“What about the Emperor?” she asked, following me as I took off down the hall. “He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
My friend? I almost sneered at that, but Corvo did not deserve it. “If they get out of this far enough ahead there won’t be anything His Radiance can do. I am a problem, Otavia. His marriage proposal with Selene is a solution to that problem, but he will not lament me if I am gone, I think.” I was speaking quickly then, tongue racing to catch up with the current of my thoughts. “They want me dead, and if they can build a strong enough case for why I should be, the Emperor won’t raise a finger to stop them. He won’t gainsay the Chantry if the Synarch himself says I’m some sort of devil worshiper.” I almost laughed aloud and touched the pitchfork-and-pentacle embroidered above my heart.
“Where are we going?” Otavia asked suddenly, stopping in her tracks.
“I told you!” I snapped. “To find Okoyo. Where is she?”
“In medica!” Corvo said, pointing back over her shoulder, back the way we had come. “That way!”
* * *
“I don’t think ’tis necessary!” Valka said, seated on the edge of the dressing table that ran along the middle of the cubiculum’s antechamber, her boots still on. “They know I’m Tavrosi.”
I placed my hands on her shoulders and spoke into her eyes. “Yes, but they might have forgotten about you. They might not look too closely.”
“Because I’m just your woman?” Valka sneered.
There was no time. “Yes!” And hissed, “But not to me.” I could not afford an argument, not then. “They might not look twice at you and might underestimate your importance, particularly because they might be fool enough to dismiss you as just my woman.”
Her icy facade cracked as she smiled. “ ’Tis better.”
I grunted. “I need you to go back into fugue. It might not occur to them that you were caught up in all this, and it might make them forget about you.” Fingers tightened on her shoulders as I willed her to understand, praying that for once in our mingled lives she would only accept what I said and not challenge me. “They’ll use you to hang me, if they can. And I can’t let them know how close their plan came to working.”
“You’re sure it was their plan?”
“Do you doubt it?”
I had no real illusions that they might forget Valka or what she was, but placing her in fugue might—might—remove her from the board.
Neither of us spoke a moment, but I took my hands away and stepped back, permitting her the room and the time she needed to think. I could see the mind working behind the face, messages racing like lightning across the surface of a cloud.
The fugue creche stood behind her, one of twenty standing empty in the antechamber filling bay. Personnel were meant to undress and load in two decades at a time, but we were alone. I’d ordered Corvo to find Lorian and Crim, and asked Okoyo to wait outside.
“What do you think they’re going to find?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “But it won’t matter.”
“Unless you figure out how that knife got aboard,” she said.
The lightning in my own head stopped. She was right. That was our only hope.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped back. “This isn’t goodbye.”
“You are always so dramatic,” she said, and raising her feet in turn unzipped her boots.
“I think I’ve earned it today.”
She made a small noise of assent before kicking the boots into a bin beside the nearest creche. The rest of her clothing soon joined them, and she turned naked to face me, a strange expression on her face, winged brows drawn up and together. It was not a face she wore often, leastways not where anyone could see.
Concern.
“See you on the other side, then.”
Which side is that? I asked myself. Who knew what world she might awaken to? If she awoke at all.
She took a half-step back, made to turn and climb into the creche housing, but I caught her hand. I can’t remember the distance closing between us. Only that it had. Both hands in her hair, I kissed her, fast and fiercely. And when we sprang apart she pushed me breathlessly away. Her clan tattoo spiraled from her arm and collarbone down her left flank. How cruel, how inexcusable, that I who knew its every line and curve—and hers—can scarce recall them now.
“Get the doctor,” she said. “Do it.”
“I love you,” I said, stopping on the threshold to look back.
“Well . . .” she smiled, clambering into the creche, “you’re not wrong.”
* * *
Crim and Lorian both met me in my chambers, still the safest and most secure spot on the ship. Corvo had been set the task of hiding any errant bits of conversation left on the ship’s monitors. I had told them everything, and telling them did not waste any time. We might have only hours before the Inquisition docked with the Tamerlane. We had to act quickly.
“Like I said before,” Crim was saying, “there’s no one on this ship who shouldn’t be. No stowaways, no intruders my men could find. No one operating that thing as stabbed the doctor and your man Martin, just like Varro said. Ilex confirmed there was no receiver on the thing, either, so maybe it was . . . smart.”
Lorian was nodding. “It’s a pity we don’t have the bloody thing. The Inquisitors might not buy our report for a steel bit, but the knife would have cleared us.”
I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. “They’d only have thrown it away.” But he was right: I might have gotten the knife through to the Martian Guard or the Ministry of Justice or straight to the Emperor himself.
“What possessed you to have it destroyed?” Lorian said, and I could feel him glowering at me.
“You were right there, Aristedes.” I glared back, and the little man quailed, remembering who I was and the distance between us. “If you’d known it was a misplay then, you could have stopped me.” That shut him up, and I added, “I was concerned that turning the knife over to the Chantry or Legion Intelligence or whoever would put a recording of the attempt in the hands of our enemies—and Emperor knows what else. There’s no telling how long the knife’s been aboard. There’s no telling what it recorded. What it heard.”
Crim had been silent a moment, fingers picking at the string of throwing knives slotted through the baldric he wore over his burgundy uniform jacket. “Why wasn’t it transmitting then? The whole time?”
“We’d have caught it, even tight beam, broadcasting out of the ship like that? We’d have noticed?” Lorian answered easily.
“Would we?” Crim cracked back. “I’m feeling a bit blind at the moment.”
“Enough!” I said. “We can discuss our tactical failures later, gentlemen. We have work to do.” And with this I removed a small metal box, four inches to a side, from the seat beside me and set it on the coffee table between us, as near to Crim as I could make it. “Take it.”
The former mercenary leaned in and picked it up. “What is it?”
“My death,” I said, without a dram of irony.
“The recording?” Lorian asked.
I nodded, looking each man in the face by turns. “They can’t find that.” As I spoke, Crim opened the box to reveal the crystal ball, about the size of a chicken’s egg, nestled safely in foam. “It’s the only copy. I need you to hide it. Do whatever you have to, and do not tell a soul.”
The swordsman pressed his lips together and slid the box into one of the massive pockets inside the greatcoat.
“So we’re back to the idea that it’s one of our people,” I said soberly, eyes tracking from my security officer to my tactical officer and back.
Commander Aristedes raised a bony finger. “We’d never technically abandoned the idea.”
Without warning I pounded the coffee table with a fist. “Damn it, Lorian! Enough with the splitting hairs.”
&nb
sp; The intus flapped his hands. “No, no, no, listen! I’ve got it! We’ve ruled out the cleaning staff and your batmen.”
“I even interrogated the cooks,” Crim said. “Everyone I could think of.”
“Everyone who had access to your chambers.” Lorian’s watery eyes flitted from me to Crim and back again, nervous and fidgeting as his hands. “But what about the people who had access to the people who had access to your chambers?”
I stood sharply and stalked toward the sideboard where Jinan’s laving basin stood. Prince Aranata’s ring lay in it alongside the elephant ivory band I often wore on my third finger, and atop it rested the still-incorrupt Galath blossom. In a voice flat and calm, I said, “I said enough games, Lorian. Do not play me in riddles. Tell me what you’re thinking, and tell me plain.”
“We should be looking at the security staff,” Lorian said.
Even with my back turned, I could feel Crim turn to ice and crunch beneath the weight of that suggestion. I heard the man stand and shouted, “Hold!” My fingers tightened on the edge of the table, but I did not turn to face them both. I did not have to. I could see Crim standing, feet apart, one hand on the hilt of one long knife, ready. I understood. Lorian had insulted his honor, and Crim’s honor had been insulted enough of late. Lorian had kicked him while he was down.
“If you’re suggesting that I have something to do with this, little man . . .” Crim said, words failing him. “Noyn jitat!” He let fly a string of expletives in his native Jaddian.
“Crim!” I said, still not turning, still staring down into the basin with my rings and the Imperial flower. “What is in your pocket?”
“Sir?”
“Your pocket,” I said again, and worked first the ivory ring onto its finger, then the rhodium one onto my thumb. This accomplished, I turned, and saw that it was precisely as I’d expected. Crim stood looming over the table and over the little intus where he sat at the narrow end: a tall, rapier-thin shadow in blood red above a pale figure in legionary black.
“I . . .” Crim stammered.
I took a step nearer the two of them, still fiddling with the rings that had not yet settled into their proper places on my hand. “Lieutenant Commander Garone, I just gave you something. What was it?”
The Jaddian mercenary looked round at me as though I’d lost my mind. “The recording?”
“I gave you the only recording that proves that what they say about me is true. And I asked you to protect it. Ask yourself: why would I do such a thing if I did not trust you?” The tall man visibly relaxed, seeming almost to deflate as he turned from Lorian to face me. Crim had been at my side since long before Vorgossos, since Pharos and Admiral Whent. “Do you think me, stupid, man?”
Crim bowed his head. “No, my lord.”
“Good,” I said, “because Aristedes here does think I’m stupid, and I’ve no wish to be outnumbered just now. So please sit down.” He sat, hand still on the hilt of his knife. Turning my attentions back to Aristedes then, I said, “Explain yourself.”
Though I had an inclination of where he was going, I found it best in dealing with Lorian Aristedes simply to let the man talk. “Look, in the past week, we’ve edited, deleted, fabricated hours and hours and hours of sec footage. Price of living under surveillance, I suppose. But listen. We’ve ruled out everyone with access to this room, which leaves us with only those people who can cover up that they had access. We wasted our time this past week interviewing personnel and reviewing the sec recordings. We should have been looking through the changelogs for signs of meddling.”
“How long will it take?”
“A couple days?” Lorian replied.
“You have until they arrive,” I said. “Put Varro on it, Durand . . . anyone you need. We need proof of what happened and we need to get it off this ship and into the hands of the Martian Guard or the Justice Ministry . . . someone who doesn’t answer to Bourbon or Legion Intelligence—and certainly no one answerable to the Chantry.”
Lorian was shaking his head. “We can’t broadcast, my lord. There’s no way to get a signal out.”
“I don’t care if you have to swim, Lorian,” I said with force. “You will find out who did this thing, and you will get the man and the evidence off this ship.”
CHAPTER 41
THE GOOD SOLDIER
I WAITED WITH MY officers on the receiving platform as the Inquisition emerged from its shuttle. Legionnaires led the way in ivory armor, their white tunics trimmed in crimson labyrinths, black disruptor rifles in hand, faceless visors reflecting the overhead fluorescent lighting. Behind them came a half dozen cathars in black robes, shave-headed and with dark muslin blindfolds over their eyes. Behind them were two Inquistors in similar black, though their cloth was slashed with white beneath, and they wore white mantles over their shoulders and silver chains with enameled cartouches depicting the Earth and Sun, the former eclipsing the latter.
“Remind me again why I enlisted with you lot,” Corvo whispered in my ear. She had to stoop to reach it. The tension in her—and in Durand, in Crim, and the other Norman officers—was so much I thought each of them might snap like a guitar string. My Imperial mates fared little better—and perhaps worse. Lorian stood at my left hand, and as I was glancing down at the small man, he looked almost green. I found myself wishing that Valka were there; I needed her spine to lean on.
The next figure in the train descending from the overlarge shuttle sent an electric spasm through my heart. Intelligence Director Lorcan Breathnach appeared at the top of the ramp, his face like weathered stone, flanked by some squire I did not know and followed by a number of lay technicians and logothetes from Legion Intelligence. I was surprised to see sad-faced Sir Friedrich Oberlin, the young head of reconnaissance in the Norman Expanse. What was he doing here? And why had Breathnach come himself? Had he been requested by the Chantry? Or had the Minister of War insisted on the Director’s presence?
Perhaps he had only come to gloat.
That he was behind all this I had no doubt. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. I wondered at his motivations. Did he think me a threat to his Imperial master? Or was it simply the patrician chip on his shoulder? He had earned his place, clawed for it and his chance to be uplifted from mere plebeian humanity, whereas I—however outcaste—remained a palatine nobile.
But he was not the last in the train, for behind him and his aides and guards came one last, a figure robed in white with a black mantle draped over her shoulders. A black Egyptian-style cap that rose a foot above her head. Her skin was pale as milk, and her eyes were just as colorless, such that I thought her blind.
A Grand Inquisitor.
The others stepped aside as the woman approached in her high crown and cape, and I was struck suddenly by just how much they all resembled chess pieces, white and black. Here surely was a queen. A dangerous piece indeed.
The Grand Inquisitor halted before me and extended a clawed hand. At first I thought she intended me to take it as the plebeians are wont to do. It was a moment before I saw the signet ring. She did not wear it upon her thumb as we nobiles do, but upon her smallest finger. Remembering the ancient lessons of my dancing master, I went to both knees and kissed it, mindful of the pointed, red-enameled nails. Only after I released the cold fingers did I realize the ring was fashioned of bone.
“So,” she said, voice deep and surprisingly throaty, “you’re the one.”
I had met Synarch Vergilian more than a dozen times over the long years, but this Inquisitor frightened me as he never had. People believe the Synarch to be master of the Holy Terran Chantry, but he is only an ambassador. First among equals representing the true power in the faith, the Synod of high priests who never left the great cloisters on Vesperad. Though nominally they served the Emperor, there are those who wonder if it is not the other way round.
These Grand Inquisitors answered to the Synod itself, a
nd so in a sense the pale woman before me was stranger and more terrible even than His Holy Wisdom, the Synarch. He was only a mouthpiece. She was a hand.
When I said nothing, she raised one bald eyebrow. “Do you know who I am?”
I could not refuse to answer a direct question. Still kneeling, I looked her in the eye. “You’re a Grand Inquistor.”
“I am a servant of truth,” she answered me. If I expected her to give me a name, I was disappointed. Perhaps she had one, once, but if so that was a long time ago. “And I will find the truth, wherever it may be. Your people will cooperate with my investigation. You will allow us access to any part of this ship or its databases and you will do so without question or else you and your people will be charged with obstruction.” Her white eyes swept over my officers, and creases formed at the corners of her mouth, as though she was not impressed by what she saw. I saw Breathnach smiling with fiery eyes over her shoulder. Her orders were not yet done. “Any personnel not required for the maintenance and upkeep of this vessel will confine themselves to quarters except at mealtimes, which will be brief and orderly. You yourself are not to leave your cabin at all, Lord Marlowe, unless you are summoned. Is that clear?”
Again, I could not ignore a direct question. “Yes, Reverence.”
“You understand that you are not accused of consortation? That you are not, yourself, under investigation for crimes against humanity?”
I could not help myself. “It doesn’t feel that way, Your Reverence.”
The Grand Inquisitor blinked. “Reports indicated a device potentially possessed of daimonic intelligence was found aboard this vessel. That device was destroyed on your orders, and so we cannot rule out the possibility of infestation here by straightforward forensic analysis of the machine in question. We must then conduct a thorough survey of all electronic devices aboard.”
Which will allow you and your friend Sir Lorcan to plant whatever evidence you wish, I did not say.
Demon in White Page 39