A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

stepping stones to damnation. In the mythical prehistoric past of Gla Taus, according to accepted aisautseb lore, God had deserted the Evashsteddan, and anyone who left Kier to explore the southern ocean and its smoldering archipelagoes thereby forfeited his soul.
    This belief, Günter Latimer had told his isohets, appeared to stem from a strange complex of causes: an ancient war or natural upheaval that had displaced early Gla Tausian peoples towards the north, the continuing volcanism in the Evashsteddan, the eerie variety of sea- and island-going life forms in the south, and the inability of present-day Kieri to tolerate temperatures much above 17°C. This last was one crucial respect in which jauddeb differed fundamentally from human beings; and when Lady Turshebsel had made known that she and Günter Latimer had concluded a long-in-the-formulation agreement whereby Ommundi representatives would exploit the untapped resources of the Evashsteddan, the patriot-priests had called upon believers to make their outrage known. Few in Kier were not believers, and the principal mistake of the Liege Mistress’s advisors—Porchaddos Pors and Clefrabbes Douin among them—lay in their failing to foresee the likely reaction of the Kieri to such a public announcement. The aisautseb, sluggishly complacent through nearly four decades of Lady Turshebsel’s rule, had leaped awake, and the citizenry had leaped after.
    For these reasons, then, Günter Latimer had died.
    He was a demon, and his spawn were demons, and religious patriotism was the order of the day.
    Seth watched a shopkeeper finger his dairauddes.
    How disturbing that the people of Kier regarded Abel and him as something far worse than quaz, as soulless beings who sullied the holiness of their country. Although Seth half expected Douin to rebuke this ugly jauddeb, as he had done the woman at the scales, Douin fixed his eyes on the Winter Palace and led Abel and Seth upward from the square as if escorting them to a gallows.

TWO
    At the palace’s outer gate a pair of sentries from Pedgor Garrison halted the three men and took their names, even though Clefrabbes Douin was far from a nonentity in Feln, even though Abel and Seth were recognizable as living if imperfect mirrors of the dead Latimer.
    Seth stared past the guards.
    Beyond the gateway: a pool outlined by tiles and pinched about its circumference with immersion nooks. In these nooks, pilgrims could give themselves to the waters of Shobbes. Today, however, the inner court was empty, and the tiled façade of the palace reflected the face of the pool as the pool reflected that of the palace.
    “You must wait for Shobbes to admit you,” said one of the guards. He and his companion wore leather pants and vests. Carrying mech-rifles, they radiated a hostility that seemed to encompass even Douin.
    “It was like this this morning, too,” Abel told Seth. “Before the aisautseb uprising, you could walk in whenever you wished, so long as you had an invitation. But now, as in the old days, you must wait for the blessing of Shobbes.”
    The geyser in the pool, Seth knew, had a regular interval, but he had forgotten what it was. How long would they have to stand in the shadow of the stone-and-ceramic palace before certification came? The guards blocking their way and the Kieri in the teeming square below them made Seth equally nervous. He was caught, with his isohet, between Scylla and Charybdis.
    At last Shobbes Geyser blew. The eruption was presaged by a churning in the pool and then an audible bubbling—whereupon the surface seemed to peel back and a pillar of reddish water shot upward, fanning out like a peacock’s tail as it climbed. Although the continuous plashing of the geyser made talk impossible, its eruption lasted scarcely a minute and soon a guard was able to say:
    “Now you may pass.”
    Seth was startled by the warmth of the drops that had misted down on him. The eruption had been too well foretokened to