None of this was the business of the gathering. He pulled himself into focus and said again, “The crusade will dissipate while she is on her way here.”
Gendra would have liked to find something wrong with his reasoning, but she couldn’t. Gendra wanted Pamra Don killed, both because it was her nature to dispose of wild factors in that way and because some instinct told her it would be a very good idea. Pamra Don and Tharius Don. And the lady Kesseret. An odd group, that. An untrustworthy group. When she, Gendra, became Protector of Man, her first order to the Jondarites would be to do away with certain of the Chancery staff. And certain Tower Superiors. And others. She smiled, a rare, awful smile, showing her teeth.
Shavian, his eyes darting between them as though watching a game of net-ball, nodded in approval. The general glared but did not object. Why would he? He would sooner believe in plots than in no plots.
Ezasper Jorn and Koma Nepor simply watched, listened, said little. Having plans of their own, they didn’t care about these things. And as for Lees Obol, his voice came to them plaintively from the curtained niche behind them. “Somebody get me my pot.”
The Jondarites outside the niche moved to the Protector’s service. Gendra stood up and ordered tea in a loud voice, at least partly to disguise the sounds emanating from the curtained room. There was general babble for a few moments, for which Tharius Don was very grateful. A Jondarite brought the Protector’s teapot into the hall and set it upon a distant table, over a lamp, ready when the Protector asked for it. Behind it, the curtain glowed red as blood in the light of the warmer. Tharius found his eyes fixed on it, as though it were an omen.
He joined the babble, adding to it. When they came to order once again, his suggestion would be remembered, but his own connection with it would be somewhat overlaid by later conversation. A subtlety, he felt, but nonetheless acceptable. Even subtlety was welcome.
And yet, except for his own emotional needs, why bother? He had asked himself this more than once in the preceding days and weeks, ever since the first word of the crusade had come via seeker bird and watchtower. Servants of the cause had passed the word along, knowing Tharius Don would want to know. Mendicants of the Jarb had passed the word along, for Chiles Medman had asked them to. The Jarb Houses were firm supporters of the cause, to Tharius’s amazement, though Chiles had explained why.
They had met by chance on one of the outer walls of the Chancery compound, brought there by a day of inviting sun and more than seasonable warmth, encountering one another quite by accident and remaining together because not to have done so would have looked suspiciously like avoidance or disaffection. Avoidance was as suspect as propinquity. There were always watchers. They had fallen into conversation, the first they had ever held outside the context of the conspiracy. They had spoken of the nature of fliers.
“Look at a flier through the smoke sometime, Tharius Don.” Chiles Medman had held out his pipe, as though inviting Tharius to do it then and there. There were no fliers closer than Northshore that anyone had reported, though there might have been a dozen of them spying from the high peaks for all anyone knew.
“What do you see, Medman? A differing reality?” Tharius was touchy about this.
“We see them stripped of our own delusion, Tharius Don. Through the smoke they look like nothing much except winged incarnations of pride.”
“Pride?” He had not really been surprised. Everyone knew how stiff-necked the Talkers were.
“They would be happy to see every human dead if they did not need us for food. They would rend all intelligence but their own. They kill, not out of bloodthirstiness, but out of pride. They have a word for sharing, horgho. It means ‘to abase oneself.’ Their phrase for sharing food, horgha sloos, means also ‘dirtying oneself.’ Did you know they call us sloosil?’
Tharius Don could not help snorting at the word. “No. What does it mean?”