It’s part of the incognito, he reminded himself. She’s taking it a lot more seriously this time.
He found his voice. “You’re going to make contact in Flatlands with your old school chum?”
“That’s right,” she said. “All I need to do is find a public comm-link kiosk. Garen can arrange everything once I get in touch.”
“Garen?”
“Garen Tarveet. He left school a half-year before I did.”
“Tarveet … if the newsreaders don’t lie, your pal’s family owns half of Pleyver. Maybe more than half, by now.”
“I suppose so,” she said. “That’s not what I need to talk to him about, though.”
Jos hazarded a guess. “Politics?”
“And long-range plans. He used to have some good ideas; now it’s time to see if he believes in them.”
Plans, Jos told himself. Remember what Errec said, hotshot—this one has plans.
Maybe so. That doesn’t mean she ought to be out on her own in Flatlands without somebody to look out for her.
“If you’re going to wait around the transport hub for a pickup,” he said, “you’ll need to have somebody with you.”
He half expected her to protest. She didn’t, though; just looked at him through the concealing swathe of gauzy scarf. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. You may come with me.”
“‘May’?” He felt his skin redden. “What do you mean, ‘may’?”
“If you like.” Her smile under the veil had a mischievous quality. “Wear plain clothing and don’t talk to anyone. They’ll think you’re my bodyguard.”
Jos considered several different replies and gave up on all of them. “Right,” he said finally, and ducked into his cabin to change into one of his talking-to-bankers outfits. He’d had the jackets on those cut to hide a small blaster up the sleeve or in a shoulder holster—tailors in Waycross were used to requests like that—but this time he decided to be obviously armed instead, going with his familiar Mark VI heavy, belted low and tied to his thigh.
“Excellent,” was all the Domina said when he returned. “Shall we go now, or wait for the others?”
“No point in hanging around,” he said. “Let’s go.”
There was a comm-link kiosk at the edge of the landing zone. The slot called for three Galcenian decimal-credits, or two Pleyveran tiles, or one Mandeynan tenthmark. Jos wasn’t surprised to find out that the Domina didn’t have any one of those. A quick search through his own pockets produced a handful of Innish-Kyllan cash-tacs and a crumpled Galcenian twenty-credit chit.
“We need to find a money changer,” Jos said. “Usually I keep enough local currency on hand to get off-port wherever the ’Hammer’s docked, but Pleyver’s not one of my normal stops.”
The exchange. booth turned out to be some distance away. Perada didn’t complain, in spite of the hot sun. What Jos could see of her face behind the concealing veil looked thoughtful. She didn’t comment on anything until the Pleyveran Guaranty Trust logo on top of the currency-exchange booth came into view.
Then she said, “People shouldn’t have to go through this every time they come into port.”
“Changing money isn’t that big a problem,” he said. “You learn to deal with it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But everything’s like that. All the worlds have their own coins and their own languages and their own fleets. Any time two systems want to work together on something—like fighting off the raiders, for example—the project dies because they can’t agree on whose things to use.”
“Lords of Life,” he said, half amused and half disbelieving. “The Domina of Entibor is a Centrist.”
“I am not!” she said. “But something needs to be done before the civilized galaxy gets carried off to the Mageworlds piece by piece.”
Jos couldn’t deny the truth of her last statement, especially since he’d caught himself thinking the same thing more than once over the past few years. His home world of Gyffer had a strong fleet, built up and kept ready to protect the planet’s orbiting shipyards and the factories below; but was that fleet strong enough to hold off the raiders if they attacked full-force?
Once he’d changed the twenty-chit, things got easier. The Guaranty Trust booth had a public comm-link, so they didn’t have to hike back before Perada could make her call. She had the call-code memorized, too, which made him wonder exactly how well she’d known this Garen Tarveet before he left school.
She kept the hush screen turned on, so he couldn’t hear what she said over the link, but when the screen went off she came out smiling. “It’s all arranged,” she said. “A driver from the estate will meet us here in half an hour.”
“Local or Standard?”
She frowned slightly. “He didn’t say … I suppose we’ll find out when the driver gets here.”
“Unless your friend’s a spacer,” Jos said, “I’ll bet he meant local.”
Free-spacers all over the civilized galaxy used Galcenian time for the same reason they used the language of the Mother of Worlds: there’d be no doing business otherwise. He was no Centrist himself—not many Gyfferans were—but he could see why some people found the concept attractive.
The hovercar showed up in a little under half an hour by the local-time clock on the wall of the currency exchange. A liveried driver got out and gave the Domina a respectful bow.
“Gentlelady Wherret?” he said.
“Yes,” said Perada.
“The young gentlesir regrets that he could not meet you himself. He awaits you at the estate.”
“Very well.”
The driver opened the door of the hovercar and looked at Jos expectantly. So, after a moment, did Perada.
Right. You’re the bodyguard; you’re supposed to check things out for her first.
Feeling a trifle absurd, he stepped up to the open door and peered inside. As far as he could tell, he was looking at an ordinary unthreatening hovercar—except for the luxury, which was enough to make a poor boy from the Gyfferan dockyards nervous all by itself. He stepped back and nodded to Perada. She gave him a polite but distant smile in return and got into the plushly upholstered passenger compartment. He decided that bodyguards were supposed to stick close to the body they were guarding, and followed.
That was apparently the right move; the driver swung the door shut without comment, and Perada was smiling. There was armor-glass an inch thick between the passenger compartment and the driver’s seat, but Jos didn’t trust it for an instant.
“Gentlelady Wherret,” he said. He let a faint hint of disbelief tinge his voice, but nothing more.
Her blue eyes danced with mischief behind the veil. “Yes.”
He wanted to say How did you come up with that for an incognito?, but he didn’t dare.
“Be careful,” he said instead.
They both fell silent. The ride from the aptly named Flatlands Portcity to the Tarveet estate took over an hour, leaving the open plain and following a broad river westward into rolling hill country. Jos decided that the driver must have been ordered to take the scenic route. Either that, or they were in trouble—I’ll give him another fifteen minutes to get us anyplace, and then we’re getting out of here if I have to shoot the door open.
Such drastic measures turned out to be unnecessary. Five minutes later, local time, the hovercar passed through a pair of elaborate wrought-metal gates and started down a long driveway lined with tall, fan-shaped flowering trees. A large manor house of pale grey stone stood at the end of the drive.
The hovercar settled onto the combed sand with the faintest of crunching noises—the sound of fine particles compacting under the car’s weight—and the driver got out and swung open the passenger door. Cool air scented with flowers rolled in from outside. Night had fallen while they were making their way from the port, and the sky burned with the colored streamers of an auroral display.
Perada looked at Jos. He took the hint—Time for
the bodyguard to go first and draw enemy fire if there is any—and got out of the hovercar. Perada followed, emerging onto the driveway in time for a lanky youth in dark blue velvet to come running down the broad steps of the manor house and throw his arms around her.
“’Rada!” he exclaimed. “I never expected—how wonderful to see you again!”
The Domina had pulled off her veil and was hugging him back. “You haven’t changed a bit, Garen. I’m glad to see you, too. I need your help.”
The young man let her go and stepped away—not very far away, though, and he was looking only at her. Jos and the driver might as well have been part of the landscape.
Skinny twerp, Jos thought. Whatever she wants him for, it can’t be his looks.
Garen Tarveet was only about a year older than Perada, if that; his thin frame had some of the lingering gawkiness of late adolescence. His limp brown hair fell down across his brow and got in the way of his eyes—which were themselves a watery and unattractive grey. He wet his lips in a nervous gesture.
“I’ll help you however I can, ’Rada—you know that—but I have to know what’s going on first.”
“Veratina’s dead.”
Tarveet made a startled noise. “But she wasn’t even eighty yet—what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Perada said. “‘Natural causes,’ according to the armsmaster, but that could mean almost anything. I’ll find out more when I get to Entibor.” She fixed Tarveet with a challenging glance—the same all-or-nothing look she’d worn back at the Double Moon—and said, “What’s important now is that I’m the Domina. And everything we used to talk about on Galcen is possible.”
Thinking about it afterward, Jos decided that he had to give Garen Tarveet points for guts. It was one thing to have big ideas and spread them out on the table to impress a pretty girl, but something else altogether when the pretty girl showed up later and expected you to follow through.
Tarveet blinked and swallowed hard. “There’s a lot of people we’ll have to talk to first. But I think we can do it.” Perada smiled. The effect was dazzling. “I knew I could depend on you, Garen. But it was a long drive from the spaceport; is there some place I can go to freshen up before we start working?”
“Of course,” Tarveet said. The two of them headed up the steps of the manor house, arm in arm.
Feeling out of place, Jos followed.
In the far western highlands of Galcen’s northern continent, a winter storm howled across the black walls and looming towers of the Adepts’ Retreat. Snow and ice covered the narrow road that led up from the village of Treslin in the valley below; snow and ice blanketed the pocket-sized landing field that linked the Retreat to the outer world by air. Nobody was going to enter the Retreat, or leave it, until the weather broke.
Within the stone walls of the fortress, however, Galcen’s Adepts contrived to keep themselves warm. Force fields shimmered across windows that had once been nothing but open slits hewn through massive blocks of stone; heat-bars glowed on every hearth. In the windowless inner rooms that housed the record-keepers for the Guild, where the winter cold should have penetrated to the bone, heavy-duty climate-control systems kept the area warm—not for the comfort of the Adepts who worked there, but for the sake of the equipment that they tended.
Two of the Retreat’s senior Adepts stood by the main comp console, leaning on their staffs and watching the apprentice who had drawn today’s round of data work. The apprentice was accustomed to working unsupervised—she was qualified to handle the comps, and the task at hand was not an urgent one—and the set of her shoulders as she went from comp screen to keyboard and back again betrayed both annoyance and unease.
A name came up on the main screen. RANSOME, E.; ILARNA.
Another dead one, she thought. Most of the Ilarnans were, or as close to it as made no difference. But she was too conscientious to mark the owner of any name as dead without a proper check, especially with Master Otenu and Master Faen breathing down the back of her neck. She touched the key to begin the search.
Behind her, she heard Otenu murmur, “Ransome. He studied here for a while, did you know?”
“Yes,” said Faen. A pause. “But he was on Ilarna.”
“Are you sure? I always wondered—the dates were so close—”
Too close, thought the apprentice. The first information had already come up on the secondary screen: records of the Red Shift Line, showing that the spaceliner Fleeting Fancy, on a regular run from Galcen to Ilarna, had carried one Errec Ransome as a passenger—putting him on-planet a full day and half a night before the attack.
She felt Master Faen leaning to peer at the screen over her shoulder.
“You see,” Faen said to Otenu. “He was there.”
“At the spaceport,” Otenu said. “The Ilarnan Guildhouse was in broad countryside—farming country. I remember him saying so once. He missed it, I think, while he was away.”
The apprentice felt sorry for Master Otenu; it sounded like Ransome had been a friend of his. But another scrap of data was scrolling up onto the secondary screen: the deposition of an Ilarnan refugee and former spaceport worker, who remembered renting a long-range aircar to an Adept fresh home from Galcen, said aircar to be returned at the rental franchise in the town of Amalind Under.
“That’s it,” said Faen. “Unless something happened to that aircar between the spaceport and Amalind Under, he was at the Guildhouse when it fell. And there were no survivors.”
“His body was never found.”
“Neither were half a hundred others,” Faen said. “Remember—everything that the raiders couldn’t take away, they burned.”
Master Otenu moved restlessly. His shifting about made the apprentice nervous, and she wished that he would stop. She had the feeling that the senior Master was the reason both Adepts were here and bothering her at her work—Otenu was looking for something, and she didn’t know what.
Maybe Otenu doesn’t either.
“Ransome makes me too uncomfortable for someone who’s supposed to be dead,” Otenu said finally. “I dreamed about him last night.”
She heard Master Faen draw a sharp breath. “I see.”
“He came to me in my dream and tried to warn me of something,” Otenu said, “but the thing itself I couldn’t hear.”
“How do you know it was a warning, then?”
“It felt like one.” Otenu paused. “And you will admit, I think, that if anyone had the strength and the talents to escape the killing on Ilarna, it was Ransome.”
“I defer to your judgment on that,” Faen said. “You worked with him and I didn’t.” Another pause. “What was he like?”
“Very strong,” said Otenu. “And not always subtle—he came to his talent late, after working for several years as a common merchant-spacer out of his home world. As for his particular gifts—you know as well as I do what Ilarna sent him here to learn.”
No, thought the apprentice. What? But neither Adept seemed willing to pursue that part of the discussion further, and her curiosity had to remain unsatisfied.
“If Ransome is alive,” Faen was saying, “then where is he? None of the Guildhouses have reported seeing him, and no Guildmembers. If he were alive and free, he would have contacted the nearest Guildhouse. He has not done so—therefore, either he is not alive, or he is not free. And in either case,” Faen concluded, “he is lost to us.”
“You forget one other possibility,” said Otenu. “It could be that Ransome is alive, and does not want to be found. And in that case—”
“I agree,” said Faen. “In that case—unlikely as it may be—in that case, it is imperative that we bring him back.”
The apprentice stifled a sigh. The name RANSOME, E., still glowed on the console’s main screen. She hesitated a little longer, then keyed in the necessary commands.
RANSOME, E; ILARNA.
STATUS: MISSING.
SEARCH: ACTIVE.
The interior of the Tarveets’ manor house w
as as luxurious as the hovercar had been, and even more elaborate. Jos decided after a few minutes’ reflection that the Double Moon back in Waycross wanted to be someplace like this when it grew up. Garen Tarveet, in his dark blue velvet, looked right at home. Perada, however, looked somewhat out of place. Jos couldn’t tell if it was her clothes—she was wearing the pick of the ’Hammer’s slop chest, along with Nannla’s hat and Tillijen’s spare blaster—or that he’d gotten used to seeing her in plainer settings than this.
The second possibility made him uneasy. In the privateering life you took the good times as they came, and you certainly didn’t turn down a sporting invitation from a girl whose personal wealth was enough to buy an entire planet on the open market. But you didn’t dare let yourself get used to having someone around—do that, and when they were gone you didn’t just miss them, you hurt all over.
Garen Tarveet and Perada went into a long, open room full of cushioned furniture made of some kind of knotty, light-brown wood. Jos followed—since nobody stopped him, he supposed that as a bodyguard he wasn’t officially there—and took up a position near the entrance, where he could watch the doors and windows while he kept an eye on the Domina and her friend.
The two former classmates had settled down on a couch at the other end of the room, screened from direct view by a small thicket of potted plants and hanging ferns. Jos wondered, briefly, what the room was used for when the family’s son and heir wasn’t occupied in making conspiracies in it. A game room, maybe; he spotted what looked like a four-high pushball cube down at the far end, behind another obscuring mass of greenery, and not far from where he stood was a low table about the right size to display a draughts board and opposing control pads.
Jos was tempted to try out the table himself, but refrained. Bodyguards didn’t do that sort of thing—and besides, he was too busy trying to overhear what Perada and Tarveet were saying to each other with their heads so close together. The young man’s dull brown hair was all but touching Perada’s lighter tresses, and she was whispering something in his ear.
The few scraps of conversation that carried as far as the entrance, however, didn’t sound particularly loverlike:
The Gathering Flame Page 10
