“Silence, Dagon!” Sire Revek whisper-shouted. “We will hear from you afterward. The probe will be carried out first. That is our decision. You have no choice but to abide by it.”
The litens-special Ishtat officers who normally stayed pasted to the far walls of the chamber-converged on him. They appeared through the mist-thick air as if they had only ever been a step away. Wearing goggles over their eyes and breathing apparatuses over their noses and mouths, they moved with a clearheaded speed that Dagon could not comprehend. They pressed down on his chest, pinned his arms to the armrests, and wrapped cords around them so quickly Dagon only realized what they were doing after they had completed the task. He tried to pull free. He could only strain against them. He kicked, but his feet, too, were bound. He shouted, but that ended quickly, too. A liten vised his jaw in a painful finger pinch. The figure stared down at him, eyes unseen behind the green glass that hid them.
Dagon got ahold of himself. He ceased struggling. It was useless and just made him look ridiculous. This situation was absurd, but it was serious. Better that he acquiesce with faith in his rightness, with dignity. That would be the shortest course back to his proper standing. “Of course, Sires,” Dagon managed through his nearly immobilized jaw. “My-my mind is yours. I have no fear of… being-”
A liten carefully slipped a tube into his nose. Dagon could not help but thrash. He had thought this part amusing when it was happening to someone else, interesting that so much tubing could be shoved and shoved and shoved up a person’s nose. Where did it all go? he had wondered. Now he knew. And then the liquid flowed.
In brief moments he had before the liquid mist overcame him, Dagon thrashed around, both in his chair and inside his head, fighting the rush of fear he claimed not to feel. He searched for thoughts that he should somehow banish, but as soon as he found one that was embarrassing or questionable, another popped up like a bubble beside it. And then another. He got nowhere. There was so much to hide, the innocuous just as much as the substantial. He wondered how this was happening. He should have arrived here a hero. A man of action. One of decisive…
B eing mind-probed by a chamber full of leaguemen, Dagon learned, was unequal parts horrifying, degrading, embarrassing, and enlightening. How much of each depended on the moment in question. Each moment of the examination blurred into spiraling circles, in which he could get no sense of time’s progression. He put together a sketchy narrative for himself of how the experience had gone afterward. Even this was putting order to a process that had in truth been like being explored by a swarm of scheming bees.
Early on, his brothers had focused their attention on the Queen’s Council meeting that had so disturbed him, the one in which Aliver had appeared in the flesh. They moved forward through his visit to Grau, in which he suggested and then argued for the monarchs’ assassinations. An observer at his own dissection, Dagon knew that the memory as he reexperienced it did not match the memory as he recalled it, but he could find no way to voice this.
His brothers watched the coronation through his eyes, turned over his emotions as the monarchs caressed their present, felt his fear as the Santoth changed everything. They looked through his eyes as he searched his library for some way to understand them, and they watched him write the letter that confessed the crime he had helped perpetrate only hours before. They followed him as he fled from Acacia aboard a pleasure yacht in the dead of night, chasing a messenger bird toward Alecia. The voyage surprised him in some particulars. Had fleeing Acacia really wrung him through with as much melancholia as it seemed to? No, not possible! He had not gotten teary at seeing the harbor lights recede in the wake of his boat. He had not been overcome with sadness for the lives of all those poor fools still rafted together, in shock and mourning and confusion now, instead of sharing the euphoria the day had begun with.
Apparently-although he did not remember it this way-a barrage of random memories had assaulted him throughout the short voyage. He revisited old conversations with Leodan Akaran and Thaddeus Clegg, his treacherous, conflicted chancellor. Dagon had not liked either man, so why did it seem like he wished he could have them with him in his cabin, talking through the recent events while sharing a mist pipe? Why recall the time one of the white minks the concubines kept got loose in his quarters, unnerving him as it darted about with its long tail swishing behind it? What use was remembering the time he sat through some banquet with a sore tooth, struggling to hide his discomfort from those around him? What a strange, useless thing to recall. And yet there it was, as vivid in its own way as some of the most crucial moments of his tenure in Acacia.
They lingered with him through the dream he had of the time Corinn arrived in his offices-so young then, beautiful in the newly ripened manner of youth. He had thought cruelly about the work he would have liked to put her mouth to when she caught him off guard. He had to retrace the half-heard words she had spoken, taking a moment to comprehend the audacity of the proposal she was making. She spoke her way into an empire right then and bound Hanish Mein’s hands with a few well-conceived words. Not her lover’s pawn after all, it turned out.
And that took him to a view of Hanish’s face in profile as he stared at one of the palace’s golden monkeys. It was an image Dagon saw with such detail it might have been a painting hung on the wall before him. He had hated the man’s perfect features, his lover’s eyes, and the arrogant grace with which he occupied his body. But what he remembered was wondering if Hanish had any suspicion that the league had often used the monkeys as thieves and messengers. They were clever, easily trained, and seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction from working covertly. Of course Hanish hadn’t known. Nobody on Acacia ever had. Dagon would miss those monkeys. Realizing this made him shake his head at his own mawkishness. He needed the steadying influence of his brothers.
Irrelevant, he thought, and yet some of his brothers seemed fascinated by these things and by the fact that he buried all such thoughts deep when he met with his fellow leaguemen in Alecia. They had all been agitated, both by what had happened during the coronation and by the call for evacuation that Dagon arrived with. He had acted recklessly. There would be a reckoning about it. An investigation. Consequences. Despite the grumbling, they echoed Dagon’s orders to their own staff.
See, Dagon thought, they did what I suggested because there was no other choice! I acted. I led. And why was there no mention of Grau’s part in all this?
By dawn of the next day they had all fled aboard the largest vessels they could organize on short notice. They sailed south, bristling warning with the manned ballistae hanging from the sides of the ship. In their wake they left abandoned estates and billows of black smoke rising from their offices and libraries, storehouses and estates. Dagon rather liked the images it all left in his mind. It helped sweep away the troublesome memories. Here was something decisive. When the leaguemen abandon a place, they leave scorched earth behind them. Nothing for others to use. No apologies. No regrets.
These portions were not so bad. Much of the probing vindicated him. If it had ended there-and it should have-he would have had no reason to complain. It did not end there, though. He would later wonder just which of his brothers had spent so much time on raking through his childhood like a gardener turning manure into the earth. And who circled around and around his early sexual encounters? What reason was there to tease out small, perverse moments, things at the edge of his life, things inconsequential?
He knew the answer. It could be any of them. And they did it because it amused them. Those things were out of his hands. Only how he handled himself when the probe ended could matter now.
R egaining consciousness took much longer than Dagon would have imagined. He slowly came back into his body. He felt the tubes as they were yanked out of his nose, and then the straps on his feet, and later wrists, being untied. Someone wiped spittle from his mouth and tugged at his nose with the same cloth. He heard one liten ask another if Dagon had soiled himself, and felt the cursory probing of his nether regions that prompted the response, “Not from the back end, at least.”
Though his consciousness returned, it took some time before he could so much as open his eyes. He lay there listening to his brothers discuss him. The gurgling of their mist pipes sounded like laughter. If they had spent time discussing the serious matters, they were beyond it now. Sire Grindus joked about the childhood infatuation he had for one of his maids. Sire Pindar increased the mirth by mentioning that he still had the same infatuation, despite the fact the woman must surely be many years a corpse. If the queen knew the sort of things he had pictured her doing, another said, she would have his head. “She would have all our heads,” Grindus admitted, to a murmur of laughter that echoed around the chamber.
“Odd the workings of the mind,” Sire Nathos said.
“Ah…” Dagon said. “Ah, odd… indeed.”
The others hushed a moment, until Revek said, “I believe he is back among us. Dagon, we have discussed your matter at length. Wake and hear our verdict.”
Dagon drew out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face. He ran a hand up over the long cone of his skull, patting his hair into place. That was all the regaining of dignity he managed before Revek continued. Pulling his
