A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Read online

  “It is not in the blood for us to follow Law!” Jaud raged. “Therefore, I ordain—not with my own voice, but with that of our singing marrow—that we shall continue to thieve, juggle, and slay! So be it always!” Shortly after Jaud delivered this impassioned speech, he journeyed alone out of the Orpla Mountains and down the Tarsebset Moraine to Sket, the summer capital of Kier.

  Full of bravado and curiosity, he had determined to breach the fortifications of the Summer Palace and behold the upstart Prime Liege whose name and word were equally law. By stealth and cunning Jaud got past the outer wall of Sket and into the buttressed chamber of the sovereign’s throne room. Soon he would meet Shobbes face to face.

  A noise halted Jaud dead still. A host of helmeted guards set upon him. Although he struggled like ten Kieri and slew one of his attackers, Jaud was eventually overcome and delivered to Shobbes in halt-chains and wrist-irons.

  Shobbes, Law, was an aged gentlewoman wearing starched black skirts and a black overtunic. Her mien was gracious and refined, her voice pedantic and precise. Never before in his life had Jaud seen or heard anyone like her. “You are banished to the Obsidian Wastes,” Shobbes told Jaud with no-nonsense authority. “You may not return until you find Aisaut, Conscience, in his dwelling there and bow before him in sincere obeisance as his vassal. Only then may you know again the company of civil, scruple-inhibited beings.”

  Northward along the Kieri coast, in High Summer, an ice barge carried Jaud into exile. At Ilvaudset Camp he was put ashore and abandoned to his sentence. Facing inland toward the pole, Jaud saw beneath the half-frozen ground cover irregular veins of the extrusive black glass that gave the Obsidian Wastes their name. How would he survive the decree of Law and find amid such desolation the hidden dwelling of Conscience? The bigness of his task both appalled and invigorated him, and he departed Ilvaudset Camp and its small garrison of Kieri soldiers in an odd humor of elation and self-doubt.

  For seventy days and seventy nights Jaud trekked into the hardening wilderness of the Wastes. He did not eat, drink, or sleep. At the end of the seventieth night he came upon the Escarpments of Aisaut, a maze of towering obsidian walls and interconnecting canyons of glass which none but the innocent or the penitential could traverse with ease. Jaud was neither, but he entered the daunting labyrinth and for seven more days and nights wandered through it in search of Conscience. On the morning of the seventy-eighth day he approached a wall of dizzying height and perdurable finality and could go no farther. Looking back, he saw not one opening into this compartment of the labyrinth but seven, and he could not find the one by which he had come to his destination. How would he ever return to Kier and the Orpla Mountains? Jaud gazed again upon the final wall, thinking that now, after all the merriment and bloodshed he had known, it would perhaps be sweet to die.

  But a voice called out, “Jaud, you may not die until you have confronted me and sworn your allegiance!”

  Although these words had the ring and tenor of authority, the voice conveying them sounded thin and distant. Jaud, both perplexed and irritated, looked for the invisible crier.

  “Approach me, Jaud! Come toward me!”

  “Where?” Jaud shouted.

  “Here in my prison of glass, child!”

  Jaud did not like being called child, but he approached the towering cliff face and peered into it like one looking for flaws in a jewel. “Who are you?” he asked the thing moving sluggishly within the glass. “What do you want of me?” He pressed his face and hands against the obsidian. The piercing light of three high morning stars revealed that the crier in the rock was none other than a second Jaud.

  But this Jaud was dressed in starched black skirts and a seamless black overtunic embroidered with threads of a darker black, and Jaud was amazed to see that his double had no hands, only stumps that he moved back and forth through the channels he had worn in the glass.

  “I am not your second self,” the creature said. “I am the half you denied. Shobbes has sent you to reclaim that half by bending before me and asking pardon for your crimes.”

  “You are Aisaut, then?”

  “Yes, I am Conscience, Jaud, and you must let me rule.”

  “But you are not the half I have denied, Aisaut. I’ve denied no half at all. I am whole without you and always have been.”

  “Shobbes decrees you outlaw, and unfulfilled. We were born when Gla Taus took shape from the matter of creation, but the lava flows of that anarchic time captured me in their searing floods and swept me into this great prison of obsidian. You—more fortunate than I—awoke in the Orpla Mountains, faulb blossoms dancing red and orange upon the hillsides and a paean of self-celebration coursing in your veins.

  “All that has kept the Kieri from destroying themselves during my imprisonment here and your mad profligacy in the world is the fact that I took a precaution. Before the lava entrapped me, Jaud, I bit off my hands and summoned a pair of hawks to carry them southward into Kier. These brave birds dropped a bleeding finger at every place where people might have a chance to thrive, and my fingers pushed up through the earth in the shapes of great-boled mirrim trees. By every tree a village also grew, and when the villages merged each with each in the Mirrimsagset Alliance, Shobbes at last had a nation over which she might beneficially rule. She called it Kier. So I am cofounder of your country.”

  “Over the Thieves of Jaud neither Shobbes nor Aisaut rules,” Jaud scoffed. “Law has sent me here, but she owns neither my followers nor my heart.”

  “That’s because my absence is felt,” Conscience replied. “The nation of ten villages has grown beyond the ken of Shobbes, and, to your own and the Kieri’s coming sorrow, you have ignored her suzerainty from the beginning.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Release me from the rock. Let me lead you home.”

  Jaud laughed. “Aisaut, you are wrong. I have never felt your absence. And by sacrificing your hands to found the state, you became less complete than I.”

  “Law demands that you release me.”

  “Where is Law, Conscience?” said Jaud, turning about. “I do not see her here. Nor any of her vassals, either.”

  “The Obsidian Wastes are still untamed,” the creature in the wall admitted. “But one day the Kieri will come to subdue them. Already there is a garrison at Ilvaudset Camp. With these soldiers and pioneers will come the Commandments of Law, in full and magnificent panoply.”

  “Why, then, must I let you go?”

  “You must do me homage if you wish to see Kier again.”

  “My mind brims with memories of the Orpla Mountains, which may be enough. Perhaps I no longer desire to return.”

  The thing in the wall shifted uneasily.

  “Further, Conscience, I am far older than you, for the Kieri recall in legends the upheavals that shaped the Obsidian Wastes. Of my birth, however, they have no record of any kind.”

  Aisaut protested, “I am as old as you.”

  “Not so,” Jaud told his despairing image. “But lacking hands and trapped in this wall, you are more helpless than I.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “Await the arrival of those who come to tame the Obsidian Wastes. As in the old days out of Orpla, I will fall upon them as a thief. Any who resist I will murder before your eyes, even as you cry ‘Stay!’ and impotently behold my deeds.”

  “Law prohibits these enormities, Jaud!”

  Jaud glanced showily about. “Where is Law, Conscience?”

  “She will come! Mind you, she will come!”

  But Jaud turned his back on the creature, and Conscience knew that Jaud’s true name was something else. The jongleur-thief had fallen into Shobbes’s hands too late to alter his nature, and Aisaut could gain no hold on his heart or his intellect. The future, at least in the Obsidian Wastes, would unfold exactly as Jaud had prophesied: Conscience, crying out “Stay!” as he struggled to free himself, would witness both the banditry and the bloodshed.

  And wou
ld weep because he could not intervene.

  —A Cultural Sourcebook: Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales of the Kieri

  Retold in Vox by Clefrabbes Douin, Minister-at-Feln, 6209 G

  BOOK ONE

  ONE

  “Why, you callow couchling, wake up! Seth, wake up!”

  Seth roused slowly, recasting his brother Abel’s idiomatic Kieri first into Vox, the established galactic tongue, and then into their native Langlish, which they had avoided speaking together for several Gla Tausian months. But, in Seth’s grogginess, every word drifted athwart his understanding, and sleep held him like a womb.

  Abel’s hand tugged his forelock. “Damn it, Seth, it’s three hours to sunfall! Get up! The Liege Mistress of Kier, and thus of all Gla Taus, wishes to see you!”

  To awake is to be reborn. Seth felt like an infant hoisted into the air by its heels and slapped loudly on the bum. Such a sensation defied memory, for it lay outside Seth’s experience. The little parturitions of ten thousand earlier awakenings, however, had given him a vivid, if numbing, analogue of the shock attendant upon live birth, and a galvanizing dread told him that it was to chaos and uncertainty that Abel was delivering him. Bolting upright, Seth struck aside his elder isohet’s hand.

  “Damnation, Seth!” Abel histrionically shook his wounded hand. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Seth regarded Abel with the same fear and grudging admiration that had marked his relationship with Günter Latimer, the slain Ommundi mercantile representative to Gla Taus. Latimer, although two weeks dead, was preserved genetically in the persons of his “sons.” Seth and Abel were isohets—as clones of disparate age were called both on the Earth of the Ommundi Trade Company and elsewhere throughout the range of Interstel where Vox was spoken—and Günter Latimer, a man of towering commercial ambition, spotty charisma, and a convincing humility in the presence of “quasi-humans,” had been their common biological template, their isosire—if not, in fact, their “father.” In any case, Latimer’s genes lived in the persons of his isohet Doppelgangers stranded in Feln, the winter capital of Kier. Abel had been twenty-eight years the dead man’s junior, and Seth, at twenty-one, was fourteen Earth-standard years younger than Abel.

  “I’m not responsible for what I do in the first full minute of awakening,” Seth managed. “That’s a period of legal insanity.” He was disoriented. His head hurt.

  Abel, portly at thirty-five, continued trying to shake the smart out of his hand. He seemed a blowsy distortion of their isosire, Günter Latimer.

  What a hideous end the old man had come to. A host of angry aisautseb, or patriot-priests, had caught Latimer outside Feln’s Winter Palace, stripped him naked, and hauled him by the heel up the southern face of the Kieri Obelisk in Mirrimsagset Square. Palace security had not intervened, and by the time the turreted copperclads from Pedgor Garrison arrived to disperse the crowd, Latimer’s body was spiculed with glass darts from the rioters’ ceramic blowguns, weapons they wore like necklaces and whose ancient Kieri name meant “demon killer.” But even violated to this degree in death, old Latimer had retained an aura of dignity alien to Abel. Abel could not muster a comparable presence even in parade-dress attire and formal mourning cap—the attire, Seth recalled, that his isohet and he had worn to the long state funeral directed by Master Douin, their host. Jauddeb, like human beings, appreciated ritual.

  “While you lie sleeping,” Abel said, “I plan our future, consulting with Kieri high and intermediate. And when I come to report that my work has secured us an audience with the Liege Mistress, you greet me thus? Damnation, Seth!”

  Seth ignored Abel’s wheedling tone, for he could be an unpredictable, sometimes even treacherous man. In his lumbering way, before Latimer’s death, Abel had proved an effective stand-in negotiator with the Kieri. Seth, on the other hand, had remained by his isosire’s and his isohet’s joint decree in the background, a son to the one and alternately a little brother and a sexual object to the other. Toddler and concubine, Seth resented the suppression of his innate talents and despised himself in the person of Abel, that grotesque caricature of his own face and figure. Simultaneously, Seth feared being cut adrift from the only human being who had ever made, or been forced to make, a long-term commitment to him. Günter Latimer had merely called Seth into existence; Abel had raised him like a natural parent.

  “The question is whether we’ll live as exiles in Kier or as freegoers among the nations of the Ommundi Company on Earth,” said Abel, shifting into Langlish for the first time that winter. “Do you want to spend your whole life on Gla Taus, shuttling back and forth between Feln and Sket with the monkeys of the Kieri court? Or would you like to see Lausanne again and live among real human beings?”

  “The Kieri seem as human as you or I,” Seth said in Langlish.

  “Because they’re born? Polecats and ratlings descend through a uterus. Birth is a negligible criterion for the assignment of humanity, Seth. The Kieri are jauddeb, not human. Just because—”

  “All right. All right.”

  Abel continued his assault: “Take your pick, Seth. Remain on Gla Taus or return with me to Earth.”

  “The latter, of course.”

  “That demands that we cooperate with Lady Turshebsel, the Liege Mistress. Also with her uppity Point Marcher and the well-meaning Master Douin. I’ve bent myself to that end ever since Günter’s murder. We have no ship. We’re at the mercy of the quaz.”

  “Why do you use that shabby epithet?”

  “Quaz?” said Abel. “No one here understands Langlish. No need to worry. And what better term for our isosire’s assassins? The memory sickens me.”

  Several successive nights since the aisautseb attack, Abel had awakened sweating ice water and trembling. Only after vomiting in the stone urinal in the lavalet of Master Douin’s Ilsotsa Era home could Abel return to sleep. And, clutching Seth to him atop their sour-smelling quilts, he slept fitfully. These had been the only times in the past year, not counting perfunctory bouts of “love making,” that Seth had felt even remotely necessary to his isohet. He was grateful to Abel for his vulnerability—which, however, was not a sentiment he could voice aloud.

  Instead, he asked, “Will the Kieri let us go home aboard the Dharmakaya?”

  “That depends on you.”

  “Nothing depends on me, Abel.”

  “This does. We have an audience with Lady Turshebsel in half an hour. If you give a good accounting of yourself, we may yet get home.”

  “A good accounting? What do you want me to do?”

  “Answer her questions.”

  “Is that all?”

  “And the questions of both Porchaddos Pors, her Point Marcher, and Clefrabbes Douin, who is kindly disposed toward you.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “About the mission we’ll undertake to earn our passage home, even if we must earn it aboard a vessel already ours. Be yourself, Seth. That will bring us through.”

  The Dharmakaya, whose Mahayana Buddhist monicker derived from Günter Latimer’s only wife’s fascination with Eastern mysticism, was the ship by which all three men had come to Gla Taus. It was a light-tripper, a vessel of more than five hundred Earth-bound metric tons, and it belonged to the Langlish Division of the Ommundi Trade Company. At this very moment, it hovered in synchronous orbit six hundred kilometers above Feln, the winter capital. Two days after Latimer’s murder, the Liege Mistress, urged on by the increasingly vocal aisautseb, had revoked the formal trade agreement with Ommundi and seized the Dharmakaya for the Kieri state. Its seizure, Master Douin had apologetically told Abel and Seth, was in recompense for the violence done Gla Tausian spirituality by the elder Latimer’s desire to open up to cultivation and animal husbandry the forbidden territories in the evil southern ocean. That Lady Turshebsel herself had championed this project until the aisautseb uprising merely demonstrated the mutability of Kieri politics.

  Seth swung his feet to the floor, knocking to the carpeted flagston
es the reader with which he had fallen asleep. Abel picked it up and examined its casing.

  “What were you reading?”

  “Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales of the Kieri,” Seth replied. “Master Douin gave me the download this morning.”

  “And how did you find these little jauddeb histories?”

  “The story of Aisaut’s release from the Ilvaudsettan labyrinths put me to sleep.”

  Abel laughed. “I can see that it did.”

  “That and the motion of the draperies,” Seth hurried to add. “And the comfort of this couch. And my own fatigue and distraction.”

  “You protest too much. Come on, then. The author of this soporific masterwork awaits us without.”

  *

  Clefrabbes Douin—advisor, diplomat, man of letters—sat on a stone bench in his ancient house’s laulset, or pool court, staring into the roiling, reddish water. Most of the power generated for home and industrial use in Kier was geothermal, and the households of powerful or wealthy citizens were often distinguished by the laulset. The central feature of the pool court was a natural hot spring circled by colorful ceramic tiles and equipped with hand rails and submerged stone steps to facilitate bathing.

  During the long winter just past, Günter Latimer and his isohets had bathed often with the Clefrabbes geffide, which consisted of Master Douin, his two wives, an elderly female parent, and five young children. Seth had come to conclude, on anatomical as well as metaphysical and sociological evidence, that the jauddeb were approximately human. Moreover, he liked Master Douin’s geffide, as a unit and as individuals. How could Abel call them quaz?