by Doyle, Debra
“Not very talented talent, indeed,” Blossom said. “They may not recognize me at all. I’ll stay on them. You go back to the ship and get our blasters. Meet you at the hotel.”
XVIII. KHESAT
CHAKA HAD been sitting for three days now in the small room in the house of Caridal Fere. When she got tired, which was seldom, she rested, but always there were recordings for her to translate if she could, of what had been said by and around the two boys.
Faral and Jens spoke together very little these days—and not much, when they did, in the Trade-talk of Maraghai—but Chaka was nevertheless learning many interesting things. And she kept written logs of the translations.
Perhaps she was being checked. The servant who had hired her spoke enough Trade-talk to be understood, and to understand in turn if Chaka spoke slowly and simply enough. That one might read the first page, or perhaps the first line, of any translation, and if it matched the recordings well enough, the servant would pass the rest.
At least Chaka hoped the rest would pass without a full reading. When the boys talked, it wasn’t always of food or home or old friends. They also spoke of their secret plans and their private opinions of the people around them. Chaka left those parts out. Time enough later to put them down, once she was convinced that it did her friends no harm.
The next question was, did she trust Fere? The automatic answer was no—he had never walked under the Big Trees. And no Forest Lord, to make only the obvious comparison, would stoop to eavesdropping on an honored guest.
The comm link hummed and clicked, and a sound of conversation started up—Jens and Faral, in the house of the Exalted of Tanavral. Chaka reached for her datapad, and began to write:
J: Where have you been all day?
F: Out with Miza, looking for something besides pale sandwiches to eat. They’ve got tiffin carts down by the river, you know.
J: There was haunch of something-or-other in frillfruit puree at dinner. And the chef made something else that Cousin-once-removed Rhal said were authentic Maraghai-style groundgrubs. But they weren’t really.
Then the tone of Faral’s voice changed, as if he’d only then noticed something. He said, *They’ve come up with a plan for your future, haven’t they? That’s where you were, all last night, * and Chaka decided not to write that down for right now, since she couldn’t tell which way it was going.
And Jens said, *The Highest is dead. And the Exalted Rhal Kasander has grown disillusioned with the Worthy whom he first intended to see elevated. He’s picked out someone else instead. *
There was a pause. *You?*
*That’s right.*
*We can get to a ship tonight, and be long gone by dawn, * Faral said at once. *Unless you want to risk getting spattered all over the plaza?*
*I can’t refuse the public Acclamation until I’m sure Mamma and Dadda are safe, * Jens said. *If I refuse, and they’re being held prisoner …*
Now Chaka was glad she wasn’t writing things down.
Caridal Fere’s friend Rhal Kasander—Jens’s cousin-once-removed, who went by the absurd thin-skin title of the Exalted of Tanavral—entered the room just as the conversation switched back to grilled grubworms. Chaka kept on writing. Kasander came and went almost as often as Caridal Fere himself; the two men were close as blood-brothers.
“Well?” Kasander demanded. The Exalted’s slipper-bearer came over to Chaka’s desk and retrieved the datapad. Kasander viewed the private conversation, then threw down the datapad onto the floor, cracking the screen beyond hope of repair.
“Do those two think of nothing but their stomachs?” he demanded. “If they aren’t eating, then they’re arranging to be eating, or else they’re discussing great meals from the past. Groundgrubs! Pfah! The cook couldn’t even palm off the left-overs on the underservants!”
The Exalted strode from the room, gone before Chaka could react to the loss of her datapad. Well, there were still scraps of paper around. She’d use those.
And what the Exalted didn’t know was not Chaka’s problem. She had enough problems without that.
By nightfall in Ilsefret the whole city lay quiet with anticipation of the coming morning. The funeral of a Highest brought down by time and circumstance would keep until a later day; tomorrow’s Acclamation, though, would see whether Khesat would be holding the rites for one Highest, or for two. On a few past occasions—or so Faral had learned from the historical-background section of the Intelligencer—the populace of Ilsefret had run through as many as five or six Highests before settling the issue.
The Intelligencer had not identified the candidate for Acclamation; such premature revelation would go against Khesatan custom and tradition. Faral had no doubt that the people in Ilsefret knew, through gossip and rumor and the same kind of veiled hints in the public newsfiles that had shown Miza how to find her contact with Huool. But nobody off-planet would have a suspicion of the truth until it was too late.
Faral had tried to make contact with Maraghai anyway—surely there was something that the First of All the Mage-Circles could do about what was going on—but he had discovered that the comm setup in Kasander’s guest wing had no access to the hyperspace links. Neither did the public kiosks.
If I’d known about the problem when I woke this morning, he thought, I could have asked Miza to pass on a message through her contact with Huool. Now it’s too late.
Then a thought came to him. Rhal Kasander was an important man on Khesat, hip-deep in politics and intrigue. There was no way that he would not allow himself, at least, the use of the hyperspace links.
All I have to do is find the Exalted’s personal comm setup. After that … if I could cheat the console for the force fields back home, I can get through whatever Kasander’s got. And I’ll bet I know where he keeps it, too.
Having something concrete to do gave Faral new optimism. He didn’t wait any longer, but left his room in the guest wing and made his way through the halls to the private study of the Exalted of Tanavral.
The study was empty. To Faral’s chagrin, a quick but efficient search didn’t uncover anything like a full comm setup. Kasander had one somewhere, that much was obvious. He had a transfer link resting in plain sight on his desktop—but the link had an ID scanner built into the grip, and the master control console was nowhere that Faral could see.
I could find it if I had a day or two. But I don’t. If only I’d started looking sooner …
A stack of folded cards lay on the desktop beside the useless transfer link—party invitations, Faral supposed, awaiting formal signature. If the Exalted of Tanavral turned out in the morning to have backed an acclaimed Highest, he would certainly be holding another party tomorrow night. And after the amount of money Jens claimed that the Exalted and his faction had already laid out in bribes, the Acclamation was only a formality.
I wish I really believed that, thought Faral. He picked up the topmost invitation.
It was written in Khesatan, of course, but Faral had expected that. He hadn’t expected not to see the one scrap of the language that he did recognize in its written form—his foster-brother’s name.
Is Kasander abandoning his own candidate? Or is calling an acclaimed Highest by his old name an insult or something?
Jens would know. Faral tucked the invitation into his jacket pocket.
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside the study. He looked around in a panic—Jens could smooth-talk himself out of being caught snooping, but Jens wasn’t here—and saw the heavy velvet curtains that hung across the office window. He ducked behind them just as the door of the study opened.
As a place of concealment, his position was traditional but effective. An eavesdropper not trained in hunting by the Selvaurs of Maraghai might have ruined everything by fidgeting, or by breathing too loudly, but Faral had lain in wait for a passing fanghorn while the bloodflies crawled across his bare shoulders. Standing motionless behind a curtain was easy.
With his eye pressed against the hairline o
pening between the folds of velvet, he could see most of the room. The man who entered was one he recognized from the entertainment of the night before: Gerre Hafelsan, a gentlesir of respectable lineage with a taste for flamboyant tailoring, but not, or so Faral had gathered, one of the Exalted’s intimates or a member of his faction. But here he was, unannounced.
Strange stuff is going on, Faral thought. If the Exalted turns up and Hafelsan wants to hide behind a curtain, I’m in big trouble.
But Rhal Kasander entered almost in Hafelsan’s shadow, carrying a tray of jellied grass-mallow in his own hands.
No servants in sight. Even stranger.
For the next three-quarters of an hour, the two men conversed in light and bantering Khesatan, and tried a flute duet which Faral found pretty but sinister. Then, after bowing to one another, they left.
Faral wished he knew what the two of them had really been talking about. He still had the invitation in his pocket—Jens would be able to read the Khesatan script, and maybe even explain what the Exalted of Tanavral was up to, playing flute duets in private with a political adversary.
After counting two hundred heartbeats, Faral left the concealment of the curtains and stepped silently to the door. He waited again, but no sound telling of a watcher came from outside.
He stepped briskly into the corridor, and headed for the wing in which he and Jens were housed.
Miza couldn’t sleep. She tried more covers and fewer; she piled the pillows into a stack and spread them out again; she tried leaving the light on and turning it off. Nothing worked. She looked at the clock on her bedside table. It didn’t help; it was an antique, and told only the local hours.
No way of telling how many Standard hours we have left until dawn.
After a while she got up. Jens Metadi-Jessan’s cousin-once-removed the Exalted of Tanavral had supplied her with an ample wardrobe, including a white silk sleeping-gown and a night-robe of deep green velvet. She put on the night-robe, tied its sash around her waist, and ventured out cautiously into the upper corridors of Rhal Kasander’s town house.
No servants were in sight, which was good. Miza wasn’t used to servants at all—on Artha, people did for themselves what needed to be done, or else programmed robots to do it. Nor had Huool been the kind to hire others for menial tasks. For that he had student interns, who themselves paid good money for the privilege.
Moving quietly, Miza went on down the hall to the extensive suite of rooms that Kasander had assigned to Jens. The door wasn’t locked; locks would be impractical in a house where servants came and went with full hands at all hours.
She opened the door no farther than necessary, and slipped in through the gap. There was nobody in the darkened outer chamber, nor in the changing room.
As she had half-expected, light showed around the edges of the bedroom door. She knocked, tentatively, and waited for an answer.
“Come on in.” It was Jen’s voice.
She entered and let the door close itself behind her. Jens’s room was twice as large as the one she’d been given, and even more exquisitely decorated. The bed alone, with its tapestry hangings and high, arched canopy, was almost as big as the cabin the three of them had shared back on the Dusty; the padded crate in which they’d made their escape from Ophel would have covered no more than a corner of the mattress. The light she’d seen came from a shaded reading-glow on the bedside table. It cast a pool of stark white light onto the pillows at the head of the bed and threw the far corners of the room into darkness.
Jens wasn’t reading, though. As far as she could tell, he never had been. No text reader stood on the bedside table, and no print-on-paper material either. He lay gazing up at the underside of the canopy, and Miza saw at once that he was at least as wakeful as she had been. He turned as she came in and propped himself up on one elbow to look at her.
“Gentlelady Lyftingil,” he said. “What brings you in here at this hour?”
He’s only got the light on because he doesn’t want to lie there by himself in the dark, Miza thought. The realization strengthened her resolve.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Faral’s room is down at the other end of the hall.”
She felt herself reddening—the curse of a fair complexion. “It’s not that!”
“Ever my misfortune,” he sighed, and lay back again on the pillows. The leather-and-bone necklace he’d gotten from the oracle on Sapne lay against the golden-tanned skin of his chest. “What, then?”
“It’s … tomorrow morning they do the Golden Tower thing—”
“I am not precisely ignorant of the fact. Believe me.”
“—and I couldn’t get to sleep for thinking that I ought to apologize to you tonight, just in case—”
“Right. Just in case I hit the pavement with a resounding splat and render the question of apologies completely moot.”
“Stop that!” she said. “You haven’t even asked me what I came in here to apologize to you for.”
He closed his eyes. “All right. What was it?”
“A bad idea, I think.” She turned to go.
“No—wait!” He sat up abruptly and held out a hand. “I’m the one who ought to be saying I’m sorry, for talking to you this way. It’s no way for anyone to act, the night before they—”
“Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “The Exalted said so. He’s spent piles of money making sure.”
“So has everybody else. And there’s never been any way of making sure that the bribed stay bribed.” Jens laughed without mirth. “And if they do … then I’m stuck with being the Highest of Khesat for the next fifty or a hundred years, which probably isn’t as painful as diving headfirst onto a marble pavement, but it lasts a whole lot longer.”
He sounded unhappy, which wasn’t surprising. She sat down on the edge of the bed next to him—all the chairs were off in the dark corners of the room—and said, “What will Faral do if they make you the Highest?”
“Go home to Maraghai,” he said. “If helping a friend ascend to the Jade Eminence counts as gaining enough fame for an allowable return.”
“It certainly ought to,” she said. “But that’s one of the things I wanted to say I was sorry about.”
“Faral?”
She nodded. “Things haven’t been easy between the two of you ever since we left Sapne, and I’m afraid that it’s all my fault.”
“No, it isn’t.” She could see a faint flush of embarrassment spreading along his cheekbones and down his neck to his bare chest. “It’s mine, for being jealous.”
“The next Highest of Khesat, jealous?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “Gauche, isn’t it? If the Council knew about it, do you think they’d find somebody else to haul up to the top of the Golden Tower?”
“You could always ask them,” Miza said.
“If I thought it would do any good … but no friends of mine are on the Council, just allies of Kasander’s.”
She looked down at her hands. “That’s the other thing I meant to say I was sorry about.”
“That I don’t have any allies on the Council?”
“No. I’m sorry I was the one who made your friend Guislen go away. I didn’t mean to do it. Will you forgive me?”
“If you’ll forgive me,” he said. He smiled and reached out a hand to take hers, free-spacer fashion, as he had with Captain Amaro back in the Dusty’s hold. “Done?”
She smiled back at him and met his grip. “Done.”
The more Faral thought about what he had witnessed in Kasander’s study, the less he liked it. By the time he entered the guest wing, he was almost running, with the invitation out of his pocket and ready in his hand. He ran through the darkened outer rooms of Jens’s suite and up to the bedroom door, knocked perfunctorily once to warn of his approach, and pushed the door open.
The room was lighted, and Jens was lying in the bed.
“Jens,” Faral began, “there’s something …”
Then he faltered. Someone else was on the bed beside Jens—Miza, with her red hair down and loose over the shoulders of her robe. Their hands were clasped, and she was smiling.
“Oh,” Faral said, turned, and shut the door behind him.
He walked down the carpeted passageway to his own quarters, unable to see clearly for the dark cloud hanging in front of his eyes. He felt like he’d been kicked in the guts, and all his assorted viscera removed and replaced by cold swamp water with bugs in it. He held the cream-colored invitation from Rhal’s study in his hand, crumpling it into a tiny ball as his hand worked without his direct control.
A patter of light footsteps, running, came from behind him. He stopped and turned as a hand touched his arm. It was Miza.
“Faral,” she said. “It isn’t what you think—”
“Then what would it be?” Faral asked and turned away, pulling himself from her grasp. He resumed walking.
“Faral, please!”
Faral ignored her and continued walking. He went on to the darkened library all the way at the end of the hall. He sat at a polished table, not bothering to turn on the light, and watched out the window as the vornatch trees blew in the dark winds of the estate.
A while later, Jens knocked on the door and entered, wearing a formal robe of black silk and silverthread, patterned with lilies. Without speaking, he laid a long, handwritten letter on the table beside Faral, then turned and left. Faral took the letter, and tore it into tiny pieces, unread, without looking away from the vornatch trees.
And that was where the servants of the Exalted of Tanavral found Faral in the predawn hours, when it came his time to rise and enter the City, there to view from the windows of Caridal Fere his cousin’s enlargement.
Mistress Klea Santreny and Mael Taleion left the Castledown Acres Guesthome in the predawn light.
“I need to go to the Khesatan Guildhouse,” Klea said, “to see if any messages are waiting for me—and to send some messages of my own.”