57

In early spring a lunatic heat settled over Manneran, coupled with such frequent rains that all the city’s vegetation went mad, and would have swallowed every street if not given a daily hacking. It was green, green, green, everywhere: green haze in the sky, green rain falling, green sunlight sometimes breaking through, broad glossy green leaves unfurling on every balcony and in every garden plot. A man’s own soul can mildew in that. Green, too, were the awnings on the street of the spice-merchants’ shops. Loimel had given me a long list of things to purchase, delicacies from Threish and Velis and the Wet Lowlands, and in a docile husbandly way I went to obtain them, since the street of spice was only a short walk from the Justiciary. She was mounting a grand feast to celebrate the Naming Day of our eldest daughter, who was at last going to come into the adult-name we had intended for her: Loimel. All the great ones of Manneran had been invited to look on as my wife acquired a namesake. Among the guests would be several who had covertly sampled the Sumaran drug with me, and I took private pleasure in that; Schweiz, though, had not been invited, since Loimel deemed him coarse, and in any event he had left Manneran on some business trip just as the weather was beginning to go berserk.

I moved through the greenness to the best of the shops. A recent rain had ended and the sky was a flat green plaque resting on the rooftops. To me came delicious fragrances, sweetnesses, pungencies, clouds of tongue-tickling flavors. Abruptly there were black bubbles coursing through my skull and for a moment I was Schweiz haggling on a pier with a skipper who had just brought a cargo of costly produce in from the Gulf of Sumar. I halted to enjoy this tangling of selves. Schweiz faded; through Noim’s mind I smelled the scent of newly threshed hay on the Condorit estates, under a delicious late-summer sun; then suddenly and surprisingly I was the bank director with my hand tight on some other man’s loins. I cannot convey to you the impact of that last bolt of transferred experience, brief and incandescent. I had taken the drug with the bank director not very long before, and I had seen nothing in his soul, then, of his taste for his own sex. It was not the kind of thing I would overlook. Either I had manufactured this vision gratuitously, or he had somehow shielded that part of his self from me, keeping his predilections sealed until this instant of breaking through. Was such a partial sealing possible? I had thought one’s mind lay fully open. I was not upset by the nature of his lusts, only by my inability to reconcile what I had just experienced with what had come to me from him on the day of our drug-sharing. But I had little time to ponder the problem, for, as I stood gaping outside the spice-shop, a thin hand fell on mine and a guarded voice said, “I must talk to you secretly, Kinnall.” I. The word jolted me from my dreaming.

Androg Mihan, keeper of the archives of Manneran’s prime septarch, stood beside me. He was a small man, sharp-featured and gray, the last you would think to seek illegal pleasures; the Duke of Sumar, one of my early conquests, had led him to me. “Where shall we go?” I asked, and Mihan indicated a disreputable-looking lower-class godhouse across the street. Its drainer lounged outside, trying to stir up business. I could not see how we could talk secretly in a godhouse, but I followed the archivist anyway; we entered the godhouse and Mihan told the drainer to fetch his contract forms. The moment the man was gone, Mihan leaned close to me and said, “The police are on their way to your house. When you return home this evening you will be arrested and taken to prison on one of the Sumar Gulfs isles.”

“Where do you learn this?”

“The decree was verified this morning and has passed to me for filing.”

“What charge?” I asked.

“Selfbaring,” Mihan said. “Accusation filed by agents of the Stone Chapel. There is also a secular charge: use and distribution of illegal drugs. They have you, Kinnall.”

“Who is the informer?”

“A certain Jidd, said to be a drainer in the Stone Chapel. Did you let the tale of the drug be drained from you?”

“I did. In my innocence. The sanctity of the godhouse—”

“The sanctity of the dunghouse!” Androg Mihan said vehemently. “Now you must flee! The full force of the government is mustered against you.”

“Where shall I go?”

“The Duke of Sumar will shelter you tonight,” said Mihan. “After that—I do not know.”

The drainer now returned, bearing a set of contracts. He gave us a proprietary smile and said, “Well, gentlemen, which of you is to be first?”

“One has remembered another appointment,” Mihan said.

“One feels suddenly unwell,” I said.

I tossed the startled drainer a fat coin and we left the godhouse. Outside, Mihan pretended not to know me, and we went our separate ways without a word. Not for a moment did I doubt the truth of his warning. I had to take flight; Loimel would have to purchase her own spices. I hailed a car and went at once to the mansion of the Duke of Sumar.

58

This duke is one of the wealthiest in Manneran, with sprawling estates along the Gulf and in the Huishtor foothills, and a splendid home at the capital set amidst a park worthy of an emperor’s palace. He is hereditary customs-keeper of Stroin Gap, which is the source of his family’s opulence, since for centuries they have skimmed a share of all that is brought forth to market out of the Wet Lowlands. In his person this duke is a man of great ugliness or remarkable beauty, I am not sure which: he has a large flat triangular head, thin lips, a powerful nose, and strange dense tightly curled hair that clings like a carpet to his skull. His hair is entirely white, yet his face is unlined. His eyes are huge and dark and intense. His cheeks are hollow. It is an ascetic face, which to me always seemed alternately saintly and monstrous, and sometimes the both at once. I had been close with him almost since my arrival in Manneran so many years before; he had helped Segvord Helalam into power, and he had stood soulbinder to Loimel at our wedding ceremony. When I took up the use of the Sumaran drug, he divined it as if by telepathy, and in a conversation of marvelous subtlety learned from me that I had the drug, and arranged that he should take it with me. That had been four moonrises earlier, in late winter.

Arriving at his home, I found a tense conference in progress. Present were most of the men of consequence whom I had inveigled into my circle of selfbarers. The Duke of Mannerangu Smor. The Marquis of Woyn. The bank director. The Commissioner of the Treasury and his brother, the Procurator-General of Manneran. The Master of the Border. And five or six others of similar significance. Archivist Mihan arrived shortly after I did.

“We are all here now,” the Duke of Mannerangu Smor said. “They could sweep us up with a single stroke. Are the grounds well guarded?”

“No one will invade us,” said the Duke of Sumar, a trifle icily, clearly offended by the suggestion that common police might burst into his home. He turned his huge alien eyes on me. “Kinnall, this will be your last night in Manneran, and no help for it. You are to be the scapegoat.”

“By whose choice?” I asked.

“Not ours,” the duke replied. He explained that something close to a coup d’etat had been attempted in Manneran this day, and might well yet succeed: a revolt of junior bureaucrats against their masters. The beginning, he said, lay in my having admitted my use of the Sumaran drug to the drainer Jidd. (Around the room faces darkened. The unspoken implication was that I had been a fool to trust a drainer, and now must pay the price of my folly. I had not been as sophisticated as these men.) Jidd, it seemed, had leagued himself with a cabal of disaffected minor officials, hungry for their turn at power. Since he was drainer to most of the great men of Manneran, he was in an extraordinarily good position to aid the ambitious, by betraying the secrets of the mighty. Why Jidd had chosen to contravene his oaths in this fashion was not yet known. The Duke of Sumar suspected that in Jidd familiarity had bred contempt, and after listening for years to the melancholy outpourings of his powerful clients, he had grown to loathe them: exasperated by their confessions, he found pleasure in collaborating in their destruction. (This gave me a new view of what a drainer’s soul might be like.) Hence Jidd had, for some months now, been slipping useful facts to rapacious subordinates, who had threatened their masters with them, often to considerable effect. By admitting my use of the drug to him, I had made myself vulnerable, and he had sold me to certain folk of the Justiciary who wished to have me out of office.