‘No,’ Ehlana said, shaking her head. ‘If we make an overt move against the Ministry of the Interior, every policeman in the Empire will scurry down a rabbit-hole.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Let’s start to do inconvenient things to the other ministries as well. Don’t make it obvious that we’re concentrating all of our attention on the Ministry of the Interior.’
‘How can you possibly make things any worse than they already are, your Majesty?’ Oscagne asked in a broken voice. ‘You’ve disrupted centuries of work as it is.’
‘Can anyone think of anything?’ Sarabian asked, looking around.
‘May I speak, your Majesty?’ Alean asked in a small, timid-sounding voice.
‘Of course, dear,’ Ehlana smiled.
‘I hope you’ll all forgive my presumption,’ Alean apologized. ‘I can’t even read, so I don’t really know what files are, but aren’t we sort of letting on that we’re rearranging them?’
‘That’s what we’re telling everybody,’ Mirtai replied.
‘As I said, I can’t read, but I do know a bit about rearranging cupboards and such things. This is a little like that, isn’t it?’
‘Close enough,’ Stragen replied.
‘Well, then, when you’re rearranging a cupboard, you take everything out and spread it on the floor. Then you put all the things you want in the top drawer in one pile, the things you want in the second drawer in another, and so on. Couldn’t we do that with these files?’
‘It’s a nice i-dee, little dorlin’,’ Caalador drawled, ‘but they ain’t e-nuff floors in the hull buildin’ fer spreadin’ out all them there files.’
‘There are lots of lawns around the outside, though, aren’t there?’ Alean kept her eyes downcast as she spoke. ‘Couldn’t we just take all the files from every government building outside and spread them around on the lawns. We could tell the people who work in the buildings that we want to sort through them and put them in the proper order. They couldn’t really object, and you can’t lock the door to a lawn at night, or move things around when there are seven-foot-tall Atans standing guard over them. I know I’m just a silly servant girl, but that’s the way I’d do it.’
Oscagne was staring at her in absolute horror.
The soil on the western side of the Isle of Tega was thin and rocky, and since there was plenty of fertile ground farther inland, the citizens of the Republic had made no effort to cultivate here. Tough, scrubby bushes rustled stiffly in the onshore breeze as Sparhawk and his friends rode along a rocky trail leading to the coast.
‘The breeze helps,’ Talen observed gratefully. ‘At least it blows away that stink.’
‘You complain too much,’ Flute told him. The little girl rode with Sephrenia as she had since they had first encountered her. She nestled in her older sister’s arms with her dark eyes brooding. She straightened suddenly as the sound of surf pounding on the western shore of the Isle reached them. ‘This is far enough for right now, gentlemen,’ she told them. ‘Let’s have some supper and wait for it to get dark.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ Bevier asked her. ‘The ground’s been getting rougher the farther west we come, and the sound of that surf seems to have rocks mixed up in it. This might not be a good place to be blundering around in the dark.’
‘I can lead you safely to the beach, Bevier,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want you gentlemen to get too good a look at our ship. There are certain ideas involved in her construction that you don’t need to know. That’s one of the promises I had to make during those negotiations I was telling you about.’ She pointed to the lee-side of a rocky hillock. ‘Let’s go over there out of this wind and build a fire. I have some instructions for you.’
They rode away from the ill-defined trail and dismounted in the shelter of the hill. ‘Whose turn is it to do the cooking?’ Berit asked Sir Ulath.
‘Yours,’ Ulath told him with no hint of a smile.
‘You knew he was going to do that, Berit,’ Talen said. ‘What you just did was almost the same thing as volunteering.’
Berit shrugged. ‘My turn will come up eventually anyway,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d get it out of the way for a while.’
‘All right, gentlemen,’ Vanion said, ‘let’s look around and see what we can find in the way of firewood.’
Sparhawk concealed a smile. Vanion could maintain that he was no longer the Preceptor as much as he wished, but the habit of command was deeply ingrained in him.
They built a fire, and Berit stirred up an acceptable stew. After supper, they sat by the fire watching as evening slowly settled in.
‘Now then,’ Flute said to them, ‘we’re going to ride down to a cove. I want you all to stay close behind me, because it’s going to be very foggy.’
‘It’s a perfectly clear evening, Flute,’ Kalten objected.
‘It won’t be when we reach the cove,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to make sure that you don’t get too much chance to examine that ship. I’m not really supposed to do this, so don’t get me into trouble.’ She looked sternly at Khalad. ‘And I want you in particular to keep a very tight rein on your curiosity.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You’re too practical and too clever by half for my comfort. Your noble friends here aren’t imaginative enough to make any educated guesses about the ship. You’re a different matter. Don’t be digging at the decks with your knife, and don’t try to sneak off to examine things. I don’t want to drop by Cimmura someday and find a duplicate of the ship anchored in the river. We’ll go down to the cove, board the ship, and go directly below. You will not go up on deck until we get to where we’re going. A certain part of the ship has been set aside for us, and we’ll all stay there for the duration of the voyage. I want your word on that, gentlemen.’
Sparhawk could see some differences between Flute and Danae. Flute was more authoritarian, for one thing, and she didn’t seem to have Danae’s whimsical sense of humor. Although the Child Goddess had a definite personality, each of her incarnations seemed to have its own idiosyncrasies.
Flute looked up at the slowly darkening sky. ‘We’ll wait another hour,’ she decided. ‘The crew of the ship has been told to stay away from us. Our meals will be put just outside the door, and we won’t see the one who puts them there. It won’t do you any good to try to catch her, so don’t even try.’
‘Her?’ Ulath exclaimed. ‘Are you trying to say that there are women in the crew?’
‘They’re all females. There aren’t very many males where they come from.’
‘Women aren’t strong enough to raise and lower the sails,’ he objected.
‘These females are ten times stronger than you are, Ulath, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because the ship doesn’t have sails. Please stop asking questions, gentlemen. Oh, one other thing. There’ll be a sort of humming sound when we get under way. It’s normal, so don’t let it alarm you.’
‘How …’ Ulath began.
She held up her hand. ‘No more questions, Ulath,’ she told him quite firmly. ‘You don’t need to know the answers. The ship’s here to take us from one place to another in a hurry. That’s all you need to know.’
‘That brings us to something we really should know,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To