Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  We reached the street that had brought us from the bay and turned up it. Giorgios pointed at the massive building just ahead to the right and said, “There’s the palace.”

  “Giorgios?” I said, because my mind was still back on something else. “Have there been escapes from the slave pen?”

  There were enough prisoners in the pit to form a pyramid from which half a dozen men could work on the grating. That was massive but it hadn’t looked particularly sturdy. I was pretty sure I could crack some of welds myself, given time—and the guards didn’t seem to pay much attention.

  The chamberlain laughed. “If there’s a lot of noise from the pen,” he said, “they toss a grenade at where the noise is loudest. The last time it happened, they used white phosphorus—an incendiary grenade.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was going to get out of this place one way or another.

  The front of the palace was three stories tall, and the arched gateway in front rose two of them. The gate leaves were split in half vertically though, and the guards pushed the right portion open as soon as they saw us approaching.

  We jolted through a tunnel and into a courtyard which was smaller than I’d expected. It was more like a light well; the hollow walls on both sides were twenty feet thick. The upper stories had windows and balconies. Poles protruded with clothes drying and hanging plant baskets. Children were playing noisily and women chatted as they watched.

  Directly in front of us was a blank curtain wall. Spikes glittered on top. It wasn’t an outside wall; there was clearly a higher wing beyond it. What I could see merely divided the courtyard into the larger portion that we’d driven into and a smaller section on the other side.

  Giorgios parked by an interior doorway. Three attendants wearing sandals and pantaloons wheeled the vehicle away, pushing it instead of driving. The chamberlain saw me studying the curtain wall and said, “Better keep away from that, Olfetrie. That’s the wives’ quarter. If you’re caught trying to look in, you’ll be gelded and become an attendant.”

  I turned my head. There were better and worse places to be a slave on Salaam.

  People stood on both sides of the passage we’d entered, talking and dozing as best I could tell. The passage was shaded and there was a slight breeze through it, so it was a reasonable place to be if you had nothing better to do. That seemed to be the case for plenty of people in the Admiral’s palace.

  We went up a set of wooden stairs in a stone well. Instead of curling like the companionways on a ship, these made right angles every six treads or so. The whole rig seemed flimsy, and it’d be a chimney packed with kindling if it ever caught fire.

  A couple people vanished onto upper stories when they saw the chamberlain coming, but there wasn’t a crowd on the stairs like I’d half expected after the entrance passage. Maybe more people than me thought the stairs were an accident waiting to happen.

  When we reached the third floor, Giorgios was puffing. He threw open the door and announced proudly, “The entire top floor of this wing is for me and my household! You’ll have a room in my private suite, where the computer is.”

  “At least the stairs’ll keep me in good condition,” I said. If the palace caught fire, I’d have to learn to fly very fast; but maybe that wouldn’t happen.

  We were in the left wing. A gallery ran the length of it on the outside. Most of the doorways opening off it were long, narrow rooms running toward another gallery at the courtyard end. Faces peered out of curtained alcoves, then ducked away.

  There were electrical lights of various sorts—mostly glowstrips, but fluorescent, incandescent, and diode fixtures as well. I didn’t see any two of the same sort.

  Also I didn’t see any open flames, which was a mercy. At this time of afternoon there was still a lot of daylight coming through the galleries, anyway.

  Giorgios’ suite turned out to be the last quarter of the corridor. He walked me past a pair of attendants—guards, I suppose, though I saw only one carbine—and into the far end where an astrogation console from a starship sat in an alcove.

  Giorgios pulled curtains to shield us and switched it on. “See?” he said when the stand-by display, an opalescent globe, appeared. “It doesn’t work.”

  I used the keyboard to get to the sidebar, where I switched the holographic display from astrogation to what I hoped was the local area. The unit was of Karst manufacture, but the hollow square looked like a good bet for my first try. A list of proper names came up with no other information.

  “How did you do that?” Giorgios shouted. “Is all the information still there?”

  I had no idea what “information” there might have been, so I called up one of the names—Petruschka. It expanded into a list of foodstuffs, as best I could tell. It was so long a list that it spread into a second screen when I expanded the typeface to a readable size.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” I said.

  “Oh, thank the Great God!” Giorgios said. “I’m saved! No wonder he was complaining that if the deliveries didn’t come in, we’d run out of food!”

  Giorgios disappeared into another alcove for a moment, then returned with a stylus and a notebook. “Here,” he said, thrusting them at me. “Write down all the orders and I’ll send out messengers at once. Oh, the Great God is good to me!”

  I got to work. Among other things, I was feeling hungry. I decided that would be my second item of business.

  Chapter Nineteen

  That was my introduction to my duties as the chamberlain’s assistant. I copied out the food orders and gave them to Giorgios. He would have gone off with them, leaving me on my own, if I hadn’t followed him out of the alcove and caught him by the flowing sleeve.

  “Sir!” I said. “I need somebody to guide me around. Where do I get food? For that matter, where’s the latrine?”

  Giorgios glared at me, but he couldn’t pull his tunic away without tearing the fabric. We had an audience, at least a dozen people, watching more or less openly. The chamberlain pointed at one of them, a boy of fifteen or so, and said, “Abram, this is Olfetrie. Do whatever he tells you.”

  Abram said, “Suits me,” without enthusiasm. He continued to squat on his heels as Giorgios swept into the gallery and out of sight.

  “I want some food,” I said to the boy. “While we’re eating, I’ll have some more questions for you.”

  “Would the food include wine for me?” Abram said, raising an eyebrow.

  “It could,” I agreed.

  He bounded upright as though he were a toy driven by a spring. His grin was not only alert but friendly. “Willing to take a bit of a walk?” Abram said.

  “Yes, if there’s a reason to,” I said, wondering what this was about.

  “I won’t say old Martial has better food than the refectory here in Giorgios’ suite,” the boy said, “but Martial’s wine is a lot better. He taps the Admiral’s own casks, right? Now, it’ll cost a bit.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll front you till you start making your own graft,” Abram said. “And you’re in a bloody good place to do that, it seems to me.”

  We went down a different set of stairs. If anything, they were flimsier than the ones Giorgios had led me up. At the bottom, we went left and through a door that led outdoors rather than into the courtyard. Thirty-odd people, men and women both, stood near a kiosk built against the outside wall. We were on the north side of the palace, so there was a strip of shade even now in early afternoon.

  Abram squeezed up to the counter. There were two servers—both middle-aged women—but Abram shouted, “Hey, Martial! I want you to meet a friend of mine. Olfetrie runs the chamberlain’s computer!”

  The cook turned around. “No fooling?” he said. He was a fat man of fifty, bald on top but sporting a magnificent moustache and sideburns. His terry cloth singlet was soaked with sweat but without any other stains that I could see. “Hey, Ayesha? I’m going to take a break. Come on back, Abram.
”

  One of the servers took over at the grill. Abram led me under the end of the counter—we ducked; it didn’t have a gate to lift—and into a door in the palace wall. It seemed to have been enlarged from a ventilator. The interior was a large storeroom.

  Martial twisted two bare wires together; fluorescents flickered on. He gestured to the low stools along the interior wall. “Will you have wine?”

  “Do fish piss in the sea?” Abram said. “I’m paying for my friend Olfetrie until he gets something going.”

  I took the glass of red wine and tasted it with my tongue. It was good, good enough that my mother would have approved. Well, she would have approved if anybody but Dad had offered it; nothing Dad did was good enough. Or anything I did, come to think.

  “So …” Martial said, settling onto another stool. “Do you think you’ll be able to earn some money, Olfetrie?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And if we’re going to be friends, I go by Roy. As for the details, I won’t know exactly how until I learn the system here, but”—I shrugged and turned my free hand up—“I can think of half a dozen ways off the top of my head. It shouldn’t be hard.”

  I’d told Captain Leary that I wasn’t a crook like my dad, and I wasn’t. That didn’t mean I didn’t know how a system could be fiddled. There was nothing about Giorgios or his master the Admiral that made me imagine that I owed them loyal service.

  “I can find anything you want, Roy,” Abram said. “Say, are you looking for girl?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. I didn’t say that I’d rather meet somebody on my own. “I told you, I need to learn the system.”

  “That’s smart,” said Martial. “Jumping in too quick, you’re likely to get trapped.” He snorted. “Or clapped.”

  “Hey, Martial,” Abram said. “You know I wouldn’t let him get burned!”

  To me, in a wheedling tone, he said, “Boys, maybe?”

  “No,” I said. “Abram, if I need something, I’ll let you know.”

  Someone knocked on the outside door. Abram hopped up and opened it, then returned to us carrying a tray of hot pasties. He held out the tray to me, but he’d taken one himself with his free hand.

  “Which division do you eat in, Roy?” Martial said. “The chamberlain’s, I suppose?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “Giorgios didn’t say, but he said I’m his slave.”

  Martial’s mouth worked as though he were going to spit in disgust, but what came out was only the words, “Gardane’s the cheapest bastard in the palace. I’d as soon drink lamp oil as the wine he serves.”

  I took a careful nibble off the end of a pasty. It was a green vegetable, probably spinach, and very good. It was hot enough that I was glad not to have taken a larger bite, but it made me realize how hungry I was.

  “Can I transfer from his division to yours, Martial?” I asked around another mouthful. “I’m not really enrolled yet, after all.”

  “Naw, the bastard won’t let you go,” the cook said glumly. “The losing division has to agree, and Gardane won’t. He screws half the per-person allowance in straight profit, and he won’t let a soul off his books.”

  “Oh,” I said. “If it’s just a matter of getting Master Gardane’s agreement, then I can talk to him. I think he’ll be reasonable if I ask him the right way.”

  “Dream on, buddy,” Martial said. “Here, though, another glassful on me.”

  “I’ll take the wine,” I said. “But Abram, you and I need to get going soon. I have a lot of work to do. A lot of work.”

  I’d decided that my first priority was to prepare for my interview with Gardane. I already had some ideas about that.

  * * *

  I wasn’t a computer expert, but the palace’s systems were so unsophisticated that I was sure within a few hours that my only problems were going to be with preexisting input errors. Nothing was encrypted, but a number of the files were corrupt beyond my ability to clarify.

  There were areas which had been mechanically blocked. They would require chipped inserts, in the unit’s present configuration. I figured I had an answer to that, but it could wait until I had the leisure.

  I found the refectory accounts easily, but it took me and Abram two hours to compile the list I wanted. The boy knew more than half the names, but the rest took research. I found a few by searching the computer, but mostly “research” meant Abram running off and talking to friends. He knew a lot of people in the palace, which didn’t surprise me; and at least at the bottom end, people seemed to like him—which didn’t surprise me either.

  When I decided I was ready, I had a much longer list than I’d expected at the start. “Now …” I said to Abram. “Lead me to Gardane. Then go do something else. This will work best if it’s just me and the cook in private. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

  The chamberlain’s refectory was five bays in the south wing of the third floor, just around the corner from Giorgios’ staff quarters. The first two bays off the gallery were given over to tables; a third was the kitchen itself. The remaining two were housing and offices.

  Abram brought me to the last of these and said to the guard, “This is the chamberlain’s personal assistant. He needs to talk to Gardane.”

  “It isn’t time yet for Gardane to see people,” the guard said stolidly.

  “Giorgios told me that Olfetrie goes everywhere!” Abram said, which wasn’t quite true. “Do you want to spend the short rest of your life on a stake because you didn’t obey the chamberlain? This is important!”

  I kept my mouth shut and looked stern. Maybe I could get a uniform. I was wearing spacers’ slops, comfortable but not very imposing. The palace seemed to be big on appearances.

  Well, bigger on appearances than society generally. And as I thought about it some more, maybe not that much bigger.

  “Look,” said the guard, “don’t try to put me in the middle of this. It’s between the chamberlain and my boss. Nothing to do with me at all!”

  He stepped out of the way and I walked in, through strings of metal beads hanging down like a curtain. Three women were in the anteroom, whispering together in a corner. They sprang apart, one of them with an audible, “Eep!”

  I pointed to that one. “I need to speak with Master Gardane, now,” I said. “In private. You go fetch him, all right? In one minute I’ll come back and find him if he hasn’t made it out here before then.”

  The woman scampered off. All three were dressed as maids: young enough to be more than that, but too plain for that to seem probable.

  The two who remained clutched one another’s hands and stared at me with a frightened expression. I smiled at them with what I hoped was a friendly face and said, “I’m new here, but your master and I are going to be great friends shortly. I’ve just come by to get acquainted.”

  They continued to stare like bunnies in the headlights. At least they weren’t screaming.

  It had been long enough that I was just about to go deeper into the bay, when a man in his forties came out of the back, still tying a blue gauze sash around his waist. He glared at me and said, “If Giorgios thinks he’s got to see me, he can make an appointment!”

  Which meant that the girl I’d sent as a messenger had reported the exchange between Abram and the guard as well as what I’d said. That was a degree of initiative that I hadn’t expected.

  “I don’t think either one of us want to see Giorgios,” I said. “And certainly not the Admiral. Is there some place we can talk in private?”

  The girl who’d eeped was peering out through the bead screen to the back of the suite. I already knew that she was smart enough to be dangerous.

  Gardane hesitated a moment. Then he said, “Come on. We’ll go up to the roof.”

  We went deeper into the bay, then up a circular metal staircase set into an alcove. I suspected the stairs had been salvaged from a starship’s companionway. The trap door at the top was open, but Gardane clanged it closed when we stepped out onto a roof of tiles set in ce
ment. Trees with short fuzzy trunks and broad foliage sat in pots in a rough circle around the trap so that shade fell on the wicker couches and table regardless of the time of day or year.

  “Go away,” Gardane said to the pair of attendants who’d been lounging in the shade. He made shooing notions with his hands. They obediently sauntered toward the nearest of the five other potted oases visible.

  The fourth wing of the palace was a story higher than the front and sides, and it had a real wall around it instead of just curbing. I remembered Giorgios’ warning about the wives’ section and quickly looked at a tree.

  “Say what you want to say,” Gardane snapped.

  I handed over my list, three sheets which I had been carrying rolled in my left hand. “Before we talk,” I said, “I’d like you to read this.”

  The cook scanned the first sheet, turned to the second, and finally the third. He looked at me. He must go to some effort to keep himself in shape, but he liked food too well to be completely successful at that.

  “It’s a list of names,” he said, working to stay calm. “What do they mean to you?”

  Keeping my voice emotionless so that the words wouldn’t sound like a threat, I said, “It’s a list of people who are assigned to the chamberlain’s refectory but who are also drawing rations from other divisions. And of people who are not members of the palace complement at all, but who are assigned to the chamberlain’s refectory. And of people who aren’t people; non-existent people who are assigned to the chamberlain’s refectory.”

  “I see,” Gardane said. His eyes flicked in the direction of the guards whom he’d sent away. “What do you propose to do with this list?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said. “I came to see you because I’ve been told that you have the authority to transfer my meal allowance to another palace division. In this case, I’d like you to transfer me and the boy Abram, and also the last four names on the list”—people who didn’t exist for any purpose except to draw rations—“to the division of Chef Martial. I believe his division generally handles gardeners and other outside workers; day laborers, many of them.”