Ravinga fastened the last infinitesimal gem into the crown of the doll she worked upon. Then she turned it slowly and critically about.
Three times had I seen the Emperor close enough to mark well his features. Doll this might be, yet there was so much life caught up by Ravinga’s skill that I would not have been surprised to see him slip down between her fingers and stand alive, his own master.
She stood him with care upon a block of black stone and then whirled that around with an impatient gesture so now he faced me.
“It is well?” and she meant that question to be truthfully answered. In all the years I had seen her as another pair of hands I had never before been asked my opinion of her work.
“By all I know, mistress,” I replied quickly, “this is in truth an image of Haban-ji.”
Now her one hand gestured but the other kept still a jealous guard between her and her masterwork.
I glanced down at what I myself had wrought. It, too, had a lifelike air to it. Almost I could feel this image looking at me measuringly as if it were indeed true one of the great menaces of our land.
“Call!” commanded my mistress.
I wet lips, desert dry, with my tongue tip, lowering my head so that my eyes were on a level with that of one image.
“Hynkkel,” I named the name of the doll which stood to my right hand anchoring the cloth. “Desert warrior—
The yellow eyes did not change. There was no sound of an answer—had I expected such? Using one of the small tools I still held as a pointer, I spoke again, quietly but not allowing myself to be denied.
“Enter!”
It was the desert cat, stretching as might one of the kottis—its front legs spread outward, its hind quarters stiff, again as a kotti before padding out on a nighttime prowl. It moved from the center of the cloth and there was something lightsome about its fur which matched a bit of the ancient markings on the skin it had rested upon as I worked.
Ravinga was not through with either it or me. Once more she turned the figure of the Emperor Haban-ji, now to face the beast I had wrought.
She had whipped up from behind her a length of fine silk embroidered with silver leopards and swung that swatch about the Emperor doll, hiding it from view. I had no more the feeling that the doll was what he seemed—that which had been life in him had departed.
The same was not so of the cat. Its head turned as it looked to the image of Hynkkel. One could believe that there passed between them some spark of communication. Ravinga reached forth across the table and caught up that miniature of the Kahulawen.
She put him down beside the cat and eyed the pair narrowly as if she was searching for one small error in craftsmanship.
Then again she gave her order in a single word:
“Speak!”
“Hynkkel,” I obeyed. I was still and tense, disliking this thing that was not of my willing. She had taken me, I saw clearly over the years, to establish her will, overriding mine. This carried the bite of old anger. Yet she never appeared to sense that I was not one of her tools, to be discarded at will and reused again at a whim.
I saw the thin shadow of a smile about her lips. Whatever game she played Ravinga surely believed that she had it under her full control.
Long back during the years I had spent with Ravinga I had learned that there was time one did not ask questions. What she did in the privacy of the back of her shop was secret and often I never knew what it was. I studied her now with some of the same old unvoiced demand as she was turning on the doll Hynkkel and the sandcat I had wrought. The heat of the room was more oppressive. Still I did not believe that she felt it.
Then putting man image and beast one together in the middle of the table, she brought forward the wrapped replica of the Emperor.
Opening up the small box of minute gems, from which she could reproduce in miniature the heavy jewelry of state, she thrust the end of her most delicate tool into the massed bits of color and then lifted it out, a thread of chain dangling from it. Pendant from that was a tiny mate to that cat mask which she had given to the feckless young man at the trading square almost a quarter of a season back.
She dropped the circlet of that thread-thin chain over the manikin’s head and sat him, so adorned, to face the Emperor whom she had unwrapped. Game—this was some game. Bits and pieces I had witnessed, words overheard here and there, they drew together in my mind.
The old puzzle was at the root of it. Who—what was Ravinga? She made no parade of any arts beyond what anyone might see, her use as a maker of dolls. Yet there was much more—very much more.
I had come to her not with any real hope drawing me to her household. For nightmare days and demon-ridden nights I had been hunted. And I knew just how much I was worth to any astute enough to break my disguise and spy me out.
When I was very small I had made a great discovery for myself. If I believed myself unseen, undetected, then it appeared that was the truth. First my nursemaid, and then old Vastar, my tutor in things suitable for a maiden of any House, could pass within touching distance and yet see me not.
Because I was a child in a household of adults, and ancient adults—the lady ruler being my grandmother twice over—I went much my own way.
Six Houses ruled Vapala and, through the Emperor and their support of him, they ruled our whole known world. Not outwardly, but in devious ways of their own. I was sure that the very deviousness of their dealings with each other gave them a cold yet intense pleasure.
Below the six, there were the twelve. More ambitious these, and more active outwardly, for they yearned to see their House standard set as near to the square before the palace of the rulers as possible. They had promise of gaining such heights. It had been done so far three times in our slow-moving history.
The twenty and five came next. And they were the doers, those who fought more openly for place. Among them it was not unusual for the Head of a House to challenge an equal, knowing that survivors in such a constant hidden war were the winners. These hunted for unusual powers and sought out knowledge long since forgotten.
There had been one such House lady under the banner of my line, and she had set herself up against the ruler of her own House, dooming it to extinction. I was nameless and clanless. No one in the whole of Vapala had so before brought to naught as old and mighty a House.
Ravinga bore a twisted scar across her shoulder which she ever concealed with a scarf. That brand I owed her recompense for.
From the first she gave me an established position in Vapala. For, having declared before the council that I was her chosen apprentice, I was removed from the wreckage of the House and even out of the ranks of the nobility, which did not bother me in the least.
My education was strict and I was put to learning things which a year or so earlier I would have argued did not exist. I discovered that, just as within the Houses there are intrigues, so did veiled action continue elsewhere, not only in Vapala but in all the queendoms. It was very much a matter of not accepting the surface but relying on one’s knowledge of what lay below.
Now it would appear that my education was to be furthered. Ravinga planted her elbows together on the table and cupped her chin in the palms of her hands, her attention now on the two images, man and cat.
“Last season,” she began abruptly, “there came one from Azhengir, a trader of salt, the one I told you afterward to keep well in mind.”
I remembered clearly the woman she meant, hard as a lump of her own dusky wares, her skin dried and chapped, her eyes buried in protecting wrinkles raised against the shifting, smarting dust of her country. She had walked into Ravinga’s shop with the sure tread of an expected visitor, though I had never seen her before.
Once inside she had done an unusual thing, dropping the heavy butt of her traveler’s staff against the door so that it denied entrance to any following her.