprise. ‘The pass is all melted black.’
The uniformed Jondarites shared a conspiratorial glance and suggested it was time for his tea. His acquiescence was no less charming and inconsequential than his participation in the walk. One item of ritual more o
r less gracefully done. Let us move on, he seemed to say, to the next and then the next.
The next being tea before the soft warmth of a porcelain stove. Cuddled deep in his curtained bed, Lees Obol nodded over his cup. His alcove was just off the main audience hall, its thick, squat walls dwarfed by the lofty barrel vaults above, its rock floor warmed and softened by carpets. Though it was too early for fires, the Protector of Man had a fire. The Jondarites were careful for his comfort, solicitous for his welfare. They would die for him without a moment’s question, just as they cared for him day by day, hands busy in his service, knives ready at their belts, eyes watchful. Two of them stood guard outside the alcove now. Two more stoked the tiny stove and closed the curtains. The stove burned only a few pieces of charcoal at a time, but with the alcove curtains closed, it developed a cozy warmth. Stretching in the heat like an old, pained cat, Lees Obol puffed a little sigh and sipped, remembering a sense of sharp discomfort without being able to identify the memory at all. Outside the alcove the Jondarites heard the sigh and remembered it. General Jondrigar would demand an accounting of them. Each sigh, each word, each breath, had to be remembered.
High on a parapet of the household wing, Maintainer of the Household Shavian Bossit peered through a glass into the southern sky. Sun glow filled the wedge of sky that marked Split River Pass, and a flying speck showed black against this fruity shine; a Servant, maybe even a Talker, here inside the Teeth, where no flier of any kind had any business being. Shavian frowned, his mouth making a point-up triangle of concentration. Not merely a flier. More than one of them, he told himself as the speck wobbled toward the Chancery lands. Several. Two or three at least. Trouble of some kind coming, and Lees Obol vacant as ever while his people plotted, some against one another, some against the Protector himself. Bossit did not pretend to himself that he was not one of them, even while breathing a quick prayer that Gendra Mitiar and Tharius Don could set their growing enmity aside for a few hours or days, if real danger portended.
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