Guilt Edged Ivory

by Doris Egan

  I grunted. Something about the situation made conversa-

  tion difficult for me. And what did he mean by "usually?" Were there forensic sorcerers on this planet who made a career of this sort of thing? There are definitely gaps in my education, but I'm never aware of what they are till I trip over them.

  He ran his little finger over Kade's lips. The finger came away red.

  I said, "Does that mean anything?"

  "Lip rouge," he said.

  He pulled the corners of Kade's eyes back and peered into each one.

  "So," he said, "What did Stereth want?"

  "What?"

  "What did the Minister for Provincial Affairs want with you, tymon?"

  "Oh. He wanted me to meet somebody. Keleen Van Gelder, the junior ambassador from Tellys."

  Ran's glance flicked to my face, then returned to the corpse at hand. "Let the head down, sweetheart. Now pull up the sleeve of the outerrobe. Why does he want you to see the ambassador?"

  "I'm not sure. He wants the Tellysians to like him, and Van Gelder asked to meet me. He said he'd arrange it as a courtesy."

  "No, hold it all the way back. I want to see the complete arm. What about Van Gelder? Why does he want to meet you?"

  "She. Keleen's a female name. And Stereth says he doesn't know."

  The glance flicked upward again. "Do you believe him?"

  I shrugged. "Who knows? He sounds sincere. And I can't see any harm in a simple meeting."

  "You mean you already agreed?"

  "Well, yes."

  Ran sighed. "I knew he wanted me to stand under that tree for some reason."

  I was relieved. Ran thought he'd found the secret at the heart of the conversation, which meant he wouldn't keep pressing.

  He said, "Was that the whole matter?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Pretty much?"

  "Yes, that was whole matter. You get a little touchy around Stereth, you know."

  "Sorry." He held Kade's right hand with one hand of his own, and pulled Kade's thumb with the other. I know a tinaje massage-healing type move that's exactly the same, but Kade was in no shape to appreciate it. I shifted my grip on the corpse, let a handkerchief drop out of my sleeve, caught it with the same hand, blew my nose, returned the handkerchief, and grabbed Kade again.

  I said, "Are we going to have to cut him open?"

  "Possibly. A little bit. We may need to take some samples."

  Suddenly he threw down the hand. "Ow!"

  "What, what's the matter?"

  "Kanz!" He reached out slowly toward the hand, and very tentatively touched the massive ring on Kade's third finger. "Yow!" He drew back again as though he'd taken an electric shock. He stepped backward from the corpse and met my eyes. "It's the ring."

  "What about the ring?"

  "It's cursed."

  I blinked. That was interesting. I'd traveled up and down the coast for weeks once carrying a cursed deck of cards and I'd never gotten any electric shocks from it. I reached toward the ring.

  "Don't touch it." Suddenly Ran's fingers were circling my wrist.

  "Come on, what am I going to do; vanish in a puff of smoke? Go swimming in the fountain outside?"

  His face was stubborn. "We make no assumptions till I've had a chance to study it."

  He was serious. I put my hand down. Instead I bent over the table and examined the ring visually: A large blue stone set in silver, etched with vine leaves around the setting. There were more designs etched in the band, but I couldn't see them properly because Kade's fingers were in the way. Probably there were characters inside, too; it looked like some kind of family-crest sort of thing. I'd have to pull the ring off to really tell. But apparently that was a no-no.

  "If we can't touch it, how do we get it off?"

  He said, "Did you bring extra handkerchiefs?"

  "In this House of Hell? Of course." I went through the pouch on my belt, pulled out a clean one and gave it to him.

  He grasped the ring with the handkerchief and pulled it off Kade's finger. Then he let the ring's weight settle in the center of the cloth like the contents of a small jewelry bag and tied a knot with the corners. He hefted the small package: "There. Most likely it only affects the one who wears it, but no harm in being careful." He smiled. "This is unexpected good fortune. The curse is still operational; we can trace it back to the sorcerer who placed it. Someone's been careless."

  I said, slowly, "Too careless?"

  He was silent for a moment. "One would think that a murder-curse would be constructed to discharge itself and dissipate, not stay tied to an object like any normal spell. That's how I would do it. But who can say what's 'too careless,' with all the incompetence that's loose in the world?" He added, "When I say that's how I'd do it, I mean of course if I performed the assassination as some public spectacle, which I would never do." Ran's personal curse, his sense of professional pride, required him to point this out any number of times in the course of the investigation.

  I realized I was still holding Kade's arm. I laid it down. "Do we still have to cut him up?"

  "What? Oh. No, we've got what we need." He slipped the tiny bundle into his pocket. "Let's see if the house steward can identify Kade's ring."

  "Ran, for heaven's sake, we can't just leave."

  "Why not?" He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  I waved toward the table. It looked as though some nec-rophiliac had been having a go at the body. "The family, Ran. Do you want them to walk in on this?"

  "Oh." He came over and helped me tidy Kade's robes.

  I said, "Damn, you smeared the lip paint when you were touching his face."

  "I don't know what I can do about that at this point." He wiped some of the smear with a corner of his sleeve. The lip paint was half on and half off, giving Kade a vamp-iric look. Appropriate to his profession, perhaps, but nothing his family would appreciate.

  "Wait a sec." I opened my pouch, pulled out the tiny brush and pot Kylla'd given me and started applying rouge to his lips.

  "What in the name of all the gods are you doing?"

  "I'm being polite, damn it." Kylla'd chosen the shade carefully for my barbarian coloring; it didn't go with Kade, but he'd have to live with it. So to speak. "There." I looked at the tiny pot and brush before tucking them away. "I never want to use these again."

  Ran sighed. "Your constant acquisition of new skills amazes me. May we go search out the steward now?"

  I glanced over the table, the body, the incense holders, the candlesticks. Everything seemed appropriate. I blew my nose a final time. "Of course."

  On being summoned, the steward met us at the front door again, not fazed in the least by our reappearance. Ran untied the knot in his handkerchief and displayed the ring. "Is this familiar to you?"

  The steward studied it for a second, then said, "No."

  It took us both aback. Ran said, "It was on Kade's body."

  "Ah. I was told he'd been found wearing a ring. The servants who took care of the matter said that his fingers were somewhat bloated at the time; we thought it best to leave the ring where it was." He paused an impeccable pause that said Is there some problem?

  Ran said, "But you've never seen it before."

  "Not to my knowledge, gracious sir."

  "If this belonged to Kade, would you necessarily know?"

  "If he were in the habit of wearing it, I would. I'm also familiar with the contents of his jewelry box upstairs, and this was never in it."

  That was a little unsettling. Did the servants at Cormal-lon know what was in my jewelry box?

  The steward went on, "I can't answer for whether he might not have kept it elsewhere, or only just bought it." Ran was retying the knot in the handkerchief, and the steward said, "Excuse me, gracious sir, but are you planning to take the ring away with you?"

  "Actually, I was."

  The steward coughed. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask for a receipt, sir."

  "Oh. Of course." And then we all stood aro
und for a few minutes while paper was obtained and the steward wrote out a description: "One ring, blue cadite, silver setting, etched with vine leaves on the outer band and the words 'Daring and Prudent' on the inner.' "

  It was the first I'd heard about words on the inside of the band. They sounded like a motto. A rather contradictory, motto, in fact.

  Ran was handed back the handkerchief, and we thanked the steward and left the Poraths'. My allergy-pummeled body was glad to leave, but my mind had more ambiguous feelings. Having told Lord Jusik Porath that we were innocent of any involvement in the death of his son, we'd just wound up our first foray into the investigation by pocketing the main piece of evidence and taking it away with us.

  Perhaps it wasn't wise, but at the time I really don't know what else we could have done.

  I called ahead to the Tellysian Embassy for an appointment that afternoon. I was fairly curious, actually, perhaps more so than I was about Kade. People get murdered all the time on Ivory, but extraplanetary junior ambassadors had never gone out of their way to look me up before.

  I was passed directly from a functionary to Van Gelder. "I'm so glad you called," she said. The visual circuit was open and I could see that she was in fact the woman from the party. A closer view showed her as older looking, but deserving of Stereth's "handsome," with strong, clean-cut features. She wore elegant modified Tellysian clothes, a silky one-piece suit whose pants were tailored a little on the full side, making them resemble an Ivoran robe. "I haven't had lunch yet. Have you? It's been a terrible day and I'm longing to get out of here for a bit. There's a terrace in the Imperial park where they serve some standard dishes; would you be my guest?"

  It was a little like being hit by a small cyclone. "I hadn't planned on—"

  "Oh, please come; if you're not hungry, you can order one of those sherbet things and a fizz."

  Well, it was a good restaurant—I'd eaten there a couple of times with Kylla and Shez. And I was still curious. "All right, but I don't think I can stay very long. Couldn't you give me some idea of what you—"

  "Damn! Another call. They haven't stopped all day. I'm really very sorry to be so scatterbrained over the Net. Shall we make it in forty minutes?"

  I gave in. "Fine."

  "Excellent, I'm looking forward to seeing you. Oh, if you need a lift after, don't worry about it—I have the use of a carriage and driver!" And she signed off.

  Well. That hadn't told me a lot. And the Imperial Park was a half hour's walk from where I was, in the full midday heat. It was a good thing I'd brought along a straw hat.

  Somehow I always end up carrying things. My hat, my extra handkerchiefs, my money, a deck of cards, a list of Net numbers for vehicle rentals that had been folded so many times it was approaching unreadable, any number of hairpins—I was going to have to get this mop cut pretty soon—a copy of Kesey's Poems that I hadn't gotten very far in reading… Fortunately my robes have lots of pockets.

  I was a little disappointed, actually; I'd been looking forward to seeing what the inside of the Tellysian embassy was like. The facade was pure, sculpted, classic Ivoran style, but the gods only knew what they'd done indoors. Athe-nans and Pryenese are minimalists; Ivorans tend to the baroque; I had no idea what Tellysians approved of. Except that their own government limited them technologically in what they could bring on-planet, they might have anything there. Solid gold drinking fountains. Grav lifts with Old Master paintings on the walls. Ask an Ivoran, and he'd tell you they could afford it, with what they squeezed out of other planets for their tech designs. But I wondered. How many things had Ivory, for example, actually bought from Tellys? Not very many that I knew about.

  The Imperial Park is cool and green, as cool as you can get in the capital in the summertime, with trees, paths, fountains, statues, artificial wading streams, and a contingent of Imperial Security whose efficiency is matched only by their extraordinary politeness. A set of terraces leads down to the river, and on the final terrace, just above the water, you will find a fairly small restaurant surrounded by a flagstoned area with white tables and chairs. I highly recommend it. The chairs, considered a pointless luxury,

  have seats more than half a meter off the ground— something an outworlder can appreciate—with intricate backs and arms. An overhang of crisscrossed wood provides a sun shield while creating a dappled effect. Just across the river you can see the striped dome of the First Wife's Palace through the trees.

  And the food's not bad, either. I was hot and tired when I got there so I immediately ordered a cherry fizz and snow sherbet. Then I waved the brim of my hat at myself until I'd gotten back into a cheerful mood. Midway between lunch and dinner, the place was empty, so I tucked one foot under my knee on the chair in a most unladylike position and watched the white birds flying among the trees across the way, trying to remember details of a legend I'd heard about how the First Wife's Palace got built. The sherbet was delicious.

  "Theodora of Pyrene?"

  I squinted up toward a patch of sunlight and eased my foot surreptitiously down to the flagstones. "Yes." The woman from the Net call was there, her long blond braid falling past the shoulders of her sky-blue suit.

  "Keleen Van Gelder, junior ambassador from Tellys." She extended a hand, the first hand I'd shaken in a long time. I took it. "This is my colleague, Jack Lykon," she continued. The man beside her was younger, perhaps in his early thirties, brown hair thinning on top and darker brown eyes with a friendly look to them. I shook his hand, too.

  "It's a lovely place, isn't it?" she asked, pulling out a chair. Jack Lykon took the third.

  "Yes, I've been here before. They've got some Pyrenese beer stocked, but it costs a fortune."

  Lykon said, "They do?"—looking interested. "How much is it?"

  Van Gelder turned to him with a slight smile, slanting her eyes. "Imagine paying someone to carry the mug to you personally from the south coast, Jack. That's about how much it costs."

  He seemed disappointed.

  Van Gelder said to me, "I see you've ordered sherbet. I may myself. Where's the waiter?"

  I reached over and pushed the bell in the center of the table. The lone waiter, an old fellow who covered about an inch a minute, tottered out. Van Gelder, interestingly, ordered tah with her meal. Lykon settled for beer from the Northwest Sector.

  "We're the only ones here," said Lykon, looking around uncomfortably. "I wouldn't have known the place was even open."

  It occurred to me suddenly that I might have been uncomfortable once myself, sitting alone on a terrace being served by a thousand-year-old waiter. All those social doubts: Should I be here? Are passersby watching me? What do the restaurant people think? But I'd been hanging around Ran too long. Wherever you were is where you were supposed to be, by definition; Cormallons are never treated below-status, except by the confused; and waiters and cooks can think what they like, as long as they provide the excellent service you are paying them to give. End of story.

  Or perhaps it was just that I was getting old.

  Van Gelder shrugged. "If we're alone, so much the better."

  Enough of comparative social philosophy, too. I said, "The Minister for Provincial Affairs made your invitation intriguing. May I ask how you know him?"

  She grinned. "A good diplomat never claims greater acquaintance than a local figure may wish to allow. You'll have to tell me what Minister Tar'krim said about our relationship, before I can confirm or deny."

  So, she could be inoffensively discreet, too. I said, "Is it asking too much to inquire about why you wanted to see me?"

  "Not at all, Theodora.—I hope I don't offend in calling you Theodora. I know Pyrene custom only provides one name for its people, and I understand that you're Pyrenese."

  I looked down at my empty sherbet bowl. "I was born on Pyrene, but at the moment I've actually got joint Athenan/Ivoran citizenship."

  "That must make you virtually unique."

  "I wouldn't know. I don't have any statistics on the matt
er."

  She seemed to be flipping through an invisible folder. "Pyrene, Athena, Ivory. Out of the four habitable planets in this sector, Tellys is the only one you've never seen. Or have you?"

  "Well, it's nothing personal. You know what interstellar travel costs, ambassador, it's not something many private citizens can afford. Other people picked up my tab—well, except for one trip, and I had a little help on that—and I had to go wherever the ticket was stamped. I was on a government scholarship to Athena, you know."

  "I'd heard that. I also heard that you paid your own fare from here to Athena a couple of years ago. A remarkable achievement, at your age."

  I blinked and said, "I had no idea I was such a topic of conversation in embassy hallways."

  She cracked a smile. "Perhaps we don't get out enough," she acknowledged.

  Our waiter began his snail-like progress from the pavilion of the restaurant proper. We were speaking Standard, but none of us made any attempt to continue the conversation until he'd deposited his load of three large plates, tah cup, and beer mug, and returned inside. You wouldn't think he could carry a sheet of paper successfully, but he negotiated the load with a flawless execution. This was a man with experience in his field.

  "He must have been waiting tables while our ancestors were still working to go multicellular." I'd said it aloud. Lykon broke up. I looked at him, surprised.

  "I was just thinking the same thing," he said. Then he went into another fit of chuckles.

  Van Gelder raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow and said to me, "Jack gets set off by things sometimes." She took a sip of pink tah. "Anyway, he takes an interest in biological references. But we'll get to that."

  Would we? This would be an unusual lunch.

  Chapter 8

  The junior ambassador from Tellys wiped grease from her fingers. She was talking about sorcery, a subject I have more than a passing interest in. "There've been two Standard papers on Ivoran 'sorcery'—only two, in the hundred years we've been in contact. Both by eccentrics, both paid little attention to by the Athenan University Committee. The latter one was slightly more exhaustive. Written by a kinsman of mine, a Tellysian, named Branusci."