Divine Right

by C. J. Cherryh

  ALONG DARK WATERWAYS...

  Jones heard the echo of hurrying footsteps above her again. Whoever that shadow was, he was good and he followed close. How to lose him? If only some traffic would come, some boat big enough to duck behind. Or if only she could get her engine started quick, take "off. . . .

  If only I had one of them ' 'Discreet'' engines. . . .

  As if in answer to her thoughts, she suddenly heard the thrumming of a large boat coming fast. Jones jabbed her pole with all her strength and shot straight across the canal, right under the oncoming bow.

  A screech of surprise and a furious obscenity followed her as she scraped past, missing collision by a handspan. She recognized the cursing voice: Deiter clan, one of their big boats. But where were the poles? How could their boat make such speed? And then it hit her. The Deiters got one of them Discreet engines!

  As she pulled into shadowy safety, all thoughts of her pursuer were forgotten in the face of this new and far greater threat. The Ban was broken! And on the waterways of Merovingen, trouble was about to sprout and spread as swiftly as the choking, inescapable tangle-lilies. . . .

  C.J. CHERRYH invites you to enter the world of MEROVINGEN NIGHTS!

  ANGEL WITH THE SWORD by C.J. Cherryh

  A Merovingen Nights Novel

  FESTIVAL MOON edited by C.J. Cherryh

  (stories by C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish, Robert Lynn Asprin, Nancy Asire, Mercedes Lackey, Janet and Chris Morris, Lynn Abbey)

  FEVER SEASON edited by C.J. Cherryh

  (stories by C.J. Cherryh, Chris Morris, Mercedes Lackey, Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, Lynn Abbey, Janet Morris)

  TROUBLED WATERS edited by C.J. Cherryh

  (stories by C.J. Cherryh, Mercedes Lackey, Nancy Asire, Janet Morris, Lynn Abbey, Chris Morris, Roberta Rogow, Leslie Fish)

  SMUGGLER'S GOLD edited by C.J. Cherryh

  (stories by Mercedes Lackey, Roberta Rogow, Nancy Asire, Robert Lynn Asprin, Chris and Janet Morris, C.J. Cherryh, Lynn Abbey, Leslie Fish)

  DIVINE RIGHT edited by C.J. Cherryh

  (stories by Lynn Abbey, Nancy Asire, C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish, Mercedes Lackey, Chris Morris, Janet Morris, Bradley H. Sinor, Roberta Rogow)

  Title

  CJ. CHERRYH

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

  1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  DIVINE RIGHT Copyright © 1989 by C.J. Cherryh

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Tim Hildebrandt.

  Maps by Pat Tobin.

  "Seeds of Destruction" Copyright © 1989 by C.J. Cherryh.

  "Run Silent, Run Cheap" Copyright © 1989 by Leslie Fish.

  "Farren's Folly: Meeting of Minds" Copyright © 1989 by Roberta Rogow.

  "Foggy Night" Copyright © 1989 by Bradley H. Sinor.

  "Second Opinion" Copyright © 1989 by Janet Morris.

  "Red Skies" Copyright © 1989 by Lynn Abbey.

  "Turning Point" Copyright © 1989 by Mercedes Lackey.

  "Draw Me a Picture" Copyright © 1989 by Nancy Asire.

  "Postpartum Blues" Copyright © 1989 by Chris Morris.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  "Merovingen Nights", "Merovin", "The Signeury", "The Det", "Moghi's Tavern" are registered trademarks belonging to C.J. Cherryh.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 795.

  First Printing, October 1989

  123456789

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  CONTENTS

  Because the stories in this volume overlap in time they are, by the authors' consent, printed here in a "braided" format—so that they read much more like a novel than an anthology. The reader may equally well read the short stories as originally written by reading all of a given title in order of appearance.

  For those who wonder how this number of writers coincide so closely—say that certain pairs of writers involved do a lot of consultation in a few frenzied weeks of phone calls as deadline approaches, then the editor, presented with the result, has to figure out what the logical order is.

  Seeds of Destruction, C.J. Cherryh 11

  Run Silent, Run Cheap, Leslie Fish 21

  Farren's Folly: Meeting of Minds, Roberta Rogow 55

  Run Silent, Run Cheap (reprised) Leslie Fish 61

  Foggy Night, Bradley H. Sinor 71

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 82

  Second Opinion, Janet Morris 89

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 106

  Second Opinion (reprised), Janet Morris 111

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 138

  Farren's Folly: Meeting of Minds (reprised), Roberta Rogow 144

  Red Skies, Lynn Abbey 153

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 196

  Turning Point, Mercedes Lackey 199

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C. J. Cerryh 221

  Draw Me a Picture, Nancy Asire 226

  Turning Point (reprised), Mercedes Lackey 256

  Postpartum Blues, Chris Morris 275

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 305

  Postpartum Blues (reprised), Chris Morris 308

  Seeds of Destruction (reprised), C.J. Cherryh 310

  Run Silent, Run Cheap (reprised), Leslie Fish 318

  APPENDIX

  From the Files of Anastasi Kalugin, Advocate Militiar, C.J. Cherryh 331

  Index to City Maps 340

  Merovingian City Maps 344

  Merovan Sea Floor and Hemispheric Maps 347

  Maps

  SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION

  C.J. Cherryh

  Summer, and Jones' skip nosed its way through West shoving aside a sheet of floating weed, green, smooth-leaved stuff that clung to poles with a maddening persistence—not least maddening (and guilt-making) because Altair Jones had some idea where this sudden bloom of strange plants had come from. Rif, damn 'er, and her bag of seeds—a midnight trip in Jones' own skip.

  Do good for the canalers, Rif had said. Cure the fever.

  Make al-co-hol for poor folks' fuel.

  Yey, and choke the lighted waterways with a damn nuisance, so in some places a skip-freighter needed an engine to plow through the crud, except the trailing feathery roots, tough as cable in the center of the feather, had a way of tangling up in your propeller— or wrapping round your pole when you were poling, or sticking to the sides of your skip and making a nasty dried mess when you were off-loaded and riding higher in the water.

  Tangle-lilies, folk began to call 'em.

  You got cheap fuel, yey, Rif, and you got the damn plants to contend with, ye got engine wash rocking your skip real hard if ye pass some damn fool running his motor in one of the little canals, where a close pass and the wake bouncing off the walls could rock your skip right up—scrape!—against some curb, or, as had happened with old man Cruse, tipped him and his load right over, whole skip-load of flour sacks that damn near broke him, not mentioning what he lost of his personal stuff—after which the Cruses and Gupta Ling were squabbling, both of them having been running under power, but Ling's skip had been passing and passing fast, by what John Cruse swore.

  One year everything worked fine and you sweated with the pole and you got around, and the next you had crud clogging up everything and Revenantist ca-nalers wondering what karma they'd acquired that did this to them; while Adventist canalers thought generally the stuff must've come in on some Falkenaer ship in from the Chattalen or wherever, and some talked of gutting and throat-cutting; or cutting Falkenaer cables at dock; but some said it was a Nev Hetteker plot, and there was more talk of throat-cutting, hell with the peacer-moves the Nev Hettekers were making, sendi
ng envoys south, making nice with the governor.

  Jones lost sleep over that—knowing what she knew. And she thought more and more that she was morally obliged to do something, like 'fess up to the Trade what she had done before somebody got killed: like put the knife to Rif and tell her and her Janist damn 'em friends they done it and they could get rid of it, quiet-like.

  Canalers 'stilled fuel off the stuff in pot-stills cobbled together out of about everything, canaler fashion. Engines better than a century old, that had always been saved just for emergencies, chugged along active again, a body having to be competitive, and they broke down, naturally: and parts were always hard come by, but parts got scarce and the price went up and mechanics were full-up if you had to get one—you changed one thing and other things changed, and the ripples kept going like that.

  The tangle-lilies slopped up onto the boardwalks in the engine wash and rotted there, to go squish under some unsuspecting canalsider's foot and send him skidding, bang, down on the walk.

  The damn things grew like crazy out in the Lagoon, where there was shallow water and sun got there that never came to the deep underside of three-tiered Merovingen's thousand bridges. You wanted to go out in the Lagoon, you fought your way through a sea of green leaves; if chance be you fell in like old John Cruse, the water was overall cleaner, and maybe you didn't catch the fever and die, but baby deathangels fed on the stuff, and you never saw baby deathangel in numbers like that—till the lilies came. Maybe the little 'uns weren't dangerous as the adults that were strictly seagoing, but you didn't want to swim with 'em, no.

  And that wasn't all the worst of it, either. Tangle-lilies needed light, and there wasn't any light in a lot of the canals, except at high noon, and some places not then. It drifted into cuts and slips and backwaters and up against pilings and just piled up in dead ends and it turned brown and cruddy green and went to jelly when it died, and made this kind of soup that stank and stuck to everything. The governor hired canalers to go along with rakes and get the weeds from wherever they piled up; and you saw skips full of it going up to the Spur—from which the Carswells who had property up to the Flats shipped it up there, dried it on racks and baled it and sold it back to Merovingen all dry and flammable, for landers who had stoves.

  Cheaper than firewood. And that made the Dundees furious, the Dundees running the sea-freighters that brought wood from the forests they owned westward along the coast: Dundee was at Carswell's throats over it, and the gossip of the town was how Myrna Dundee had gone after Eddie Carswell at Festival, damn near to drawing knives, and them hightowners.

  'Fessing up to dumping that stuff in the canals meant 'fessing up to a scary lot of things; and nailing Rif for it—and Jones was torn between thinking Rif had tried to do good and maybe didn't deserve what might fall on her then; or thinking Rif and her Janist friends might not be friends at all, and doing something terrible in town, with real dark motives.

  Altair Jones had run the dark ways all her life, and never ratted on a job; but she never took a job, more to the point, that hurt them as didn't deserve it. She wished to hell she wasn't guilty of this one; and that she knew what to do about it.

  She worried and she fretted about it. And it only got worse, so that now there was so much anger built up in Merovingen against whoever was responsible that she had the idea she had already waited much too long to come forward, that it wasn't just Rif the retribution would come down on, now—it was her and Mondrag-on and everybody she touched; and it wasn't just the Trade would be after her hide: the word would get out all over town.

  She could say—the Janes held a knife to my throat. It was all their fault. But that was a lie, and she couldn't hold that up if the questions got close: she wasn't like some, that could lie with a straight face and not a second thought how many folk were going to die for it. She could gut a man outright. She had killed more than one. But that was fights. This was cold and it had to be deliberate and she had to go on lying once she started, and be good at it; or she. was going to get other folk involved, and she wasn't the only one could end up knifed or, worse, arrested and taken up by hightowner law—

  —after which the Justiciary was going to ask her questions in that awful little room in its basement; and she wasn't the only one they would arrest. Everybody she knew was in danger then—

  Especially Mondragon, her and him being lovers, and it no secret on the canals and probably not in hightown where Mondragon moved. The whole town thought he was a Boregy bastard, half a Falkenaer; and the whole town didn't know he was Nev Hetterker and that he'd been a friend of Karl Fon and a member of the Sword of God, (before Fon double-crossed him, killed his family and threw him in prison for it.) Folk generally thought he worked for Boregys; but working for Anastasi Kalugin was the real truth, the governor's youngest son—and if Mondragon got hauled in as in any way involved in some Janist plot against the city, Anastasi would shut him up so fast—

  Anastasi, who could take either one of them up any time he wanted,—would take her in at the first breath of notoriety; and Mondragon . . .

  Mondragon, who had an eel's ways and who could ordinarily protect himself, would be a fool for her sake, and she knew it.

  She was seventeen, well, surely she was by now; and she knew things that she wished she didn't know— and she was in a mess of a kind she wasn't sure had a way out. Month after month she had told herself it was going to get better and now it was wider and worse, so that Tom Mondragon, who had survived prison and fever and Boregy plots and outmaneuvered the Sword of God itself, might get killed because of a canal-rat who'd taken a fare one night and who'd been fool enough to figure Rif was harmless.

  Rif, she'd said, late as last night, you see. what's going on. You got to do something.

  And Rif had said with a shrug, Yey, but you got fuel for your skip, you got no more fever.

  And she, with a notion to take Rif by the throat and shake her: Yey, Rif, but ain't every skip's got an engine, and some's taking cargo away from the little 'uns, and we got families hungry that never was, Rif—

  And Rif, with a second shrug: Jane'll provide. You got hungry folk, there'll be food.

  They ain't takin' charity! she'd yelled at Rif. They'd starve, first! Ye do somethin', ye skit-hearted sherk, ye brung it, ye get rid of it!

  Which only proved she was in the grip of the hysterics, because when she looked out on a city drowning in weed and rot, she couldn't see any getting rid of it.

  She couldn't see herself living with what she knew.

  She couldn't see herself living at all much longer, because secrets had a way of coming to the light, like bodies out of Harbor-bottom, and this one was closer and closer to it.

  The wood-paneled College hearing room buzzed with voices, clattered with notebooks and echoed with the scrape of chairs—cardinals, and councillors low-town and high, and secretaries from the Astronomer's office, the Harbormaster's office, and the Deputy Secretary from the governor's office-Cardinal Willa Exeter gathered up her aching bones and shoved her chair back, feeling as she did so a gentle tug at her sleeve—not her aide, but Cardinal Vincente Cromwell, in company with councillor Rod-rigo White-Eber and Devrie Eber from the Astronomer's office.

  Cromwell was the surprise. Cromwell was Reform Party, a partisan of Tatiana Kalugin; and Exeter was staunch Loyalist; and while the choice of heirs to the governor was not, by rule, the business of the cardinals, Family was Family, politics was politics, and Cromwell interests were not, either socially or economically, Exeter's.

  Except this particularly passionate hearing associated some very ill-assorted interests, irate merchant-families and anguished shippers and the Carswells and the Dundees, who had, aside from looking murder at each other across the table, confined their feud to prepared, icy statements. It had all been remarkably civilized—considering the subject of the hearings, which was the complaint of engine noise and erosion of the foundations of the city.

  This approach was immediately interesting to Wil
la Exeter. This—unprecedented—approach suggested both hazards and solutions in the present impasse.

  "A word," Cromwell said, and, holding her sleeve, drew her well aside in that company.

  Cromwell, Eber, White, Basargin, now, the whole group moving quietly to the cloakroom, Basargin another surprise—especially when Cromwell said, first off, in a low voice, "Exeter, the Trade Secretary would be here with us, but appearances, you understand,—"

  Willa Exeter made a noncommittal noise, thinking of betrayals and double crosses.

  "Basargin," Basargin said, "will not object to the motion—if"there's a small expansion of the language— to include distilling."

  Willa cleared her throat and tucked her arms in her sleeves, ducking her head.

  "It's a hazard," Eber-White said. "Cardinal, a simple statement: that the College suspects unlicensed technology, and supports a bill to require all distillation apparatus be licensed. Not banned. Simply regulated."

  "An enforcement nightmare," Willa said, .thinking of blackleg police poking into canal-boats, thinking of the ill will and the aggravation of an already restive element. .

  Thinking of the expansion of blackleg authority, meaning Tatiana Kalugin, who, Lord and the Angel knew, already had enough to threaten the peace.

  "Impossible," she said. "Tm afraid we've nothing to discuss on that score."

  "It's the responsibility of the College to oversee such matters!" Basargin said. "To sit contemplating one's hands while the city falls apart is not responsible, Cardinal! We have documented erosion and undermining on the walls; we have an economy in upheaval—!"

  "And Eber's fuel import business, mmmm?" Willa said in a low voice. "Conflict of interest is written all over this business. Not mentioning you can't enforce it. I can't support this."