A man with that history had his future pretty well laid out for him. There was always a market for assassins, especially assassins who could think. Mitigan could think, though he did not think much about his career. A man could get tied up in his own thoughts, worried over them, or guilty over them, or overly convinced of his own prowess. A man needed a clear head to survive. He had to be careful.
Still and all, if a man really wanted to hit a target, Chur Durwen was right. There was always a way.
It wasn’t long before Mitigan put two and two together to come up with the same answer those at Cochim-Mahn had arrived at. The key to traveling on Dinadh was to have a structure or vehicle inside which one could be safe at night. Since the hover cars were controlled from the port city, they wouldn’t do. Since any other structure would make too heavy a load for a man, it would have to be hauled by beasts, which meant the beasts themselves had to be protected. Travel on Dinadh required a wain and beasts to pull it. Or the equivalent.
“You think I’m goin’ to fool with animals, you got a fool’s idea.” Chur Durwen yawned.
“Right,” agreed Mitigan. “We’ll do it our way.”
They’d brought certain items of equipment with them, the parts innocuously labeled and packaged as health monitors or retrievers and transcribers or library modules. Several of these items, taken apart and reassembled into a portable unit, would create a protective dome big enough to sleep in. Big enough to live in for a while, if necessary.
“Though it’ll be somewhat troublesome,” Mitigan told his companion, “I think we’d be wise to take a pack animal.”
Chur Durwen didn’t argue with him. In a pinch, Mitigan later told me, they could have carried their own provisions, but assassins preferred to stay unencumbered when engaged in their profession. Besides, at T’loch-ala, spring had not advanced so far as it had at Cochim-Mahn and there were many strong animals to choose from still in the caves.
“So now we know how,” muttered Mitigan over his evening meal as he stared out the window at the dancing Kachis. “All we have to figure out is where.”
The question plagued him as he ate, as he slept, as he did his weapons exercises morning and night. Chur Durwen, who preferred to get his daily exercise climbing up and down the ladders between hive and valley below, was bothered by the same question. Where?
It was a conversation Mitigan overheard between two women at the well ropes that gave them the clue they needed.
“Will you be going to Tahs-uppi with songfather?” one asked of the other.
“Alas, no,” replied the other. She was quite beautiful, Mitigan thought, with black hair that fell in a lightless flow almost to her knees. She was also very pregnant. “Songfather feels it is too near my time.”
“He’s probably right,” said the first, with a delicate shudder. “One should not be far from help the first time. Still, it’s sad that you’ll miss it. All the songfathers and their guests will be there, from everywhere in Dinadh. Another such opportunity will not come in our lifetime.”
Mitigan went at once to inform his colleague. “She said people would be there from all over Dinadh. Which means there’ll be someone there who knows where Famber is, or was.”
“Fine,” muttered the man from Collis. “So we go to Tahs-uppi. Where is it?”
It took them some days of fumbling questions to elicit the information that Tahs-uppi was not a place but an event that took place at the omphalos, the navel of the world. Plotting a route that would get them there occupied them for scarcely another day. The morning after, very early, they stole a beast from a herd cave and departed T’loch-ala, leaving only one dead body behind them, that of an impertinent herdsman who’d wakened early and gone down to his flock without waiting on Lady Day. Had he waited properly, he would still be alive, a fact the songfather of T’loch-ala would later discourse upon at length.
“Have you never married, then?” Poracious Luv asked the King of Kamir.
Jiacare Lostre reflected. “I saw wedlock as wedded lock indeed, another set of chains binding me fast. Seeing what fate I saw for all Kamir, I did not wish for children.”
“You can speak like common people if you like,” she said, grinning at him. “You are no longer king.”
He flushed, started to say something, then stopped. The slow beat of aristocratic speech had become second nature when talking to any but intimates or servants—in which category he had always included his ministers, just to infuriate them. And yet, he had not spoken like that when he was Osterbog Smyne. Why should he as ex-king?
Enjoying his embarrassment, Poracious thrust her seat back to the limit of the inadequate space the ship provided, stretching out her legs. She felt cramped. She was cramped. Her sleeping cubicle was the size of a disposal booth, and after spending several hours in it, she wished it were a disposal booth. One would travel more comfortably as ashes.
Of course, the journey could have been passed in sleep. Most passengers had chosen to sleep until a day or two before they reached their destination, but the king wanted to savor every moment of freedom, and Poracious had thought it wisest to stay with him. On the well-established ground that men like best to talk about themselves, she had led him to discuss his life and times at great length.
“What did you do for amusement?” she demanded. “Everyone has to have amusement.”
“One spends one’s time—” he began, catching himself. “I spent a great deal of time in
