Nor did it hurt that the Fudir would pay for information from the deep pockets of the Kennel.
“And this,” he said, pulling from his scrip the necklace he had borrowed from Méarana. “It may mean nothing; it may mean everything. The Hound bought it here on Thistlewaite, or received it as a gift. Somewhere there is a merchant or a dealer in curiosities who remembers it, and perhaps remembers whence it came.”
Bwana and his councilors studied it in turn. “It is unfamiliar to me,” said the chairman. “If it be thistlework, it must be of a far-off sheen. Yet, we see imports in our bazaars from even Fire Over Water, which is the farthest of the Fourteen States, and I have never seen its like. See thou Mwere Ng as thou departest, and she will prepare whole-grams of it. I will have its likeness circulated among jewelcrafters and importers and may fortune reward thy curiosity.”
And so matters ran for several days. Méarana would play songs of the Periphery and engage in “small-talk” with the emperor, and the Fudir would nose around the Terran Corner and other eddies of the city asking after the activities of Bridget ban and the provenance of the medallion. The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step, but it seemed to the harper that neither she nor Donovan were advancing the search for her mother by so much as even that single step. The sense of being stuck in a dreamland crept over her. The days were distinguished only by the particular songs she sang, and the precise lack of information with which the Fudir returned each evening.
Now and then, simply to remind them where they were, the world shrugged his shoulders and the land trembled. Once, Méarana was shaken awake in the night and she lay awake a long time thereafter before sleep reclaimed her, and in the morning she found that a great tree had come down on Great Heaven Street.
Because Resilient Services had discovered the relaxing properties of her harp, he had bid her remain for his afternoon Council and play gentle suantraís while he reviewed the reports the dough-riders had brought in from the distant shau, prefecture, and county officials. And so her day at the palace expanded from command performances at High Tea, to “muzaq” at staff meetings.
No decision in Sheen Jenlùshy was ever final until ratified by the emperor: not the death sentence to a murderer meted out in Wustershau, not the mei-pol festival to be held in Xampstedshau, not the list of candidates proposed from the 7th Dough for the imperial examinations. Each must be reviewed with the Six Ministers, a decision rendered, and the triplicate copies apportioned.
The suantraí was supposed to induce drowsiness in its hearers. Méarana wondered why the emperor thought it necessary. The subject matter alone should induce coma.
While her fingers plucked long-mastered melodies from the strings, she learned that for each official there was a quota of decisions to be overturned. This number could be exceeded in the case of an especially inept official, but never shorted. “If all decisions stand,” Morgan Cheng-li explained as he escorted her from the palace later, “official think above station, fixed by birth and examination. So, if no other cause, council overrule random cases, as lesson in humility.”
Resilient Services himself overruled the Council on a few occasions, and Méarana supposed that this was for the same reason. In one case, the emperor denied “yin privilege” to the daughter of the Minister for All Things Natural Within the Realm. “Yin” was the privilege of bypassing the examination system to secure a place in the hierarchy. Apparently, this was sufficiently pro forma for the children of officials that the Minister’s face twitched in irritation. The Grand Secretary noted this and snapped, “Five blows! Filial impiety!” The sergeant-at-arms, who stood by the wall with a long cane of slapstick, stood to attention; but Resilient Services, looking up from perusal of yet another report, said, “Belay that, please. Imperial grace.”
“I was frightened,” the harper later admitted to the Fudir, when that worthy had emerged from the Terran Corner slightly scathed and greatly enlightened. “At least, a little,” she added. They had met in the Fudir’s room at the Hotel Mountain Glowering. Méarana sat in the comfortable sofa while the scarred man examined his face in the mirror.
“What? Of our young emperor?” The Fudir applied a healing stick to the cut over his left eye, wincing slightly at the sting.
“Not so much of him as for him. His slightest whim is instantly obeyed. What does that do to a man’s soul? And the others grovel before him. It can’t be good for a man to have others grovel to him.”
“Better perhaps,” said Donovan, “than for the ones who must grovel.”
“There was one set of reports… Did you know there is a second, independent hierarchy whose only purpose is to monitor the behavior of the regular officials and report any ‘nonharmonious words or acts’?”
The Fudir dabbed at the other cuts he had suffered. “The Bureau of Shadows,” he said. “It could be worse.”
“Worse, how?”
“They could be shadowing the common people. If a government is going to snoop, they may as well restrict their snooping to one another. The system could be brought to perfection if the first set of officials were then restricted to monitoring the second. How soon can you break off these afternoon tête-à-têtes?”
Méarana sat up. Something in the Fudir’s voice…” What did you discover?”
“Two things. First, the jewelmonger Hennessi fu-lin remembers your necklace. He bought it in pawn from a man of Harpaloon. The man never came back for it, so he sold it to your mother.”
“Harpaloon. Mother’s next stop. Was she following the necklace? What was the second thing?”
“The Terrans remember that she met several times with a man from Kàuntusulfalughy who had been stranded here by the thistlequake. It isn’t much, but it’s the only activity of hers that I’ve heard about that wasn’t tied directly to disaster relief.”
“Who was it? What did he and Mother talk about?”
The Fudir held up a hand. “It may mean nothing at all. The Sleuth is always too eager to see patterns. The rest of us pointed that out and the Sleuth got huffy and left…”
“Fudir… The Sleuth is inside your head. Where could he go?”
“He’s sulking; not communicating. That makes it hard for the rest of us to put things together. The Terrans claim that when your mother returned she asked after this Kauntling. Debly Jean Sofwari. He was a science-wallah, or impersonating one, because he wore the white robes they favor. The Terrans say that he was flitting all around the sheen swabbing people’s mouths.”
“He was what?”
The Fudir spread his hands, palms up. “Could I make up something like that?”
“That must be why Mother met with him. She wanted to learn if he was a madman.”
“I bribed the log-keeper at Dewport Field, but Sofwari must have had his own ship. There’s no record of him in the departure logs. The automatic system was wrecked in the ‘quake and they were doing everything the hard way. I’ll spend another day snooping after Sofwari, but if the Terrans had known anything more, I’d have some inkling. We don’t know why your mother found him so interesting. He was too young for her bed.”
Méarana stiffened. “Dinnae speak of Mother in such ways.”
“Méarana… You must know that your mother’s bed was not a restricted area. Little Hugh was there; I was there. Even Greystroke was there. So was a Die Bold businessman, the Peacock STC director, a—.”