A Time of Changes

58

This duke is one of the wealthiest in Manneran, with sprawling estates along the Gulf and in the Huishtor foothills, and a splendid home at the capital set amidst a park worthy of an emperor’s palace. He is hereditary customs-keeper of Stroin Gap, which is the source of his family’s opulence, since for centuries they have skimmed a share of all that is brought forth to market out of the Wet Lowlands. In his person this duke is a man of great ugliness or remarkable beauty, I am not sure which: he has a large flat triangular head, thin lips, a powerful nose, and strange dense tightly curled hair that clings like a carpet to his skull. His hair is entirely white, yet his face is unlined. His eyes are huge and dark and intense. His cheeks are hollow. It is an ascetic face, which to me always seemed alternately saintly and monstrous, and sometimes the both at once. I had been close with him almost since my arrival in Manneran so many years before; he had helped Segvord Helalam into power, and he had stood soulbinder to Loimel at our wedding ceremony. When I took up the use of the Sumaran drug, he divined it as if by telepathy, and in a conversation of marvelous subtlety learned from me that I had the drug, and arranged that he should take it with me. That had been four moonrises earlier, in late winter.

Arriving at his home, I found a tense conference in progress. Present were most of the men of consequence whom I had inveigled into my circle of selfbarers. The Duke of Mannerangu Smor. The Marquis of Woyn. The bank director. The Commissioner of the Treasury and his brother, the Procurator-General of Manneran. The Master of the Border. And five or six others of similar significance. Archivist Mihan arrived shortly after I did.

“We are all here now,” the Duke of Mannerangu Smor said. “They could sweep us up with a single stroke. Are the grounds well guarded?”

“No one will invade us,” said the Duke of Sumar, a trifle icily, clearly offended by the suggestion that common police might burst into his home. He turned his huge alien eyes on me. “Kinnall, this will be your last night in Manneran, and no help for it. You are to be the scapegoat.”

“By whose choice?” I asked.

“Not ours,” the duke replied. He explained that something close to a coup d’etat had been attempted in Manneran this day, and might well yet succeed: a revolt of junior bureaucrats against their masters. The beginning, he said, lay in my having admitted my use of the Sumaran drug to the drainer Jidd. (Around the room faces darkened. The unspoken implication was that I had been a fool to trust a drainer, and now must pay the price of my folly. I had not been as sophisticated as these men.) Jidd, it seemed, had leagued himself with a cabal of disaffected minor officials, hungry for their turn at power. Since he was drainer to most of the great men of Manneran, he was in an extraordinarily good position to aid the ambitious, by betraying the secrets of the mighty. Why Jidd had chosen to contravene his oaths in this fashion was not yet known. The Duke of Sumar suspected that in Jidd familiarity had bred contempt, and after listening for years to the melancholy outpourings of his powerful clients, he had grown to loathe them: exasperated by their confessions, he found pleasure in collaborating in their destruction. (This gave me a new view of what a drainer’s soul might be like.) Hence Jidd had, for some months now, been slipping useful facts to rapacious subordinates, who had threatened their masters with them, often to considerable effect. By admitting my use of the drug to him, I had made myself vulnerable, and he had sold me to certain folk of the Justiciary who wished to have me out of office.

“But this is absurd!” I cried. “The only evidence against me is protected by the sanctity of the godhouse! How can Jidd place a complaint against me based on what I’ve drained to him? I’ll have him up on charges for violation of contract!”

“There is other evidence,” the Marquis of Woyn said sadly.

“There is?”

“Using what he heard from your own lips,” the Marquis said, “Jidd was able to guide your enemies into channels of investigation. They have found a certain woman who admitted to them that you gave her a strange drink that opened her eyes to you—”

“The beasts.”

“They have also,” the Duke of Sumar said, “been able to link several of us to you. Not all, but several. This morning some of us were presented, by their own subordinates, with demands to resign their offices or face exposure. We met these threats firmly, and those who made them are now under detention, but there is no telling how many allies they have in high places. It is possible that by next moonrise we will all have been cast down and new men will hold our power. However, I doubt this, since, so far as we can determine, the only solid evidence so far is the confession of the slut, who has implicated only you, Kinnall. The accusations made by Jidd will of course be inadmissible, though they can do damage anyway.”

“We can destroy her credibility,” I said. “I’ll claim I never knew her. I’ll—”

“Too late,” said the Procurator-General. “Her deposition is on record. I’ve had a copy from the Grand Justiciar. It will stand up. You’re hopelessly implicated.”

“What will happen?” I asked.

“We will crush the ambitions of the blackmailers,” said the Duke of Sumar, “and send them into poverty. We will break Jidd’s prestige and drive him from the Stone Chapel. We will deny all of the charges of selfbaring that may be brought against us. You, however, must leave Manneran.”

“Why?” I looked at the duke in perplexity. “I’m not without influence. If you can withstand the charges, why not I?”

“Your guilt is on record,” the Duke of Mannerangu Smor said. “If you flee, it can be claimed that you alone, and this girl you corrupted, were the only ones involved, and the rest is merely the fabrication of self-serving underlings trying to overthrow their masters. If you stay and try to fight a hopeless case, you’ll eventually bring us all down, as your interrogation proceeds.”

It was wholly plain to me now.

I was dangerous to them. My strength might be broken in court and their guilt thus exposed. Thus far I was the only one indicted, and I was the only one vulnerable to the processes of Mannerangi justice. They were vulnerable solely through me, and if I went, there was no way of getting at them. The safety of the majority required my departure. Moreover: my naive faith in the godhouse, which had led me rashly to confess to Jidd, had led to this tempest, which otherwise might have been avoided. I had caused all this; I was the one who must go. The Duke of Sumar said, “You will remain with us until the dark hours of night, and then my private groundcar, escorted by bodyguards as though it were I who was traveling, will take you to the estate of the Marquis of Woyn. A riverboat will be waiting there. By dawn you will be across the Woyn and into your homeland of Salla, and may the gods journey at your side.”