Glamdrul Feynt was a young man by Chancery standards, only slightly half past a hundred, but he seemed to hover on the edge of dissolution, his aging unstemmed by the Payment. It had been given him tardily and with deep frustration by certain underlings of the Dame Marshal who devoutly wished him dead but were unable to replace him. It amused Glamdrul Feynt, therefore, to act even older and feebler than he was while still conveying omniscience on any matter relating to the files. Bent and gray, shedding scraps of paper from every pocket as he came, he approached the Dame Marshal with dragging footsteps and failing breath, leaning heavily upon his cane, meantime whispering his compliments in a gasp that bid fair to presage extinction at any moment.
“Oh, sit down, sit down,” she snarled at him. “Jorum, make him sit down. Now get off down the corridor, all of you. I’ve private business to discuss.” She watched them malevolently as they retreated out of earshot, then leaned close to Feynt’s side and said in a low voice, “I need you to do some research for me, Glamdrul Feynt. And if you do it well, I’ll see you get a dose of the Payment that’ll do you some good.”
“Ah, Your Reverence. But I’m too old, I’m afraid. Too late. Much too late, so they say. On my last legs, I’m afraid.” He fished in a pocket for a wad of paper fragments, drew them forth, and peered at them with ostentatious nearsightedness.
“Nonsense. Play those games with those who believe them, Feynt. Now listen to me.
“There’s a thing going on. The Talkers call it the Riverman heresy. What it is, it’s people putting their dead in the River instead of giving them to the Awakeners. Now, it’s no new thing. Seems to me I’ve heard of it off and on in passing for a few hundred years. There’s been a flare-up of it in Bans. Maybe other places, too. There’s a new thing in Thou-ne. Some fisherman pulled a statue out of the River. Now it’s set up in the Temple, right under Potipur himself. Rumblings. That’s what I hear. What I want to know is, where did this heresy start? And when. When is important, too. And could the two things be connected?”
“I can look, Your Reverence. I don’t recall the heresy, offhand. Don’t recall anything about Rivermen. But I can look … “
“Go back two or three hundred years and look in the records of Bans. Find out who was Superior of the Tower then. Find out what was going on. Hah? You understand?”
He did not answer, merely wheezed asthmatically and bowed, as though in despair.
For her part, she took no notice of his pose but shouted for her entourage and went back the way she had come. Something within her quickened, hard on the trail of a connection she merely suspected. Tharius Don. The lady Kesseret. Hah. Both from Baris. And she seemed to recall something about Baris as a center of rebellion, long ago.
Behind her on the bench the old man peered after her with rheumy eyes, his hands busy with the scraps of paper he had drawn from a pocket, sorting them, smoothing them, folding them twice and thrusting them into the pocket once more. “Oh, yes,” he muttered to her retreating back. “I’ll bet you would like to know where it started, old bird.” He sat there, perfectly still, until he was alone in the files once more. Then he rose and moved swiftly down the corridor, shedding scraps from every pocket as he went.
A door halfway down the long corridor opened as he approached, and a figure came halfway into the hall, beckoning imperiously.
“Well, what did the old fish want?” The question came from a mouth thin-lipped as a trap and was punctuated by the snap of fingers as long and twisted as tree roots. Ezasper Jorn was a man of immense strength and enormous patience, though this latter characteristic was not now in evidence. “Come up with it, Feynt! What did old Mitiar want?”
Behind the Ambassador the shadowy figure of Research Chief Koma Nepor stared at the file master. “Yes, yes, Feynt. What did she want?”