“The Honored Matre who is coming, what does she expect?” Teg asked.
“Bashar, I warn you: Do not take that tone with her. You have not the slightest concept of what is about to happen to you.”
“An Honored Matre is about to happen to me,” Teg said.
“And I wish you well of her!”
Muzzafar pivoted and left via the tube slot.
Teg stared after him. He could see the flickering of second vision like a light blinking around the tube slot. The Honored Matre was near but not yet ready to enter this room. First, she would consult with Muzzafar. The Field Marshal would not be able to tell this dangerous female anything really important.
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
-Mentat Handbook
Lucilla and Burzmali entered Ysai from the south into a lowerclass quarter with widely spaced streetlights. It lacked only an hour of midnight and yet people thronged the streets in this quarter. Some walked quietly, some chatted with drug-enhanced vigor, some only watched expectantly. They wadded up at the corners and held Lucilla’s fascinated attention as she passed.
Burzmali urged her to walk faster, an eager customer anxious to get her alone. Lucilla kept her covert attention on the people.
What did they do here? Those men waiting in the doorway: For what did they wait? Workers in heavy aprons emerged from a wide passage as Lucilla and Burzmali passed. There was a thick smell of rank sewage and perspiration about them. The workers, almost equally divided between male and female, were tall, heavy-bodied and with thick arms. Lucilla could not imagine what their occupation might be but they were of a single type and they made her realize how little she knew of Gammu.
The workers hawked and spat into the gutter as they emerged into the night. Ridding themselves of some contaminant?
Burzmali put his mouth close to Lucilla’s ear and whispered: “Those workers are the Bordanos.”
She risked a glance back at them where they walked toward a side street. Bordanos? Ahhh, yes: people trained and bred to work the compression machinery that harnessed sewer gases. They had been bred to remove the sense of smell and the musculature of shoulders and arms had been increased. Burzmali guided her around a corner and out of sight of the Bordanos.
Five children emerged from a dark doorway beside them and wheeled into line following Lucilla and Burzmali. Lucilla noted their hands clutching small objects. They followed with a strange intensity. Abruptly, Burzmali stopped and turned. The children also stopped and stared at him. It was clear to Lucilla that the children were prepared for some violence.
Burzmali clasped both hands in front of him and bowed to the children. He said: “Guldur!”
When Burzmali resumed guiding her down the street, the children no longer followed.
“They would have stoned us,” he said.
“Why?”
“They are children of a sect that follows Guldur — the local name for the Tyrant.”
Lucilla looked back but the children were no longer in sight. They had set off in search of another victim.
Burzmali guided her around another corner. Now, they were in a street crowded with small merchants selling their wares from wheeled stands — food, clothing, small tools, and knives. A singsong of shouts filled the air as the merchants tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end of the workday lift — a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.
In the street directly ahead of them a burly figure in a thickly padded coat was engaged in loud-voiced argument with a merchant who offered a string bag filled with the dark red bulbs of a sweetly acid fruit. The fruit smell was thick all around them. The merchant complained: “You would steal the food from the mouths of my children!”