If any did, the cowards and scoundrels leaning back in their seats kept their mouths shut. Had Dagon been one of them, instead of the individual at the center of this scrutiny, he would have been just as silent. Probing was not without its benefits, at least from the point of view of the ones doing the probing. It was rarely called for, but he had enjoyed the unfettered access to other unfortunate leaguemen’s minds on several occasions. Nobody would refuse looking into his secret places under the guise of an official inquiry.
Being the one being probed, however, was ghastly. It involved inhaling a liquid distillation of mist, one that inundated your mind in a way that let your fellow leaguemen push inside it and explore your memories at will. It was an ancient process, one that each of them trained for in their youth-both to learn how to penetrate and how to allow penetration. Better the one than the other, Dagon had always thought.
What of Grau? he came very close to saying. Will he be probed as well? He did not want to end the possibility of getting aid from that senior leagueman just yet, though. He tried to return the discussion to reason. “We all understand the facts already,” he said. “Truly, if you just let me answer each of these points, I’ll put your minds at ease. Sire Grau can assist me-”
“I second the chairman’s proposal,” Sire Nathos intoned.
Several others chorused their assent as well.
Dagon craned around to see back into the dim ranks of reclined leaguemen behind him. “But if you just-”
Sire Grau said, “Let it be done.”
Let it be done? “Did you say that, Grau? Let it be-”
“Silence, Dagon!” Sire Revek whisper-shouted. “We will hear from you afterward. The probe will be carried out first. That is our decision. You have no choice but to abide by it.”
The litens-special Ishtat officers who normally stayed pasted to the far walls of the chamber-converged on him. They appeared through the mist-thick air as if they had only ever been a step away. Wearing goggles over their eyes and breathing apparatuses over their noses and mouths, they moved with a clearheaded speed that Dagon could not comprehend. They pressed down on his chest, pinned his arms to the armrests, and wrapped cords around them so quickly Dagon only realized what they were doing after they had completed the task. He tried to pull free. He could only strain against them. He kicked, but his feet, too, were bound. He shouted, but that ended quickly, too. A liten vised his jaw in a painful finger pinch. The figure stared down at him, eyes unseen behind the green glass that hid them.
Dagon got ahold of himself. He ceased struggling. It was useless and just made him look ridiculous. This situation was absurd, but it was serious. Better that he acquiesce with faith in his rightness, with dignity. That would be the shortest course back to his proper standing. “Of course, Sires,” Dagon managed through his nearly immobilized jaw. “My-my mind is yours. I have no fear of… being-”
A liten carefully slipped a tube into his nose. Dagon could not help but thrash. He had thought this part amusing when it was happening to someone else, interesting that so much tubing could be shoved and shoved and shoved up a person’s nose. Where did it all go? he had wondered. Now he knew. And then the liquid flowed.
In brief moments he had before the liquid mist overcame him, Dagon thrashed around, both in his chair and inside his head, fighting the rush of fear he claimed not to feel. He searched for thoughts that he should somehow banish, but as soon as he found one that was embarrassing or questionable, another popped up like a bubble beside it. And then another. He got nowhere. There was so much to hide, the innocuous just as much as the substantial. He wondered how this was happening. He should have arrived here a hero. A man of action. One of decisive…
B eing mind-probed by a chamber full of leaguemen, Dagon learned, was unequal parts horrifying, degrading, embarrassing, and enlightening. How much of each depended on the moment in question. Each moment of the examination blurred into spiraling circles, in which he could get no sense of time’s progression. He put together a sketchy narrative for himself of how the experience had gone afterward. Even this was putting order to a process that had in truth been like being explored by a swarm of scheming bees.
Early on, his brothers had focused their attention on the Queen’s Council meeting that had so disturbed him, the one in which Aliver had appeared in the flesh. They moved forward through his visit to Grau, in which he suggested and then argued for the monarchs’ assassinations. An observer at his own dissection, Dagon knew that the memory as he reexperienced it did not match the memory as he recalled it, but he could find no way to voice this.
His brothers watched the coronation through his eyes, turned over his emotions as the monarchs caressed their present, felt his fear as the Santoth changed everything. They looked through his eyes as he searched his library for some way to understand them, and they watched him write the letter that confessed the crime he had helped perpetrate only hours before. They followed him as he fled from Acacia aboard a pleasure yacht in the dead of night, chasing a messenger bird toward Alecia. The voyage surprised him in some particulars. Had fleeing Acacia really wrung him through with as much melancholia as it seemed to? No, not possible! He had not gotten teary at seeing the harbor lights recede in the wake of his boat. He had not been overcome with sadness for the lives of all those poor fools still rafted together, in shock and mourning and confusion now, instead of sharing the euphoria the day had begun with.
Apparently-although he did not remember it this way-a barrage of random memories had assaulted him throughout the short voyage. He revisited old conversations with Leodan Akaran and Thaddeus Clegg, his treacherous, conflicted chancellor. Dagon had not liked either man, so why did it seem like he wished he could have them with him in his cabin, talking through the recent events while sharing a mist pipe? Why recall the time one of the white minks the concubines kept got loose in his quarters, unnerving him as it darted about with its long tail swishing behind it? What use was remembering the time he sat through some banquet with a sore tooth, struggling to hide his discomfort from those around him? What a strange, useless thing to recall. And yet there it was, as vivid in its own way as some of the most crucial moments of his tenure in Acacia.
They lingered with him through the dream he had of the time Corinn arrived in his offices-so young then, beautiful in the newly ripened manner of youth. He had thought cruelly about the work he would have liked to put her mouth to when she caught him off guard. He had to retrace the half-heard words she had spoken, taking a moment to comprehend the audacity of the proposal she was making. She spoke her way into an empire right then and bound Hanish Mein’s hands with a few well-conceived words. Not her lover’s pawn after all, it turned out.
And that took him to a view of Hanish’s face in profile as he stared at one of the palace’s golden monkeys. It was an image Dagon saw with such detail it might have been a painting hung on the wall before him. He had hated the man’s perfect features, his lover’s eyes, and the arrogant grace with which he occupied his body. But what he remembered was wondering if Hanish had any suspicion that the league had often used the monkeys as thieves and messengers. They were clever, easily trained, and seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction from working covertly. Of course Hanish hadn’t known. Nobody on Acacia ever had. Dagon would miss those monkeys. Realizing this made him shake his head at his own mawkishness. He needed the steadying influence of his brothers.
Irrelevant, he thought, and yet some of his brothers seemed fascinated by these things and by the fact that he buried all such thoughts deep when he met with his fellow leaguemen in Alecia. They had all been agitated, both by what had happened during the coronation and by the call for evacuation that Dagon arrived with. He had acted recklessly. There would be a reckoning about it. An investigation. Consequences. Despite the grumbling, they echoed Dagon’s orders to their own staff.