Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  There were arguments to be made on both sides of that issue — the enjoyment of luxuries issue, not the pre-packs one. She’d argued it with Karol often enough, but on the Padrake side of the question. She wasn’t going to indulge that line of thought. “Tell me about the isolation. Who’s come? You’re speaking for Brisinje, I know that, but who’s at Supicor these days?”

  A man with a persuasive rant, and a terrible gossip. It was one of the most enjoyable things about him, he always knew things, and he would tell you what was being said about you behind your back as well; so it wasn’t as though he was deceitful in any sense. Not really. And a wonderful lover, but that was history.

  “Nion is here for the Seventh Judge at Supicor. New kid. I don’t know too much about her, except that she came out of Core. Tough. She’ll be good if she lives long enough. The really interesting thing, though, is the Bench specialist out of the Sixth Judiciary. Guess.”

  The Sixth Judge sat at Sant-Dasidar, and that Judiciary included all of the Dolgorukij Combine. “Don’t tell me. Not Sarvaw.”

  “Better than Sarvaw. Female. A female Bench specialist from the Dolgorukij Combine, she’s Kizakh, I believe. There are rumors about her, Jils, indicating that the string she wears her chop on isn’t just any old bit of red cord. If you get my meaning.”

  Malcontent. That was what Padrake was implying; that the Bench specialist at Sant-Dasidar was a Malcontent, and wore the Saint’s halter, the symbol of her slavery.

  Stubbing her rolled-up slice of meat in the relish-dish in much the same way as she had seen people stub out the lefrols they’d been smoking, Jils considered the implications.

  “Well. It’d make sense, I suppose, but I didn’t think the Bench ever commissioned talent out of system government.” That wasn’t exactly true, but close enough. “I guess it would fit, in a perverse way. It’d take a really unusual personality to make a Bench specialist out of a female Dolgorukij, what with the cultural biases. So she might as well be Malcontent. She’s not likely to have had any chance of fitting in on her own. Who is this woman?”

  “Name of Rafenkel. Blonde hair, brown eyes, soft voice, impressive vocabulary. Oh. Capercoy’s here for Cintaro.”

  She hadn’t seen Capercoy for years, either. Under the influence of her hot bath and the delicacies on the table Jils decided to risk a blunt question. “Any of them likely to be carrying a Bench warrant with my name on it?”

  No, she hadn’t surprised him. She would have been surprised if she had. He just took a moment to think, pouring her a glass from one of the flagons. Thick peary juice, by the perfume of it. Peary juice with a slice of citrus to keep the sweet sharp and focused on the edge of the senses.

  “I don’t think so, Jils. Despite what any given Judge might think, people who actually know are not going to take the idea that you killed him and then tried to discover the body seriously. Too many problems. And there’s the other thing.”

  What other thing was that? It certainly was good juice. She held out her flask for a refill, listening.

  “You’re here from Chilleau, to observe and then defend. We need to get this done. We all know that. You’re as safe as any of us until the Selection is decided, Jils, you can have my life on it.”

  Oddly enough that was comforting. It wasn’t the same as claiming that nobody with the lawful authority to murder her for cause believed that cause existed. Pointing out that it would not be expedient to murder her until an answer had been agreed to in the matter of the Selection was much more limited an assurance, but much more solid regardless.

  “Well, it’s my life, not yours.” But she appreciated his candor. “I’ll have that tray of the semi-soft, please.”

  She couldn’t quite eat, drink, and be merry. She’d always preferred moderation in most things anyway. But she’d been warned: pre-packs for the next while; and, whether or not she was comfortable with what seemed to be an assumption of earned privilege, there was no sense in letting this feast go to waste.

  ###

  The light-access ports in the cave-roof high above shone against the darkness like stars from the surface of a low-atmosphere moon, brilliant, steady, dangerous to gaze upon too directly for too long. Even though the ventilation-shafts were sunk through level upon level of igneous rock to provide air to the cavern complex, the solar reflectors and refractors that carried what there was here of ambient light down through the earth were efficient enough to transmit intensities of light that were not safe to be long gazed upon with an unshielded eye.

  Erenja Rafenkel sighed, and dropped her head to focus once more on her target. She liked deep places as well as she liked high places, which was not particularly. Yes, she was actually Kizakh Dolgorukij by birth, but her people had been city people. Tradesmen and mercantile women. Skilled piecework in fabric, wood, and ceramics, born and bred to an urban environment for generations and as attached to the famous high aeries of the Chetalra Mountains of Azanry as she was to any other abstract and otherwise meaningless concept.

  Rivers she understood; rivers had featured in some of the happiest memories of her childhood — walking in a public park on her saint’s-day, hand in hand with her mother or her father or an aunt or uncle down a gentle path along the riverside. Feeding the ducks on bread-crusts.

  There was a perfectly beautiful river in Brisinje, but it might as well have been in Tuberchiss for all the pleasure she could take in it. It was well north of the ancient and blind shore on which she stood. Some octave it would wear its way finally down past its bed into this cavern, perhaps, and then there would be a cataract of spectacular beauty to enjoy but nobody to enjoy it with the cavern flooded out.

  She was being watched. The skin at the place where the fur over her shoulder would lie if she was dire-wolf instead of Dolgorukij was prickling as though it remembered what it had been like to raise its hackles. She welcomed the knowledge; there was always the danger, in throwing a knife, that concentration would blinker the senses and shut away peripheral information that could be crucial. It made her aim much less reliable. But keeping her senses open to all the input around her would keep her alive, in the long term, much longer than simply superlative aim with a throwing-knife.

  The range was a stretch of the midnight beach that ran between the cavern walls and the black lake, almost unimaginably old, lit with all-spectrums to supplement the channeled light of Brisinje’s sun and moons. There was no sense in speaking to Bench specialists about “alien environments;” few environments were totally alien to a Bench specialist with anything more than a handful of missions in memory, and yet this one was as fantastic as any Rafenkel had seen yet.

  This facility had been a research station, a place to study rock formations and analyze the chemical composition of the cold but living water and catalog the life that had adapted to this bleak and nearly eventless ecological niche. Once its presence had contaminated the environment past hope of remediation, the station had been abandoned; functionally forgotten, it made a good site for a convocation the likes of which the Bench had never seen — a gathering of Bench specialists to decide the fate of the Jurisdiction.

  Steadying her arm, she took aim. The air was pleasantly cool, and the flavor of the moisture in the air was sharp and clean like that of an autumn wind. Whoever was watching had stilled their breath, but was shifting position so that fabric caught against fabric; the vestigial scales of one of the black lake’s blind eel-like fish caught the sun and reflected it, a gleaming silver serpent in the obsidian waters. She threw. The knife flew clean and true to target and sang as it struck home.

  She straightened up. “Capercoy,” she said. “Maybe Balkney. But I’d be surprised if you were Rinpen. What’s on your mind?”

  “Time,” her watcher replied, and stepped away from the shadows at the rock-wall to show himself. Balkney. The Hangman. A Bench executioner, and welcome to the job; but he was no more personally unpleasant about it than the next man, so long as the next man was understood to be a Bench specialist
. There were much worse ways to die than by Balkney’s agency, and she had implemented some of them from time to time herself. Time. That was what Balkney had just said. There was more to it than that, though, she was sure. She moved downrange to her targets to retrieve her knives without reply, to leave him plenty of space in which to speak.

  “Specifically, the time that has elapsed between the death of the First Secretary at Chilleau and now. What can we do to speed the resolution of the issue?”

  He’d tell her. This wasn’t any sort of a casual conversation. Examining one blade, holding it up to the sun-stars in the sky — there was a minute nick in the edge, wasn’t there? — Rafenkel wondered what was on Balkney’s mind. “Go on.”

  Now he was beside her, and reached out for the knife she had been frowning at. Holding it up to the light himself. “Yes. It’s sharp. It’s a knife.” He could be very unpleasant when he meant to be; now he was just being moody. He handed the knife back to her. “We have two problems with our instructions as they stand, as I see it. One, that it calls for revisitation of issues that do not need to be discussed. Haspirzak is willing to freely admit that it should not be the next First Judge. It therefore makes no sense to take the time to challenge Haspirzak against all comers.”

  He could say that. He was here for Haspirzak, to represent the Third Judge’s interest and put forth the Third Judge’s platform. He was right, too: Haspirzak was not in serious contention for the Selection; was it really necessary to go through a formal disqualification of a Judiciary that had never entered itself into competition in the first place?

  “We’ve never done this before,” she reminded him. “It’s best to be careful, accordingly. History will judge. It’s up to us to ensure that we find the best solution to a situation that is already deeply to be regretted without creating any unnecessary turmoil to sap our resources and trouble our citizenry.”

  “Which is exactly why I think we should reconsider,” he said, agreeably enough, taking her arm to walk her to a stone bench beside the door of the air-lock that would lead them back into the research station, embedded in the living rock. He was not a tall man, and she was tall for a Dolgorukij; but “tall for a Dolgorukij female” meant about the same thing as “medium height, Standard,” when applied to city people, and so he had to lower his head to maintain eye contact.

  “I’m not in the least interested in proving to history that Haspirzak was really and truly not an option. I do want to be sure that some alternatives are at least addressed. It’s not just Chilleau, one question. It’s at least three.”

  And he had a point, there.

  She could hear the soft plashing of oars; someone was out there in the darkness beyond the full-spectrums, lit only by the piped light from the surface. Zeman would be having a scull. There were no breezes here to disturb the surface of the water; she had seen Zeman now, and that scull seemed to glide upon glass.

  “Chilleau at Chilleau now, Chilleau at Fontailloe, Chilleau at Chilleau later.” Yes, she had heard the issues identified. “And, of course, Fontailloe at Fontailloe. Or nothing.”

  Balkney snorted. The sound carried over the still water to echo vaguely in the dark. The acoustics of this place were strange. Zeman would be able to hear the entire conversation; that was one of the reasons it was safe to be having it - a third party could witness to the exact nature of the conversation, and testify as to whether there was evidence of collusion or undue influence.

  “The confederacy model. Yes. If you ask me that shouldn’t be so much as discussed. But it’s as you said. The verdict of history.”

  “So what do the others think?” Rafenkel asked casually, fitting her knife into its soft wrap alongside its fellows. They were beautiful knives. She was fond of them. Far from Emandisan steel, of course, but there was very little that could really compare.

  “Tanifer spoke to me about it.” The question clearly did not embarrass Balkney in the slightest. “Said that he’d discussed it with Nion and Rinpen. I talked to Capercoy. No one’s spoken to Delleroy or Ivers, of course.”

  Because they weren’t here. Well. It was hardly a conspiracy, then, if everybody was in on it. “Zeman?”

  “I thought I’d stick around and wait for him. I like the idea of cutting out some iterations to save time, Rafe. I don’t like the thought of not working out every real alternative, and that means time, and I can only stand the idea of taking more time if I can make it up somewhere.”

  If things went on much longer, Fleet would have to cede much more responsibility to the home defense fleets for police duty than Fleet wanted to, because Fleet simply didn’t have the resources to do all that needed to be done by way of patrol and containment, and even if Fleet managed to wrest the additional taxation privileges that it sought from the Bench it wouldn’t solve the problem. Money couldn’t create a disciplined recruit class overnight.

  But Fleet was holding out against ceding any of its authority to the home defense fleets for reasons that Rafenkel knew to be excellent. Once give people the idea that they could patrol their own spheres of influence and keep their own peace, and they would be very reluctant to give that power up, and even more reluctant to continue to remit tax money to fund an external Fleet to do a job that they could do themselves.

  There was the other consideration, of course, as well; the Combine had never quite adjusted to Bench-dictated equal rights for Sarvaw, and what was to stop the Combine’s home defense fleet from finishing the job that Chuvishka Kospodar had so notoriously started, generations ago? The Bench meant one law for all people, at least where trade was concerned. Home defense fleets had their own stores to house. What was the phrase? Their own oxen to gore?

  “No harm in at least speaking to Tirom about it.” Brisinje’s First Secretary was their official point of contact with the Bench for the purposes of this exercise; he would be coming down with Delleroy and Ivers, when she got here, and they could be started.

  They could have been started already, but Ivers was for the Second Judge, who had been cruelly robbed of the Selection and there was nothing anybody could do about it. There was no honorable way in which they could decide issues between themselves without the wronged judge’s representative on hand to follow the events and agreements, and speak for Chilleau’s interest. “We could meet after third-meal. Clarify parameters. Be ready to go.”

  Balkney was gazing out over the black lake, now, at the bioluminescence in the water stirred and roiled by the oars of Zeman’s scull. “Do you think she did it?”

  Knives stowed, Rafenkel rolled the bundle and tied it closed with one hand. Practice. “Ivers?” Well, yes, obviously Ivers. “Could have. We all know that Verlaine’s agenda would have been difficult to implement, especially where Fleet’s concerned. But unless she had reason to believe that the penance was genuinely worse than the peccadillo, assassination seems too extreme. Fleet wouldn’t have allowed any drastic measures. He’d have had to take it slowly.”

  “Interesting analysis,” Balkney said, waving for Zeman to come to shore. People like Balkney were employed against sensitive targets — and dangerous ones. Like other Bench specialists. Like senior administrative officials? “Thank you. See you in common after third-meal, Rafe.”

  There hadn’t been a Bench warrant on the First Secretary. How could there have been? And yet Chilleau’s security system had been gotten past. That took a very sophisticated understanding of Security codes. Whether or not Jils Ivers had that level of in-depth knowledge Rafenkel didn’t know, but she would have been surprised if Balkney didn’t have what it would take. Balkney and Tanifer, to name the two most obvious.

  Preconceptions and assumptions were the enemy; they would put out your eyes and blind you to the army that stood gathering in the young wheat until it was too late and the raiders were upon you. Rafenkel put hers away in the locked place in her mind that she kept for such enemies of analysis and went to wash and change before she took third-meal.

  ###

  “Rea
lly?” Rukota said, impressed, and set a “yaohat” token down in Sperantz. The card-array was almost complete. Had Vogel noticed that with the placement of yaohat in the Sperantz slot, the way was clear for Rukota to put Caliform in Jabe, and take the hand with “forests”? “That was you, at Ankhor? I’m impressed.”

  He meant it, too. The Ankhor campaigns had been among the ugliest and unhappiest with which he had ever been associated. He’d been a much more junior officer then, of course.

  Vogel nodded. He was a man of more or less usual height, with a grizzled iron-gray moustache and a battered campaign hat pushed well back on his head, whose relatively broad high forehead coupled with the deep set of his pale blue eyes pointed at a lineage somewhere down along the Glenglies group, class six hominid.

  “Fleet had ten cruisers in reserve,” Vogel said. “Port Carue had stealth atomics. We’d never have been able to stop it if both sides hadn’t been equally convinced that the balance of power was in their hands.”

  “How d’you mean?” This was intriguing. Yes, he knew what Fleet had been holding; standing off on vector transit, due to arrive within hours if the cease-fire hadn’t been declared. He hadn’t heard about any stealth atomics, but come to think of it Fleet’s cruiser array had never made it in to the official narratives either that he had ever noticed.

  “Game theory.” Vogel plucked a card out of his hand and put it down in Magenir.

  Wait a minute, Rukota thought, alarmed. There were three, five, seven tokens containing water all around Magenir. If Vogel played anything with an earthquake in it he could sweep the board on a lahar.