Songtsan Gampo awoke with a start, not knowing what had wakened him. Vaguely he remembered troubled dreams, but nothing that seemed to account for his waking. Swinging his legs from the bed, he put his feet on the floor. Outside his balcony doors was black night.
He’d had trouble going to sleep in the first place. Finally, toward midnight, he’d had a serving girl sent to him, one he’d noticed and had had instructed. The cause of his wakefulness, he had no doubt, was his unsolved problem: the demon in the fabric of the Tao. Clearly he couldn’t rely on Tenzin to handle it, but in the middle of the night, what could he do? So he’d had sex to satiation and soreness, and fell asleep before he could send the girl back to the maids’ quarters.
He wondered how long he’d slept. Not long enough, he thought wryly, and getting out of bed, started toward his balcony to better feel the night. A strange-feeling night, he told himself. As if something is waiting to happen.
Before he reached the balcony doors, the light of the oil lamp showed him the star man’s weapon on his dressing table. The star man! He’d had him put in a cell beneath the guard building, and then forgot him. Not entirely—he’d thought of him a time or two—but always in passing, when he was busy with other matters.
He picked the weapon up and looked it over again, wondering how effective it could possibly be. It was so small, and hadn’t even a blade!
What had the man said? When the right button is pushed, and the right lever—touched? No, squeezed . . . He examined it closely but cautiously. There seemed to be only one button and one lever.
Then a piece of metal was supposed to fly out of the little hole. It sounded like a fairy tale.
He pressed on the button, the safety. It didn’t depress, so he pushed it forward. Ah! That must be it. Then if one lined the hole up with the target and squeezed the little lever . . . Looking down the top of the barrel, he pointed it at the girl asleep in his bed, then lowered it and called to her.
“Girl! Wake up!”
She didn’t move, so he went to her and shook her roughly by a shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered and opened; she raised her head slightly from the pillow. “Get up! Now!” He slapped her. She blinked, became more fully conscious, then abruptly knew where she was and got quickly from the bed.
“Come with me,” he said, and led her into his study. “Stand there.” He pointed to the middle of a rug. She went there and stood, small and naked, her eyes frightened.
He raised the pistol and sighted down it. With a bow, he thought, one usually wants to put the arrow through the heart. He squeezed the trigger, and the gun fired with a bang that made him jump. The girl fell backward to the floor and lay there like a marionette with its strings cut.
Songtsan Gampo peered intently at her—clearly she was dead—and then at the seemingly harmless thing he held. Meanwhile the yeti door guard on duty had bounded in and stood staring, along with the emperor’s night runner.
The emperor looked at the ogre. “She is dead,” he said. “Leave her on the rug; pull it into the corridor and wrap her with it.” He watched the yeti drag her out, then turned to the runner. “Send someone to take the body to the trash bin, and someone else to arrange a special pickup. Otherwise it will stink.” He wrinkled his nose. “It does already. Also send to the guard barracks and have Corporal Nogai wakened. Have him select another guardsman and bring the star man to me at once.”
As he’d spoken, he’d stepped to his desk chair and laid the pistol on an arm of it. On the desk itself he turned a sand glass over, one in a row of them. “Also have Nogai informed that I want the star man here in the time the third sand glass takes to empty. Run! You and Nogai both will be punished, you and the man you send to waken him, if the glass is empty before he arrives. Go!”
The runner turned and fled.