“Hello. Yes, small glass—and, Major Mason, if you don’t mind—”
“Let him stay. He’s my deputy,” Rick protested.
“It’s all right, Colonel. I better go check out that commotion in the courtyard. I’ll be back to walk you to your meeting.”
“Don’t bother. Jamiy and the guards can do that.”
Mason nodded. It wasn’t hard to read his expression. Since Tylara’s man Caradoc had been killed in street riots, there weren’t as many locals Rick could trust to guard his back. Come to that, a lot of other things had changed for the worse.
“I’d rather you found out what the problem is down there.”
“Okay.” Mason threw half a salute and left without waiting for Rick to return it.
Rick poured wine and handed it to Les. They sat at the table and Rick lifted his goblet. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
They sat in silence. Finally Les spoke. “I’ll be leaving in a day or so.”
“Back to Earth?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose I can talk you into taking us with you.”
Les shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t want me to.” He wasn’t smiling.
“Try me.”
“You wouldn’t. What would you do? Go to the authorities? Tell them you were kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken across light-years to another planet just so you could grow drugs?”
“Well, that would have the great merit of being true—”
“And the serious demerit that no one would believe you,” Les said. “It would be worse if someone did. Either way you’d irritate the High Commission, make a deadly enemy of Inspector Agzaral, and spend the rest of your life dodging us. No, my friend, you do not want to be returned to Earth.”
“What if—suppose we promise to lay low? Never tell what happened to us?”
“No,” Les said.
“Yeah, well I suppose you can’t believe us—”
“Even if I did, I couldn’t hide the fact that I took you back to Earth. I could probably hide it from the Commission, but not from Agzaral. I don’t know what he’d do about it, but I don’t want to find out.” Les sipped at his wine. “There’s another reason. You may be safer on Tran.”
“What? Come off it! This planet is coming apart! It’s going to be fried by a rogue sun, the ice caps melt, coasts under water, migrations sparking wars everywhere, and your Shalnuksi friends are probably going to bomb the survivors back to the Stone Age anyway—and you say—”
“I say it may be safer than Earth,” Les repeated. “Things happen so fast. Atom bombs. Space travel. Big colliding beam accelerators. Huge lasers. Leave things alone and pretty soon Earth will have real space travel. There are factions on the Commission that don’t want that.”
“And they’d really bomb Earth?”
“I don’t know. They could.”
“You said Earth is the breeding ground for—for wild humans.”
“Wild. Not like me,” Les agreed. “Not slaves.”
“Slave soldiers. Janissaries.”
“I’m not a soldier,” Les said. “But yes, that’s as good a description as any.”
“And you run the whole damned empire—”
“It’s not an empire.”
“Confederation. But humans run it. You have all the military power, but you’re still slaves. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Put that way, maybe not. But you don’t have to make sense of it. Lay off, Rick. Just lay off.”
“Lay off. Look, I have to know. Are they going to bomb Earth? Us? Both?”
Les shook his head. “Rick, I don’t know. I don’t understand Federation politics. Agzaral may know what’s going on. He claims to. But he hasn’t told me.”
“You haven’t told me much, either,” Rick said.
“I know. Look at it my way. It’s all the Shalnuksis need, to find out Tran natives are discussing Federation politics! They’d sure know who told you.”
“How will they find out?”
“The next time one of their ships comes here they’ll see changes. More water mills. Your semaphore towers. They just might pick up some locals for questioning. One of your mercs. You, even. They’re pretty lazy. They probably won’t. But they could.”
“Do they own this planet, then?”
“It’s complicated,” Les said. “The Commission has rules about dealing with primitives, but they don’t seem to apply to this place. Most records of Tran have been lost. I expect the Shalnuksis paid plenty to lose them. There are rules, my friend, but who’ll enforce them?”
“Agzaral?”
“Maybe. If it’s to his interest.”
“What is his interest?”
Les shrugged and held his glass out to be refilled. “I do not know. He doesn’t tell me.”
“But—”
“But I do as he says anyway,” Les said. His voice fell and he grew more serious. “Agzaral’s all I’ve got. I think he’s doing his best to look out for humans. All humans, everywhere, and especially Earth. Think, hell. I don’t think it, I know it. He’s doing his best. Whether that’s good enough is another story, but he is trying.”
“Okay. But about the Shalnuksis—”
“They don’t exactly own the planet, but you better act like they do. And if Tran looks like it’s about to spring an industrial and scientific revolution, the Commission has some hard choices to make. They’d have to set up permanent surveillance, with an inspector. Like Agzaral’s operation on Earth’s Moon. That could be expensive. There’ll be some to argue that it’s cheaper and simpler to blast Tran back to the Early Iron Age.”
“Like they did before—”
“Like the Shalnuksis did before,” Les corrected. “Two or three times before. But that was their own work. If the Commission orders it, the bombardment will be a lot more thorough.”
“Will they do that?”
Les shook his head. “Insufficient data. The Shalnuksis don’t have as much influence in the Commission as they used to have. That’s the good side. And there’s Agzaral’s plan.”
“Whatever that is—”
Les nodded firmly. “Whatever that is. Because it’s about all we’ve got.”
* * *
By the light of the Demon Star the dead sentry looked uglier than the run of corpses. Lord Morrone knew that there was no such thing as a handsome corpse; for all that he had not seen his eleventh name-day he had been in enough battles to learn that. Even so, the sentry was an unwholesome sight, his face dark, tongue protruding, and his clothes fouled and stinking. It’s not his look, it’s what this foretells.
Morrone and his guardsmen whirled, hands to swords, at the sound of footsteps.
“Belay that.”
The voice was soft, but there was no mistaking it. “Lord Mason. Well come. I feared it was another.” Well come indeed, Morrone thought. Now work your star magic and discover who has done this—
“Who found him?”
“Guardsman Echaino. An accident. He came into this passage to relieve himself, found the sentry where you see him, and summoned the guard.”
“Did you leave the corpse, Echaino?”
“No, my lord.”
“Touch anything?”
Echaino shuddered. “No, my lord.”
“Good man.” Mason knelt by the body and took its wrist in his hand. He moved the dead arm back and forth. “Not dead long,” he muttered. He poked at the body for a moment and stood. “How many men have you got with you?”
Morrone’s lips tightened. That tone of command was not the proper way to address a Companion to the Wanax Ganton. Morrone let it pass. He had seen enough of the starmen and their peremptory ways. Strangely effective ways. There might yet be a reckoning over the place of the starmen in Drantos, but this was not the time for it.
“Twelve guardsmen and three of my own men-at-arms. You have brought nine. I fear we shall need more, if we are to search the Outer Bailey without making each searching part
y too small to defend itself.”
Mason nodded. “Right.” He turned to one of his men. “Lugh, take a message to Lieutenant Brionn. The ready platoon is to turn out in full kit and report to Lord Morrone at Hestia’s Fountain. Tell them to move quietly, and tell anyone who sees them that this is a drill.”
“Sir!” Lugh clicked his heels and hurried off. Morrone knew that Brionn would obey, for all that he was the son of a knight and his orders came to him by the son of a carpenter. A year ago Mason might have had to go himself to bring the platoon, but much had changed in that year. For the better or for the worse?
It couldn’t matter. The urgent need was for a thorough search. That wouldn’t be easy. Edron was the royal seat of Drantos, but it had never been planned as such. What had begun as a fortress tower had grown into a full castle, then into a city. The Outer Bailey was no open courtyard with few buildings set against the walls, but part of the city of Edron itself, walled off by the Wanax Ganton’s great-grandfather to provide more quarters for his men-at-arms, servants, and (so the tales ran) mistresses. Except for one broad street leading from the Outer Gate to the Great North Gate of the castle itself, the Outer Bailey was as much a warren as any part of the city outside the walls.
In war the defenders would fire this area and retreat behind the flames to the castle. That was hardly the answer here, though Morrone was tempted. “What plot is afoot?” he asked.
Mason chuckled. “Must be fifty of them, wouldn’t you say, my lord?”
“True enough.” The royal wedding of Wanax Ganton and the Roman Lady Octavia Caesar had drawn lords, senators, merchants, barons, knights, soldiers, and wealthy magnates from a dozen lands, half of them at war or nearly so with each other.
“We’ll be until the True Sun rises searching this lot,” Mason said. “Who’s out here?”
Morrone shrugged. “Am I a clerk? Those of rank who could not find room inside. Lords, retainers. Clergy. Great ones. Any might be the target of a plot.” Or be plotters themselves. “Wanax Ganton will not care to have his guests turned out on his last night unwed. Nor, I think, will Caesar care for the complaints of his senators.”
“Yeah. It’s a problem. Got any suggestions?”
Morrone looked up at the sky, but Yatar Dayfather did not appear with an answer to his dilemma. Only the baleful glare of the Demon Star—which did give enough light to make the searching easier, for all that its growing power over the nights on Tran meant that the Time was coming nearer. . . .
“I think it would be well if I turned out the rest of my men-at-arms who are fit for duty,” Morrone said. “Also—do you know who is quartered in this house?”
“Am I a clerk?” Mason said, but he was laughing, and turned to one of his Guardsmen, who produced a paper.
It was a list. Morrone took a mild pleasure in seeing that even starmen did not tax their memories with details more fit for clerks and scribes than for warriors.
“Nobody seems to be assigned to it,” Mason concluded. “But the one to the left is for Councilor Daettan of Dirstvaal, who’s Ambassador from Lord Gengrich. The one to the right is for the Lady Gwen, Lord Warner, and the rest of the University people. The one across the street is for Fabricius Maximus Valens, Marselius Caesar’s ambassador, but he hasn’t arrived yet. Too bad about that; I’d have liked to have seen these bastards take on some legionaries.”
“Do you doubt the valor of the men of Drantos?”
“Not at all. It’s just that if a legionary had been killed, we could have found more reliable troops for the searching parties without having to spread the word of what happened.”
“Indeed.” Lord Mason sounded sincere and spoke good sense, and there was no helping the starmen’s fondness for the Romans. The other Rome on the starmen’s home world—once our ancestors’ home world, the starmen say!—had passed down much wisdom to the starmen, particularly in matters of war and statecraft. It was still just as well that Publius Caesar, the heir of Rome, saw the starmen as a new kind of “barbarian” and openly distrusted them; if starmen and Romans made an alliance only the gods could help Drantos.
“Okay, let’s get at it,” Mason said. “You take charge here. Post some guards. Maybe they killed that sentry to keep him from seeing something. Make sure there’s men enough to see anything the sentry would. Then search this place as best you can.”
“And you?”
“I’ll wait for the duty squad, then somebody’s got to tell Lord Rick and the king. Want that job?”
“No. No, the arrangement is satisfactory. Armsman Garrakos, take three companions and torches to search this house. The rest of you, move to surround it.” Morrone shuddered. “I like it not, this skulking about in the dark. It makes me feel like an assassin. There can be no honor in it.”
“Now there’s something we can agree on,” Mason said. “But there’s not much more in letting the Wanax’s guests be slaughtered on the night before his wedding. Steady up, my lord. I’ll be back when I can come.”
Morrone sent off a messenger for his men. “Now, Garrakos. Let us go see what we find.”
The autumn night was chilly even though the wind had died, but Morrone felt himself sweating under his mail and arming doublet as he had not since the Battle of the Hooey River. “I like it not,” he muttered to himself. “An evil omen. I like it not.”
* * *
Art Mason unbuttoned the flap of his shoulder holster and wished that the nearest tobacco wasn’t ten light-years away. There was a kind of aromatic grass that grew in the High Cumac, and some of the troopers made it into cigarettes; Mason had tried it once. The stuff was probably related to madweed. It gave a mild high, nothing like enough to compensate for the awful taste.
Morrone was trying hard not to fidget or look nervous, but you could tell he wasn’t too happy over the prospect of somebody’s hired goons screwing up his friend’s wedding. A lot of people on this planet believed in omens. The sentry was bad enough. If some high muckety-muck did get offed—
“Happened on my watch,” Mason muttered. Not that all crime was his responsibility, but this was no burglar caught in the act by the sentry. Thin cord around the man’s neck, dagger in just the right place. A professional job. “Damn professional,” Mason muttered. “Green Berets?”
It was worth thinking about. Most of the Earth troops here on this screwy planet had some training in the dirty tricks department, and some of them had been Green Beret before the CIA hired them off to go mucking about in Africa.
All our troops are accounted for, Mason thought. But there’s a dozen off with Gengrich. Gengrich’s ambassador in yonder house. Says no starmen with him. None I recognized. But one could have been smuggled in—
Or, what the hell, there’s no shortage of local talent good enough to do that job.
Wish it hadn’t happened on my watch.
* * *
“Watch ho!” someone called. Mason heard the Outer Gate guards respond. There were sounds of horses and centaurs.
“Who is there?”
Mason couldn’t make out the words of response, but one of the voices sounded familiar. The gate opened, and a smaller number of horses and centaurs came through the wall into the Outer Bailey.
A small mounted party guided by two guardsmen with torches appeared at the gate end of the street. Five armored men, a couple of unarmored ones, and a banner-bearer carrying the red raven banner of the Bheroman of Westrook.
By God, Mason thought. Ben Murphy. Grown pretty big for a private. Of course I was only a corporal when we came here.
Ben Murphy had defended Castle Westrook and its lands after the Westmen rode down out of the High Plains. When the Westmen killed Lord Harkon and most of his knights, the king had created Murphy a real honest-to-Yatar Drantos nobleman, so that on the local scale of rank he was senior to everybody else from Earth except the captain himself. . . .
“Hello, Art. How are things?”
“I’ll be damned!”
“I hope not.” The
lead rider reined in, dismounted, and came over to Mason. It was Ben Murphy all right—no mistaking that big Irish nose or the way he walked. But until you got up close and saw the shoulder holster with the .45 in it, you couldn’t tell him from your standard Drantos ironhat.
“Like I said, Art, how are things?”
“Could be worse, could be worse. Everybody and their Aunt Ermentrude’s come to town for the wedding, so if you’re looking for a billet in the castle—”
“No way. My—Lord Harkon’s son Jan’s—grandmother wants to look me over, see if I’m the right sort to be raising her daughter’s son. She’s the Dowager Eqetassa of Rhuinas, so what she wants she gets, and what she’s got is everybody I brought with me billeted in her townhouse. The men-at-arms are stacked up like cordwood in the stables, but at least we’ve got a roof over our heads. I was afraid we’d have to camp outside the walls, along with the Romans. Did Publius really bring a whole legion to the wedding?”
“Two cohorts, under our old friend Titus Frugi.”
“Oho. Little Caesar can’t be too happy about that.”
“No.” Titus Frugi had commanded forces loyal to the old emperor. Now he was loyal to Marselius Caesar. Not necessarily to Marselius’ son Publius. “No, I don’t expect he is. Belay that. How are you getting along?”
“Not too bad, all things considered. The Tamaerthan archers who’ve settled the vacant farms pretty much make up for the people the Westmen killed. None of them have turned bandit, either.”
“Lady Tylara will be happy to hear that. And how’s Honeypie—I mean, Lady Dirdre?”
“We’re going to be married, soon as I get back from the king’s wedding. He’s already given permission, but I want to swear fealty to him for Westrook and get an update on the charter before we make it legal. That way Dirdre inherits with no trouble if something happens to me on the way home.”
“Yeah. Say, Ben, how many men do you have with you—here and outside the gate?”
“Six here, ten more outside. Why?”
“I got a problem and maybe you can help me solve it. Somebody killed a sentry just a few minutes ago.”
“Blood feud?”
“Looked more like a professional job. Somebody’s up to something, and I’ve got the reserve platoon of guards on the way. But I’d like some more reliable men on hand before they get here. If you help, I think I can persuade the captain and the Wanax that they owe you one, like maybe letting you billet some of your people in the castle.”
Lord of Janissaries Page 57