Zasper fumed, full of speculation he wanted to share but unwilling to say anything at all while they were here on shore and might be overheard. Just as he had left Enarae, a tourist dink had brought him a transmitter cube from Boarmus with a very long, rambling message adding to the somewhat muddled but nonetheless threatening picture of what they were all dealing with. Zasper had spent the flight to Thrasis listening to the cube and trying to figure it out: According to Boarmus, Elsewhere had been taken over by something both omnipresent and omnipotent, something paranoid and erratic, full of malice and cunning, which seemed mostly concerned with its own sense of esteem and power. “It wants to be a god,” Boarmus had said. “Maybe it is one.” Little god or big god made no difference, Boarmus said. A big one might kill them all at once, little ones could nibble them to death. They’d be just as dead either way!
Zasper stared at Danivon and made a covert sign in use among Enforcers that meant, roughly, “I’ll tell you later.”
Danivon replied with an angry gesture, his lips drawn back in an impatient snarl, but he held himself in check.
Jory blinked at the recent interloper and murmured, “If there’s nothing else….”
Zasper growled, “There’s a good deal else, old woman. Am I right that you are the same Jory somebody who used to follow Fringe around when she was a child?” He took her silence for assent and demanded, “What are you doing here in Thrasis?”
“I’m here because the ship is here. The ship is here because it has cargo to unload. I’ll go when the ship goes.”
“Go where?”
“Home,” she said.
His eyebrows lifted almost to his smoothly drawn-back hair. So this was Fringe’s Jory. The legendary Jory. Oh, he wanted to talk to her, now or later. Later, probably. Without Danivon hovering at his elbow. “Home being?” he asked her.
She pointed westward, up the river.
Zasper and Danivon exchanged glances. Danivon lifted his hands, palms up, sniffing the air. He tilted a palm, this way, that way. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t smell it.
Zasper sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Women aren’t allowed to walk about loose in this province.”
“The things that followed us aren’t on this side of the river, yet,” Jory said, “and I have business here.”
“He’s trying to tell you you’ll be killed,” Danivon said flatly as he came down from the deck of the Dove. “The servants of the Prophet will kill you all. Women have to be in the bowers of their owners or in the towers, no place else.”
“Great Dragon comes with us,” said Jory. “And I don’t think the servants of the Prophet will interfere. I would invite you to join us, except that you Enforcers already know all about Thrasis. No doubt you want to talk man talk. Or is it Enforcer talk? Whichever, we’ll leave you to it.”
She took Cafferty and Latibor by the hands and moved away from the ship.
“Why are we doing this?” Cafferty asked Jory.
Jory pointed at the bulky towers along the river. “Because we’re here. Because we can.”
Latibor murmured, “Great Dragon comes.”
They couldn’t see Great Dragon, though they had a sense of something beside them as they left the ship and strolled down the waterfront. Their way was immediately barred by infuriated men who screamed and waved curved blades at them, but who then mysteriously lost their enthusiasm for confrontation and ran off toward the town, not looking back. The Luzes and Jory were not surprised.
“These buildings are still called towers,” said Jory in a didactic tone as they approached the nearest of several similar complicated structures. “Though they are not towers in the architectural sense.”
The whole was surrounded by high walls pierced with fretted gates. As they came near the gates, the guards fled and the gates burst open, allowing Jory to walk through with the others behind her.
“This is the Court of Removal,” Jory continued in a lecturer’s tone. “Old women like us, Cafferty, are left here to die. It would not be fitting for them to die where men who don’t own them might look upon them—and of course their owners don’t want to look at them—so they die here, where none see them. The religion of Thrasis prohibits murder. They are merely given no food or water and left to the mercy of the Thrasian god.”
She walked across the wide yard, the others tiptoeing behind. “Through there,” she said, pointing, “is the tower proper. The tower administrator, an office he purchases from the Prophet, is allowed to buy selected girl babies, to rear them, to train some of them in music and dancing, then later sell them as breeders or entertainers. We won’t go in there. My business is with the House of Restitution.” She headed toward a massive block whose windows were crowded with women peering out at them. “This is the place from which girl children are sold as workers and where women who have proven unsatisfactory to their owners are allowed to labor on an interim basis.”
Cafferty asked, “Unsatisfactory to their owners? How proven unsatisfactory?”
“Oh, by growing ugly. Or sexually unexciting. Or bearing a girl instead of a son. Or speaking where a man can hear them. Or allowing a man other than their owners to see their faces. Or menstruating at a time when a man would prefer they did not. Or giving birth inconveniently. Or being sick. Or getting old.”
She turned, pointing once more. “The walled fields to your right, stretching down to the river, are where the women of this tower grow their food and fiber. They are expected to feed themselves since they have
