Flood Tide

by C. J. Cherryh

  "There's a problem," Anastasi said to her.

  "I heard," the woman said, calmly and coldly; and of a sudden, matching that red hair with the distant sight of Tatiana Kalugin, Jones knew who she was dealing with.

  Tatiana and Anastasi all in one room, and no throats cut.

  And Mondragon in Exeter's hands.

  "Ye got to do something," Jones said. "M'ser, he ain't never played you off. Ain't never. You c'n get 'im out."

  But she was thinking: what in hell kind of double-cross is this, Tatiana here, Lord an' my Ancestors— what's up?

  Is that what Exeter's sniffin' after? Oh, Lord, what've I gone an walked into, like a fool; an' what am I seein' here that I ain't supposed t' see?

  Anastasi said, looking at his sister, "We'd better take care of it." And to the guards that were standing around, "See sera Jones has a cabin to herself—"

  "I ain't stayin'!" Jones yelled.

  "No breakables," Anastasi said without a flicker, "and no weapons."

  Light flared and flickered about the walls of Mon-dragon's black sky, became stonework, a narrow place like a cut into some building, lamplight on the walls as the boat glided in. Mondragon blinked, tried dimly for control of his limbs, and was not sure whether they answered at all. "Get him up," someone said, over the splash of water and the sound of hurrying footsteps on wet stone.

  He thought, Where in hell am I? and could not remember what had happened to him, or whether some vast amount of time had not elapsed since his arrest, in Merovingen's dark underside. It was Merovingen, the water-sound told him that. He had a canaler-girl and a few friends who had not betrayed him: they were all right. He was relatively sure of them and he was happy with that memory—but hereafter, for himself, the rules were different, there were stone walls, there was no way to get word to anyone, and God only knew how long he had been here or how many more days he had.

  "Come on, come on," voices said. They gathered him up off the bottom of the boat and a vision out of hell swung about him, oil-light and black-cloaked figures. They stumbled over a body in the bottom of the boat, someone that wasn't moving— they said, handing him on to someone else, "He killed Depagian," and that echoed through his head along with a sound like some massive working engine, that might have been his heart pounding. His head swung helplessly, he could not get his feet under him and the grip hurt his arms: he thought he was going to fall as they passed him ashore and a gap of water opened under his feet—he could not have saved himself; but they hauled him up the steps and into a great open doorway, more oil-light, blond stone, a desk, a cleric sitting there with a book open in front of him.

  The priest said, "Canon court," while they held him on his feet, and the words rang in his hearing, over that continual engine-sound. The priest said, "Thomas Mondragon. Place of birth?"

  He kept his mouth shut. They jerked at him and brought his head up.

  "Place of birth?"

  He thought, They already know who I am, this is a damn game. . . .

  The priest wrote something down. The priest said, in the disinterested voice of record-keepers everywhere, "Thomas Mondragon, a Falkenaer, resident of the city, charged with conspiracy, with espionage, with sedition, with theft, with murder of one Everett Depagian, with resisting arrest, with—"

  The voice came and went in his hearing. He watched the pen move on the paper. The priest said, "Put him in number three," and made another note in his book—after which the cardinal's men dragged him off and tried to make him get his feet under him. As long as they shook at him and cuffed him, he tried, but it was not smart to acknowledge he was aware of anything: if they knew he was, they might decide to question him now and right now he couldn't remember the right, the safe answers. So he made the minimal effort, endured the acute pain in his arms and only half tried to stay on his feet as they dragged him down a narrow stairway into a vaulted hall.

  Big room, lamp-light, ropes and hooks and a clutter that might have been some warehouse, except he knew the use of things like this, and he knew this was the place in the Justiciary you never, having seen it, got out of. The townfolk were wrong, it wasn't any little room the Justiciary had in its gut, it was this place with barred cells at one end, a place of echoes and strange noises that might be voices from elsewhere. He felt cold of a sudden, not sure what sounds he was hearing and what he was remembering: one thing blurred with the other, one prison was very like the other, and all that kept it focused was the surety that he had no great deal of time left.

  "Stand up," they said, and pushed him against the iron grating of a cell—someone took his hand and closed it about a cross-bar head high, and he held on and grabbed another, because they were letting him go and if he fell down they would kick him, he had had experience enough of irritated guards. He held on while they stripped his clothes off, not sure what they would do then, and he wanted to be no more conscious than he was.

  But they shoved him into the cell, that was all. He stumbled sideways and fell, skinning his arm on the rough stone, hit his shoulder and his head, and heard the door slam shut and chain run through.

  Nothing in the cell, not even a ledge to sit on. His jailers said something about a bench, wood scraped over stone, and he heard them walk away—except a single footstep, the rattle of the bench. He opened his eyes a slit to see that one of them had sat down outside his cell.

  Here and there again. Consciousness came and went in a steady flux, sound droning in and out of his awareness. Eventually he realized the man sitting outside was a priest, and the rhythmic sound he was hearing was the priest swinging this kind of stick and ball arrangement and praying in a steady monotone.

  Go to hell, he thought, but he had still no wish to move and let them know he was conscious.

  We can get someone to him in his cell, Anastasi had said, speaking of Delaree.

  But the priest out there was a suicide watch, no doubt of it. They had lost Delaree, and they had no intention of losing him before they could ask their questions.

  Wrong choices, Mondragon told himself, a string of wrong choices, starting with the one to temporize with the situation. He should never have stopped Jones, he should have used a pole-end himself, killed a handful of the cardinal's men, and used the time to get himself and Jones—

  —where? Where, that a faster boat could not overtake them, or frightened people turn them in, or assassins find them? He knew too much, had gotten far too high, the list of people who had to fear what he knew had grown impossibly long. It was his own survival he could not believe in any longer—Jones hadn't a chance in hell of living anywhere, so long as he was with her, and he accepted that fact. Jones—

  —hated roofs, she said: more than hated them, she panicked. He had tried once and again to keep her off the water and away from his enemies, had watched her die a little every day she tried to live the life he was asking of her, shut away from sun and weather. That was how it was. You didn't hold Jones, you kept her only if she was free; and if he had sworn one thing since that last futile attempt, it was that Jones was never going to die in a place like this. He had to: that had been laid down a long time ago. But, dammit, she didn't—and that, he decided, was the real reason why he had walked ashore like a fool—because Jones still had a chance, at Kamat's door, within reach of friends who had their instructions. Everything had added up against him, and damned if he was going to take her down with him.

  Maybe she was on a ship by now, maybe it was morning. Richard Kamat might have to knock her cold to get her there, but get her there he would, between his resources and Moghi's—Richard had promised him that in exchange for his sworn silence on certain matters, and if he was any judge of men at all, Richard would keep that promise, that after all cost him so little. He had not dropped bodies at Kamat's door, he had kept his bargain with Kamat; and there would be no city-wide hunt for a canal-rat who had vanished, except among the Trade. No one would follow, no one would investigate, no one would care, in the halls of power in Merovingen; and wh
en a week or so had passed and Jones, safe upriver, heard that he was dead, maybe it would occur to her that there was sun and wind on the river, and that the Det was wider and longer than Merovingen's dark canals. Maybe when she saw there were places like that—she would know there was more to do with her life than throw it after his.

  He kept trying to believe that. But, God, it was hard . . .

  RAPPROCHEMENT

  by Janet Morris & Chris Morris

  "What do I want, Chance?" Tatiana Kalugin repeated Magruder's question softly. "I want Mondragon dead. He's still in that same cell in the Justiciary basement. Anastasi's assassins can't get to him the way they got to Delaree . . . it's too dangerous. So is Mondragon. He knows too much about us—"

  Perhaps it was something in the set of Magruder's jaw that silenced her. Chance Magruder was supposed to be her lover. She'd made the rules of their relationship clear. Everything in Tatiana's life had rules.

  She would help Magruder in Merovingen, and he would help her. She was helping him—had been helping him since he'd come here to establish a Nev Hetteker embassy and trade delegation. She'd done for him what he never could have done on his own. She'd secured him the very embassy he was standing in, clothed in Chattalen velvet and sitting on a Kamat House chair. She'd risked her father's wrath when they were found together—risked everything, over and over, for this man.

  Partly because she'd known, in her heart of hearts, some day there'd come a time when she'd peed the help of someone like Magruder—an outsider, a Nev Hetteker, a provocateur and the only man in Merovingen who could command, however covertly, Karl Fon's revolutionary Sword of God assassins.

  When he didn't answer, just stared off into the distance, as if the tapestry on the far wall was a window, she knew she'd misjudged him.

  "Is it so much to ask, to take care of Mondragon for me?" she prodded. She wasn't accustomed to asking favors. Favors, unlike orders, could be refused.

  Chance Magruder had a face of slightly crumbling planes and aging angles. In lovemaking, it was beautiful. Right now, it was a death's head. "Is it so much to ask me to kill a man for you? Yeah, it's . . . something. It's . . . more than a casual request. It's an overt act that could get me the cell next to Mondragon's, for one thing. For another, he's a Nev Hetteker, just like me. ..."

  Each word seemed to pull something from her body: her heart, her soul, her stomach, and finally, her bowels. At last, feeling totally emptied, she sat sideways on the ormolu desk between them. She'd given him that desk when he'd moved in here. She'd raised his fortunes beyond anything he could have dreamed without her.

  "So you think Exeter will prevail, is that it? You think you don't need me any more? You think it's time to change partners— throw in with Mikhail, perhaps—shift your allegiance to what seems now to be the winning side?"

  She could barely command her tongue to move. Betrayal was the final horror. Betrayal was what you feared the most. Betrayal was ignominious. Betrayal made you a fool. Betrayal made you a target. It was always betrayal that got you in the end. So you made alliances, outside the family, because the family was completely dedicated to betraying one another. God had betrayed her and made her a woman; if she hadn't been, perhaps her father wouldn't have betrayed her in favor if her idiot clockmaker brother, Mikhail. And Anastasi was the soul of betrayal.

  But Magruder? She'd opened her heart to him, her legs to him—done whatever she could, at the greatest possible risk. And all because, when this moment came (as she'd known it must) she'd known she'd need one man like Magruder on her side. An unquestionable ally. Someone who owed her too much to betray her. Someone to count upon when no one could be counted upon. . . .

  That Magruder betrayed her was too cruel a trick even for fate. It made her a slut, a fool ... a tool. It meant that Magruder counted her as an expendable ally, that he had neither enough fear of her nor respect for her—forget affection; never count on affection, or morality, or strength of character or ethics—

  Magruder said, "It can't be done, Tatiana."

  —She would have to humble herself before Anastasi, after all. After she'd made such a show of being unafraid of everything that Anastasi feared. Exeter. Iosef, loving father of Mikhail and them both. Discovery, because of Mondragon. Indictment for treason. The Justiciary cells. Even a death at the hands of Exeter's priests on Hanging Bridge. . . .

  "How dare you say 'can't' to me?" she managed to ask. Barely more than a whisper. Badly enunciated. Words that wouldn't rise to her nose, but seemed to tumble right out of her throat.

  She couldn't look at him. She'd let him use her. He'd lied to her and she'd believed him. She had never been more surprised by a betrayal in her life. She'd been so clear with him about the price of her aid. . . . Perhaps she'd been insufficiently clear with herself about the price, to herself, of her own affection for him.

  "I told you, Chance, some day it would come to this."

  "There must be another way. Somebody else—"

  "I'm not asking somebody else. I'm asking you."

  Her eyes were closed, because she didn't want to see even her pale hand on her black-clad leg. She was wearing the battle dress of her militia, these days. She had a pistol on her hip. If only she could make her body obey her mind, she could shoot Chance Magruder. Shoot him in the face, if she opened her eyes and saw him smiling that cynical smile of his. She recalled their recent lovemaking, and squeezed her eyes shut harder. How could she have so misjudged him . . . herself . . . everything?

  "Tatiana, I'm telling you: this isn't the way."

  "You're telling me you won't help me," she corrected. "I made myself very clear, from the beginning, that it would come to this. Over and over, we discussed what we'd do when it did ..." She clamped her mouth shut. She wouldn't plead. She didn't want to look at him. She had an impulse to tell him to leave, to throw him out. But this was his embassy. Nev Hetteker territory. Nev Hetteker soil in Merovingen. She'd seen to that, to bind her lover tighter in advance of this moment, so he'd never be able to say all the things he was saying now. ,

  "I thought you were . . . hyperbolizing. All ruling classes are paranoid. You've got to calm down, Tatiana. Murder won't solve this."

  "Hyperbolizing? You're a coward," she said dully.

  "So I'm a coward. I'm a live coward who's lived through one revolution and can help you live through another one, if that's what it takes."

  She would not look at him. The pale eyes. The deep shadows around them in which his lids hid. Somewhere she'd heard that people whose eyelids were hidden were duplicitous. Magruder's duplicity was never in doubt, never a problem—always an asset, until it was turned on her rather than turned to her service. "You're a betrayer. Everything I've done for you was predicated on an agreement . . . now that the time is here, you tell me to find someone else?"

  "That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, don't find anyone else. Don't do this. It will lead Exeter right to your door. If you kill Mondragon—or your brother does—or Kamat does, or Boregy does— whosoever does it, will swing from Hanging Bridge. Believe me. If there's one thing I know, it's revolutions. Exeter's trying to thin the pack. She doesn't care which of you takes the bait. But that's what Mondragon is—bait."

  "You're lying. You're a liar."

  She had to open her eyes to find the door. She slid stiffly off his desk and started out of the room, still not looking at him. If she caught him smiling at her, or even smirking, she would shoot him in his own embassy. She could say he'd tried to rape her, if she had to. Everyone but her father would believe that.

  Of course, her father was in league with Exeter, paving the way for Mikhail to become Iosef's official heir, and thus prolong Iosef's own life with an insurance policy called Mischa the Idiot.

  Old losef would be tended solicitously by one and all, once it was mandated that Mikhail would succeed him. And then she and Anastasi, as Anastasi had succinctly put it so recently on the boat, could suck Det water, for all the good it would do them.


  Magruder's hand came down on her shoulder, hard, and hers went to the service revolver on her hip. As he spun her to face him, she jerked the revolver from its holster. By the time he started to pull her against him, she had it firmly in both hands.

  The gun was cold.

  Heavy.

  Its muzzle thrust against his navel.

  There was a revolver's length between their bodies.

  Time stopped.

  Her breathing nearly stopped as well.

  It would only take a little squeeze, and there would be one less wild card in Merovingen. . . .

  His embrace lost its fervor when the gun poked his hard belly. She could almost see, under the velvet he wore, the graying hair on his stomach, parted by the gunbarrel. All she had to do was squeeze the trigger. . . .

  He knew that, too.

  He didn't pull her closer, or put any pressure on her at all. But he didn't let her go, either.

  The sensation of being frozen in time grew stronger. She couldn't truly banish the temptation to let the gun remove him from her list of problems. She was humiliated by his very existence. If he ceased to exist, at least the one man who'd truly made her as much a fool as Mikhail would die before he could spread the word or act on the knowledge.

  "Tatiana, look at me."

  She couldn't.

  But then, of course, she did. She had to. She was not some canalside trollop whose fare had seduced her and stolen her poleboat. She was, if nothing else, still a power in Merovingen. So far.

  And powers didn't shoot their enemies personally. One didn't give an enemy that much importance. She had the whole blackleg militia to do that sort of thing for her. This creature whom once she'd trusted would see his final moments in deep water, cough out his last breath into the Det, and she'd be nowhere about.

  Looking up to meet Magruder's eyes, she wondered how she ever could have considered him handsome. His conniving, narrow mouth; his cruel, downturned nose; his empty eyes full of artifice. . . .