“Something for something, Gendra. If you want our support, Nepor’s and mine, you’ll have to offer something. We’ll talk again.” He left her chewing on that, figuring how to outwit him in the long run, so taken with her own cleverness she couldn’t think for a moment he had already outwitted her. The corridors of the Bureau of Towers were long and echoing, the stairs even longer. When he came to the bottom of the sixth flight, three levels below winter quarters, smelling the opulent dust of the files, he was too out of breath to summon Glamdrul Feynt for a time. He contented himself with leaning on a table while his heart slowed, then banging the nearest door in its frame three or four times, hearing the echoes slam down the endless corridors, ricocheting fragments in an avalanche of sound.
When the sound died it was resurrected, coming from the opposite direction, another door slammed somewhere far away, and the sound of Feynt’s voice, “Hoo, hoo, hoo,” as he stumbled nearer. When he saw who it was, he straightened and stopped limping. “So, Jorn. What’s on your mind?”
They sat on a filthy bench, staring at dust motes like schools of silver fish in a slanting beam that struck from a high lantern into the well of the files, talking of Gendra Mitiar, of fliers, of this and that.
“So you’ve got it all planned, have you?”
“If you’ll tell her there’s heresy in Baris, yes. That’ll do the trick. She’ll trot off to the fliers with Pamra Don, and she’ll keep right on going. Oh, she can’t wait to set her claws into that woman in Baris.”
“And you’ll be the next Protector, then?”
“Sure as can be. We count three votes for it, against two at the council. Of course, the assembly’s something else, but we can manage that.”
“And what’s in it for old Feynt, Jorn? Oh, I know you’ve talked dribs of this and drabs of that, but what’s in it for me, I want to know?”
“Elixir, Feynt. All of that you want. What else can I do for you? Some other job? No reason you have to stick down here, is there?”
“Nobody else knows where anything is, you know that, Jorn.” It was said with a kind of belligerent pride.
“Does it matter?” It was said all unheeding, Jorn so drunk with his own plotting he didn’t think. He was watching the dust motes, thinking of himself on the royal Progression, dressed all in gold and held up by the Jondarites to the acclaim of the mobs. He did not see the wrinkle come between Feynt’s old eyebrows or the hateful gleam that winked once across his eyes. Did it matter? Did a man’s life matter? Over a hundred years spent on these files, and did it matter?
When Ezasper Jorn left in a little time, he did not know he had made an enemy of what had been, at worst, a malicious but disinterested man.
Among the more respected followers of the crusade were several scribes, including a light-colored spy sent by Queen Fibji and at least one adventurer from the island chain. Night found these assigned recorders, among others who kept records for their own various reasons, hunched over their individual campfires or crouched into the pools of their lantern’s light, scribbling an account of the day’s sayings. Some of them had not seen Pamra Don herself, so they wrote what others said of her, of her and Lila.
“She shines with a holy radiance,” some wrote, confusing the shining statue that had appeared in Thou-ne with the woman it had likened. “The child is a messenger of God, sent into her keeping, an unearthly being, of an immortal kind.” In which they were more accurate than they realized, though Lila’s unearthly nature came from a source closer to them than the God of man.
“The Noor are personifications of the darkness,” they scribbled. Queen Fibji’s spy gritted his teeth as he made note of this particular doctrine. It was a new teaching. Peasimy Plot had been stopped by a troop of Melancholies in a town market square as they were passing through. Unwisely, the Melancholies had suggested the crusaders be whipped for holiness’s sake. Peasimy had peered into their dark, grinning faces and had turned away with revulsion, shivering. “These are devils,” he cried. “The darkness creeps out of their skins.” The word had spread rapidly through the following, and since that time, the crusade had gone out of its way to surround and brutalize troupes of Melancholies, beating them with their own whips.