by Diane Duane
A small gong chimed softly on the worktable she kept in the chamber. She went to it, touched the control attached to it. “Speak.”
“Madam, the lord Evekh is here and desires to see you.” The voice on the other end of the comm sounded frightened. “My apologies, lady, for troubling you so late, but he would not leave without seeing you.”
“Bid him enter,” the woman said. She sat down by the windowsill again, on her couch, and gazed out on the spires of the city, as if more concerned with that view than with the setting crescent easing itself toward the horizon, shimmering uncannily in the uprising heat.
The carved doors swung open, and Nesheh, her maid, let the visitor in. The woman heard the soft rustle of stiff, rich robes behind her, ignored them till they stopped, then turned. There he stood, Evekh, all in a splendor of embroidery of violet brocade and silver wire, withlasha stones set in a great silvern collar at his neck: they caught the lamplight and a gleam or so from sinking T’Khut and gave it back in a shimmer of opalescent violet. Above all the finery, there was the plain, hard, blunt face, noble in its way; but the cruel eyes hinted that the nobility had fallen on hard times. That was all to her advantage. She made a graceful gesture of welcome. “A social call, I take it, my lord,” she said.
“Lady Suvin,” he said, and held his hands up to her in reverence. “Yes.”
“At such an hour.” Now that he was here, finally here, she could not resist baiting him a little. “Do sit, then. Will you take water with me?”
“Gladly.”
She stepped over to the little singing fall in the corner, chose two cups from the sideboard. All were a message in themselves. The waterfall spoke of the wealth of someone who could afford to have such a thing directed seven floors up from the living stone; the cups were of perfect design, simple and clean in a time when more obvious ostentation would have had them covered with rare gems from the Hehei or gilded in platinum electroplate. Suvin despised gauds of that sort: or if she stooped to them, she made sure they far surpassed anything else a rival might find. The cups were of simple enough design, but each one was carved of a single nightfire, all black with glitters of gold in it, like T’Khut outside the window.
She filled the cups, gave one to her guest, and sat down on a bench opposite him. They drank, first, without speaking, as the guest had by the proper laws of hospitality to be refreshed before telling his tale. “Tell me, then,” Suvin said when the cups were half drained, “since this is a social call, how fares your family? How does your lady wife?”
It was meant to be an arrow in his side, and the flicker of rage that went across his face told her that it had gone home. “She is as well as can be expected.”
“Ah, I am glad to hear it. And the family prospers.”
He said nothing.
“I am glad to hear it,” she said again. “These are such busy times for all of us.”
“For you, at least,” Evekh said. “The lesser houses rally behind you, I see.”
“They have seen the sense of what we mean to do,” she said. She turned and gazed out the window. T’Khut was half set: through a gap in the towers one could see that the horns of the crescent were beneath the horizon now, and the crescent made a sort of bright bridge, with a few sparks of fire caught under it. “The latest researches have proved very compelling indeed. There is metal beyond our wildest dreams—iron, steel, rare metals, and rare earths—lying scattered about T’Khut like pebbles. No need to dig for it. Untold riches lie there, and untold rewards for our people and our industry. We must get there: it hangs so close. We can do it. And now we shall.”
He sat silent. She knew what he was thinking.It should have been us. Unfair, unfair —Suvin felt like laughing out loud to mock him, saying,Your house had its chances and let them slip: now reap what you have sown! And it would have been true enough. Evekh’s house was anciently involved with trade. Many centuries back, as the smaller city-states grew up and goods began to be traded between them, his house had come to run the caravans that went back and forth between the tiny outposts of the civilization that was then Vulcan. The great difficulty with handling many such caravans at a time had proved to be communications: without it, there was no way to predict when goods would arrive, where they were in transit, whether they would be late. Evekh’s forefathers had solved the problem by hiring, buying, or kidnapping as many people as they could find who had the talent of clear mind-speech at a distance. Then they had begun a selective breeding program, and bred the talent true, and increased its power and honed the training of it until the talent was no longer an accidental thing that worked only in times of stress, but a predictable and manageable power that would operate over thousands of miles. It made them rich and powerful enough so that, after some centuries, Evekh’s house let the caravan-trade-cum-overland-shipping-corporation go, and concentrated on psi-communications technologies alone. Their people were in demand all over the planet, except in one regard…and Suvin knew it.
“We are quite close,” Suvin said, so casually that it could not possibly be regarded as a taunt. “The hulls of the first two ships are complete, now, and the instrumentation is being installed by the various lesser houses.” She looked out the window as the last scrap of T’Khut slipped beneath the horizon. The sky grew dark, except for the red Eye and the white one, that gazed down brightly enough to cast faint shadows. Outside the window, somewhere in the middle air, a nightvoice spoke: a sweet, mournful sound, answered just as mournfully from somewhere close by. “We will launch for the first time at the end of the year.”
“So soon,” Evekh said.
Suvin nodded. Inside, she was shaking with mirth that she dare not show. It would lose her too much, just for the sake of a little entertainment. “I should like to speed things up somewhat,” she said, “but there seems no way at this point; we are depending mostly on machines, except for the construction itself.”
“And more speed would make that much difference?”
“The difference between eighteen millionnakh next year,” she said, “and four thousand million.” She paused enough for the thought to sink in like water into sand. “It is a matter of the subsidiary voyages,” she said, “out to the sister planets. The delay of normal ether-wave communications adds a certain unavoidable delay to the process of assessment and pickup of the raw materials. Delay is costly, as usual…. ”
She trailed off.And psi-communication is instantaneous. Come along, old fool. Make a fine show of pride for me, so that I can offer you what I have for you.
Suvin waited. It was just as well for her that Evekh had no training in his family’s gift and could not hear her. Otherwise this deal would be much more difficult to drive.
Evekh drank from his cup. After a little while he said, rather tightly, “I have often wished that my family had not let the transportation side of our House fall into decline.”
I dare say—because if they had not, you would be sitting in my place now: the place of one about to be mistress of the richest and most powerful House on the planet, one that even kings bow to, knowing their betterment when they see it.“Evekh,” she said, again so casually, “surely you could come into it again if you wanted to.”
She watched him look at the meaning under her words, watched him shy away from it, with another flicker of anger in his face. Perhaps he was getting the feeling he was being toyed with.Ah, softly: have a care. “We would be glad to ally with you in this regard,” she said. And added, “If you would have us.”
The five words took the rage that had abruptly shown on his face and as abruptly erased it. He was silent for a minute or more, looking at the cup in his hands. “Our house is somewhat fallen from its early grandeur,” he said, trying to make light of it.
“Ah, hardly,” Suvin said.
He looked sharply at her. She looked back, a frank and dissembling look that was meant to say,But I meant it.
He swallowed his pride again. She watched with mild astonishment. It was worth all her wait
ing, this delicate debasement. She knew quite well that pride was at the root: that Evekh could not bear the sight of what he considered a young upstart house advanced far beyond his…and his own house reduced in wealth and status. Only that had made him refuse her first offer of alliance, some years ago. But now he was tasting the bitterness his pride had brought him to: his own house and his lady wife were not beyond reminding him of their opinion of this situation from time to time.Pain, and pride: we will see which is stronger. I think I know….
Suvin put the look on her face of a woman who has a sudden thought. “If you would be willing,” she said, “there would be a way to do this that could not invoke a question of loss of face, if that concerns you.”If!
Evekh blinked. “Speak on, lady.”
“A binding. I have a grandson of age. He is past the Raptures without ill effect, and we were looking him out a match among one of the nobler houses. Surely yours would be one of those.”
Evekh looked slightly pale for a moment. “We have no one who would suit, I fear.”
“Ah, but surely you do. That youngest right-line daughter of yours. T’Thelaih, that’s her name, is it not?”
Evekh stared at Suvin in shock.
“And what is more,” she said, “after the wedding, we wouldkeep her.”
Evekh was quite still for several minutes. “And the groom-price?” he said.
Suvin shrugged. “That would be negotiable. But the match is a noble one, and the alliance between our houses would be most profitable, both in the short and long terms. Your share—it would certainly be at least five percent of our takings. As for the groom-price—shall we say,” and she paused for thought she had taken long ago, “all the extant adepts of the Last Thought long-range psi-communications technique, and their offspring? And all necessary chemical training and teaching materials. That should more than suffice our space program’s needs for many years.”
There was a long, long silence: and then Evekh began to curse her. He cursed her in the names of gods that had been removed from the official calendar, and gods that had not, and in the names of beasts and men, and in the name of the One Who Does Not Hear. She sat unmoved, and when she spoke again, it was as if nothing had happened.
“Does the offer please?”
“It pleases,” Evekh said heavily. “I will have my bailiff see yours tomorrow to make the instrument of binding. May I call on you tomorrow evening?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
Evekh got up, then, and bowed. Not hands up in reverence, but the bent-double bow, showing the back of the neck, of a new-bought slave. And he went from there with no other word.
Well-pleased, Suvin gazed out the window a few minutes longer…then called her maid to prepare her couch.
She slept soundly for the first time in many months and got up in the morning in a good temper, to the astonishment of the household staff. Then, her toilet and levee done, she sent for her grandson.
Their meeting was brief and to the point. It was nooning: the family was resting at such a time, but for Suvin that made little odds, and they knew better, by and large, to fly in her face about such little things. When she called them, they came.
Mahak stood before her and fidgeted, looking about him at all the rich and costly things, and obviously wondering why under the moon he, the least of the family, had suddenly been called up here. She let him stand there and worry for a moment, pretending to work as she did.He is goodly enough to look at, I’ll give him that, she thought. He was dark-visaged but well favored, with great dark eyes and a long face, and well made in his body.
“You are to be bonded,” she said, without any preliminaries, “to a daughter of Old House Yehenik, at the full of T’Khut. You may go to the merchants and arrange the festivities to your liking: so long as the binding is properly carried out, I do not care about the expense. See to it.”
Astonished, he bowed and went out without a word. Soon this information would be all over the house and out into the streets, where the professional gossipmongers would get their hands on it and spread it all over the planet…some of them using Evekh’s techniques. There was a choice irony to it. To Suvin, her grandson was a playing-piece, one of many: she cared little enough about him to hear what else the tongues would be wagging about—that he was unlikely to survive his binding night. Even if he did, she was unconcerned.But it would be better far if he did not, she thought,for then my old enemies will have given me their most priceless asset, and they will get nothing in return. Nothing. While I will have everything they have…
…and perhaps something more.
Smiling, she went to her work.
When T’Thelaih heard of it, her first response was to rage, and then to weep. But she dared do nothing else. Her father, who had made the match, she saw perhaps once a month, when his leisure allowed it, and then rarely for more than a few minutes. At such times she often wanted to cry out to him,It’s not my fault! But there was no hope of his understanding, and no use in making trouble.
She was a murderess.
It wasn’t her fault.
T’Thelaih had most of her family’s traits: the fair or light brown hair, the light bones and short stature, good looks that tended to be blunt rather than finely drawn. There the obvious assets of the Old House ended in her, for she did not have the psi-communications gift: she was mindblind, like her father, and that had been hard enough to bear in a house where almost no one ever had to speak—the slightest intention to communicate with another person was always heard.
One gift she did have, though, that the house had acquired long before and striven hard to be rid of. They had never succeeded: every six or seven generations it would pop up again, and there would be curses and fear. It was associated with the communications gift, but independent of it. When angry, the person with this pernicious gift could kill with the mind.
She had not known until she was betrothed for the first time. She was frightened: she had not yet suffered the Rapture, and though her body was ready, her mind was not. Her first husband, a son of rich House Kehlevt, and one who thought well of himself, had taken her to the room set aside for their binding and had simply begun to rape her.
She killed him. Without touching him, without laying a hand to a weapon—though she would have liked to—suddenly she was inside his head: suddenly the connection that had never been complete before was complete: and her rage and terror burst out through it and froze his heart and stripped the receptor chemicals out of his brain and deadened the life-fire in his nerves. He was dead before he rolled off her. No healer had been able to do anything.
There had been the expected uproar. But the bruises on her body spoke clearly enough about what had been going on, and the matter was hushed up, and money changed hands to keep the quiet well in place. So much she had heard later. She had been very afraid that that would be the end of her—that some evening, someone would slip something deadly into her cup; or that some day before dawn, someone would come in over the sweet white flowers on her windowsill and put a knife in her. Such things had been heard of. But no one troubled her. T’Thelaih went about the house keeping small and still. It took her some time to realize that other people were now keeping small and still aroundher. No one had ever cared ajah before whether she was angry. But now, the people of the house were not sure thatany anger of hers was something to cause, or to be near.
She tried to ignore the changed status of things and went about her studies and work as usual. Everybody in the house worked, whether they were marriage-fodder or not. T’Thelaih was very clear that that was just what she was—a gaming piece. She was not an own-child, but a “right-line child”—that was a euphemism that said she had some relationship to the head of the house, but not one confirmed by binding or other legal instrument. She was a by-blow, destined to be married off to some other house in return for some political favor or potential alliance. Now she went about her accounting work as usual and wondered whether the business with her f
irst husband would put her out of the marriage market. That could be bad: she could wind up disowned, or sold as a servant. But things quieted down after a while, and another offer was made, this time from House Galsh. It was a good enough match, and the young man was very nice, and T’Thelaih wondered whether or not the first time might have been a quirk or an accident. In any case, she looked forward to the wedding. She felt the slow burn of the Rapture coming over her as the days till the binding grew closer, and she welcomed it. The binding fell in the middle of it: her blood fever kindled her new husband’s, and the night was wild and memorable.
But in the morning he was dead.
There were no more matches made. T’Thelaih had leisure to work with the house’s accounts, now: all the leisure she liked. Everyone, the servants, her half sisters, her mothers, looked at her with terror. Sometimes it relaxed a little, but never for long. No one dared tease her or say something that might make her laugh…because it might make her angry, too.
The time that followed was long and lonely.
But now she stood in front of her father, listening incredulously to the news that she was being bound again. To a young man of House Velekh, of the “High House.” She stared at her father.
“But they are great,” she said. “What do they want with us?”
“Alliance,” he said.
