Sliffisunda did not come himself. He sent a Fourth Degree underling and the human, Ilze. It amused him to do this, setting the humans one against the other. He did it sometimes with slaves or craftsmen, making one’s safety dependent upon betrayal of the other. So, now, he thought Ilze might work against Gendra Mitiar to obtain the person of Pamra Don.
But she, remembering Ilze in the Accusatory, was disinclined to pay him attention.
‘I must speak with the Talker,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what he was thinking of, sending you.’ She sniffed, raking her face, staring at him as though he had been some kind of bug. Her teeth ground, and he tensed in every nerve, expecting pain. That sound had accompanied pain before, and he wanted to scream at her.
‘Sliffisunda wants to see her,’ he grated.
‘Fine,’ Gendra said. ‘Let him come to see her. Talk with her. Question her, if he likes. I need to talk with him, too, and I’ll not be hauled up there like some sack of laundry.’
Taking a quick look at the alert Jondarites, Ilze retreated, quelled for this time. He had not laid eyes on Pamra Don. For all he knew, she was not even with the group. She, however, spying through a slit in the tent side, had seen him very well, seen him and disregarded him as an irrelevancy. He would hurt her if he could, but he would not be allowed. The Chancery folk would not allow it. Her great-great-grandfather, Tharius Don, would not allow it, She explained this to Neff and her mother and Delia as all of them nodded and smiled.
Back at the Talons Ilze’s failure was reported to Sliffisunda, who cawed laughter. ‘I did not think he would do any good!’ The Fourth Degree Talker who had reported on Ilze kept his beak shut, wisely. Sliffisunda shuffled back and forth on his perch, darting his head from side to side. ‘Well, I will go talk to this old human. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or next day.’
He let two days pass before going to the camp. Gendra, who had studied the fliers for some time, was not concerned about the delay. The lassitude that had bothered her on the journey had not yet abated, and she remained in her tent, ministered to by Jhilt. Pamra, meantime, preached to the Jondarites. They, remembering how their general had responded to her, varied in their response from polite to enthusiastic.
And at last Sliffisunda arrived. The Talkers had lately taken to regalia, a tendency borrowed from humans, and Sliffisunda wore a badge of degree slung about his neck as well as various sparkling ornaments on his legs, feet, and wing fingers. Warned of his coming, Gendra had Pamra brought out of her tent, fully accoutred in her Jondarite armor, and set in a chair beside the fire with Jondarites at either side. If the old rooster wanted this one, Gendra thought, he would have to give something significant in return, though nothing of this appeared in her face or voice as she first greeted the Talker.
‘I am honored,’ she said. ‘We grant the request of Sliffisunda to talk with – even question – the woman, Pamra Don.’
‘She was to have been sent to us,’ the Talker cawed, depositing shit on Gendra’s words.
Gendra’s fingers twitched toward her face, then stilled, knotted. So, it was to be a battle of insults. ‘One pays little attention to what Talkers demand,’ she replied in a bored voice. ‘Unless one is given reason to listen.’
Sliffisunda almost crouched in surprise. So, the humans could engage in Talkerly disputation! Almost always the humans were like spoiled eggs, stinking soft. This one was not. He turned away from her, showing his side – not quite a fatal insult, though close. ‘What reason would humans understand?’ he cawed.
‘More subtle reasons than a Talker could ascertain, perhaps,’ she replied, turning her shoulder toward him to signal the Jondarites. ‘The Thraish have not been noted for good sense.’
He stretched his wings wide and threatened her. She gestured again at the Jondarites. He looked up to see a dozen crossbows centered on his chest. He laughed and subsided. ‘So. So, Gendra Mitiar. What have you to say?’
‘I have to say your interest and mine are the same, Sliffisunda. Do you speak for the Talkers?’
‘I speak to Talkers,’ he boasted. ‘And they listen.’
‘Ah,’ she murmured. So, he could not commit the Talkers to anything, but he could argue a case. If she succeeded in acquiring an alliance with him, she would buy an advocate, not a potentiary. Still, what matter? Those in the assembly would accept a Talker’s interest as representative of the Thraish. They would not know the difference.
She turned full face toward him and said, ‘I have a case to put to you, Uplifted One …’
She spoke of her desire for the post of Protector of Man. She spoke of her intentions, once that post was hers.
‘There is no reason the Thraish cannot increase in numbers. Human numbers can be increased to feed them. The Noor are no good to you because the color of their skins will not allow the Tears of Viranel to grow properly within them. Let us eradicate the Noor. Let us replace them with settlers from Northshore.’
Behind the tent flap, Jhilt quivered in shock. This she had not heard before.
‘How will you convince the Chancery to do this?’ Sliffisunda asked, interested despite himself. Even though none of this would be needed when the herdbeasts multiplied, it was still an interesting concept.
‘If your numbers are increased, the amount of elixir can be increased. More humans can receive it. Those whose votes are needed in the Chancery assembly will be promised elixir. A simple thing, Sliffisunda.’
‘How will you wipe out Noor?’
‘War.’ She shrugged. ‘General Jondrigar needs opportunity for war.’
‘Not enough Jondarites.’ This was said as mere comment, not as objection.
‘True.’ Again she shrugged. ‘We will need to conscript men from Northshore as well. Any man, I should think, who has not fathered a child in a few years.’
Who will then not be available to support children he has fathered, Sliffisunda thought, while keeping silent. The Thraish understood nestlings. Even Talkers understood nestlings. When the parent was lost, the nestlings were lost. Many would die if this woman came to power. The pits would be full. And if that went on for a long time, the Thraish could expand in advance of the day he had planned. The woman was ambitious, but not wise. He could use her, despite her disputatious nature.
‘Let us talk,’ he said, smiling inside himself.
On the day following, Sliffisunda arrived to question Pamra. This was a simple feint or, as the fliers put it, hadmaba, a threatening posture designed to bluff rather than injure. Sliffisunda wanted to support Gendra Mitiar; he did not want her to think he did it willingly or for his own purposes. So, let her think he was really interested in this pale, thin woman with the blazing eyes with the child on her lap.
‘Tell me of your crusade,’ he said, expecting nothing more than ranting or evasions.
‘You do an evil thing,’ she said in a level tone, fixing him with her eyes. ‘All you fliers.’ The child fixed him with her eyes, strangely.
He hunched his shoulders, staring at her, ignoring her young. ‘What evil is that?’
‘It is for you the workers are raised up,’ she said. ‘I did not know that until I came to the Chancery, until my great-great-grandfather Tharius Don told me. I thought it was for the work they did, as we were taught. I thought it was Potipur’s will. I had been taught that. It was false.’
‘It is Potipur’s will,’ Sliffisunda replied, amused. ‘Potipur has promised the Thraish plenty. The bodies of your dead are the plenty he promised.’
‘A true god would make no such promise. A true god would not do evil. Therefore, Potipur is not a true god, he is merely your god, a Thraish god. Not a god of man.’
‘Does man have a god?’ Considering the trouble the priests and Towers had been to to suppress all humanish religions, it was amazing that she had come up with this. Despite himself, he was intrigued.
‘If the Thraish have a god, then men, also, have a god. My voices tell me that if there is not One, over us all, then there are several, for each
race of creatures.’
‘Or none?’ he asked. ‘Have you thought of that?’
She shook her head at him. ‘My voices say there is. A god. Of humans and Treeci, for we are like.’
Sliffisunda shat, offended, turning his back on her. She did not seem to notice but merely stared at him as though he were some barnyard fowl. He screamed at her, wings wide, and she merely blinked. ‘Foul Treeci. Offal. Fish eaters.’
‘The Treeci are wise and benevolent creatures,’ she said. ‘As man can be if not brutalized by wickedness. Raising up the workers is a wicked thing to do, Sliffisunda. We know their pain and do nothing. Thereby we condone it. Thereby we are made brutes. Not by the workers themselves, but by the Thraish, who require they be raised. So my voices say.’
Gendra, sitting on the other side of the fire, blinked in amazement. She had not heard more than five words from Pamra Don during the entire trip. Now this! What had gotten into the woman?
‘Heretic!’ Sliffisunda cawed. ‘Unbeliever in Potipur.’
‘If Potipur is only a Thraish god, why should I believe in him?’ she asked. ‘If the weehar had a god, would it be the god of the Thraish?’
Theology dictated that the weehar could have no god except the Thraish god, but Sliffisunda had his own doubts about that. He recalled the quasi-racial memories of the fliers’ last hunt, as he taught them to nestlings. Certainly the weehar had not seemed to rejoice in Potipur. Perhaps the weehar did not rejoice because they were being punished. But for what? What sins could a weehar commit? The sin of offal eating? The sin of debasement? The sin of doubt in Potipur’s care for the Thraish? The sin of failing to breed? The sin of failing to give honor? How could the weehar or thrassil commit any of these? More likely the weehar were only things, needing no god at all. As the humans were things. Sliffisunda shook his head. The woman didn’t talk like a thing, which was troubling. Abruptly he rose, stalked to the edge of the encampment, and raised himself into the air. Too troubling. Too much talk.
Behind him, Pamra watched him go, a little wrinkle between her eyes. It was hard, so hard. She could not reach him. She looked around for Neff, for her mother. They would have to help her with this one. She could not feel her way into his heart, not at all. They stood remote, their effulgence dimmed in the light of the day, hard to see. She listened for their voices and was not rewarded. Nothing. Tears crept into her eyes, and she shook them away angrily. If they did not speak to her, it was because they didn’t need to. She could not expect them to be with her every minute. Perhaps they had other things to do, other people to guide as well.
Sliffisunda arrived at the Talons in a foul mood. He stalked into his aerie, snatching a mouthful of food as he passed the trough, ripping an arm from the twitching meat and cracking it for the marrow. It had no savor. The human, Ilze, was waiting outside. Sliffisunda could smell him, that sweetish, human stink which only the Tears of Viranel softened and ameliorated into something almost satisfying. Almost. Sliffisunda drooled, thinking of weehar.
A human god? To believe in a human god, that would be a sin. But if weehar believed in a god at all, what god would it be? Sliffisunda made a noise like a snarl in his throat. Under the Thraish, the weehar had ended. Under the humans, they had multiplied. Which god would the weehar accept? And that could be the sin for which they were punished – except that the punishment had come first.
Ignoring the crouching human on his porch, Sliffisunda launched himself toward the Stones of Disputation. This was not a matter he cared to think about by himself.
Behind him, Ilze pounded his knee with his fist, livid with frustration. Where was Pamra Don? Why hadn’t this Talker brought him Pamra Don?
In the camp, Gendra Mitiar watched Pamra Don, her eyes narrowed. She had noticed for the first time that Pamra Don ate almost nothing. The woman seemed built of skin tightly drawn over her bones, like a stilt-lizard, all angles, with eyes like great glowing orbs in her face.
‘Doesn’t she ever eat?’ she asked the Jondarite captain.
‘Very little,’ he admitted. ‘A little bread in the morning. She seems to like Jarb root, and one of the men sought it for her during the journey.’
‘You’d better detail him to find more,’ she said. ‘The woman may not last a week if she doesn’t eat something.’
‘I can force her if you like,’ the captain suggested. It was sometimes necessary to force-feed captives, particularly Noor captives, who often tried to starve themselves when their families had been killed before their eyes.
Gendra shook her head. ‘No. I need her cooperative with the Thraish. If she will eat Jarb root, see she gets it. At least enough of it to keep her alive.’ She looked up, drawn by a distant cacophony. ‘What’s that?’
‘The Talkers on the top of the Talons, Dame Marshal. They do that sometimes, late into the night – sometimes all night long.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Arguing, so I’ve been told. Only the high-mucky-muck ones like the one who was here. Sixth Degree ones. They have the highest pillars all to themselves. The less important ones, they meet lower down. Some nights there will be three or four bunches of them, all going at it. Not always this loud, though. Sliffisunda must have a bone in his craw!’ The captain laughed, unawed.
Gendra’s eyes narrowed once more. So. Sliffisunda had talked to Pamra Don, and then some great argument followed among the Thraish. Perhaps Gendra’s case was even now being argued. She smiled. Good. Very good.
As she rose from her chair and moved toward the tent, she stumbled, a sudden dizziness flooding over her.
‘Jhilt,’ she gasped, feeling the slave’s hands fasten around her arms and shoulders.
‘The Dame Marshal has been sitting too long near the fire,’ the slave soothed, hiding a smile behind her hand. ‘It makes one dizzy.’
‘You get dizzy, sitting by the fire?’ Gendra said childishly. ‘You do?’
‘Of course. Everyone does.’ Jhilt half-carried the woman into her tent and eased her onto the bed. ‘Everyone does.’ Especially, Jhilt said to herself, when one is some hundreds of years old and is no longer getting any elixir. The woman on the bed looked like a corpse, like something in the pits, gray, furrowed skin gaped over yellow teeth, like a skull. ‘Everyone does,’ she soothed, wondering how long it would take. Jhilt had a small supply of Tears in a vial hanging on her chains. She had toyed with the idea of using the Tears before rather than after Gendra’s death. She amused herself by thinking of this now, weighing the idea for merit.
‘No,’ she sighed at last. ‘The captain would know what I had done. If she merely dies, he will know.’
Perhaps she could use the Tears on someone else. That Laugher, perhaps. That would be amusing, too.
The disputation on the stones went on until almost dawn, not merely acrimonious, which most disputations were, but becoming increasingly enraging as the night wore on. Blood was drawn several times before the argument broke up, and only Sliffisunda’s quickness in parrying attacks kept him from being among the injured. It was clear the Talkers would not accept the idea of a human god or any weehar god. Only the Thraish had a god, and the god of the Thraish was the god of all. The Thraish were the chosen of Potipur, who set aside all other creatures for the service of the Thraish. So the Talkers believed.
Sliffisunda, bruised and tired, was not so sure. The other Talkers of the Sixth Degree had not heard Pamra Don. He did not like to think what might have happened if they had heard Pamra Don. It might be better if none of them heard her, ever. Better if Sliffisunda had not heard her himself. He settled upon his perch, head resting upon his shoulder. In the afternoon, he would talk with the human, Ilze. In the evening, he would go to the camp of the humans again and make an agreement with Gendra Mitiar. It did not matter what agreement with her was made. The woman stank of death. She would not live long enough to worry him.
‘What will you do with Pamra Don?’ he asked Ilze.
Ilze’s mouth dropped open. He salivated. T
he stench of him rose into Sliffisunda’s nostrils, sickeningly sweet. ‘Teach her,’ he said at last, a low, gargling sound. ‘Teach her she cannot do this to me.’
‘Where?’ Sliffisunda asked. ‘Where will you do this?’
‘Here. In the Talons. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Before those from the Chancery?’ Sliffisunda was watching him closely. If, as Sliffisunda thought likely, all those in the crusade had been contaminated by Pamra Don’s ideas, then some private vengeance against the woman would not suffice. Her followers would have to be convinced that Pamra Don was wrong. ‘Would you punish her before those from the Chancery and all her followers?’
Ilze shivered. He wanted to say yes, but his soul shrank from it. He had orders not to touch her. If he punished her in public, they would kill him. He knew that. They would kill him at once. Those from the Chancery would do it. Her followers would do it. And no one would care enough to save him from them. ‘If you would protect me,’ he whined, hearing the whine and hating it.
‘Ah. Well, suppose you don’t do it. Suppose we do it, the Thraish. How should it be done?’
Ilze had only thought of whips, of stakes. ‘Tie her to a stake,’ he said, then stopped. The Talkers didn’t use whips. ‘'Eat her?’ he offered.
Sliffisunda cawed his displeasure, pecking Ilze sharply on one side of his head so the blood flowed. ‘Take into our bodies the foul flesh of a heretic? Stupid human!’
‘Well, do whatever you do, then,’ Ilze sulked, trying to stanch the blood.
‘We have a ceremony,’ Sliffisunda said. ‘A ceremony.’
Night came. Sliffisunda came again. Pamra Don came again, to the fireside.
‘Do your followers believe as you do?’ the Talker asked her, already certain of the answer.
‘Yes. Most of them. All of them, in time. All mankind, in time.’ It was not the question she had expected, not one of the questions she was ready for, but the Talker asked nothing else. He turned and left her, going to Gendra Mitiar to carry on a lengthy, soft-voiced conversation which Pamra could not hear.
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