The white hair of this remarkable head was brushed straight back as if raked, receding from a broad forehead. There were no eyebrows, but the pallid eyes were surrounded by thick dark lashes—so thick that some people suspected Madi blood somewhere. The eyes were further bolstered by grey pillows or bags below them; these pillows, having a certain goitrous quality, acted as embankments behind which the eyes watched the world. The lips, though ample, were almost as pale as the eyes, and the flesh of the face almost as pale as the lips. A sebacious sheen covered forehead and cheeks—sometimes the busy hands went up to wipe at the film—so that the face gleamed as if it had recently been recovered from the sea.
“Come near, Luterin,” said the face now. The voice was deep and somewhat slow, as if the chin was reluctant to disturb the mound of goitre lying below it.
“I am glad you are back, Father,” said Luterin, advancing. “Had you good hunting?”
“Well enough. You are so metamorphosed that I scarcely recognised you.”
“Those fortunate enough to survive the plague take on compact shape for the Weyr-Winter, Father. I assure you I feel excellently fit.”
He took his father’s neat hand.
Ebstok Esikananzi said, “We may assume that phagors feel themselves to be fit, yet they are proven carriers of the plague.”
“I have recovered from the plague. I cannot carry it.”
“We certainly hope you can’t, dear,” said his mother.
As he turned to her, his father said sternly, “Luterin, I wish you to retire to the hall and await me. I shall be there presently. We have some legal matters to discuss.”
“Is there something the matter?”
Luterin took the full force of his father’s stare. He bowed his head and retired.
Once in the hall, he paced about, heedless of the tongue of his bell. What had made his father so cold he could not guess. True, that august figure had always been distant even when present, but that had been merely one of his qualities, as much taken for granted as the hidden goitre.
He summoned a slave and sent him to fetch Toress Lahl from her quarters.
She came questioningly. As she approached, he thought how appealing her metamorphosed shape was. And the frost prints on her face had healed.
“Why have you been so long away? Where have you been?” There was a hint of reproach, although she smiled and took his hand. As he kissed her, he said, “I’m entitled to vanish on the hunt. It’s in the family blood. Now listen, I am anxious for you. My father’s back and evidently displeased. This may be something that concerns you, since my mother and Insil have been talking to him.” “What a pity you were not here to welcome him, Luterin.” “That can’t be helped,” he said dismissively. “Listen, I want to give you something.”
He led into an alcove off the hall, where a wooden cupboard stood. With a key taken from his pocket, he unlocked the cupboard. Within hung dozens of heavy iron keys, each labelled. He ran a finger along the rows, frowning.
“Your father has a mania for locking things,” she said, half laughing. “Don’t be silly. He is the Keeper. This place has to be fortress as well as home.”
He found what he wanted and picked out a rusted key almost a hand’s span long.
“Nobody will miss this,” he said, locking up the cupboard. “Take it. Hide it. It is the key to that chapel built by your countryman, the king-saint. You remember, in the woods? There may be a little trouble—I can’t tell what. Perhaps about pauk. I don’t want you harmed. If anything happens to me, you will be in danger of arrest at the least. Go and hide in the chapel. Take a slave with you—they’re all longing to escape. Choose a woman who knows Kharnabhar, preferably a peasant.” She slipped the key into the pocket of her new clothes. “What can happen to you?” She clutched his hand. “Nothing, probably, but—I just feel an apprehension…” He heard a door opening. Hounds came scurrying, nails clicking on the tiles. He pushed Toress Lahl into the shadows behind the cupboard, and stepped forth into the hall. His father was emerging. Behind him came half a dozen of the conspiratorial men, bells clanking.
“We’ll speak together,” said Lobanster, lifting one finger. He led into a small wooden room on the ground floor. Luterin followed, and the conspiratorial men moved in behind them. The last one in locked the door on the inside. The biogas hissed when turned up.
This room had a wooden bench and table and little else in the way of furniture. People had been interrogated here. There was also a wooden door fortified with iron straps, which was kept locked. It was a private way down into the vaults, where the well was whose waters never froze. Legend had it that precious brood animals had been preserved down there in the coldest centuries.
“Whatever we discuss should be said privately, Father,” Luterin said.
“I don’t even know who these other gentlemen are, though they make free in our house. They are not your huntsmen.”
“They are returned from Bribahr,” said Lobanster, speaking the words as if they gave him a cold pleasure. “Eminent men need bodyguards in these times. You are too young to understand how plague can cause the dissolution of the state. It breaks up first small communities and then large. The fear of it disintegrates nations.”
The conspiratorial men all looked very serious. In the limited space, it was impossible to stand away from them. Only Lobanster was separate, poised without movement behind the table, on the surface of which he played his fingers.
“Father, it is an insult that we should have to converse before strangers. I resent it. But I say to you— and to them, if they are capable of hearing—that although there may be truth in what you say, there is a greater truth you neglect. There are other ways of disintegrating nations than by plague. The harsh measures being brought against pauk—the common people, the Church—the cruelty behind those measures—will eventually bring greater destruction than the Fat Death—”
“Cease, boy!” His father’s hands went to the region of his throat. “Cruelty is also part of nature. Where is mercy, except with men? Men invented mercy, but cruelty was here before them, in nature. Nature is a press. Year by year, it squeezes us tighter. We cannot fight it but by bringing to bear cruelty of our own. The plague is nature’s latest cruelty, and must be fought with its own weapons.”
Luterin could not speak. He could not find, under that chill, pale gaze, words to explain that while there might be a casual cruelty in circumstances, to formulate cruelty into a moral principle was a perversion of nature. To hear such pronouncements from his father turned him sick. He could only say, “You have swallowed utterly the words of the Oligarch.”
One of the conspiratorial men spoke in a loud, rough voice. “That is everyone’s duty.”
The sound of this stranger’s voice, the claustrophobia of the room, the tension, his father’s coldness, all mounted to Luterin’s brain. As if from afar, he heard himself shouting, “I hate the Oligarch! The Oligarch is a monster. He murdered Asperamanka’s army. I’m here as a fugitive instead of a hero. Now he will murder the Church. Father, fight this evil before you are yourself devoured by it.”
This he said and more, in a kind of seizure. He was scarcely aware of their bringing him from the room and helping him outside. He felt the bite of the chill wind. There was snow in his face. He was pushed through a courtyard where the biogas inspection pit was, and into a harness room.