by Doris Egan
Ran sat down beside me on the bench.
"He's checking us out," I said.
"I thought you were fast asleep," he replied. "The sound of your snores was making conversation difficult."
"What lies you tell. No wonder the man doesn't trust you." I closed my eyes again, my head leaning against the old plaster wall. "Anyway, I wasn't asleep; I was just—"
"Resting your eyes, I know." Suddenly he jabbed me in the side.
I didn't respond. "Ran, I can't keep you entertained every single moment."
"No, look, open your eyes."
I did so. Loden Broca had just entered the anteroom to our left. Another man was with him, slightly older, and familiar-looking. I said quietly, "The other one—was he on duty, too?"
Ran frowned, remembering. "He directed our carriage driver the night of the garden party. And I think he was on the boat."
"Let's talk to them both, as long as we've got them."
He nodded. "The supervisor better finish his checking before they leave for their assignments."
Loden Broca had curly, wind-tousled brown hair, a jaunty step, and a quirky half-smile that he bestowed on the dispatcher as he was handed his schedule for the day. It was the sort of half-smile that suggests all this paperwork is a joke, but he'll be tolerant enough to go along with it. A few short encounters don't make a secure base to speculate, but I had the strong impression that Loden Broca was one of those men who do not like authority as it applies to themselves.
I recalled that when we were first entering the pleasure boat, Kylla had made some remarks about his being extraordinarily good looking. I watched him closely as he touched his companion on the shoulder, making a joke. He was handsome, certainly, and I remembered that his eyes were particularly fine, but her comments seemed far beyond his desserts—more appropriate to a young god than a nice-looking boy on a planet that was overrun with vibrant and beautiful people. Ran put him in the shade.
Ben Mercia's door opened. He nodded to us, then called, "Loden! Trey! Come in here!" He turned to Ran and said, "Trey Lesseret was on the Porath detail as well; I thought you might want to speak with him."
It's nice to be anticipated. "Thank you," said Ran, as though it were no more than his due, and he added, "I trust I do not keep you from your duties." It would be easier to question them away from their supervisor.
"Not at all," said Ben Mercia, sinking down on the bench by the window with what was almost a smirk. "I'm happy to stay and be of help."
"Commendable." Ran rose to exchange polite bows with the two men entering the room. I got to my feet as well and made that incline of the head appropriate in the wife of a first of Cormallon, rather than the smile and matching bow I sometimes made in the course of easier social en-
counters. I'm not really sure why; but I didn't feel at home in the Mercia Guard Service building, and wanted all the formal status I could get. I saw from a brief look that Ran took notice of my choice of greeting. "Loden Broca Mercia, Trey Lesseret Mercia, we've met briefly before. I'm Ran Cormallon, here on behalf of Lord Jusik Porath. This is my—" Wife? Assistant? "—colleague, Theodora Cormallon." And let them make what they will of the last name.
"Honored by this meeting," said Trey Lesseret, and Loden Broca mumbled the same after him. Lesseret had at least a half-dozen years on his friend; he looked to be brushing thirty, a little shorter and stockier than Loden Broca, who was muscled, but on the slender side. Lesseret was paler, too, and his hazel eyes squinted toward us as though we were standing in the sun instead of with our backs against the wall of a windowless room in a cheaper quarter of the capital. He put one foot up on the boot-polisher stool by the bench. "Take it you're here about Lord Porath's boy."
"Boy" was debatable, coming from him. Kade and he were probably of an age, though Lesseret looked as though he'd packed more experience into the time than the ex-first-son of Porath had.
"Yes," said Ran, "a terrible tragedy."
"Terrible," agreed Lesseret, adding briskly, "so how can I help you, gracious sir?"
"My colleague and I are trying to get a better idea of what happened. Physically, I mean, in terms of placement. Who was where. Anything anybody saw."
"I was in the lounge most of the time," Lesseret said at once. "My house-brother here was above-deck for a bit, having a smoke—" he gestured toward Loden Broca—"but I stayed by the musicians for the whole trip. Get a better view of the salon that way, you know."
I said, "So you would more or less remember where people were?"
He turned to me. "More, rather than less, gracious lady. It's the kind of thing I pay attention to."
"What about you?" Ran addressed Loden Broca. "You could do the same for the upper deck?"
The guard smiled. "You, this gracious lady, and another man and woman were the only people on the front side.
There were three others looking down the canal by the railing in back."
"Not including Kade."
His smile vanished. "No. But he only came up for a moment."
I thought Ran would ask Loden Broca now if he'd seen Kylla's mysterious stranger on Catmeral Bridge. Instead he pulled a familiar handkerchief from an inner pocket and untied the knot. "Both of you had a good view of Kade Porath," he said. "Can you tell me if he was wearing this the entire time he was on board?" He pulled out the last of the knot and extended the massive cadite ring.
Lesseret was making a shrugging gesture, but Loden Bro-ca's expression was one of surprise, followed by blank incomprehension. His gaze went up to Ran's, a furrow cutting the golden skin of his brow.
"What are you doing with my ring?" he asked.
He got everyone's attention in the room, no doubt about that. Neither Trey Lesseret nor Ben Mercia knew what significance the ring had, but they wanted to hear more. Ben Mercia insisted on hearing more, to Broca's acute and obvious discomfort. Ran solved the problem by buying the guard's services for the morning for a rather inflated fee, and a quarter hour later found the three of us wandering somewhat aimlessly down Luster Street, looking in vain for a place to sit and talk. The Mercia agency, when it came down to it, was happy to put another guard in Loden's place for the day if it could get an extra fee from us, and postpone its natural curiosity (in the form of Ben Mercia) in the higher cause of House profit. Ben Mercia knew his duty.
"Your ring?" repeated Ran, as he scanned the scruffy shopfronts at this end of Luster.
"A family inheritance," said Loden Broca. "The only one I've got, really. Boldness and prudence, the Broca mottoes." He smiled that twisty grin. "My father left it to me, and enough to put a down payment on security school. Though we don't know how that'll turn out, at the moment. I'm on probation."
Ran said, carefully, "Would you have any guesses as to where we found the ring?"
"You said Kade Porath was wearing it. That wouldn't surprise me. I gave it to him."
I looked at his face as we turned the corner of Luster and Tin. He didn't seem to find anything unusual in the statement.
"Pure charity?" prompted Ran.
In this part of town people who ran small-scale, miserable businesses out of their homes sat on doorsteps, by windows, even in the gutter, trying to catch a breeze as they weaved and sharpened knives and made paper animals for the tourists over in Trade Square. There wasn't enough room here for courtyards in the back, so they took relief where they could, heedless of danger. But then, they were in more danger from each other than from any violent, gameplaying nobility, who probably wouldn't be caught dead in this neighborhood. I'd stayed in the equivalent of this sort of place when I first came to Ivory, but we'd had a bit more space—my inn had had a courtyard. That practically made me a merchant prince by comparison.
Loden's face wore a wincing, sheepish look; he seemed to be picking through a pile in search of the proper words, and not finding any. "It wasn't," he began, and stopped again. We passed a massive, elderly woman in a faded orange robe, sitting on a stool by the curb, sharpening kitchen knives
on a wheel. A bolt of ragged striped cloth had been rigged for shade in the branches of the spindly tree beside her. As we passed she moved her stool back an inch, further into the shadows. "You see—" said Loden, and discarded those words, too. The old woman in orange glanced up and met my eyes; there was a crazy look there that, taken in conjunction with all these sharp objects, made me uncomfortable. I walked around to the other side of Ran.
"It's like this," said Loden. He paused one more time. I had a momentary urge to yell spit it out, man't—which, fortunately, I got the better of, because he finally achieved takeoff velocity. "I play cards," he said, "not, you understand, that I'm a gambler. Just as a pastime. But it happened that I lost a lot of money one night—I'd had a few drinks, you know how that is," he said, confidingly, though in fact I had no idea how it was to get drunk and gamble my savings away. It was an alien concept. But then, other people are alien to us in so many ways I try to be careful about making any quick judgments. "So I ended up owing these fellows some money. And since I didn't have any to pay them back, I borrowed some."
"Transferring your debt to someone else," I said, puzzled. "I don't see the point."
"Well, it got these guys off my back," he said reasonably.
"This new loan was at a lower rate of interest, then?" I asked.
"Not exactly. Ah, no, it wasn't. But it was only one person to worry about."
Finally outlines were emerging from the mist. I said, "Did you by any chance borrow this money from Kade Porath?"
Ran stopped. He turned to Loden and said, "Are you trying to tell us that Kade was your creditor as well as your employer?"
"Well, yes, it's not as if—"
"Was this before or after the house party? I mean, did you meet Kade through being assigned to the Poraths, and borrow the money then?"
"Uh, no, I borrowed it back at the beginning of spring. Five months ago. Kade knew I was with the Mercia agency and he chose us when he wanted to cover his sister's party. He said he may as well make sure I kept getting a salary."
We were midway down Tin Street. Ran looked irritably around for a route out of this neighborhood. "Doesn't this hook up with Grapefruit Alley somewhere?" he said, seemingly in my direction.
"You're asking me? You've spent a lot more years in this city than I have."
"But you're the one who's map crazy."
This was true. I like to know where I am, in the larger scheme of things. Since philosophy gives no final answers, I make do with maps. I'd unofficially inherited a lot of them from Ran's grandmother—an incredible woman who'd never left the estate in all the decades since she'd married into the family, but who had closets full of starcharts, geological surveys, and plans showing the water-pipes under cities I'd never heard of. The servants were still running across them occasionally in pantries and under old sets of drawers.
Grapefruit Alley leads into Trade Square eventually,
so—"It would have to be in that direction," I said, pointing crosswise over the road.
"There's a robemaker's in the way," he said, implying my contribution was less than helpful.
"That isn't my fault. I didn't build it."
Loden Broca looked from one of us to the other uncertainly.
Ran kicked a loose stone with the edge of his sandal and we continued down the street. "How much did you owe?" he said, suddenly addressing Loden again.
"About four, well, five, uh—I don't see what this has to do with anything."
"Neither do I," said my husband disarmingly. "You brought it up."
It took another few seconds for the logic of this to penetrate. Finally Loden said, unwillingly, "Five hundred and fifty tabals. But it only started out as three hundred."
"Oh." Noncommittal.
"The thing is, I'd missed a payment. And Kade kept giving me a hard time about it. He wanted something, and I don't own anything, except this ring, so… he said to give him that. So I did."
"When?"
"On the boat. You saw when he came up to get me. He was mad, because I hadn't paid him, and he saw my ring when I had my hand on the railing on the stairway."
Ran and I looked at each other. I said, "You were wearing it openly when you got on the boat?"
"I had it on my hand, if that's what you mean by openly."
"And this was a spur-of-the-moment thing?" asked Ran. "Nobody had any reason to believe you'd take the ring off? Kade never demanded it before?"
"No, it was the first time he'd mentioned it. I wore my ring all the time, you don't expect somebody to ask you for a family heirloom. But, look, I didn't think I was in any position to say no, especially with my house-brothers all over the ship. You aren't going to mention this to them, are you?"
He said it so wistfully, like a little kid. Well—more like a little kid trying to get away with something.
Still. If this was true, maybe we should give him whatever slack we could. After all, somebody was trying to murder him.
Chapter 1O
Loden Broca couldn't confirm Kylla's story about the sinister watcher on Catmeral Bridge. "I went down below before we were close enough to the bridge to see," he said. "Why, do you think that might have been the sorcerer? It was sorcery, wasn't it? Kade didn't just have some kind of weird fit? I mean, he never struck me as entirely normal."
Ran stopped by a wide, unpaved opening between two buildings. "Grapefruit Alley," he said to me, pleased, bowing slightly as though he were presenting me with it as a gift. "It's a good half-kilometer from the robemaker's," he had to point out.
"It probably curves around behind it when you get further in," I said. (It did.)
Loden said, "Gracious sir?"
Ran turned a courteously meaningless smile on him. "Thank you so much for your help, sir. Please take the rest of the morning off, with our compliments to your supervisor."
Loden stood there a moment, looking bewildered. I felt a little sorry for him. "Do you have any enemies?" I inquired.
"Well, uh, not really… there are a few people who've gotten mad at me sometimes… ah, why do you ask?"
Ran took hold of my elbow and pulled me a couple of steps into the alley. "No reason," I said hastily. "Just wondered." Apparently we were not telling Loden Broca Mer-cia that he was a potential murder target. This did not seem quite right. But Ran always has his reasons for acting the way he does. I don't always agree with him, but he does have them.
"Gracious lady?" asked Loden, still with that confused expression, like a just-born puppy trying to come to terms with its suddenly colorful lifestyle. Oh, it was a shame not to at least warn him.
"Sorry, can't chat," I said, as Ran set a walking pace that took us deep into the alley and around the corner of a building with remarkable speed.
"Why aren't we telling him?" I asked, when he'd slowed down enough for me to get sufficient breath.
"We're doing this for Jusik Porath," Ran said, "whatever he may think. He gets our first report, not somebody in the Mercia agency."
"But in a situation like this—"
"A situation like what? We still have no hard evidence, only suspicions."
"But if Loden's telling the truth—"
Ran finally slowed down a little. He glanced back along the curve of the alley. "Then we'll visit him later and suggest that he take care."
I considered that as we walked. Within a few minutes we reached the beginning of the market stalls that line Grapefruit Alley all the way up to Trade Square. Every other cart was a food cart, and the smells would detour a truckload of monks on their way to the Court of Contemplation. Heavily spiced meat of every description, cut into cubes and stuck on sticks; cut into slices and added to hot rice; shredded into a dusting of protein and sprinkled over yellow and white vegetables. Raw vegetables and fruits in the cart next door, and eight sorts of flavored water in the cart beyond that. There were stationers, too, and dollmakers, and all the usual mishmosh of Ivoran businesses, but Grapefruit Alley was—contrary to all appearances—the gourmand's hear
t of the world. Not even the bustling cookshops around the Square itself could match these dirty-looking vendors, who'd handed down their three meters of turf from parent to child since as far back as anyone's ever heard. One of the refrigerated carts we passed was stocked full of Py-renese beer; how the beggarly seeming gentleman behind it managed that, when the most exclusive restaurants in the city were often out, was a mystery.
A mystery. I glanced over at Ran. "What are you going to tell Jusik?"
"Nothing, maybe, for the moment. We don't know anything for certain yet."
"Maybe, but I don't feel right leaving Loden twisting in the wind while we get our thoughts together."
So we walked along in more silence, getting our thoughts together. I said, "Let's try Kylla's theory."
"The mysterious stranger on the bridge?"
I saw it had occurred to him, too. "Why not? We don't need a boat to test that one. You just need to stand where the sorcerer stood, to start a backward trace—so let's go to the south railing of Catmeral Bridge, Ran, and see what we can see."
The alley turned into a straightaway around that point, cutting diagonally across the streets in the center of town. A long way off in the distance I could see the opening into the bright sunlight of Trade Square. You could almost hear the noise from there. Ran said, thoughtfully, "We do seem to be going in the right direction for it, don't we." The section of the canal crossed by Catmeral Bridge is half a mile north of the Square.
I grinned. I had to admit that Loden Broca or no, I was curious about this thing with Kade, and hanging about on open bridges in the midday sun seemed a small price to pay, at least at that moment. Just then my gaze fell on a cart-stall piled to overflowing with blossoms of red, white, violet, blue, and burnt gold—and the violet ones were versions of the unidentified bouquet Kylla had carried so jauntily away with her last night.
The fat face of an old woman was framed beyond the heaps of flowers; her head just topped the merchandise. "Oh, Ran! Look! Could you—"
He trudged over toward the cart. "I know," he said mournfully. "The little purple ones."