Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

Someone had given the baby a token. “By the moons, look at the face on him,” someone had said. “Send him to the Chancery when he grows, mother,” someone else had said to Firrabel. “We have need of those who can frighten demons just looking at them.” Had it been the Protector who had called out, saying these things? Or someone in his entourage? Who knew? Firrabel didn’t remember, then. , He was a child who had had to fight for his life, many times. He learned to fight very well and to despise weakness, in himself, in others. Then, when he was a strapping youth of such horrible mien and reputation that people hastily hid when they saw him coming, Firrabel had given him the token and sent him north. “Go to the Chancery,” she had said. “Ask for the Protector and remind him that he chose you out of thousands to serve him.”

By this time, she had convinced herself the Protector had said it all. Actually, it had been Bossit himself who had said most of it, and it was Bossit who remembered the whole thing when Jondrigar came to the Chancery at last. The guards had laughed in his face when he’d passed into Chancery lands. They had laughed, but they had passed the word. Bossit had seen monstrousness in the child, he saw the promise of that monstrousness fulfilled in the man. Bossit had given him a spear to see what he could do with it, and he could do a good deal. Jondrigar had become a guardsman, and then the leader of a company, and then head of a battalion. And by the time the old general had died, all the

guards in the Chancery were Jondarites, and no one suggested any other candidate to lead the Chancery army.

Jondrigar the gray, the scaly, the pitted, wild-haired, long-armed monster. Jondrigar the untouchable. Jondrigar, who cared for only two people in all the world: Firrabel, who had raised him and cared for him; and Lees Obol, Protector of Man, who had picked him-so he thought-out of all the world. He had never loved a woman, never cared for a child. To Firrabel he sent money and gifts and infrequent letters. To Lees Obol he gave all his devotion and his life. And to Bossit, who furnished the general with tempting morsels from time to time, the monster served as a constant amusement, a source of daily wonder.

As for the general’s own feelings, he did not think he had underestimated Queen Fibji. The northlands might rise under one of the male advisers to the scepter, perhaps, but not under the Queen. She was a pacifist. She would not fight. Her young men would fight, but she would not. From what he knew of women-that is, of his dutiful aunt and some even more dutiful whores-Jondrigar believed that women put comfort above all other considerations. Fibji was a woman, and she was comfortable as she was. He, Jondrigar, would allow her just enough comfort to keep her quiescent by exercising his troops at some distance from the Queen’s tents. When Noor were to be murdered, maimed, or otherwise brutalized, he would do it out of Fibji’s sight or hearing. Though she might learn of it later, it would be after the blood had dried and most of the grieving done. None knew better than Jondrigar how difficult it was to work up an outrage over something that had happened a long time before. So wherever Fibji went, the balloon scouts came to tell him, and he sent the troops elsewhere. A kind of game, really, but effective. The ceaseless depredations of the Jondarites kept the steppe dwellers’ population in check and prevented them from assembling the stores they needed to wage outright war: the confiscated grains and roots filled vast storehouses behind the Teeth, enough to keep the Chancery for a generation if it were ever needful. General Jondrigar was well satisfied with Queen Fibji. If General Jondrigar was grateful for anything, he was grateful for comfortable, dutiful, compliant women.

In a hidden room off a remote corridor of the palace, Ezasper Jorn, Ambassador to the Thraish, built up the small fire in his porcelain stove and invited his guest to bring a chair closer to the warmth.