Though Hell Should Bar the Way - eARC

by David Drake

  “Get out of here, you fool!” a guard growled, jabbing his impeller at me. I jumped clear and whisked around the partition into Giorgios’ bedroom. There’d usually have been an attendant there to keep underlings out, but that fellow had vanished when the Admiral arrived.

  The chamberlain was alone in his big bed. He’d awakened, probably when his attendants fled. He swung his legs out—he was wearing a paisley shift—and gestured me to the back of the suite. We went out onto the gallery and Giorgios closed the door behind us. There was no one in sight.

  “Did he say what he was looking for?” Giorgios whispered.

  “He didn’t say anything,” I whispered back. “A guard told me to get out. Does this happen often?”

  “Not often,” Giorgios said. “He doesn’t usually leave the Wives’ Wing except on court days. And this is early!”

  Then he gasped and said, “The computer was working, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a blank screen?”

  “The console was fine,” I said soothingly. It was nearly midday—which might have been early for the Admiral, come to think, as well as for his chamberlain. “I was going over the Treasury Division accounts.”

  That led to an obvious segue and I said, “What does the Admiral do at the console?”

  If he was checking the treasury accounts, there were going to be more people on stakes shortly. I wasn’t doing an audit—and I’d just started on the division anyway—but the corruption I’d found in household expenses was subtle compared to what I’d seen at a glance in the Chancellor’s department.

  “I don’t know,” Giorgios said miserably. “Do you suppose he’s checking on me?”

  I started to say, “Well, I’ll tell you as soon as I look at the console history,” but I decided to keep quiet about that. The chamberlain certainly didn’t know that the console logged usage, and I realized that the Admiral himself probably didn’t.

  “I guess we’d better hope not,” I said instead. Then, because Giorgios was so rattled, I said, “I think that for safety’s sake, I’d better start contacting the vendors myself instead of you sending the orders by messengers. Heavens only knows what some of them would say under a little pressure.”

  “Oh, Great God,” Giorgios said. “Do you really think so? Oh Great God.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “I’ll take care of it and we’ll both be safe.”

  I wouldn’t be safe until I was gone from ben Yusuf. I was pretty sure this would be a step toward getting me there.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’d thought my first order of business would be to find Abram, but I heard his laugh—a cheerful bray—coming up from below several times while Giorgios and I were chatting. I leaned over the gallery railing and saw the boy among the customers at Martial’s diner.

  I could have shouted to him, but walking down the stairs didn’t arouse general notice. That didn’t necessarily make me safe, but keeping a low profile struck me as the better option.

  People who randomly whack the heads off flowers start with the tallest stems. There were plenty of randomly violent people in the Admiral’s palace.

  When Abram saw me walking toward the diner, he waved and trotted to meet me. “Hey, boss,” he said. “Glad you don’t need a stake to stay upright. How’s Giorgios?”

  “The same when I left him,” I said. “He may need to change his trousers. Though come to think, he was still in his nightshirt. Still, it seemed like a good time to get out into the town. Take me to Balian’s, to begin with.”

  “We have an order for Balian?” Abram said. “He usually gives me a glass of wine when I bring him an order.”

  “I’ll talk with Balian,” I said. “There’ll be others today, and more later too.”

  I planned to come away with more than a glass of wine. Martial had kept me supplied with as much as I needed in piaster coins—he’d still be making a nice profit on the six “mouths” I’d transferred to his roster—but I thought it was time that I started making my own way.

  Abram led. I made an effort to recall the turns, but I wasn’t very concerned about it. I’d be just as happy to have a companion every time I wandered the city.

  I could get Giorgios to assign armed guards, I suppose, but I trusted Abram and his wits to stand me in as good stead as any of the guards I’d seen thus far. They seemed to be village boys who’d been handed a weapon. They might be brave enough, but they had the intelligence of the goats they’d been herding before they entered Salaam.

  Abram turned into a plaza around a sprawling building with white walls. The walls were less than ten feet tall, but I could see that the roof was covered by a series of vaults. As soon as we stepped inside, keepers of the shops inside greeted us with noisy enthusiasm.

  They came from behind their counters, often with a selection of their wares hanging from one outstretched arm. Those in this neighborhood seemed to be jewelers, offering chains and bangles hanging from chains.

  “We want hardware,” Abram explained to me in a dismissive tone. “That is”—his expression grew cunning—“unless you’ve changed your mind about a girl? Murid in the last shop down is my friend and he can give you a good price.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead despite the fingers plucking my sleeves. Did they treat everybody this way? Because Abram and I certainly weren’t dressed to impress people with our wealth.

  We continued through to a cross bay and turned right. This time the shops sold low-end clothing, the local equivalent of the spacers’ slops I was wearing. I could use more garments, but not now.

  For that matter, my inclination was to let Abram shop for my personal needs. I preferred to bargain at a higher level.

  Beyond the clothing was a hardware market. The shopkeepers were mostly male as they had been in the jewelry bay, but they were less boisterously enthusiastic. The garment sellers had been women.

  Balian was an old man seated at the back of the shop. At the counter were two younger men; one wasn’t much older than Abram. They cheerfully greeted him, taking him by the arms and drawing him past the counters of pipe fittings and into the racks of tools.

  I’d intended to have lists with me when I began visiting shopkeepers, but the Admiral’s arrival hadn’t given me time to plan. I’d recently gone over hardware purchases, though, so I figured I was current enough for the present purposes.

  “And this one…?” said the older of the youths, eying me without pleasure. “You’re training to be the new messenger?”

  The words were harmless. The insult was in the tone.

  “Not exactly,” I said. The acoustics in this large hall were designed for drinking clatter rather than for transmitting speech clearly, but I could see that the old man in back was listening intently. I pitched my voice for him: “I’m the chamberlain’s assistant and have sole control of the console. I’m here to discuss future orders rather than to place one today.”

  The younger clerk sniffed. “Well, I guess we can stand a second glass of wine,” he said loudly.

  I looked over his head at Balian and smiled. It wasn’t a good-humored smile. I didn’t speak, which seemed to put the boy off his stride.

  The old man got up and said, “Mehmet, why don’t you and Suleiman attend our friend Abram. I will take the new gentleman—your name, sir?”

  “Roy Olfetrie,” I said, nodding slightly.

  “Our new friend Roy into my office,” Balian said. To me he added, “It’s quieter, and perhaps I could find a better bottle of wine?”

  “I’m not here for wine,” I said as I followed him toward the back of the shop.

  “No, no, I didn’t think you were,” Balian said sadly. He opened a door to which a rack of small metal fittings hung. They tinkled when the panel moved. “Well, what can a poor man do?”

  The office was small but antiseptically clean: one small desk, two straight chairs, and a four-drawer file cabinet. The old man opened the bottom drawer of the
cabinet and came out holding an earthenware bottle and two shapely tulip glasses.

  He looked up and paused. “Unless perchance you’d like something stronger?”

  “Ben Yusuf wine is quite strong enough for me,” I said.

  Balian handed me a glass and closed the bottle with a plug of waxed wood. When he’d settled into his chair with the second glass, he eyed me and said, “Not bad, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I agreed after a taste. “But as I said, I’m not here for the refreshment.”

  “Of course,” Balian said. “What proposition do you have for me, Roy Olfetrie?”

  “For every twenty items ordered for the palace,” I said, “you invoice twenty-one as delivered. I enter the twenty-one, and you and I split the billed amount of the twenty-first. You pay over my share in cash the next time I come by.”

  “Indeed,” said the old man, speaking with no inflection. “And what would you do, Roy Olfetrie, if I reported this conversation the Giorgios, your master?”

  I shrugged. “I think he’d be pleased,” I said. “At least when I explain that your pique is natural, given that I moved all the hardware purchases to Ajah. He agreed to pay a twenty-five percent commission to the chamberlain instead of twenty, you see.”

  “Ajah won’t pay twenty-five percent!” Balian snarled, the first time his mask had slipped.

  I shrugged again. “I suspect he will if I double his volume,” I said.

  For a moment, Balian stared at me with an expression as blank as a pearl. Then he chuckled and said, “You know, you might be right about that. But”—his eyes hard-focused again—“you haven’t actually done that yet?”

  “You were my first stop,” I said truthfully. “As best as I could tell, your prices are better than Ajah’s. While the well-being of my employer—my owner, I suppose I should say—isn’t my only consideration, I did take it into account.”

  Balian chuckled again. He set his glass down on the desk and laughed harder.

  It didn’t hurt me, but neither did the business seem to me such a funny joke. I said, “Where do you get your supplies? Are there factories elsewhere on ben Yusuf? Because I haven’t seen much sign of them in Salaam.”

  “Pipe and fittings are mostly made on planet,” the old man said, sobering. “There’s an extrusion plant in the west suburbs here. Hand tools, some on ben Yusuf; there’s a couple factories in Eski Marakech. Power tools, they’re all from off planet.”

  I thought of what Giorgios had said when he brought me to the palace. I said, “I didn’t realize ben Yusuf had off-planet trade.”

  “Charities on other planets buy back their citizens under truce,” Balian explained. “That’s mostly done in Eski Marakech, but my agent there buys on my orders and ships them to me.”

  He lifted the wine bottle. “Another?” he said.

  “Not for me,” I said, getting to my feet. “But I’ll be sending Abram with a formal order in a few days, once I’ve checked my records on the console.”

  That wasn’t all I’d be checking on the console. I hoped the Admiral was finished by now. I was looking forward to learning what he’d been doing.

  * * *

  I let Abram check about on Admiral’s whereabouts. I didn’t want to be seen asking about him or about much of anything. That was largely my plan of keeping a low profile, but I’d seen from our first meeting that Abram would get better information than I could. He knew so much that his quick brain could cross-check whatever people told him, and nobody was going to ask why he wanted to know something.

  Abram was always working an angle. If you stayed on his good side, you wouldn’t find that angle jabbing you in the dark some night.

  The Admiral had only stayed twenty minutes before going back to the women’s wing with his entourage of guards and toadies. None of them were permitted to watch what he was doing at the console.

  As before, I had Abram shoo the spectators off to a distance, though there hadn’t been any reason for that except that I didn’t want to be jostled. Less than half of the palace staff were even literate, and all I was doing at the computer was my job as the chamberlain’s assistant. I didn’t intend to discuss with the chamberlain what I was doing, sure; but he was probably happier not to know.

  I checked the usage log and found that all the Admiral’s activity had been in areas accessed after insertion of a chip key. That disassociated them from the console’s normal routines.

  The only way around that was to create an identical key—impossible for me and probably impossible for anybody else unless they had the original to copy—or to reset the console itself and to wipe all security formatting. That too was impossible unless you had the console’s password, which could be set to fourteen digits of letters, numbers, and symbols.

  In the RCN, every console was given a password generated by cosmic ray impacts; I’m sure the Alliance used a similar system. As consoles came from the manufacturer, though, the normal default was the last three digits of the unit’s serial number. The palace console was ex-commercial; as I expected, keying in A3* opened all sectors of the console to me.

  There were document files which could be updated by information transferred when the key was inserted. That had been done regularly, but there’d been no changes in the past month. Each was a personnel file, so to speak: the name of a woman; particulars of height, weight, and identifying characteristics; and where applicable the name of her father and her birth village, with the bride price.

  In five cases the file gave the woman’s name and planet of origin, with no mention of bride price. Four of those women did have prices listed, but with the name of a captain rather than a father; they’d been bought at slave auctions.

  The unique item on the list was Monica Smith, a blonde from Saguntum. She was the most recent arrival, from three months back. No source or price appeared. That was a puzzle with no obvious means of solution.

  The sectors which the Admiral had been checking a few minutes ago were displays for observation cameras in the Wives’ Wing, though I had to check the sources to be sure of that.

  I blanked the display in sudden terror, then turned on the couch. The console was in an alcove. Ten or a dozen palace servants sat in a loose semicircle out in the gallery. They were staring at my back. They didn’t seem concerned or even interested when I looked at them.

  Between me and them squatted Abram, with a double-edged dagger in his lap. Nobody was close enough for the point of the dagger to reach—quite—if Abram suddenly started swiping at spectators. I made sure the focus of my holographic display was set so that the images cohered only from within sixteen centimeters—the unit was of Karst manufacture—of where my eyes were when I sat at the console.

  I took a deep breath and opened one of the camera feeds.

  I was looking at a woman with lovely blond hair, about as old as I am. She was staring at a window covered by a carved wooden screen. The screen was a marvel of workmanship; the craftsman who’d made it could have earned a fortune on Cinnabar, turning out one-off masterpieces for newly rich gentlemen in Xenos.

  People like my dad had been.

  The blond was in a corner room; I judged that she was looking over the alley on the south side of the palace. I doubted whether she could see the pavement, and I wasn’t sure that she could even see the tops of the two-story buildings across the way; the screen was finger thick, and the openings were narrow swirls an inch or two long.

  The blond got up from the window ledge. Her expression was the only part of her that wasn’t lovely. It was as cold as polished granite, not ugly but inhuman. There was only one blond in the Admiral’s records, so this was Monica Smith.

  Monica picked up a long-necked stringed instrument and walked to the door. I lost her when she went out, but there were more than twenty other feeds. I cycled through them until one gave me a large bay, probably the central half of the wing.

  Eight women lounged there. Two were playing a game with cards and tiles; three sat at an
other table and drank small cupfuls from an urn; and the final three read or stared at wood-screened windows, much as Monica had been doing in her room.

  The camera installation had been expert. It covered the entire top floor of the wing and showed the interiors of every chamber. The feeds must have come from extreme fish-eye lenses, but there was no distortion in what I saw because the console’s enormous capacity easily corrected the images.

  I wondered who had installed and connected the equipment; and I wondered also if they had long survived the task. It was possible that the work had been done by women or by eunuchs. My suspicion after my past experience with the palace was that the Admiral had bought slaves with the necessary expertise and then had executed them.

  The women were all dressed in loose garments and slippers. Monica wore a shift much like the one Giorgios slept in, though hers was white instead of patterned. Most of the others were in similar garments or skirts and blouses, though one of the game players wore only a bandeau above the waist.

  Monica walked to a woman reading. They moved to a bench without back or arms and sat. Monica began to play while the other woman watched her fingering intently.

  Another woman entered the hall from a door which had been closed until then. The observation cameras didn’t have sound—and I wouldn’t have dared use it anyway—but the roomful of women started as suddenly as birds raised by a gun dog.

  The newcomer was older than most of the others—midforties I would guess—but in very good condition. She was plumper than my taste, but that seemed to be the norm for ben Yusuf. The only slim adult woman whom I’d seen here was Monica.

  The woman who’d been sitting with Monica disappeared into one of the rooms. She left behind the book she’d been reading. Monica stood also, but she didn’t back away.

  The Admiral’s chief wife was Azul, fifty years old and born on ben Yusuf. I was certain now that I was watching her, though she wore her age well. I couldn’t hear the words the two women exchanged, but I could read them easily enough in the postures and expressions.