Trader's Honour

by Patty Jansen

However, when she typed the code into the screen at her usual cubicle, Rehan had only sent a message of a single line. I have to go now. Something has come up. Keep well.

  Panic rising in her, she stared at the screen and the non-responsive dot at the bottom.

  She'd gotten used to him being in the office to chat. How could he not be there?

  Had he said anything about going somewhere? He couldn't work, so he wouldn't be travelling. What did he mean something has come up?

  She thought of fights in the streets, barricades, people setting fire to houses. Rehan unable to get to the office and unable to leave the Endri quarter. Braedon and Taerzo unable to work. She rose from her seat. All other cubicles in the room were empty, and the only person in the room was the keihu woman who attended the desk who probably reported everything that happened in this room straight to the council. When Mikandra left the room, the woman smiled cheerfully and said there was no charge.

  Mikandra left the building again, despair clawing at her. There were no Traders' craft at the airport, no one to ask until and the passenger shuttle from Miran arrived later in the day, if there would be a passenger shuttle.

  Chapter 25

  When she came to the library, someone sat at her desk.

  Daya Ezmi.

  He leant back in her chair, casually flipping through a book from the pile that she intended to tackle this morning.

  Mikandra stopped, and considered running before he noticed her, but in retrospect realised why there had been a particularly vicious black-clad guard at the door. A Coldi woman, with arms thick as jungle vines, not the juvenile keihu type that usually patrolled this part of the building. Daya was the reason for her presence. There was no way Mikandra could leave the library past this guard.

  Daya looked up from the book and his eyes met hers.

  He rose from the desk and gestured for her to come.

  Mikandra did, because there was nothing else she could do. Her heart thudded against her ribs.

  "So we meet again. I heard that you have an interest in history."

  Mikandra nodded, listening in his voice for any signs of emotion, but finding none. Her mouth felt too dry to speak.

  "So do I. Bakimay told me that she showed you the replica of the cave we've built here. That room is not quite ready yet, but we're planning to take students into that room. The Pengali have maintained these caves for thousands of years and we understand their objection to letting large numbers of people visit. I also understand that people in Miran do the same thing, that there is an underground chamber underneath the Foundation monument that all school children visit. I've applied to visit it, but the Mirani council won't give me the permit." The statement sounded like a challenge. Hell, of course the Mirani council wouldn't allow him to visit that room under the Foundation monument if they knew who he was.

  He rose. "Come, I'll show you something."

  Mikandra hesitated. She didn't want to go anywhere with him where she wasn't in view of at least two other people.

  He said, "I've told Bakimay that I'll be talking to you for a while. You don't need to worry that she'll be angry with you."

  Just as she feared. Mikandra looked around the library. She couldn't see Bakimay anywhere. She glanced at the door. The menacing guard still stood there. She carried her gun Coldi-style on her right arm. The male Coldi guards were scary, but it was the female ones who were truly petrifying.

  "Is there a problem?"

  "Uhm. Yes. I want your guarantee that wherever we go, you'll bring me back here." Even to herself, her voice sounded strangled.

  He frowned. "Of course I'll bring you back here. Bakimay will have my hide if I keep you."

  He smiled, and again she tried to judge his expression, but couldn't.

  That creepy, shivery, head-pounding feeling crept over her again.

  Then a scary thought: what if that feeling was caused by his mind-reading?

  She met his intense eyes. Could he see inside her thoughts? Did he know who she was, why she was here and what she wanted?

  Sweat rolled over her back.

  The vicious Coldi guard was looking at her with an intense expression.

  Nothing for it. She didn't trust him in the slightest, but there was no way she could run from that guard and as far as she knew, there were no other usable doors into the library.

  "All right. But I have nothing to hide." So don't even try any of that mindreading stuff on me.

  Daya raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. He led her into the corridor. They walked past restoration parties who all greeted him, into the passage that provided access to the assembly hall. In her wanderings through the building, Mikandra had peeked into this door once when it was unguarded. The assembly hall had already been restored, with a mosaic floor, wood-panelled walls and wooden benches, a magnificent combination of old keihu style and Pengali craft.

  They passed a guard station where Mikandra had always had to turn back. The huge keihu man nodded politely. Then Daya turned left, up a broad flight of stairs.

  At the top was a set of wooden doors where two Coldi guards stood sentry, both of them women. One of them opened the door to let Daya pass. She wore a singlet-type shirt and her bare arms bore scars in a pattern of triangles. Her expression remained blank. Both women were Hedron guards, most definitely.

  The room on the other side was huge, more like an apartment than an office. The far side consisted entirely of windows overlooking the square and Market Street—they were in the room on the very corner of the complex. A set of comfortable couches stood so that visitors could admire the view.

  A glass wall separated off two other rooms. The one closest to the main door held a neatly-made bed. The other room was a library.

  Daya bade her to sit and Mikandra sat, looking around the room and searching for clues as to why she was here and finding none.

  A restored mural on the wall behind a desk showed an image of the Barresh council in session. All the men were handsome, none with voluminous stomachs and a couple of chins each. An image on the other wall showed Pengali at work in what looked like a quarry where they cut stone and fashioned it into ornamental tiles.

  The five-pointed star was everywhere: on the ceiling, in the carpet and engraved in the glass separation to the library.

  Daya went to the desk and rummaged in a stack of folders that lay on a cabinet against the wall. His back was turned to her. The guard had remained in the foyer and the door had shut. Mikandra wondered what would happen if she attacked him.

  The library on the other side of the glass partition held books that were much older than those in the main library where she worked. Not all of them were in Mirani either. She spotted titles in Coldi and Kedrasi and other languages she didn't recognise. She spied several works on the history of Barresh.

  To her surprise, there were also several volumes with the emblem of the Trader Guild. The manual, a book on navigation. There was also a book about the history of Miran which was exactly the same volume as sat on her father's bookshelf. The book next to it was unmarked but there was a note stuck on it that said Iztho Andrahar in Coldi writing. And there were the volumes of council transcripts that were missing from the library shelves.

  Her heart was thudding. Those were the books she wanted.

  Daya came to sit opposite her and put a reader and a folder on the table between them.

  "I've been wanting to talk to someone who has been in the chamber that's underneath the Foundation monument in Miran. Everyone I've asked has been too old. Apparently they only started taking school children there recently."

  Mikandra shrugged, wary. This was not just about history, wasn't it? He wasn't stupid and strongly suspected the truth behind the Mirani Endri. Any moment now he would come up with some question or remark that was at complete right angles to the history issue. He'd distract her and get into her mind and would find out what she knew. Or something.

  He picked up the reader and thumbed the screen into life. For a fe
w moments, he flicked through images, then he said, "Ah."

  He passed the screen to her.

  The screen showed an underground chamber fairly similar to the one she had seen in replica, except this one was circular. There was a stone table-like structure in the middle, also covered in carvings.

  "Press the corner," he said.

  She did, and the next few images showed details of stone friezes. One was a view over a city. Another looked like a street map with tiny characters indicating names of streets or buildings or people who lived there. The pattern of streets didn't look familiar.

  "The text on the walls in the Miran chambers, does it look the same as this?"

  "Where is this? Are these from the caves in the escarpment?"

  "No. These are from under the foundations of Athyl." The current biggest city on Asto.

  Yes, things were exactly as she had suspected. But what was she going to tell him?

  She flicked through a few more images with details of carvings until coming to one of a frieze that was unfinished. The left half of the picture was intricate and beautiful, with flowers and trees and flying creatures. On the right-hand side, there were roughly-carved outlines of intended work, with a carved panel over the top.

  Daya said, "With the help of the Pengali, who have used our script all this time, we've been able to picture together the Aghyrian language. This sad story describes what happened. The author of this panel says that he heard news of an impending collision between a meteorite and the planet. He says astronomers discovered it by accident when they were observing an eclipse of Beniz of Yaza." He used the Coldi names for the two suns. "The meteorite came from between the suns. The planet had three days warning. He says that there are only three space-worthy ships and that people are fighting over who gets to go on them. He says chaos has broken out in his beautiful city. People are fighting in the streets for places in cellars and in the underground aquifers. He says that authorities are not giving out details about where the meteor will hit or how much will be destroyed and he thinks that this means that they expect no one to survive."

  The air in the room suddenly seemed cold. Mikandra repressed a shudder. Some worlds were notorious for being prone to strikes from space.

  "Some people did survive. There were the Coldi, made to be a tough kind of human to settle worlds with hostile climates. There were the three ships. We've now found the likely location of the one that came to Barresh. My question is: it makes sense that the second ship came to Miran. Did they?"

  "I . . . I don't think so." Her mouth felt dry. Sweat ran down her back, but she shivered at the same time. Her head felt like it was filled with sawdust. She licked her lips and plunged further into the lie. "I went into the chamber underneath the Foundation monument. It only lists the members of the people who witnessed the Foundation agreement." She bade silent forgiveness from the Mirani historians.

  "Are you sure? How old were you when you went in there?"

  Mikandra put both her hands on the sides of her head. "Stop it!"

  "Stop what?"

  "Whatever you're doing. It makes me dizzy." The pounding in her head stopped. Mikandra glared at him. "Don't you already know what I'm thinking? Can't you see what's in my mind?" She clamped her hands between her knees to stop herself shivering.

  He gave her a sharp look.

  In the silence that followed, the feeling vanished completely.

  Daya breathed out heavily through his nose. "If you must know, this supposed 'mindreading' doesn't quite work like that. Communication requires input from both parties. None of us can plainly see what other people are thinking."

  That was a lie.

  She met his eyes squarely. Neither of them spoke.

  After a tense silence, he went on, "We in Barresh are trying to piece together a viable population of Aghyrians. This is a private project of mine and has nothing to do with the Barresh council. Apart from the zhadya-born of the Coldi, which is where I come from, and the buried children, of which there is only one, my lady Anmi, I have found Aghyrian genetic material in keihu and Pengali. I'm trying to piece this genetic material back together. We have severe fertility problems. Zhadya-born are mostly male. Besides Anmi, we have two women of fertile age. Three children were born this year. All of them are male. We have two pregnancies. Those children are male, too. We need to find more pieces of our genetic heritage. If there is anything in Miran . . ." His eyes looked genuinely pleading. " . . . anything at all, we want to know about it. If people suspect that they have Aghyrian heritage, I'll pay for them to come here and have us look at it."

  So that was why he was interested in scouting out people with a lot of Aghyrian blood and picking them up off the street? Use them as breeding factories? She thought of that Pengali woman who had been taken away from the guesthouse party. Was she now locked up somewhere and pregnant with some experimental child?

  And what about his wife? Was she a prisoner?

  Was he peeved that the father had turned out to be one of those Mirani he hated, and was a boy to boot? Or had he attempted to keep Iztho here, and when Iztho would not let himself be restrained, had he taken steps to get rid of him?

  He was still talking about how people from Miran were welcome in Barresh. That is was a safe haven for those who fled the residency laws. That Barresh had no laws about the ethnicity or origin of its people. That he would help any businesses that wanted to shift from Miran.

  Blah, blah, blah. The man was a criminal.

  She had to get those books to see what secrets they hid. He clearly hadn't counted on the fact that she could read the titles from this distance. Sometimes it paid to have very sharp eyes.

  Chapter 26

  Rehan wasn't there the next morning either.

  Mikandra sat in the cubicle staring at the screen but it remained unresponsive. When she went to sign off at the counter, the woman said for the second day in a row that there was no charge to the account in the same cheerful voice she had used the day before. Mikandra had trouble meeting her eyes, and refraining from asking what could have happened. Was anything bad going on in Miran? What had Rehan meant Something has come up?

  She went to work in the library, replaying horrible scenarios in her mind and she had to slap herself for getting worked up. Likely, the truth was simple. Maybe the unrest had spread and he couldn't reach the office anymore. Maybe he was busy with the court case.

  At midday, she wandered around the marketplace hoping to catch some news from people coming in from Miran, but there were no arriving shuttles and all Mirani she saw at the markets were the usual crowd, those who lived in Barresh. There were no visiting Trader craft.

  She needed to do something. Check on the Andrahar brothers, get out of here before anyone questioned her.

  She stood in front of the Exchange building, and her attention went to that library room in the corner. The only thing that separated her from that curious folder with Iztho's name was a glass window. All right, it was on the top floor of the building. And there was lots of security—on the inside of the building.

  What about the outside?

  One of the windows had a small box balcony. It was an odd construction that suggested that the window in question had once been a door. There was a large spreading tree whose branches reached over the wall. Not quite to the balcony, which was a pity. A group of painters was working on the ground floor. They had ladders.

  The answer to what had happened to Iztho was in that room, and it was perhaps already too late for her to find it. Rather than being too brash, she had been too timid. She should have barged into the Exchange, given them her name and who she worked for, and demanded to see the records and whatever else they had relating to Iztho.

  They probably would not have given it.

  No, probably not.

  She went back to the library, and back to worrying. If she did something stupid, like break into that library to see what was in that book, she wanted to make sure it was worth the risk and not a
lready too late.

  * * *

  At the end of the afternoon, she was working on packing away books she had finished assessing when she spotted a Pengali man in council uniform come into the library. He was not one of the regular guards and Mikandra's nerves jumped up a notch.

  He went to speak to Bakimay, and she pointed in Mikandra's direction. The Pengali crossed the hall, walking around the stack of boxes with Mirani army archives that had become a lot more organised. He stopped at Mikandra's table. By that time, her heart was thudding.

  Mikandra met his eyes, but saw no emotion in them.

  He said only, "Come."

  "Has anything happened?"

  He shrugged.

  "What is going on?"

  He gave her a blank look. Damn, she got the one council worker who didn't speak Mirani. She had learned some keihu, but hardly enough to hold a conversation and her command of Pengali was non-existent. She understood their tail gestures better than their speech. This man didn't have a tail.

  She bet it was that creepy Daya Ezmi again, with his mindreading and friendly-threatening-aloof conversation that freaked her out. You can all come to Barresh indeed. Come and never be heard of again.

  She accompanied the Pengali out of the library, down the corridor with the mural to the alley outside, where the ground was wet with large puddles from a recent shower. They went into Market Street and around the corner to the entrance of the Exchange.

  Her thoughts about the nature of the matter changed. There was bad news from Miran, about her parents, or about the Andrahar brothers. That was why Rehan hadn't contacted her.

  Upstairs in the communication room, the Pengali took her to one of the cubicles next to the door, the ones she didn't like because the light from the corridor glared in the screen.

  She sat down. He gave her a code and an earpiece, which she put on. Then he left and one the screen appeared—

  "Rehan! What's wrong?" He looked his usual distant, well-groomed and businesslike self. His hair hung loose, combed forward over his right shoulder in a glossy curtain of platinum.