The corpses around him were proof enough of power. The official left quickly, and Riktors continued giving orders, already setting in motion the changes that had to be complete in a week for him to stay on schedule, that had to be so thorough that no new dictator could spring up on Garibali for centuries. He picked up the phone and called the port. His second-in-command had been waiting for his call.

Proceed, Riktors said. I have Talaso here, dead of course, and we're moving well.

And I have a message for you from the emperor. His agents on Clike have found that the rumors were unfounded and your visit there has been canceled. He orders you to proceed to Tew when this work is accomplished.

Tew. The Songhouse, and Mikal's Songbird. Then would you please inform the Songhouse we will be arriving a week earlier than we anticipated. Courtesy could not be forgotten, not if the machinery of government were to run smoothly. The Songhouse. That frozen, frightening woman, Esste, and the beautiful child who would not sing for him. Petty politicians and adventurers like Talaso were easy to handle. But how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely- those were questions whose answers could not be found. That was an assignment that could not be handled routinely, and if he succeeded it would be because they let him succeed, and if he failed it would mean the end of his career, the whimsical end to his ambition because he had once happened to be the soldier nearest to Tew that Mikal Imperator could trust.

Damnable bad luck.

He sat down at the receptionist's desk and began to reorganize the government of Scale while his soldiers took control of every other government on Garibali, one by one, and placed the rule of two billion people in Riktors's hands. In the delight of power, Riktors soon put the Songbird far into the back of his mind, where he need not worry. Not just yet, anyway.

19

It was the fourth day that Ansset had tormented Esste. It was near dark outside, and the High Room was growing cold. He had stopped singing an hour ago, but he could not move. He sat in the middle of the floor and looked at Esste and was afraid.

She sat still, her eyes open, looking forward but seeing nothing. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She had not moved from that position since Ansset began his song in the morning.

And now he was full of doubt. He did not understand what was happening to her. The first time he had been excited because he had actually changed her. While her Control had held and she still remained silent, she had stopped work, had lost her struggle to concentrate on the computer in the table. He had thought the end would come the next day. But the next day she had held on, and the next, and today he realized that she was not going to break. He knew that these were the songs that would make her afraid. But he had no idea what fears he had summoned up.

Each night he had gone to sleep with her frozen at the table; each morning he had awakened to find her asleep in the blankets. When she woke she said nothing, hardly looked at him, just got up, ate, went to the table, and began work. Each day he had started to sing and, each time a little sooner, she had stopped working and taken her day-long pose of studied inattention.

What am I doing to her behind her face?

Ansset felt restless, felt that he had to move. He delayed (Control) and when he got up he got up slowly (Control) and did not walk back and forth but instead headed directly for a shutter and tried to open it and realized that the very attempt was a sign that his Control was slipping. At the thought he was instantly aware of the walls of rock inside him, the deep placid lake that grew ever deeper within them. But something was stirring at the bottom of the lake.

He touched the cold stone wall between the windows and heard the whine of wind outside. Perhaps the first storm of fall was coming. Why had she brought him here? What was she trying to achieve?

What have I done to her?

He looked into the lake, looked deep and began to understand what was happening to him. After eleven days in the High Room he was beginning to be afraid. Things were out of his control. He could not leave. He could not force Esste to speak to him, or even to weep or show any sign that she felt anything at all. (Why is it so important that she show a sign of feeling?) And now he was feeling things within the walls of his Control that did not belong there. Fear stirred at the bottom of his calm. Fear, not just of what would happen to him in the High Room, but of what he might have done to Esste. He could not put it into words, but he realized that if something happened to her, something would happen to him. There was a connection. They were linked somehow, he was sure of it. And by raising her fears he had raised his own. They lurked. They waited. They were inside his walls and he did not know how he would be able to control them.

Speak to me, Esste, he said silently. Speak to me and be angry with me and demand that I change, abuse me or praise me or sing idiotic songs about the cities of Tew but stop hiding from me!

She did not look alive or human, her face empty like that, her body motionless. Human beings moved, their faces expressed things.

I will not break Control.

I will not break Control, he sang softly. But in the moment of singing he knew it was not true, and the fear moved sluggishly within him.

20

It was her childish nightmare that held her. A roaring in her ears and a vast invisible globe that grew and grew and rolled toward her to crush her swallow her fill her empty her... .

And the globe reached her, roaring like a storm at sea. She was a little girl holding the blanket up right to her neck, lying on her back, her eyes wide open, seeing and not seeing the ceiling of the Common Room, seeing and not seeing the vast roar that had filled the hall. She opened her hands to press against the globe, but it was too heavy and she could not lift her hands against the weight. She closed her hands into fists, but the stuff of the globe could not be shut out so simply, and it squeezed in between her fingers and into her fist so that instead of shutting it out she was holding it in. If she opened her mouth it would enter and fill her. If she closed her eyes it would be able to change without her seeing. And so she lay there hour after hour until sleep overcame her or until she screamed and screamed and screamed.

But no one ever came, because she never made a sound.

The stone wall emerged from the shadows. It was dark night, and the light through the cracks in the shutters was gone. Ansset was no longer in the middle of the room. She could see him asleep sitting up in the corner, his blanket wrapped around him. The wind whistled outside; it was cold. She reached stiff and painful fingers down to the computer and made the room warmer. She was inured to cold, but Ansset was still young. Freezing him to death would accomplish nothing.

She got up slowly, so that her body could adjust to movement. Her back protested. But the pains of her body were nothing. Today had been worse than ever, not a memory of the past at all, but the terrors of childhood returned with a vengeance. I cannot last another day of this.

She had said the same thing to herself yesterday, and yet she had lasted.

How am I different from him, she wondered. I, too, am hiding behind my Control. I, too, am unreachable, express nothing to anyone but what I choose to express. Perhaps if I unbent, if I broke Control just a little, he, too, would come out and be human again.

But she knew she would not try the experiment. He would have to open first. If she moved first it would all have been wasted, and he would be stronger and she weaker the next time it was tried. If there was a next time. Twenty-two days. It was the twelfth night, tomorrow would be the twelfth day, they were more than halfway through the time and she had accomplished nothing of importance except that her own strength was flagging and she wondered if she could last another day.