“The Diamond,” Vance snarled, forgetting himself.
“Moro Dalgleish, my intended husband,” Sardis corrected smoothly. “I’d thank you to remember it, Sero Vance. It will save unpleasantness later. So did your men actually track Valier Antonin ne’Cama to the roof of Vaclav 18?”
“Yes,” Vance admitted. “And lost him. I didn’t know the kid could fight so well.”
“He probably can’t, Sero Vance,” said Sardis. “Moro was on the same roof, at the same time. Wherever we find the Antonin, we might find Moro Dalgleish.”
“Those subhuman cowards were running to their embassy last night,” said Vance. “For what, I don’t know.”
Sardis actually looked troubled. “They would,” he muttered. “They would have been warned. One cycle fled south. One north. It fits. He’s in the damned embassy!”
“Well, you should probably pry him out before noon, because the fire-spitting Camels aren’t going to be much of a problem after—”
“What?” hissed Sardis. One perfect, strong hand caught Vance’s throat. Another held a sleek gun to his temple. “Talk, you old worm. Now.”
A minute later Dennis Vance was deposited, pale and shaken, at the discreet and efficient police station next door to his café. The Rio Sardis limo lifted high above the trees and shot away east toward the university and diplomatic districts.
LYTON SARDIS TOOK one call, from the observers near RS14. He made another, to the Cedar-Saba police. Then he called the Rio Sardis main offices.
“Terise?” Sardis said, patched through on a secure channel. “Grab your away gear. We’re leaving now.” Hearing the argument on the other end of the channel, he rolled his eyes. “I know where Moro is. We’re going to have his full compliance this time. The Sonta will be here in a few hours. Remember our hypothetical Camalian situation, the one we discussed a few years ago? Yes. Get the large containment unit onto Persepolis. What? No,” Sardis finished, narrowing his charcoal gaze, “don’t tell Bill just yet.”
Thirty-Six
MORO AWAKENED AS he had for nine years, in a split-second blind reconnaissance. A checklist he went through without twitching or changing his slow, even breathing.
He was in a private room with a closed door, not the echoing steel cage at the foot of Kott’s bed. The mattress under him was soft and yielding. He was clothed, under a single sheet, and unrestrained. Nor did he hurt anywhere.
He was not alone. A warm, limp weight shifted against his left side. Warm breath fanned the pillow next to Moro’s cheek. A few feet to Moro’s right, a more alert presence schooled its own breath back to near silence.
From the direction and the even-cadenced breathing, his watcher was adult. In peak physical condition. Too tall to be Dr. Volker. Possibly Sardis?
His sleeping bedmate chose that moment to snuggle closer under the sheet. The touch of hair on Moro’s cheek, the scent of male musk suddenly brought him back to—
Val.
Moro opened his eyes to see Val’s face just a few inches away, half-buried in a soft pillow and curling gold hair. Pale-gold stubble glinted on Val’s jawline. Val’s nostrils flared with his breathing. His wide, full lips were slightly parted, and the gold lashes fluttered a little against his high cheeks. One of Val’s hands lay across Moro’s chest, possessive even in sleep.
Someone kind had levered Val out of his rags and into an amber silk shirt. It reminded Moro uncomfortably of Cama’s dress. And Cama’s kisses. And a fierce, healing kind of sex, vividly real even in dream.
I’m alive, Moro thought, even as his body responded with direct longing for Val’s. Val’s alive. Have we been captured?
“No, my darling,” whispered a newly familiar female voice inside his mind. “Not yet. Not if I can help it.”
Cama. The previous day’s events hit Moro and rolled away, scoured by the inescapable truth. He’d survived Cama’s Touch. He wasn’t completely human anymore.
Some of his pressing need evaporated.
“Later,” said Cama, her sly tone promising all sorts of adventures. “If you can slither out from under Val, I want you to meet someone you very much need to be your friend.”
Moro turned his head, assessing then ignoring details of the dim bedroom around him. Not an infirmary. A living space where elegant furniture met no-nonsense warehouse shelves packed with electronic equipment, random parts, and odd tools.
A tall, lithe woman in an amber uniform leaned against the wall near a closed door. She wore many weapons, all less intimidating than the fierce cast to her dark, strong features. Her hair was a mass of long braids. A pile of heavy cloth folded over the crook of her right elbow.
When their gazes met, Moro saw worry, challenge, and wry amusement battle for supremacy across the woman’s face. She had the listening look of someone with a vocal Cama chattering away in her mind. The woman inclined her head at Moro, pointed silently and crooked her finger in unmistakable command.
Moro eased away from Val, substituting the pillow for his own body, and smiled when he saw Val clutch the pillow closer.
Something flopped across Moro’s shoulder. He pulled up the long segmented tail Val had made of his hair. The bottom-most ragged amber ribbon had nearly fallen off. Moro pulled it the rest of the way and tucked the knotted loop under Val’s hand.
Silently Moro followed the woman out the opened door, into a curving white-tiled hallway. Large windows were now covered on the outside by steel plates. Lamps alternated light and dark to save energy.
A place preparing for siege?
After she quietly closed the door on Val, the woman shook out the fabric, revealing a dark blue robe.
“After the doctors were done, I put you in some extra nightclothes that fit,” she said in a low, husky voice. “Didn’t think you wanted to wake up in just skin.”
No. He’d had enough of waking naked and vulnerable. The loose pants and tunic were soft gray cotton and covered him from neck to wrist and ankle. He shrugged into the fluffy cotton robe, relieved to find it was ankle-length and long-sleeved as well. He tied it around his waist.
Even as she asked, “Hungry?” Moro’s stomach rumbled. He nodded, realizing his last solid meal had been lunch in Kott’s stable. How many hours or days ago?
“Can I eat?” he murmured. He stopped, bringing his fingers to his throat.
“Cama and the doctors did a lot of repairs on you,” said the woman, leaning now against the corridor wall. “You should drink liquid meals for a day or so to be safe. You can talk now if you want. Cama says the implants in your brain and spine need to come out, and we don’t have the tech for that here. Where Volker got it, we’d love to know. It was her, wasn’t it?”
Moro nodded.
The dark woman patted his shoulder. “Cama can keep them dormant for now, so they won’t trouble you. The speech-center damage was easily reversible, which has unsettling implications. You might stammer and shake a little if you get nervous. But you should talk anyway, to get back in the habit. Face the dragon, eh?”
Moro dimly remembered his dour father, saying the same thing whenever Moro got hurt or frightened. “Face the dragon, Moro lad, it’s the only way.”
Moro’s father had plucked him away from Gran Case when Moro turned four. Merrick Dalgleish had died when Moro was six. From that gloomy, silent apartment, Moro had gone back to the Ventana Holding Company crèche: a familiar place, filled with bright colors, fun toys, other children, kind adults telling kind stories, clean rooms, and a green garden filled with sunlight.
He’d avoided thinking about Merrick and the crèche for years. People he’d loved or tried to love…always seemed to pay the worst prices.
“Come back from wherever you’ve gone, lad. We need to talk, and you need to eat.”
Eventually she urged him through a wide doorway into a big room filled with long tables in rows, groups of short tables, and comfortable chairs. Spotlights centered on potted plants, all windows were covered with blast plates, and most of the ambien
t lights were out. Several dozen Camalian adults and children ate and talked quietly. Some looked up when Moro and his guide walked in.
They nodded, gave him kind smiles, and returned to their private discussions. There were none of the predatory smirks Moro usually saw in public. Moro wondered if the Camalians would still smile when they found out he’d been a murderer and a whore.
Cama was now silent in his mind, but he sensed the symbiont’s intense curiosity.
He was here as a test, but for whom?
“Easy now,” said the dark woman, her firm hands grabbing his arm before he could bolt back into the hall.
She found a single table partially screened by plants and put him in a corner where he could see the whole room. “Sit,” she ordered Moro while waving a hand at someone circulating between the other tables.
A young server brought over a filled tray. The teenage girl unloaded a plateful of smoked vat-protein, waffles dusted with brown sugar, and fried apple slices in front of the woman. The girl’s gaze lingered on Moro as she served him a single glass. When he smiled at her, her hands shook.
“Laren, my dear,” said the woman, “could you check if they need help in the kitchen?”
When the girl had gone, looking back behind her whenever possible, the woman chuckled. “We are rationalists. No one here is stupid enough to blame an obvious victim for events outside his control. But we are suckers for grand stories, and you and Valier have just given us an epic. Drink this. Get at least three or four sips into you, and we’ll talk.”
The tall glass of thick, pale-brown fluid tasted of vanilla. Moro didn’t gulp it, not wanting to hit his stomach with too much, too fast. After sipping a third of the glass, he set it aside.
“Right,” said the woman, pushing away her own half-demolished breakfast. “I am Alys Antonin ne’Cama, the Camalian ambassador to Cedar. Valier calls me Aunt, but I am legally as much his parent as his birth mother and father.”
Val was a rich diplomat’s son, then. Although the ambassador looked like she’d be more at home commanding a gunship or a dockside brawl. She moved as Moro did, like a trained predator.
“Now, who are you,” she asked, “beyond the first outsider to survive Cama’s Touch in two hundred years? Valier wasn’t entirely coherent before we drugged him to calm him down. And we were too busy saving your life last night to ask many questions.”
Moro took a deep breath. Now or never. “I’m Moro,” he began, marveling over his newly steady voice. “Moro Dalgleish, of Ventana Holding. I was—”
“I know who and what you were,” said the ambassador. “More than most people in this room. I worried. Violence can breed violence in warped minds. But Cama vouches you’re sane and honorable. Now you’re a Camalian citizen and somewhat more. You can’t have known Valier for more than a few hours. How did you meet him?”
“On a skyscraper roof,” Moro said, finding his way slowly through the words. “I was going to jump off it. He was being attacked. It wasn’t fair. So I killed his attackers and told him to leave. He wouldn’t go. He kept me from jumping. Told me about Cama and the death she offered.” He paused, sipping more of the drink. “It seemed a cleaner way.”
She sighed, cradling her sharp chin on her interlaced dark fingers. “You didn’t know who he was. Cama says you didn’t want wealth or power, just escape. Just death.”
“Yes,” said Moro rather than nodding.
“And now?”
“Cama will k-kill me if she needs to,” said Moro, looking directly into the ambassador’s deep-brown eyes. “I’m grateful to know it. Removes all manner of burdens.” He breathed away the lingering stutter.
“Well, you’re certainly no fortune-hunting opportunist, Moro Dalgleish,” said the ambassador. “If you were, there’s an easier way to wealth than chancing Cama’s mercy. You’d be wed to Lyton Sardis by now.”
Thirty-Seven
MORO’S HANDS CLENCHED on the tabletop. “I’d r-rather die.”
“Just what Cama has led me to believe. Don’t worry. You’re one of hers now, and she will stand by you. We’re some ways alike, you and I.”
Moro tried to calm the lurching fear in his stomach.
“We’re both killers,” said Alys Antonin easily, as if it didn’t matter where Moro had learned such terrible skills. “And we’re both permanently shackled to short, brilliant, gorgeous, obnoxious pests.”
Moro surprised himself by laughing aloud.
“It’s rather earth-shattering, I know,” said the ambassador, “when an Antonin Royal suddenly fixates upon you. They tend not to take no for an answer. But they’re so enthusiastic and stupidly loyal you eventually forgive them.” Her tone softened. “For me it was his mother, Lia’s, voice, in an army bar in Port Tysona on Camonde. She was yelling the most filthy curses at someone who’d failed to bring her a clean glass, but all I could think about was hearing more. Preferably in bed, screaming my name.” The ambassador smiled, shaking the dozens of dark-brown braids cascading down her back. “Then I saw the little brown ratling and at least a yard of curly gold hair. I guessed she was the crown princess. They have a look, the Cama-linked Antonins. A foolproof genetic marker for their gift. A kindness to the rest of us who want to stay out of Antonin business. I was almost out the door when Lia spotted me. She let out a war whoop. Everyone cheered. I turned around and saw those eyes. Don’t remember much else of the night.”
“What happened?” Moro asked, remembering Val’s huge, lambent gold eyes.
The ambassador put her face in her hands, groaning. “You know, decades later, it’s still almost too embarrassing to say. I woke up naked, tangled around Lia, on a bed and in a room I’d never seen before, in what I eventually learned was the Antonin Residencia in the capital city of Sagana. Hours AWOL and a thousand miles from my unit. Cama was trying to damp down my massive hangover. And an older man with Lia’s skin and hair was looking down at us. When he found out I was a soldier, he couldn’t stop laughing. Lia woke up then. I thought she’d throw me out.”
Moro remembered Val’s possessive streak. “Did she?”
“She threw her father out and locked the door.” The ambassador grinned, white teeth vivid in her face. “Took her a few more hours to explain everything to me. When I, ah, met him more formally, Lia’s father did say she couldn’t have picked a better Knife among the eager ranks of what passes for our aristocracy.”
“Knife?”
The ambassador reached slowly toward him, keeping her hand in his view. She brushed light fingers over the crest still knotting Moro’s hair off his face. “Poor man, you have no idea, do you? In Camalian culture, the Knife is the same-sex spouse of the emperor, the empress, or their heir. Of equal honor to the Shield, the opposite-sex spouse. Between them the Knife and Shield are the Royal’s bodyguards, storm-anchors, confidants, and mates. And executioners, if necessary. Not every Royal finds a Knife, or needs one. But supposedly the really powerful Royals must have two mates, or they go insane from the stress of being Cama’s main conduit. I am Knife to Liatana Antonin ne’Cama. You are Knife to Valier Antonin ne’Cama. Your lover will eventually become the emperor of the Camalian Commonwealth when his mother steps down.”
Moro could only stare at her. Was this a horrible practical joke? Certain things Val had said came back now with implacable context: “I want my people to know who you are to me.”
Somewhere near the hallway door, a tray dropped in a metallic, glassy crash.
Moro looked up, seeing a startled woman backing away from the door and her spilled tray.
Val stood in the open doorway. He was barefoot like Moro and still in the amber sleeveless shirt and drawstring pants. Val’s pale golden hair was a messy halo around his fierce, searching face.
He spotted Moro and the ambassador, picked his way unscathed through the shattered glass, and stalked past the now silent Camalians. When he reached Moro, Val held out his right hand and opened it palm up. The scrap of amber silk lay crumpled against his golden-brow
n skin.
“Moro. I thought you’d been taken from me,” Val growled. “Cama wouldn’t tell me anything. But then I guessed you left this for me, so I’d know you were safe.”
“I did,” said Moro, flustered at Val’s proximity. Even unshaven and unkempt, Val’s beauty still made Moro feel grubby and tarnished. Especially now!
“You can speak,” Val said, low in his throat.
“I can. Val, I didn’t mean to, I can’t possibly be—”
“Sshh,” Val said, taking Moro’s face in his hands and bending down for a kiss that drowned Moro’s earlier composure. Moro thought he heard whistles, cheers, and clapping, but Val’s hot, clean, orange-flavored mouth created its own universe.
The daft little thing had stopped just long enough to brush his teeth.
His kiss was pure bravado, Moro noted from all the awkward ways Val’s tongue engaged his. Val was terrified and insecure, shaking almost as much from doubt as from lust.
Moro kissed back, trying to soothe that fear.
“Boys,” Cama hummed smugly into Moro’s mind. “You are in public, you realize?”
He tried to disengage, turning away a little before Val got a hand in his hair and pulled him back. The almost pain sent a jolt down Moro’s spine, waking edgy, desperate need. He wanted to take his pleasure in a willing and generous body instead of being coerced. To burn away every one of Val’s apprehensions in sheer joy. To teach his princeling not to be ashamed of those hidden desires, or they’d be weapons aimed against him.
“Cama,” Moro said silently to the symbiont exulting in their kiss, “he should have been taught better years ago. He thinks he’s defective.”
“I was waiting for the right teacher,” she said.
Val might have been listening in. Or he’d remembered some of their discoveries last night. He pulled his mouth away from Moro’s, refastened on the spot behind and below Moro’s right ear. And nipped. Demetra had found it first. Michol had known the spot. So had the Leopard, the only man in the arena to ever ask. Sardis never had. It wasn’t something Dr. Volker had done to Moro, but some quirk of nerves he’d had since birth. None of them could do what Val could to that tiny patch of skin.
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