A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (8 page)

SIX

Somewhere amid the crossing pathways
of the government building, Magistrate Vrai introduced Seth to another Tropiard who spoke Vox. This person was attired in a jumpsuit the color of day-old cream and a pair of glinting white goggles. He stood at least a quarter of a meter shorter than Seth, and although his body appeared a weak and breakable thing, his movements had the punishing rigor of an ineptly handled marionette. He bowed, nodded, and gestured as if too tautly strung.

“Seth Latimer, this is my administrative deputy, Ehte Emahpre.”

A jerky, birdlike nod.

Deputy Emahpre was wearing an amulet similar to the Magistrate’s: a pouch of dark brown embellished by a tiny amber gem. Seeing another amulet, Seth was reminded that he had not yet given the Magistrate the dairauddes that Pors had repeatedly told him to present
at once.
This realization stung and befuddled. His answering nod to the Deputy was awkward, without follow-through, and his attention to the little man disintegrated into the fragments of his broken pledge to Pors. Still, this was not the right time to remove the ceramic weapon and hand it to his host. . . .

“Deputy Emahpre,” the Magistrate was saying, “is the most incorruptible and self-confident of my advisors.”

This testimony failed to focus Seth’s concentration. He wanted to be free of the moment, but hoped, too, that Pors and Douin would not appear before he could hand over their bothersome gift. Günter Latimer had understood the mechanisms of such trifling protocol. So, perhaps, did Abel. But, for him, the demand on his patience was a minor horror. Hadn’t he accomplished the first phase of their mission without any such meaningless formality?

“The most annoying thing about our relationship,” the Magistrate was saying, snapping his fingers, “is that Deputy Emahpre’s incorruptible thinking almost inevitably leads him to conclusions different from my own.”

Emahpre politely demurred. “Not inevitably, Magistrate.”

“But often. Quite often.”

Although the Magistrate continued snapping his fingers banteringly, Seth slowly awoke to the fact that conflict as well as respect bound the two administrators. Wasn’t it true that Abel often laughed as he filtered a relationship of grudges? Apparently gosfi psychology permitted a similar tack among Tropiards.

Seth was alert again. He wished to survive.

He listened as the Magistrate explained to Deputy Emahpre what had just occurred between Seth and him. He listened as the Magistrate declared his intention to accompany Seth and the two Kieri envoys to Palija Kadi to speak with Duagahvi Gaidu’s Pledgechild about the proposed removal. And he listened as Emahpre, taken aback by this declaration, began expostulating with Vrai in their native tongue.

“For our visitor’s sake,” the Magistrate interrupted his deputy, “I would prefer you to speak in Vox.”

The Deputy glanced at Seth, as if surprised to find him still there, and then obeyed the Magistrate: “You needn’t go to Palija Kadi yourself,” he said more composedly. “The decision of the Pledgechild may be secured through me or some other intermediary, Magistrate. The danger to you is such that—”

“I’ve decided to go, Deputy Emahpre.”

“Why?” Emahpre asked.

“It’s my word that determines in which direction Trope moves, and the Sh’gaidu are Tropiards—even if they sometimes seem to disown us, and we them.”

“Sometimes!” Emahpre said. “They reject both union with us and repatriation as enfranchised citizens.”

“My responsibility requires that I go to them directly with this proposal, Deputy Emahpre. My
position
requires it.”

Seth watched Emahpre strut away along a bank of consoles as if to regroup his wits. Even if he walked like a marionette, he was obviously far from being the Magistrate’s puppet.

Jerking about and jabbing a finger at Vrai, he said, “Your word need not arrive in the Sh’gaidu basin in your own person in order to be implemented. If you’re killed there—”

“I won’t be killed.”

“If you’re killed there, Magistrate, you will have sacrificed yourself—the leader of Trope—not to state ends, but to private ones I’m totally unable to fathom.”

Seth asked, “Are the Sh’gaidu prone to violence, then?”

“Precisely the opposite,” Vrai said.

“Precisely what they’re prone to is a matter of conjecture,” the Deputy rejoined. “Which is precisely why they remain under state surveillance.”

The Magistrate approached his deputy with his hands spread, but halted an arm’s length away and dropped them to his sides. “Alone among our magistrates, I’ve dealt humanely with these people. Why should they wish to kill me? I don’t fear them, Deputy Emahpre, and I intend to go.”

“Why?”

To Seth the question had the ring of insubordination. The Magistrate, he saw, reacted almost as if he had been slapped, turning his face and then walking a step or two aside.

Still, Vrai did not resort to Tropish: “I’ve come to my position”—a strange, gravid pause—“honestly, Deputy Emahpre, and I intend to fulfill its responsibilities to their most exacting letter. Tomorrow morning, I accompany our visitors to Palija Kadi. No more about this, please.”

“Very well,” said Ehte Emahpre crisply. “But it’s
my
intention to go with you. Until the morning, then, Kahl Latimer.”

He performed a bobbing bow and stuttered off into the open labyrinth of the J’beij.

Outside, it was far colder than Seth recalled. The sky was a dolorous purple behind the massive red-brown planes of the buildings, and a wind came careering along the plateau from the northwest. Seth saw that their transcraft was no longer on the landing terrace. His heart misgave him, and he grasped the Magistrate’s sleeve.

“We’ll go to Palija Kadi in a Tropish aircraft!” the Magistrate shouted in response to his unspoken query. “Yours has been towed away to clear the landing terrace for other vehicles!” He pointed to the east.

Among the silver-strutted remotes on a distant landing field Seth saw the
Dharmakaya
’s
transcraft. It was too big for the playmates it was grouped with, even though it looked alien-seeming and tiny because of the distance.

Relieved, Seth shouted, “Where are we going?”

“Our dormitory for state visitors! Your seconds are already there!”

The dormitory on the eastern edge of Huru J’beij didn’t much resemble the J’beij itself. It was faceted like an enormous piece of garnet, with tall rectangular windows resembling the panels in the Magistrate’s command table. Following his host, Seth entered a foyer glassed about like an aquarium. He turned around to find that the sky was not discolored by the dormitory’s tinted windows. He could see out without hindrance, but no prying Tropiard could see in. Nor could the wind rattle the immense panes visoring the front of the dormitory.

Anja, Trope’s mercurial sun, hovered above the J’beij. A deepening purple spread over everything as it descended beyond the acropolis.

“Here,” Seth said, removing the dairauddes and handing it to Magistrate Vrai. “I’ve been remiss in failing to give this to you before now. Once it belonged to Lady Turshebsel. Her chief advisor among all the aisautseb, Narthaimnar Chappouib, placed it in my keeping the day before we left Gla Taus as a gift to you and an emblem of our cooperation in the endeavor ahead.” The phrasing was Pors’s, but Douin had rehearsed Seth in its delivery a hundred times.

Magistrate Vrai accepted the dairauddes and turned it in his hands as if it were a flute and he an inexperienced musician.

“Is it true, then,” he asked, “that the administrative head of Kier is perpetually sh’gosfi and that her shamans are exclusively male?”

“The priests are men,” Seth replied, puzzled. “And Lady Turshebsel is of course a woman. Is that what your question means?”

The Magistrate, without answering, hefted the dairauddes. He took a sighting through it as if it were an abbreviated telescope. He inserted his finger in the wider end. He tapped it in his palm. He blew, to no purpose, across the smaller end. He plugged the wider end with the tip of his thumb and again blew across the smaller opening, this time producing an ear-splitting whistle. He shook the dairauddes like an old-fashioned thermometer. He twirled it gently on its chain, as if it were a winding tool. He pointed it at Seth.

“What is it?” he finally asked.

“A dairauddes, Magistrate. That’s what the Kieri call it. A literal translation is—” Seth caught his breath. The Kieri had played a vicious trick on him. Or, if not the Kieri, then Chappouib and all the aisautseb. For an entire E-month he’d been carrying about with him, almost unquestioningly, a specimen of instrument that—in bloody orchestration with others like it—had slain his isosire. Was he buying his trip home in the coin of Kieri mockery?

“Yes?” the Magistrate urged him.

“A literal translation is demon killer, Magistrate Vrai.” He was too confused to weep, but the impetus was there somewhere, biding its time. “It’s a
spiritual
weapon, they say.”

The Magistrate handed it back to Seth. “I’m sorry, Kahl Latimer, but the statutes of the Mwezahbe Legacy don’t permit me to accept such a gift. The Magistrate of Trope never goes armed.”

“Not to carry, then, sir; to keep as a memento among your other possessions. As I say, this is a spiritual weapon.”

Seth looked despairingly across the tablerock at the J’beij. Trope’s small, orchid-blue sun was balancing on the northern end of the building’s long entablature. The sky around it seemed to be in a state of lush, organic rot. To return to Pors without having presented the dairauddes . . .

“But it’s wounded you, this weapon, hasn’t it?”

“Magistrate?” Seth asked.

“Never mind, Kahl Latimer. I can’t accept it, not even as a memento to put in a museum case. Not only does the Legacy forbid me the possession of weapons, it likewise prohibits me from collecting or wearing the products of superstition or religious ritual.” Vrai suddenly grasped the amulet hanging at his breast. “With one exception, that is, and by this we all acknowledge the ultimate mystery of origins.”

Seth started to replace the dairauddes about his own neck.

The Magistrate’s cool hand checked him. “No,” he said. “Wear this in its place.” Fumbling briefly at the chain, Vrai slipped the amulet over his head and placed it in Seth’s free hand. Then, gesturing, he urged Seth to don it, which the young isohet did bemusedly.

—Being men of one mind, we may safely share what’s most important.

Seth closed his eyes. He had registered the Magistrate’s cerebration as a series of piquant, encephalic pin pricks—even though he knew full well that the brain has no nerve endings.

“Magistrate, what have you given me?”

“This ornament we call
dascra gosfi’mija.
It means treasure of the birth-parent. I wish you to wear mine. Perhaps its bestowal will atone in some small way for the insult your seconds are likely to perceive in my refusal of their Liege Mistress’s spiritual weapon.”

“I can’t speak for their possible response, Magistrate.”

“Of course you can’t. In the meantime, wear this. I must have something from you in exchange—
not
the dairauddes—and you must agree to keep my gift with you at all times until your departure from Trope, when you must give it back into my keeping. Our exchange will betoken the bond between us during our mission to Palija Kadi. We are men of one mind.”

Discomfited, Seth replied, “Magistrate, I don’t know what you mean when you say that. I don’t feel it as you seem to, and I believe you should know my confusion. What we have in common, I think, is a desire to settle our own private concerns through the Sh’gaidu. That’s all.”

—
I must have something in exchange,
the Magistrate cerebrated sharply, as if Seth hadn’t even spoken.

“But I—”

“This will do, I think.” The Magistrate stepped forward and with quick fingers unclasped still another chain at Seth’s neck. Was he retrieving the amulet he’d just given? No, not that. Seth saw that clutched in Vrai’s right hand were the collapsible eye coverings that Abel had told him to wear on Trope.

“But those are for the sun, Magistrate. I may require them tomorrow in the Sh’gaidu basin.”

“If you do, we’ll provide you with
anjajwedo
—slit-goggles
,
you might say—like our own. Yours I must have in exchange for the amulet.” He put Seth’s goggles around his neck.

The sky’s orchid rot had quickened to a kind of overarching bruise. Deeply melancholy, this hurt stained the entire twilight landscape.

“I trust you, Kahl Latimer. I’m sensitive to emanations. I know you for a good man. Moreover, we have at least one thing else in common besides the Sh’gaidu.”

Seth waited for clarification.

“We each wish to go home,” the Magistrate cryptically obliged. “We each wish to go home.”