“Good. Good. We’ll talk again tomorrow, perhaps, Gardinak Cheysz. I want to hear all this a second time, by daylight, to see if it seems any more real to me then.” He grimaced and threw his hands high. “Make peace with the hjjks! Invite them to Dawinno so that they can teach their philosophy! Can you believe it?” He reached under his sash, pulled out a pouch filled with exchange-units of the City of Dawinno, and tossed it to Gardinak Cheysz. The spy caught it deftly and saluted. His drooping mouth jerked upward in what might have been an attempt at a smile, and he went from the room.
The same night, in a tavern in another part of the city. Esperasagiot, Dumanka, and a few other members of the crew of the caravan that brought Thu-Kimnibol to Yissou have gotten together with some of the newcomers. The hour is late. The wine has been going down freely. They are all old friends. The men of Thu-Kimnibol’s crew had often served in the regular merchant caravans that pass between the two cities. Among those who came in today was Esperasagiot’s brother, Thihaliminion, nearly as good a hand with xlendis as Esperasagiot himself. Thihaliminion had been wagon-master to the caravan that has just arrived.
There are some local folk in the party, too — a harness-maker named Gheppilin, and Zechtior Lukin, a meat-cutter, and Lisspar Moen, a woman whose trade is the making of fine porcelain dishes. Friends of Dumanka’s, they are. New friends.
Thihaliminion has been speaking for some time of the sudden rash of unusual events in the City of Dawinno: the murders, the disappearance and subsequent madness of the chieftain’s daughter, the emergence of the new cult of Kundalimon. Laughing into his wine, he says, “It’s like the end of the world. Everything is going strange at once.” He shakes his helmeted head. “But why am I laughing? It’s no laughing matter!”
“Ah, but it is,” says Dumanka. “When all else has gone foul, laughter still remains. When the gods send us disaster, what else can we do but laugh? Weeping won’t heal anything. Laughter at least buries our sorrows in merriment.”
“You were ever a mocker, Dumanka,” Thihaliminion tells the quartermaster. “You take nothing seriously.”
“On the contrary, brother,” Esperasagiot says. “Dumanka is one of the most serious men I know, behind that bawdy grin of his.”
“Then let him be serious, if he will. What’s happening in Dawinno is serious stuff, as you’ll find out when you get back there. It’s easy enough to laugh when you’re hundreds of leagues away.”
“Brother, he meant no offense! It’s only his way, don’t you see? He was only making sport with words.”
“No,” Dumanka says. “That wasn’t what I was doing.”
“No?” Esperasagiot says, frowning.
“I was being as serious as I know how to be, my friend. If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll explain myself.”
“We’re all wasting our breath with this talk,” Thihaliminion says, in something like a growl. “We could be drinking instead of talking.”
“No. Give me a moment. I think this is no waste of breath at all,” Dumanka says, and the others look at him, for they have never heard the quartermaster speak so solemnly before. “I said we should laugh when the gods send us misery, rather than weep, and I think I’m right about that. Or if not to laugh, then to shrug; for what good is it to moan and grumble over the will of the gods? These people here—”
“Enough, Dumanka,” Thihaliminion says, a little too sharply.
“One or two more words, I beg you. These three here, Zechtior Lukin, Lisspar Moen, Gheppilin — do you know them? No, of course not. But I do. And there’s wisdom in them, let me tell you. They’ve plenty to teach us all on the subject of bowing to the will of the gods. Have you ever considered, good Thihaliminion, why it was that the sapphire-eyes took it so easily, when the gods threw death-stars down to destroy their world? Everyone knows the sapphire-eyes could have hurled the death-stars back, if they’d cared to, but—”
“Nakhaba! What can the sapphire-eyes possibly have to do with the lunacy that’s running rampant in our city? Will you tell me that, Dumanka?”
“Pass the wine, and I’ll explain. And then you may want to listen to Zechtior Lukin, and even to read a little book that he’s written, eh, Thihaliminion? Because there may be comfort in it for you, if you’re as troubled by the difficulties in Dawinno as you seem to be.” Dumanka nods toward the meat-cutter, a short thick-bodied man with a look of great strength and force about him. “The thing that Zechtior Lukin has taught me in our conversations,” he says, “is the same thing that I’ve practiced all my life without having a name to put to it, which is that I acknowledge the absolute greatness of the gods and the role they play in our fates. They decide everything, and we must obey cheerfully, because the only other choices we have are to obey sadly, or to obey angrily, and those simply get us to the same place, but not as merrily. So we have to accept whatever comes, be it death-stars or hjjks, be it strange new religions or bloodshed in the streets, be it anything at all. What Zechtior Lukin and his Acknowledgers believe, good friend — and these two here are Acknowledgers too, Lisspar Moen and Gheppilin, and so am I, so have I always been, though I’ve only just discovered it — is a creed that brings peace to the soul and calmness to the mind, and has made me a better man, Thihaliminion, no doubt of it, absolutely a better man. And when I return to Dawinno, let me tell you, I’ll will be bringing Zechtior Lukin’s little book with me, and spreading the truth it contains to everyone who’ll listen.”
“Just what we need,” Thihaliminion says, staring broodingly into his wine-cup. “One more new religion.”
Thu-Kimnibol knocked and entered. Salaman, half dozing over a nearly empty bottle of wine, came instantly awake.
“You wanted to see me, cousin?”
“I did. You’ve had a chance to catch up on the news from your city, have you?” Salaman asked. “Taniane’s daughter going mad? And Taniane herself so upset over it that she couldn’t be bothered to govern her city for a time?”
Thu-Kimnibol’s fur flared, his eyes grew bright. Tightly he said, “Yes. So I’ve heard.”
“And have you heard also of the new hjjk-loving religion which has sprung up down there? It was the murder of the envoy Kundalimon that got it going, I’m told. My agents tell me that they’re speaking of him in Dawinno as a holy prophet, who died for love of the People.”
“Your agents are very efficient, cousin.”
“They’re paid to be. What they inform me is that the Kundalimon-worshipers are in favor of signing the Queen’s treaty. Is it true that they want to invite hjjk missionaries to Dawinno to teach them the mysteries of hjjk wisdom?”
“Cousin, why are you asking me these questions?”
Crisply Salaman said, “Because you promised me that your people would fight, when the time comes. Instead this is what they do. This foolishness. This idiocy.”
“Ah,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “So that’s it.”
“It is idiocy, cousin.”
“But useful idiocy, I think.”
The king looked up, wonderstruck. “Useful?”
Thu-Kimnibol smiled. “Of course. The peace faction’s playing right into our hands. They’re carrying things to the extreme that will destroy them. Can you imagine what it would be like, cousin, with Dawinno full of hjjk preachers, clicking and hissing on every streetcorner, and everyone down there walking around with talk of Nest-bond and Queen-love and such on his lips, and the hjjks marching up and down the coast in droves, free as you please, going to visit their new colony in the south?”
“A nightmare,” Salaman said.
“A nightmare indeed. But one that can be put to good use, provided there are still a few in Dawinno who haven’t yet lost their minds, and I think there are.” Thu-Kimnibol leaned close. “What I need to do is make them see the picture I’ve just sketched for you. Show them how the hjjks are trying to subvert us from within. Don’t you realize, I’ll say, that the new religion’s designed to deliver us all into the clutches of the bugs? The Queen’s love is a worse thing than the Queen’s hatred, I’ll tell them. At least we know where we stand with hatred. And in fact Queen-love and Queen-hate are the same thing wearing different masks. Friends, I’ll say, this is a deadly threat. Accepting the treaty means opening our arms to our enemies. Do you want hjjks overrunning Dawinno the way they did in Vengiboneeza? And so on and so forth, until this new cult is driven underground, or put out of business altogether.”