Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

The business of the Tower crept on at the pace of a tree’s growth, slow, unobservable. She tried to keep up appearances, with everything as it had been before. She let herself become a bit negligent in recruiting, but that could be laid to her experiences with the traitor junior, Pamra Don. Her servant, Threnot, seemed to spend more time than ever walking around Baristown in her veils and robes, but if the Superior wished to gather information, no one would question that too strongly. The Superior herself looked unwell, old, somehow, which might be explained by the strain of the long journey that had returned her to Baris.

Or could be explained by the fact that the elixir, sent from the Chancery through the office of Gendra Mitiar, was not efficacious. It seemed to have been adulterated. Kessie sent frantic word through secret routes. She did not mind dying, but she did not want to do it until after the strike. Her life had been given to the cause. She must see its fulfillment.

In time, another vial of elixir arrived from Tharius Don, but the damage had been done. She looked in the mirror at the lines graven around her eyes and mouth, the fine crepe of her skin. No pretense would convince her ever again that she was young. She regretted this. When the end came, she had wanted both of them to appear, at least for a time, as they had when they loved one another so dearly. It had been a culmination, a picture in her mind. A honeymoon. Ah, well; ah, well. She offered it up to the cause, along with her twisted fingers and toes.

“How long, lady?” begged Threnot. She was an old woman, eighty at least. She wished to live long enough to see the end, to see the Thraish confounded, to see the pits emptied. She was glad to see the lines around Kessie’s eyes. They were like the lines around her own, confirming them sisters grown old in the cause.

“Soon, Threnot. Tharius Don tells me that Pamra Don is only a few weeks’ journey from the Chancery. He admits to selfishness, but says he wishes to have her in his protection before the strike. There are one or two other things he’s waiting on. If possible, he wants to locate the stolen herd beasts and eliminate them from consideration. He thinks if the Thraish have any beasts at all, they may place great weight upon some impossible future and delay acceding to reality.” And when he has done that, she thought despairingly, he will find some other reason for delay.

“They would.” Threnot nodded. “Those filth bags would rather do anything than what good Tharius Don expects them to do.” Threnot had never met Tharius Don, but she had long been Kessie’s confidante.

“When they are Treeci, they will not be filth bags anymore,” Kessie admonished, surprised that she had come to believe this. She had longed for this faith, the faith of Tharius Don, and perhaps it had come as a reward for her suffering. “When they have become Treeci,” she said again, rejoicing in the calm confidence of her voice.

In the Tower at Thou-ne, Haranjus Pandel reflected on transiency. The sun was far sunk in the south. First summer had gone, and the rainy winds of autumn gathered about the tower, making the shutters creak and cold drafts creep through the stone corridors. Thunderheads massed over the River and surged over Northshore, sailing away into the north in mighty continents of cloud. Ill luck gathering, he thought. Like fliers. Dark and ominous. For days, weeks, fliers had been gathering upon the Black Talons to the east of the town, coming and going. He had never seen so many, not even at Conjunction when they came, so he believed, to breed. It was not the only strange thing to have happened recently.

A few weeks ago had come a Laugher, down from the northlands, cut off from further travel east, so he said, by the towering height of the Talons.

“I demand your assistance, Superior.”

He was like all of them, hot and bitter, his eyes like burning coals in the furnace of his face.