“We don’t know,” Jass Kebessa said. “We know only that the Emperor Gebrem is under the spell of this Kyroun, and when Gebrem opens his mouth to speak, it is the Fidi’s words that come out. Kyroun is even made himself the Leba! And how much longer will it be before a Fidi, and not a Matile, sits on the Lion Throne?”
That speculation caused the others to fall into silence for a long moment, before Adisu spoke in reiteration of his opinion.
“We must act, then.”
“But how?” Kebessa asked again.
“To kill a serpent, you must cut off its head.”
These words came not from Adisu, but from a new speaker, one who had previously made few contributions to the dissidents’ discussions even though he attended all the gatherings.
The speaker’s name was Sehaye.
3
A slight smile curved Sehaye’s lips as he wended his way through the rubble-strewn interior streets of Khambawe. The dissidents’ meeting had ended, and his ideas had received much attention, even from the cautious Jass Kebessa. Almost without thinking, Sehaye avoided the broken stones and other debris that littered his path as he savored the outcome of the gathering. In another part of his mind, he wondered if he would soon help to remove the wreckage past which he was now stepping, rubble he had, in his way, helped to create.
In the time before Sehaye’s countrymen had launched Retribution Time, the street he travelled had been free from detritus. But it had not been free of tsotsis, who had awaited in the shadows, poised to pounce on the unlucky and unwary who came within their reach. Now, the tsotsis were penned in the Maim, and were steadily disappearing. The only danger the street now posed for Sehaye was the chance of stumbling over some unnoticed obstacle.
Sehaye’s smile broadened as he left the interior of the city behind and approached the dwelling he had appropriated in the aftermath of Retribution Time’s failure. It was a modest house that had escaped the brunt of the destruction on the night of the invasion. Its previous owners had been killed, and no one else had come forth to claim it. Close to the area in which the dissidents met, although they never gathered in the same place twice in a row, as well as the other still-damaged areas in which he made his living, the location was ideal for Sehaye’s purposes.
And he had finally found a purpose after a period of aimlessness, and at times madness, that had lasted until the time immediately following Jass Gebrem’s coronation as Emperor. It was a gap he barely remembered, and he knew he was fortunate to have lived through it.
Even before the coronation, he could no longer maintain his previous identity as a fisherman. His boat had long since been lost. And after he had looked at the harbor the day after Retribution Time ended, and he had seen the spider-scarred corpses of his countrymen covering the surface of the water so thickly that he could have walked across them, he could no longer bear the sight of the sea.
Despite his wiry frame, Sehaye’s back was strong. Soon enough, he was able to stave off starvation by helping to clear the rubble left from Retribution Time, and participating in the rebuilding of the city he had dedicated his life to bringing down. The irony of his position did not escape him, and there were times when he teetered on the brink of an abyss of despair.
Then, one day, a voice that came from within pulled him away from that brink. He was certain that the voice belonged to Legaba. Sometimes, though, he thought it might belong to a different source, one that he did not care to contemplate very long or very deeply ...
Why I make questions? he asked himself.
Voice helping I, he assured himself in the Uloan dialect he spoke only in the deepest recesses of his mind.
I and I listen and learn, he promised himself.
Sehaye became known as a silent but capable worker who did what he was told without asking any questions. Following the advice of his new inner companion, he watched and listened as he worked. At first, he was searching, as always, for fellow spies from the Islands who might have survived Retribution Time. But even if any such people existed, he had no way of recognizing them. Jass Imbiah had forbidden any contact among her mainland spies; if they became acquainted, they could inadvertently give each other away. After a while, though, he gave up that search. If he were to be the only Uloan left in Khambawe, so be it.
Where Jass Imbiah gone? he often asked himself bitterly. Why she leave we? That the ruler of all the Islands was dead, he had no doubt, even though he had not personally witnessed her demise. And he also knew he had no way of ever returning to his homeland. Even if he did, he would likely be killed as a damned blankskin before he could open his mouth to convince his fellow Uloans that he was one of them despite his lack of spider-scars.
Sehaye had listened more closely as he heaved rocks and repositioned beams. And he began to hear mutterings of discontent; the voices of those who did not accept the huge changes that had occurred in Khambawe and spread throughout the Matile Mala Empire, even though the catalysts of those changes, the Almovaads, had saved the dissenters’ lives as well as those of the Believers.
And those were the voices the new speaker inside Sehaye’s head wanted him to hear ...
Sehaye continued to listen as he worked. Then he began to speak ... softly, unobtrusively, using the words that the voice inside him suggested. At first, the dissidents were surprised that their taciturn co-worker possessed the ability to utter more than two words at a time. However, the more they
