A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (18 page)

SIXTEEN

Dawn broke gray
. Sixteen trucks descended out of the rocks west of Palija Kadi, floating down its dusty roadway in single file. They were clumsy-looking vehicles. Their high sideboards supporting rounded, plastiglas roofs, these trucks rolled on heavy rubber tires as tall as an adult Tropiard. The whine the trucks made seemed little more than the droning of an auroral breeze, and the helmeted Tropiards in their lofty cabs looked like mannequins or marionettes.

Emahpre espied the convoy coming and woke Seth up. “It’s time to recover what you lost, Kahl Latimer. Come.”

Seth rose groggily and followed the Deputy into the airship’s passenger compartment. Rolled tightly in his sleeping cape, Magistrate Vrai resembled a creature undergoing an arcane metamorphosis. He was dead to the two intruders from the pilot’s bubble, dead to the baleful susurrus of the morning.

“Go on,” Emahpre said, scarcely bothering to whisper. “Wake him and confess your negligence.”

It seemed a pointless and cruel suggestion. Seth glanced guiltily at the sleeping Tropiard and decided to let him lie. Maybe Douin or Pors had found the missing amulet. Maybe the Pledgechild, having recovered it from Lijadu, was even now awaiting his arrival in the Sh’vaij to restore it to him, and to explain the significance of the apparent theft. Maybe the fey Lijadu herself intended to hand it over. If any of these speculations approached the truth, why worry the Magistrate with a premature and therefore needless confession?

Emahpre, drumming the fingers of one hand against his thigh, opened the ship’s side panel and gestured Seth through it ahead of him.

The trucks in the convoy had lined up sixteen abreast behind The Albatross, their noses pointing upbasin toward the Sh’vaij. At the driver’s window of the only vehicle whose nose protruded a hood’s length beyond all the others, Deputy Emahpre conferred with the officer in the cab. Seth took this opportunity to walk between two of the trucks, examining their construction and marveling at the indecipherable hieroglyphs painted on their doors.

Behind the parked trucks, however, he came face to face with a group of Tropish soldiers who had spilled from the enclosed carriers into the light. They stared blankly at Seth, each one masked. They wore small chromium helmets, single-piece garments of white, and broad black belts from which several pieces of complicated metal equipment hung. Two or three soldiers held long, tubelike implements before them; corrugated hoses ran from the tubes to gleaming, plastic canisters on their belts. Virtually all these warrior j’gosfi had laser rifles slung across their backs.

“Kahl Latimer!” the Deputy called.

Seth backpedaled away from the soldiers until he had at last turned about and confronted Emahpre. “What are
they
for?” he asked.

“The necessary.” The Deputy nodded at the officer in the point truck. “Captain Yithuju will see to the comfort of the Magistrate. When he awakes, the captain will tell him what’s occurred and where we’ve gone. I’m not abandoning the Magistrate, Latimer. My loyalty is still his.”

“Why don’t
we
tell him, then?”

“Follow your conscience. I’m going to the Sh’vaij, however.” He hurried up the path through the rich Sh’gaidu crops, knees and elbows pumping. Seth fell in behind him, demoralized by his grogginess and the weather.

The thunderheads that had formed above the basin during the night had toppled to the south, flattening out across all the visible sky. They had become something decidedly odd. Giving off a mother-of-pearl sheen, they resembled clusters of depending human breasts. Palija Kadi was a shadow beneath their matriarchal heaviness.

It was going to rain.

Almost as if he had been there all night, Douin awaited Seth and Deputy Emahpre on the assembly building’s apron.

“Something’s going on in there,” he said, indicating the Sh’vaij. “The Pledgechild and several of the Sh’gaidu elders—”

“Midwives,” Emahpre said. “They call esteemed older communards by a title that translates ‘midwives.’” The term plainly disgusted him.

“Very well, then. The Pledgechild and several . . . midwives . . . have gathered in the old woman’s cell,” Douin said. “They know your trucks are on the roadway. The rest of the Sh’gaidu are still in the galleries. The old woman says they’ll remain there until this business is settled.”

“Where’s Lord Pors?” the Deputy asked.

“He went out in search of Lijadu. He’s convinced she abandoned the galleries for the fields. He wants to check each of the kioba
in turn, beginning with the one where Lijadu’s birth-parent kept her three-day vigil.”

“You told him of the theft?” Seth asked Douin.

“Of course. Did you tell the Magistrate, Master Seth?”

“I encouraged him not to,” Deputy Emahpre said, surprising Seth by the readiness with which he excused, before the Kieri, Seth’s failure of will. “But did the Sh’gaidu allow Lord Pors to traipse unmolested into the fields? Didn’t they try to prevent him from going?”

“No,” Douin replied. “Our freedom hasn’t been restricted in the least. In fact, the Sh’gaidu haven’t paid much attention to us this morning.”

Inside the assembly building, Seth’s party came upon the Pledgechild, Huspre, and three midwives kneeling at the altar before Palija Dait. Ifragsli’s corpse was gone, and only a single heartseed lantern burned. With help from Huspre and a midwife, the Pledgechild stood to receive those who had interrupted her meditations.

“Where’s your heir?” Emahpre demanded.

“I don’t intend to tell you,” the old woman said.

“She stole from Kahl Latimer the Magistrate’s dascra
—
last night, when she took him into the galleries.”

“We don’t deny that, Deputy. But Lijadu’s reasons are her own.”

“Her motives—her goals!—derive from you!”

The old woman said nothing. Seth shifted from foot to foot, while Douin kept his head bowed, as if to downplay his existence among these argumentative people by a self-effacing silence.

Deputy Emahpre made a slashing hand motion. “The Sh’gaidu have been a wart on the nose of the state for over two hundred years! What can’t be healed must be cut away! Your heir has at long last forced us to essay that surgery!”

“And you are the knife?”

“I am the knife,” the Deputy declared.

“Where’s Ulgraji Vrai, Deputy?”

“This morning I act in his stead, Pledgechild. My hands are his.”

“Then you’re to blame for the trucks in the basin—also for the foolhardy soldiers scarring the face of Palija Kadi with their ropes.”

Emahpre stalked off several paces. “The trucks, yes. The other, however, means nothing to me. Foolhardy soldiers? Ropes? If you’re seeking to deflect me from the recovery of Magistrate Vrai’s dascra
,
you’d—”

“Go outside!” The old woman flapped her hand at the Deputy. “Go look at the Great Wall! See for yourself the nuraj
you’re perpetrating!”

The Deputy scornfully beckoned Douin and Seth to accompany him and trotted toward the door. “I’ll be back,” he told the Pledgechild. “Whatever you’re talking about, I’ll be back to conclude this business.”

Seth and Douin bewilderedly dogging his heels, he exited the Sh’vaij. Then, outside, the three of them ran along the building’s apron until they had reached a vantage from which the Great Wall was visible.

Above the stair-step terraces ascending to Palija Kadi, upon the wall’s awesome bone-white face, ten or twelve figures emulated the gravity-defying antics of ballooning spiders. They rappelled down the wall on ropes no more substantial-seeming than threads of spiders’ silk.

“What are they doing?” Douin asked, nearly winded.

Bitterly, Emahpre said, “I intend to find out.”

He surged toward the terraces, scrambling away from Seth and Douin like a puppet being lifted a full body’s length at a time. At the base of the terraces, he halted, and his companions caught up. Meanwhile, four or five of the rappelling soldiers had reached the bottom of the wall. Several more began to leapfrog down its face from the summit. Two of those already down were snapping pods off heartseed plants, scooping out the balls inside the fruits, and releasing these spheres on the wind. A number of these effervesced up the face of Palija Kadi like pale blue champagne bubbles. Emahpre swore in Tropish. In counterpoint, thunder mumbled in the bizarre cloud cover. The Deputy bounded up the stair steps to the wall on a grim steeplechase.

Before Seth could pursue him, Douin intervened. “Don’t, Master Seth. Even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he gets up there. Look to the east.” He pointed toward the kioba
in which Lijadu had told Seth of her sojourn in the Tropish city of Ebsu Ebsa. “Let’s see if Lord Pors is there.”

“We’ll have to climb toward the wall,” Seth told Douin, “and cut across to the left from one of the terraces.” If they tried to go directly to the lookout, uninterrupted stands of monarchleaf and silverbriar would impede their progress.

They climbed. More state soldiers dropped lightly down the wall, leaping out and sliding along their taut double ropes. Emahpre had disappeared on a higher terrace, and neither Seth nor Douin tried to spot him. They struck southward along a tier of slender bushes loaded with mottled brown-and-yellow legumes.

“Look!” Douin cried. He nodded at the kioba
,
which was below them now. Two naked Sh’gaidu were digging in the loose earth beneath the tower’s lookout. “What do you suppose they’re doing?”

“Maybe they’re burying a part of Lijadu’s birth-parent.” Douin had no chance to debate this proposition with Seth because Lord Pors appeared in the lookout and hailed them with a wave and a shout.

“I’ve found the Pledgechild’s heir!” he called. “Hurry, Master Douin! Hurry, Master Seth! She’s here, the deceitful slut!”

Startled, the two Sh’gaidu beneath the tower looked up. One rose from her crouch and began climbing the rope hanging from the platform. The other turned her topaz eyes on Seth and Douin.

“I’ve found her!” Pors shouted again, unaware of his peril.

“Look to the rope beneath you!” Douin cried in warning. “Look to the rope, Lord Pors!” An anxious noise escaped his lungs, and he ran for the steps descending toward the kioba
.

A low booming of thunder sounded.

An instant later, Lord Pors screamed. He was pulled away from the lookout’s southern wall. His screaming grew more bloodcurdling, modulated into a banshee wail, and ceased. As Douin and Seth reached the stone-braced steps leading downward, Pors’s body came hurtling out of the tower. It completed only half a somersault before striking the ground.

The Sh’gaidu who had knifed Pors came shinnying down one of the stilts of the tower—for she had pulled the rope onto the platform after her and left it there. Her accomplice on the ground hurried to Pors’s body and crouched beside it with her back to Seth and Douin.

Douin crumpled to his knees. Crucified with grief or incredulity, he threw out his arms and called out his compatriot’s private Kieri name. Seth tried to raise him. Both Sh’gaidu were huddled over Pors now, and two wayward heartseed globes bobbed down the basin toward them. Raindrops pattered among the leaves and pocked the dust.

“Master Douin, you can’t stay here!” Seth cried. “It’s going to pour!”

Meanwhile, Pors’s murderers rose from the body and scampered away toward the Sh’vaij. At last Douin looked up. Seth, numbed by what he’d witnessed, helped the other man up. Then, the deluge threatening, they descended the stone-braced steps. Once down, Seth knelt over the corpse of the Kieri noble.

“Dear God,” he said, “what have they done to him?”

Douin replied, “They’ve cut out his eyes, as if he were Sh’gaidu.”

“I’m sorry.” Seth tried to compute the degree of his own culpability in Pors’s death and mutilation. “Master Douin, I’m sorry.”

“Go into the tower,” Douin said tonelessly. “He said he’d found the Pledgechild’s heir.”

Seth stumbled away from Lord Pors’s face, with its ragged, empty eye sockets and its knocked-askew dentures. He climbed hand-over-hand up the kioba’s strut. The entire structure swayed. When Seth reached the underside of its platform, he locked his knees about the strut, reached for the opening in the floor, and swung out over the ground. He hung for a moment in free space and then did a strenuous pushup into the tower. His fingers had begun to bleed. “Lijadu!” he called.

She did not respond. She appeared to be bound to the lookout’s central pole, as Ifragsli had been before her. But when Seth approached and looked at Lijadu’s hands, he found that she was not tied at all. She was leaning against the pole as if in empathy with her dismembered birth-parent. Seth jerked her around and prepared to revile her for her duplicitous treatment of him, for standing by complacently while Lord Pors was knifed, tossed overboard, and then mutilated.

But Lijadu’s features were bruised, her eyes shot through with crystalline clouds. She was elsewhere, if anywhere. Was this a self-induced spiritual trance or a catalepsy meant to thwart his questioning of her?

Seth turned her face from side to side. “Lijadu, Lijadu,” he intoned. “What have you done with the Magistrate’s dascra?” Clearly she didn’t have it. She was naked this morning; no amulet hung from her neck. Nor did it seem likely that she had hidden it in the kioba
.
The only other artifact in the lookout was the rope the Sh’gaidu had pulled up after her. Retrieving it from the corner, Seth considered what to do. He had to get Lijadu down and back to the Sh’vaij. He fashioned a harness, slipped it about her, and eased her through the opening in the platform, paying out more rope and bracing himself against her weight. Douin received Lijadu and undid the makeshift harness.

“She doesn’t have it,” Seth called.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the Great Wall was streaked with blowing rain. The drops spatted more heavily now. Fewer soldiers rappelled down the wall, and no one had thrown a new set of ropes over the summit. Maybe the Deputy had made his displeasure known. Several of the Tropiards were running purposefully through the basin toward the Sh’vaij.

Seth tied his rope to the pole in the kioba and slid down it to the ground. Yesterday, he recalled, Lijadu had braced it for him. . . .