“He’s currently financing the excavations in Thisthissima, right down the coast from Bornigrayal. The Bornigrayan archaeologists who made the Sea-Lord discovery are connected with that work too. Thisthissima, you know, is built right on top of a major Great World city, and some very fruitful digging has been going on the past couple of years. So the Bornigrayal people came to Til-Menimat and said, ‘Listen, your grace, we’re on to something very big over across the Eastern Ocean, but we need serious funding in order to go ahead with it, and therefore—’ ”
Nortekku began to feel just a little dazed. He understood the hunger to unearth the buried remnants of the world’s forgotten epochs, here in these constantly burgeoning years of the New Springtime. But only since becoming involved with Thalarne had he come to understand how fierce that hunger was. There was something ugly about it. Highborns from every city seemed to be competing frenziedly with one another in the race to uncover the secrets of all those lost yesterdays. Til-Menimat was a charming, cultured man, but in his lust to own pieces of the Great World he seemed to have greedy tentacles outstretched everywhere.
He walked to the window. The morning sun was high, now, painting a fiery orange track across the snowy fields below.
“So this is just an artifact-hunting operation, then?” he asked.
“Not just an artifact-hunting operation. That part of it won’t be any concern of yours or mine. But we’ll be there to do scientific work. Studying the Sea-Lords.”
“While these other archaeologists do the treasure hunting. These Bornigrayal people.”
“Yes,” she said. “A man and a woman, Kanibond Graysz and his mate Siglondan. I’ve had a little correspondence with them, and I met them for the first time the other day, but I don’t really know much about them. It seems that they were in Sempinore consulting the archives there when some local Hjjks came to them and said that they had made a very interesting discovery over on the other side of the Inland Sea. So Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan went over with them to have a look, and there were the Sea-Lords. They hurried back to Bornigrayal, and then down to Thisthissima when they heard that Prince Til-Menimat happened to be back east touring the Thisthissima excavations just then. And that was when they told him about the discovery and got him to put up the money for this new expedition.”
Nortekku nodded distantly. One aspect of the story had begun to bother him as this part of her story unfolded. “But you were right on the verge of setting out on our cocoon expedition, which Til-Menimat was also underwriting. Why would he have wanted to pull you off that and send you flying out to Bornigrayal?”
“He didn’t,” Thalarne said. All resonance had suddenly fled from her tone, and her voice sounded hollow and dead. “It was Hamiruld who got me mixed up in this.”
“Hamiruld?” he said, in a voice as suddenly leaden as hers.
So he was in this too. The revelation came with the force of a blow. Every one of these highborns seemed linked to each of the rest in their worldwide dealings. They were all over the place. You came upon one where you didn’t expect him and then you saw that there was another of his kind standing right next to him. For all he knew, Prince Samnibolon was part of the group too. And had been quietly smiling within while Nortekku went on and on, the other day at the Embassy, about Thalarne’s having come to Bornigrayal on “family business.”
Speaking a little too quickly, Thalarne said, “Prince Til-Menimat invited him into the syndicate, you see. They’ve gone into a lot of these things together. But Hamiruld pointed out that an out-and-out artifact-collecting expedition would raise some ethical problems, considering that what was involved was a bunch of actual living Sea-Lords. I mean, it’s one thing to dig up artifacts on an uninhabited site a million years old, and another thing entirely to take them from living people. Some archaeologist whose interests were purely scientific ought to go along also, Hamiruld said, for the sake of keeping an eye on the two Bornigrayans and make sure that everything was carried out in an appropriate way.”
“Someone like you,” Nortekku said.
“Someone like me, yes.”
“Even though the artifacts are going to get taken anyway, whether you’re keeping an eye on things or not?”
She gave him a pained look. “Don’t press me too hard on this, Nortekku. If I want to be part of the expedition at all, I can’t make myself too much of an obstacle. I know there are problems here. I’ll do whatever I can.”
Everything was falling into place now for him. Hamiruld not only had known all along about her running off that way to Bornigrayal, he had engineered her leaving town himself. Unwilling, despite his pretense of indifference, to have Thalarne and Nortekku spend cozy weeks or even months digging things up together out by the Hallimalla, Hamiruld had maneuvered her into a place on this Sea-Lord expedition. Til-Menimat would surely have seen the importance of the discovery, and it might not have been hard to convince him that the cocoon venture could always wait for some other time, that the Sea-Lord journey must come first, and that Thalarne’s presence on it was necessary to provide scientific cover for the real purposes of the project. And then, after having shipped Thalame safely off to the other side of the world, presumably far beyond Nortekku’s reach, Hamiruld would prevent Nortekku from finding out where she was by coolly pretending to him that he had no information whatever about where she had gone.
Nortekku could understand all that easily enough. Hamiruld must have been more annoyed by Thalarne’s affair with him than he wanted to admit. Any man, even one who had countenanced the sort of things in his marriage that Hamiruld evidently had, might be expected to react in that way to an affair that gave the appearance of going well beyond the previously defined bounds of their arrangement.
Well, he had thwarted Hamiruld’s scheme—but only because Hamiruld had been careless enough to tell Khardakhor that Thalame had gone to Bornigrayal, never dreaming that Khardakhor would share the news with the son of his worst enemy. What still disturbed him, though, was the agitation Thalame had displayed when she discovered that Hamiruld had blatantly altered the message she had given him about going to Bornigrayal, and the hesitation she had shown in revealing to him that Hamiruld was actually a key player in this Sea-Lord enterprise.
In his quiet way Hamiruld held plenty of power over her, he saw. On some level she must still be uneasy about his presence as a third partner in her marriage—that the marriage itself still had more of a hold on her than she would like him to think, that she seemed eager to gloss swiftly over anything that might demonstrate to him that Hamiruld still played a significant role in her life. It was clear now that Hamiruld intended to fight to keep his marriage intact; what was not so clear, Nortekku thought, was what Thalarne’s own position on the future of that marriage might be.
“You’re very quiet,” Thalame said, in something more like her normal tone of voice.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“The risks of the trip? The part about collecting artifacts? The fact that Hamiruld is involved?”
“All of it.”
“Oh, Nortekku—”
They stood facing each other across the room for a moment. He had no idea what to say. Neither, it seemed, did she. But only for a moment. The same bright glow came into her eyes that he had seen at their first meeting, back in Yissou, what felt like eons ago. She stretched her arms toward him.
“Come here,” she said.
The ship was much smaller than Nortekku had expected—a tubby, wide-bodied vessel, oddly square-looking, fashioned from thick planks of some kind of blackish wood, that sat low in the water along a weather-beaten pier at the harbor of Bornigrayal. It was hard to believe that a clumsy little craft like that, which seemed scarcely big enough to pass as a riverboat, would be able to carry them all the way across the immensities of the Eastern Ocean in anything less than a lifetime and a half.