At the other end of the room, the Queen was talking to several of her counselors. “You will want to send certain representations to Authority,” old Lord Multron was saying.
“No,” the Queen responded, her voice strident as brass as she turned away from the old man toward the Commander. “There will be no more representations to Authority. I require complete mobilization of the army by morning. They are to occupy Green Hurrah and cut off all access from Skelp. They are to cut off routes from the peninsula. They are to put guards on every inch of coastline. Our seagoing forces are to blockade Voorstod from the water. Not one rat from Voorstod is to be able to crawl out of that rat hole.”
“Your Sublimity,” faltered Saturday, rising from her chair. “I must still go in.”
The Queen looked at her blindly, not seeing her.
“She must still go in,” said Maire, expressionlessly. “One of ours is still held hostage there.”
Maire’s dress was clotted with blood. She had torn strips from that dress and had bound the arms of the harpist, had saved her life, though no one knew how long Stenta would live. The musician was old and frail. All her strength had been in her music, in her fingers, and now there could be no music. When they had left her to come here, the medical people had been gathered around, thick as flies, while Stenta’s family had knelt outside their circle crying as for one already dead, “Mama-gem, oh, Mama-gem.
“There are Gharm there in Voorstod,” said Maire sharply, getting the Queen’s attention. “Thousands of Gharm. You don’t want them hurt. That would be a bad memorial for Stenta Thilion. Saturday must go in. Later I must.”
Queen Wilhulmia tried to focus. “What are you saying? That you have some way to save the Gharm in Voorstod?”
“Perhaps,” said Saturday.
“Perhaps,” agreed Maire. “You must let Saturday and Sam go in. No matter what else you do.”
“Is it your plan to invade Voorstod, Mother?” asked Prince Ismer. His fine features were drawn into an expression of pain and resolution. His younger brother, Prince Rals, stood at his side, blank-faced, unable to comprehend what was happening. At one moment he had been drowsily listening to some quite pleasant music, and the next moment he was being dragged off by guards. He still wasn’t sure what had happened to the harpist.
“Ismer, I don’t know if we will invade. All I know at this moment is that no man of Voorstod is to come out of that place. Should I prevent these people going in?”
Ismer regarded the three. “Why should you go into Voorstod now?” he asked Saturday.
“One reason is that my cousin is there,” said Saturday. “They’ll kill him unless someone gives them a reason not to.”
Maire stared at Sam, as she said, “If they think it is only a blockade, they will hope that eventually the blockade may be lifted. While they have hope, they may continue with their prior plans, with what they wanted before all this happened. They may still want Maire Manone. Or they may simply wish to appear reasonable, for a change. They may still be willing to trade a life for a life. Or trade many lives for the lifting of the blockade. It gives you something to bargain with, for the Gharm.”
And gives me time for myself, thought Sam. Time to meet Phaed and set this matter straight between us.
“Very well. Let us say it is only a blockade,” said the Queen. “For now. Maire Manone is right. Let them have hope. Let us conspire to get every life that we can out of there and safe before we take hope away, as I will do. What right have they to hope.”
“Sam and I … we will go in,” said Saturday, looking closely at Sam to be sure he was in agreement. “Maire must stay with the soldiers until we return.”
“Once they have you, girl, they may not want me,” said Maire. “Remember, if they saw what happened, they heard you sing. They might rather have a girl who can sing than an old woman who can’t.”
“When the time comes,” said Saturday, fueling her determination on outrage, “that’s when I’ll worry about that, Maire.”
• Men had fled from the citadel of the Cause. They had removed their coup markers, coiled up their hair on top of their heads, put on their caps, and gone out into the night like skulking beasts, quietly. Their lofty moment had turned to dust and irritation. They were greatly angered at that.
“What do we do with him?” Preu asked Epheron, indicating Jep.
It was not Epheron who answered. Mugal Pye answered. “Take him back to Sarby.”
“Why don’t we get rid of him now?”
“Because he’s a trade! Something to give for something! Kill him now, and we’ve nothing to give for nothing. Take him back to Sarby. He’s no trouble there. Let’s see what’s going to happen.”
“Oh, we’ve an idea as to what’ll happen,” said Preu, with a sneer. “Those bracelets of yours worked a pure joy, didn’t they, Pye. I’ve never seen better.”
“You got them into the box!”
“Only after Phaed found out where the Gharm was. The Gharm thought they came from the Queen. Couldn’t have been better. Timing, setting, everything. Very dramatic.” His voice was bitter.
“Bastard!” snarled Mugal Pye. “It was not only Phaed and me. We all decided when it was to be, how it was to be.”
“Neither you nor Phaed mentioned the Gharm was a pet of the whole damned Ahabarian world!”
Phaed snarled. “You knew that. That’s why you sent Pye to me in the first place. It was that riled your guts, Preu Flandry. It was that fact riled all of us. If she’d not been a pet, who’d have cared what we did to her!”
Epheron thrust a shoulder between them. “Whatever’s done’s done. Now we have to figure what’ll happen next. What do you think the Queen will do.”
Preu Flandry pursed his lips and spat, glaring at Phaed from the corners of his eyes. “Oh, she’ll have the army marching back and forth, I should say. She’ll make some threats maybe, askin’ Voorstod to turn over those who did the deed, which is us, and which the neither the Faithful nor the prophets will allow. She’ll complain to Authority, no doubt.”
“Invasion?”
He thought about it. “Either she’ll move in the next few hours, out of temper, or she’ll cool and won’t move at all.”
“So, then, we go to ground and keep quiet for a time. Let things sort themselves out.” Epheron kicked at Jep, where he crouched against the pillar. “Take him back to Sarby. Maybe he’ll be good for something there.”
• By dawn of the following day, Commander Karth was at the southern border of Green Hurrah with armies stretching in long east and west wings, curving northward to the sea. The lines would cut off Voorstod from the rest of the land. The order was search and seize. Persons who could not be identified as known and trusted residents of Green Hurrah were to be rounded up and placed in confinement camps at the rear of the lines. The line was to push into Green Hurrah all along its length, filtering out the suspect, leaving only safe persons behind it. Meantime, behind them in Ahabar, agents of the Queen were rounding up all known Voorstoders who were in Ahabar “on business” or “visiting friends.” They would join their countrymen in the camps.
The line would move forward until it arrived at the coast and the border of Skelp, the thin neck of land going on northward. At that point, the coasts would be occupied, the seas would be watched, and the only land access to the continent of Ahabar would be closed.
From that point, whenever they got there, Saturday and Sam would go on into Voorstod alone. The Commander had sent word for someone from the Skelp Council to come forward and guarantee them safe passage as far as possible.
Until then, they stayed in the vehicle fitted up as the Commander’s field quarters, and did whatever they could think of to relieve their apprehension. Sam stared at the wall and asked himself the same questions he had been asking since he had been about ten or eleven, who he was and whether Phaed missed him, and what there was in Voorstod that he had lost. Maire slept, the sleep of someone who thought she might never sleep again
. Saturday sat in a wide window of the vehicle as it moved slowly forward, trying to see in the surrounding countryside those beauties Maire had so often spoken of, and seeing only handless arms, fountaining blood. Until that moment, she had not truly perceived what kind of place she was going to.
Prince Rals had been sent along as their escort. He was only a few years older than Saturday herself.
“I don’t understand why you’re so determined to go into Voorstod,” he said to her. “I’m afraid Mother doesn’t get the point, either. I mean, if you want your cousin, we’ll just tell the damned Voorstoders to bring him out before the lady goes in. You don’t have to go in there.”
Saturday, in the grip of sudden inspiration, said, “It’s a religious matter.”
“Oh,” said the Prince, suddenly cut off from his argument.
“My cousin has been … defiled,” said Saturday. “He must be … cleansed before he can come out again. You understand?”
The Prince shrugged. What was to understand? Religion was, so much was certain, and one didn’t argue about it or with it. Though, for the life of him, he could not recall, despite his comprehensive education as a future diplomat, that people from Hobbs Land had any such beliefs.
“Aren’t you kind of young to be doing religious work?” he wanted to know.
“The person doing the cleansing has to be about the same age as the person being cleansed,” said Saturday, beginning to develop the fable. She thought this over. “Except babies, of course. With them, it takes someone older.”
“It’s a kind of … ritual, is it?”
“Kind of,” she said.
“With sacrifices?”
“Not really,” she murmured. “Anybody who’s died recently will do.”
Despite Saturday’s friendly smile and inarguable beauty, Prince Rals decided to go forward and help the driver.
Saturday, meantime, was wondering if there was likely to be someone recently dead where she and Sam would be going. Actually killing someone would not be a good idea. Actually killing someone would not be what the God wanted at all.
Then she remembered Stenta Thilion and realized there would always be recent dead, anywhere in Voorstod.
• When the Religion Advisory had been set up in the early years of Authority, it had seemed wisest to have it a representational group made up of adherents of the various religions in System, their numbers roughly proportional to the numbers of their worshippers, communicants, parishioners, or whatever they might be called. Shortly thereafter, Authority had added a number of generalists, who had done research in such fields as religious history, xenotheology, deconstruction of scriptures, the anatomy and chemistry of revelation, and the social and economic consequences of prophecy. While the resulting mix suited no one very well, it at least prevented domination by any one system of thought, a sufficient advantage to guarantee the group’s survival, on virtually its original basis, for well over a millennium.
At the current time, there were half a dozen High and one Low Baidee on the Advisory, and twice that many persons representing various of the casual Phansuri sects, none of which (or whom) took themselves very seriously. Indigenous religions were represented by xenotheologians who had studied in the field among the Glothee and the Hosmer, and at a respectful distance from the Porsa, who could not, in any case, be said to have any religion beyond what a few researchers had called, not indefensibly, Holy Shit. The state religion of Ahabar was well represented in the person of a Bishop Absolute and three Importunaries. When the Voorstoders had settled upon Ahabar, one Voorstod prophet and one Voorstod priest had been added to the Advisory, and neither they nor their successors had, for one moment since, ceased demanding that numerous others of their ilk be brought in as well. “Truth,” they said, “could not be represented numerically.”
Each representative had administrative assistants, and the administrative assistants had aides and senior and junior researchers, readers, chaplains, haruspices, oracles, and the like. Over time, a very nice system had developed by which persons actually interested in religion as religion (rather than religion as a system of social control, religion as politics, religion as warfare, or religion as spectacle) met over luncheon from time to time to read their scholarly research to one another, while clerks and aides got on with the endless and self-generating paperwork, for so it was still called, despite the fact there was little or no paper involved.
Matters requiring, or pretending to require, decision were referred to the Official Advisory, or OA, which was simply shorthand for those originally selected persons, or their successors, who had been actually charged with advising the Authority. The Religion Advisory, en toto, including the panels and all the subordinates, consisted of several thousand individuals. The Religion Advisory, OA, consisted of about thirty, give or take a few who might be back on planets of origin receiving instruction or have died and not yet been replaced.
No one remembered, offhand, when the OA had last met, though virtually everyone knew that the reason for the meeting had been a discussion of the Voorstod problem. The site of that meeting had been the Great Library of the Advisory, where, it was presumed, any future meetings would also occur. On ordinary occasions, the library was empty or scantily occupied by research fellows or, very rarely, visited by scholars.
Which explained the dogged and martyred attitude of the messenger who did, at last, find Member of Authority, Member of the Advisory, and Notable Scholar, Notadamdirabong Cringh, at one of the long, silent tables in said library. Cringh was deeply involved with a dusty, huge, and very old real book, over which the information stage scanner was laboring with difficulty, and he did not at first see the messenger standing before him with flushed cheeks and an air of frayed annoyance.
“Aaah, yes,” he said at last, when the messenger’s active fidgeting drew the attention of his aide, who nudged him. “Aaah, yes.”
“Message, Notable Scholar. For the Scholar’s eyes only.” The messenger held out his skin snip, and Cringh allowed a few dermal cells to be dragged from a finger in return for a square, metallic object, which he recognized, after regarding it thoughtfully for a few moments, as an envelope. It probably contained real paper with words on it. He could not recall having seen an envelope actually in use before, though he had, of course, seen them in museums and read of their being used.
How very interesting, he told himself, squinching his eyelids into a net of tiny wrinkles, pursing his lips into another such net. Notadamdirabong Cringh was an old, extremely wrinkled man. He liked to think his interior was younger than his exterior by a number of decades, despite the illogicality of that wish. He rubbed his hand across his totally bald and equally wrinkled head and asked himself why anyone would go to the trouble of sending a written message in a tamper proof envelope, when one might equally well place a personal message into the Archives directed to Scholar Cringh’s identity and personal attention.
How intriguing! He could think of several possible answers.
Perhaps because it was known that other persons might see, either by intention or accident, messages placed in the Archives for private viewing only. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, but it was possible, everyone knew that. Some people were unbelievably nosy and would actually go out of their way to see messages directed to other people!
Perhaps because the person sending the message did not have access to Scholar Cringh’s identity number. Though that seemed unlikely. The identity number was right there in the roster for all System to see.
Perhaps because the person sending the message was a decorative hobbyist, a what-you-call-it, calligrapher, someone who enjoyed making words on paper.
Perhaps because the delivery of an actual message carried more psychic weight than the delivery of a mere Archives message.
Perhaps because the writing of the message had some spiritual significance of which Cringh had been heretofore unaware.
Perhaps …
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Cr
ingh’s favorite aide asked, from behind his left shoulder.
“You spoil all the fun,” grunted Cringh. “I was going to figure it out, first.”
“It might be urgent,” the aide said, purring. Her name was Lurilile. She was willowlike in her grace and ferretlike in her abilities. She had a face like a corrupted angel. She was from Ahabar, though no one knew that but herself and those who had sent her. Queen Wilhulmia knew her, of course, and was deeply concerned about her presence upon Authority.
“Urgent, maybe …,” Lurilile suggested again. “… what’s inside?”
Cringh nodded, slowly. The one thing he hadn’t thought of was that it might be urgent.
He touched the envelope, which recognized his cellular structure as being compatible with the delivery instructions, and opened along a seam, emitting a tiny hiss of damp air and a small unpleasant smell.
“Ninfadel?” shuddered Lurilile, in the tone of one detecting a fart.
Cringh shook his head as he examined the contents. “Chowdari,” he said. “From Reticingh, who was in his bath at the time. Or so he says. Though why he should think I care where he was at the time rather escapes me.”
“So?”
“So, there’s a copy of a report in here that somebody named Shanrandinore Damzel gave to the Circle of Scrutators, plus a set of questions Reticingh came up with. Reticingh wants to know what I think of them. We. What we think of them. Unofficially.”
“We, the six High Baidee members of the Religion Advisory? Or we, the three Baidee members of the Theology Panel? Or we, the whole panel?”
“We, the whole OA. However, Reticingh stresses that it is an unofficial request.”
“How can anyone ask something of the Official Advisory unofficially?”
“One wants to say it would make no difference. Nothing ever happens when they’re asked officially, anyhow.”