And it had happened, and it had ceased, and everyone was grievously disturbed, for blight and plague had followed what should have been a sign of unprecedented good fortune…
Jing’s journey had been fruitless so far, but it was not yet doomed to failure. His store of pearlseeds from the Lake was less than half-exhausted, for they grew stranger and more precious as he traveled, exchangeable for more food and longer lodging, and he had clung to his roll of maps even though in all the lands and cities he had visited he had met only one person who appeared to grasp their significance. He had expected students of heaven-lore as dedicated as himself, libraries too— albeit in alien script on unfamiliar materials—because tradition told of merchants from Geys and Yown and Elgwim who had brought amazing horns, hides, seeds and spices along with boastful tales about the riches of their homelands. What he had actually found…
Half-starved mud-scrabblers incapable of distinguishing dream from reality, ascribing crop-failure, blight and murrain to supernatural beings, imagining they could protect themselves by sacrificing most of what remained to them—whereupon, of course, weakness and fatigue allowed dreams to invade their minds ever further. Madness, madness! Why did not everybody know that the heavens bodied forth an impersonal record of the world below, neither more nor less? How could anybody, in these modern times, credit a god prepared to launch missiles at random with a view to killing people? The welkin shed messages, not murder!
His whole course since leaving Ntah had been a succession of horrid shocks. Geys, one of the first cities he had planned to visit, stood abandoned and overgrown, for—so he was told—a flaming prong from the sky had struck a nearby hill and everyone had fled in panic. Moreover, of the escorts and banners who had set out with him (any other of the court officers would have had concubines as well, but Jing was obliged by his calling to accept celibacy) most had deserted on finding how squalid was the world beyond the mountains, while not a few had succumbed, as had his mount, to bad food or foul water.
One alone had survived to accompany him into the branchways of the great city Forb, where first he had encountered learned men as he regarded learning. Yet they were parasites, Jing felt, upon their city’s past, disdainful of sky-shown truths, able only to expound concerning inscriptions and petty relics which they claimed to be older than anything elsewhere. Jing was reticently doubtful, but it was impolitic to speak his mind, partly because he was unfluent in the speech of that region, partly because its masters exercised very real power which he had no wish to see turned against Ntah, and chiefly because of the nature of that power.
His tallness, and the fact that his companion was taller yet, made him remarkable. The nobility bade him to banquets and festivities as a curiosity. It was a time of dearth, as he had discovered on his way; nonetheless, the fare at such events was lavish. It followed that the lords of Forb must control vast domains—not, however, vast enough to satisfy them, as was apparent from the way they spent all their tune maneuvering for advantage over one another, and instructed their interpreters to ply Jing with questions concerning weaponry. They were prepared to descend as far as spreading disease among a rival’s crops, than which only the use of wildfire could be baser. Were such monsters to be let loose in the peaceful region of Ntah…!
Shuddering, yet determined to pursue his quest, Jing eventually discovered the secret of their dominance. It lay not in their armies, nor their treasuries. It consisted in the deliberate and systematic exploitation of the dreams of those less well-to-do than themselves, a possibility which had never occurred to him, and which the language barrier prevented him from comprehending until a lordling he had disappointed in his hope of brand-new armaments set sacerdotes upon him at his lodgings.
He had frequently seen their like bringing up the tail-end of a noble’s retinue, always gaunt in a manner that contrasted greatly with the glistening plumpness of their masters, and initially he had assumed them to be nothing more than servants: scribes, perhaps, or accountants, though it was hard to conceive how such dream-prone starvelings could be relied on.