She also remembered her grandmother saying how chaotic the whole thing had been for the first year or two, until I got things in hand.
Then a square-chinned blond woman in a green kirtle and white wimple slid through the door behind the usher and out into the night air.
“Is that the Walla Walla survey people, Bobbie?” she said to the usher. “Or should I say Dagobert?”
He flushed. “It’s Dagobert now, BD,” he snapped.
BD, Órlaith thought. I know that name, Grandmother Juniper mentioned her . . . yes, she was one of Sandra’s helpers, one who knew her and Norman in the Society before the Change. . . . She smuggled fugitives out of the Protectorate too, and had to flee for her own life later.
“I spent seven days looking for them and I thought someone had killed them for their horses, but luckily I hadn’t reported that yet,” BD said. “Let them in.”
“Oh, all right,” Dagobert said and raised a wand of office, also familiar to Órlaith. “But if Lady Sandra isn’t in a good mood, you’ll answer for it, not me. Our Lord Protector’s son and heir is well along now!”
“I’m aware of that,” Órlaith said dryly. “I operate out of town mostly, but I do report to Lady Sandra directly. She doesn’t hand these tokens out to the housemaids, you know.”
And to herself: That’s my mother Sandra’s carrying right now . . . she was born in January of the first full year of the Change, so it must be her seventh month. Yes, I bet Grandfather Norman was hoping for a son.
BD gave her an odd look.
“I don’t know you?” she said.
“And we’ll both be happier if we keep it that way,” Órlaith said neutrally and faded into the background of the delegation.
Fortunately there was a full baker’s dozen of them, and five were women. She still stood out, but mainly because of her height and the way she moved. The Guard troops saluted, spear-butts to the floor or sword before the face, and the doors opened. Within was the bright light of dozens of incandescent-mantle lanterns, not as vivid as the similarly equipped gaslights of the future, but good enough. She could have read comfortably.
Órlaith felt an unclenching below her breastbone; it was totally irrational, since this was more dangerous. Hopefully this BD would assume she was another of Sandra’s spies-agents-scouts-enforcers, and the survey party would assume she was part of Lady Sandra’s apparatus too.
Sandra had been the head of the PPA’s secret service right from the beginning, and she made a practice of employing women whenever she could. She’d also made a practice of never letting the left hand know what the right was doing.
In fact, she’d once told her granddaughter that as a girl she’d always wanted to be either Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Cardinal Richelieu, or both. Her warrants to her agents had often read:
“The bearer has done what has been done on my authority, and for the good of the State.”
I’m walking into a place where my mother was born and where I spent years of my childhood, and it’s also the den of a monster.
The black granite staircase was still there, and busier than she’d ever seen it. The second story was organized chaos—half mess hall, half barracks, and they had to stand aside as a chain of laborers came up with newly-made scale hauberks strung on carrying-poles through the arms, with helmets on the central pole, the whole looking like deflated scarecrows. The third floor was quieter, but mainly because the construction crews had knocked off for the day, though their materials and tools were still there.
“BD,” Órlaith said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve gotten these people here and I’ve got better places to be,” she said.
“You don’t want the points?” BD said curiously. “Sandra’s been getting impatient about these people. Impatient enough I don’t mind interrupting the appetizers.”
Órlaith shrugged. “You can accomplish anything if you don’t care who gets the credit; take them on through.”
She hesitated, then added: “It’s better that Norman doesn’t know my face, so don’t mention me, if you don’t mind.”
BD’s own cleared a little. If the survey party hadn’t been treading on her heels Órlaith thought she might have argued, or at least asked questions. But they were and she nodded and led them forward.
Órlaith waited, quickly checked that nobody else was watching—the guards had their eyes on the surveyors—then ducked back into a room labeled Collins Gallery. She remembered it as an informal dining room-cum-study, where they had family meals or ones with relatives and friends, rather than the grander chambers downstairs, and then could comfortably sit around afterwards. Ironically for a place that had been a library until March seventeenth none of the books she remembered were here yet, unless there were some in the stacks of boxes, which mostly looked as if they were for oil-paintings. The rooms smelled of plaster and grout and dust.
What was here was a collection of Japanese byōbu, six-panel folding screens, some still in their improvised packing and labeled Seattle Asian Art Museum.
Most of which she recognized because she’d grown up with them; the one leaning against a stack of marble floor-tiles swaddled in padding had a kinpaku gold-leaf background, and a painting of a flock of crows coming in to rest. It was seventeenth century work, and it had stood in her City Palace bedroom here for most of her adolescence. Now she rolled behind it, lying curled up in her fortress of green-veined white stone and Nihonjin art, looking for a tiny scratch in the lacquer of the lower frame of the outermost panel. . . .
And it wasn’t there now, because she would put it there herself, inadvertently, after her sixteenth birthday party.
The sounds from below died down, though they never entirely went away; there were a couple of hundred people in the building, counting the servants. Órlaith waited with trained patience. She’d been much more uncomfortable on hunts, in fact—once up to her ankles in a swamp in the far north, waiting for hours for a tiger turned man-eater and plaguing a Koyukon band . . . though what had shown up after her feet went numb had been a grizzly bear with a strong territorial sense and no fear of human-kind at all.
After a while the survey party and BD passed; the surveyors were chatting in relaxed tones and she was promising to find them quarters. Half an hour after that, the iron tramp and jingle of men in mail sounded, a small guard party. A voice she hadn’t heard since her early teens sounded. Like a hand stroking warm velvet, with an undertone like a knife: Sandra Arminger, née Whittle, her mother’s mother.
“Well, that was an interesting dinner, my love. Columbia caviar and probable yields of volunteer wheat, cream of potato and turning range steers into plow oxen. . . . That’s a brilliant idea we should have thought of before given the horse shortage, we must reward the lady with something really nice, by the way . . . ennoblement and a pension at the least, possibly a fief. . . .”
“It’s that important?”
“Oh, yes, darling. We’re getting short of people now, we’re going to need peasants, and having them pull things is so . . . so wasteful. And oxen can eat grass.”
“If you say so.”
“And then poached salmon with cattle numbers . . . grilled pork loin with capers and water supplies . . . and a jellied trifle with a garnish of optimum manorial acreage.”
“It could have waited . . . darling! Are you all right?”
The last part was sharp with concern; it was a man’s voice, deep, clipped-sounding—you could hear the beginning of the staccato North-realm accent in it, probably because so many in the next decade would imitate his patterns of speech that it became a habit with a life of its own, spreading down through the pyramid-shape of the Association’s hierarchy.
Grandfather Norman, Órlaith thought, and swallowed. Odd. He doesn’t sound like a murderous tyrant . . . but none of human-kind are all one thing, are we?
“Just a bit
dizzy for a moment. This pregnancy thing is barbaric—we should divide, like bacteria, or do grafts and buds like plants.”
“Let’s get you to bed,” Norman Arminger went on.
Sandra chuckled. “I’m afraid that’s not going to be very entertaining for you, my dear. Tossing and turning and possible puking. Do feel free to go elsewhere.”
“Damn entertainment and damn elsewhere,” he said crisply. Then more softly: “You’re the only one I like to sleep with, in the technical sense of the word, you know that.”
“You charmer!”
The voices passed on, and the iron tramp of the guards. When the corridor lights were turned down a deeper silence fell. Órlaith crawled to the door of the Gallery and looked both ways. No actual guards except the pair outside the State Apartments on this level, but spearpoints caught the low light from the lanterns; the men-at-arms were lower down the stairs, where they could come at the run if someone called or blew a whistle. She waited again, and nodded to herself as she heard soft steps approaching. She would have had someone walking the corridors too, and at irregular intervals, unless it was specifically forbidden. The steps went by.
Time passed by; she grew conscious of thirst and hunger, and searched her coat’s many pockets and in one she found jerky and a rectangular bar of chocolate with nuts in it wrapped in plastic, which was fascinating. The little luxury surprised her, though not enough to stop her eating it, though at the second bite she almost stopped at the unfamiliar taste. She’d eaten chocolate fairly frequently most of her life, once a month or so . . . but this didn’t taste much like what she was used to.
More sugary, for starters. Bland.
Of course, chocolate hadn’t been such a luxury before the Change, but by the first winter of the Change she’d have thought it was mostly gone, scavenged by desperate, starving survivors.
No, wait a minute, I’ve got the clothes and gear that a real agent for Grandmother Sandra would have. Good boots, a really nice knife, a cosh . . . and chocolate in my pocket. The privileges of working for her.
“They’ll be down here, Kat,” a very soft voice said. “What used to be the Sheet Music Room.”
“What do we do if they’re not so impressed they want to give us a job—” someone, presumably Kat, replied.
“That’s if she’s not impressed,” the not-Kat said. “Well, we try to run but we’re probably dead. Look, we settled this, Kat, right? We need someone we can work for, someone important. She’s our best bet.”
It’s her, Órlaith thought. It’s Tiphaine d’Ath . . . Colette Rutherton. That was the name her parents gave her. She was an acrobat before the Change! This is how she met Sandra and became her protégé, and then later her assassin and then a commander. The other must be Katrina Georges, her friend from the Girl Scouts who died in the Protector’s War.
The two girls ghosted by.
Grandmother Sandra kept Norman from killing Da while he was a hostage in the north-realm just before the Protector’s War, but she used Tiphaine to watch over him at Montinore, Órlaith thought. And she used that to throw Da and her daughter Mathilda together, too. If Tiphaine doesn’t become Sandra’s henchwoman, I won’t be born! Montival won’t be born! The Prophet might win!
That was why she was here.
She waited to follow; and then waited a little more, letting her mind drift, not trying to suppress the strings of random thought that drifted through it, just being. That was rewarded when she heard quiet footsteps rutching down the corridor, the odd sound of rubber-soled footwear. And then something else, something infinitely more familiar. The soft hiss of a sword being drawn from a sheath of leather-bound wood greased with neat’s-foot oil.
If Tiph and her companion are found fighting a guard, they’ll be killed out of hand, Órlaith knew. They’ll just be assumed to be assassins. Fourteen-year-old girl assassins, but Grandfather Norman’s mind always worked on the principle that when people caused a problem, no people meant no problem. Because death solves all problems.
She swung to her feet noiselessly. She said the Sheet Music Room . . . that’s the State Apartments . . . out, turn left, turn right. . . .
It was dark but not black outside, the lanterns turned down but still burning, and more light spilling up from the stairwell. There was a way to go; the building covered a full acre, and each floor had over forty thousand square feet of space. Órlaith used the space to keep her distance, flitting from one door—or pile of tile or sacks of cement or adhesive or tall piles of neatly bundled Isfahan rugs or sheet-wrapped furniture—to the next along the outer wall.
Wait a minute, she thought. There will be guards at the door of the State Apartments! What are Tiph and Kat planning to do? Surely two fourteen-year-olds aren’t going to tackle a pair of grown-ups in full armor?
The officer doing the rounds was a tall brown-haired man with the back of his skull shaved, not in armor but in a set of black T-tunic and dark-blue cross-gartered hose and what the ancient world had called running shoes, with a longsword in his hand. He would have been very hard to see indeed, if it hadn’t been for the gold-thread embroidery at the hem of the tunic, and around the neck and v-front. He pulled up himself at the sight of the pair standing at parade rest beside the door, and Órlaith ducked neatly sideways into a space that would have a door again when one was hung, but didn’t yet.
They clanked to attention, bringing their shields up to their shoulders and their spears upright and thumping the butts on the floor. Those weren’t pole-and knife specials, they were solid lengths of ashwood with ten inches of ground-down leaf-spring solidly mortised into it, double edges tapering to a wicked point, and the shaft wound with stainless-steel wire for a foot below the head.
“Nothing to report?” he began, sounding a little puzzled.
He was planning to catch them himself to get the credit, but now . . .
Then he stiffened. “I thought I saw someone unauthorized here.”
He realized something. He realized what she just realized. Tiphaine and her friend went out a window and they’re going around on the outside ledge to get into the State Apartments.
“Search this floor!” he barked at the guardsmen. “Quickly! Two intruders, both small! Look for open windows, check the sides of the building!”
Aha, Órlaith thought, following his mind.
She also plastered herself to the wall inside the door as the two men-at-arms clanked by, being as quiet as you could in a fifty-pound knee-length hauberk of scale mail, which wasn’t very.
Probably they got inside in the first place by the elms on the other side of the building, they overhang with the ones across the street. Up, across, open a window. I’d break the branches, but if you were quite light and very agile you could do it. Then they crossed the third floor inside, that’s how I saw them, and now they’ve gone out one of the windows again and they’re going back into the State Apartments the same way, neatly bypassing the door guards. . . .
Órlaith sprinted as soon as the two guards had passed the doorway she was hiding in, running lightly on the balls of her feet. The knight ahead of her just had time to plunge through the door into the sitting room of the Apartments. He started a curse at the sight of the open window, with a cold wind blowing in and fluttering the draperies, and drew a breath before she caught up with him.
“M—” he began to shout; doubtless intended to be: My Lord!
The flat of the cosh took him behind the right ear. He’d chosen stealth over the protection of armor and helmet, and the bet wasn’t paying off. For once the results were as neat as they were in a chanson; he simply collapsed limply after the flat thwack sound like a puppet with its strings cut. Unlike the way it worked in an adventure epic, he wouldn’t spring up as if from a nap in a couple of hours. At the very least he’d feel the world’s worst hangover, and there would probably be dizziness and headaches for some while.
; He might well die, in fact, but Órlaith wasn’t going to waste any regret on that. If you went to work carrying arms for a man like Norman Arminger, you’d already offered up your life to the Dark Mother of your own free will, and left your killer clean of it. And Órlaith hitting him was part of the sequence of events she was creating here . . . and which had created her. The two girls would be more than smart enough to keep their mouths shut and keep the credit for a silent takedown of the guard captain.
She dropped the cosh, and caught the knight’s sword before it struck the floor, laying it quietly beside his unconscious body.
The sitting-room part of the State Apartments had already been redone in the style she remembered, save for a touch here and there. There was a big glass table supported on a cast-bronze dragon that always made you think it was going to bite your ankle while you were sitting at it, more conventional furniture carved in the Gothic style, and art that included a Botticelli crucifix of Christ, and a fourteenth-century Virgin and Child by Cecco di Pietro.
A sixth-century BC krater with a red-figure portrait of a bull looked familiar but out of place. Then she realized she was used to it in Montinore Manor’s reception hall. Sandra had given it to Tiphaine d’Ath after the Protector’s War in recognition of services that included removing several recalcitrant noblemen who didn’t think the Lord Protector’s widow was the right candidate as Regent for his only child.
Widows had run the Portland Protective Association for some time after that war, mostly. There had been a lot of widows.
Órlaith had laid the sword by the fallen man’s hand; from his stertorous breathing and the way he was dribbling on the carpet he wouldn’t be waking up for a while. Cat-footing over to the door to the bedchamber took only a moment as lamplight flared brighter behind it, and through the crack of the hinges she could see the two girls kneeling on the Khotanese rug with their hands linked behind their heads, and Norman Arminger standing before them naked save for a set of underdrawers of the type the ancient world had called tighty-whities for some reason, fury in his eyes and an entirely naked broadsword in his hand. He had a warrior’s body, all flexible rolling muscle and ridged belly with a fuzz of dark-brown hair on his chest, and a hard square face marked by weariness and wariness both.
The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 25