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 Supervisor; 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 tininess 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 it 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 Riverman 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.
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. ‘Of such small duties is the solidarity of the Noor built,’ he remarked to himself, remembering something similar his father had once said. ‘Of our concern for those who travel after us comes our unity as a people.’
He trotted down the hill, head swinging to and fro in its search for the mud grave. His tribe had not been this way in several years. He could have forgotten where it was – no. No. He had not forgotten. It stood in a slight declivity, the sculptured face looking toward him. Rain, though infrequent, did come upon the steppes from time to time. It had washed the mud face, leaving it bland, almost featureless. In a way that was a good sign, for when the mud grave fell to dust, the spirit would move on. Some were ready to go on in only a year or two. Others so longed for their lives and kin that they stayed in the mud graves for many years, even a lifetime. This grave was neither very old nor very young.
‘Father …’ He bowed, pouring the sammath wine onto the thirsty clay that covered the bones. ‘I have brought you drink. And news. The tribe has been chosen by Queen Fibji to take part in her great plan. We go now to her tents, all of us. Your friend Mejordu is still well, though he tires sometimes after a long day, and he asks to be remembered to you.’ He had several anecdotes about Mejordu to share, for the man had always been clownish and amusing. After this he was still for a moment, trying to recall the last bit of news. Oh, yes. ‘Your grandson Taj Noteen has led a group of Melancholies south to net shore-fish for the Queen.’
He fell silent then, thinking he had heard cries from the camp. Well. Whether or not, it was time to be getting back.
‘I take my leave, Father. I will visit you when we next come by this way.’ He bowed again and turned back toward the camp, not trotting now but running, for he did hear cries, screams.
Before reaching the crest of the hill, he dropped to his belly and writhed upward to peer over it.
Glittering figures moved among the tents of the Noor. Jondarites! Shiny fishskin helms plumed with flame-bird feathers sparkled over the huddled people of Mumros’s tribe. He wriggled forward, serpentlike in the sparse grass, down the hill into a slanting gully. Over the cries of his people he heard the voice of the Jondarite captain.
‘Women and children here. Men over there. All boys over ten with the men. Boys under ten with the women. Speed it up there, move! Move!’
Mumros risked raising his head. The men were herded together at one side of the camp. The women were all in the center, near the fires, surrounded by the Jondarite soldiers. Suddenly, without a word of command, the soldiers began slaughtering the women and children. All at once. Quickly. Like fishermen clubbing fish, they struck them down. Like stilt-lizard beaks, swords dipped in and out, emerged dripping, plunged in again.
The men of the tribe tried to break loose, but they had been tied. Over his own howling blood, Mumros heard their voices, crying names: ‘Onji, beloved!’ ‘Creedi, Bowro, children – ah!’ ‘Girir, oh, Girir!’
Then the voice of the captain once more.
‘You men are to be taken as slaves to the mines. You will be roped together and marched there. Before we go, you are to look at the bodies, closely. Make sure all are dead. We have had men try to escape in the past to get back to their families. We want you to be very sure you have no families to come back to.’
Mumros dropped his head into the grass. He could not move. There was bile in his mouth, an agony in his head. He wanted to kill but had nothing to kill with. He was one and they were many. He could go to them, but what good would it do? They would only take him with the others.