Barrodagh leaned back in his chair, trying in vain to ignore the incessant, melodious chuckle of some kind of bird outside the window of his office in the Palace Minor. He massaged the bridge of his nose, his sinuses still outraged by the heady atmosphere of Arthelion.
The irony was as inescapable as it was irksome. He had expected to be more comfortable here, for the Mandalic Archipelago, with its mild weather and warm sun, was far more akin to his native Bori than the austere highlands of the Kingdom of Vengeance that had been his prison for so long. But Arthelion was merely a different kind of prison, in spite of its lack of high-gee corridors to afflict his joints and limit his movements. At times he found himself longing for the simplicity of Hroth D’Ocha.
Especially now. His compad flashed notice of an incoming real-time com. The irritation flared to anticipatory fury as he tabbed it—and the window came up blank.
It works just long enough to drive us mad. Long habit drove the back of his elbow into the edge of the table he’d taken as his desk, the familiar nerve-wringing pain dislodging the stupid notion.
Network access was intermittent, that was all. The computer tech, Ferrasin, whom Barrodagh had plucked from obscurity because he’d done his doctorate work on the history of the Mandalic computer system, had made it clear—or as clear as his stuttering permitted—that it was nearly miraculous that they had any communications at all inside the Palace, apart from the laboriously-wired secure access points in offices and critical security areas. “The whole Palace complex is faradayed: only line-of-sight communications are possible without the House network, and lower-chthon security phages keep surfacing and shutting down the access points we manage to open.” Barrodagh grimaced, remembering the shower of spittle that had accompanied Ferrasin’s attempt at the word “chthon.”
The compad flashed again. This time the window brought up Almanor’s name, then went blank. Barrodagh poked at his compad again. Nothing. He glared at the secure access point on the wall, cabling snaking from it to the hole in the baseboard. The light was green. Useless. If she’d been in range of a secure access point, he’d already be talking to her.
It had taken some time to get used to the compads. On Dol’jhar, the Catennach had been limited to a primitive mix of fixed consoles and belt communicators both by Dol’jharian paranoia and the reality of their confinement in low-gee offices and quarters. Not so on Arthelion, where the exigencies of the Occupation placed a premium on adaptability and mobility—at least for high-ranking Catennach. Subordinates were still limited to fixed consoles and beltcomms. But Barrodagh already found it hard to imagine going back to the old ways.
He got to his feet and grabbed his compad, then lunged for the door, lurching back on his heels just in time. All of them had bruises on their faces from walking into doors that refused to open even though moments before they had swung freely.
He thrust the door open.
“Dula—” He started to call for his secretary, and abandoned the half-name, the rage intensifying. He hated the necessity of a secretary, but until he had reliable communications, he had to have one. He’d given Dulathor that promotion from Rifter ship duty to the Avatar’s service, which was the highest any Catennach could achieve, and what does she do? Disappear.
Some insisted that the conscripts and Bori who had vanished were being murdered by a nascent resistance, but Barrodagh suspected she’d gotten a taste for... for what? Certainly not sex. Nor money—the smallest trace of a monetary trail would lead straight to the mindripper. Anyone who ran would know Barrodagh would not stint to find them. Perhaps it was simply the knowledge that, unlike Dol’jhar, with its crushing gravity and extreme climate, on Arthelion one could just walk away.
The replacement. What was his name? Danathar. Ordinarily, Barrodagh would never have promoted such into his personal service—his Uni was not fluent, he argued with Ferrasin and his techs, but most of all he never seemed to be actually there. But Barrodagh’s trusted staff was already stressed with the burden of extra, unexpected duties.
That was it, the unexpectedness. Barrodagh glared around the outer office. Danathar’s desk was scrupulously tidy, but he himself was absent. Again. The urge to consult his compad to locate Danathar was like an itch he could not scratch.
Barrodagh pushed through the outer door. Even the intensely-conservative Dol’jharian lords accepted the efficiency of automatic doors, except in their personal quarters. Why did the Panarchists insist on manual ones everywhere? As far as he could tell, there wasn’t a single automatic door in the Palace, unless one counted the little hatches that served the bots and dogs alike.
Just as he poked his head into the hallway Almanor approached, one hand tapping at her compad, her forehead lined with irritation as she looked up, then past Barrodagh.
The patter of steps from the opposite direction announced Danathar, who halted, saying breathlessly, “Forgive me, senz-lo Barrodagh. I got lost again.” His gaze flickered as he bowed obsequiously, and Barrodagh thought, He’s lying. But there was no way to prove that—not without assigning yet more overburdened staff to the task. And Danathar knew that.
“Senz-lo Almanor,” Danathar went on. “We’ve lost contact with the detention area.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Almanor said to Barrodagh.
She was in charge of the sections where the Panarchists were housed: communications to all those areas were highest priority.
“Is it—” Barrodagh began, then shook his head. Useless to ask the question of two whose ignorance was as apparent as his own.
Anything even remotely having to do with those prisoners must be investigated by Barrodagh himself. He started off toward the lift to sublevel one, Almanor beside him.
“Should I...” began Danathar.
“Stay there. Monitor the office,” Barrodagh called over his shoulder, and to Almanor, “Do you have your map?”
“I have a map,” she said, her fingers bringing it up. “Ferrasin’s techs made it for me. But it’s useless, as we can’t get access to the sensors to locate us on it, and the bots remove the location signs as fast as the grays put them up.”
Obviously she didn’t know her way around any better than he did.
Barrodagh felt a snarl twisting his lips, and bit hard into the side of his cheek as he looked away. Almanor closed her compad and dropped it to swing at her belt as they ran to the nearest lift.
Barrodagh struggled against the acidic fury lapping at the back of his throat. It was useless, it only made him feel sick, and he had to regain, and stay in, control. But so much constant irritation—so many small, insignificant things—the doors, the insistent mindless bots, the growing lack of discipline, the general recalcitrance of the palace systems... and the damned dogs. The Avatar took affront at every puddle of urine or dog turd he encountered in his peregrinations about his new demesne, regarding them as a blot on the triumph of his paliach.
Paliach. Then there were the sudden heart-lurches, the sharp pangs of remembered terror that still caused Barrodagh to jerk awake at night, drenched in cold sweat from dreams of Hreem’s gloating face. “One of the Panarch’s sons is here...”
Barrodagh bit his cheek again, hard enough to cause the copper-taste of blood and forced his mind to the moment.
They reached the lift after one false turn. It functioned fine, its cables undisturbed, but as soon as the doors slid open at sublevel one, the sounds of hammering and other machinery reached them. In the pause between one set of machine noises and another, someone cursed heatedly, offering the names of at least three demons. As Barrodagh and Almanor followed the sound of the voices, a voice rose in disgust. “This time they chewed it up and pissed on it.”
The work party of grays paused in their work at the sight of them, then turned to the Tarkan in command. She raised a hand and said, “Senz-lo Barrodagh. It appears the damage is being done by dogs.”
“Dogs,” Barrodagh repeated. “Why would dogs chew the cables?”
“Someone is commanding them,” Almanor said, her voice trembling.
At least she was fighting the same tide of fury. “Kill them,” Barrodagh said. “That order was never rescinded. Kill them on sight.”
The grays exchanged looks as the Tarkan said emotionlessly, “No one reports seeing them.”
“Did you put out more poisoned meat?” Barrodagh asked. “As I recall, we got rid of a number of them when we did that.”
“Twelve,” Almanor reported. “Until they stopped eating the poisoned meat.”
“So you put out a different type of meat, and make sure the poison is odorless and tasteless,” Barrodagh said, scarcely restraining his sarcasm. Why was this so difficult to figure out?
“Do you not think we tried that?” Almanor retorted. “It worked precisely as well as sealing up the bot-hatches the dogs apparently use for access, and destroying the sensors to unblock services, and just about everything else we try in this damned maze...” She stopped, her lips pressed together.
Barrodagh carefully unclenched his teeth until the tightness of his throat relaxed, and his voice could be trusted. On Dol’jhar, Almanor would have been more circumspect. “Then clearly someone is commanding the animals. The order to shoot on sight stands, but institute a thorough sweep for their human commander. Someone has to be directing the sabotage: the location of this latest evidence is not random.” He had no idea where Green Corridor was in relation to where they now stood, but surely at least one of those in front of him did. If the security system can’t be trusted, what is to keep them guarded?
The vivid image of dogs somehow loosing the Panarchist prisoners was real enough to shoot terror through Barrodagh’s nerves. They’d chosen the Green Corridor because of the paucity of bot hatches there, and the primitive nature of the cells, but still...
One of the Panarch’s sons... Once again the memory hit him with the force of a blow.
Dogs, sensors... He turned to the Tarkan in charge. “I want chuqaths in the watch sector surrounding Green Corridor. Let them roam freely.” The Tarkan evidenced surprise with the merest flicker of dark brows, and Barrodagh added, “I know they can’t be trusted. I want that savagery on guard here.” No dog would survive an encounter with a hungry chuqath. “Make certain that the grays and other non-essential staff are told to stay clear of this area.”
“It shall be done,” the Tarkan responded. She motioned to one of the grays, who would have to relay the message using the nearest functional console.
That gave Barrodagh an idea. “Order a cart to meet us,” he told the Tarkan. “And make certain Ferrasin awaits our arrival.”
The gray hurried away, her gait an almost bounding run in the lower gravity of Arthelion.
Barrodagh and Almanor watched the grays remove the junction box. Its case had been quite deliberately torn apart—the teeth marks were evident if one examined closely. The stench of urine was strong as he bent. Not satisfied with shredding the internal circuitry, the dogs had urinated on the remains as well. No dog would do that on its own. There had to be someone, or someones, lurking in these very sublevels.
Well, the Tarkans would find them. In the meantime, he’d have to reassign some of the cims to make metal junction boxes, and cable cladding, until the techs could re-route the cables along the ceilings. Danathar could see to that.
The cart arrived. Barrodagh noted the grays watching as he and Almanor were driven away. There was less of the healthy fear in their expressions that had been the norm on Dol’jhar, he thought. Another sign of the ongoing erosion in discipline.
As the cart hummed through halls and corridors that all looked the same, Barrodagh smelled dog urine now and again; some sections were totally dark, and the driver sped through them.
The computer offices were deep under the Palace Major. Barrodagh walked into a chillingly cold room filled with blank-faced compute arrays, cables snaking everywhere and consoles on every surface. As Barrodagh and Almanor stepped over the cables, all the consoles blinked once, twice.
“No! No!” howled Ferrasin, a huge, sloppy man, both hands clutching unkempt sandy hair. “NonononoNO!”
The consoles all went dark. Several techs dived at the keypads. Someone somewhere must have achieved something, for the displays reappeared, the images bouncing in unison, then showing... the blue and gold phoenix medallion of the Panarchy.
“Ch-ch-chatzing...” the man uttered a strangled curse, spun around, then spotted Barrodagh. His face was red and sweaty, his expression almost demented. He blinked rapidly, then said, “At least wuh-wuh, we’ve b-bounced. Back.” He slowed, fists clenched as he struggled to enunciate past his stutter. “To the t-top. Top. Chthon.”
“Does that mean you can speed up progress in getting our compads functional beyond line of sight? And the Tarkan and conscript comms? Without the damned relays?” The need to wire independent access points had left security stretched perilously thin.
“It’s t-taken us tuh, time to fuh, fuh, fuh...”
“Firewall,” someone murmured softly from behind. Barrodagh could not see whom.
Rather than being irritated, Ferrasin seemed relieved, and waved a tech forward, a Bori who didn’t look any older than fifteen. He exchanged looks with Ferrasin, then said, “There are actually two problems here. We’re trying to extend our control of the upper chthons of the computer system so we can use the existing network for secure communications, rather than laying our own cable. “
The boy’s knobby hands swooped on the word ‘upper’ signaling symbolic rather than physical space. “While he’s trying to probe the deeper chthons, which is where things like the security phages and sensors are.”
“Can you find out who is commanding these dogs? They must be using their own communication system,” Barrodagh said.
“Dogs are deep chthon, too...” began the boy.
“No one,” Ferrasin interrupted. “N-no one is using the palace comms. I wuh, wish someone would. So we c-c-c-could puh, puh, piggyback. On their traffic. The d-dogs?” He swallowed, shut his eyes, and made an enormous effort that Barrodagh could almost feel in his facial muscles. His head began to pang.
“The p-palace system is almost a thousand years old. And enormously c-complicated. Dogs are p-part of it. The bots... w-we’re seeing em-muh-merrrr—”
“Emergent properties,” said the Bori tech. “We don’t think anybody programmed some of what we’re seeing.”
Barrodagh waved a hand, cutting off Ferrasin’s painful attempt to continue. “Just treat security of the prisoners as secondary only to matters pertaining to the Avatar. And report any progress to my office.”
“We’ve got some progress already,” a woman called from farther back in the room. She poked her head over a console, tired black eyes blinking. “The neuraimai are settling down! I think we’ve finally got them an upper-chthon space of their own that the system can’t get at.”
Barrodagh contained his impatience at the jargon. After some initial disasters that had furnished subjects for Evodh but no advances in understanding of the Palace compute arrays, he had learned to insulate Panarchist technical staff from the realities of Dol’jharian discipline—it just terrified them into stupidity. Unfortunately, that also tended to compromise the attitudes of the Bori technical staff he’d brought from Dol’jhar, but as with so much else on Arthelion, he had little choice.
“Translate,” he said to Ferrasin, who blinked, his face relaxing slightly.
“That’s m-major progress, senz-lo Barrodagh. Now we have a chance at penetrating the lower chthons of the s-system and undoing the security blocks. Once that’s d-done, we’ll be a lot closer to the access you want.”
Barrodagh nodded and walked out—followed by Almanor. So her purpose was not just a status report from Ferrasin, but something private. He wasn’t going to hear it in front of the gray driving the cart.
As they passed a lift, Barrodagh halted the driver with a word, and climbed off the cart. Sure enough, Almanor hopped down as well, showing the ten years of difference in their ages with her agility. The lift took them back to ground level, opening onto a corridor supported by fluted columns of rose marble. He knew where he was: his offices were in the building across this garden, which held pools of fish gathered from numerous worlds.
The enormous glass door slid open, and they walked into the garden. Both their compads chirped at the same time; they were now in range of the external Dol’jharian system.
Barrodagh glanced at his and suppressed a groan at the length of his message queue—what good was Danathar, anyway? But that could wait. More important was whatever Almanor was working herself up to.
He scrutinized the complication of vines and flowering shrubs surrounding the tiered pools, then said, “I imagine your com queue is nearly as long as mine.”
Almanor looked around very deliberately, as though Barrodagh hadn’t scanned. He suppressed his irritation. He had never liked her, but he would not deny her thoroughness, which was as scrupulous as his own. And he was as sure as was possible among the Catennach that she was no threat to him.
She said, “There’s something going on with Vox.”
Vox Populi. On Dol’jhar, nobody ever talked outside Catennach quarters about the game that was so very much more than a game. Here, in the complexity of the Palace, there was less reason to fear the lords’ attention, but the reticence remained. This must be serious. Barrodagh stopped, facing her. “What?”
Almanor’s thin lips pressed into a pale line. Then she said, “It’s...” She glanced skyward, as if the data was written there. “Vox is changing. I still don’t think it was a good idea to run it on the Palace arrays, although I realize we had little choice if we were to run it at all. But the longer it runs, the more compute space it consumes, the odder it gets.”
When Barrodagh began to speak, she brought up a hand. “I realize we don’t have time or wherewithal to deal with it now. But I thought you’d better know.”
On Dol’jhar, Barrodagh had been only an observer of the game, and occasional participant in the hidden conversations about Bori life it made possible. On Arthelion he didn’t even have time for that.
“What do you mean, odder?”
She shook her head. “I can’t really define how, except to say that players whom no one took seriously on Dol’jhar seem to be unusually lucky. Like Danathar. And Nyzherian. Especially him. He’s gaining gravitas with every round.”
“Nyzherian has too much free time,” Barrodagh said. “I shall amend that.”
Her lips curled upward at the corners, then she turned away, and walked rapidly in the direction of her own offices.
Vox Populi! There would be some changes in Catennach playtime, starting today. For a few steps Barrodagh took pleasure in working out the wording of the memo. But he must not let himself be distracted with the easy problems. As he turned up one of the slate pathways, careful to avoid stepping on the fragile-looking grasses, and swatting at things that buzzed near his face, he forced himself back to one of the deeper problems, one he yearned to delve into when he regained computer control.
Deeper problems were those with roots back on Dol’jhar, when his control had seemed secure: how could he possibly have missed the connection between Anaris and the slave Lelanor? More importantly, how could he have missed that Lelanor had been taken aboard the Fist of Dol’jhar? It could only be Evodh behind it, and his motivation to strike at Barrodagh’s careful attempts to build trust with the conditional heir.
Barrodagh stumbled over some loose rocks on the path, and paused to kick them back into place, with a swift and wary look to make certain the Avatar was not roaming about as he’d begun doing so uncharacteristically. The intermittency of their comms made it difficult to keep track of him, which was another... oh, it was far too dangerous, and unsettling, to think of as an irritation.
He never would have known about the incident with Lelanor if Morrighon had not reported it. He did not have enough resources, that was the fundamental problem. Without resources, how could he establish the control he needed? His cheek ached, and that brought back Hreem’s face. One of the Panarch’s sons...
That vid replaced his surroundings: Brandon nyr-Arkad exiting a flyer, and behind him, Barrodagh’s agent, the cashiered marine guard Deralze. What really happened that day at the Ivory Hall? Barrodagh was beginning to suspect that this question was the impulse behind the nightmares, not merely the shock of discovering that Brandon nyr-Arkad was still alive, and free, when he had expected to hear from Rifthaven that Deralze had delivered the nyr-Arkad’s head and had then been killed. At least he’s dead now. They both are.
Fortunately, Brandon nyr-Arkad’s death had followed close enough on the news that he was alive that Barrodagh had been able to balance the failure of the Enkainion plot with the Krysarch’s death in his report, thus preserving the Avatar’s paliach, if not his paliachee. Even so, Barrodagh had been astonished at how easily Eusabian took the news.
He rocked back on his heels when once again he almost ran into a door—another heavy glass one. After a moment it slid open. He entered the cooler hallway beyond, blinking to adjust to the shadowy lighting. His compad chirped again as it lost access.
A short time later he entered his office antechamber. Danathar was present at his desk, Barrodagh noticed with sour approval.
“There are several requests for real-time coms for you, senz-lo Barrodagh,” Danathar said obsequiously. “Beginning with Kyvernat Juvaszt.”
Barrodagh nodded curtly as he continued through to his private office, showing no sign of his satisfaction. Juvaszt, with his familial connection to the Eusabians, had been one of the most dangerous Dol’jharian nobles with whom Barrodagh had to deal in the run-up to the attack, and had always communicated through subordinates. But no longer; not since the near disasters at Narbon and Lao-Tse.
He brought up his queue and touched Juvaszt’s name. In less time than Barrodagh had expected, the kyvernat’s dark, scarred face windowed up.
“Kyvernat,” Barrodagh said.
Juvaszt did not speak for a moment. Barrodagh watched his jaw muscles bunch before the Kyvernat finally said, “I am concerned about the Avatar’s security. The Panarchists will eventually rally, and I need more ships for the defense of Arthelion.”
Juvaszt calling the Rifters ‘ships’ was an acknowledgement that Barrodagh had never thought to hear. Before he’d referred to the Rifter allies by pejoratives. The only ‘allies’ in his view were the Dol’jharians dispatched to Narbon and Lao Tse.
That was another deep-reaching problem that Barrodagh had managed not to think about: just how close they had come to losing the battles that had erupted after the assassination of Semion and the capture of the Panarch.
It had been relatively easy to play on the kyvernat’s belief in the superiority of the Pure Blood—an assumption shared by Eusabian—to limit Dol’jhar’s nascent fleet to the Fist of Dol’jhar and three destroyers. Procuring more, Barrodagh had felt, would have risked alerting the Panarchists.
Not procuring more had very nearly lost them Narbon and Lao Tse. The assassination of Semion had not, as expected, disrupted the Naval response, and Dol’jhar had lost two destroyers at Narbon, manned with Dol’jhar’s best, with a third battered almost into scrap. Not to mention the loss of some of the best-drilled forces among the Rifters. Though the losses the Navy had taken were tremendous, they had come very close to winning: only the fact that Barrodagh had assigned an overwhelming force had turned the tide, no matter how much the Pure Blood despised the Rifters and Panarchists.
It had been very little better at Lao Tse. The battlecruiser that had brought the Panarch and the Privy Council to the planet had badly mauled the Dol’jharian destroyer leading the Rifter contingent before being destroyed. The only functional capital ship actually crewed by Dol’jharians was again, as had been the case in the long years since Acheront, the Fist of Dol’jhar.
The fact that Juvaszt said he needed “ships” was as close as the Kyvernat could come to acknowledging the truth of that.
Well, there was no need to exacerbate the Kyvernat’s wounded pride.
Too much, anyway.
“I will consider our strategic situation with that in mind.” Barrodagh paused just long enough to allow Juvaszt’s irritation at his apparent deflection to surface, and then added, “In the meantime, as you know, the Satansclaw is on the way from Charvann. I will place Tallis Y’Marmor under your command once he has discharged his duty concerning the Urian artifact.”
The Kyvernat jerked his head in assent, looking as if he had swallowed something unpleasant, and cut the connection. Barrodagh closed his eyes, taking the space of three breaths to enjoy a momentary pause, then opened his eyes and pulled up the rest of his queue.
o0o
Two weeks into their flight, Marim woke from jumbled dreams with a sense of anticipation that at first she couldn’t identify. The subliminal hum of Telvarna around her... fuel stash? No! They were going to the nick planet, with...
She chortled as she rolled out of bed. The nicks! Not that she’d gotten the drama she’d hoped for.
Whatever was going on with Montrose and the Schoolboy happened in the galley, and if you nosed around there, Montrose had a nasty habit of snagging you and putting you to work. As for the Arkad, he’d slept two ship’s days through. When he came out on their fourth day out, Vi’ya sent him straight to Jaim, like promised. And he went.
Marim paused to consider that. When he’d arrived, he’d been the nick, or the Arkad. Somehow he was turning into Brandon, though she had never heard him ask anyone to call him that—unlike the Schoolboy, who had become monotonous with his “My name is Omilov, and I have earned the rank of Lieutenant.”
It was difficult to believe that Brandon really was an Arkad; at least, not the kind of royal nick you saw in wiredreams. For one thing, he talked even less than Jaim. For another, he followed directions like any other slub, as he was passed from hand to hand to do scutwork both necessary and unnecessary.
Marim had watched avidly from a distance. After the Arkad had to strip and rebuild the Eya’a’s tianqi, then the ship’s tianqi, Jaim sent him under the engine housings to check the wave guides and couplings. Then she saw young Ivard blushing and stammering as he directed him in shifting and unpacking crates of supplies. Even Lokri had had charge of him once, though he seemed to prefer avoiding the nicks altogether: the Arkad had to crawl under each of the consoles on the bridge, probing circuit nodes, while Lokri lounged, bored, tabbing lazily at his console.
Those next few days, after his work shift was over Brandon went straight to his cabin and slept.
Then, the rec shift just before Marim’s snooze watch, for the first time, the Arkad had stayed after he ate. He sat there at one of the consoles, reading something, but Marim noticed how everyone was aware of him. When she’d left to sleep, he was talking to Montrose about music.
Marim dressed and left her cabin. She found Lokri in the rec room. As she punched up a rice bowl, Greywing appeared.
“Hey,” Jaim greeted her. “Montrose let you out?”
Greywing’s freckled skin blotched with color. “Said I could be up for rec time.”
Marim had seen Greywing out of sickbay several times, probably checking on Ivard. As if the boy could get lost! But Marim was not going to interfere. “Where’s the Arkad?” she asked.
“Montrose has him working in hydroponics, since Schoolboy is cooking,” Greywing said. “I saw him when I left sickbay.”
“He’s practically cleaned the entire ship.” Marim whistled. “No squawking, either. Wonder if Vi’ya’s going to let up? Never knew her to be nasty like that before.”
Greywing snorted. “Not being nasty.”
“What’s the purpose, then?” Jaim asked in his quiet voice. “No fun when he just does what we tell him, and doesn’t even talk nick.”
Greywing’s watery blue eyes turned Lokri’s way, then she turned back to Jaim and shrugged. “You figure it out.”
Jaim shook his head, the tiny talismans woven into his six brown braids tinkling gently. “Rack time for me.” He slouched out.
Lokri got to his feet, lip curled in faint derision. “My watch,” he said, and also left.
Greywing eased herself down, her short, square body a contrast to Lokri’s elegant length. She put her hands around her cup of hot caf, her wounded arm still held close to her side.
Greywing was one of the best scantechs in the Rift Sodality or out of it. Rumor had it that three of the Rifthaven syndicates had tried to hire her, shortly before Hreem attempted to obtain her services by more violent means. She’d somehow known that his lethal pet tempath was coming to abduct her, and had escaped.
Vi’ya said Greywing was not a tempath, but that she had an uncanny ability to sniff out traces of ships and figure action-patterns that not only had saved them again and again but had made them reasonably wealthy. If Greywing had not been at the other base, Markham might still be alive, Marim thought, looking at the unprepossessing pale, freckled face before her.
Greywing and her little brother Ivard were both ugly, throwbacks to a time when humans had pale, thin skin, and they had constant eye trouble. But they were both talented in other ways. Not just good at sniffing out the intentions of ships, Greywing was also remarkably adept at reading people. But she didn’t always share what she read.
Marim slid into the seat across the table from her and smiled. “Lokri hates nicks.”
“So do I—sometimes,” Greywing said unexpectedly.
“But you don’t think Vi’ya does?” Marim prompted. “Or maybe she thinks it’s funny for the Arkad to be scrubbin’ Rifter engine castings.”
Greywing hunched her shoulders. “‘S what Lokri thinks. Let ’im. Not true, though.”
“So why’d she do it?”
Greywing narrowed her eyes, her lip curling. “Didn’t you see anything when you gave ’em the tour?”
“See what? The Schoolboy looked like we smell bad, and the Arkad kept eyeballing things like something was missing. Servants, I thought.”
“Markham, vacuumskull,” Greywing said. “Hit him, sting after sting. Must have. Anywhere he looked he’d see Markham—don’t you think he’d see right away who redesigned everything when he took us over?”
Marim’s mouth popped open. “Ha! Didn’t think of that. Even changed the tianqi scents, maybe those are familiar nick settings. Nasty thought.”
Greywing sat back, lips pursed in a small smile. “Knows Markham’s ship now,” she said. “After he been crawling around in its guts it no longer be a shrine.”
“Shrine!” Marim repeated, laughing. “Greywing, you been poppin’ hopper. Lost your mind.”
Greywing got up. “You got no mind to lose, Marim.” She snorted a dry, voiceless laugh, finished her caf, and went out, probably to check up on her brother.
o0o
In the galley Osri wiped his nose, frowned fiercely, and resumed chopping onions. “Damn these Rifters,” he muttered on each smack of the knife, “and damn squared that Light-accursed villain Montrose.”
His hand whacked down with increasing violence until a low, cultured voice startled him into nearly adding four fingers to the pile.
“Even strokes, Schoolboy, even strokes. Lumps are not acceptable in this dish. Unless your uselessness is repaired, and quickly, I fear I shall have to request the captain to invite you for a stroll solitaire out the lock. I can work faster, and more peacefully, alone.”
Osri ached to throw the knife at the old monster, but instead he forced his lips to acknowledge the command, and his hands to chop more evenly as Montrose vanished across the short corridor into the sickbay again, his voice a low rumble as he talked to that red-haired spacer with the burn.
Osri’s life had become hell ever since that first watch, when the captain ignored the carefully thought out speech he’d said about his credentials, and what he felt was appropriate work for one of his training.
She’d led him straight to the galley and handed him off with a wave to Montrose—this giant, grizzled man with a flamboyant taste in clothing that a man of his age should long ago have grown out of.
“Chef and ship’s doctor,” Montrose had said, smiling. “And I can use an assistant.”
Osri had sneered at the obvious barbarity of employing a cook for health care—and Montrose had only laughed.
Osri paused and savored the image of the knife flying at Montrose’s bearded face. It would be great to see him panic—except he wouldn’t panic, Osri reflected bitterly. Being the Rifter murderer and thief he was, he’d probably just pluck the knife from midair by the handle, put it neatly away, and set Osri to scrubbing floors and walls again. And if he refused...
Osri winced at the memory of the drubbing that Montrose had given him on that never-to-be-forgiven first shift. The huge man had effortlessly swatted Osri’s fists aside with one of those tree-thick arms, then—squashing him companionably against a chest like a cast of metal ingots—informed him that, much as he detested violence, a thrashing would be “good for your soul.”
It had taken two days to recover from that—two days of feeling even worse than he had after surviving Lao Shang’s Wager.
Ever since then, he’d been stuck in this damn galley, first cleaning it from deck plates to bulkheads. Then came two entire ship’s days of exacting rules for tending vegetables in the hydroponics tanks, and the proper cleaning and cutting of them. After which he graduated to chopping and stirring and measuring. Then another round of cleaning. Over and over.
Two solid weeks of that, and the fiend finally consented to instruct him in how to... stir. Osri had put in more training hours before operating his first in-system aircraft. Stirring!
Montrose reappeared. Osri nearly jumped, relieved when he discovered that his hand had returned to the monotonous stirring. Bitter was his resentment of how habitual some of this cookery slubbing had become.
Montrose’s mighty paw looked incongruous picking up the tiny tasting spoon. He delicately skimmed the spoon across the top of the simmering sauce and held it out to Osri, who reluctantly opened his mouth. He knew that the sauce would be delicious—and that he would have to admit it, or be castigated as ignorant “as that nullrat Marim.” Much more repellent than praising his sauces was the prospect of being equated in any way with the disgusting Rifter vermin infesting this ship.
“Roll it around. Don’t bolt it like one of those hell-spawned syntho-paks. Now. There should be three different taste levels... First, the initial pungency...”
Osri swallowed the spoonful and glared at Montrose, who gazed at the bulkhead in pleasurable contemplation.
When Osri was scrubbing down walls in the dispensary, he had done some checking on the computer there and found a formidable bank of medical information, much of it in language Osri found difficult to decipher. If the man had not gotten a medical degree, he must have studied somewhere.
“... then it should blend into savory as you consider the intermingling of spices and the broth base...” Montrose went on, still looking soulfully upward.
Osri gritted his teeth. Then there was the pirate’s pleasant, helpful tone as if his perforce assistant were the most eager of volunteers. Not once had Osri’s most acrid sarcasm brought any reaction but a smile and an expansive answer.
“And last... the pure taste of the sweet phraef wine. Ahhh. Don’t you agree?”
“Certainly better than those it’s intended for,” Osri muttered, curling his lip.
Montrose’s wide, bearded face took on a long-suffering look. “I begin to fear you are hopeless, and I am wasting valuable time on a lead-tongued oaf. The chzchz herb was too strong and upset the balance of the second level. Never mind—it’s not completely ruined. Get back to your pastry dough, and remember: rhythm! Rhythm!” He grinned. “You would hate to get to the eighth kneading and discover that you must begin again.” Montrose pulled out a synth and set it across his lap. “I shall favor you with inspirational music to help you gain your rhythm.” Shutting his eyes, he began playing, his thick fingers dancing across the keyboard as a complicated melody filled the air.
Osri trod heavily across the little galley, cursing under his breath. A loud, rusty rumbling sound, not unlike a mowing machine badly out of adjustment, announced the presence of the second worst horror he’d found aboard this Telos-forsaken pesthole.
“Get away, you disgusting beast,” he snarled at the huge cat that appeared atop a storage cubicle. Its cream-colored fur was short and sleek, faintly striped with brown on head and ears, paws and tail.
The wedge-shaped head lifted, and its slightly crossed eyes fixed on Osri, the pale blue of glacier ice. The rumble increased in volume. The cat leapt to the floor and butted against Osri, its tail high, the big head wiping back and forth behind Osri’s knee, making his leg buckle. It obviously loved music—and conversation.
“Keep your foul hair away from my food,” Osri snapped at the cat. “Begone!” He waved his chopping knife at it.
The cat’s blue eyes widened. It opened a mouth full of needle-sharp white teeth and emitted a loud sound not unlike one of a lawn-tender sheering through a rock, then rubbed harder against his leg. The animal, it appeared, loved insults even more.
Montrose chuckled and continued to play, without pause or error, a series of brilliant, complex compositions. Osri had no particular talent for music, but his Douloi education had equipped him to recognize at least one of them as originating on Lost Earth before the Exile. The cat provided a percussive accompaniment with its loud purr.
Muttering heartfelt imprecations, Osri braced his weight against the cat’s ministrations and slapped the lumpy white dough onto the kneading board.