“Oh, dear. That could be awkward. Unless—”
She held out a hand and waited, eyebrows lifted in polite inquiry. Jos took the hint and passed over the envelope.
“Want me to open that for you?” he asked, as she turned it over for a closer look. “It could be rigged.”
Perada smiled. “Spoken like a true bodyguard. But it isn’t necessary. I recognize the mark.” One neatly trimmed fingernail tapped the unfamiliar sigil. “It belongs to Ser Hafrey, armsmaster to my House.”
The name sounded familiar to Jos. A moment’s thought, and he remembered: she’d used it once in Waycross, talking to her brace of escorts, the thick-necked bruiser and the one who looked like a retired schoolteacher.
“Which one was Hafrey?” he asked. “The young guy?”
Perada’s lips twitched in amusement. “No.”
That’ll teach me not to trust in appearances, Jos thought. Aloud, he said, “You told the armsmaster you were coming here?”
“No—I didn’t decide until after we were away. Until you mentioned Ophel, in fact. Up until then, I’d thought that you would be making course for Entibor.”
Once again Jos felt the stirring of unease. The armsmaster, it seemed, was an unknown quantity, and one who didn’t match his outward seeming. I definitely have to talk with Errec about all this.
“Then how did he—?”
“Hafrey is like that,” she said. “He makes it his business to know things that other people don’t.”
“For your benefit?”
Perada shrugged. Jos couldn’t be certain, but he thought that he sensed in her manner an uneasiness similar to his own. “He’s always been loyal to the House. Veratina trusted him.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I do.”
She opened the envelope and drew out several sheets of paper covered with Entiboran script. Jos left her reading it, and went back out into the service hallway. He’d thought earlier that he’d recognized one of the pieces of stacked luggage, and he wanted to see if he’d been right.
He had been. Sitting on the carpet next to the Domina’s pile of trunks and footlockers was a duffel from Warhammer, with an address tag dated from the day before. There was a note on the back of the tag, written in Tillijen’s firm hand: “If you’re planning to spend the night, boss, I thought you might like your tooth cleaner and a change of clothes.”
Jos shook his head and picked up the bag. There was no mystery about this one, other than how Tilly had found out where he was going. He supposed that Errec had been involved somehow—this Hafrey wasn’t the only one good at that sort of thing.
First the armsmaster, now my own crew members, he thought. If it’s so damned easy to figure out what I’m going to do next, I sure wish that somebody would let me in on the secret.
Because I haven’t got the foggiest idea.
In her office at the Entiboran Fleet Base on Parezul, Captain-of-Frigates Galaret Lachiel swallowed the dregs of her latest mug of cha’a. She was starting to feel worried. Parezul had beaten off the first wave of raiders—and the second wave, which had hit a few days later—but Gala wasn’t inclined to call the accomplishment a victory. She’d lost too many ships and seen too many others crippled, and not even knowing that she’d swapped the Mages one-for-one in losses could make her feel good about the overall situation.
Parezul lay near the end of a long supply line; only Tres Brehant and his squadron patrolled farther out. Without more ships and fresh crews, Gala knew that neither she nor Brehant could bear up for long under repeated attacks from the Mageworlds. She’d tried her best to get the supplies and reinforcements that Parezul needed, but her best, it seemed, had not sufficed. The requests she’d sent to Central had been acknowledged, and nothing more.
Veratina Rosselin—damn her barren bones—couldn’t have picked a worse time to die. Central wasn’t going to bother itself with thinking about Mages when there was a new Domina to worry about instead. Gala knew what that meant, too.
They’ll leave us hanging out here. And when the Mages push in past the outplanets and start raiding An-Jemayne, they’ll blame us for not keeping them away.
Unless somebody did something, the situation could only get worse. Already the even flow of trade and communications—the constant back-and-forth of raw materials and finished goods, of news and entertainment and simple gossip—had been disrupted by the repeated attacks. The next stage wouldn’t be long in coming: unable to rely on the Fleet for protection, the colonies would begin to slip away from the influence of their mother world.
Gala wondered if Entibor’s outplanets were the only target in the current raiding campaign, and decided that she wasn’t going to find out while it still mattered. If raiders had struck the Khesatan colonies, the Highest of Khesat wasn’t likely to pass along the news.
And Central, damn them, wouldn’t bother to tell me even if they did happen to know. Just like they sure as hell haven’t mentioned the situation to any of our so-called allies.
Base Commander Galaret Lachiel thought about the future she saw coming, and decided she didn’t like it.
I can’t fight this war single-handed with my head stuffed in a sack. Something has to change.
She left her office and went down the hall to the base comms center.
“Captain Brehant’s squadron should be coming into orbit shortly,” she told the crew member on duty. “Send word to his flagship that I will be coming aboard for a private conference.”
Most of Entibor’s western hemisphere lay in darkness. In a fashionable block of houses in central An-Jemayne, a shuffling noise disturbed the predawn quiet. An instant later there came a flash of light and a rolling boom, and a section of wall collapsed inward in a cloud of dust from broken stonework.
Dark-clad figures carrying blasters and energy lances slid into the building through the smoke of the explosion. As soon as most of the haze had dissipated, Ser Hafrey left his position on the far side of the street and entered the ruins as well.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Meinuxet said, coming out of the wreckage to join him. Shadows obscured the features of the armsmaster’s chief agent, but his voice sounded concerned. “There could be traps or snipers—and we haven’t evaluated the structural damage yet, either.”
“Let me judge how much peril to place myself under,” Hafrey said. He gestured Meinuxet aside and moved farther into the broken room.
The whole chamber had been painted and hung in black, except for a white-painted circle on the floor in the center of the room. The circle was surrounded by candles, now extinguished. The heavy smell of wax hung in the air, masked by the acrid, throat-catching smell of the explosion and its attendant dust and smoke.
Hafrey reached out with thumb and forefinger and pinched the candle near its wick. The wax deformed easily.
“They were here,” he said. “Not more than five minutes before the raid began. They were here.”
“All the exits were watched, and the street has been cordoned off,” Meinuxet said. “They won’t get far.”
“You can believe so, if you will,” Hafrey said. “But I suspect that the truth will be far otherwise.”
He turned to go. As he stepped out through the shattered wall and into the street, a hovercar pulled up in a hiss of nullgravs. The door of the vehicle bore the crest of the Minister of Internal Security. Hafrey watched, unsurprised, as a familiar heavyset figure unfolded from the hovercar’s passenger compartment and strode forward to meet him.
“Nivome,” he said, and made a half-bow.
The younger man didn’t bother to return the armsmaster’s greeting. “What is the meaning of conducting violent operations in my area of control?”
“You were informed prior to the raid.”
Nivome glowered, unmollified. “You made sure that the message reached my desk so late that I couldn’t countermand it.”
Hafrey shrugged. “I did all that I was required to do.”
/>
“Your damned high-handedness is going to get you in trouble someday, old man.” Nivome’s glance slid sideways toward the rubble. “What did you find?”
“What I expected. That there are Mages conducting their rituals on our planet.”
“You arrested them?”
“No. They escaped.”
The Rolnian’s lip curled. “Did they get away by accident,” he wondered aloud, “or was it another one of your everlasting plans? If state security wasn’t at issue, I’d have you put on public trial.”
“As you will,” Hafrey said. “When the Domina arrives, you are invited to lay all of your grievances before her.”
Nivome gave the armsmaster a look of disgust. “And while she’s missing—thanks to you!—you seek to wear the tyrant’s robes in An-Jemayne, is that it?”
“It is whatever you wish it to be. Good day, sir.”
Ser Hafrey bowed again and walked off, pulling the hood of his cloak up and over his head to guard against the chill of dawn. Behind him, pale smoke drifted away in curls from the empty building.
“I’ve already located and disabled Central’s snoop in this compartment,” Captain-of-Corvettes Trestig Brehant said, as soon as he and Gala were together in his private cabin. “I have a feeling that you’re about to suggest something dangerous.”
“I am,” Gala said. She’d perched herself on the edge of Brehant’s bunk. The cabin only had room for one chair, and Tres was sitting in it. She was aware in the back of her mind that most of the ship’s crew were going to suspect that she and the squadron commander were lovers—Better that, she thought, than the truth.
She pushed the thought away and grinned at Brehant. “Tell me, Tres—how do you feel about rank insubordination?”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Depends on who’s being rank about it.”
“Me, probably.”
Brehant laughed aloud. “You’d have to go pretty far—you’ve got a fair amount of credit to drew on around here. With me, anyhow.”
“I wasn’t thinking about you.”
“Oh, damn. And here I thought something interesting might come out of this mess after all.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Tres, you’re incorrigible. If things weren’t so serious, I might even take you up on that offer … but right now the raiders are bleeding us like sucker-flies, one bite at a time.”
“No argument there from me.” His mobile features changed, becoming sober again. “What’s the odds they’re planning to drain us dry and knock down the empty shell?”
“I don’t take bets like that,” Gala said. “I’ll tell you something else, though: if we don’t take out their staging bases, there’s no way that we can stop them. And nobody has the foggiest idea where the raiders are coming from, unless you count from the Magewords’ as a workable set of navigation coordinates, which I don’t.”
Brehant’s dark brows drew together in thought. “You say we don’t know where the Mageworlds are—but I’ll bet my paycheck against yours that the privateers have a pretty good idea. Maybe we should go find ourselves some privateers and ask.”
“I have a better idea,” said Gala. “It’s what I came here to talk with you about, in fact—”
“Took you long enough to get around to it.”
“I had to work up my nerve first.”
He made a face of astonishment. “Nerve? You?”
“Wait until I’m finished, Tres.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m thinking that I ought to go to Central and ask them where the Mageworlds are. And ask them a few more things while we’re at it—like why they haven’t sent us the reinforcements we’ve asked for, or the intelligence we’ve asked for, or anything else we’ve asked for, ever since the raids began.”
Brehant gave a long, admiring whistle. “That’s nervy, all right. It won’t work, though. Central doesn’t listen to lowly line captains from the outplanets.”
“Maybe not. But somebody has to make the attempt.”
“Two somebodies,” he said. “If you’re hell-bent on throwing your career down the waste chute, then I might as well throw mine in after it.”
On the seventeenth floor of the Markey’s Prime Hotel, not far from the Art Institute of Flatlands, morning sunlight slid in through the drawn curtains and touched the pillows of the large double bed. Tillijen sat up and stretched.
Warhammer’s number-two gunner felt well rested and satisfied with herself and the universe. She had spent a marvelous first night of liberty, not at all unhappy with her impulsive decision to send the captain a change of clothes. Errec had helped a lot there—the ’Hammer’s copilot was good at locating people, an odd gift to encounter in such a reserved and solitary man.
Ransome was like that, though, she reflected; quiet, and talented in strange ways. Even the thick bulkheads in Warhammer‘s berthing spaces couldn’t hide the fact that sometimes he screamed in his sleep. Tillijen had never asked him why. The spacelanes had their own etiquette, as rigid as any court’s—and as Nannla had said, such things weren’t done.
At least he was unbending a bit as time went on. He was a lot more relaxed now than he had been when Jos first brought him aboard. And he’d proved his worth. He found Mages.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Pulling on a light robe, she went over to the window and drew the curtain a little aside. Flatlands Portcity spread out beyond the glass. The metropolis lived up to its name, being flat and uninteresting with an uninspired style of local architecture. She let the curtain fall back into place. Time to get dressed for the day.
This morning, she and Nannla planned to go to the Art Institute. Pleyverans didn’t have much of a name for producing great art, but they did have a considerable name for making money, and the collection of off-world objects at the Flatlands Institute was well spoken of in the better guidebooks. After that, well … other things of interest would surely present themselves. A restaurant, perhaps. Tillijen had never been to Artha and had never found an Arthan restaurant on any of the worlds she’d visited. The Flatlands Directory in the hotel room listed no fewer than three.
An evening began to take form in her mind as she headed over to the closet where she’d stowed her portside clothing. A call to the ship after breakfast, to let Ferrda know where they’d be, then off into Flatlands … there was something lying on the carpet inside the door.
Tillijen changed her path from a direct course toward the closet to approach the vestibule. The object on the carpet was an oblong of cream-colored paper—an envelope. Tillijen frowned. She didn’t recall an envelope being there the night before.
She reached out one toe and pushed the corner of the envelope. It slid a bit. She pushed again, this time getting her toe under one corner, and flipped the envelope over. The other side had lettering on it—Warhammer, in square Galcenian capitals.
Tillijen left the envelope lying on the carpet. Instead of going to the closet, she made her way back to the bed, where Nannla lay with a pillow pulled across her face. Tillijen pushed her friend on the shoulder.
“Time to wake up, Nannla,” she said, in the Ophelan patois they spoke when they were alone. “I believe that the morning has become interesting.”
The bedclothes twitched, and Nannla’s voice came muzzily from underneath the pillow. “What could possibly be interesting about mornings?”
“I have a mystery for you. Someone’s sending us letters.”
“What’s so mysterious about that?”
“Get up and find out.”
Nannla pulled the pillow aside. “All right. Half a moment while I put some clothes on.”
A few minutes later, both women were dressed and standing together in the vestibule. The envelope lay where it had landed when Tillijen flipped it over. Nannla regarded it with a speculative expression.
“Sure isn’t from anyone I know,” she said after a while. “How about one of your friends?”
“Both of them know how to find me if they want to. They do
n’t need to sneak around Flatlands being mysterious.”
“You’ve got a point.” Nannla looked at the envelope a while longer. “Maybe we should leave it right there and go on about our business.”
Tillijen raised an eyebrow. “And let the hotel servants pick it up instead?”
“I suppose not,” said Nannla, with a regretful sigh. “You will be careful opening it, won’t you?”
“Of course. You know me.”
Tillijen pulled a pair of thin leather gloves out of her jacket pocket and slipped them on. Then she drew a small knife from her boot top and, stooping further, picked up the envelope by one corner. She slit the envelope and shook out the card it contained, a sheet of stiff paper covered with flowing script.
“Well, what is it?” Nannla demanded. “A ransom demand, a death threat, or an invitation to the ball?”
“None of those,” Tillijen said. She put the card back into the envelope and crumpled both together. “It’s a—” she dropped out of Ophelan for a few syllables, then stopped and started over again, stumbling a little as she translated the awkward bits. “It’s a—you might call it an Announcement of Expectancy—in the name of the Domina of Entibor.”
“Does that mean what I think it does?” Nannla looked shocked. “Our little Perada?”
“‘Our little Perada,’ indeed,” Tillijen said. “Her family are cousins to mine—and she’s not that little, either. Do you know who these things usually go to?”
Nannla shook her head. “Enlighten me.”
“The Announcement of Expectancy,” said Tillijen grimly, “goes to the closest female relative—or, absent a relative, the closest female associate—of the lady’s consort.”
“Oh, my,” said Nannla. “Jos.”
Tillijen nodded. “Jos.”
By the time morning came to the Strip in Flatlands Portcity, most of the bars and lounges had closed until the next night. Those places that remained open, like the Meridian Grill, tended to do as much trade in cha’a and breakfast as they did in stronger stuff. Breakfast, however, wasn’t what Errec Ransome had come for.
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