“Coup markers?” Jep had asked Pirva. “The Cause?”
Pirva had not looked up from what she was doing. “The Cause is their society, their religion, their brotherhood,” she had said, the words dripping like acid from her mouth. “It’s a killers’ club. A man gets a coup counter for each Abolitionist or Gharm man, woman, or child he has killed out there in Ahabar or the Three Counties. There are special counters for bombs set off in the three counties, no matter who is killed or mutilated.”
“They do not set off their bombs in Ahabar?” Jep asked.
“So far they have not risked bringing the Ahabarian army into Voorstod. With every year that passes, though, while the Authority sleeps and Ahabar withholds its power, the Cause pushes itself closer to the brink. Some of the members have hair to their knees, with coup markers set every inch, but they are not content. So long as another man has as many, their sense of competition will not let them rest. They will carry their murders into Ahabar sooner or later.”
“Mugal Pye has this long hair?”
“Him, down to his knees. And Preu Flandry. And Epheron Floom, though his is only a wig to make up for all the time he spent out there in short-haired Ahabar, spying.”
Remembering what Pirva had told him, Jep was content to wear the cap. He did not want to be thought one of them, but no doubt it was safer than to parade his distinction. For all he knew, some Voorstoder might decide to kill him as an outsider or Gharm sympathizer and ask for a special coup marker to memorialize the event.
The trip to Cloud was by flier, at first moving along the coast, where there were no roads for surface vehicles and where the heaving seas would have made water travel unpleasant at best. Voorstod had made no investment in short-distance Doors, no more than Hobbs Land had. Few planetary populations did, except where there were great cities separated by considerable travel time, as upon Phansure, where the volume of travel between cities was large and constant. Fixed-destination, constant-flow Doors were too expensive to obtain and operate to be economically feasible otherwise.
The trip was improved, so far as Jep was concerned, when a wind came up to clear the mists and disclose the rock-pimpled surface of the heaving seas, the stone-fanged coastline, and the clustered clutterings of towns and hamlets. They flew over Old Port in Odil County, with its timbered houses staggering down the steep hills toward the bay; they viewed the pastures of Bight County, puffed like piled green pillows between the mountains and the sea, then turned inland to fly along the base of the mountains.
Preu pointed out the town of Scaery, away to their left, its markets and stone streets netted among golden hills. On the right gaped the black maws of mines, horizontal holes in the sides of mountains, with long dun dunes of tailings trailing down the mountainsides and pools along the streams stained green and blue and red by leached minerals. Neither the tailings nor the edges of the pools showed any signs of life. Both were too poisonous for any seed to sprout. From the mines, tiny cog railways climbed down over the cliffs to dump their contents in other dunes beside the roads at the bottom.
“What are they digging for?” Jep asked, as they passed the hundredth such mine.
“Voorstod makes its living out of rare ores and gems,” said Preu Flandry, pointing out this and that, as though Jep were a tourist.
Though Preu did not mention it, the workers in the mines were Gharm. The supervisors were Voorstoders, with whips. The flier was close enough to the cliffs that Jep could see that for himself.
In midafternoon they came to the fields of Cloud, soil black as tar and rich as a glutton’s dinner, said Epheron, with the town of Cloudport standing on a level plain above the sandy beach—” the only sand beach in Voorstod,” he said. The castle and the cathedral towered above the town on a stony arm thrust out from the mountain chain. It had become a day all blue and gold and white, with the sun taking the curse from the wind’s chill and no mists remaining at all. As they swung above Cloud and Jep looked down at the people busy in the marketplace, at the children playing in the schoolyard, he thought how little it looked like the Voorstod he had learned to know. It did not look like a land steeped in violence and such hatred that there was no part of it unstained by blood.
The flier side-slipped up the hill and over the castle wall, coming to rest in the courtyard. The first things Jep saw when he climbed out of the vehicle were the hooks set high onto the wall, some of them burdened with dried bundles from which bones protruded, others of which held bodies still twitching or moaning. The second thing he saw was the blackened and twisted loop of a Door framed against looming walls of lichened stone. Above those walls and behind them, the towers of the citadel stabbed jeering fingers into the sun’s eye.
“What’s that?” Jep asked, pointing out the Door in an effort to distract himself from the walls and their hideous burdens.
“The Door we came in by,” said Mugal Pye. “We leave it here as a reminder.” He did not say a reminder of what, and Jep did not ask. The Door looked burned past any use.
“Are we going into town?”
“Not likely, boy. There’s spies in town. The meeting is here, in the citadel, where we hold our secrets to ourselves and where the prophets will look you over
