I stayed there for several minutes, before returning to Ennis’s table to tell him I wasn’t feeling quite up to par.
Ennis Severeth Gilleys was very polite. He sat drinking for a while after Keylinn had gone. Then he went to the docking area, took passage to the Opal, and went to see his tarethi-din.
He found him packing a bag.
“Can’t trust servants for this,” said Lord Cardinal Amo. “I find they always leave out just the thing I want to wear.”
“I didn’t know you were going anywhere,” said Ennis.
“Nor 1.1 just heard recently that my presence is needed on the Diamond. One of my flock is having a spiritual crisis.”
Ennis did not remark on this; outsider religious madness bored him. He flung himself down on a couch and reached for a handful of grapes on a nearby table.
“Guess who I ran into on the Station,” he said.
Chapter 19
Let’s suppose I go to someone living in a wealthy and comfortable social rung of the Empire, and I say, “There’s a famine in Henan” He or she might say “I know there’s a famine in Benar; I am current with the latest news; there is often famine in Benar. ” But if I took him to Benar and asked him to hold a swollen-bellied, stick-footed child in his arms while the dying mothers are handed their latest rations, he might protest, “But dear god, this is a famine! People are suffering! Something must be done!”
Or let’s say I told any one of you that someday you’re going to die. You might respond, “Brilliant point—I know I’ll die someday, you’re not telling me anything new.”
But one day something you hear or see—the words of a medtech, or the sight of someone you know dying, the lines of a poem or the year on a calendar—will strike into your heart, and you’ll cry, betrayed, “I’m going to die!”
The Graykey would say that you only thought you knew before, but now you really know. The Graykey mark a great difference between knowledge one is taught and this other form of knowledge that cannot be taught, that comes from personal experience and strikes so deeply. It is less marked in other societies, not because it isn’t recognized, but because there is no term for it. The Graykey call it bone-knowledge.
Another word for it is tarethi.
from CAUDLANDER’S
A Tourist Guide to the Graykey
Will wanted to walk by himself. He let Johnny and Jack see Bernadette home—or more the opposite, really, as Johnny and Jack had both drunk rather more than their general capacities.
Sangaree’s lighting was rarely bright at the best of times, and on night-time it was almost black in places. Much of this part of Opal had not been intended for human habitation, and the comforts and lighting had been planned accordingly.
Lysette was singing tonight at the Bloodshed. It was too early to expect her to be off, and Will was restless, so he turned into the darker walkways that led down toward his old school.
There was a flash of light just ahead by an entranceway; Will stopped short. Before it was extinguished, the light showed an old man’s face, lined and uncaring, and a white kitchen uniform. There were foosteps, and a man’s voice said, “How they hangin’, Fred?”
Fred—the old man—grunted. Will made out a huge shape on wheels that Fred was pushing over to the other man. Whether it was laundry, or garbage, or contraband, Will had no idea, nor did he have any intention of asking. He waited until the sound of footsteps and wheels went away, and a small square of light showed that Fred had gone back inside. Then he went on down the street.
Sangaree. The place wasn’t so bad if you followed the rules. So what was his sister’s problem? No … what was his problem, that he had this feeling of getting in deeper and deeper water, farther and farther from land? He was using Bernadette as a life preserver, as though she could save him from the complicated mess existence was becoming … only to reach for her in the water and see that she was too far away to depend on.
At the end of the street he turned into the tunnel by the recycling plant. People avoided it because of the flooding and the stink, but Will had learned every foot of it, with Hartley Quince, at the age of nine. It led by a shortcut to the courtyard of Blessed Sacrifice School. He had no conscious plans to walk by the school, for he had few happy memories connected with it; but he wanted to avoid any encounters with anyone. Especially at night, the people one met on the streets and walkways of Sangaree were … unpredictable. Will’s father had been one such; Will didn’t remember a lot about his father, but it was clear the man had what they called here “troubles.”
Often the “troubles,” however they manifested themselves, ran in families. Will thought about this sometimes, especially when he was trying to go to sleep.
He emerged from the tunnel behind a dark entranceway to the Blessed Sacrifice dormitories, where unmarried teachers were housed. And now he wished he’d gone some other way, any other way, by Tanamonde Street and the well-heeled, or by Broken Comer and the jail, where the debtors and petty thieves would be yelling out the bars to their mates and lovers—it was better than a play, at Broken Comer. Whatever had possessed him to come this way? The stench of the tunnel was making him sick, or maybe it was the memories the tunnel called up.
“Nathys are unreliables, riffs are informers.” He could hear Hart’s nine-year-old voice telling him. Hart was new to Sangaree while Willie’d lived there all his life, but Hart had the structure of power down pat within weeks. Was it a structure at all similar to the pens, was that why he could recognize it? Or maybe he
