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21
When we were docked in Ma
Twice before had I been in Ma
My childhood recollections did not prepare me for the heat. A steamy haze enveloped the streets. The air was wet and heavy. I felt I could almost touch the heat, could seize it and grasp it, could wring it like water from the atmosphere. It was raining heat and I was drenched in it. I was clad in a coarse, heavy gray uniform, the usual wintertime issue aboard a Glinish merchant ship, and this was a sweltering spring morning in Ma
A telephone directory gave me the address of Segvord Helalam, my bondsister’s father. I hired a taxi and went there. Helalam lived just outside the city, in a cool leafy suburb of grand homes and glistening lakes; a high brick wall shielded his house from the view of passersby. I rang at the gate and waited to be sca
“The Lord Ki
I rang again. “Scan this, and judge if he be dead,” I said, holding up to the machine’s eye my royal passport, which I had kept so long concealed. “This is Ki
“Passports may be stolen. Passports may be forged.”
“Open the gate!”
There was no reply. A third time I rang, and this time the unseen butler told me that the police would be summoned unless I departed at once. My taxi driver, parked just across the road, coughed politely. I had not reckoned on any of this. Would I have to go back to town, and take lodgings, and write Segvord Helalam for an appointment, and offer evidence that I still lived?
By good fortune I was spared those bothers. A sumptuous black groundcar drew up, of a kind used generally only by the highest aristocracy, and from it stepped Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port of Ma
“Your bodyguard may relax,” I said. “Are you unable to recognize Ki
“The Lord Ki
“That comes as grievous news to Ki
22
I was conducted to a pretty chamber and told that it was to be mine, and two servant-girls came to me, plucking off my sweaty seaman’s garb; they led me, giggling all the while, to a huge tiled tub, and bathed and perfumed me, and cropped my hair and beard somewhat, and let me pinch and tumble them a bit. They brought me clothes of fine fabric, of a sort I had not worn since my days as royalty, all sheer and white and flowing and cool. And they offered me jewelry, a triple ring set with—I later learned—a sliver of the Stone Chapel’s floor, and also a gleaming pendant, a tree-crystal from the land of Threish, on a leather thong. At length, after several hours of polishing, I was deemed fit to present to the High Justice. Segvord received me in the room he called his study, which actually was a great hall worthy of a septarch’s palace, in which he sat enthroned even as a ruler would. I recall feeling some a
I asked at once after my bondsister Halum.
“She fares well,” he said, “though her soul was darkened by the tidings of your supposed death.”
“Where is she now?”
“On holiday, in the Sumar Gulf, on an island where we have another home.”
I felt a chill. “Has she married?”
“To the regret of all who love her, she has not.”
“Is there anyone, though?”
“No,” Segvord said. “She seems to prefer chastity. Of course, she is very young. When she returns, Ki