Guilt Edged Ivory

by Doris Egan

  Ran began, "I'm sorry—"

  Coalis sniffed through his thin, aristocratic nose. He did that very well, I thought. "Stereth will tell me," he said.

  "You're at liberty to ask him," said Ran, "if you think he knows."

  Coalis said, "I think if he doesn't know, you'll have to tell him when he asks."

  Looking as though he'd just swallowed something bad, Ran turned and went down the steps without waiting any longer for the house steward or giving his farewells. It was verging on bad manners, in which he almost never indulged; and saved from that only by the fact it was deliberate. A reply to what he considered presumption.

  Eliana and her defensive chaperone seemed taken aback. I shrugged hurriedly, said "Sorry, noble lady; bad day," and clattered over the porch and down the steps after him.

  There was a Net message from Stereth Tar'krim waiting for us when we got home. Ran put it on permanent hold, unread, with a privacy code beside it. Yes, I was very curious. But considering my recent adventure with privacy codes and Net messages, I thought it best to stay away from it.

  Chapter 12

  We duly warned Loden Broca that evening. His lodgings, in a cheap inn in a nasty part of town, were not on the Net, and this being the kind of message one doesn't like to give to a courier, we were compelled to visit him at home.

  Climbing the dark and dirty stairs to his room, Ran said, "Theodora, whenever you get me involved in one of these affairs—"

  Catch that?

  "—no matter how high the birth of our client, we always seem to end up rattling around with the dregs of society."

  I stepped up the steep stairs behind him, noting how airless the place was. "This time we have a nice house to go home to at night, and you're not wandering around penniless."

  "Mmm, there is that." On the fourth floor the stairs ran out and we emerged into a hallway every bit as brilliantly lit. He counted off the doorways. "One, two, three, four— five." He hit the flat of his hand against the door.

  We waited. He pounded again. I said, "He's probably not home. If I lived in this place, I'd spend as much time away as I could, myself."

  "I refuse to come back here again," said Ran, making yet more noise, as though he would conjure Loden Broca home and available through force of will alone.

  The door to number four opened. A woman in a nightshirt appeared, her black hair caught back in a long fall. She looked in her thirties, and she appeared unaware that her legs were on display from the knees down. Perhaps she didn't own a nightrobe. "Do you mind?" she said. "I'm trying to get a few hours' sleep."

  It was still early evening, but Ran said politely, "I beg your pardon, gracious lady."

  She blinked and peered at him in the dimly lit hall. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but my husband is one of the better looking creations in the universe. She said, "Oh," as though in reply to something. Then she said, "He's not home. And if he were home, he wouldn't answer. Nobody comes but creditors."

  "You saw him go out?" asked Ran. I could tell he was trying to keep his gaze up around face-level. You don't often see legs on Ivory, except on performers in a few dance shows.

  "Heard him. A couple of hours ago. He's probably at a tith-parlor, that's where he spends his time."

  "Do you know which one?" I asked.

  Her eyes went to me, then shifted back to Ran. "No, sorry, could be any of 'em," she said, as though he'd asked the question.

  Ran said, "When does he usually come back?"

  She shrugged and slowly wiped one hand against her thigh as though it had jam on it. "Depends on how much money his friends have on 'em. Or if he got paid today. Or if he meets somebody and goes to her place—that means he won't be back at all." She paused. "If the money runs out, he could show up any time. If you want, you can wait at my place—"

  "Thanks for your help," I said warmly. "We'll carry on from here. Please don't let us interrupt you."

  "No trouble," she assured Ran, still not looking my way.

  It would be undignified to check and see where he was looking, so I confined myself to surreptitiously jabbing him in the ribs. I heard the intake of breath, but he gave no other sign. Then he smiled at our informant, bowed, and echoed, "We'll carry on from here. Please don't let us interrupt you."

  She sighed, shrugged again, and went back into her room. Ran turned and looked at me. "What?" I said.

  "I'll be black and blue in a couple of hours."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  He took my hand. "You're not usually this hair-trigger. Does the council agenda have you that nervous?"

  I was going to deny that, but he pulled my hand, and the next thing I know I had my head against his chest and we were holding each other in Loden's ratty hallway, and I was having trouble talking. "Kanz," I said, finally, "I don't know. I don't know. It's just that—I don't have any place to go. I left Pyrene, and I left Athena, and I don't regret it… but this business with the council, somehow that's not what I envisioned when I took on your family."

  "You're not leaving Ivory."

  "I know."

  Reassured as to my sanity—nobody leaves Cormallon, you get thrown out or you're in for life—he pushed back my hair and said, "Listen, this custom of multiple wives isn't the horror you seem to think it is."

  "Kylla doesn't seem to be looking forward to it!"

  "I wonder if it's the marriage she minds or the fact that she'd be junior wife. That's not the point, though, the point is that of course if it bothers you so much, we won't do it. Nobody can marry into a pair unless the senior wife accepts her in full ritual during the ceremony."

  "People have consented to wedding ceremonies before, who didn't want to. Because of pressure."

  He smiled. "I'd like to see them pressure you, foreign-barbarian-without-manners. ''

  "They'd pressure you, that's the problem."

  He was silent. I said, "Should I wait while they figure out sneaky Ivory ways to make your life as difficult as possible? And while all the time you know yourself that any confusion over succession rights is not a good idea for the House."

  Finally he said, "The marriage is young. The council is overconcerned. We have plenty of time."

  "We only have the time they're willing to give us—"

  Footsteps on the stairs made us step apart. We faded into the shadows at the edge of the hall, aware that if Loden Broca had creditors his first reflex upon seeing anybody would be to fly down the stairs again. And if it weren't Loden, who knew how friendly this particular tenant would be?

  That second one wasn't a problem. Loden appeared at the head of the stairs, walking easily but not quite as steadily as he had yesterday morning on duty. The smell of bredesmoke accompanied him.

  We waited till he had his door open and then Ran stepped forward on one side of him, and I took the other.

  He started to bolt inside—a bad move if we'd really been after him—but Ran got a foot in the door and grabbed hold of the shirt beneath his short outerrobe. A minute of undignified back-and-forthing gave Loden time to see who we were. He stopped, looking confused. "Sir Cormallon," he said. He peered my way. "Gracious lady. Uh, what are you doing here?"

  "May we come in for a moment?" asked Ran.

  Loden hesitated. Then he said, "Of course, gracious sir, but it's kind of a mess." He held open the door.

  It wasn't kind of a mess, it was a total mess. Rolled-up piles of robes, shirts, and trousers were sitting in mounds over the floor. You'd almost think he was a university student back on Athena, except if he'd been Athenan books would have been mixed up with the clothes. A flute was on the tiny windowsill, beside a glass with something old and encrusted in it. A bag of half-eaten apples lay open on the floor beneath, the apples spilling out over the dusty floorboards. There was a bed and a stool, standard issue from the innkeeper; no other furniture or pictures.

  Loden was fortunate in his choice of inn. It was the kind of housekeeping that asked for vermin, but there didn't se
em to be any at the moment. I watched Ran to see where he was going to sit, but like me he apparently decided standing was the better part of valor. "Sir Broca Mercia," he began.

  Loden made a sound like an unhappy laugh. "Maybe not Mercia for much longer," he said.

  "Oh?" asked Ran, derailed from his path.

  Loden sat down on the bed. "My supervisor isn't pleased with me. He isn't pleased with any of us who were there when Kade Porath died, but he's particularly not pleased with me. I wish you hadn't come to the agency, gracious sir. People get the idea that you wouldn't have paid so much attention to me unless I were involved in some way."

  I said, "We think you are involved."

  He glanced up at me. "I swear, I didn't even know Kade Porath that well—"

  "No, you misunderstand. We think you might have been the intended target."

  He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again, but nothing came out. Apparently the idea was so new he needed time to comprehend it. Then he said, "I think you must be mistaken—"

  "Possibly," said Ran, "but listen to our evidence." He told Loden Broca the story of his ring. "Clearly it was the focus for the murder," he finished. "And you've already told us nobody knew you were going to give it to Kade."

  You could practically see an invisible iron anvil settling on Loden's shoulders.

  I said, "Have there been any other attempts on your life?"

  He made some fishlike motions with his lips, then said, "No. And they know where to find me, it's no secret I live here… although I… generally don't answer the door. I like privacy."

  The grave's a fine and private place, said the scholar's voice in my head. I didn't have a lot of respect for Loden Broca as a human being, but suddenly I felt sorry for him. His life, such as it was, was rapidly going down the chute. Maybe he was a bad gambler and hung out in tith-parlors, but did that mean he deserved to die? This dingy room was the best he'd done for himself, and now he was going to lose that, and possibly his job, and possibly a lot more.

  Once I'd lived in a cheap inn, and gone hungry when I couldn't work.

  I gave Ran a look which he met with alarm. "We've done what we can," he said quickly, walking toward the door. "We felt we should warn you. Come along, Theodora, we've got a lot to do."

  "Wait a minute," I said, irritated. I groped for the moneypouch on the belt beneath my outerrobe, and pulled out two ten-tabal coins by feel. I stepped over to the bed and said, "Here." Loden put out a hand, still looking rather blank, and I dropped them into it. "Maybe you should leave the capital for a while. Do the Mercians have any branches elsewhere?"

  "In Timial," said Loden. "But my supervisor would be more suspicious than ever if I asked for a transfer."

  "Theodora," said Ran, from the doorway, with a trace of grimness.

  "All right, all right," I muttered, and joined him.

  "Best of luck, sir Broca Mercia," said Ran politely.

  Loden nodded, sitting in the dark, that blank look still on his face. We left him there.

  That night I woke up a few hours before dawn, and decided to go downstairs to get a drink of water. I stumbled down, half-awake, got the drink, and was making my way along the hall to the stairs to go back up, when I saw a shape in the dimness by the front door that shouldn't have been there. A large, bulky shape. A man-sized shape, lying on the floor.

  My heart started going like a power drill. How could someone possibly have gotten in? Ran had the house spell-protected. Not that they couldn't get past that if they wanted to, but only a fool would deliberately bring down a curse on his head. Not to mention there were the locks and bolts to contend with. But there he was. My brain tried to figure out some other shape that could legitimately be hulking there in the darkness, but nothing came to mind. What the hell was he doing on the floor? Did he break in, get tired, and take a nap? Nerves of steel; or just stupid? Gods, what if this was another corpse? Which would suggest somebody else was likely in the house at this very moment…

  These thoughts stampeded through my head, one after the other, like a crowd that's just heard "Fire!" It was only about three seconds since I'd first seen his shape there in the shadows. It was too dark to make out his face; were his eyes open or closed? Well, we were going to have to assume they were closed because otherwise we were in the deep kanz. I kept moving forward, very gently, till I reached the stairs. Then I started backward up the first couple of steps.

  The shape heaved itself up, shoving my heartrate into the stratosphere. I'd half-convinced myself he was dead. I flew up the stairs yelling, "RAN!"

  With a yell like that and let me tell you, I put my heart and soul into it—you'd think he'd get the pistol from its compartment in the headboard before he did anything else. And you'd be right.

  In nonemergencies he's hard to get up, but he was already standing in the doorway to the bedroom, armed, by the time I got there. "There's somebody here," I panted.

  Probably right behind me, in fact. I threw a look over my shoulder, saw a moving shape on the stairs, ducked past Ran and went for the knife hanging from yesterday's belt on the corner of the bed. Then I turned around.

  Lights snapped on. We all blinked. Ran said, "Sim? There's not anybody else here, is there?"

  A rumbly voice said, "No, none I saw. I think I startled the lady."

  I'd reached the doorway. At the end of the hall, looking slightly embarrassed, was a man of about forty, wearing a conservative street tunic with a nightrobe over it. There was a holster showing beneath the nightrobe, but his hands were empty. I looked at him, then back at my husband. I said, "Ran?"

  He turned and laid the pistol on the sleeping platform. He said, "Theodora, this is my cousin Sim, from Mira-Stoden."-

  One of Ran's innumerable cousins? I decided it would be better for my marriage if I put down my knife also. I opened my mouth to say something telling to Ran, then closed it and turned to Sim. "Honored by this meeting." I turned back to Ran. "What's he doing here in the middle of the night?"

  "You went to sleep early," said Ran. "He got in after you went to bed. I was going to tell you in the morning— I didn't know you'd go downstairs. Or if you did, I thought I'd wake up when you left the bed."

  "I don't know why. You never wake up when I leave the bed. I do it every night."

  "You do?—Anyway, breakfast would have been plenty of time to reintroduce you properly."

  "i?e-introduce?"

  "You must remember Sim. He was at our wedding party."

  "Everyone in the known universe was at our wedding party." I glanced toward Sim, who looked silently uncomfortable. "Hello, Sim. Sorry if I startled you."

  "Quite all right, lady Theodora. Sorry I gave you such a shock."

  Fortunately he was too embarrassed by the whole incident to call attention to himself by opening up the long exchange of complimentary apologies we might have gotten trapped in. "Please drop the 'lady,' since we're definitely introduced. Ah, may I ask why you were lying by the door? It seems an eccentric place to choose to sleep. Not that you aren't welcome to bed down anywhere you like, of course."

  I felt Ran's fingers on my arm as he stepped in to relieve Sim of further explanation. "It's the traditional place for bodyguards to sleep, Theodora. I asked Sim to come stay with us for a while. After what happened in Trade Square, it seemed prudent. My cousin's worked in security before."

  "I… see." I scanned Ran's face, which as usual was giving little away. "You left me with the impression that you didn't consider us as still in danger. Now that the case is closed."

  "It's possible that not everyone has heard yet that the case is closed. You know I like to be careful, Theodora."

  "Yes, I do know that." I paused. "Will Sim be accompanying you to the council meetings? It'll cause a little talk, won't it?"

  "Well, actually I thought that when I went to the meetings he'd stay with you."

  "I see," I said again.

  "I thought it might give you more sense of security," he added.

/>   I felt my chest, which was thumping the exhausted rhythm of a mount that's been ridden hard for the day and needs wiping down. "You thought it would give me a sense of security." I walked past Ran and back into the bedroom, tapping the back of his hand where it rested on the doorway. "We'll discuss that further in the morning." I pulled open the coverlet and slid into bed.

  I heard Ran's voice say, "I guess we'll see you at breakfast, Sim."

  "Sorry about the excitement," came the reply.

  "It's all right."

  "Say, do you folks have tri-grain in the larder? I always have that for breakfast."

  "I wouldn't worry about that right now, Sim."

  I heard steps going down the stairs, and pulled the coverlet over my head. "Gods of fools and scholars."

  "Did you say something?" asked Ran.

  "I said good night."

  * * *

  So four days later I was sitting in the arboretum of the Taka Hospitality Building, just down the river from the Imperial Park, with a hulking shadow named Sim waiting by the entrance. The Taka had gone up a mere ten years ago, a durasteel tower with weapon-proof glass and endless suites of rooms, providing conference facilities for all persuasions—polished mahogany tables, seating twenty at a time, with full Net facilities, for the more democratic meetings; polished marble bowls with a raised podium in the center for more arena-like get-togethers; polished stone group baths, with or without pleasant Taka personnel to scrub your back while you discuss business. There were also group beds, for when the intellectual and physical aspects of discussion became blurrily entwined. I know all this because they had a brochure in the lobby.

  I was not, you see, invited to the Cormallon council meeting, taking place at that moment on the twenty-first floor. (In a room with a table, Ran assured me.) This was a branch-heads-only meeting. I had been invited to the financial controllers' conference, that takes place in the spring; since women traditionally handle the budget, that one is heavily female. Supposedly the branch heads meeting is more policy-oriented, although as Ran pointed out, nothing can really be settled in a day. But just in case anyone was tempted to make any promises he couldn't keep, each delegate would have been primed by his sister, wife, or mother before coming, as to what he could give away and what he couldn't.