Quoted By:
~~FILLERPOST~~
mathing Toady's TRAINAN happens in 26 hrs from here
There are benefits from doing people's laundry. Their marks of trade, station, outlook and habit of life are on their loads. And these merely for those with eyes and noses; those that have <span class="mu-i">knowing</span> can tell much more: character, luck, direction, and fate.
Match these to the dropped morsels of the washerwomen's gossip and a picture emerges:
Many Rhea of Whythistle will die a violent death, and more follow from privation. Not that they are aware at this moment; possibly no one knows but the ones preparing to act upon them.
For all the Rheas cultural sneaking and thieving, it wasn't unknown that a key node of the Underground was hidden and supported in Whythistle.
What <span class="mu-i">was </span> unknown was that Myrmid spies have already come among them: transient Humans in the main, but also Rheas of low character, low station, none of their own will, none conscious of their condition.
They suffered a kind of aural mites, each no larger than a speck floating in sunlight. But they left their victims in a perpetually hightened state of curiousity and verbally compulsive, unable to keep secrets under stress. It would be easy enough to send a host of such infested persons among the common folk, then harvest a crop of them the following year or so with an "invitation to tea".
This mite was a cultivated 蠱 (Gu), Yang Wuhan was sure. Very weak in its suggestive power, impossible to improve and therefore pointless to cultivate, and yet, employed in quantity, might spoil kingdoms by their secrets.
Information about the Underground was already being fed to the Myrmids; the concerted destruction of Whythistle was a pending matter.
All this he learned just from doing laundry at Prestie's.
The other great benefit was that it kept him in money; Tudi had run off without giving him any.
