Cordelia's Honor

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The room tilted around her. Cordelia's hand locked around the hilt of the swordstick and triggered its sheath flying into the head of one guard, then brought the blade smartly down across Vordarian's weapon-wrist. He screamed, and blood and the nerve disruptor flew wide. Droushnakovi was already diving for the first discarded nerve disruptor. Bothari just took his target out with one lethal hand-blow to the neck. Cordelia slammed the door shut against the guards in the corridor, surging forward. A stunner charge buzzed into the walls, then three blue bolts in rapid succession from Droushnakovi took out the last of Vordarian's men.

  "Grab him," Cordelia yelled to Bothari. Vordarian, shaking, his left hand clamped around his half-severed right wrist, was in poor condition to resist, though he kicked and shouted. His blood ran the color of Kareen's robe. Bothari locked Vordarian's head in a firm grip, nerve disruptor pressed to his skull.

  "Out of here," snarled Cordelia, and kicked the door back open. "To the Emperor's chamber." To Miles. Vordarian's other guards, preparing to fire, held back at the sight of their master.

  "Back off!" Bothari roared, and they fell away from the door. Cordelia grabbed Droushnakovi by the arm, and they stepped over Kareen's body. Her ivory limbs lay muddled in the red fabric, abstractly beautiful forms even in death. The women kept Bothari and Vordarian between themselves and Vordarian's troops, and retreated down the corridor.

  "Pull that plasma arc out of my holster and start firing," Bothari savagely directed Cordelia. Yes; Bothari had managed to retrieve it in the melee, probably why his body count hadn't been higher.

  "You can't set fire to the Residence," Drou gasped in horror.

  A fortune in antiquities and Barrayaran historical artifacts were housed in this wing alone, no doubt. Cordelia grinned wildly, grabbed the weapon, and fired back down the corridor. Wooden furniture, wooden parquetry, and age-dry tapestries roared into flame as the beam's searing fingers touched them.

  Burn, you. Burn for Kareen. Pile a death-offering to match her courage and agony, blazing higher and higher— As they reached the door of the old Emperor's bedchamber, she fired the hallway in the opposite direction for good measure. THAT for what you've done to me, and to my boy—the flames should hold back pursuit for a few minutes. She felt as though her body were floating, light as air. Is this how Bothari feels, when he kills?

  Droushnakovi went for the wall panel to the secret ladder. She was functioning steadily now, as if her hands belonged to a different body than her tear-ravaged face. Cordelia dropped the sword on the bed and raced straight for the huge old carved oak wardrobe that stood against the near wall, and flung its doors wide. Green and amber lights glowed in the dim recesses of the center shelf. God, don't let it be another decoy. . . . Cordelia wrapped her arms around the canister and lifted it out into the light. The right weight, this time, heavy with fluids; the right readouts, the right numbers. The right one.

  Thank you, Kareen. I didn't mean to kill you. Surely she was mad. She didn't feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for.

  Vordarian was still struggling against Bothari's grip, swearing horribly. "You won't escape!" He stopped bucking, and tried to catch Cordelia's eyes. He took a deep breath. "Think, Lady Vorkosigan. You'll never make it. You must have me for a shield, but you can't carry me stunned. Conscious, I'll fight you every meter of the way. My men will be all over you, out there." His head jerked toward the window. "Stun us all and take you prisoner." His voice went persuasive. "Surrender now, and you'll save your lives. That one's life, too, if it means so much to you." He nodded to the replicator Cordelia held in her arms. Her steps were heavier than Alys Vorpatril's, now.

  "I never gave orders for that fool Vorhalas to kill Vorkosigan's heir," Vordarian continued desperately into her silence. Blood leaked rapidly between his fingers. "It was only his father, with his fatal progressive policies, who threatened Barrayar. Your son might have inherited the Countship from Piotr with my goodwill. Piotr should never have been divided from his party of true allegiance. It's a crime, what Lord Aral has put Piotr through—"

  So. It was you. Even at the very beginning. Blood loss and shock were making a jerky parody of Vordarian's usual smooth delivery of political argument. It was as if he sensed he could talk his way out of retribution, if only he hit on the right key words. Somehow, Cordelia doubted he would. Vordarian was not gaudily evil like Vorrutyer had been, not personally degraded like Serg; yet evil had flowed from him nonetheless, not from his vices, but from his virtues: the courage of his conservative convictions, his passion for Kareen. Cordelia's head ached, vilely.

  "We'd never proved you were behind Evon Vorhalas," Cordelia said quietly. "Thank you for the information."

  That shut him up, for a moment. His eyes shifted uneasily to the door, soon to burst inward, ignited by the inferno behind it.

  "Dead, I'm no use to you as a hostage," he said, drawing himself up in dignity.

  "'You're no use to me at all, Emperor Vidal," said Cordelia frankly. "There are at least five thousand casualties in this war so far. Now that Kareen is dead, how long will you keep fighting?"

  "Forever," he snarled whitely. "I will avenge her—avenge them all—"

  Wrong answer, Cordelia thought, with a curious light-headed sadness. "Bothari." He was at her side instantly. "Pick up that sword." He did so. She set the replicator on the floor and laid her hand briefly atop his, wrapped around the hilt. "Bothari, execute this man for me, please." Her tone sounded weirdly serene in her own ears, as if she'd just asked Bothari to pass the butter. Murder didn't really require hysterics.

  "Yes, Milady," Bothari intoned, and lifted the blade. His eyes gleamed with joy.

  "What?" yelped Vordarian in astonishment. "You're a Betan! You can't do—"

  The flashing stroke cut off his words, his head, and his life. It was really extremely neat, despite the last spurts of blood from the stump of his neck. Vorkosigan should have loaned Bothari's services the day they'd executed Carl Vorhalas. All that upper body strength, combined with that extraordinary steel . . . the bemused gyration of her thought snapped back to near-reality as Bothari fell to his knees with the body, dropping the swordstick and clutching his head. He screamed. It was as if Vordarian's death cry had been forced out of Bothari's throat.

  She dropped beside him, suddenly afraid again, though she'd been numb to fear, white-out overloaded, ever since Kareen had grabbed for the nerve disruptor and triggered all this chaos. Keyed by similar stimuli, Bothari was having the forbidden flashback, Cordelia guessed, to the mutinous throat-cutting that the Barrayaran high command had decreed he must forget. She cursed herself for not forseeing this possibility. Would it kill him?

  "This door is hot as hell," Droushnakovi, white and shaken, reported from beside it. "Milady, we have to get out of here now."

  Bothari was gasping raggedly, hands still pressed to his head, yet even as she watched his breathing grew marginally less disrupted. She left him, to crawl blindly over the floor. She needed something, something moisture-proof. . . . There, at the bottom of the wardrobe, was a sturdy plastic bag containing several pairs of Kareen's shoes, no doubt hastily transported by some maidservant when Vordarian had Imperially decreed Kareen move in with him. Cordelia emptied out the shoes, stumbled back around the bed, and collected Vordarian's head from the place where it had rolled to a stop. It was heavy, but not so heavy as the uterine replicator. She pulled the drawstrings tight.

  "Drou. You're in the best shape. Carry the replicator. Start down. Don't drop it." If she dropped Vordarian, Cordelia decided, it would scarcely do him further harm.

  Droushnakovi nodded and grabbed up both the replicator and the abandoned swordstick. Cordelia wasn't sure if she retrieved the latter for its newly acquired historical value, or from some fractured sense of obligation for one of Kou's possessions. Cordelia coaxed Bothari
to his feet. Cool air was rushing up out of the panel opening, drawn by the fire beyond the door. It would make a neat flue, till the burning wall crashed in and blocked the entry. Vordarian's people were going to have a very puzzling time, poking through the embers and wondering where they'd gone.

  The descent was nightmarish, in the compressed space, with Bothari whimpering below her feet. She could carry the bag neither beside nor in front of her, so had to balance it on one shoulder and go one-handed, palm slapping down the rungs and her wrist aching.

  Once on the level, she prodded the weeping Bothari ruthlessly forward, and wouldn't let him stop till they came again to Ezar's cache in the ancient stable cellar.

  "Is he all right?" Droushnakovi asked nervously, as Bothari sat down with his head between his knees.

  "He has a headache," said Cordelia. "It may take a while to pass off."

  Droushnakovi asked even more diffidently, "Are you all right, Milady?"

  Cordelia couldn't help it; she laughed. She choked down the hysteria as Drou began to look really scared. "No."

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ezar's cache included a crate of currency, Barrayaran marks of various denominations. It also included a choice of IDs tailored to Drou, not all of which were obsolete. Cordelia put the two together, and sent Drou out to purchase a used groundcar. Cordelia waited by the cache while Bothari slowly uncurled from his tight fetal ball of pain, recovering enough to walk.

  Getting back out of Vorbarr Sultana had always been the weak part of her plan, Cordelia felt, perhaps because she'd never really believed they'd get this far. Travel was tightly restricted, as Vordarian sought to keep the city from collapsing under him should its frightened populace attempt to stream away. The monorail required passes and cross-checks. Lightflyers were absolutely forbidden, targets of opportunity for trigger-happy guards. Groundcars had to cross multiple roadblocks. Foot travel was too slow for her burdened and exhausted party. There were no good choices.

  After an eternity, pale Drou returned, to lead them back through the tunnels and out to an obscure side street. The city was dusted with sooty snow. From the direction of the Residence, a kilometer off, a darker cloud boiled up to mix with the winter-grey sky; the fierce fire was still not under control, apparently. How long would Vordarian's decapitated command structure keep functioning? Had word of his death leaked out yet?

  As instructed, Drou had found a very plain and unobtrusive old groundcar, though there had been enough funds to buy the most luxurious new vehicle the city still held. Cordelia wanted to save that reserve for the checkpoints.

  But the checkpoints were not as bad as Cordelia had feared. Indeed, the first was empty, its guards pulled back, perhaps, to fight the fire or seal the perimeter of the Residence. The second was crowded with vehicles and impatient drivers. The inspectors were perfunctory and nervous, distracted and half-paralyzed by who-knew-what rumors coming from downtown. A fat wad of currency, handed out under Drou's perfect false ID, disappeared into a guard's pocket. He waved Drou through, driving her "sick uncle" home. Borthari looked sick enough, for sure, huddled under a blanket that also hid the replicator. At the last checkpoint Drou "repeated" a likely version of a rumor of Vordarian's death, and the worried guard deserted on the spot, shedding his uniform in favor of a civilian overcoat and vanishing down a side street.

  They zigzagged over bad side roads all afternoon to reach Vorinnis's neutral District, where the aged groundcar died of a fractured power-train. They abandoned it and took to the monorail system then, Cordelia driving her exhausted little party on, racing the clock in her head. At midnight, they reported in at the first military installation over the next loyalist border, a supply depot. It took Drou several minutes of argument with the night duty officer to persuade him to 1) identify them, 2) let them in, and 3) let them use the military comm net to call Tanery Base to demand transport. At that point the D.O. abruptly became a lot more efficient. A high-speed air shuttle with a hot pilot was scrambled to pick them up.

  Approaching Tanery Base at dawn from the air, Cordelia felt the most unpleasant flash of deja vu. It was so like her first arrival from the mountains, she had the sense of being caught in a time loop. Perhaps she'd died and gone to hell, and her eternal torment would be to repeat the last three weeks' events over and over, endlessly. She shivered.

  Droushnakovi watched her with concern. The exhausted Bothari dozed, in the air shuttle's passenger cabin. Illyan's two ImpSec men, identical twins for all Cordelia could tell to Vordarian's ones they'd murdered back at the Residence, maintained a nervous silence. Cordelia held the uterine replicator possessively on her lap. The plastic bag sat between her feet. She was irrationally unable to let either item out of her sight, though it was clear Drou would much rather the bag had ridden in the luggage compartment.

  The air shuttle touched neatly down on its landing pad, and its engines whined to silence.

  "I want Captain Vaagen, and I want him now," Cordelia repeated for the fifth time as Illyan's men led them underground into the Security debriefing area.

  "Yes, Milady. He's on his way," the ImpSec man assured her again. She glowered suspiciously at him.

  Cautiously, the ImpSec men relieved them of their personal arsenal. Cordelia didn't blame them; she wouldn't have trusted her wild-looking crew with charged weapons either. Thanks to Ezar's cache the women were not ill dressed, though there had been nothing in Bothari's size, so he'd retained his smoked and stinking black fatigues. Fortunately the dried blood spatters didn't show much. But all their faces were hollow-eyed, grooved and shadowed. Cordelia shivered, and Bothari's hands and eyelids twitched, and Droushnakovi had a distressing tendency to start crying, silently, at random moments, stopping as suddenly as she started.

  At long last—only minutes, Cordelia told herself firmly—Captain Vaagen appeared, a tech at his side. He wore undress greens, and his steps were quick, up to Vaagen-speed again. The only residue of his injuries seemed to be a black patch over his eye; on him, it looked good, giving him a fine piratical air. Cordelia trusted the patch was only a temporary part of ongoing treatment.

  "Milady!" He managed a smile, the first to shift those facial muscles in a while, Cordelia sensed. His one eye gleamed triumph. "You got it!"

  "I hope so, Captain." She held up the replicator, which she had refused to let the ImpSec men touch. "I hope we're in time. There aren't any red lights yet, but there was a warning beeper. I shut it off, it was driving me crazy."

  He looked the device over, checking key readouts. "Good. Good. Nutrient reservoir is very low, but not quite depleted yet. Filters still functioning, uric acid level high but not over tolerance—I think it's all right, Milady. Alive, that is. What this interruption has done to my calcification treatments will take more time to determine. We'll be in the infirmary. I should be able to begin servicing it within the hour."

  "Do you have everything you need there? Supplies?"

  His white teeth flashed. "Lord Vorkosigan had me begin setting up a lab the day after you left. Just in case, he said."

  Aral, I love you. "Thank you. Go, go." She surrendered the replicator into Vaagen's hands, and he hurried out with it.

  She sat back down like a marionette with the strings cut. Now she could allow herself to feel the full weight of her exhaustion. But she could not stop quite yet. She had one very important debriefing yet to accomplish. And not to these hovering ImpSec twits, who pestered her—she closed her eyes and pointedly ignored them, letting Drou stammer out answers to their foolish questions.

  Desire warred with dread. She wanted Aral. She had defied Aral, most openly. Had it touched his honor, scorched his—admittedly, unusually flexible—Barrayaran male ego beyond tolerance? Would she be frozen out of his trust forever? No, that suspicion was surely unjust. But his public credibility among his peers, part of the delicate psychology of power—had she damaged it? Would some damnable unforseen political consequence rebound out of all this, back on their heads? Did she care? Y
es, she decided sadly. It was hell to be so tired, and still care.

  "Kou!"

  Drou's cry snapped Cordelia's eyes open. Koudelka was limping into the main portal Security debriefing office. Good Lord, the man was back in uniform, shaved and sharp. Only the grey rings under his eyes were non-regulation.

  Kou and Drou's reunion, Cordelia was delighted to note, was not in the least military. The staff soldier was instantly plastered all over with tall and grubby blonde, exchanging muffled un-regulation greetings like darling, love, thank God, safe, sweet. . . . The ImpSec men turned away uncomfortably from the blast of naked emotion radiating from their faces. Cordelia basked in it. A far more sensible way to greet a friend than all that moronic saluting.

  They parted only to see each other better, still holding hands. "You made it," chortled Droushnakovi. "How long have you—is Lady Vorpatril—?"

  "We only made it in about two hours ahead of you," Kou said breathlessly, reoxygenating after a heroic kiss. "Lady Vorpatril and the young lord are bedded down in the infirmary. The doctor says she's suffering mainly from stress and exhaustion. She was incredible. We had a couple of bad moments, getting past Vordarian's Security, but she never cracked. And you—you did it! I passed Vaagen in the corridor, with the replicator—you rescued m'lord's son!"

  Droushnakovi's shoulders sagged. "But we lost Princess Kareen."

  "Oh." He touched her lips. "Don't tell me—Lord Vorkosigan instructed me to bring you all to him the instant you arrived. Debrief to him before anyone. I'll take you to him now." He waved away the ImpSec men like flies, something Cordelia had been longing to do.

  Bothari had to help her rise. She gathered up the yellow plastic bag. She noted ironically that it bore the name and logo of one of the capital's most exclusive women's clothiers. Kareen encompasses you at last, you bastard.