“When you were senior, lady, did you use the whip?” he asked, whispering. “And have you whips here still?”
When she nodded, he whispered again, and she sped to find the things he suggested. She knew then she had guessed aright in choosing the tool to save her life and in saving that to save more than that. She took a moment to speak to Threnot, dictating a message to be sent to Tharius Don, Propagator of the Faith, at the Chancery, in case they did not arrive there themselves.
“Enough,” croaked a voice from behind her. “Enough time spent enlightening your lackeys. We will go now.”
“Of course,” said Lady Kesseret of the Tower of Bans, as though she were going for an afternoon walk into the parklands. “We will go now.”
In a monstrous fanged circle halfway between the River and the pole, the Teeth of the North gaped at the swollen sun, their peaks thrust eight miles or more into the glittering sky. Here, driven deep into the frozen stone, were the only mines on this metal-poor planet, icy tunnels plunging into the heart of the towering range, warmed only by the feeble lamps of the slaves who dug the ore, the mines incessant in their demand for new flesh, for few men lived long in these frigid, airless holes.
The wall of the Teeth was riven in only one place. High against the southern light the jagged jaw of Split River Pass gaped at either side of the sky-filled notch, bared now and briefly, before the snows came again. There black rock tumbled from black rock down an ogre’s stair to the loess of the slopes and taiga of the plain, with the river lunging over it in frantic starts and sorties, like a drunken man-at-arms waked suddenly from dreams of battle.
Within the lofty circle of the mountains stretched an enormous basin, taiga and grassy plains, dotted here and there with a few tens of migratory weehar and tnrassil. When the teeth leaned toward the sun, the lands of the northern basin bloomed and burgeoned toward a hasty harvest. While the people along the River shivered in the chill rains that separated their first and second summers, above the Teeth the sun rolled up from the north around the circle of the sky like a swollen fruit upon the sides of a bowl, never setting, and the Chancery folk walked out of doors in their shirt-sleeves to smell the flowers while the woodsmen piled thick fortresses of firewood along the walls. Axes, axes on the height! Oh, yes, the summer sound in Chancery lands was the crack of the axe and the creak of wagon wheels behind the plodding feet of weehar oxen.
In the winter, when the Teeth turned from the sun after months of lengthening autumn dusk, the long night came down to drown Highstone Lees under a cold cataract of stars. Then the weehar and thrassil dug deep into ice caverns to sleep the three-month night away, and the residents of the Chancery retired to their tunnels and rooms burrowed into the rock below while they made other tunnels into the mighty walls-stacks of wood, carrying it inside load by load, leaving snow-covered, canvas-roofed tunnels behind, widening as the winter went on until the outside walls could be taken in to be burned in the half sun of early summer.
And it was summer yet, though there were few flowers left and evenings brought chill winds to curl at the corners of buildings and rattle the fastenings of windows. The broad leaves of the mime trees in the ceremonial plaza were beginning to roll into tight cylinders, fronds of papery green sheets becoming brushes of fine needles, black as jet. The fountain in the plaza still played, but plaintively, and North Split River rattled a shallow complaint upon its black stones beneath a hundred high-backed bridges. There would be little more melt from the heights to feed it and then no more at all until spring came again.
It was the time some people of the Chancery liked best, after summer’s labor and before the cozy hibernation of the snow time. The High Lodge of the Jarb Mendicants preferred the season, the fading sun of autumn, the needling of leaves, the plaint of water. The Mendicants moved abroad to draw into their pores each scant ray of the slowing sun, drug pipes hanging cold in their lax hands, for a time unpossessed by oracular visions. And the Mendicants were not alone in their enjoyment. To the palace garden, tippy-toe with tiny mandarin steps, sweet as a leaping lamb upon the grass, came the Protector of Man, Lees Obol, in his padded robes, one Jondarite at either arm, half carried, half escorted in his gentle perambulation of .the cloisters. Such an old, old man, Lees Obol, beneficiary of the fliers’ Payment for almost five hundred years, all the youthful passion spilled away over the centuries to leave this vague contentment in its stead. Not that all that youthful urgency leaked away unremembered and unremarked. At the center of him was an ache sometimes, a feeling of vacancy, as though an essential vessel had been drained, an imponant room left untenanted. This hollowness echoed occasionally, a dim seashell sound, the susurrus of his blood, perhaps; or a thudding like the boots of armed men come to rob a temple of all its valuables, only to find it empty and the worshipers gone.