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

continent, usually to Feht Evashsted, a coastal area near the great southern ocean. For many, particularly the aged, this was a virtual death sentence. That, too, was why the passing of each Liege Mistress was customarily made public three full days after its occurrence, when an official of the court could verify, with little fear of either error or deception, all the first-blood registrations of the regal lady’s death day. After that, the aisautseb selected her successor from among the available candidates by a lottery that Seth did not wholly understand. Latimer had said that it involved the immersion of the bleeding girls in either the pool of the Shobbes Geyser (if the Liege Mistress had died in Feln) or in the sulfur baths of Shobbes in the forbidden moraine territories west of the Summer Capital (if the Liege Mistress had died in Sket). Purity and endurance were important criteria, and the famous pinkish cast of the waters of Kier was said to derive not from ferric oxides but from the pure, enduring tincture of the royal menses.
    Although Seth had often heard Abel describe the Liege Mistress as an unprepossessing woman with a squat body and a full-moon face, he now began conjuring images of a dragoness or Gorgon—only to step into her laulset and find Abel vindicated.
    Lady Turshebsel stood beside a small but exquisitely proportioned bathing pool shaped like the central cluster of a meadowland flower; each of its nine semicircular petals was an immersion nook. The tiles here were a dazzling burgundy, and to keep from slipping on them, the Liege Mistress wore a pair of thongs with adhesive soles and carried a rubber-tipped metal staff. In a row of tilework chairs growing out of the floor behind her sat Lady Turshebsel’s advisors, attendants, and sycophants: the members of her palace geffide. Not counting the Kieri over whom she ruled, Seth reflected, they were all the family the Liege Mistress would ever have. As an avatar of Shobbes, she was betrothed forever to the state, virgin to her death day.
    Beyond that, old Latimer had said, she was an enlightened woman who quite early in her reign had renounced all but the most trivial ritual authority of the aisautseb. She had forced them out of the palace by command, securing their obedience because they themselves had chosen her and could disobey her only by openly conceding their own fallibility. Until two weeks ago, Lady Turshebsel had been able to survive—in fact, to prosper—without the aisautseb, largely because Gla Taus had remained for so long outside the range of Interstel’s benign meddlesomeness, and because the patriot-priests of Kier had found no cause to dispute the wisdom of her rule. Then, after sending an emissary to the court in Sket, Interstel had given the Ommundi Trade Company permission to seek mercantile rights on the planet, and the Latimers had come to Gla Taus to negotiate these rights with the Lady.
    One of those sitting in a tilework chair, Seth noticed, was a priest. Engulfed in robes, his legs drawn up beneath him on the ceramic seat, his unblinking eyes like silver nail heads, he sat in a chair reserved for a prominent advisor. Two weeks ago, that chair had belonged to another, but to appease the aisautseb after their uprising, Lady Turshebsel had not only declared the Dharmakaya Kieri property but had reestablished a patriot-priest advisorship. This man was the first to hold that position in thirty-seven Gla Tausian years.
    “Welcome, Master Seth,” Lady Turshebsel said from across the laulset. “Please join me in the waters.”
    A woman advanced from another doorway, took the Liege Mistress’s staff, and removed her starched skirts and jacket. Then, wearing only her awkward-looking thongs, Lady Turshebsel descended into the pool. Her squat, naked body, like that of other Kieri, was lightly haired over its entire surface (excepting only the face), the hair deepening in color rather than in thickness at the pubic region: an