The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1)

by P. J. Fox

  The evidence against the alleged perpetrators, including a police sergeant, turned out to be very strong. Kisten had the men arrested by military police and held in the cantonment brig. It was all he could do—that, and hope that the justice system brought some measure of justice. Moreover, he wanted everyone, on both sides, to see that the Alliance could and would punish wrongdoing.

  Kisten was no Nan Jhansi, to look the other way in exchange for a bribe. But even despite these early successes, his hold on his position was precarious. Apart from the handful of men he’d brought with him, he didn’t know who he could trust. He could only hope that, over time, he’d successfully weed the liars, bullies, and malcontents out of his administration. And then start rebuilding the Tarsonis Civil Service into something functional.

  He’d left Aros to deal with the rest of the afternoon’s petitioners. Aros needed to meet a girl; he needed something. He missed his home, and his life, and if he didn’t find a way to distract himself he’d have problems. A few months ago, Kisten would have said that he himself needed a girl—or, more likely, three or four girls, preferably all voluptuous and accommodating. But now, the only girl he wanted to see was Aria. Which didn’t preclude the possibility of other, more casual relationships at a later date. Provided they could be arranged discreetly.

  What priggish Zerus would call a house of ill repute was referred to as a tea house on Brontes, or a club. To single out the Savage Club as the premier institution in Haldon wasn’t much of a recommendation, but it catered almost exclusively to senior officers and the wealthiest of the local worthies. The madam was a former lover of Kisten’s with whom he’d remained on good terms.

  He’d been surprised to find her on Tarsonis, but he supposed that he wasn’t the only one who’d needed a change of scene. After Grace had approached him, asking for his help, he’d written her a letter of introduction. That she’d want such a thing surprised him, and he’d also offered to find her a husband—which she’d found offensive, naturally. So, given her connection to Aria, helping her get established had seemed like the least he could do.

  Although, to be honest, there was something…off about Grace. He couldn’t put his finger on what, precisely, but she worried him. The other girls had clear reasons for being here. Stupid reasons, in some cases, but reasons. Grace had no reasons, and he’d wondered if her disagreeable attitude wasn’t an act: a purposeful means of keeping people at a distance and preventing them from asking too many questions. She could be charming when she chose, a trait she’d ill-advisedly demonstrated when she’d come to see him.

  There was also something off about Naomi, albeit something far more obvious. What she’d want with a married man to begin with, he had no idea; and despite what she seemed to believe, Kisten was no one’s knight in shining armor. He also had no intention of taking on the kind of mistress that Naomi imagined herself becoming, especially not one with ambitions.

  He wondered if Aria knew, and supposed that she must. Women always knew.

  And then he arrived at the hospital and put the matter out of his mind, except to wonder distractedly whether Aria would like to model a certain piece of black mesh for him that he’d purchased for a…suitable occasion. And then Finn opened the door and he stepped out into the fog.

  One of Kisten’s personal guard, another Blue, had been sitting next to Finn in the front seat. He joined Kisten on the sidewalk as a second car pulled up behind them and four more guards got out. Two of them would accompany Kisten into the hospital, while the rest waited with Finn.

  The sidewalk was strewn with filth. Kisten looked up at the crumbling façade of the hospital. It seemed ready to collapse, if not from poor engineering then from sheer exhaustion. The whole capital had a listless feeling to it, as though it couldn’t quite bring itself to care. Kisten had commissioned two new hospitals and was using his personal funds for one, a free clinic and surgical center for children that he planned to name after his grandmother.

  Inside, the Temple of the Heart Hospital looked more like a prison than a hospital.

  Built from the same stucco-faced poured concrete as the rest of the city, its walls were the same grime-covered white indoors as out. Pressed metal signs indicated which thing lay in which direction. Kisten was met by a short, pale man in a lab coat: Doctor Rhanjan Bharavi, a half-Charonite, half-Bronte surgeon who’d trained at the most famous medical school in the Alliance and was now determined to bring health to the colonies. Somewhere between his father’s age and his grandfather’s, Kisten guessed that the man must be motivated at least in part by his own experiences.

  “You’re from Dharavi, correct?” Kisten had read the man’s dossier.

  Bharavi nodded. “Compared to the place of my birth, this is nothing. I wake up to children screaming, jackals tearing apart corpses in the streets and the woman in the house next door wailing about how God has abandoned her, and feel as though I’ve died and gone to Paradise.”

  He led Kisten through the hospital, explaining as they went how he made things work in a city where nothing worked. The halls were as packed as the waiting room had been, dull-eyed and hopeless patients squatting on the floor or leaning against the wall. There was no central air and despite the chill wind blowing outside, the atmosphere was humid and close.

  “These are, for the most part, farmers and laborers. We can afford to treat them,” Bharavi admitted bluntly, “because we cut corners. On Brontes, a heart surgeon might do five surgeries a week. Here, each of ours does as many as four per day. By running the operating theatres from dawn till dusk, we save money. We order our supplies in bulk, like for a supermarket.” They passed into a broad bay, almost the size of a small airplane hangar and entirely filled with metal beds. Some had curtains for privacy, some did not. “As we cannot afford nurses, except for the most critical patients, relatives wishing to visit must first undergo a six-hour nursing course and are expected to change bandages and do other simple tasks—dispensing medication, that sort of thing.”

  Kisten was both amazed and horrified.

  From the bay, they entered what was clearly a different wing of the hospital: here, the patients had private rooms. Hope and fear had been replaced with the indifference of those who had no hope and, therefore, nothing to fear. Bharavi stopped. “It is very bad,” he warned Kisten.

  Kisten nodded.

  FIFTY-NINE

  She’d gone out for coffee with a friend, and he was bringing her home when she was attacked. At twenty-one, she still lived with her parents. She’d promised to be home by midnight and, when midnight came and went, they’d gotten concerned. Distrusting the local police, they’d appealed for help instead to the garrison. Their daughter’s date for the night was, after all, stationed there.

  They’d met the boy, and he seemed nice enough if shy. Traditionally, the Tarsoni had never segregated the sexes and her parents felt no qualms about letting their daughter spend time alone with him. They didn’t know how serious the friendship was, or even if her daughter and this boy were more than friends, but he’d emphasized his respectful intentions and the two had fun together. When they’d left, they’d been laughing.

  At twenty-three, he was a non-commissioned officer of middling rank too young to have combat experience. The youngest in a family of seven and the child of farmers, he’d enlisted to see the world and pay for university. He’d apparently cherished some hope of becoming a veterinarian. He’d befriended some sort of bushy-tailed arboreal rodent similar to the Bronte gilahri—Tarsonis was crawling with the things—and gotten some grief from his barracks-mates for being so soft.

  One of the perpetrators had been arrested and, according to his statement, he and his friends had ambushed the couple about a block from the coffee shop where they’d decided to stop.

  They’d grabbed the girl and, when her companion had tried to intervene, beaten him to death with an iron rod—but not before he’d broken the leg and severely damaged the eye of the man who was now in custody. He, too, had be
en left for dead by his fellow “Brothers.” The girl was raped repeatedly, both by the men and with the same iron rod. It was an L-shaped implement, according to military police, the type of thing used as a wheel jack handle. It had been inserted short end first and pulled out with such force that it ripped out her intestines, too.

  She’d fought viciously, biting and scratching her attackers. She was found some hours later, sprawled in the street and mercifully unconscious. A slip of paper had been pinned to her chest, scrawled with a single word: collaborator. Her name was Asta, but that was too hard on the Bronte tongue and so her friend had called her Asha, which meant hope.

  “These are…palliative measures.” The doctor spoke quietly, so as not to disturb her parents. “She cannot survive, but she can die in peace.”

  Asta’s small body was almost invisible under the hospital coverlet. Her breathing was steady, and her eyes were closed. Kisten had spoken with her parents, two staring, blank-faced people who hadn’t left her side since arriving at the hospital the night before. They weren’t political, their daughter wasn’t political, and they didn’t understand why this had happened.

  “She’s a sweet girl,” her father said numbly. “She wouldn’t harm a cricket.”

  He’d turned back to the bed, and Kisten had stepped out into the hall to give them some peace.

  Bharavi studied him with bright, perceptive eyes. “Do you have a family?”

  “Yes,” Kisten said shortly, surprised by the truth of his own statement.

  He let Bharavi walk him back to the lobby, and then he joined the man for coffee in a small shop obviously frequented by hospital staff and visitors.

  It was a shambles of a place with chipped tables and walls painted a putrescent aqua. The doctor said happily that Haldon reminded him of home except much cleaner, and Kisten wondered how it was possible for such dirt and want to exist in their supposedly civilized world. Coming here had been like traveling back in time. His friends on Brontes would hardly credit his descriptions; Kisten’s own colonial ancestors would have written off these conditions as medieval. But the coffee was good and the atmosphere was cheerfully noisy. Poor or not, the other patrons seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves.

  Doctor Bharavi told Kisten more about his view of the medical situation, detailing his and every hospital’s need for supplies and trained staff. Even in an empire as wealthy as the Alliance, resources, however vast, were still finite. Both in the capital and in the rural areas, where most Tarsoni actually lived, life was hard. The average life expectancy was just sixty-five. Too many people, especially children, died of preventable diseases. Until the infrastructure itself was fixed, bringing in supplies was a stopgap measure and nothing more.

  Kisten saw the problem clearly, he just wasn’t sure what to do about it. He wasn’t sure what to do about the violence, either. Growing up, he’d never seen any real cruelty. His father had hit his mother, of course, but rarely and never without good reason. She, in turn, had accepted his right to do so with mostly good humor; she was, in fact, the only person on earth who teased his father and got away with it. But more importantly, she loved his father and trusted him and Kisten knew that Rajesh would never hurt her—would die before he let anyone hurt her. Then again, unlike Solarians, evidently, Bronte did not consider the occasional slap hurt. For a woman or a man.

  And mostly his father’s punishments had been non-physical in form; once, he’d grounded his better half for failing to properly instruct the slaves in how to reorganize his closet. Kisten had been home on term break at the time, and recalled the episode producing more laughter than anything else. Still, his father expected his mother to obey him—just as Kisten expected Aria to obey him. But, Rajesh had once explained, years ago, women were entrusted to men and, thus, were not the owners of their fortunes and misfortunes. Men blamed women for failing to do certain things, when really they should blame themselves for not inspiring women to want to do these things.

  A man’s mistreatment of his consort was a betrayal of God’s trust in him—which was what Kisten had been taught and what he believed. The kind of violence he’d seen since coming to Tarsonis spoke of a hatred so profound as to defy containment. Women were convenient targets, because they couldn’t fight back. It was easy to blame the Alliance for all the problems on Tarsonis, and to make so-called collaborators a focus for that anger, despite the fact that most of them far predated Alliance involvement with the planet.

  Men like Awadh Zamindari accused Kisten of playing prognosticator, but there was more to his fear than, it happened there so it can happen here. His government was making the same mistakes it made on Charon II, and with the same results. Even the problem of headwear was similar. The violence, the protests, the minor rashes of seemingly unconnected violence, everything was the same. At least, this time, Kisten was in a position to do something—but he was still only one man, and one man could only do so much. Given the political situation at home, he didn’t know how much support he could count on. He had to prepare himself for the very real possibility that he’d be left out here to rot.

  He’d thought often, lately, of his conversations with Master Nagarjuna and what the old man would say if he were still alive. He knew Keshav was worried; as one of the assistant directors of the ISS, he had spies everywhere. He’d been a field agent himself for years, including in Dharavi. He and Kisten had their ways of communicating, and his intelligence had already proved invaluable. Men like Admiral Zamindari received much of the same information, but to no effect. No bodies could be produced, no statements recorded—therefore, it was bunk. Once again, the powers that be were ignoring anything even suggesting that things might be other than ideal and, while their backs were turned, the problem continued to grow.

  And then, once again, millions would be killed in the name of free trade.

  Kisten’s only real hope lay in the fact that, even though the roots of the conflict on Charon II long predated his grandmother, things didn’t pass the point of no return until he was almost twenty. If he could get the situation under control, he could still cut this off at the pass.

  Thinking about poor Asta made his stomach twist, but it wasn’t Asta who’d keep him up tonight. He’d looked at the still form in the bed and, selfishly, he’d seen Aria. And been afraid. The compound was well-guarded, but by a mere handful of men. There were fifty thousand of them, fifty million Tarsoni, and reinforcements were weeks away—at best.

  The nearest system was the Charon System. Even if he demanded help and received it immediately, immediately meant longer than they’d probably be able to hold out. They might be able to hold out for fourteen days, if granted a miracle—but they had no way of knowing, at least not yet, how many of the native troops were still loyal.

  He forced his attention back to the doctor, but his coffee had gone tasteless and he found that he couldn’t summon up much interest in the problems posed by bulk ordering heart valves.

  SIXTY

  Kisten threw himself into the oversized cordovan leather wingchair and wished he had a drink. The library was a pleasant enough space, and comfortably musty with old books. One half of the double doors had been propped open to admit a breeze. It was spring in Halstead—he thought. The air had a softness to it, and smelled of the mineral deposits in the lake.

  Ceres looked up from the book he’d been reading. Ceres was adept at the art of appearing to relax, but Kisten doubted that the old man ever slept. One of the slaves appeared with a drink, two fingers of dark green liquid in a cut crystal glass. Kisten accepted it gratefully, the first sip burning like fire down his throat. “Where’s Aria?” he inquired.

  Ceres shrugged. “How should I know? She’s your consort.”

  “She’s not in the house?”

  “The last I checked,” Ceres replied, “she’d traipsed off to the Hanafis’ bungalow for some ghastly sort of poetry recital.” His ignorance was an act; he knew where Aria, and everyone else in the house was. “She was with that fr
iend of hers,” he continued, “Lei of the unpronounceable name. They seem to have grown quite fond of each other. In any case, Lei was here yesterday advising her about the garden and then she served me something inedible for lunch. It was called poached egg.”

  Kisten laughed.

  “It came on some sort of odd little leavened muffin,” Ceres continued, “and was served with a bilious yellow sauce that tasted vaguely of grass. And she informs me that on Solaris this catastrophe of a dish is served with pig. Slices of pig! The Braxi, I gather, eat something similar—ill-advisedly. She and Lei were in the kitchen for hours, teaching the chef how to make it.”

  “It doesn’t sound that bad.”

  Ceres glared. “Wait until she serves it to you.”

  “With or without the pig?” Kisten’s tone was mild.

  “Moving on,” Ceres said, changing the subject, “as my sojourn on this pain planet can hardly be indefinite, as enjoyable as it’s been, I’ve taken the liberty of setting a date for this party. You,” he added, expression owlish, “certainly haven’t shown any signs of doing so, yourself.”

  “I don’t want a party.”

  “First,” replied Ceres, “it is a prince’s duty to entertain his people and, moreover, they expect to be entertained. A good carouse will do wonders for morale, inside the city and out, and it will certainly distract your restive subjects. Bread and circuses, and all that. Second, no one wants a prince who is impotent.”

  Kisten sat up straight, almost spitting out his drink. “What?” he managed.

  Ceres arched an eyebrow. “Considering that the celebration usually takes place within a day or two of the wedding, three weeks is a long wait. People will think you had difficulty completing the act. And if you refuse to have a party at all—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Perhaps I should compose a rhyme about erectile dysfunction for my toast.”