Talaso tried to hide behind the desk; but he did look at Riktors, just for a moment. Just long enough for Riktors's dart to strike him in the eye.
Talaso clutched at his face; then the poison struck. He vomited violently, so violently that his jaw dislocated. He sprawled on the desk until the spasms began. His muscles contracted sharply. He jerked and flopped over like a fish drowning in air, until one of the spasms struck with such force that his neck broke. Then he lay still, his hair matted with his own vomit, his face turned at an angle from his shoulders that it could never have assumed in life.
Riktors grimaced. It was an unpleasant business, serving as Mikal's emissary. Soil, he had done it well enough these past years, and at last he had been promoted to the palace guard. He could have been moved into the job of assassin, an ugly business of stealth and well-contrived natural deaths, a dead-end assignment. Riktors was sure he would have been a good assassin, and he had good friends among that most private group-but much better to govern. That was the part of his job that Riktors actually liked, and thank God the emperor had chosen to let him follow that path instead of the other.
He turned and opened the door. More guards had just arrived. Riktors killed them all, along with Talaso's receptionist and the official whore and the confused official who had led him here.
Then he called in other bureaucrats from nearby rooms. He brought them into Talaso's office and showed them the corpse. I assume there was holographic recording equipment running, he said. There was. Duplicate it and broadcast it immediately throughout Scale and all over the world. The official he looked at was confused. My friend, Riktors said, I don't care much what your job has been before. I am the government of Scale now, in the name of the emperor Mikal, and you will do what I say or you will die.
The corpses around him were proof enough of power. The official left quickly, and Riktors continued giving orders, already setting in motion the changes that had to be complete in a week for him to stay on schedule, that had to be so thorough that no new dictator could spring up on Garibali for centuries. He picked up the phone and called the port. His second-in-command had been waiting for his call.
Proceed, Riktors said. I have Talaso here, dead of course, and we're moving well.
And I have a message for you from the emperor. His agents on Clike have found that the rumors were unfounded and your visit there has been canceled. He orders you to proceed to Tew when this work is accomplished.
Tew. The Songhouse, and Mikal's Songbird. Then would you please inform the Songhouse we will be arriving a week earlier than we anticipated. Courtesy could not be forgotten, not if the machinery of government were to run smoothly. The Songhouse. That frozen, frightening woman, Esste, and the beautiful child who would not sing for him. Petty politicians and adventurers like Talaso were easy to handle. But how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely- those were questions whose answers could not be found. That was an assignment that could not be handled routinely, and if he succeeded it would be because they let him succeed, and if he failed it would mean the end of his career, the whimsical end to his ambition because he had once happened to be the soldier nearest to Tew that Mikal Imperator could trust.
Damnable bad luck.
He sat down at the receptionist's desk and began to reorganize the government of Scale while his soldiers took control of every other government on Garibali, one by one, and placed the rule of two billion people in Riktors's hands. In the delight of power, Riktors soon put the Songbird far into the back of his mind, where he need not worry. Not just yet, anyway.
19
It was the fourth day that Ansset had tormented Esste. It was near dark outside, and the High Room was growing cold. He had stopped singing an hour ago, but he could not move. He sat in the middle of the floor and looked at Esste and was afraid.
She sat still, her eyes open, looking forward but seeing nothing. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She had not moved from that position since Ansset began his song in the morning.
And now he was full of doubt. He did not understand what was happening to her. The first time he had been excited because he had actually changed her. While her Control had held and she still remained silent, she had stopped work, had lost her struggle to concentrate on the computer in the table. He had thought the end would come the next day. But the next day she had held on, and the next, and today he realized that she was not going to break. He knew that these were the songs that would make her afraid. But he had no idea what fears he had summoned up.
Each night he had gone to sleep with her frozen at the table; each morning he had awakened to find her asleep in the blankets. When she woke she said nothing, hardly looked at him, just got up, ate, went to the table, and began work. Each day he had started to sing and, each time a little sooner, she had stopped working and taken her day-long pose of studied inattention.
What am I doing to her behind her face?
Ansset felt restless, felt that he had to move. He delayed (Control) and when he got up he got up slowly (Control) and did not walk back and forth but instead headed directly for a shutter and tried to open it and realized that the very attempt was a sign that his Control was slipping. At the thought he was instantly aware of the walls of rock inside him, the deep placid lake that grew ever deeper within them. But something was stirring at the bottom of the lake.
He touched the cold stone wall between the windows and heard the whine of wind outside. Perhaps the first storm of fall was coming. Why had she brought him here? What was she trying to achieve?
What have I done to her?
He looked into the lake, looked deep and began to understand what was happening to him. After eleven days in the High Room he was beginning to be afraid. Things were out of his control. He could not leave. He could not force Esste to speak to him, or even to weep or show any sign that she felt anything at all. (Why is it so important that she show a sign of feeling?) And now he was feeling things within the walls of his Control that did not belong there. Fear stirred at the bottom of his calm. Fear, not just of what would happen to him in the High Room, but of what he might have done to Esste. He could not put it into words, but he realized that if something happened to her, something would happen to him. There was a connection. They were linked somehow, he was sure of it. And by raising her fears he had raised his own. They lurked. They waited. They were inside his walls and he did not know how he would be able to control them.
Speak to me, Esste, he said silently. Speak to me and be angry with me and demand that I change, abuse me or praise me or sing idiotic songs about the cities of Tew but stop hiding from me!
She did not look alive or human, her face empty like that, her body motionless. Human beings moved, their faces expressed things.
I will not break Control.
I will not break Control, he sang softly. But in the moment of singing he knew it was not true, and the fear moved sluggishly within him.
20
It was her childish nightmare that held her. A roaring in her ears and a vast invisible globe that grew and grew and rolled toward her to crush her swallow her fill her empty her... .
And the globe reached her, roaring like a storm at sea. She was a little girl holding the blanket up right to her neck, lying on her back, her eyes wide open, seeing and not seeing the ceiling of the Common Room, seeing and not seeing the vast roar that had filled the hall. She opened her hands to press against the globe, but it was too heavy and she could not lift her hands against the weight. She closed her hands into fists, but the stuff of the globe could not be shut out so simply, and it squeezed in between her fingers and into her fist so that instead of shutting it out she was holding it in. If she opened her mouth it would enter and fill her. If she closed her eyes it would be able to change without her seeing. And so she lay there hour after hour until sleep overcame her or until she screamed and screamed and screamed.