“How soon will she be back from this island?”

“At any moment,” said the High Justice. “How amazed she will be to find you here!”

I asked him concerning my death. He replied that word had come, two years earlier, that I was mad and had wandered, helpless and deluded, into Glin. Segvord smiled as though to tell me that he knew right well why I had left Salla, and that there had been nothing of insanity about my motives. “Then,” he said, “there were reports that the Lord Stirron had sent agents into Glin after you, so that you could be brought back for treatment. Halum feared greatly for your safety at that time. And lastly, this summer past, one of your brother’s ministers gave it out that you had gone roaming in the Glinish Huishtors in the pit of winter, and had been lost in the snows, in a blizzard no man could have survived.”

“But of course the Lord Kinnall’s body was not recovered in the warm months of the year gone by, and was left to wither in the Huishtors, instead of being brought back to Salla for a proper burial.”

“There was no news of finding the body, no.”

“Then obviously,” I said, “the Lord Kinnall’s body awakened in the springtime, and trekked about on a ghostly parade, and went its way southward, and now at last has presented itself on the doorstep of the High Justice of the Port of Manneran.”

Segvord laughed. “A healthy ghost!”

“A weary one, as well.”

“What befell you in Glin?”

“A cold time in more ways than one.” I told him of my snubbing at the hands of my mother’s kin, of my stay in the mountains, and all the rest. When he had heard that, he wished to know what my plans were in Manneran; to this I replied that I had no plans other than to find some honorable enterprise, and succeed in it, and marry, and settle down, for Salla was closed to me and Glin held no temptations. Segvord nodded gravely. There was, he said, a clerkship open at this very moment in his office. The job carried little pay and less prestige, and it was absurd to ask a prince of Salla’s royal line to accept it, but still it was clean work, with a fine chance of advancement, and it might serve to give me a foothold while I acclimated myself to the Mannerangi way of life. Since I had had some such opportunity in mind all along, I told him at once that I would gladly enter his employ, with no heed to my royal blood, since all that was behind me now, done with, and imaginary besides. “What one makes of himself here,” I said soberly, “will depend wholly on his merits, not on the circumstances of rank and influence.” Which was, of course, pure piffle: instead of trading on my high birth, I would instead here make capital out of being bondbrother to the High Justice of the Port’s daughter, a connection that had come to me because of my high birth alone, and where was the effect of merit in any of that?

The searchers are getting closer to me all the time. Yesterday, while on a long walk through this zone of the Burnt Lowlands, I found, well south of here, the fresh track of a groundcar impressed deep in the dry and fragile crust of the red sand. And this morning, idly strolling in the place where the hornfowl gather—drawn there by some suicidal impulse, maybe?—I heard a droning in the sky, and looked up to see a plane of the Sallan military passing overhead. One does not often see sky-vehicles here. It swooped and circled, hornfowl-fashion, but I huddled under a twisted erosion-knoll, and I think I went unnoticed.

I might be mistaken about these intrusions: the groundcar just some hunting party casually passing through the region, the plane merely out on a training flight. But I think not. If there are hunters here, it is I they hunt. The net will close about me. I must try to write more quickly, and be more concise; too much of what I need to say is yet untold, and I fear being interrupted before I am done. Stirron, let me be for just a few more weeks!

The High Justice of the Port is one of Manneran’s supreme officials. He holds jurisdiction over all commercial affairs in the capital; if there are disputes between merchants, they are tried in his court, and by treaty he has authority over the nationals of every province, so that a seacaptain of Glin or Krell, a Sallan or a westerner, when hailed before the High Justice, is subject to his verdicts with no rights of appeal to the courts of his homeland. This is the High Justice’s ancient function, but if he were nothing but an arbiter of mercantile squabbles he would hardly have the grandeur that he does. However, over the centuries other responsibilities have fallen to him. He alone regulates the flow of foreign shipping into the harbor of Manneran, granting trade permits for so many Glinish vessels a year, so many from Threish, so many from Salla. The prosperity of a dozen provinces is subject to his decisions. Therefore he is courted by septarchs, flooded with gifts, buried in kindnesses and praise, in the hope that he will allow this land or that an extra ship in the year to come. The High Justice, then, is the economic filter of Velada Borthan, opening and closing commercial outlets as he pleases; he does this not by whim but by consideration of the ebb and flow of wealth across the continent, and it is impossible to overestimate his importance in our society.

The office is not hereditary, but the appointment is for life, and a High Justice can be removed only through intricate and well-nigh impracticable impeachment procedures. Thus it comes to pass that a vigorous High Justice, such as Segvord Helalam, can become more powerful in Manneran than the prime septarch himself. The septarchy of Manneran is in decay in any case; two of the seven seats have gone unfilled for the past hundred years or more, and the occupants of the remaining five have ceded so much of their authority to civil servants that they are little more than ceremonial figures. The prime septarch still has some shreds of majesty, but he must consult with the High Justice of the Port on all matters of economic concern, and the High Justice has entangled himself so inextricably in the machinery of Manneran’s government that it is difficult to say truly who is the ruler and who the civil servant.

On my third day in Manneran, Segvord took me to his courthouse to contract me into my job. I who was raised in a palace was awed to see the headquarters of the Port Justiciary; what amazed me was not its opulence (for it had none) but its great size. I beheld a broad yellow-colored brick structure, four stories high, squat and massive, that seemed to run the entire length of the waterfront two blocks inland from the piers. Within it at worn desks in high-ceilinged offices were armies of drudging clerks, shuffling papers and stamping receipts, and my soul quivered at the thought that this was how I was to spend my days. Segvord led me on an endless march through the building, receiving the homage of the workers as he passed their dank and sweaty offices; he paused here and there to greet someone, to glance casually at some half-written report, to study a board on which, apparently, the movements of every vessel within three days’ journey of Manneran were being charted. At length we entered a noble suite of rooms, far from the bustle and hurry I had just seen. Here the High Justice himself presided. Showing me a cool and splendidly furnished room adjoining his own chamber, Segvord told me that this was where I would work.

The contract I signed was like a drainer’s: I pledged myself to reveal nothing of what I might learn in the course of my duties, on pain of terrible penalties. For its part the Port Justiciary promised me lifetime employment, steady increases of salary, and various other privileges of a kind princes do not normally worry about.

Quickly I discovered that I was to be no humble inkstained clerk. As Segvord had warned me, my pay was low and my rank in the bureaucracy almost nonexistent, but my responsibilities proved to be great ones; in effect, I was his private secretary. All confidential reports intended for the High Justice’s eyes would cross my desk first. My task was to discard those that were of no importance and to prepare abridgments of the others, all but those I deemed to be of the highest pertinence, which went to him complete. If the High Justice is the economic filter of Velada Borthan, I was to be the filter’s filter, for he would read only what I wished him to read, and make his decisions on the basis of what I gave him. Once this was clear to me I knew that Segvord had placed me on the path to great power in Manneran.