Courtship Rite

45

SURELY SOEBO WAS the most magnificent city on all of Geta! Casual sightseeing soon bewildered Humility. There were canals, cut at angles through what had once been river delta, distorting her sense of direction. By unfortunate choice she picked as landmarks two look-alike temples whose alternating appearance turned her around. Finally she worked her way down stone stairs, and hired a guide with a waiting flat-bottomed boat.

“Can we reach the Temple of the Wind from here?”

“It is at the junction of all the canals,” replied the tall female Ivieth while she poled her blue boat out toward the center of the waterway. “The Plaza of the Wind is the node for all Soebian gossip.”

Humility paid her fee and took her padded seat and would have cooled her hands in the diluted brine except for the drifting garbage. “I’m starved for gossip. I’ve been at sea.”

“All talk is of the Gathering. We hear only that the pretenders have camped well beyond the robe-hem of the city and seem loath to come closer where there might be danger to their skins.”

“I think the Kaiel will be soundly chastised,” Humility said, casting for nibbles.

“I don’t think they’ll come close enough to get scratched,” the woman replied scornfully.

“I once listened to Ivieth songs about the bravery of the Kaiel,” teased the passenger.

“We have songs about the bravery of everyone. We sing them when flattery is appropriate. We even have songs to warn our children about idle conversation within ear’s range of the Liethe who wear the ears of our Masters for necklaces.”

Sunset found Humility in the Plaza of the Temple of the Wind soaking up the gossiping and the chess and the excited antics of a group of iron-ball players. She ate fruit at a table above the crowds, careful to leave untouched the poisonous yellow peel. She chatted, provoked, probed. The sea clan was thought to be invincible, yet there was an undercurrent of hatred; even the Ivieth female had been wary of her, thinking her to be a tool of the Mnankrei.

Against the Plaza and the seething power of this city, Hoemei seemed like such a village priest. Because Humility was bewildered by her feelings of love — alternately rejecting them and rediscovering them — she wanted Hoemei to be wrong so that she could laugh at him and right so that she could love him all the more fiercely. He was probably wrong. Soebo was too solid.

She spotted a Liethe holding the arm of a white-haired Storm Master as he led her across the Plaza. Now there was a powerful man! The slight girl hurried to keep up, and once touched her head to his arm affectionately. Would she want him to be right? Would she connive ruthlessly to make her man right? or would she drift with whomever was strongest?

Humility’s baggage arrived at the Liethe hive long before she did. The hive in Soebo was an old building that had been in Liethe hands since before the first of the se-Tufi line had ever died. Even then it had been old, a stately derelict of the bawdy entertainment district. Now the whores and the theaters and the gaming houses were gone, washed away by shiftings of money that had not left even the hive untouched. Prospering Liethe had built onto their ancient mansion a wing of high towers around a walled garden where once had passed a street alive with drunken sailors. Perhaps the ghosts of Vlak seamen still bought orphaned women at auction in the brick theater-of-the-round that was itself a ghost, having been replaced by a public fountain.

Humility was given a tiny tower room and a mat. Three crones questioned her at length. One, a high mother of the nas-Veda line which had been discontinued because of immunological irregularities that appeared in old age, took her down to a sealed, sterile room of the hive’s genetic workshop where she met the se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh, a youth older than herself but who did not look older. They bowed slightly, giving their recognition gestures.

“You will be sharing Flesh’s two men. She carries the persona of the schemer Comfort, who is consort to High Wave Ogar tu’Ama, and the servile persona of Radiance for Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal’s use. She will be drilling you through the Nine Tier Matrix of Understanding immediately so that you will be ready as her back-up in either role by sunrise of the Knave’s Oneday. Please strip and don these sterile clothes. The mask, too.”

The nas-Veda guided her charges through sealed doors to a hall adjoining a small resin-coated room which she did not let them enter. There were windows. Inside, a young o’Tghalie woman sat, seemingly without control of her eyes or neck or hands.

“Is she mindless, too?” asked Humility sharply.

“Quite. Mnankrei records show she has died and been cremated. We collected her covertly out of curiosity. We have been wondering what the Mnankrei have been doing with these women. They do not use men for this kind of experiment.” The nas-Veda crone turned her face toward Flesh. “Now perhaps you can understand why we have assigned you to Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal?”

Humility’s memory tripped a file. “He is the designer of the deviant underjaw!”

The se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh was pondering the movements of the idiot o’Tghalie girl. They fit nowhere in the intricate map of political intrigue she had been trained to perceive. “Will she recover?”

“No.”

“That’s horrible. Fosal creates such monsters?” This would be the reason that High Wave Ogar tu’Ama had opposed Fosal at such great cost to himself.

“Fosal is gifted. The horror is not that such men exist, it is that others have allowed such men to rise to power.”

Flesh had become intense. “I am consumed with curiosity. How can the o’Tghalie have allowed their women to be used thusly? A sale is not an open contract.”

“They know nothing of what has happened to her, and you will tell them nothing. We have determined in our quiet way that she was sold in faraway Osairin and her clan believes her to be perished of a desert dust storm while she was being carried to the Njarae.” The old woman added ominously, “Fosal has used Liethe, too!”

“Mother! And you’ve given me to him!” exclaimed Flesh.

A hundred thousand wrinkles chuckled. “Humility will share your burden.”

Black pupils, embedded in blue and flecked irises, probed each other over the whites of the sterile masks.

“How has she been harmed?” asked Humility.

“You have been taught of the micro-life that sometimes rages in stinging scourge of death among the profane? Nie’t’Fosal has found ways to bring such profane ills into the sacred world.”

“She is diseased!” Both se-Tufi spoke with astonishment.

“We are not able to decode the mechanism. We have sampled this girl’s brain and all appears normal except that axionic and dendritic neural growth is unusually prolific. We believe a double process is involved. Viral constructs, hosted in free invading cells, have been used to play with genetic controllers. Mouth contact can transmit the disease.”

Suddenly Humility found herself in the middle of a huge attack of loyalty for the Kaiel. How could she have pretended to forget Hoemei! She was his abject servant! “The Kaiel are right to call a Gathering!”

The crone swiveled in contempt, gesturing at the demented o’Tghalie. “The Kaiel will be destroyed before they reach Soebo — by that!”

“We must warn them!” cried Humility. “We have our rayvoice contacts!”

“We will not warn them,” retorted the nas-Veda crone angrily. “With such a frightening thing loose do you think they will spare us? They will deliver a holocaust of flame to this city to roast us all — all of us — in a purifying total fire. All clans will be consumed to char as were the people destroyed when the Kaiel chastised the Arant! Would they see a way to mercy? Would you be merciful if you were they and knew of this horror that might spread from here like poison spores on the wind to every man-inhabited region of Geta? No, Liethe child, you will not warn the Kaiel. I bind you under penalty of death!”