The joy of killing was on her.

Carefully she folded away the black robe and its contents, keeping only the ring that ’t’Fosal had given to Radiance, which she wore on her index finger, and a perfumed garter for her right leg where she could reach it with one touch of her fingers. She rememorized the room, checking over possible emergencies, and then crawled into bed and went to sleep, setting her mind so that she would be suddenly wide awake when her victim returned from his party.

She dreamed she was a courtesan in some exotic Tower of Contribution set in a black city on the outer reaches of the Sky where the stars were dim, tendering a man who would die tomorrow.

Alertness. It was already light. Fosal must have stayed for the dawn display at the Palace of Morning. She watched him lock his massive door, waiting for him to notice her. He was already half way to the bed before the shock of her appearance registered. She chose exactly that moment to emerge from the covers.

“My lover.” The toes of her gartered leg reached over the pillows and a happy breath moved her body as she held her ring hand toward him, telling him with her smile that no other man on Geta was as powerful as her master. She watched Nie struggle with this vibrant image of a dead woman.

“I didn’t invite you here!” he said coldly.

She bowed her head contritely. “I had such a headache after that antidote. What was in it? Liethe bodies are immune to just about everything.” She watched his amazement as he calculated the number of grains of poison she must have survived. Was she killable? She let him think about that, then apologized with a voice that evoked forgiveness. “I’m sorry I missed your party. It was all I could do to drag myself up here. But you’re pleased that I destroyed your enemies? Have I done something wrong?”

“How did you get in?”

She smiled coyly. “I don’t remember. I had a headache. Liethe can walk through walls when they really want to be with their lovers. We’re a magical clan.”

“It’s my private place!”

The better for killing you, thought the Queen. “Oh,” Radiance cried pitiably. “I’ve angered you and all I wanted to do was please you. Punish me! But don’t make me go! I don’t mind when you punish me because you are so just. There’s a cane over there,” she said, pointing with her ring finger to a rod heavy enough to kill her, tempting him. She crawled from the bed and began to grovel toward him on her hands and knees. “Punish me. I want you to feel better. Beat me till you feel better!”

At the moment he reached for the rod, she was close enough to spring with her dancer’s legs. He reacted instantly to the shock of hitting the floor by rolling away from her but she was already disconnecting the motor nerves between his brain and body with a tiny syringe she had pulled from her garter. A heartbeat later she whacked him in the throat to stifle his scream. With a stabbing thrust, her thin knife cut his vocal cords. She disconnected his tongue next, and with other quick probes eliminated all sensation from his body. He still breathed. His heart beat rapidly.

“Look at me and see my hate!” she sneered as she slipped a tool behind his eyeball and destroyed the vision in one eye. She turned his good eye toward her. “I am the face of hatred!” And he saw a valley of black hair that led to eyes of blue cremating fire. “I am the Vengeance of Geta come for you. I am the sibyl of the Silent God!” It astonished her to be talking to a man while she was killing him. The force of her hatred was overwhelming. Her hand started to shake and she stared at it while the helpless one-eyed man stared back.

Was it because she knew why he had to die that her hate was like fire? My God, I’m ruined as an assassin! Nevertheless she disconnected his other eye.

“Die, knowing that you have failed,” she raved in a whisper to two hearing ears. “The Kaiel could never have destroyed you. But when the clans of Soebo desert you, your priests will become a mind severed from its body. I’ve seen one of the women in whose body you grow your disease. Does that make me, a woman, loyal to you? You have stupidly thought to poison a Liethe who knows poisons, and the whole clan rises against you. Are we the only clan so offended? Winning command of a ship is not the same as sailing her!” Humility’s rage was building; she wanted to hoard this pair of captive ears and berate them with the contempt that Radiance could never show.

An old discipline watched her lack of control with dismay. What was served by striking at a victim’s ego? Would he then jump away from his crimes? Was this need to hurt him a defiance of someone seen to be stronger? Boasting gives an opponent time to react, echoed the voices of her teachers. Boasting tells your opponent that you fear him.

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

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.