Patients were definitely the downside of a medical career, just as natives were the problem with being the Barents Resident in Udara. If only someone would devise a 'mat modification that would make people's brains work properly, so that they recognized and respected his genius and let him alone . . .
* * *
Higher up the mountain, in the palace that overlooked all of Puvaathi, the Bashir's brain was working far from properly by Lorum van Vechten's standards. In fact, it was about to boil over with rage and frustration.
"What do you mean, the envoys escaped?" he bellowed at the man standing stiffly before him. The red and golden hangings of his audience chamber vibrated as he pounded his fist on the low table in front of him. The concubine Khati, who always attended him, dressed like a festival-day idol in gold-embroidered red silk, shrank back against the folds of the hangings as if she hoped to disappear among them.
Indukanta Jagat bowed stiffly. "Doubtless my lord the Bashir will wish to punish the Vakil of Dharampal for his insolence in letting the prisoners go."
"I thought you said they escaped."
Jagat lifted his shoulders slightly. "That they are gone is certain. Whether it was with or without the connivance of young Yadleen is not so certain; I can only say that he refused to have the Minister responsible for their house arrest publicly impaled when I suggested the suitability of some such measure, claiming the escape was no more Harsajjan Bharat's fault than it was his own. Whether he had the insolence to contermand my lord's expressed wishes, or was simply incompetent to keep two outlanders under control, hardly matters; in either case he is clearly not fit to rule a country on our borders. In my opinion, we should take over the state before internal unrest turns it into an anarchic threat—"
"Your opinion? Your opinion? Hah! And in your opinion, Indukanta Jagat, which are you—corrupt or merely incompetent? You should have assassinated those envoys on their first night under house arrest."
"I had arrangements to do exactly that," Jagat protested, "but when my men reached the Bharat compound, the envoys were no longer there."
"So which was it? Were you too incompetent to post a guard . . . or were you in a conspiracy with the Vakil to thwart my wishes? It seems to me that Harsajjan Bharat is not the only one in this affair who has earned a sharp stake to rest upon."
"My lord!" Jagat paled. "My lord the Bashir will recall that it was I who brought the first news of these outlander envoys, I who warned him of their supernatural powers and evil intentions."
"Perhaps you did so only to put yourself in the perfect position for seeing that they went about their way unmolested. What, after all, has been the result of your meddling? They were brought to Dharampal—very well; they had to pass that way in any case. Now, instead of traveling openly on from Dharampal, where we could have had them killed on the road, they have been forewarned of their danger. Now they are traveling by secret ways, so secretly and cautiously that even you and your men could not find them at any of the passes into Udara—or so you say." The Bashir invested those last four words with a menace that sent Jagat to his knees, babbling pleas for mercy.
"Remove this scum," the Bashir said to the two guards who stood immobile, arms folded, on either side of the door.
Before they could lay hands on him, Jagat had flung himself forward to grasp the concubine's knees. "In the name of love and pity, let my lord forgive my incompetence! Let my lands and houses be given over to the state for the glory of Greater Udara, only let me remain to serve the Bashir—"
"As you served me in Dharampal?" The Bashir laughed loudly, his voice cracking at the end. "The estates of a traitor are forfeit to the Bashir in any case. Take him!"
The guards grasped Jagat under the arms and lifted him. A portion of Khati's brocaded shalin tore away in his desperately grasping hands. She reached forward, tears in her eyes. "My lord, have mercy!"
"You dare to speak in my audience chamber?" The Bashir whirled and turned his wrath on her. "By Red Radhana, I should have you stripped and impaled together with this traitor!" He laughed again, a high-pitched, nervous laugh, as she shrank back among the hangings. "No, not yet. A pity to ruin such a lovely body. I shall just give you a little reminder to show more respect."
Khati curled on the floor, arms wrapped around her head, as the Bashir kicked her. She gasped once or twice when his foot found old bruises, but managed to keep from crying; tears excited the Bashir in dangerous ways.
It could have been worse, she repeated to herself over and over, trying to make of the words a mantra that would take her mind off the repeated blows. It could have been worse. On the Bashir's whim she could have been dragged away with Indukanta Jagat to be impaled, or held down by the guards while he flogged the flesh from her bones. Someday, when he ceased to desire her, that would happen. If he guessed at her part in warning and diverting the outlanders, it would certainly happen. For now . . . he would probably want to use her as soon as he had tired of kicking and hitting. Worse happens every day to some poor Rohini who attracts the wrong sort of attention.
"My lord Bashir!" It was one of the guards who had dragged poor Jagat out; what was he doing back here so soon? "My lord must come . . . must see . . ."
"Must?" the Bashir repeated sharply.
"The Bashir would wish to see what is in the skies," the guard corrected himself. "There is a flying dragon hovering over the palace!"
"Have you been at the madira?"
"No, truly, my lord!" The guard prostrated himself. Khati relaxed slightly as the Bashir's attention was removed from her, and concentrated on taking slow, deep healing breaths. She was one dull ache all over, but there were none of the sharp flares of pain that usually came with a broken bone. It really hadn't been so bad . . . this time. The Light was with her.
"I think it is a flying dragon, but of a kind that I have not seen before—I mean, not that I've ever actually seen one, but you know, my lord, the pictures in the temple—anyway, it is smaller than I thought it would be, and much more shiny. I suppose it would be hard to paint the light flashing off it, that's part of the problem . . ."
The Bashir stepped over the prostrate, babbling guard and strode down the hall. The guard's terrified ramblings died away. After a moment both he and Khati raised their heads. It was Vedya, she saw. Part Rohini, though that was a carefully kept secret, but she thought he had sometimes tried unobtrusively to help her. "If you made that up to distract him from beating me," she whispered, "you'd better start running now."
Vedya shook his head. "I'm not that smart—or that brave," he confessed. "Really, it is a flying dragon. Come and see." He offered a hand to help Khati up, and she compressed her lips to keep from whimpering at the pain of movement.
"He is a madman and I am ashamed to be in his service," Vedya said under his breath as he saw what it cost Khati to get to her feet.
"It's not that bad," Khati assured him. "Truly." She was about to say I've had worse, but this was not the time to start trying to recruit Vedya to their cause. Besides, she wanted to see the dragon in the sky!
"It's landed," Vedya said, unnecessarily, as they reached the crowd at the front of the palace. Khati swallowed her disappointment and stood on tiptoe, trying to see over all those tall Rudhrani. Maybe the dragon had been sent by the gods to destroy the Bashir in its flaming breath.
"Will it hurt you if I set you on that?" Vedya asked, seeing her struggles to see through the crowd and indicating a pillar that rose from a low, squared-off base.
"No," Khati lied, and managed not to gasp when Vedya's hands closed round her bruised waist and lifted her up to the base of the pillar. It was worth it; from here she could see everything in the square.
"It doesn't look like I thought it would," she said with some disappointment. The dragon glittered brightly in the sun, that much was true. But otherwise it looked . . . well, rather small, for a dragon, and boring. Its hide was smooth, not scaly, and instead of coruscating with brilliant flashes of color it seemed to be a
dull grey all over except for some patterns in blue along its flanks. And where were its wings?
The dragon's side opened and two demons with glittering skin stepped out. No, they were only outlanders in some strange costume, Khati realized with even more disappointment. One was tall and unnaturally fair-haired, like the Barents Resident; the other was just an ordinary person, rather pale, but of normal height and with curly dark hair like Khati's own.
"It's not a dragon," she said sadly. "It's just a flying box."
"Don't be silly," Vedya said. "Have you ever seen a box fly through the air?"
"No, but I've never seen a dragon do that either," Khati pointed out. "Hush! I want to hear what they're saying."
The small outlander was doing all the talking, and maybe she wasn't an outlander at all, because she spoke as well as any Udaran—quite unlike the strongly accented, simple words that Lorum van Vechten used. She didn't get a chance to say much, though, barely started introducing herself before the Bashir interrupted with a command to his guards. Khati saw the telltale glitter of the Bashir's magic nets and sighed with grief. She had hoped to see more of the outlanders before they were destroyed. But nobody ever survived the magic weapons that Lorum van Vechten had given the Bashir. They would be caught immobile in nets of light, and hacked to bits by ordinary unmagical swords, and if she had any sense she would get out of here before it started, but the crowd of palace servitors was too close around her and she couldn't see Vedya, he had been pushed away by the curious crowd, all right then, at least close her eyes so she didn't have to see . . . or would it be worse, hearing and not seeing? Khati had not quite decided when the small outlander's hand flicked outward, for all the world as if she were sowing seed on a fresh-plowed field. But instead of seed, what fell from her hand was a kind of dark emptiness that consumed the flickering lights of the Bashir's nets.
"Demons," sighed a clerk standing by her pillar.
"Outlanders," Khati corrected scornfully. It made perfect sense; why hadn't she seen it coming? The Bashir's magic weapons came from the outlanders, didn't they? Of course they hadn't sold him their strongest magics; they kept those for themselves. She should have foreseen it.
So should the Bashir. He'd been used for too long to winning too easily, Khati thought as she saw him foaming with impotent rage. He ordered his guards to strike, but invisible walls around the outlander women caught and held their swords.
"The penalty for attacking a Diplomat of Rezerval is stasis," the small woman remarked, in a pleasant tone that somehow carried quite clearly through the square and up the palace steps, more clearly than if she had shouted. "We are willing to assume that the Bashir was surprised by our visit and gave his orders before he had identified us as peaceful emissaries." She paused, one dark eyebrow arched, and waited—quite clearly waited—for the Bashir to back down.
Which he did, stumbling and stuttering.
Khati thought she had never enjoyed anything so much in all her sixteen years.
But when the outlander envoys demanded a private meeting with the Bashir and the Barents Resident, and suggested that the onlookers go on about their business, she regretfully melted in with the crowd and slipped away to one of her secret hiding places in the palace. This would definitely not be a good time to catch the Bashir's eye; if he had been looking for somebody to beat after Indukanta Jagat's unwelcome news, he would be looking for somebody to kill after being publicly humiliated by the envoys he had failed to assassinate in time. And this time he might not remember how much he enjoyed Khati's body in time to prevent his ordering her impaled on a stake beside Jagat.
If she had any sense, she would disappear from the palace now and take refuge with her own people. Meer Madee would not expect her to stay here and spy on the Bashir any longer, not now; she had always warned Khati to run when it started feeling too dangerous.
But she did want to know what would happen at this meeting.
And why Indukanta Jagat's information had been wrong. He had clearly said the Diplo was being escorted by a man, a soldier of the Barents army.
And most of all, she wanted to know whether Chulayen had intercepted the Diplo and her escort, and if so, why had they come on into Udara instead of going with him to Thamboon?
Chapter Sixteen
Udara on Kalapriya
"That," Annemari said with a long sigh, "was not quite the most frustrating meeting I've sat through in the last twenty years. But it came close."
After the long and extremely formal diplomatic discussion, they had been ushered to what must be the most luxurious guest quarters in the Bashir's palace. No indoor plumbing, Annemari noted, but lots of tapestries and cushions to soften the raw cedar walls and packed-earth floor, and basins of beaten metal for washing in. The ubiquitous red and gold that the Bashir favored made her eyes hurt after a while, especially the clashing of soft vegetable reds with imported chemical dyes from Valentin. And the gold embroidery made the cushions rather scratchy. Still, it did seem they were being treated with appropriate respect. For what that was worth.
"They're being very polite," Calandra agreed, "and very good at not telling us anything. Do you believe the Bashir's story about where his prohibited weapons came from?"
"A Barentsian fugitive, under sentence of death in Valentin, fleeing inland and buying his safety in Udara with a pack full of tanglers and nerve dazers? And now conveniently dead?" Annemari's laugh cracked a little. "All very convenient, isn't it? I especially liked the part about the Bashir being shocked—shocked! to hear that the weaponry is seriously illegal, being far beyond the technology level approved for Kalapriya."
"Umm." Calandra rolled over on the pile of embroidered cushions that served as both chair and bed, and nibbled the end of one curly frond of hair. "I notice you didn't point out that Lorum van Vechten had to have known the weaponry was pro-tech."
"Why bother? I'm sure their story will be that he had no idea the Bashir was using tanglers; he's the Resident, not an arms master. He'll claim he thought Udara was extending its territory by legitimate means, diplomacy and traditional warfare, and none of his business to interfere. And if we question that, he'll point out that nobody in Valentin questioned the speed of the Udaran conquests either."
"I rather suspect Valentin doesn't know much about what goes on among the hill tribes," Calandra said. "Remember, communications outside the coastal enclaves are limited to native technology. They've got some sort of primitive system of signaling by electric wires in the coastal plain—"
"That's not pro-tech?"
"Hand-cranked generators," Calandra explained, "and it was actually a Kalapriyan who invented the concept. They get wire for the electrographs through the Barents Trading Society, but that was approved because it isn't different in kind from the wire they can hand-draw through a plate, just smoother and a whole lot cheaper."
"It must be nice to have everything there is to know about Kalapriya, including the language, downloaded onto a memory chip inside your head," Annemari said with a trace of envy.
Calandra put one hand to her temple, where the ache came after a download. She didn't know if that was where the chip was located or whether some confusion of nerves made it hurt there instead of in the socket at the back of her neck; she just knew that absorbing a mass of information in seconds usually cost her a few days of headache. If she was lucky. Really heavy downloads meant migraines with flashing lights instead of ordinary headaches; she was lucky that there hadn't been all that much information this time.
Or not, depending on how you looked at it.
"Not everything there is to know," she corrected Annemari, "just everything Rezerval knows. And I have a feeling there's a lot about this world that isn't in Federation databases." She sighed. "It may have been a mistake to let them find out I speak Kalapriyan; we might learn a lot more by eavesdropping than in formal meetings."
"Seeing that our alternative would have been depending on Lorum van Vechten as a translator," Annemari said drily, "
I think it's an exceedingly good thing you do speak Kalapriyan." A flicker of movement on the tapestried wall caught her attention; was it just light from the water in a nearby basin reflecting off the golden threads? She was so tired that all her surroundings seemed a mystery of moving lights and shadows.
"Yes, but I might have learned a lot by listening to how he translated you."
"And he almost certainly would not have made it clear to the Bashir how important a Diplo is, and how many people—not just in Valentin, but on Rezerval!—know exactly where we were going, and how much trouble it would make for the Bashir if he had us quietly assassinated," Annemari pointed out. The tapestry was definitely trembling; and there was no wind blowing through the crude windows in the outer wall. "So you would've had to step in and use your Kalapriyan anyway, to make sure he understood that it would be a really, really bad idea to make us disappear. I'm sorry, Calandra, but eavesdropping really never was an option."
She threw herself flat across the layers of carpet and grabbed a handful of stiff brocaded wall hanging, and something else inside the hangings, something firm and yet yielding like flesh, something that squeaked in distress as she yanked with all her force and brought down a whole wall of tapestries over a small human figure.
" . . . for us, anyway," Annemari finished, slightly out of breath. Years of sitting behind a desk and tapping her fingers on a vid screen were no training for wrestling with unseen adversaries. She sat on a portion of the eavesdropper to keep it from getting away while Calandra excavated the rest from the heap of tapestries.
Disappearing Act Page 28