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.
54
If a man has been tamed, The woman is never blamed.
IN THE DAYS that followed her execution of Nie’t’Fosal, Humility stayed with moody High Wave Ogar tu’Ama, feeding him what little he could eat, listening to his self-recriminations, his foreboding, his wild plans. Her quiet sister, Flesh, who did not like to be beaten, loved this gentle man but Humility pitied him. She had been the companion of Aesoe the Prime Predictor and Hoemei the Thinker Who Could Act. She longed to teach white-haired Ogar of the slashed face the art of leadership, but he was too old. He could make fiery speeches and pinpoint moral issues but he could not delegate authority and somehow in his long life, with only one wife and no husbands to help him, he had never been simultaneously in all the places he had needed to be to block the Swift Wind.
The murder of the Winterstorm Master had shaken him. At first he was elated and gave his Comfort a rousing speech on the new glories that now awaited the Mnankrei while he broke out a special bottle of whisky. Then drunk, he became obsessed that he would be blamed for the murder. Finally, with the empty bottle hugged in both hands, he gloomed that the murder meant nothing, that the young ones of the Swift Wind would simply take over and run a more ruthless ship.
He snored away his stupor until sunrise, then contritely helped her fix the meal though Mnankrei men traditionally found kitchen work demeaning. They played game after game of chess. She could not beat him; he was a chess dobu. He refused a game of kol. Its strategy was too real.
“I’m going for a stroll. You nap,” she said.
Humility chose a direction down the Grand Avenue and then over along the Blue Canal where there were few people. When the orange furnace of Getasun became a distorted red oval at sunset, the great gongs began to sound over Soebo in a dirge for ’t’Fosal. She listened quietly. The rollings of the bass vibrations were the echo of her deed reflected off the mountainous grief of hundreds of the Mnankrei who had allied themselves with his vision. She returned home to find Ogar dressing for the Funeral Feast.
He had decided to drop overboard the grudges of the past. Death meant a new beginning. If he showed good will and partook of the body of their leader, perhaps they would show good will, too, and begin a program of reform.
“You will not go to that man’s Feast!” Humility was astonished by this new tack. “Where is your morality? How could you face your people with his flesh as part of you?” She knew of no other way to handle Ogar’s sudden rationalization than rage, but her rage was real enough.
She had to argue. She had to threaten to leave him. She called in his friends and juggled the chaos of their conflicting positions until she won. She made them write down a manifesto. Those who disapproved of the policies of ’t’Fosal would absent themselves from the Feast as a. declaration of what they stood for. It was dangerous to make a public show of opposition to the Swift Wind, and they debated the dangers interminably as they composed their manifesto, muting this phrase, and padding that one with double meanings. They were accepting the danger, with prodding, but Humility was internally enraged that they did not make the gesture spontaneously.
Thus it went.
Ogar was an old man but his vacillations carried with them the energy of the sea, sometimes calm, sometimes cresting and troughing with sickening speed. She was appalled. This was the man the crones would place as the Master of the Mnankrei? Controlling him was exhausting and she called for Flesh to spell her while she took an earned rest walking the heart of Soebo as Sugarpie.
It was as Sugarpie that she first heard the rumors telling of the sickness and death of the powerful men of the Swift Wind who had attended the somber Funeral Feast. A relieved and then gleeful Queen of Life-before-Death skipped over a puddle and began to play Miss the Crack on the cobblestones and managed twenty-seven hops before she slipped. Sugarpie wandered from bakery to n’Orap skin shop to stall to bazaar to park, her curiosity aflame, listening and provoking response and adding her own black comment now and then to the wild rumors.
Her wagging tongue was of the opinion that the virulent disease the Mnankrei priests had launched against the Gathering had got loose and been caught by the creators and it served them right for mixing the sacred and profane in ways God had never intended and God only knew but that this horrible disease which made your eyes bulge and your head wobble might break out all over the city soon enough.
Soebo was terrified by nightfall.
In the morning the rumors were even worse. Over one hundred Mnankrei had died in the night and they were being cremated in secret! It was horrifying! They had become unclean! The best of the Swift Wind were unfit to eat! And the Kaiel! The ghosts of the defeated Kaiel were advancing on the city and they were coming with the vengeful fury of the sinister winterstorm, piling the waves before them like a wall moved by the wind.
Humility had spent the night as Comfort describing to Ogar in rich detail the dying agonies of those who had been foolish enough to pay homage to the great ’t’Fosal at his Final Feast. A long night it had been, and the rumors were well into their late morning form before she heard them. Unbelievable! The judges were coming! She rushed from tu’Ama’s residence to the hive, striding, sometimes running.
“Is it Bendaein or Joesai?” she asked, breathless.
“It is Joesai the Scythe,” said the crone.
Humility turned her face because tears had burst upon her cheeks. Without dressing for the journey, she hired an Ivieth palanquin to carry her toward the Gathering as far as those giants would take her and then continued impatiently on foot, still wearing Comfort’s flighty morning dress which had been chosen to please the High Wave to make up for her teasing.