Festival Moon

by C. J. Cherryh

  It was getting too dark to see anything but the shapes, at any rate. His pilot knew the Harbor, but Chamoun worried anyway. You couldn't trust 'em, not a one: not the uptowners, not the Merovingian Adventists, not his contacts ashore or, most especially, not the Sword members he had on board.

  They would be wondering where he was. They wouldn't understand, nor give a damn that they should. His itinerary was planned, this trip arranged by cooler heads and colder hearts. What Michael Chamoun wanted didn't count for eels to those who'd gotten him this boat, this trip, this... chance to see her again, yeah. Rita was why he'd taken it. Rita was why he'd agreed.

  Tie up at the seawall, walk Grand Detside till you find a pole-boat with a white flag on the bow. Take it to Boregy. Opposite the Signeury, that is. Their own bridge across to it, their own ways into it.... It'll do fine there, just do what you know to do. All told to Michael Chamoun through a carved screen in an Adventist meeting hall back in Nev Hettek, under dim electrics, by he-didn't-know-who.

  He didn't care to know. He was coming in as a possible suitor to some rich Revenantist Boregy woman, with enough surreptitious Sword of God flanking him to make sure he did it right. He'd have agreed to marry old Iosef Kalugin himself if it would have got him here, out of Nev Hettek, where he could see Rita again.

  Didn't matter who you were married to. ... Merovingian women slept where they wanted, whelped brats by different fathers, did much as they pleased. Didn't matter, unless you were an Adventist and the woman was devout Revenantist and scared of fouling up her life and lives.

  Hopeless. Helpless. Bringing the Revenantists to their knees had seemed like a close second to courting a Revenantist woman who wouldn't have him, when the right Nev Hetteker did the asking. Chamoun's family were river-boaters now; were shippers and new society; Detfish was theirs to keep if Chamoun did his job and lived to captain it home.

  He took the steps from the poop with care: there was a slick of mist everywhere; then he pulled open the hatch to his cabin and descended.

  The Boregys were hiding an ex-Sword in and among their hightown holdings. Somewhere up in Merovingen-above, where the occasional light twinkled like a whole new spiral of stars, was secreted a liability and a troublemaker called Mondragon.

  One final look at the city-upon-city-upon-city stacked like a house of cards up toward heaven, and Chamoun let the hatch close, finding his way in deeper dark with a familiar hand, trailing it along the paneling: this riverboat was in camouflage—more than it seemed, more than his family could refuse.

  Like Mondragon, Michael Chamoun had dim prospects—if this gambit failed. He felt a kinship with the man whom the Sword was hunting. Mondragon was the last of his line left alive (after he'd fallen afoul of his one-time friend, Karl Fon, and Fon had decreed Sword vengeance), if proof were needed. Chamoun didn't want to become the last of his.

  There were three men in Chamoun's cabin.

  The man who sprawled, under a closely shielded electric, on the captain's bed as if it were his own, was Dimitri Romanov. "Well, Det-man, have you seen what you wanted to see?" he asked Chamoun. Fine diction, fine manners, fine control of what Sword was aboard the Detfish, and of more back in Nev Hettek.

  "Ain't nothin' t' see," Michael Chamoun replied, sinking into one of two unoccupied chairs at the tiny table catty-corner to the bed. "C'mon, Mita," he addea, river-talking to a man who despised such talk, because he had to gain control of something, and Romanov had all the authority aboard the Detfish, no matter who was captain. "Charts say a boat big as this, she can't clear the Rimmon bridges." Defensive. Too much so. Chamoun shrugged at Romanov: don't push me.

  Dimitri Romanov didn't like being called "Mita" so familiarly by Chamoun. He looked from Chamoun to the two other men in the small cabin, and smiled sourly.

  Romanov was pale, blond, covered with a layer of good-life fat that belied his Sword training. The other two Swords were dark like Chamoun, hard and lean like Chamoun, and nearly ten years younger: Rack and Ruin al-Banna, brothers of the revolution, youngsters who took ears from their kills and strung them on necklaces they wore at Sword parties. Monsters of the revolution, Romanov's trained and lethal pets.

  Chamoun lowered his green eyes and looked at the dark hair feathering his wrist, at the dark skin tanned olive under it. He wasn't fish or fowl; he was mixed blood and mixed up. If his family were richer or poorer, life would have been clearer, right and wrong better defined.

  Chamoun trusted only tech, and lusted for it like it was the Revenantist woman. His father had been government until the revolution, a tech supervisor; his mother had been a teacher. Now they had a fledgling shipping business, thanks to Karl Fon, who always paid his debts. And Chamoun's tail was firmly caught in the door that swung between his parents and Nev Hettek's governor.

  He flushed under Romanov's scrutiny, wishing he hadn't come down here. The al-Banna brothers eyed him suspiciously, too. You could have cut the tension with the fish knife on Chamoun's hip, probably because the Sword pilot, up on deck, had questions about the berth Chamoun had chosen.

  The pilot abovedecks was as tall as Michael Chamoun, taller than average, fairer and more solidly built. Up in the pilothouse, he ought to have been calling down by now.

  The silence down in the little cabin grew until Chamoun's ears began to thump with his pulse.

  "Cool feet, m'ser," said one of the al-Banna brothers, rising to his feet, "don't matter now. Too late's the time, ain't no doubt."

  Chamoun looked up at the hook-nosed Sword and said, "I didn't say nothin'. I wouldn't. I know what I'm into."

  It was the pale aristocrat who nodded, "Good boy."

  They called you that, these Uptowner Swords, even if you were of an age with them. Michael Chamoun had five years of manhood on the curly-haired Sword youths who watched him with restive violence in their velvet eyes. A matter of power, matter of money, matter of class.

  "Once you've cleaned up, Chamoun," continued Romanov, "and gotten into these,"—he gestured to a pile beside him on Chamoun's bed: velvet, lace, wool, polished leather and a scabbarded dress sword— "we'll deal with the fine points. All your papers are in order. Vega Boregy is expecting you. I imagine he'll present his daughter, Cassiopeia, at the first opportunity." When Chamoun didn't answer in the pause Romanov provided, the Sword aristocrat rose up, dusted his white-clad knees, and motioned to the al-Bannas: "Come, boys, let's let the suitor dress in peace. He must appear at his most fetching."

  "Damn," said Chamoun, running a spread hand up into his dark brown hair, finding a knot, jerking irritably. His fingers came away with a few strands of hair, some graying prematurely, curled around them.

  He felt like a paid woman must feel, he imagined. Or a trapped cat about to be let out in someone's attic full of rats.

  He just looked at his worn shoes and listened as the other men made their way toward the door. Too late, got to do it now, or die of not doing it. He knew the Sword. They didn't take no for an answer. If he found Mondragon somewhere there in Boregy, he'd be finding what was left of somebody who'd tried saying no.

  The door hadn't closed yet; Chamoun didn't raise his eyes. "Be a good boy, Michael. So much depends on you. We're all hopeful of your success. I know Magruder is."

  At last, an outright threat. The pilot, Chance Magruder, was Sword with a capital S. "Mita," said Chamoun to Dimitri Romanov, "go. .. ." Mustn't tell Romanov where to go. ".. . Check procedure, or something. Else we'll be congratulating each other in the Justiciary's torture chambers."

  The door closed and Chamoun slumped as if someone had cut strings holding him upright. Romanov was tactical Sword, one of Fon's best; the al-Banna brothers were the worst kind of Sword assassins, all muscle, no brains; Magruder, up in the pilothouse, was more frightening than all the others rolled together. Magruder was a twenty-year man, a man who'd been doing Sword business so long that you had to look straight into his granite eyes to realize he didn't believe in any of it, not the cause, not Retribution. He didn't hav
e to. Chance Magruder was Retribution, the will of Karl Fon incarnate.

  And that made four smuggled members of the Sword of God, brought into Merovingen to wreak havoc and deal death. Brought by Michael Chamoun, if anybody took the blame, because you couldn't hit back from here to Nev Hettek. That was what tech and the Sword itself were worth: protection for Fon and his kind in Nev Hettek.

  If smuggling the Swords ashore were the extent of Michael Chamoun's involvement, he'd have been nerved up, but not nearly paralyzed. Damn girl, damn Rita. Doesn't even know I got drunk and took this one because of her. Doesn't know or care. Probably doesn't remember me. If only the Sword wanted a Nikolaev girl instead of Cassiopeia Boregy. ...

  But they didn't. And of all the candidates Fon thought likely to succeed in making a marriage with the Boregy family, Michael Chamoun had been chosen.

  Because women liked him; because he was the right age and the right build and of the right mercantile profile to interest the Boregys, thanks to the Sword.

  And, most of all, because Michael Chamoun was the fifth man aboard the Detfish with orders from Nev Hettek that must be obeyed: Michael Chamoun was Sword of God.

  Chance Magruder had changed into sable velvet and cream silk by the time Chamoun came on deck. Only the revolver tucked against his spine, the sword on his hip, and the pathati-ampules nestled among throwing stars in his belt-slung purse were familiar. The rest of this, by his reckoning, was as bad an idea as had ever come out of one of Karl Fon's drunken stupors.

  The younger man, who stopped half-way through the hatch to stare at Magruder, wasn't right for this gambit. The gray in Chamoun's hair was as sporadic as his nerves and as non-indicative of his performance as his record.

  But you worked with what you had. Magruder had an invitation to the Merovingian Governor's 24th Eve bash, and a bash it was going to be, if the Sword had anything to say about it. This Chamoun was just a pry-bar. With him, Magruder was going to open whatever barrel contained Thomas Mondragon. From there on, events tended to depend on discretion— Magruder's. Bring Mondragon back, kill him, compromise him .. . whatever worked.

  One thing was certain in Magruder's mind: the Sword needed to make it clear to all and sundry that there was no such thing as ex-Sword. Especially to fellows like Chamoun, who tended to stare at Magruder as if Chamoun were a cornered rat and Magruder the feral cat.

  Which wasn't a bad analogy. You didn't quit the Sword. Mondragon had tried and Mondragon's life or death from that day on had to be an example of what happened to traitors. Mondragon's death wasn't the best choice, unless it was particularly and spectacularly terrifying. To Magruder's mind, the fate of Mondragon was history in the making—the future of the Sword lay in how the traitor fared.

  And Mike Chamoun was a poor chisel for sculpting history, in Magruder's estimation. Better than no tool at all, though. So Magruder had kept Chamoun primarily in the dark—he knew only what he needed to know.

  It could be that Chamoun didn't even know that, Magruder thought as he said in a flat voice, "I'm going with you. Hurry up."

  "I know the way, don't need no—"

  "Cut the river-talk, Det-man. Your Nev Hettek accent's all that makes you any better than a pole-rat dressed up in a dead man's clothes. You don't know squat. Now I'm telling you what you need to know. You know I'm from the Nev Hettek Bureau of Trade and Tariffs—Customs man. You know I've got an invite to Kalugin's party. And you know you oughtn't to cross me, or you won't be shipping anything, anywhere. Now, let's go. I got to get you there to get any use out of you, and it's Festival. If I want you gutted, floating along the Grand, I'll do it myself. There're too many crazy people with the Melancholy out there for one man, m'ser."

  That softened it: acknowledge Chamoun as a man, give him a m'ser, tell him he's worth a bodyguard. And make sure he understands the briefing he's just gotten. There was, Magruder knew because it was his job to judge the edge on a sword or a man, a chance that Chamoun would balk. He didn't need another Tom Mondragon; nobody did.

  So it was down onto the Harborside, and walk with shoulders brushing, commanding the dockside walkways two abreast, undl a certain pole-boat was found.

  Then it was show a piece of silver and try to understand the gutter talk of Merovingen-below. The pole-boater was a woman, and Magruder's silver spoke loudly enough. She'd have poled them to the Scouring and back for a handful of silver skimmers.

  "Hey-hin, m'sers," the female pole-boater said. "Hey-hin and yoss right up to Boregy, I will."

  It was gibberish until you thought about it. Then it was as close to a welcome aboard and assurance of competence as these Det-trash could get.

  She poled and hollered at other polers, and Magruder watched the bridges to make sure she was taking him, by the fastest route, where he and Chamoun were bound.

  Someone called, "Jones! Ware starb'd; a starb'd!" and two boats almost collided—theirs and another.

  Nearly, he took the pole from the woman in the loose sweater. Probably drunk. Possibly hostile. But Magruder slid his hand from the knife he'd grabbed reflexively and watched carefully, dividing his attention between landmarks, the woman, and Chamoun, whose instincts seemed good in this circumstance.

  At least, Chamoun's "fish" knife had come into his hand. You trained them and trained them, but you had to see them in a situation like this to know if they were really Sword, or just talked a good game.

  The name Jones had lodged in Magruder's mind, but he doubted luck: if this was that Jones, then Magruder could slit Chamoun's throat, push him into the canal, and go to Plan B. But it wasn't clear which female of the two who'd exchanged shouts was Jones. And it wasn't clear how many Joneses there might be poling these canals. And it wasn't clear yet that Magruder ought to grab Mondragon's girl, Jones.

  There were other ways.

  The best of those began at Boregy House. When the pole-boater brought them to it, he let her go with an extra skimmer for her tip once she'd poled them in through the water gate, where a demon's face had lit when a watchman answered the bell she'd pulled.

  The iron gate, closed after sundown, that had opened to admit them once Magruder identified himself as Nev Hettek Trade and Tariff, gaped wide again for the pole-boater, and she glided away.

  Iron screeched as the gate closed and there was a shock of finality as it shut, like a prison door slamming. Magruder could feel Chamoun, beside him, shiver. Good instincts, once again. They were in this place, locked up tight, under the watchful eye of the gatekeep. There would be more and more of his kind, armed retainers of the house, up those stairs.

  Prison. Magruder had been there more than once. He took a last look out toward the canaled city and freedom, and glimpsed the Signeury, out beyond Signeury Cross where no boats moored.

  The Boregys had their own damned bridge, private, to the signeury, beyond which was another bridge, to the Justiciary, which had interrogation and holding facilities in its depths, down in the solid bedrock into which the government center was set—special facilities for special, politically sensitive prisoners, the kind you wouldn't want to execute publicly on Hanging Bridge. The kind of facilities you wanted for a Chance Magruder, if you got your hands on him.

  Mike Chamoun they'd probably just hang, if things went awry. His type didn't know enough to be worth protracted interrogation. But Magruder was. And Tom Mondragon was.

  "C'mon, m'sers, if ye please," said an impatient voice and Magruder turned to see a white-stockinged houseman come down from upstairs to get them. The man had shiny buckles on his shoes and a definite air of impatience. Didn't come down here much. Didn't have to. The kind he usually greeted walked the hightown bridges from place to place, never came in the water gate. The water gate was for family. And for shady dealings. The fellow wrinkled his paunchy face into the time-honored put-upon demeanor of class-conscious servants everywhere, and held his lamp high.

  Turning, the servant preceded them up dimly lit stairs. From niches and narrow corridors off the gardeporte, Magrud
er heard shuffling feet: go with this one, or get a heavier escort.

  He elbowed Chamoun and they followed, up and around and up again, Magruder watching everything, memorizing turns and twists, where the scattered electrics burned, in case he might have to run for it.

  Prison feel here, and a real prison over that connecting bridge, one from which the Sword probably couldn't extract him. Magruder was sweating in his Merovingian foppery. Chamoun, beside him, didn't have sense enough to sweat. He just gawked.

  Take a good look, boy. Engrave every window on the water-side in your memory; count the doorways, the corridors. Might come back this way in Retribution's own hurry.

  Prison two bridges away across the canal, and Mondragon wasn't in it. Tom Mondragon should have been, that was the root of Fon's distress. A renegade Sword who had tried for Karl Fon's guts, and he slipped prison and was living high in Merovingen on Boregy sufferance and borrowed money. Something reeked. Reeked like deals with the Merovingian government. If Mondragon wasn't dead and wasn't locked up in the Justiciary's underfloors, babbling answers to questions before they were asked, there had to be a reason why. Karl Fon and Tom Mondragon had been the best of friends, once. Now Fon figured Mondragon for the worst of enemies. Fon couldn't rest easy while Mondragon was sucking up to Merovingen's governing family, which was the best reading of what was going on here.

  Not the preferred reading, just the most likely. Magruder shot a look at Chamoun on a stair landing, up where the electrics were more frequent and the servant leading them was beginning to wheeze. A long run down them, or a long dive into the canal. Detwater funerals beat long conversations, to Magruder's way of thinking.

  Chamoun didn't seem to be thinking at all. He wasn't pale or flushed, he was just putting one foot in front of the other. Good boy, so far.

  Either the Det-man hadn't heard the stealthy footfalls behind—at least a landing's turning behind, always, but never out of earshot if you knew what to listen for—or he wasn't worrying about it.