Divine Right

by C. J. Cherryh

  "I wondered if you'd gone," said a voice behind him as he dropped.

  He turned. Mondragon sat on the edge of the rumpled bed, eyes half-closed, but not at all sleepy, fishy-smelling breeze coming in the open window and ruffling his hair.

  "No m'ser," Denny replied uncertainly. "I—bin thinkin', m'ser."

  He could feel Mondragon considering him from under those half-closed lids; weighing him.

  "You've been thinking."

  "I'm a fool, m'ser. Lucky, but—Greg was lucky for a while."

  "And you saw what riding luck got him." "Yey."

  "And what do you propose to do about this revelation?"

  Denny couldn't stand looking at that expressionless face. He dropped his eyes to his own feet; bare, callused, dirty, and covered with little scratches. "Dunno, m'ser," he murmured. "Jest—you need help, m'brother needs help—an' I dunno how—what t' do. I jest—wanna do it smart, that's all. I wanna be able t' do things. An' if somebody d'cides t' put a hole in me—"

  He looked up again, his chin firming stubbornly, a kind of smoldering anger in the bottom of his stomach.

  "—if somebody d'cides to put a hole in me, I don't want it t' be fer no damn reason!''

  Mondragon licked his lips a trifle, his eyes no longer hooded. "You're asking my advice."

  "Yey," Denny said. "I'm askin'. An' I'll take it. I ain't gonna be a fool no more."

  "Kamat," Mondragon replied.

  Denny wrinkled his nose doubtfully. "M'ser? What's Kamat got t'do—"

  "Richard Kamat has been made aware of the fact that there are two Takahashi boys in Merovingen. It is only because of my effort and Raj's that he hasn't had his people out to bring you in, regardless of your wishes in the matter.'' Was that a hint of smile? If so, it was gone before Denny had a chance to identify the expression. "We persuaded him that until you wanted the shelter of Kamat's patronage, it would be—a less than successful venture. He continues to inquire about you. He has a very strong sense of obligation—" It was a hint of smile, "—has young m'ser Kamat."

  "But—Raj, he wants t' be a doctor," Denny felt moved to protest. "I ain't smart, not that smart— what'm I supposed t' do?"

  "What did your grandfather tell you to do?"

  Denny remembered, as clearly as if he had Raj's perfect memory, the words of his Granther's note. It is your duty to take care of Rigel; he has no talent for lying, no ability to deceive. This is not altogether bad: there should be one in every generation that understands and believes in Takahashi Honor. But those who believe in the Honor need those who understand the price of Honor to care for them.

  "He tol' me t' take care'f 'im."

  "Why you?"

  " 'Cause I ain't good—an' the good 'uns need bad 'uns t' watch out fer 'em." That may not have been what Granther said, but it was what he meant.

  "And if Raj were to become Head of Takahashi," Mondragon said intently, his green eyes boring into Denny's, "what then?"

  Denny thought about Granther; clever, canny Granther, who understood expediency—and Raj, who did not—and shivered.

  Mondragon leaned back on his pillows a little. "So. You see."

  Denny nodded, slowly.

  "Then, young m'ser, I advise you to go to Richard Kamat. And I advise you to ask him to train you in the ways of business. And I further advise you to learn, Deneb Takahashi. Apply yourself as devotedly as you did to learning to pick a lock."

  "Yey, m'ser," Denny said, in a small, humble voice. He turned, and started to go—then turned back for a moment. "M'ser—"

  Mondragon simply raised one golden eyebrow.

  "Yer debt still stands, m'ser. You call it in, any time—I pay it. Roofwalkin' too."

  "That's a little foolhardy a promise—"

  "No, m'ser," Denny interrupted bleakly. "It ain't. 'Cause you ain't no fool. Not like—some of us."

  And he picked his way carefully down the staircase, and out the door, into the dawn sunshine.

  He sat on the doorstep of Kamat for a very long time before the doorkeeper opened the outer protective grate for the day. The doorkeeper was a withered old man who stared at him with a pride far more in keeping with a Househead than that of a gatekeeper.

  "Away with you, boy," he grated, looking down his nose as Denny scrambled to his feet, and clasped his hands behind him. "We don't need idlers or beggars. If you're looking for work, present yourself at the kitchen—"

  "Pardon, m'ser," Denny interrupted, looking out of the corner of his eye at the huge pile that was Kamat, and feeling more than a little apprehensive at what he was getting himself into. "Your pardon—but—I got a message. For m'ser Kamat."

  "Well?" The ancient drew himself up and sniffed disdainfully. But his disdain was short-lived.

  "M'ser Mondragon sent me, m'ser. 'F it's convenient. I'm s'pposed to speak t' m'ser Richard. I'm—" He gulped, and watched the surprise flood the old man's face. "I'm Deneb Takahashi. Rigel's brother. I think m'ser Richard wants t' see me."

  POSTPARTUM BLUES

  Chris Morris

  It was nearly noon and hot as an oven down on canalside. Kenner didn't need to check the time because Black Cal had just left Kenner's shop, and Cal rousted Kenner every day just before noon, regular as clockwork.

  Kenner came around the counter, flipped the fly-specked sign in the window from "Open" to "Closed," and went into the office he'd partitioned off so he'd have a place to sit where he could take a deep breath without wondering who was watching.

  He put his feet up on the sawhorse desk and leaned back, grease-blackened fingers laced behind his head. He wasn't hungry, but Jacobs would be bringing in fish and chips from one of the stands at any moment.

  You couldn't get away from fish and chips in Mero-vingen. Kenner kept dreaming about rare steaks, two inches thick, cold in the center, with blood and fat oozing out of them.

  The only way somebody with his cover could get a steak was go up to the Embassy on some pretext and sneak one in the kitchen. He was seriously considering what, among recent events, might constitute such a pretext, so that if he got his steak, he'd have the stomach to eat it. Magruder didn't like screw-ups.

  Therefore, Kenner was going to need a good reason to go uptown, a reason that wouldn't sound fake to Magruder, who'd conducted his orientation personally and personally warned him that the error factor here was zero.

  He hadn't told Magruder that there was no such thing as an error-free environment; if Magruder wanted zero-tolerance, you gave it to him. No quibbles about what was possible and what wasn't. When Magruder looked at you and told you that if you screwed up, you were fish food, you didn't argue. And you didn't screw up.

  Since his meeting with Magruder, Kenner's orientation in Merovingen was feeling more like a trial by fire every day. He and Jacobs were working themselves silly in the machine shop, patching up ancient motors and machining new parts where old parts wouldn't fix, as well as cobbling together weed-cages for a range of standard and nonstandard propellers and crankshafts. And that was just his cover.

  Every few hours some militiaman would stomp in, trying to catch him doing something wrong, or sidle in dressed like a civilian and ask him leading questions.

  Didn't any of the yokels down here realize that if you were dumb enough to fall for that old trick, you wouldn't be what they suspected you were?

  But the harassment gave him an opportunity to size up the opposition. He was beginning to be able to tell Anastasi's military militiamen from Tatiana's secret police, and distinguish both of those from old man Iosef's handpicked special agents—by smell if not by sight.

  And then there were the real players: the College marshals and the private stock: every House in Mero-vingen was beefing up its own guard. Private armies were as common here as religious crazies and cutthroats and thieves. Well, nobody'd said it was going to be easy, back in Nev Hettek, when he'd volunteered.

  But if Kenner did well, he'd not only cut himself a piece of the revolutionary pie down here, but maybe e
ven catch the eye of Karl Fon back home. He'd already caught Chance Magruder's attention.

  Magruder was a walking textbook, a perfect master, and scary as hell. It had been a long while since anything or anybody scared Zack Kenner. Being caught on the wrong side of Magruder was something that happened to you only once.

  Being caught between Danielle Lambert, Karl Fon's personal pick for this assignment, and Magruder's entrenched Sword organization, hadn't been part of what Kenner'd been told to expect.

  But that was what was happening here.

  Magruder wanted the moon, the stars, and perfect performance. Kenner had run death squads during the revolution in Nev Hettek, and laid down the law pretty hard back then among his boys.

  These were different rules, but nothing was impossible if doing it kept you alive and winning. Jacobs took direction well; Doctor Lambert was busy uptown with the Boregys; and he was doing what Magruder had ordered: making this machine shop indispensible to the local canalers.

  They came in with their desperate eyes and clenched jaws and suspicions, and he gave them just hard enough a time to make the desperation overcome the suspicion. He fixed what needed fixing and sold them weed-cages on credit, at exorbitant interest. Nobody knew yet that, down the line, Nev Hettek would issue a public order that he forgive the debt.

  All he was supposed to do was get their signatures on receipts and make them aware that, even with the interest on the time payments, Nev Hettek was doing this out of humanitarian concern for its Merovingian trading partner. Sure thing.

  Well, the prices were low enough, if you paid cash. Some did. Some tried to, but in the end, couldn't. Chance Magruder knew his targets' mentality. You couldn't give the Merovingians anything. They were devotees of karma, and karmic debt was worse than a pauper's grave.

  Weird way to run a revolution, but it seemed to be working. Everybody Kenner met was the right degree of nervous, anyhow.

  Except his direct superior, Dani Lambert, who was taking everything personally or else had orders to make it seem that she was, in order to spook Magruder and see if he'd jump the wrong way.

  Kenner didn't think Magruder was constitutionally capable of jumping the wrong way. Their first meeting had convinced him of that. Their second, with Dani Lambert and Michael Chamoun, Magruder's protege, in attendance, had made him wish he hadn't come in here attached to Lambert: she was here checking up on the way Magruder was running things, and she wasn't making any secret of it.

  You never really got a clear take on the way the higher-ups maneuvered. But Kenner's instinct was good, and he instinctively wanted to separate himself from Lambert, to make Magruder think of him as an asset rather than a potential liability. You couldn't survive long down here with Magruder thinking of you less than fondly, not when you were Sword of God.

  When the tinkle of brass bells told Kenner that the door to the shop had opened, he didn't get up to see who it was: he was expecting Jacobs with the fish and fries for lunch.

  So he just waited for his food. When it didn't immediately appear, he realized that the footsteps coming toward the office door weren't sure enough, quick enough, to be Jacobs'. Then he admitted that the cadence of the footfalls wasn't familiar. Must be some customer who couldn't read. There were enough of those here.

  Kenner was just taking his boots off his desk when the door to his office swung open.

  The man standing there was blond, taller than the Merovingian average, and balanced on the balls of his feet like a duelist. He was dressed in uptown clothes, not the best or the worst tailoring that Kenner had seen.

  By the clothes, then, the man was probably in the shipping trade, somebody who lunched at a cafe nearby called Moghi's, that catered to a halfway respectable shopkeeper clientele. In the daytime, anyway.

  Kenner said, "What can I do for you, m'ser?" as he got up and moved to the right so that the newcomer wasn't standing in the sunlight streaming in the shop window behind his back. Kenner hated being at a disadvantage—any disadvantage. Having the sun in your eyes and your enemy coming out of it was a classic mistake ... but this wasn't an enemy, or a combat situation. Was it?

  The man answered, "I'm after a propeller cage. Heard you do 'em quick." But the accent didn't ring quite true. And there was something familiar about the underlying patois, something that smacked of home.

  "Well, you've come to the right place, m'ser," said Kenner, still maneuvering for position. Now he could see the fellow's face clearly. There wasn't a canaler in Merovingen with a face like that. Aristocrat was written all over the blond man.

  Was there something familiar about the face, as well? Kenner told himself that he'd been here just long enough that lots of Merovingians were folk he was seeing for the second or third time.

  "Come on out inta the shop. I was takin' a little break," Kenner responded in as close to canalside patter as he could manage.

  He had a good ear for dialect. It wasn't what he'd said or the way he said it that made the other man peer at him with such keen interest as he slid by to lead the way.

  Out in the shop proper, Kenner felt better behind his counter. Funny how even the flimsiest barrier can represent rank and authority. Behind the counter, he was the proprietor and the other guy was the customer. Things were in balance. So what was making him nervous about the man?

  Maybe his visitor was a militiaman in disguise? No, too loose. Maybe a private guard, attached to one of the warehousing concerns? That sounded better. Some House security type, that must be it.

  But the houses didn't need Nev Hettek relief, or charity, or assistance. And when they were checking him out, they didn't send their top men—at least none had before. Again, Kenner said, "What can I do for you? A propeller kit, is it?"

  The man who looked like a Nev Hettek blueblood gave him specifics; the boat in question wasn't a poor man's skiff, by any means; but not a yacht, either. Personal craft, Kenner was willing to bet.

  And the guy was still looking at him with that keenness that Kenner didn't like.

  Just then he saw a girl, or a boy—a waif—peering in the window, nose fogging the glass; and Jacobs, coming back with lunch.

  "Hey, Jacobs, lock the door or we'll never get to eat that."

  "Wait till I'm done, if you would," said the customer in a tone that made Jacobs scurry by into the office, leaving the door not only unlocked, but ajar.

  "That'll be . . . say . . . ten sols, cash on the barrel," Kenner said, testing the waters. "Or we can arrange credit with a downpayment. . . ?" If this fellow needed time payments, Kenner needed his eyes examined.

  "How about half now and half on delivery?" said the blond man, watching him as if Kenner might go for a weapon at any second. He had one, a Nev Hettek ten millimeter revolver tucked against his spine. But it was his fail-safe, and nothing happening here was justifying Kenner's instinct that he was failing, somehow.

  "No problem," Kenner said, and got out his sales book. He wrote up the order specs, flipped the pad around, and shoved it toward the customer. Find out whether the guy could read, anyhow. "If it's right, just write your name on the top line there, and an address where you can be reached."

  The man took the pencil lying on the counter and said, as he scribbled, "You won't need to reach me. Tell me when it'll be ready and I'll bring the boat down. That way, if there's anything wrong, we can fix .it on the spot."

  The customer handed the sales book back. On it, in a clear, precise hand, was written, Thomas Mondragon, c/o Richard Kamat/South Bank.

  Kenner actually blinked at what he saw there, and read it again. Then he looked up, at his customer's face. Thomas Mondragon? Bold as brass and in the flesh, staring back at him. Did Mondragon recognize him, when he hadn't had a clue to the other man's identity? Five years in a Nev Hettek prison could change you. . . .

  Mondragon said, "Now if you'll sign where it says 'Received,' I'll give you five sols in cash and be on my way."

  Kenner wasn't using an alias; his orders had been clear on that
. Everybody who was anybody in Nev Hettek had been a revolutionary player; command didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. In case of just this sort of situation.

  He signed his name, not bothering to scrawl any more illegibly than usual, tore off a copy for Mondragon, and took the sols the other man counted out.

  Well, now he had a reason to go up to the Embassy and get that steak. Only he'd just lost his appetite.

  Had Mondragon recognized him, by face, name or reputation? You couldn't assume otherwise. And if so, so what?

  Only Magruder was in a position to assess the damage, if any, since Mondragon was cool as a winter evening when he left, just folding the receipt and pocketing it as he said, "See you at the end of the week, m'ser Kenner."

  When Mondragon was gone, so was the waif at the window, and every shred of Kenner's composure.

  He didn't even bother to explain things to Jacobs, just called, "I'm going up to the Embassy; don't know when I'll be back. Close up at the usual time."

  Like there was anything usual about Merovingen. Or about completing a polite transaction with one of his country's most wanted criminals. If he'd been anywhere else, he'd have shot Tom Mondragon on the spot.

  Only here, he couldn't. If Mondragon was supposed to be dead, Magruder would have gotten the job done long before Mondragon had showed up at Kenner's little shop.

  Wouldn't he?

  With belated doubt gnawing at his innards that maybe he should have killed the criminal when he'd had the chance, Kenner made his way uptown, to the Embassy, to sit around and wait for Magruder to make time for him.

  Cassie Boregy knew that her husband was Sword of God. She'd seen it in a vision, and her visions were always true. Or at least, they always had seemed true. She'd seen her baby dead, but she had her baby, live and in her arms. So maybe Michael wasn't Sword of God.

  If Michael wasn't her enemy, then neither was Danielle Lambert, the obstetrician. But she knew the doctor was her enemy, because the doctor was the one who wouldn't let Daddy give her any deathangel. And she really needed deathangel now, to see through the fog to the truth of things as she lay in her bed with her baby in her arms.