The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "I couldn't do anything! I saw Shavian Bossit throwing suspicious glances my way when Gendra spoke of putting you and the Awakener to the question. He knows I came from Baristown, and he knows I've spoken out against this inquisition atmosphere the fliers want to force us into. Trust Shavian to put egg and fire together and hatch a plot."

  "You think he suspects?"

  "Suspects? Of course he suspects. Everyone! Of everything! Suspicion is his standard mode of operation. He maintains the household by suspicion." Tharius gritted his teeth.

  "I mean, do you think he suspects us? Do you think he is convinced there really is... a heresy? From his point of view, I suppose that's what it would be."

  "No. Not yet. The thing that's occupying his mind just now is another matter. There's supposed to have been a miracle in Thou-ne. Some idiot fished an image out of the World River, and the people demanded it be taken into the Temple. They're almost worshiping it, calling it the 'Bearer of Truth.' It shines, so they say. There are people traveling from six towns east just to visit the Temple, even though they know they can't come home again."

  "The Bearer of Truth?" Kesseret frowned. "An image? I hadn't heard about that. Do you think it's connected in any way?"

  "Shavian may. He has a habit of connecting everything. And it may be more than habit. During the last convocation, he spent an unwarranted amount of time with the Talkers. It was almost as though he were trying to usurp Ezasper Jorn's prerogative as Ambassador. He's ambitious, is Bossit."

  There was a sound from the next room, a hesitation in the music, then the dissonant fall of a hammer. In the silence they could hear a monotonous thrumming. Martien thrust one hand into the room, knocking on the open door.

  "Tharius. Someone's coming down the private corridor. It sounds like the old weehar. Mitiar."

  "Damn," Tharius said, unwinding himself from the lady Kesseret. "That's Gendra's majordomo with that damn drone. Quick, Kessie. Get yourself into bed."

  "I really should sit up-"

  "Quickly. Don't argue. Back to your hammers, Martien." Quickly he closed the window, pulled the chair into the center of the room, and seated himself in it, reaching a long arm toward the bookshelves. "Something dull, Kessie? An eschatological essay, perhaps?" He leafed through the volume and began to read, his voice dry and instructional.

  The thrumming came closer, a low moaning, "Whoom, whoom." The sound ceased outside the door to the suite. In the outer room Martien's music was interrupted once again, this time by a crash as the door opened and a loud voice cried, "Dame Marshal of the Towers, Gendra Mitiar."

  "She didn't even knock," Kesseret hissed between her teeth. "Your private corridor, and she didn't knock!"

  "Shh, Kessie. Remember who she is."

  He smiled quickly as he leaned back in his chair and called through the open door, "Ah, Gendra! I see you do not need to be invited to come in. Have you come to tender apologies to the lady Kesseret?"

  There was a bark of humorless laughter from the outer room. "I'm sure all my subordinates understand necessity." She came into the doorway, showing a voracious arc of yellow teeth. "We must all make sacrifices. And it is. Necessary to apologize for necessity. Isn't that so, lady?"

  "I'm sure it is, Your Reverence." Kessie lay pale upon the pillows, not needing to play a part. At the sound of Mitiar's voice her hands and feet burned agonizingly, and she found herself remembering the flame-bird as unexpected tears flowed unheeded down her face, sudden and unstoppable as the spring spate.

  "Gendra, if you will?" Tharius was on his feet, escorting the woman out, pulling the door almost shut behind them. Kesseret heard him in the outer room. "Have you no sensitivity at all? By Potipur's teeth, woman. At least let her recover!"

  "I was told she was little injured," the Dame Marshal snarled, aggrieved. "The Ascertainers said she seemed to feel little pain. Had it not been for the infections, she would have been long since healed."

  "Let them do to your hands and feet what they did to hers, Gendra, then tell me if you consider yourself little injured. Let your hands and feet swell to twice their size in the winter caverns, let you burn with fever! Would you have been happier if your blasted Ascertainers had broken her? Made her whimper for mercy? Made her confess to something she hadn't done in front of a roomful of fliers? Would that have satisfied you, made you sympathetic?"

  "Why should I be sympathetic? It was she who housed the conspirator."

  "Oh, pfah, Gendra. Conspirator! Don't talk nonsense. Only the Talkers profess to believe that, and even they doubt it. You owe the lady Kesseret your thanks. Don't you understand she protected us all by her demeanor? If it weren't for the lady Kesseret's courage, the entire Chancery might be under siege by some thousands of paranoid Talkers. By all three gods and their perverted offspring, Dame Marshal, but you've more gall than good sense." He heard himself raging and didn't care. Let her make what she would of it.

  Stiffly, she answered. "I would not have come if I had thought she would not welcome-"

  "She may understand the necessity of what you did to her, but for the love of Potipur, don't expect her to welcome your visits now."

  This was a word too much. Gendra snarled, "She'd better welcome them if she intends to go back to the Baris Tower as Superior under my orders."

  He did not relent. "Of course she goes back to the Baris Tower. And you'll let her alone until then and not harass her after she's returned. I swear to you, Gendra, you've laid an obligation for vengeance on me already. Don't make it worse."

  "Why you, Tharius? Hmmm? What is she to you?" It was both a sneer and a threat.

  "An old friend and my cousin - oh, yes, Gendra, my cousin. Though we must perforce set aside family relationships when we receive the Payment, those of us who have family members also receiving the Payment are blessed with kin who remember us as we were. My cousin, I say it again. Also a loyal member of the service. That's what she is to me and should have been to you, if you'd forget your damned Tower discipline for a moment and think of people... "

  Their voices dwindled away down the corridor. Into the silence behind them the sound of the flat-harp flowed; water music, a few tones repeated over and over in differing orders. Rippling. Lulling. Martien was covering the anger with calm, washing the pain away.

  Tharius shouldn't have spoken so. He shouldn't have angered Gendra. He shouldn't ever do anything to make her angrier or more suspicious. And yet Kesseret warmed at his words, at his defense of her. For a little time she forgot the conspiracy to which her life had been given and let the waters of surcease wash around her.

  After a time, the lady slept.

  17

  Six stone courtyards separated the library wing from the Bureau of the Towers, each succeeding each through long, echoing corridors lit by occasional oculars that spilt dim puddles of watery light onto the clattering stone. Jorum Byne, majordomo to the Dame Marshal, led the procession, the long neck of the single-stringed viol held against one shoulder as he plied the bow with his right hand, whoom, whoom, whoom. Two functionaries followed after, laden with documents and dispatch boxes. Then came Gendra herself, her teeth grinding endlessly in time with the viol, and last her personal servant, Jhilt, in a shankle, shankle of chains and rustle of stiff fabrics.

  Jhilt was a Noor slave from the lands north of Vobil-dil-go. There was no reason for her to wear chains. Though her personal duties in providing various kinds of pleasure for the Dame Marshal were not pleasant for her - were, indeed, often quite painful - escape from behind the Teeth was impossible. Still, she wore chains. Gendra Mitiar liked the sound of them, finding them even more pleasing in that there was no reason for them at all.

  Except for the palace itself, the Bureau of the Towers loomed higher than any building in the Chancery, its vast hexagonal bulk heaving skyward in stark, unornamented walls of black brick, windowless as cliffs. Behind those walls in serried ranks were four divisions, each with six departments; each department with ten sections, each section with a Sup
ervisor; each Supervisor responsible for ten Towers and thus ten townships. Each Supervisor had a deputy and an assistant. Each of these had a clerk, perhaps more than one. Some Towers, after all, were much larger than others, and the supervision of them was therefore more complex.

  Deep in the bowels of the bureau lay the labyrinthine vaults of Central Files, their complexities guarded and their secrets plumbed only through the let and allowance of the Librarian, Glamdrul Feynt, who did not, as might be naively supposed, have any responsibilities at all for the library wing of the palace. There had not been any books or records worthy of attention in the library wing for generations. What was there could be cared for, if at all, by Tharius Don; cared for by Tharius Don simply because it did not matter. Such was Feynt's opinion. He had not seen the books in the library wing. He did not need to do so. He had seen what was in the files, and everything of importance was there.

  So now, Gendra Mitiar, passing by the great corridor that led to her offices and reception rooms, her dining halls and solaria, elected to descend the curving stone staircase that led to the vaults below. The railing of this stair was carved in the likeness of fliers slaughtering weehar, thrassil, and an unlikely animal that was the artist's dutiful though uninspired conception of the legendary hoovar. None of the party except Jhilt - who shuddered to see the ravenous talons so bloodily employed, reminded thereby of certain habits of the Dame Marshal's - paid any attention to the railing. Gendra did not see it. She had stopped seeing it several hundred years before.

  The whoom, whoom, whoom of the viol announced her coming. Far down an empty corridor that dwindled to tidiness at the limit of its seemingly endless perspective came a faint echo, a door slamming, perhaps, or a heavy book dropping onto stone. At this, Gendra halted, snarling at Jorum Byne to stop the noise. Jhilt, too, was silenced with a gesture, and the five waited, heads cocked, listening for any defect in the dusty silence.

  "'Roo, 'roo, 'roo," came the call, softened by distance into a whisper. "Haroo. Your Reverence. Dame Marshal. Haroo?"

  "Tosh," growled the Dame Marshal. "Jorum, go find him. Bring him here. And don't lose sound of him. He's half-deaf and likely to go limping off in six other directions." Pleased with her own wit, she chuckled, grinding her teeth together as she found a bench along the wall to sit upon, not bothering to dust it, though the dust was deep with the even gray coating that covered every surface in the files. The bench was in a niche carved with commemorative bas reliefs, fliers and humans locked in combat, fliers and humans solemnly making treaty. Dust softened the carving, obscuring the details. No one had looked at it for generations.

  "Glamdrul Feynt is too old for this job," Gendra assured her clerks and bearers, going so far as to glance at Jhilt as though the information were so general it might be shared even with so insignificant a person as she. "Too old, and too deaf, and too crippled. Trouble is, hah, what you might suppose, eh? Trouble is no one else can find anything! We give him apprentices, one after the other, boys and boys, and what happens? They vanish. Lost. So he says. Lost in the files, he says. Can you imagine. Hah!"

  "It is said," ventured Jhilt in a whisper, "that a monster dwells below the tunnels here, coming out at night to feed upon those in the Chancery."

  Gendra found this amusing. "A monster, hah? Some toothy critter left over from ages past, no doubt? A hoovar bull, mebee? Got frozen in a glacier until we built Chancery atop him, hah?" She roared with laughter, stopping suddenly to listen to the clatter of approaching footsteps, one firm, one halting.

  Glamdrul Feynt was a young man by Chancery standards, only slightly half past a hundred, but he seemed to hover on the edge of dissolution, his aging unstemmed by the Payment. It had been given him tardily and with deep frustration by certain underlings of the Dame Marshal who devoutly wished him dead but were unable to replace him. It amused Glamdrul Feynt, therefore, to act even older and feebler than he was while still conveying omniscience on any matter relating to the files. Bent and gray, shedding scraps of paper from every pocket as he came, he approached the Dame Marshal with dragging footsteps and failing breath, leaning heavily upon his cane, meantime whispering his compliments in a gasp that bid fair to presage extinction at any moment.

  "Oh, sit down, sit down," she snarled at him. "Jorum, make him sit down. Now get off down the corridor, all of you. I've private business to discuss." She watched them malevolently as they retreated out of earshot, then leaned close to Feynt's side and said in a low voice, "I need you to do some research for me, Glamdrul Feynt. And if you do it well, I'll see you get a dose of the Payment that'll do you some good."

  "Ah, Your Reverence. But I'm too old, I'm afraid. Too late. Much too late, so they say. On my last legs, I'm afraid." He fished in a pocket for a wad of paper fragments, drew them forth, and peered at them with ostentatious nearsightedness.

  "Nonsense. Play those games with those who believe them, Feynt. Now listen to me.

  "There's a thing going on. The Talkers call it the Rivermen heresy. What it is, it's people putting their dead in the River instead of giving them to the Awakeners. Now, it's no new thing. Seems to me I've heard of it off and on in passing for a few hundred years. There's been a flare-up of it in Baris. Maybe other places, too. There's a new thing in Thou-ne. Some fisherman pulled a statue out of the River. Now it's set up in the Temple, right under Potipur himself. Rumblings. That's what I hear. What I want to know is, where did this heresy start? And when. When is important, too. And could the two things be connected?"

  "I can look, Your Reverence. I don't recall the heresy, offhand. Don't recall anything about Rivermen. But I can look... "

  "Go back two or three hundred years and look in the records of Baris. Find out who was Superior of the Tower then. Find out what was going on. Hah? You understand?"

  He did not answer, merely wheezed asthmatically and bowed, as though in despair.

  For her part, she took no notice of his pose but shouted for her entourage and went back the way she had come. Something within her quickened, hard on the trail of a connection she merely suspected. Tharius Don. The lady Kesseret. Hah. Both from Baris. And she seemed to recall something about Baris as a center of rebellion, long ago.

  Behind her on the bench the old man peered after her with rheumy eyes, his hands busy with the scraps of paper he had drawn from a pocket, sorting them, smoothing them, folding them twice and thrusting them into the pocket once more. "Oh, yes," he muttered to her retreating back. "I'll bet you would like to know where it started, old bird." He sat there, perfectly still, until he was alone in the files once more. Then he rose and moved swiftly down the corridor, shedding scraps from every pocket as he went.

  A door halfway down the long corridor opened as he approached, and a figure came halfway into the hall, beckoning imperiously.

  "Well, what did the old fish want?" The question came from a mouth thin-lipped as a trap and was punctuated by the snap of fingers as long and twisted as tree roots. Ezasper Jorn was a man of immense strength and enormous patience, though this latter characteristic was not now in evidence. "Come up with it, Feynt! What did old Mitiar want?"

  Behind the Ambassador the shadowy figure of Research Chief Koma Nepor stared at the file master. "Yes, yes, Feynt. What did she want?"

  Glamdrul Feynt entered the room, casting a curious glance at the boyish figures that lay here and there in its corners and along its walls. These were his apprentices. They were also the materials Nepor had used in his research on the effects of Tears and blight and half a dozen other substances found here and there on Northshore.

  "Any luck?" he asked, purposely not responding to their questions. "Did you have any luck with that last one?"

  "It talked," whispered Nepor, his pallid little face with its pink rosebud mouth peering nearsightedly at one of the forms. "It talked for quite a while, didn't it, Ezasper? I was quite hopeful there for a time."

  Ezasper Jorn refused to be sidetracked by these considerations. He gripped the file master in one huge
hand and shook him gently to and fro, as a song-fish might shake a tasty mulluk. "Out with it, Feynt. What did the old fish want?"

  And Glamdrul Feynt, chuckling from time to time, explained what it was that much concerned the Dame Marshal of the Towers. After which came a long and thoughtful silence.

  18

  Mumros Shenaz rolled out of his blankets well before dawn, awakened by the peeping of the ground birds, a repetitive, percipient cry that seemed as full of meaning as it was without purpose. There was no mating, no nest building, no food searching going on. No defense of territories. Only this high, continuous complaint of bird voice, as though only by this sound could the dawn be guided to the eastern horizon and only by these cries driven to mount the sky.

  Such thoughts amused Mumros. He sat often by himself, thinking such things, and was called the Lonely Man because of the habit. He did not mind. Since all who were his had died, he was indeed a lonely man, spending his life seeing the joys of others and remembering his own that were past. One such was to be remembered this dawn time.

  He stretched, bent from side to side, working the kinks out of his back and legs. All around him lay the lightweight pamet tents of the Noor. Last night's campfires were hidden beneath lumps of half-dried bog-bottom. Smoke leaked upward in thin, coiling bands. He stretched again and bent to pick up the pottery flask of sammath wine laid by for his father's ghost. His father's mud grave was nearby, only over the hill, and Mumros walked away from the camp toward it, the walk turning into the distance-eating trot of the Noor as his sleep-tightened muscles loosened with the exercise. At the top of the hill he looked back, hearing someone in the camp call, a long-drawn cry to the new day. There was movement there. Flames. Someone had risen as early as he and built up the fire with dried chunks of bog-bottom cut by some other traveling Noors, days or even months ago. Such was the life of wanderers. Planting grain to be eaten by others, harvesting grain others had planted. Cutting bog-bottom for another's fire, burning bog-bottom some other Noor had cut.