'I live to obey,' said Yen Olass.
'You do have a choice, you know,' said the Ondrask.
A choice? What on earth was he trying to tell her? Yen Olass saw him start to finger her laundry. He came upon one of the pads which she used to…
'Get out!' screamed Yen Olass.
She had been through too much that day. To have this stinking animal exploring the intimacies of her laundry was more than she could bear.
In the face of her anger, the Ondrask retreated, leaving her room without another word.
It had been a disastrous day. She had failed Lord Alagrace. The debacle in the Enskandalon Square might well cause the Silent One of the Sisterhood to ask questions about her competence. She seemed to have made an enemy in Chonjara. And now, by losing control for just a moment, she had grieviously offended the high priest of the horse cult.
When she had been at the Ondrask's yashram, Yen Olass had prided herself on her cultivation of a new and valuable political contact, but now all her efforts had gone to waste. She knew the enormous size and tenderness of the typical male ego; she could only guess at what the Ondrask might do now. Maybe he might try to buy her just for the pleasure of subjecting her to his discipline.
Yen Olass got the brazier going at last. Then, in defiance of the Rule, she went to bed, and stayed there for the rest of the day. Her cat Lefrey soon joined her; during the winter weather, he was never away from her room for long. As a special treat, she allowed him to sleep in the bed rather than on it; he was her only friend, and she treasured him.
CHAPTER FIVE
A month after the duel, Lefrey disappeared.
Yen Olass immediately suspected what had happened, and challenged Nuana Nanalako accordingly. She readily admitted complicity.
'We've got him,' said Nuana, 'and you won't get him back till you bring us the map.’
This was blackmail.
What Yen Olass felt about the half-inching of her cat need not be described; civilized people, having cats of their own, will understand immediately, whereas doglick-ing barbarians are beyond enlightenment. However, after the initial shock had worn off, Yen Olass stopped sentimentalizing over the loss of Lefrey, and began to consider the wider implications.
Though cats may well be considered as people, ultimately cats are expendable, but there was a lot more at stake than a cat. Nuana could take everything Yen Olass owned – and Yen Olass would never dare complain.
'An oracle has no attachments.’
So ran the Rule.
But Yen Olass, a hoarding creature by nature, found it impossible to conform to the Rule. By possessing a cat she was in breach of the Rule; her dreamquilt was against the Rule, and so was her seven-stringed klon and her collection of shells and her amber thankskeep.
However, the problem did not end there.
Yen Olass could say a parting for her cat; she could even live with the confiscation of her comforts and fripperies. But if Nuana went one step further and laid an Information with the Sisterhood, then Yen Olass really would be in trouble.
In a dormitory in the Woman Sanctuary in the Western quadrant, there was a bed assigned to Yen Olass Ampadara. The wardmistress had never reported her absence, for, as Yen Olass well knew, that greedy old woman was more than happy to lay claim to an extra food allotment. However, if the Sisterhood investigated their oracle, they would soon discover the truth – and ask questions.
How did Yen Olass come to have her own room in tooth 44, Moon Stallion Strait? Who arranged eating privileges for her at the Canoozerie? What quid pro quo earned her a seat of her own in the Hall of Heavenly Music? Was it true that a horse in Lord Alagrace's stables was permanently assigned to Yen Olass? If so, what did she use it for? Was it true that she sometimes actually rode out hunting?
There was, in short, much more than the fate of a cat in question. A whole way of life was threatened.
Any investigation would soon lead the Sisterhood to suspect – correctly – that Yen Olass had earned these unlawful privileges by performing political favours for Lord Alagrace. When making a reading, an oracle was only supposed to conjure up images, fables, tales or parables suggesting alternatives to the patrons; to attempt conscious persuasion was forbidden by the Rule.
And there was no doubt that Yen Olass had sinned against the rule for years now. Even before the Blood Purge, Lord Alagrace had made occasional use of her talents. Since he had returned from exile in Ashmolea, she had served him on a daily basis, and had benefited accordingly. By now, he rarely had to instruct her, for she knew his purposes as well as any of his chief ministers, and could serve his will even when a crisis arose in his absence.
If the Sisterhood investigated Yen Olass, she might be stripped of her powers as an oracle and put to work in the kitchens. At the very least, steps would be taken to ensure that she did live in the Woman Sanctuary from now on – and that in itself would be unbearable. Yen Olass hated the wetwater smell of the female quarters, the cloistering walls which encouraged the captive women to engage in feuds and jealousies; she remembered the meals of scange and rotten lanks, which sometimes stank like vomit.
In her own quarters in Moon Stallion Strait, Yen Olass enjoyed many luxuries, and the finest was her privacy. There were no secrets in the Woman Sanctuary, that place where close-quartered women combined their body chemistry to make themselves one single animal, celebrating this mystery by menstruating in unison once in every moon.
Seeing how much damage could be done if she continued to resist, Yen Olass went to the text-master Eldegen Terzanagel and promised to get the map for him; he instructed her accordingly.
The War Archives was a relatively young institution; it had been established twenty years previously by Lord Pentalon Alagrace. Originally it had been a modest establishment devoted to the study of logistics, for Lord Alagrace believed that most campaigns were decided, to a large extent, by the degree to which logistical requirements could be satisfied.
However, in twenty years the War Archives had grown considerably. Staffed mainly by past and present army officers, it had survived the Blood Purge intact, and had profited from the chaos which followed.
It now controlled the previously independent House of Cartographers; it had taken over the Guild of Praise Singers; after a direct appeal to the Lord Emperor Khmar, it had even won permission to establish its own cadre of interrogators in direct competition with the traditional School of Executioners.
Strong, confident and aggressive, the War Archives bureaucracy was now contending for one of the richest prizes of all: the regulation of Ordhar, the command language of the Collosnon Empire. Ordhar had been previously developed and administered by the text-masters,
who bitterly resented the War Archives' effort to deprive them of their prestige, salaries, offices and assistants; the relentless infighting had now reached its peak, with the text-masters accusing the War Archives of complicity in the fire which had badly damaged the Pranzalstrud, the chief library of the text-masters.
If the text-master Eldegen Terzanagel had gone anywhere near the War Archives complex now dominating King's Honour Crescent – only four years old, that complex contained the finest architecture in all of Gendormargensis – then the consequences of such a foolish move would quite possibly have been the immediate and permanent disappearance of the said text-master. However, nobody challenged Yen Olass as she passed through the portal giving access to the complex. Nobody would ever challenge an oracle, or even think of doing so.
On her way to the map room, Yen Olass walked down wide corridors where floors and walls were decorated with mosaics in the Drayling Style, which depends for its effects on the interweaving of different seasons, blending
