Alkres blushed at that, but realized there was no real answer. "Thank you, ama."
A tiny lift-tube carried us up through the cliff to the Tower complex. Unlike the Halex Tower, the Orillon Tower had no single focus; instead, square, three-story buildings formed three corners of the pentagonal compound, while long, barn-like structures made up the sides. Flat sheets of mirror-glass glittered from roof-tree to the first-floor ceiling, and I guessed that, like the Halex, the Orillon kept greenhouses tucked beneath the steep roofs. I doubted, though, that they'd have much success in Electra's colder climate.
Signe led us directly across the courtyard toward the nearest of the three-story buildings, disdaining the shelter of the compound's other buildings. The unfamiliar cold struck through my boots—city boots, not the thick felt Oresteians wore against real cold—and set me shivering even beneath my cloak. I glanced at Alkres, and saw that he was shivering, too, gloved hands tucked deep into his tunic pockets. Not for the first time, I wished we'd had time to get him a coat, and a bashlyk for his head and face. But we could get those here, I told myself sternly—if Landret consented to help us.
It was much warmer inside the buildings, almost startlingly so, or at least it seemed warmer, after the frigid air outside. It was also a much brighter place than the Halex Tower had been. Lights were hung in every shadowed corner—lamps with fretted, gaily colored globes, as well as more practical plain ones—and the walls were painted with fanciful scenes of a city that floated on the surface of an unfrozen sea. Panels of striped silk in warm colors, reds and yellows and creamy whites, hung from the main staircase. Some of the panels had been sewn with thin strips of reflector cloth, I saw as we came closer, and a mobile, its pendants made of some highly polished metal, was hung directly beneath the skylight that dominated the stairwell. More mirrors lined the walls, reflecting and redoubling Atreus's feeble light.
"Father claimed it would cost more money than it was worth, when my Uncle Belen showed him the design," Signe said. "Now he's talking about adding a skylight to the other towers."
"It's wonderful," Alkres said. He kept his head tipped back as we made our way up the staircase. I had to steady him twice before we reached the first landing.
The Orillon Patriarch was waiting for us in his private study. This was a double-edged compliment, and I had to admire him for it even while it annoyed me. The room was small—I hadn't seen any really large rooms in our passage through the Tower, and assumed it was for warmth—and the walls were paneled with strips of goldenwood, rather than painted. There were half a dozen tape-carousels scattered about the room, each almost as tall as I, with very few empty slots: not merely a working office, I thought, but a library. Landret Orillon was sitting behind a rather battered executive's desk, but he had shut down his console as soon as the door opened, and now looked up in greeting. I had only seen him in hologram before; up close, his thin face looked almost haggard, and there were puffy circles under his eyes. His hair, pulled up and back into the traditional topknot, was grey, streaked with white.
"Welcome to my house, Alkres," he said, adult to adult, without the condescension Alkres had been braced to meet, and hauled himself to his feet. I heard Signe's quick intake of breath, and saw Landret fumble with something out of sight behind the screen, bracing himself bodily against the desk. Then the Orillon Patriarch had himself under control, and pulled himself awkwardly out into the main part of the room, leaning heavily on a pair of crutches. It had to be the arthritis that was endemic here, I thought blankly. Herself had suffered from it. . . . I had never seen Landret standing, of course, but I had never heard any gossip, either: he had to be quite a leader to achieve that sort of silence.
Landret stopped when he reached the cluster of chairs that stood near the middle of the long room, and freed one hand long enough to gesture toward them. "Please, be seated. Signe, will you do the honors?"
"Of course," the Heir murmured, her face unreadable, and turned away toward a standing cabinet. She returned a moment later with a tray of drinks, and coffee with its trimmings.
Landret lowered himself into a chair that had obviously been built specially for him, and freed his forearms from the crutch-rings with a sigh. Alkres started, and sat quickly in the closest chair. I seated myself on a tambour at his side.
"Will you take coffee, sor, Medium?" Signe asked, and I resigned myself to the polite small talk of the coffee service.
When at last we each had a glass, and had commented at some length on the spices and the savor, Landret leaned back in his chair, darting a mischievous glance in my direction. When he spoke, however, it was to Alkres. "Well, sor, we are in private here. May I suggest that we dispense with the formalities for now, and discuss this like the kin we are?"
"Kin?" Even Alkres looked a little blank at that.
"Distantly," Landret said.
Signe said, "If we're being informal, Father, I'll bite. How are we related?"
"Come now, daughter, what good are history lessons if you don't pay attention? Andres Orillon married and divorced—or was divorced by—Jessa Halex before Home Rule ever reached Orestes. Their child was Engineer at the Landing."
He was talking about events that had happened fifteen hundred years ago. It was hardly much of a claim to kinship—and if we couldn't do any better, after generations of intermarriage, Alkres could be in trouble. Quite possibly that was what Landret had meant to emphasize, I thought, and a chill went down my spine. I had known Landret was a formidable man—how could he be anything else, Patriarch of the one Kinship that stood outside the immediate tangles of Oresteian politics?—but I hadn't realized just how formidable he could be. I just hoped the revelation hadn't come too late.
"If we're being informal," Alkres said, "I don't think we ought to count that. It doesn't seem to be anything more than formality."
It wasn't a bad riposte, from a fifteen-year-old to a man four times his age. Landret smiled. "I suppose that's true. Now—" His voice sharpened suddenly, flicking from banter to cold question. "Just what is it you want from me, Alkres Halex?"
I stiffened, but knew I could not answer the old man's question. He was testing Alkres, I recognized that much, but I couldn't quite see the answer he wanted. Silently, I willed the boy to answer carefully.
Alkres shot a glance in my direction, but looked away as quickly, and I knew he'd recognized the test as well. The shadow of a frown showed on his face, but his voice was perfectly polite. "Sor, I've come to appeal to you, under the code, as Patriarch of a Kinship to another. I'm being cheated of the rights we all swear to protect when we promise to follow code, and I ask you to help me—I ask for sanctuary, and for your sanction."
Landret didn't answer for a long moment. At last, he said, "But what exactly do you want?"
Alkres's frown deepened. "I told you.—" He broke off, and said, with creditable steadiness, "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear; I'm not quite used to being Patriarch. Perhaps Trey could make it clearer."
"Serves you right," Signe murmured, and Landret's mouth twitched once. He controlled himself, however, and said, "Very well, Medium, let's hear your explanation."
"I don't see quite what I can add to Himself's appeal," I said, keeping my expression as open and innocent as possible. It is not a look I do particularly well, but it would serve, for this. "He—all of us—ask for sanctuary here, for shelter, and Himself wishes your sanction to speak before the Ship's Council. I think this is unquestionably a matter for the Council, sor."
"Why should I sanction you?" Landret leaned back in his chair, dismissing me as if I no longer existed. I felt sure he was doing it deliberately, to goad me into—what? I didn't know what he was pushing for, and that uncertainty helped me keep my anger under firm control.
Alkres lowered his eyes, looking out from under his lashes. It was a trick I'd seen him use before, to hide annoyance at his cousins, and I doubted he knew how demure it made him look. After a moment, he said, "Because I've been wronged."
There was a long silence, and then Landret said, "Trumped, by God. How old are you, Alkres?"
"Fifteen," the boy answered defiantly.
Landret nodded. I kept my face straight with an effort. Whether he'd fully intended it or not, Alkres had picked exactly the right words to sway the Orillon Patriarch. Under the code, of course, Landret was obliged to help him, and Alkres would have been within his rights to invoke that openly—but then Landret could have pretended to accept the Brandr justification of the attack, which ruled out any argument that any Halex had been wronged. This way, by simply assuming that Landret would follow the code, Alkres had put the older man under an obligation he could not refuse.
"Very well," Landret said. "You and yours are welcome here, as my honored guests, and I will sponsor you to speak to the Council—though I cannot promise more than that." He did not bother qualifying the statement, and Alkres's eyes widened briefly at that assumption of equality.
"I beg your pardon, sor," I said, "but when does the Council meet?"
"At Sunset," Landret answered. "Our Sunset." He reached for his crutches again, fitting his arms into the rings without seeming to look at them. "Until then, consider my household to be yours."
It was obvious dismissal, and we stood. Alkres said, with unexpected dignity, "It's been so long since people have behaved properly, I hardly know what I'm supposed to do. Thank you, sor."
Landret smiled. "Very prettily spoken, but it's only right. Signe, see them to their rooms."
As I'd expected, Signe turned us over to one of the house-stewards as soon as we'd reached the bottom of the great stairway, but as a courtesy, she walked with us to the neighboring Tower, where most of the Family was lodged. We were housed on the second floor, Alkres in a two-room suite usually reserved for Signe's child, the rest of us in the rooms to either side. Guil and Leith had chosen to share the larger room, and I wished with all my heart I had someone to share mine with. If Rehur had chosen to come with us. . . . But he had been right, it would have been impossible to keep to the code on the long flight.
"If you'd like, Medium, I can have your dinner sent up," the house-steward said, tentatively. "Don't worry about the Patriarch, I can see to him."
I hesitated, and she nodded toward the closed door of Leith and Guil's room. "They'll be eating informally tonight, Medium. It's no trouble."
I glanced at Alkres's door, knowing I should go down to dinner with him, but the temptation of a few hours' peace and quiet, away from all my responsibilities, was overwhelming. "Thank you, I'll accept the offer."
The house-steward nodded. "I'll send the tray in just about two hours."
"Thank you," I said again, but she was already out of earshot. This room was not as luxurious as my quarters in the Halex Tower—just a single room, with a stove-bed set into the near wall, and a tiny, palm-sized window—but it was perfectly comfortable. The painted walls were more muted here—abstract geometrics done in subtle, pleasing colors—and the furniture was the heavy, practical stuff I'd gotten used to on Orestes. More important, the wall heater, set in a carved frame of the charcoal-colored holdstone, had its own control. I hesitated only for an instant before turning it to its highest setting, telling myself I would be more conservative tomorrow. When the coils were glowing orange, I unfastened my cloak and set it aside, newly aware of my filthy clothes. There would be a communal bath somewhere nearby, of course, but there wasn't much point in washing if I had nothing clean to put on afterwards. Without much hope, I pulled open the storage drawers set into the wall beneath the bed. No clothes, as I'd expected, but there was a light quilted robe. I could ask the house-steward to find me some better clothes when she brought the tray. I stripped, wrapped the robe around me, and went looking for the baths.
It was crowded, of course, just before the dinner hours, but most of Oresteian etiquette evolved to deal with crowding. I managed to find a free cubicle, and spent a luxurious half hour washing away the last of the grime. Then, winding the robe tightly around me, I hurried back through the cold corridors to my room. The steward had been there before me, but my curse died away when I saw that she had left me not just the dinner tray but a complete change of clothing. A pile of ceramin laundry tags lay on the desk beside the tray. I dressed—the steward had made an accurate guess of the correct sizes, though the undershirt was a little short in the sleeves—then scrawled my mark on each of the tags. It was the work of a minute to fasten the cords to my filthy clothes, and I shoved them outside for the launderers to collect. It was only after I'd finished eating that I remembered I still didn't know precisely when Electra's Sunset was.
I'd never been anywhere on Orestes without finding an almanac close at hand, but it took me some minutes to find the slim pamphlet, tucked almost out of sight beneath the reader. I flipped through the flimsy pages until I found the current date—just past Electra's Sunrise, I discovered—and began counting diagrams. The concentric circles showed the moons' relative positions every twelve hours; Electra would cross the line into Sunset in about six calendar-days. That meant I had a little time before the Ship's Council met, and I didn't intend to waste it.
Neither did some others. Over the next three calendar-days, Guil managed to discover an old friend who worked on the tower switchboard, and persuaded him to keep us informed of events on Orestes. The news was mixed: the Brandr, aided and abetted by Yslin Rhawn, still managed to keep control of Destiny proper and the more settled parts of the Mandate, but they were unable to subdue the small-hold miners who had benefited so much from Herself's efforts, or the Destiny Necropolis. This was somewhat encouraging, especially when we began hearing rumors of perfectly respectable Family members—not merely of the mainline Family, but of the Branches as well—vanishing for calendar-days in the Necropolis, to reemerge as ghosts or para'anin, or simply as themselves, newly committed to Alkres's cause. The Brandr, it was said, were looking for any excuse to close the Necropolis, but every attempt had brought renewed threats of rioting. Rehur and his friends were doing their job well, as the script demanded. I only hoped he would have the sense to stop short of the usual denouement.
And then the ships began to arrive from Orestes. There weren't many, of course—the Brandr held both spaceports now, and the moons were moving apart, so that it took almost seventy hours to make the crossing—but the ships that did manage to lift brought Family members to show their support for their new Patriarch. Most had thought to bring money, thank God, since we could never have paid for their keep in Glittermark, and Landret Orillon agreed to support the rest. Alkres asked for and received a daily account of the costs, an adult gesture that pleased the Orillon Elders, and deceived no one. By ones and twos, the new arrivals made their way to the Orillon Tower to pay their respects to Alkres, and each one brought more news of resistance that stopped just short of open rebellion. Many of them were Rhawn, outraged by the Holder's behavior, and for the first time, I began to think that we might be able to win outright in the Ship's Council. The newcomers, some of whom I'd known slightly at the Tower, were less sanguine, but I couldn't help hoping.
Two days before the Council was to meet, the Donar landed at Glittermark, diverted from Orestes. I was sitting with Leith in one of the Tower's common rooms, staring out the low window at the thin snow blowing across the headland, when Guil arrived with the news. It meant nothing to me, and I frowned, but Leith's slow grin warned me that something important had happened.
"You know Petrovich, too, don't you?" she asked, still with her catlike smile.
Guil nodded. "Well enough, yes."
"Go talk to Colgar, see if he can give you a clear line to the Donar, and see what Petrovich is carrying. If it's right, get him to hold off doing anything about it until he's talked to me—or to Trey," she added, with a quick glance in my direction. "Just don't let him talk to anyone from off-world first."
Guil nodded again, unresentful of the order, and vanished. I said, "What's this all about, Leith?"
Moraghan's grin w
idened again, irresistibly. "Donar works under contract to Fenris and Sons, usually—that's who your Halex were dealing with, right? If we're lucky, we've got your boy's arms shipment."
"That would be too lucky a coincidence," I said.
"Would you want to put money on it?" Leith asked, and I shook my head.
"I don't bet on a sure thing. There's no sport in it."
As it turned out, though, I had to eat my words. Before Guil had time to contact her friend, a runner arrived from the switchboard to announce that a Captain Petrovich was looking for either a Captain Moraghan or a Mediator named Trey Maturin. We went down to the switchboard together, Leith crowing her victory.
The Donar had brought the Halex arms, but it had also brought complications. Leith's friend on the Trade Board had been unable to stop the first—Brandr—shipment, but on hearing of the unrest on Orestes, he had ordered Fenris and Sons either to stop or divert the second shipment. Evgen Petrovich had received the message just as he made the last jump to the system buoy. Fuel requirements left him no choice: he had to come into the system to refuel, so he had requested emergency berthing on Electra. That brought the weapons directly into the hands of the intended recipient, or at least it should have done so. Petrovich cited his orders from Fenris and Sons, and refused to consider delivery until he'd talked to his employers. I did my best to persuade him, but he remained adamant: only Fenris herself could authorize the release. He did agree to contact her, and I ended the conversation with the request that Fenris contact me if she had any questions.
Apparently, she didn't: within fourteen hours of my conversation with Petrovich, the captain was back on the 'net with apologies. Fenris took the position that the goods had been bought and paid for legally, and that she could not and would not stand in the way of their delivery to their rightful owner. That Alkres was that rightful owner, she had no doubt, and we made a brief foray into Glittermark to sign the appropriate papers. Signe, as Portreeve, waived the storage and import fees, and Alkres was left in possession of a blockhouse full of expensive weaponry.
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