One gray morning, while an easy rain was dropping upon the sea, a small ship hailed them and a wounded man was brought aboard. The patrol had tried to stop a boat smuggling the false judges of the Kaiel across to Mnank. Explosions had thrown pellets at them and one of the men had taken a lead ball into his stomach. Humility tended the man that she might hear him speak of this wonder. The rifle! How would these men of the sea respond to this awesome Kaiel magic?

“We couldna come close,” said the sailor in his pain. The wound was days old, but movement to the larger ship had opened the hole and his suffering was fresh.

“At what distance were you taken?” asked Krak.

“Five hundred man-lengths.”

Krak was surprised and asked for more details to confirm the estimate. Finally he shrugged. “Are you frightened?” he asked sarcastically of a young Mnankrei who seemed most awed by this report of metal flung through the air like seed popping from the ripened pod of a hurler.

“The game has changed,” came the reply, revealing neither fear nor foolhardiness.

“The sand is stirred but the beach remains,” quoted Krak, calling upon a common Mnankrei proverb. “Let me instruct you. In the blood of this poor man’s belly you see demonstrated a mastery of metal — a tinkerer’s skill, worthy of the og’Sieth perhaps. But I ask you, why do the priests rule and not the og’Sieth? God gave the priestly clan no special privilege. Is it that we rule because priestly skills have proven their seniority? Knowledge of the sacred and the profane dominates all else. Lo! This lead ball flies across 500 man-lengths to attack us. Shall we tremble as we contemplate the vastness of 500 man-lengths? I tell you that the sacred skill of the Mnankrei can extend a Black Hand across 500 thousand man-lengths and clean a city bare. To what avail is a lead ball against the forces we command? Will not the Kaiel die even before they have seen as specks those they presume to judge? Will not they die while thinking they are safe because they are beyond the range of flying stones!” He laughed. “The mite, on guard against the carnivorous flea, flies into the maw of the maelot.”

Krak dismissed the litter bearers, indicating that they should carry the wounded man below decks. He was happy with some secret knowledge. Humility, her assassin’s mind alert to allusions of death, was left to wonder at a perishing over which riflemen could not prevail.

The ship rode out a storm with furled sails. Continuous heavy winds brought them into Soebo harbor, a long extension of the river. The sea’s violence still grumbled as a cold drizzle but Humility braved the wetness to catch her first sight of the waterfront.

Ancient stone structures of the uniquely massive Mnankrei design reached into the bay, crusted at the waterline, some of them built on the ruins of older structures. Ships cluttered the wharves and canals. Flotsam floated and bobbed on the water, carrying with it the slight smell of sewage. Endlessly the city rose over the hills of the river valley.

Humility had never imagined that she would be so happy to see land again. One of the young Mnankrei, sensing her mood, pulled out a small flute and began to play to her from his seat on the wet ropes. She turned and listened. She picked up the melody. For a while she hummed along, then began to sing in her high voice of a city that waited for sailors to return from the sea. Soon she had an audience.

A tall Geiniera, stooped from the low ceilings of the ship, brought out a flask of whisky, brewed from the somber barley of Mnank, and passed it around to the beardless Mnankrei he had been training in the lore of the sea. They drank. They clapped. The captain stepped from the warmth of the High Room onto the cold of the upper deck to watch. Soon she was dancing for these men who were her friends, Liethe in every movement and flirting gesture, thriving on their attention.

She had arrived at the greatest city on all of Geta, a city of rumor and fame and debauchery, that nurtured a Liethe settlement unequaled in size except for Hivehome on the islands of the Drowned Hope. This was civilization and she could dance to its glory on the deck of one of its magnificent vessels. Kaiel-hontokae was but a desert village grim in its determination, a waystation in her past. Kaiel-hontokae had only Hoemei, her lover, whom she still remembered a little, a man so deliciously arrogant that he was foretelling the imminent fall of this great city which would crumble, he said, on the day he chose to touch it.

She laughed. Did all lovers seem so foolish once they had been abandoned?

44

The Society will use all of its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the people until at last their patience is exhausted and they are driven to a general uprising.

TEENAE TOOK UPON herself the duties of working in the forward organization, duties requiring her to slip in and out of Sorrow in her mediations with the people of the Gentle Heresy. Her best friend came to be an old weaver of the o’Maie who had grown enamored of scholarship when he was crippled as a boy and could not work the looms or dye. He was poor, always in the same ragged trousers and sweat-soaked leather jerkin, always at home in his insect-ridden attic room, always smiling with his rotten teeth. His grasp of Getan history was great and he helped her translate portions of The Forge of War which she brought with her.

Teenae had become fascinated by a fanatic she found in that vile history who was plagued by the Riethe madness. His grandiose visions of an impending conquest of Riethe by the Worker clan were conjured in color but proved, with the passage of time, to be delusional. By Kaiel measure his predictions were unimpressive. On the other hand, his ability to savage a wounded nation was awesome. The name was Lenin and he rode in a great steam-powered engine to take over the Russian socialist uprising so that he might destroy the embryonic Russian socialism with systematic Nechayevian terror to provide fertilizer for his own cardboard future.

The destruction of the very world he hoped to build began with the shooting of the demonstrators who were marching on the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in support of the first elected socialist Constituent Assembly. It was winter of the Riethe year 1918, full of cold snows. In the rage of Lenin’s own words, brought to Teenae by God across the depths of His Unimaginable Sky, she felt that mean man’s deathly fear of all power other than his own. She pitied him the loneliness it implied. To wield total power requires the destruction, everywhere, of all free wills. To need total power is to be totally insecure.

By the end of 1918 Lenin was calling for mass exterminations on a daily basis. “You must mobilize all forces, establish a troika of dictators, introduce immediately mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment…” He never watched an execution squad at work and never saw the effects of the terror he had created. Thus to Teenae he was a coward. He killed more people than he could eat. Thus he was a fool.

In the isolation of his Kremlin office the fury of his decrees escalated. Chekist leaders and political commissars vied with one another in rounding up hostages and shooting them without trial. Fellow socialists were murdered. The peasants who had fought with Lenin against the hated landlord clan were themselves exterminated when they discovered, too late, that the land had passed, not from the landlords to them, but to the state. In Tambov province there was a massacre of 200,000 peasants…