"Ye been in here too long yourself. You been sitting in these walls and messing 'round with that damn Anastasi and that Boregy. Time you got the feel of a boat again, time you worked up some callus on your hands, work up a sweat, feel old Det move under your feet—"
"I wish, I really wish I could."
"Run with me tomorrow night. We got a Falkenaer ship in. We just go out there and make a little deal, Moghi's got 'er all set. Ain't no way there's going to be trouble. Ye want people t' believe that ye're Falkenaer, right? Ye got business ye don't want people t' know. So ye smuggle. Ever'body knows a smuggler's got secrets he don't want people messing into. Answers all their questions. Smart, right?"
More long silence. She felt him sigh, and his hands caught hers. "Jones, I've got business tomorrow. I will have. For a few days."
"What d'ye mean business? You been sitting on your rump in this place for a month, ye—"
His hands squeezed hard. "Tomorrow I won't be. I've got to go uptown. Tomorrow. Maybe late. Maybe more than tomorrow. I don't know. I haven't got a choice. Understand?"
"Ye wasn't going to tell me!"
"I was going to tell you in the morning. I swear."
"Oh, sure."
"I'm not lying. I swear." "What's he want?"
"I don't know. See him. That's all the message I got."
"Anastasi?" "Yes." "Damn him."
"I don't want you running late. I don't want to worry about where you are. I'd like you to go to Moghi's, rent the Room,—"
"Well, I can't do that, can I? I got a run to make." He frightened her. He was good at that. So was Anastasi Kalugin, the governor's son, who had them both any time he wanted to take them. And so, equally well, the Sword of God frightened her. It was in town again. Maybe it had never left at all. It aimed at upsetting everything. It aimed, Mondragon had said, at whatever would cause the most trouble and give it the most power. Mondragon should know: he had been one of them. Which was his value to Anastasi Kalugin, who hoped to outlive his brother and his sister and be governor of Merovingen someday.
Of course Anastasi's sister Tatiana had other thoughts. Maybe so did Iosef Kalugin, who was not through being governor.
There were a lot of people she and Mondragon had reason to worry about. There were a lot who had reason to worry about them. And who might, some dark of the Moon, try to do something about it.
"Forget the run," he said.
"I can't do that!"
"Moghi'll understand. He can find somebody else. You give him enough money, he'll understand well enough how it is."
"Oh, sure, I back out on him this time and I make him go use some other skip and then what do I get next time? What's he going to do next time he wants a load carried? Call me? Hell, I might be busy. I might have some reason to hide out. He might just find himself another skip that don't come with problems, mightn't he? And the word might just get around Jones ain't real reliable, Jones don't need the work that bad—"
"Moghi will understand!"
"Moghi's who we got to go with if we got to have help. You want I make 'im mad at me? You want I go back on a promise with 'im? I dunno how you do business uptown, Mondragon, but canalside, ye don't back out on a thing and then come asking favors. You could've told me—"
"I didn't know it, dammit."
"Well, now it's too late, ain't it?"
"It's not too late. Tell him you have a friend in trouble, tell him it's life and death, hell, wouldn't you, if you had to? How's he to know the difference?"
"Because I ain't never give my word an' lied, that's how! Because if you was in trouble uptown I'd come, but you ain't asking me to come with ye, ye ain't got any intention of it, and I’ll have my skip tied up here about while Moghi gets the idea I might need help an' sends somebody to follow me— How'd that look, huh? I got no choice. I go with you, or I make that run."
"You can't go with me. It's uptown. I'd have to leave you at a tie-up at Boregy and it's not safe—"
"Well, ye got it, then, don't ye? I make the run. I'll tell Moghi he better keep an eye to you. An' he'll do 'er. Won't make no noise, either."
"Not a bad idea," Mondragon allowed. "Not really a bad idea."
"Ye want Del to take you up?"
"No. I'll pick up a poleboat. I don't want Del mixed up with this." She sighed. And thought that she knew now why he had asked her here every night. It hurt, even if it was good of him. Trying to keep her safe, that was all. Keeping her inside walls as much as he could.
Her gut hurt when she reckoned that.
So, damn, you didn't think it was yourJooks, did you?
Shut up, mama. He ain't no fool. Never was. But he was looking out for me, wasn't he? We're friends. An' he don't mind making love to me.
"Fine," she mumbled aloud, to what he had said. "Fine."
"Is it fine, Jones?"
"Yey." She turned over in the circle of his arms and faced him, nose to nose. "Hey, I'll be careful. I'll slip out there and back, I got the fuel, ain't no way I'll make a mistake. I'll watch real sharp and I'll use the engine, all right?"
"Don't get caught. For God's sake don't get caught. It could get political real fast and I'm out of trade-goods. Hear?"
"I hear ye. I hear ye real good. If you get in trouble, ye hail any boat, hear, any boat in the Trade. Ye tell 'em Moghi's. Ye know that."
"I know."
"Deal, then." She snuggled closer. Wrapped her arms around him and shut her eyes. She was still worried, but sleep when it came, came fast and deep, on the exhaustion of a heavy cargo and a long run—honest work, well, mostly. In her dreams the water moved, the bed had the motion of the waves, the pilings glided like black ghosts. Like all her life on the water. It was stable ground that was the dream.
Tea in the morning, biscuits—Mondragon could cook, if he had a whole kitchen to do it in, and pans enough to outfit any three boats. Eggs. Sugar for the tea.
Then it was dress and get ready: the canals woke up early as they went to sleep late—canalers dozed during the day as they got the chance; and there was no way she could ask old Min or Del to watch her skip for her while trade slipped away. She pulled on her pants, pulled on the faded red sweater and put a blue one over it, figuring what the morning was going to be out there, and made up her mind to be thoroughly cheerful in the parting at the door.
So he was going to risk his neck.
So he would be fine, he always was, he had a cat's luck and an eel's ways when trouble was on him.
He gave her a hug at the door, and a kiss on the mouth— He don't need to do that, now, does he, mama?
She kissed him back, feeling the fool, her, in her canaler's rough clothes and him still in his robe. Lazy man. Going back to sleep after he had seen her off.
Sleep until he had to keep his own appointments.
"Damn," he said, "wear socks. It's cold out there."
"Working feet is warm. Wet socks is damn cold, lander. My feet'll be fine once I get to poling."
"Makes me cold to think about it. Here." He fished a small heavy purse out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand. "For Moghi, for whatever you might have to do."
"Lord an' my Ancestors, Mondragon, I got money. I got all I need—"
"Take it. Hear?"
"Won't." She shoved it back at him, shoved it back so hard, and him not taking it, the purse dropped and hit the floor, scattering bright gold bits.
Gold, by the Ancestors. All of it gold.
"Lord, Mondragon, what're ye trying t' do?"
"You can take it, is what." He bent down and picked it up and slapped it hard into her hand. "You can damned well take it and put it on account with Moghi—"
Get off the water. You don't have to work. You don't have to take the late runs.
"I ain't doing no such thing!" she yelled. And tried to give it back. Dropped it again when he would not take it. "Mondragon, ye don't buy me off! I ain't taking any more money."
"You damn well take it!"
"Won't!"
"I'll stop over at Moghi's and leave it, if I have to. It'll just cost me a stop. Waste my time. Put me late."
"Ye're always giving me money, Mondragon, and I ain't earned it! Ain't no way I earned it, I damn sure ain't earning it in no bed, and you can take it an'—"
"Jones—"
" 'Day." She jerked the door open and walked out into the fog and the chill, across the second-level walk, down the stairs where the ghosts of slips waited, with friends.
Damn man.
What c'nl do with 'im?
Damn weather. Ain't much moving till noon, that's sure.
But fine weather if we got fog again tonight, running out to that ship in Harbor. Down to the canalside, bare feet sure on the slick boards.
The fog was lifting by the time Mondragon set foot out his door—quietly dressed, in dark blue trousers, black sweater, a heavy jacket and a navy knit cap pulled down low. He locked the door and set the small trip—he varied it: this time it was a sliver of wood that an opening of that door would crack without notice. He had taken similar precautions with doors inside, that were always set a certain way, with trips that were not standard Sword teaching. He had learned certain things in prison. Some of the inmates of Nev Hettek's notorious hellhole had been professional thieves, waiting execution.
He turned up his collar against the chill and took a second good look around with a single glance. No weapon on him at the moment but a riverman's knife. He had left the uptown clothes at Boregy. He came and went into that house by the servants' entry. Like any good riverman with business with the highest banking interests in Merovingen.
God knew why. Boregy wanted it that way, that was all. Layers upon layers of duplicity: give out that he was a relative pretending not to be, but showing uptown, which let people think that he was in fact a Boregy with foreign connections. Boregy wanted folk to perceive his coming and going by the servants' entry as elaborate subterfuge designed to fool the town authorities, and his coming and going in society and in Merovingen-below alike as the actions of a Boregy spy (possibly really a cousin) living frugally in mid-town because that was where the Boregys wanted him, but socializing uptown because he was Boregy and thought no one knew about his other life. All of which mess was his cover: he was a Kalugin spy, which had nothing at all to do with banking, and a great deal to do with Boregys, in a very non-commercial way. Which Boregys of course knew, the Sword presence in Merovingen knew, and he was sure Tatiana Kalugin knew, and probably Iosef the governor as well, which meant that anyone who had a motive to kill him knew.
The only ones in town who did not know what he was and who he worked for were the ordinary folk he met on the walkways, the merchants and tradesmen and canalfolk and craftsmen that were Merovingen. Which was the way it had to be—because Merovingen would never tolerate the things its leaders and would-be leaders were up to. Merovingen was upset enough about the Nev Hettek trade mission. There was muttering in the bars and taverns waterside, that it would be no wonder if some foreigners turned up floating some morning.
There were the beginnings of whisperings about Tatiana Kalugin: he had seen to that. It was too good to let pass, the intimation that the governor's second heir had been sleeping with a Nev Hettek trade minister. Tell old Mintaka a romantic secret and it was end to end of Merovingen by nightfall for sure.
But people gave Tatiana benefit of the doubt: That Nev Hetteker better count his change, was one way they put it. Meaning Tatiana did nothing that did not involve profit to herself, and the very fact she had done something so blatant meant she was after something. It puzzled people. It puzzled them enough they had rather gossip about it for a while. Which was where things stood-
Till the news got down to the canals about the census that old Iosef had requested—still a rumor, nothing had gotten to the lowest tiers yet. But there was assuredly a point-past-which-not with the rank and file in Merovingen… something the Kalugins instinctively knew; and which maybe the Sword, for all its fine calculations, did not entirely figure into its plans.
It was even possible that old Iosef had thrown out the census for a bait, to get the town stirred up. Which made it a more difficult atmosphere for the Sword, in some senses.
Far better to be a Falkenaer in public eyes, than Nev Hetteker. Hanging Bridge had seen more than one lynching, so accounts ran.
Better, he thought, as he rounded the comer of Foundry onto Grand, and had one of the widest views in Merovingen, the whole Grand Canal spread out in front of him from Ventani to Ventura, all the skips, the barges, the busy main artery of Merovingen—better if he could do what Jones wanted: throw over everything, take to the water, live his whole life on one of those skips. Free.
But that was not a choice he had.
It never would be.
He had no idea what Anastasi wanted of him. But he knew the way things were tending. He knew that there were too many sides to this, and too much danger, and too many enemies.
There were several enemies he would as soon eliminate— had offered to; but Anastasi said no. He thought about arranging an accident to Magruder and Chamoun on his own, something Anastasi could not readily trace. But that had hazards as grievous as letting these people go. And if he had a hope in the world it was that Anastasi would live to be governor, and find him for some reason… still useful, and not an embarrassment. God knew he had no hope with Tatiana and none at all with her new friends.
He had helped one man into a governorship: Karl Fon, up in Nev Hettek. He had been Karl Fon's close friend and comrade in arms—until Karl Fon found it necessary to bury his affiliations with the Sword of God and become a staunch and conservative Adventist moderate. So Karl used him for a scapegoat; murdered his own father and Mondragon's whole family, and framed his boyhood friend for all of it.
Karl Fon was horrified to learn of his friend's true character. Of course.
Damn him to deepest hell.
Mondragon sneezed, suddenly and violently. Morning chill. He realized an ache in his bones, which he attributed to the cold and to, God help him, falling out of bed like a fool. Prison and old wounds made him hate the winters. He felt a violent chill when the same morning wind that began to blow the mist away got under his coat and up his sleeves. He had half decided to walk over to Boregy, but that turn of the corner on Foundry decided him: it would be a hell of a lot more comfortable to get out of the windy upper tiers, go down to canalside and hail a poleboat. No sense courting a cold.
Jones would not thank him for that. Damn, if he had felt his throat this prickly last night he would not have shared a bed with her.
He thought of Jones, barefoot in this weather, like every other skip-freighter down there, and shivered.
HEARTS AND MINDS
Chris Morris
Three months had passed since Mike Chamoun found the dead man, gutted like a fish, aboard his boat, and the worst hadn't happened—yet.
No one had come to Boregy House, where Chamoun was living with Cassie Boregy, his new bride, to accuse him of murdering Dimitri Romanov, who had been the most feared and influential agent that Nev Hettek's Sword of God had in place here in the stronghold of its enemy, Merovingen. Second most feared and influential man in Merovingen, Chamoun amended on his way to the Revenantist College for his catechism lessons: Dimitri Romanov, the Sword's tactical agent in place, was a) dead and b) no match for Chance Magruder, or else Romanov wouldn't be dead.
It was probably Magruder—His Excellency, Nev Hettek's Ambassador and Minister of Trade and Tariffs in Merovingen— who'd arranged Romanov's death. Then arranged to keep Michael Chamoun's name out of it, the young man told himself for the hundredth time as he slipped unremarkably through the sparse traffic across the high water bridge that led, if you didn't mind cutting across the Signeury, straight from Boregy House to the College, where Chamoun's uncle-in-law, the cardinal, waited to make a good Revenantist out of a heretical Adventist from Nev Hettek who'd married his niece, Cassie, for mercantile reasons.
Married to Ca
ssie Boregy, even on a five-year contract, Michael Chamoun had a certain degree of immunity from the laws all lesser folk of Merovingen-above and -below obeyed. The Boregys were inextricably linked to their patron, Anastasi Kalugin, son of Iosef who ruled Merovingen with a rusty iron hand. Aging, Poppa Kalugin was preparing for the future of his dynasty: watching and waiting while his three children— Mikhail the Craftsman, Anastasi the Advocate Militiar, and Tatiana the Terrible and only daughter—vied for position.
Soon the old man would die, and even if he designated a successor, the war for power here would break into the open. If the war between Nev Hettek and Merovingen didn't break out first, helped along by Nev Hettek's agents provocateur in Merovingen, a "terrorist" group called the Sword of God, of which Dimitri Romanov, dead on Chamoun's boat, had been a member.
Of which Chance Magruder was another. Of which Michael Chamoun was a third, brought in here at great expense and under painstaking cover for the express purpose of marrying into the Boregy family, as close to Anastasi Kalugin as the Sword could get.
Or as close as it had thought it could get, until Chance Magruder found a way into Tatiana Kalugin's bed. Certainly it was Chance who was protecting Chamoun from involvement in the investigation of Romanov's death. Probably it had been Magruder who'd ordered the hit—a disagreement between rival Sword factions. Magruder wouldn't say— wouldn't admit it to Chamoun.
And that worried Michael. It worried him every day. It worried him at night in bed with sweet Cassie Boregy, the girl he'd married for the Cause, who loved him with an innocent love he didn't deserve. It worried him especially when he was out of Boregy House, abroad in Merovingen as he was now, crossing the treacherous heights of the Signeury where the Kalugins had total and autocratic control. There were fates worse than pretending to convert to Revenantism to legitimize his marriage.
There were dungeons in the Justiciary; interrogation cells, it was whispered, in the Signeury itself. To land in one of them, you only needed to make a Kalugin nervous. And Mike Chamoun had already done that, in spades.
Fever Season Page 2