Seth’s hand went to his chest. Would informing the Magistrate of Lijadu’s theft of the amulet alter his feelings toward the Sh’gaidu? Thus mocked and affronted, would Vrai, too, take an implacable stand against them? Seth glanced at the Deputy. He was startled to find that Emahpre had witnessed his involuntary fumbling at his chest and throat. Dear God, he had revealed his secret to Emahpre even before breaking the news to the Magistrate. Now the Deputy watched him with such rigid intentness that Seth feared to speak. His mouth opened. Emahpre, out of the seeing of Magistrate Vrai, shook his head in warning.
Didn’t either of these rational Tropiards care to know why he’d left Yaji Tropei in the middle of the night? Emahpre had asked, but Seth had offered up a lie—or, at best, a partial truth—and the Magistrate had subjected him to a pair of polite, if nonessential, questions. In truth, Vrai had been catechizing himself.
Obsessively, he continued: “My deputy thinks he’s the only Tropiard who understands the Sh’gaidu. But I know something about them, too. You see—” He swiveled away, peered into the darkness aft. “You see, I’m capable of empathy even with rebels, pariahs, discards. I have to be. I am the guilty conscience of my nation.”
“These people are sh’gosfi by choice, Magistrate! Harlots and mystagogues! By choice!”
But Vrai said only, “Let’s think again of sleep. Prepare a bunk for Kahl Latimer.”
“Tell Kahl Latimer your decision, Magistrate. He may not be able to sleep.”
“What decision?” Seth asked, taken by the conflict between these Tropiards but too intimidated by Emahpre to confess his sin.
Still facing aft, the Magistrate said, “Because we’re bond-partners, I trust you’ll understand and accept my decision. It’s not one I arrived at easily.”
“Only quickly,” Emahpre said.
“That’s simply not so. My reasons have historical antecedents. What we saw in the Sh’vaij this evening played a part, of course, but really just to tip me toward the only possible decision among all my seeming options.”
“Tell him,” Emahpre urged.
The Magistrate swiveled toward Seth. Tropiards slept masked, apparently. Vrai’s face suggested that of an aristocratic bandit.
“I’ve decided that we must let the Sh’gaidu be.”
Seth lay in a berth opposite the Magistrate’s. Deputy Emahpre slept, or pretended to sleep, in the bunk below his commander’s. A half hour or more had passed. All that Seth knew for certain about this finite eternity was that the Deputy had spent it trying to gauge how soundly Magistrate Vrai was sleeping.
At last the little Tropiard eased out of his bunk, crossed the cabin, and tapped Seth on the brow.
“Come into the pilot’s bubble,” he whispered.
Haggard and fearful, Seth swung his feet over the edge of his berth and dropped lightly to the floor. After ducking into the pilot’s compartment, he slid into a frame chair before the instrument console.
“Where’s the Magistrate’s dascra, Latimer?”
Seth, noting that the Deputy had dispensed with the usual honorific, told Emahpre what had happened in the cliffs. His inquisitor stared through the dome of the pilot’s bubble at the weird stars and the thunderhead growing in the northern sky. As if silently commiserating with his superior, the Deputy fingered his own amulet, now and again rubbing the amber stone decorating its pouch. When Seth had finished his story, Emahpre remained silent a long time.
“Latimer, you’ve given me a lever,” he at last said.
“A lever?”
“Your crass negligence can be made to appear nothing but Sh’gaidu deceit.”
Seth hissed in return: “I had no reason to suspect this theft would happen!”
“The Magistrate warned you. Then you slept with the Pledgechild’s heir without seeing to the safety of his dascra. If not negligence, what do you call such irresponsible flouting of a trust?”
Seth averted his gaze. “It’s past recall. Recriminations are pointless. We need to recover the amulet. And I must tell Magistrate Vrai what’s happened.”
“Let him sleep.” The Deputy gripped Seth’s wrist. “My intention is to recover the amulet. I’ll do so by refusing to overlook this provocation.”
“How will you do that?”
Deputy Emahpre released Seth’s wrist and touched the lighted console before him. The viridescent glow of the panel X-rayed his hand. Seth could see the bones of each finger strung like elongated bamboo beads. Then the fingers played lightly across a series of communication keys, and Emahpre’s alien visage took on an almost ghoulish aspect as he leaned forward to speak into The Albatross’s batonlike mike. There then ensued a rapid, static-free exchange in Tropish with a disembodied voice that Seth had never heard before.
“What was that about?” he asked afterward.
“Using the Magistrate’s code, I’ve called Commander Swodi of the surveillance force. I informed him of the theft and ordered him to dispatch a convoy of evacuation vehicles to the roadway before sunrise. Support troops, too.”
“That contravenes the Magistrate’s decision,” Seth said, perplexed.
“I’m seeing to it that you and the Kieri envoys return to Gla Taus with exactly what you came for.”
“You’ve committed treason, Deputy.”
When Seth tried to climb out of his chair again, Emahpre’s cerebration twisted through his brain like a fruit-corer: —Sit down, Latimer.
Seth sat down. Aloud, the Deputy said, “The recovery of Magistrate Vrai’s amulet hardly constitutes a treason.”
“You stole his personal code, deployed a portion of the surveillance force, and authorized an invasion of Palija Kadi. That’s treason, Deputy Emahpre.” Bracing against the inevitable, Seth lurched sidelong to get free of his chair.
—Sit down!
The command countered Seth’s own animating will. Awkwardly, he sat again.
“This is an internal state matter outside the province of you and your friends, Latimer. But by acting in Trope’s best interest, I’ll help you fulfill your mission. All you need do is renounce all Tropish executive, political, and military concerns. Any other posture is illicit intervention. Even Interstel recognizes the truth of what I’ve said and forbids such meddlesome arrogance.”
Seth whispered, “You’re committing treason against Magistrate Vrai.”
“For Magistrate Vrai, Latimer. I love both the Mwezahbe Legacy and Magistrate Vrai enough to commit such ‘treasons’ endlessly on their behalf.”
Down the southern sky above The Albatross, a meteor plummeted, tracing its path like a crisply burning fuse, fiery against the indigo of the night. Seth’s heart plummeted with it. For a moment it seemed that the Dharmakaya had fallen from its orbit. Abel, he silently cried, save yourself. But the meteor was only a meteor, not a light-tripper skipping to its death; and Seth was hurled back into his unwilling complicity with Deputy Emahpre.
Cheerily, the Deputy said, “It may please you, Latimer, how this works out. Why don’t you withhold judgment until you see?”
Eventually, exhausted, Seth slept where he sat.
BOOK FIVE
SIXTEEN
Dawn broke gray. Sixteen trucks descended out of the rocks west of Palija Kadi, floating down its dusty roadway in single file. They were clumsy-looking vehicles. Their high sideboards supporting rounded, plastiglas roofs, these trucks rolled on heavy rubber tires as tall as an adult Tropiard. The whine the trucks made seemed little more than the droning of an auroral breeze, and the helmeted Tropiards in their lofty cabs looked like mannequins or marionettes.
Emahpre espied the convoy coming and woke Seth up. “It’s time to recover what you lost, Kahl Latimer. Come.”
Seth rose groggily and followed the Deputy into the airship’s passenger compartment. Rolled tightly in his sleeping cape, Magistrate Vrai resembled a creature undergoing an arcane metamorphosis. He was dead to the two intruders from the pilot’s bubble, dead to the baleful susurrus of the morning.
“Go on,” Emahpre
said, scarcely bothering to whisper. “Wake him and confess your negligence.”
It seemed a pointless and cruel suggestion. Seth glanced guiltily at the sleeping Tropiard and decided to let him lie. Maybe Douin or Pors had found the missing amulet. Maybe the Pledgechild, having recovered it from Lijadu, was even now awaiting his arrival in the Sh’vaij to restore it to him, and to explain the significance of the apparent theft. Maybe the fey Lijadu herself intended to hand it over. If any of these speculations approached the truth, why worry the Magistrate with a premature and therefore needless confession?
Emahpre, drumming the fingers of one hand against his thigh, opened the ship’s side panel and gestured Seth through it ahead of him.
The trucks in the convoy had lined up sixteen abreast behind The Albatross, their noses pointing upbasin toward the Sh’vaij. At the driver’s window of the only vehicle whose nose protruded a hood’s length beyond all the others, Deputy Emahpre conferred with the officer in the cab. Seth took this opportunity to walk between two of the trucks, examining their construction and marveling at the indecipherable hieroglyphs painted on their doors.
Behind the parked trucks, however, he came face to face with a group of Tropish soldiers who had spilled from the enclosed carriers into the light. They stared blankly at Seth, each one masked. They wore small chromium helmets, single-piece garments of white, and broad black belts from which several pieces of complicated metal equipment hung. Two or three soldiers held long, tubelike implements before them; corrugated hoses ran from the tubes to gleaming, plastic canisters on their belts. Virtually all these warrior j’gosfi had laser rifles slung across their backs.
“Kahl Latimer!” the Deputy called.
Seth backpedaled away from the soldiers until he had at last turned about and confronted Emahpre. “What are they for?” he asked.
“The necessary.” The Deputy nodded at the officer in the point truck. “Captain Yithuju will see to the comfort of the Magistrate. When he awakes, the captain will tell him what’s occurred and where we’ve gone. I’m not abandoning the Magistrate, Latimer. My loyalty is still his.”
“Why don’t we tell him, then?”
“Follow your conscience. I’m going to the Sh’vaij, however.” He hurried up the path through the rich Sh’gaidu crops, knees and elbows pumping. Seth fell in behind him, demoralized by his grogginess and the weather.
The thunderheads that had formed above the basin during the night had toppled to the south, flattening out across all the visible sky. They had become something decidedly odd. Giving off a mother-of-pearl sheen, they resembled clusters of depending human breasts. Palija Kadi was a shadow beneath their matriarchal heaviness.
It was going to rain.
Almost as if he had been there all night, Douin awaited Seth and Deputy Emahpre on the assembly building’s apron.
“Something’s going on in there,” he said, indicating the Sh’vaij. “The Pledgechild and several of the Sh’gaidu elders—”
“Midwives,” Emahpre said. “They call esteemed older communards by a title that translates ‘midwives.’” The term plainly disgusted him.
“Very well, then. The Pledgechild and several . . . midwives . . . have gathered in the old woman’s cell,” Douin said. “They know your trucks are on the roadway. The rest of the Sh’gaidu are still in the galleries. The old woman says they’ll remain there until this business is settled.”
“Where’s Lord Pors?” the Deputy asked.
“He went out in search of Lijadu. He’s convinced she abandoned the galleries for the fields. He wants to check each of the kioba in turn, beginning with the one where Lijadu’s birth-parent kept her three-day vigil.”
“You told him of the theft?” Seth asked Douin.
“Of course. Did you tell the Magistrate, Master Seth?”
“I encouraged him not to,” Deputy Emahpre said, surprising Seth by the readiness with which he excused, before the Kieri, Seth’s failure of will. “But did the Sh’gaidu allow Lord Pors to traipse unmolested into the fields? Didn’t they try to prevent him from going?”
“No,” Douin replied. “Our freedom hasn’t been restricted in the least. In fact, the Sh’gaidu haven’t paid much attention to us this morning.”
Inside the assembly building, Seth’s party came upon the Pledgechild, Huspre, and three midwives kneeling at the altar before Palija Dait. Ifragsli’s corpse was gone, and only a single heartseed lantern burned. With help from Huspre and a midwife, the Pledgechild stood to receive those who had interrupted her meditations.
“Where’s your heir?” Emahpre demanded.
“I don’t intend to tell you,” the old woman said.
“She stole from Kahl Latimer the Magistrate’s dascra—last night, when she took him into the galleries.”
“We don’t deny that, Deputy. But Lijadu’s reasons are her own.”
“Her motives—her goals!—derive from you!”
The old woman said nothing. Seth shifted from foot to foot, while Douin kept his head bowed, as if to downplay his existence among these argumentative people by a self-effacing silence.
Deputy Emahpre made a slashing hand motion. “The Sh’gaidu have been a wart on the nose of the state for over two hundred years! What can’t be healed must be cut away! Your heir has at long last forced us to essay that surgery!”
“And you are the knife?”
“I am the knife,” the Deputy declared.
“Where’s Ulgraji Vrai, Deputy?”
“This morning I act in his stead, Pledgechild. My hands are his.”
“Then you’re to blame for the trucks in the basin—also for the foolhardy soldiers scarring the face of Palija Kadi with their ropes.”
Emahpre stalked off several paces. “The trucks, yes. The other, however, means nothing to me. Foolhardy soldiers? Ropes? If you’re seeking to deflect me from the recovery of Magistrate Vrai’s dascra, you’d—”
“Go outside!” The old woman flapped her hand at the Deputy. “Go look at the Great Wall! See for yourself the nuraj you’re perpetrating!”
The Deputy scornfully beckoned Douin and Seth to accompany him and trotted toward the door. “I’ll be back,” he told the Pledgechild. “Whatever you’re talking about, I’ll be back to conclude this business.”
Seth and Douin bewilderedly dogging his heels, he exited the Sh’vaij. Then, outside, the three of them ran along the building’s apron until they had reached a vantage from which the Great Wall was visible.
Above the stair-step terraces ascending to Palija Kadi, upon the wall’s awesome bone-white face, ten or twelve figures emulated the gravity-defying antics of ballooning spiders. They rappelled down the wall on ropes no more substantial-seeming than threads of spiders’ silk.
“What are they doing?” Douin asked, nearly winded.
Bitterly, Emahpre said, “I intend to find out.”
He surged toward the terraces, scrambling away from Seth and Douin like a puppet being lifted a full body’s length at a time. At the base of the terraces, he halted, and his companions caught up. Meanwhile, four or five of the rappelling soldiers had reached the bottom of the wall. Several more began to leapfrog down its face from the summit. Two of those already down were snapping pods off heartseed plants, scooping out the balls inside the fruits, and releasing these spheres on the wind. A number of these effervesced up the face of Palija Kadi like pale blue champagne bubbles. Emahpre swore in Tropish. In counterpoint, thunder mumbled in the bizarre cloud cover. The Deputy bounded up the stair steps to the wall on a grim steeplechase.
Before Seth could pursue him, Douin intervened. “Don’t, Master Seth. Even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he gets up there. Look to the east.” He pointed toward the kioba in which Lijadu had told Seth of her sojourn in the Tropish city of Ebsu Ebsa. “Let’s see if Lord Pors is there.”
“We’ll have to climb toward the wall,” Seth told Douin, “and cut across to the left from one of the terraces.” If they tried to go d
irectly to the lookout, uninterrupted stands of monarchleaf and silverbriar would impede their progress.
They climbed. More state soldiers dropped lightly down the wall, leaping out and sliding along their taut double ropes. Emahpre had disappeared on a higher terrace, and neither Seth nor Douin tried to spot him. They struck southward along a tier of slender bushes loaded with mottled brown-and-yellow legumes.
“Look!” Douin cried. He nodded at the kioba, which was below them now. Two naked Sh’gaidu were digging in the loose earth beneath the tower’s lookout. “What do you suppose they’re doing?”
“Maybe they’re burying a part of Lijadu’s birth-parent.” Douin had no chance to debate this proposition with Seth because Lord Pors appeared in the lookout and hailed them with a wave and a shout.
“I’ve found the Pledgechild’s heir!” he called. “Hurry, Master Douin! Hurry, Master Seth! She’s here, the deceitful slut!”
Startled, the two Sh’gaidu beneath the tower looked up. One rose from her crouch and began climbing the rope hanging from the platform. The other turned her topaz eyes on Seth and Douin.
“I’ve found her!” Pors shouted again, unaware of his peril.
“Look to the rope beneath you!” Douin cried in warning. “Look to the rope, Lord Pors!” An anxious noise escaped his lungs, and he ran for the steps descending toward the kioba.
A low booming of thunder sounded.
An instant later, Lord Pors screamed. He was pulled away from the lookout’s southern wall. His screaming grew more bloodcurdling, modulated into a banshee wail, and ceased. As Douin and Seth reached the stone-braced steps leading downward, Pors’s body came hurtling out of the tower. It completed only half a somersault before striking the ground.
The Sh’gaidu who had knifed Pors came shinnying down one of the stilts of the tower—for she had pulled the rope onto the platform after her and left it there. Her accomplice on the ground hurried to Pors’s body and crouched beside it with her back to Seth and Douin.
Douin crumpled to his knees. Crucified with grief or incredulity, he threw out his arms and called out his compatriot’s private Kieri name. Seth tried to raise him. Both Sh’gaidu were huddled over Pors now, and two wayward heartseed globes bobbed down the basin toward them. Raindrops pattered among the leaves and pocked the dust.
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Page 20
