Courtship Rite

53

HER KILLING MOOD as invisible as her secret name, the Queen of Life-before-Death stalked slowly through the Swift Wind’s victory party in the se-Tufi persona of Sugarpie, a woman who wore gaudy clothes of her own design, flirted without much interest in sex, and was an avid gourmet of gossip. Sugarpie’s smile was quick to say hello and as quick as her eyes to wander in search of people more worthy of her smile. This evening she was spreading colorful rumors of the violent end of Radiance who had turned traitor for the sake of the hairy Kaiel.

There were no Mnankrei wives present. This was Nie’t’Fosal’s victory party, a celebration of male prowess. Everywhere the talk gave the greatest Winterstorm Master of the Mnankrei credit for destroying the Gathering of Outrage as easily as the Red Death tree poisons the swarming gei. The tales were of Fosal’s invincibility. No enemy stood against him! no friend dared betray him! no woman dominated him! He had promised his followers that in time he would snuff out the Gathering as if it had never been. And he had been right! The final fevered agonies of the Advance Court embellished the tales like decoration upon cake.

Humility finally targeted the ideal carrier of her lie. From a distance she saw’t’Fosal at the gaming tables being served by a naked courtesan whose scarifications had been outlined with blue and red paint. This garish beauty left her master for a moment to fetch him a drink and Humility caught her just long enough to tell her of the grim death of her Liethe rival, knowing that the story would go directly to the ears of the Winterstorm Master.

The antidote ’t’Fosal had treacherously instructed Radiance to take after she had infected the food of the Kaiel was no antidote, but a poison violent enough to rip the muscles from her bone. He was not a grateful man. Tonight he would be keyed to hear about that death. Let him feel the elation of total success. An enemy with his belly full was a dead enemy.

As she drifted back through the party, Humility wondered at this madman’s perception of people. He despised women and so he perceived the Liethe as incompetent to perform a simple chemical analysis. Humility herself had done the preliminary toxicity study of his “antidote” as a normal precaution and had been appalled by the crudity of his chemicals as well as his tactics. Only a man who longed to be vastly superior to others needed to see his enemy as a fool who might be persuaded to eat strychnine like candy. Nie was a brilliant biologist lacking understanding of people. He did not even know that to murder a Liethe and leave the slightest trail was an act of suicide.

Moments later Humility was inside the cabin of a small canal boat with an adolescent se-Tufi, changing from the guise of Sugar-pie to the black robes of the night assassin. They chatted about romantic love. The young girl was disdainful and sure that it would never catch her. She was trying to say that she was in love with her brave older sister.

Humility thought only of Hoemei. Scowlmoon, trailing a ruddy scarf upon the canal, was all she had to remember him by. His room in the round ovoids of the Kaiel Palace had looked upon Scowlmoon, night and day, and all the changing moods of that moon had watched the loving of their bodies. Why should she still feel the touch of his hand above all others?

The two identical women, one smaller and less breasted than the other, poled the boat to the buildings of Nie’t’Fosal’s residence where Radiance had been but once. Humility kissed her young sister and disappeared into the shadows, and, from the cover of a silent alley, climbed the walls until she gained one of the slate rooftops that led to the tower lair of her prey. A rope trick and a swift flying fall took her to a parapet of the tower. Another climb found the hexagonal window. Nie had never noticed how Radiance had spent one pensive interlude beside the window. Now the lock broke easily and she entered this place where the leader of the Swift Wind did most of his lonely thinking and some of his chemical trickery. Once inside she reclosed the hexagon.

The joy of killing was on her.

Carefully she folded away the black robe and its contents, keeping only the ring that ’t’Fosal had given to Radiance, which she wore on her index finger, and a perfumed garter for her right leg where she could reach it with one touch of her fingers. She rememorized the room, checking over possible emergencies, and then crawled into bed and went to sleep, setting her mind so that she would be suddenly wide awake when her victim returned from his party.

She dreamed she was a courtesan in some exotic Tower of Contribution set in a black city on the outer reaches of the Sky where the stars were dim, tendering a man who would die tomorrow.

Alertness. It was already light. Fosal must have stayed for the dawn display at the Palace of Morning. She watched him lock his massive door, waiting for him to notice her. He was already half way to the bed before the shock of her appearance registered. She chose exactly that moment to emerge from the covers.

“My lover.” The toes of her gartered leg reached over the pillows and a happy breath moved her body as she held her ring hand toward him, telling him with her smile that no other man on Geta was as powerful as her master. She watched Nie struggle with this vibrant image of a dead woman.

“I didn’t invite you here!” he said coldly.

She bowed her head contritely. “I had such a headache after that antidote. What was in it? Liethe bodies are immune to just about everything.” She watched his amazement as he calculated the number of grains of poison she must have survived. Was she killable? She let him think about that, then apologized with a voice that evoked forgiveness. “I’m sorry I missed your party. It was all I could do to drag myself up here. But you’re pleased that I destroyed your enemies? Have I done something wrong?”

“How did you get in?”

She smiled coyly. “I don’t remember. I had a headache. Liethe can walk through walls when they really want to be with their lovers. We’re a magical clan.”

“It’s my private place!”

The better for killing you, thought the Queen. “Oh,” Radiance cried pitiably. “I’ve angered you and all I wanted to do was please you. Punish me! But don’t make me go! I don’t mind when you punish me because you are so just. There’s a cane over there,” she said, pointing with her ring finger to a rod heavy enough to kill her, tempting him. She crawled from the bed and began to grovel toward him on her hands and knees. “Punish me. I want you to feel better. Beat me till you feel better!”

At the moment he reached for the rod, she was close enough to spring with her dancer’s legs. He reacted instantly to the shock of hitting the floor by rolling away from her but she was already disconnecting the motor nerves between his brain and body with a tiny syringe she had pulled from her garter. A heartbeat later she whacked him in the throat to stifle his scream. With a stabbing thrust, her thin knife cut his vocal cords. She disconnected his tongue next, and with other quick probes eliminated all sensation from his body. He still breathed. His heart beat rapidly.

“Look at me and see my hate!” she sneered as she slipped a tool behind his eyeball and destroyed the vision in one eye. She turned his good eye toward her. “I am the face of hatred!” And he saw a valley of black hair that led to eyes of blue cremating fire. “I am the Vengeance of Geta come for you. I am the sibyl of the Silent God!” It astonished her to be talking to a man while she was killing him. The force of her hatred was overwhelming. Her hand started to shake and she stared at it while the helpless one-eyed man stared back.

Was it because she knew why he had to die that her hate was like fire? My God, I’m ruined as an assassin! Nevertheless she disconnected his other eye.

“Die, knowing that you have failed,” she raved in a whisper to two hearing ears. “The Kaiel could never have destroyed you. But when the clans of Soebo desert you, your priests will become a mind severed from its body. I’ve seen one of the women in whose body you grow your disease. Does that make me, a woman, loyal to you? You have stupidly thought to poison a Liethe who knows poisons, and the whole clan rises against you. Are we the only clan so offended? Winning command of a ship is not the same as sailing her!” Humility’s rage was building; she wanted to hoard this pair of captive ears and berate them with the contempt that Radiance could never show.

An old discipline watched her lack of control with dismay. What was served by striking at a victim’s ego? Would he then jump away from his crimes? Was this need to hurt him a defiance of someone seen to be stronger? Boasting gives an opponent time to react, echoed the voices of her teachers. Boasting tells your opponent that you fear him.

Humility breathed. The White Mind took over. Then, silently, she destroyed his hearing. Whoever might come now would be unable to communicate with Nie to discover what had happened and whom to blame. She rose from the once most powerful man of Soebo to redress in her black robe. She coiled the rope about her waist while she checked escape routes.

The se-Tufi Who Finds Pebbles, her crone mother in Kaiel-hontokae, had said that the Liethe ruled Geta. Perhaps it was true. She looked down at the priest she had forcibly imprisoned in his own skull, her killer instincts still at full alert for he was not the only danger. How alone it was to have power. She could never share this triumph even with Hoemei who understood power.

Quietly she set up an apparatus to drip poison into ’t’Fosal through a tube connected to the blood vessels of his wrist. She had given much thought to the choice of the poison. It was temperature-resistant and not affected by roasting. It was slow-acting even in huge doses but still lethal in minute quantity. And it was known only to the Liethe who had developed it accidentally while trying to eliminate some of the common side-effects of a drug used to retard senility.

Afterwards, she lifted Nie to the bed, laying him out in a pillowed comfort he could not feel. All day he marinated in the poison, but before it killed him she slashed his wrists and let him bleed to death. She left a knife in his hand in the normal position for Ritual Suicide, though the simplest autopsy would discover that he had been murdered. No routine autopsy known to the Mnankrei would indicate that he was poisoned bait.

The long shadows across the room faded into the dimness of twilight while Humility cleaned out every clue of her presence. When the nocturnal stars opened their eyes she left by the window whose lock had been repaired. It clicked shut and she became a rooftop shadow again.