A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (21 page)

EIGHTEEN

“This one’s ours,” Emahpre said
. “Let’s board.”

The driver was Captain Yithuju, who had led the trucks down into the basin early that morning. Emahpre took a moment to rebuke the captain for failing to secure The Albatross and for letting Huspre sneak aboard, take its controls, and lift the airship off the roadway right in front of his nose. This dressing-down was dramatic but brief, and the Deputy returned to Seth and Douin in a viler mood than any he had manifested since coming back from the wreckage.

His eyes still uncovered, Magistrate Vrai was already in a truck, his back against its port gunwale. As a concession to the eminence of this group of evacuees, Yithuju had covered the truckbed with a clean, white, spongy mat. As Seth, Douin, and Emahpre climbed aboard, pausing to clean their boots on a tailgate scraper, the Magistrate turned his eyes toward them but said nothing. Seth believed he was replaying the Pledgechild’s death and mourning the loss of his dascra.

Although Seth had expected the convoy to get moving quickly, none of the trucks budged. This delay—as Tropish soldiers scoured the galleries for stragglers and those few wretched Sh’gaidu holding out against the inevitable—lengthened toward twilight. It was dark before Yithuju fired their truck’s engine to life and urged the vehicle up the muddy gradient out of Palija Kadi. Theirs was the lead truck, though, and Seth stood at its tailgate to watch the basin drop away and the headlights of all the trailing vehicles bob fuzzily in the mist. He hardly regretted leaving this place, but would have been happier if he had never come at all.

After a time, his companions all sleeping, Seth lay down, too. Despite the truck’s jouncing and its huge tires’ sluthering, he fell asleep, exhausted by everything that had happened and vaguely hungry. In his delirium, Abel came whistling across his mind like something made of blown glass, its surfaces reflecting many distorted images of Günter Latimer. When this Abelesque bauble had shattered against the glassy wall of Seth’s dreaming, there arose from the shards a dust of fireflies, as thick and mobile as gnats. Seth tried to brush them away.

—Kahl Latimer, wake up.

He awoke to find the Magistrate sitting beside him, his hard naked eyes like match flames.

“It’s time to conclude our bond-sharing, Kahl Latimer.” The Magistrate dangled something over his chest before dropping it. Seth’s hand crept up his body to claim this item: a pair of goggles.

“I’m returning them,” the Magistrate said. “We’ve concluded this enterprise, but our bond will never be severed. Had I another amulet to put into your keeping, I would readily do so. One failure doesn’t disgrace you in my eyes, Kahl Latimer. I would bond with you again.”

“Even if your dascra
held the eyes of Gaidu?”

The Magistrate refused to wince. “Especially then,” he said.

“What would Ulvri, a simple j’gosfi in his fifth lifetime, be doing with the eyes of the Sh’gaidu Holy One?”

Magistrate Vrai drew back a little, but at last said, “I’m still Ulvri, Kahl Latimer, even today.”

“How?”

“I’ve undergone only four auxiliary births. Since long before the disappearance of Gaidu, I have been one continuous personality, a Tropiard defying the Mwezahbe Legacy even as I struggled to uphold it.”

“Were you once a Sh’gaidu?” Seth asked, unable to make sense of what he was being told.

“No, no. You jump ahead of me.”

“Then why should you have ever possessed the jinalma
of Gaidu?”

“Before I was Ulvri, Kahl Latimer, in my first incarnation, I repudiated the vision of my birth-parent and cast his jinalma
into the winds screaming across the prairie we call Chaelu Sro.”

“But why?”

“Because on a trek between Ebsu Ebsa and Ardaja Huru, my birth-parent betrayed the Mwezahbe Legacy by taking up with a band of nomads—sh’gosfi, perverts, thieves—people at odds with the progressive policies of the state. These outlanders have always been with us
,
Kahl Latimer, traveling together in the vacancies among the great cities, usually in groups of from four to twelve people. Gaidu drew on some of these pariahs for her first converts. My birth-parent lived too long ago to become a follower. Instead he allied himself with a small but active band known for chicanery and violence, and so abstracted himself from my life. I never saw him again.”

“But you acquired his jinalma
when he died?”

“The private records say that I was preparing for my first auxiliary birth when the dascra was delivered to me. My birth-parent had entrusted it to a fellow outcast, who risked capture to enter the dormitory of my horticultural workers’ brotherhood in Ardaja Huru. I awoke to find the amulet about my neck and a long letter atop a work console near my door. I tore up the letter after reading it, then delayed my auxiliary birth long enough to go into the wastelands of Chaelu Sro to repudiate my birthright. The records say I cast away the dust of my birth-parent’s eyes.”

“And you wore no amulet at all into your second lifetime?”

“I did as all Tropiards who have lost their treasure do, Kahl Latimer. I wore an amulet filled with sand.”

“Until you acquired the eyes of Gaidu?”

In the truckbed, the Magistrate leaned close to Seth and told the strange story of his meeting with the sh’gosfi messiah, the self-proclaimed redeemer of all Tropiards, dead now for 172 years:

I was a soldier with the previous magistrate, Orisu Sfol, whom I came to know quite well indeed. He instituted a pogrom against the Sh’gaidu. I wasn’t a common soldier, you understand, but a troop controller with a vehicle of my own and a compelling responsibility.

On a night I have never been able to forget, from a vantage high on the western rim of Palija Kadi, Ulvri—the self I haven’t yet shed—directed an operation designed to harass the people of the unlawful sisterhood. It resembled what happened today in the basin except that it was deadlier. The mission of Orisu Sfol’s dragoons that night was to slaughter at least three quarters of Palija Kadi’s inhabitants, including Gaidu herself if that were possible.

The Fifth Magistrate understood true intimidation. Those dissidents who remained alive would give up their fanaticism and return to the state; potential converts to Gaidu in the Thirty-three Cities would be dissuaded from falling from grace. And to some extent Magistrate Sfol’s ruthless variety of intimidation had results: fear of reprisal, along with the Holy One’s disappearance, worked to chill the fervor of the original Sh’gaidu and to discourage the defection of any impressionable Tropiards.

Ulvri, from his communications vehicle, directed one portion of the state’s assault on the basin. He relayed an order to a lieutenant on the northern roadway and watched a single line of three hundred dragoons fan out across the basin floor firing their laser weapons and running the fleeing sh’gosfi to ground. There was nothing subtle or sneaky about this assault. The state meant business, and it met its objectives with the utmost efficiency.

His own role in the slaughter fulfilled early, Ulvri left his van and climbed to the edge of the western wall to watch the final sweep of the dragoons. Crop fires and laser bursts illuminated Palija Kadi. Although Ulvri could not see the dead, already he could smell them: an acrid stench rising to his nostrils and seeming to sear even his eyes. The operation had been a success. The rumor of this cruelty would perhaps avert the need for a follow-up.

As he stood on the basin rim, his feet straddling a crevice that deepened below him, Ulvri heard small stones snicking and sliding away in deceitful avalanche—deceitful because the sound betrayed someone climbing up from the basin’s floor through the crevice. Ulvri was fascinated. As if amplified by the natural rock funnel, the noise of the sliding stones muted the roaring of the crop fires into mere background hiss.

The fugitive’s ascent deserved admiration. Having wedged herself into the crevice, she used the pressure of her hands and arms to squeeze slowly upward through the funnel. When she finally reached a slope where she could crawl, she scrambled on her hands and knees, dislodging pebbles behind her but advancing steadily nonetheless.

Ulvri stepped back to wait. At last the fugitive emerged, and her nakedness identified her as Sh’gaidu. Wearing just a greatcoat of shadows, she crept forward a few steps and then stood upright as if the starless darkness would protect her from discovery. Ulvri leaped out at her and beat her cruelly before she could plead for mercy or lift an arm to deflect the assault. Then Ulvri bent the fugitive over a slab of rock and gripped her face to see what she looked like.

The biting, sky-blue eyes were enough to tell the troop controller who she was: Duagahvi Gaidu herself. Duty dictated that Ulvri must set sentiment aside and kill her.

“What will you do with my eyes after you’ve killed me?”

Ulvri reared back, startled. “Cast them into the planet’s deepest gorge and lose them forever.”

“That would be a senseless waste of power.”

“Don’t try to bribe me from my purpose.”

“I tempt no thinking being from its duty—but once I’m dead, my eyes are yours. Don’t spill them into the wind.”

“How are they mine?”

“You have no dascra
.
You reside in neither the past nor the future, but only in the now. Since you must kill me, I beg you: Take my eyes and wear them.”

Ulvri had no answer. He was dumbfounded. To wear Gaidu’s eyes would be an unspeakable offense against the Legacy of Seitaba Mwezahbe.

“Tell me your name,” the Holy One asked, still bent beneath his hands, and he told her. “Ulvri, if you become my heir, if you accept my eyes, one day you will be more. You will be the benefactor of all Tropiards, the docile and the defiant alike. You will rule the Thirty-three Cities.”

“Nuraju!”
Ulvri cursed her. To end her life beneath the starless sky, all he need do was tighten his fingers about her neck and squeeze.

“Yes, kill me,” she urged. “But keep my eyes and submit to no more auxiliary births. When Magistrate Sfol comes to die, tell him of your deed so that you may be preferred. Give him the proof of my jinalma
,
of my bones—but tell him that he may not announce my death in the Thirty-three Cities. If he does, the Sh’gaidu will claim my resurrection and evangelism will begin again. Let everyone think me abroad in the world, and my people will wait—wait patiently—growing in power and in their dependency on one another.”

“If I wore your dascra
,
I would be Sh’gaidu myself.”

“No, Ulvri. You must be Tropiard. It’s fitting that I should have a j’gosfi heir, hostile in his appointed post but friendly in his inmost self. Thus the Sh’gaidu, who will always be few, may come to fulfill themselves on Trope.”

“And I will be Magistrate after Orisu Sfol?”

“For having killed me. For having preserved the secret of my death. For being who you are.”

“One isn’t preferred to the magistracy of Trope for a single deed, even that of slaying Duagahvi Gaidu!”

“In the years following this one, you will grow in wisdom, heart, and purpose. Your rise to the magistracy will have its basis in a body of achievement totally apart from the murder you must commit. Only you and Orisu Sfol will know of this murder.”

“How can you possibly guarantee this?” Ulvri cried.

“I will work for you in death, as will my people, infusing you with wisdom, heart, and purpose. . . .”

“Enough!” Terrified by these speculations, Ulvri tightened his hands about Gaidu’s neck, slammed a knee into her belly, and bent her backward over the rock. Crimson spilled from her nostrils, and the Holy One, still youthful in her appearance, lay dead.

Ulvri considered what to do. Deeply agitated, he went to his van, found a flat-bladed knife in a compartment beneath the driver’s seat, and returned to the body to cut away its eyes. Although his hands trembled, he removed the eyes cleanly, emptied the sand from his dascra
,
and replaced it with the Holy One’s two eerily perfect eyes, there to bulge grotesquely until they disintegrated. Lost in the lofty dark, he felt like a vivisectionist as well as a murderer. The person he had killed was in some ineffable, threatening way still alive. He had started back toward his van when a faint cerebral tingling halted him between steps.

—My body, Ulvri. Don’t leave my naked body the prey of your soldiers.

Ulvri, willing each step, went back to the body, lifted it to his shoulders, and carried it along the basin rim. When he had found a funnel in the cliff similar to the one Gaidu had climbed, he dropped her into it and nearly toppled headlong after her as she plunged into the dark.

Who would find the corpse in this place? Only Ulvri, no one else. One day he would reveal the site to Orisu Sfol and would be believed. He would bring the bones up, the bones would be studied by Tropiards ignorant of what they studied, and he would be formally preferred for killing the Holy One and for withholding from the world the fact of her death. In the years between the murder and the secret revelation, he would grow in moral stature just as Gaidu had predicted, developing a character fit for the needs of the position he would one day assume. Eventually everything would happen just as the Holy One had said.

Ulvri became Ulgraji Vrai, Sixth Magistrate of Trope, without renouncing his former self or the understanding of that self acquired after the Holy One’s death. He did not fully understand the process by which he had reached this pinnacle, but he hoped that one day he could bring about a spiritual reconciliation of his people akin to the private one that had taken place in his heart. When he became magistrate, he halted the persecution of the Sh’gaidu pursued so vindictively by Orisu Sfol, a well-meaning butcher, and waited. Although he feared that because of the Mwezahbe Legacy few real Tropiards would ever subordinate themselves to the “illogical,” he hoped that a more rigorous and humane logic would one day prevail.

Officers and advisors—Ehte Emahpre among them—pressed for a policy of watchfulness, along with discreet applications of force. Vrai accepted surveillance as reasonable, but resisted using force for as long as he was able. The power of the magistracy is not unlimited, he had learned, and under intense pressure even moral force may erode. He began to fear that he was no longer strong enough for the task that Gaidu, a dreamer and mage, had said he would carry out with honor. Sometimes it seemed that love and tolerance were at odds with the priorities of his office, and that he must either abdicate or enforce a minority tyranny that would finally drive him from power.