Hour of Judgement

by Susan R. Matthews

  Great grief, yes, perhaps, but not for a loved one’s death. Great agony, but of spirit and heart alone. A woman was expected to rule her temper better than that, especially in hospital. If Sylyphe Tavart was not a woman yet, it was still time that she learned better how to be reticent.

  “You must let me at least see him. He’s our own gardener — I have a right — ”

  Sylyphe Tavart. As pale as she could be in the unkind light of the bright day, her face scrubbed clean of cosmetics and her eyes ringed with deep bruise-purple shadows born of sleeplessness. Very unbecoming. Arguing with the orderly at the record-station, she had not heard him approach.

  “That will do, Miss Tavart, you are making a scene on ward, and that is not seemly of you. Come with me.”

  The orderly was grateful to be rescued from her insistent pleading, but Andrej kept a straight face. He knew something about Sylyphe Tavart he hadn’t known at this hour yesterday. Since she was here there were some things that he could tell her, if she could but be made to hear.

  “Indeed I will not, take your hand away — ”

  But she was too young to make her indignant protest stick, and to her credit she didn’t raise her voice. Andrej escorted her firmly to the duty physician’s station and nodded at Stildyne to shut the door that separated the small room from the rest of the ward.

  The admissions report was in the scroller; it took him a moment to find what he was after. He searched the record with grim concentration, conscious of Sylyphe standing in the middle of the room staring at him. She could not break away and flee from him. Stildyne was at the door, and Stildyne could do one of the best impressions of an immovable object that it had ever been Andrej’s pleasure to behold.

  Here was the admissions report, Doctor Howe’s notes as to the status of his patient Skelern Hanner. Very precise. And very detailed too; it was not for nothing that Howe had survived his years under Bond, and lived to be reborn.

  Sylyphe spoke at last, unbidden and unasked but not unexpectedly. Her voice was quiet and calm in the hush of the small room; very cool and formal. “You know, I thought that it was wonderful that Andrej Koscuisko should come to Burkhayden. Such a man, with such a reputation. And now I wish you had never come at all.”

  She was to be a formidable woman, when she came into her majority. There was no scorn in her words, and that only made the implicit rebuke more telling.

  “Oh, don’t be tedious. You cannot imagine I have never heard that before.”

  As seductive as her interest had been, as tempting as he had found her innocent desire for him, it was time to make a proper separation. She was not for him, nor he for her. Andrej meant to leave no traitorous hint of wistful longing in her heart, and if that meant that he would be a brute — so would he be.

  “No, I am sure it is all old to you.” Very plain she spoke, and wrung her hands. “I didn’t know. How you must have laughed at me .... How is . . . ? What did you . . . ? Skelern.” She offered up her self-pride with a contrite humility that nearly staggered Andrej where he stood. It only made him the more sure of his purpose.

  “It’s not for me to say, Miss Tavart. That would entail a violation of his privacy, and that would not be lawful. Now. Not since.”

  Hanner had suffered horribly. Andrej knew his craft, he knew his own skill. Captain Lowden had insisted Hanner be harmed as little as possible, and Andrej had obeyed that order too. It would still be days before Hanner could walk, days longer yet before he could be released to light labor. It wasn’t Sylyphe’s business unless Hanner himself acknowledged it to her.

  “They will not let me see him. May I see him? I only want to tell him. There’s a message. From the Danzilar prince.”

  The strain was too much for her; she began to fail beneath the enormity of her self-appointed task. The tears were all too clearly audible in her now-trembling voice. She wrung her white-square with shaking hands, and as much as Andrej wanted to take her into his arms to comfort her he knew that it would not be welcomed if he tried.

  “You may not see him now. Nor would you be able to deliver any sort of message; he’s asleep.” Asleep or still unconscious, under the influence of pain-relief drugs. It didn’t matter. “You must trust the doctors to act in Hanner’s best interest, Sylyphe. I do not ask you to trust me. Only to believe that I am telling you the truth.”

  Wait, wasn’t that the same?

  She untwisted her white-square with deliberate determination. Folding it flat, she creased its folds against the soft curve of her young stomach with an unselfconscious childlike gesture and put the thing away. “You won’t let me see him. I can’t know what you did to him. I will go home, now. Only. Please.”

  That you had never come to Burkhayden. Yes. Andrej knew. Another woman might have cursed him, struck out at him, spat in his face. Sylyphe merely announced that he was unwelcome, now, as unwelcome as if he had only come to Burkhayden to torture her friend and break her heart.

  “You have asked me nothing of what I may in fairness tell you.” Andrej shut the scroller off at last and leaned his back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest, facing her. “Such things as what excuse he had to make for being where he was. And yet it may well be that you should know.”

  In an odd and indirect way it was his own fault Hanner had been put to torture for the crime. Andrej’s fault. He had not put Sylyphe in her place, beguiled by her sweet innocence. Because he had indulged himself in her adoration Hanner had seen them and assumed the worst. It was his fault. He had to make it up somehow, or part of it, at least.

  “Very well.” Rolling her underlip between her teeth she took a deep breath. Waiting for the blow. “I am listening, your Excellency.”

  Torturer. Your Excellency, which was to say criminal. And so he was. Straightening up, Andrej pushed himself away from the wall; Stildyne caught the gesture Andrej made and moved to one side of the door. Ready to leave. Because Andrej had no intention of staying here for a moment longer once he’d had his say.

  “Watching us dance. You and I.” He had to select his words carefully. He knew it was his fault: he did not meant for her to conclude that she was the one who was to blame. “He imagined that you . . . Well. I hardly know how to say it. Did you know that he is in love with you, Miss Tavart?”

  There was a moment, there, an instant of pure vibrant energy, a shimmering in the air as the sound of Andrej’s voice fell away. The space between one breath and the next. Forever. Forever, an eternity of time in which to realize not only that what Andrej had said was true but that she had herself somehow become in love with Skelern Hanner while she’d not been looking.

  She only looked at Andrej now, her eyes like great luminous gems. Glittering with tears. He could not stay a moment longer, because if he did he would kiss her quivering mouth, and that was for Hanner to do. Not for him.

  So Andrej took her trembling hand and kissed the air above her fingertips, instead. And left the room with her still in it, pure and chaste and suddenly aware. A word or two with the physician’s assistant made it right, and they would let her in to see her mother’s gardener after all; and now Andrej could leave the area entirely. Not only could, but had to, or risk setting a blight on an uncertain romance by some awkward gesture.

  Had he ever been so young as that?

  Could he remember how it had felt, when he had first known that he loved Marana?

  And now he was in a filthy mood, tired and hung over, and sorry for himself.

  There was no time like the present to visit Specialist Vogel.

  Chapter Eleven

  Bench intelligence specialist Garol Aphon Vogel sat over a shuffle of documentation laid out on a lab table, the lab stool drawn well up to the work surface, his feet tucked behind the lowest forward rung. Not so much puzzling over his conclusions as weighing their implications. Andrej Koscuisko stopped in the corridor, declining to step into the doorway, taking a deep draw at the smoldering lefrol he carried and releasing the greater part of its t
hick gray-white smoke into the hall. Rather than into the room. Garol wondered why Koscuisko was smoking at all, in a hospital — deserted wards or no. Koscuisko knew better than that. Surely.

  “Your Excellency.” Tired and depressed and unsure of the best route to take out of the mess that murder had made of Port Burkhayden, Garol didn’t bother to straighten up. “Good of you to stop in. Doing rounds?”

  The person who thought he’d seen Garol himself go up to Lowden’s suite had turned out to be the floor manager at the service house. Once the floor manager had gotten it into his head that it was Garol he’d shown through, his tentative identification had hardened into rock-solid certainty. Memory was like that. Played tricks on a man.

  A Bench intelligence specialist was clearly an appropriate person for a harried floor manager to have shown straight through. If the man to whom the floor manager had given access to luxury quarters was an assassin, though, then the floor manager was potentially to blame for a murder — if that was what it would turn out to be. So it was much safer for the floor manager to be convinced that he’d seen Garol Vogel, and as long as Garol didn’t contradict him they could all be happy.

  “I came to see my man, and also to check on the gardener. You left word, Specialist Vogel. You wanted to see me.”

  Reaching into the front-plaquet of his over-blouse, Koscuisko drew out a smooth silvery tube, matte-dull with age and use as only an antique of rhinsillery alloy weathered: a lefrol-keeper. Tucking his lefrol into the container Koscuisko put it away and then stepped across the threshold, but stopped just inside the open doorway.

  “How’s the gardener doing?” Garol asked, mildly curious. What was the etiquette observed between a man who had been unjustly tortured, and the very much senior-ranking man who had tortured him? “Does he remember anything about the event that might help to identify an assassin?”

  Koscuisko frowned, as if as much annoyed at Garol for asking embarrassing questions as out of shame or diffidence. “Hanner is unconscious. Sleeping. Well drugged. Surely you do not imagine that I would have the face to confront him. After what I did.”

  What Koscuisko had done was only what Koscuisko had been ordered to do. But Garol thought he understood. Koscuisko believed that he should have caught the anomaly with the crozer-hinge right away. Koscuisko was probably right, on one level at least.

  “You don’t have to make any excuses for doing your lawful duty, not even with the gardener. We all heard the Captain.” And though Koscuisko’s private passion was fearful sadism, it wasn’t Koscuisko who used and indulged it. It had been Captain Lowden who had been responsible for Koscuisko’s extravagances.

  Koscuisko swore. “Holy Mother. As if there was any excuse to be made for the time that it took to discover. I will not be patronized, Garol Vogel.”

  Only two names. Did Koscuisko know all three? Koscuisko’s point was unarguable. If Koscuisko would not accept rationalization to cover the gardener’s ordeal then Koscuisko would not — and was a better man for it than otherwise.

  Garol set it all aside as a bent pin and took up the threads of his problem. “All right. The gardener. I’ll need a statement. He may have heard something. Seen something. From your man St. Clare, as well.”

  Koscuisko hadn’t stirred to come near or sit down. Koscuisko stood still now. “On a speak-serum, in the presence of a Judicial officer — of course, Specialist Vogel. But Hanner will not remember. Still less will my Robert remember anything. I have just come from having a word with him, and he has lost most of yesterday. Amnesia can be transient when its cause is trauma to the brain itself, but in this instance it is the processing which has been disrupted. I am convinced that any information Robert might have had will be unrecoverable.”

  Calm; not the least concerned. Garol Vogel was not a Ship’s Inquisitor; but his survival depended upon his ability to read people and situations, which was as a consequence fairly well developed. Koscuisko was not worried. So neither man would be able to incriminate anybody. If Koscuisko was that sure that Garol would get no evidence, even under a speak-serum, then there was really no point in even trying; though it would have to be done, of course.

  “I’ll schedule the interviews for once the gardener’s awake and strong enough for it. For the Record. Two or three days?”

  He had to complete the investigation, or risk leaving a hole that might arouse suspicion simply by virtue of the fact that he had discarded suspicion without comment. Koscuisko merely nodded. Garol spoke on.

  “That’s about all I had, sir. Except to ask if you happened to remember what you were doing in the streets last night, when I found you.”

  “And took me to bed,” Koscuisko agreed, with a little smile. “Excuse me, the phrase is not what it was to have said. Conveyed me to Center House. I was drunk, I think.”

  And wasn’t about to tell Garol if he did remember anything. Why should he? Because if Koscuisko wouldn’t talk the whole matter would either go forward on a supposition or be allowed to lapse for lack of evidence. Risking the chance that Koscuisko would let slip something incriminating some year; while he slept, for instance.

  “We won’t know how many are dead in the fire until the Port Authority can get people in to what’s left at the site of the service house.” Garol had no real doubt in his own mind about it. He knew he wasn’t the one who had asked for the Captain at the service house. He hadn’t gotten there till the place was already on fire.

  But he could see where an over-stressed floor manager might mistake Andrej Koscuisko in the dark of a house on auxiliary power, and convince himself later that the man he had seen was Garol and none other. Koscuisko had been there. Koscuisko had gone up. And shortly thereafter the fire alarms had gone off, and the service house had been evacuated; all except Captain Lowden.

  As nearly as the Port Authority had been able to determine so far, only one person who had been in the service house had failed to get clear with his life. That was powerful evidence for the supposition that Lowden had been dead when the fire had started.

  Koscuisko was waiting for him to finish his thought. Garol took a deep breath. “But we know that Lowden was in there. So he’s dead. Can’t say I’m sorry.”

  “As long as no innocent man must be taken,” Koscuisko agreed. “I’m not sorry myself.”

  No, Koscuisko knew. Koscuisko remembered. Koscuisko would say something if he had to. But if he didn’t have to, why should he say anything?

  Captain Lowden had needed to die.

  They both understood that.

  Garol rubbed at the front of his over-blouse idly, feeling the crackling of the folded document in the inner pocket. Bench warrant. He’d got Jils thinking it was on Lowden. Why shouldn’t it have been?

  “Yeah, well. Once we find the body maybe we’ll know more.” But probably not. Probably no more than that it was Lowden’s body, or at least verifiable as such from a gene-scan on whatever was left of it. The chances that the body was undamaged enough to prove so much as that a murder had even happened were almost nonexistent. Circumstantial evidence was all they would ever have, in the absence of a confession.

  Who had killed the Fleet Lieutenant?

  Had it been St. Clare?

  How could a bond-involuntary have done such thing?

  And what did Garol care, one way or the other?

  Wyrlann was dead. The gardener hadn’t killed him. Wyrlann had been a bully with a developing reputation as a man who needed killing. He was better dead. The Judicial order was better served by Wyrlann dead than alive, and Captain Lowden as well.

  “Call for me when you wish the Record to complete, Specialist Vogel,” Koscuisko said, bringing an end to the interview. As if it had been his interview. As if it were Koscuisko who had sent for Garol, and not the other way around. That was the way of it, with people who held rank.

  Garol had dealt with people like Koscuisko for all of his adult life.

  He still couldn’t quite manage the absolute self-assurance.

>   “And I will for you the speak-sera administer. To the upholding of the Judicial order in completion of the Record. Though neither man will have any words for you.”

  That wasn’t the point.

  Both of them knew that.

  The point was that all avenues had to be laid out on Record, drawn out, described, then decisively cancelled. Or someone might follow one of the avenues back to a problem, someday in the future.

  “Very good, sir.”

  And get out.

  Why should Koscuisko get away with murder?

  What difference did one more murder make, whether the Bench had ordained it or not?

  Koscuisko went away with a nod; and left Garol to brood over life and injustice, alone by himself in the deserted lab, with a shuffle of depositions for company.

  ###

  Megh heard them coming down the hallway toward the half-closed door to her room, and grimaced in irritation. She didn’t mind the hospital very bitterly; she hadn’t had so much time to herself since she could remember. But that the orderlies came to her to touch her was an irritation. She had to bear it; it was her life to be handled at the will of another, not at her will.

  And still she was in hospital, not in the service house.

  Which had burned down.

  Somehow it seemed more distasteful to her that she should be outside the service house and yet still be subject to someone else’s judgment as to where and how she was to suffer being touched.

  She closed her eyes and turned her head away from the door, toward the window. It was Doctor Barit Howe. She recognized his voice. And to listen to him he was bringing yet another unfamiliar face, a new orderly, to lift the bedding carefully away from her legs to salve the bruises or to take the bed-wrap down from her shoulders to daub an ointment on the still-healing skin of her arms and shoulders.