He started to accept it from her hand and then thought better of it. “No, you open it. Show me. It would be like you to have had it fitted with some poisoned clasp …”
“You wrong me, beloved,” she said, and wondered how the man who sold her this box had known that Hafiz would say this. She touched the catch and the lid popped open. “You see? Nothing in it but fine sparkling powder, like ground moonstones or opals.”
“I do not traffic in drugs, Yasmin,” Hafiz said huffily. He didn’t either. Not any more. Not for many years. Well, not on a regular basis. It wasn’t really profitable any more.
“Ah, but, husband, this is no drug of the sort to which you refer. This is a very special powder indeed. It will heal any wound, neutralize poisons, and will act as an amazing aphrodisiac to any man or woman who takes only a few grains in a drink or food.”
“This is so?” Hafiz asked. “That is a wondrous thing indeed, mother of my deservedly-deceased son. And something I will happily accept if only you will tell me, why is it that you, who have never, so far as I could discern, borne love for any part of me but my wealth, bestow this upon me? As a gift,” he reminded her hastily. A gift was, after all, a gift, though for a remedy with such powers as this powder was said to have, he might well have paid a great deal.
“Because, dear husband, it is said to come from the horn of a humanoid being who has but a single horn in the center other forehead. Since you once showed favor to such a being …” She laughed, and taking a deep breath, blew the powder from the open box into his face, and into his eyes, blinding him with a starry swirl that also, somehow, silenced him and made him swoon so that when he regained his senses^ he was lying upon the central pattern of the Garden of Paradise carpet, and the living ghost of his late wife had vanished.
He was one with his home world, gray-brown and broken, and to an onlooker would have been almost indistinguishable from the rubble. He no longer knew which was rock and soil and which part of his own body, except for the pain. He had had no fear, when the ship landed, that either the small furry animal or the cumbersome monster who kept flinging things in and out of the vessel would notice him.
But he watched when they landed once more with far greater trepidation, and with relief that he had already removed from its resting place the sacred trust that undoubtedly drew the outsiders.
The House of Harakamian chemists reported ????? that the powder -was a mixture of the ground pollens of the rare Wahanamoian Blossom of Sleep and another substance difficult to analyze, but appearing to be calcified tissue of the horn variety, about which they could say nothing further except that one of the men who had cut himself accidentally a little earlier spontaneously healed upon coming in contact with the powder.
Hafiz mentioned nothing of this to Karma. Until he could finalize his divorce to a supposedly dead woman, he did not wish to jeopardize his marriage by mentioning the inconvenient vitality of his late spouse to his present one.
But he was very troubled indeed. Surely, Yasmin had obtained the powder through her underworld contacts, which he was certain she had, as -who else would have financed her all these years while she plied the trade that she seemed to feel made her a star? But if these people had somehow contrived to murder Acorna and the delegation from her home planet, Hafiz felt sure they would have said so more directly-he himself would have done that, though he was often the most indirect of men. Therefore, this powder was a warning. And yet-where could the horn material have come from?
A sickening thought occurred to him. Before he had met the Linyaari, they had broadcast as a warning vids of the Khieevi torturing Linyaari prisoners. Was there some faction of the sort of worm with whom Yasmin consorted so low as to actually have contacts among the Khieevi who would sell them Linyaari horn?