“Of that I am sure,” she said.
“So you will need to prepare yourself for some rude shocks and sudden drops.”
I watched her regather her forces and again I was sure that this was no delicate wisp. She might be pushed back by circumstance, but she would always rally and plow on once more. She rose and went to collect the tumbler, stepping lightly among the devices that had come out to siphon up the spilled liquid.
“Good,” I said. “Now, I wish to have a word with Prepostor Brist.” She waved her acquiescence, stooping to pick up the container. As she did so, I turned at the door and said, without stress, “Irmyrlene?”
But she did not turn and say, “Yes?” I saw that the three syllables carried no power. She sighed and straightened. “Never mind,” I said. “We will arrive when we arrive.”
I stood at the door and spoke quietly to my assistant. “Seek out any conflations of the names Irmyrlene and Broon.”
It replied instantly. “The local nexus is deficient. It scarcely records births and deaths, let alone any semblance of full information. I can tell you that Irmyrlene is a common name and that the Broons have been a numerous clan on Greighen Island since the antecession. They are further subdivided into several septs, each of which includes a score or more of different families. There are twelve persons registered who have both names and are of the client’s approximate age. If I had a birth date or an image, we would be on firmer ground, but even then, the whereabouts of most of the dozen prospects are not known.”
“They value privacy,” I said.
“To an extreme.”
I tried another tack. “What of the name Imrith?”
“Rare on Shannery, common on Ikkibal, especially among the higher ranks.”
I told it to combine Imrith with another Ikkibali name. The answer shed new light on the situation.
“Good,” I said again. “I believe we will clear away the fog tomorrow.”
I went out into the hallway where Brist had resumed his seat. His surveillance suite was watching the area, so he had opened a flask of punge and was sipping from it between taking bites of a roll filled with a spicy substance. “All is nominal,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for handling that situation so competently.”
He dismissed the matter with a shrug. “Easy enough when nobody wants to fight.”
“Do you know them?”
“They do not speak to us. I have seen the least of them, the servant who came with the young one,” he said. “He does business with Erghreaves the carrier. The others I have never seen.” He took another bite, chewed, then washed down the morsel with punge. I waited because I knew there was more to come. “But I would put a week’s stipend on the old one being the highman of the outfit.”
“The outfit being the Grange,” I said.
He made an affirmatory noise around his new mouthful.
“Would this Erghreaves know what goes on east of the Hedge?”
“He might.” Another piece of roll went to its destiny. “He might even be persuaded to say what he knows.” Lest there be any confusion in my mind, he made a motion involving his thumb and its nearest two neighbors that signified that money would be the most likely persuader.
“What about Prepostor-Corporal Hoop?” I said. “Would he know?”
Grondin Brist smiled the universal smile of the low-ranked policeman who has answered his last question from a civilian and said, “Now how would I know what a corporal might know?”
#
A painted board above the door of Tamp Erghreaves’s dockside establishment advertised: Shipments To All Points, Onworld and Offworld, Even Unto Destinations Unheard-Of.
“A comprehensive service,” I complimented the firm’s owner, whom I found inclined against the wall while seated in a tilted-back chair on the wooden porch outside his enterprise. He was filling his immediate surroundings with clouds of gray-blue exhaust from a disreputable instrument that depended from his beard-enfolded lips.
“You have something to send?” he said, squinting one eye at me.
“I would prefer to receive,” I said, and saw a glint of avarice appear in his unsquinting orb; it arrived so fast I knew that it could not have been far away.
“Receive what?” he said.
“Information.” I produced a small gem. “And I would prefer not to haggle.”
His chair’s front legs struck the porch a resounding thwack! Both eyes opened and the pipe came out of his mouth. “I see,” I said, “that I have secured your attention.”
He stood up. Being bandy-legged and encumbered by a heavy paunch that pulled him somewhat forward of the vertical, he did not gain much height by the change. His gaze swept over me. “You don’t look like one of them,” he said.
“Probably because I am not one of them,” I said. “And who might these ‘them’ be?”
“The ones who come looking for information,” he said. “They have a certain look about them.”
“A Razhaman look?” I said, pushing back the tip of my nose to enlarge my nostrils.
“Could be.”
“And what information do they seek, these Razhamans?”
He gave me a look that said we both knew the answer to my question. “Why, the secret of the cream.”
“And do you know the secret of the cream?” I said.
His eyes went back to the jewel and I saw him briefly tempted to lie, but then he shook off the urge as pointless. “No,” he said. “And I’ll tell you for free, nor does anyone else.”
“No one?” I said, producing a second stone.
“Just him,” he said, and I turned to follow his gaze. Behind me, down the street that descended from the town square, strode the raptor-faced father of the night before. Behind him came his large and capable servant, and bringing up the rear was Bars Hoop. The corporal wore the face of an officer who had a duty to perform and every intention of doing so. The older man came to a halt a pace or two away, his darting eyes having taken in me, Tamp Erghreaves, and the jewels before I could put them out of sight.
“There you see the scurrilous plan,” he said, over his shoulder to Bars Hoop while fixing me with a glare of cold contempt. “As I said, it is about the cream. The woman was to be the key to unlock the secret, through my credulous son. Having failed, this delinquent now seeks to suborn my shipper.”
I regarded the speaker with calm equanimity. “You are mistaken. I care nothing for your cream and its secret. My client has had her memory stolen from her—and I suspect you of being involved in that crime.”
I think he would have struck me. But the servant placed restraining fingers against his wrist until the older man had mastered himself again. The corporal had watched our exchange with interest, his face giving nothing away. Now he said, “We will repair to my office and disentangle the threads.” He spoke to his wrist. “Bring her in.”
I had left Hespira at the hotel, watched over by a second prepostor who had relieved Grondin Brist at daybreak. When I arrived at the Prepostory, she was waiting with her escort in the hall outside Hoop’s door. Again, the sight of the Razhaman dominee troubled her; I saw her struggling with the nothingness where memory should have been. The older man strode past her as if she did not exist. I took her arm and we all went into the corporal’s office.
Hoop took control of the situation. “No infraction has been committed,” he said, raising a hand to stay the Razhaman who had immediately started from his chair, protest on his lips. “But it is obvious that a breach of the peace is imminent unless the situation is resolved. I mean to resolve it.”
I kept my voice calm. “It is clear that my client has been deprived of her memories—” I began, but was cut off when the old man issued a harsh sound.
“Tchaa!” he said. “Farce and flannel!”
“Easy,” said the corporal, pushing at the air with his broad hand as if the motion could gently press the dominee back into his seat. Then to me he said, “No loss of memory has
been established. She could be feigning.”
Hespira made a small noise of protest to which I added, “I have tested her. The amnesia is real.”
“And who,” said the Razhaman, “has tested you? If ever I saw a jumped-up mountebank—”
“I assure you,” I said, “my credentials—”
We were both interrupted as Bars Hoop raised his voice. “Enough!”
The old man was not used to being talked to in such tones, but his retainer, standing behind his master’s chair, again exercised a calming effect via a slight pressure of fingertips on shoulder. We all subsided.
“Now,” said the corporal, “the document, if you please.”
The servant drew a small roll of some light-colored material from his pouch and stepped forward to spread it on the desk. I leaned forward to look and recognized it as a variant of the unalterable paper that was used for legal documents on many of the Ten Thousand Worlds. I read the several paragraphs of text that were indelibly entered beneath the shimmer of its surface.
The document was an agreement between an Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett, resident of Sandwynd, and the company known as the Grange. In it, in return for “substantial benefits received and herein acknowledged,” Broon-Paskett agreed to depart Greighen Island “and its surroundings on land and sea to a distance of not less than three hundred stads,” and not to return for the duration of the Grange’s operations. The terms of the agreement were enforceable by the justiciar of Sollom Province, the administrative division of Ballaraigh in which the island lay.
The old man’s sharp-pointed fingernail tapped that clause. “This empowers you to remove the woman,” he said to Bars Hoop. “I demand that you do so.”
Hoop regarded the Razhaman with an unsympathetic eye and he amended the dominee’s interpretation of the agreement. “Upon the issuance of an order from the justiciar,” he said. “Produce the order.”
I offered my own amendment. “And while you are about it, produce proof that my client is Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett.”
The Razhaman’s nostrils flared alarmingly. I took it that he had not spent much of his long life learning to control his anger. His finger stabbed at a spot farther down the page. “There is your proof!”
When he lifted his hand I saw that he had struck at a signature block that showed the autograph of Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett, in a rounded script. Beneath it, a thumb print had been indelibly affixed.
From inside his desk, the corporal brought out a small device that had a lens in its upper surface. He bade Hespira rise from her chair and put her thumb onto the polished surface. There came a flash of dark blue light, then an image of my client’s print appeared next to the one captured beneath the document’s shimmer. They were identical.
I heard Hespira’s sharp intake of breath. She stared at the evidence before her. “What is the name again?” she said. She read it from the document, silently mouthing the syllables.
The old Razhaman’s lips made a fricative sound of contempt and dismissal. My client turned to him and said, “Who am I to you? Why did you want me to go? Was it because of your son?”
He would not return her gaze. “You are nothing to me,” he said, “but a nuisance and a reproach to the honor of my house.” He spoke to Bars Hoop. “Will you now enforce the agreement?”
The corporal was wearing his duty face again. “Produce an order, and I will obey it.”
“You will have your order!” the old man snapped, and now he gave my client and me a last withering look. “You,” he said to Hespira, “will not collect another scintal from me. And you,”—it was my turn—“can go back to Razham and tell your masters they have failed again.”
He had expected those to be his parting words—I had come to understand that Razhamans had a love of drama in their comings and goings—but as his hand reached for the document on the desk, I scooped it up and examined it closely.
“This,” I said, “is an agreement between my client—for I accept the identification—and something called the Grange. Your name, whatever it is, does not appear on it.”
He snatched for it, but I withdrew it beyond his reach. The servant began to move forward, but Bars Hoop spoke a single syllable and the man stopped.
“What he says is true,” said the corporal. “How do we know this agreement has anything to do with you?”
“This is insupportable!” the Razhaman snapped.
“Still,” said Hoop, “if you come to the Prepostory seeking our help, you are required to identify yourself. I do not know your name.”
The old man struggled to master himself. “My name,” he said, “is for my peers.”
Hoop’s russet brows rose. “And we are not numbered among your peers?”
The old man’s only reply was the sound of his breath rushing in and out of his wide nostrils.
“I remind you,” said the corporal, “that Shannery was settled by our ancestors, who chafed sore within the strictures of Ikkibali ranks and precedences. While you stand on our soil, we are all your peers.”
The Razhaman turned to me. “Give me,” he said, “my document.”
I handed it to him. He passed it to his retainer as if it had become soiled since he had last held it. Both of them left with neither a word nor a rearward glance.
Hoop regarded Hespira and me in silence for an extended moment. “The nexus will have information on Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett,” he said, then added, “though probably not much. Broons are not such as to let others know their business.”
#
He was right, as I found when we returned to the Orban House and I closeted myself with my assistant, asking my client to wait in her room while we queried the island’s nexus. I suggested that she might ask the hotel’s integrator to provide her with background on the Broon clan, since it was now indisputable that she was Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett.
“Don’t call me by that name,” she said. “It is not mine.”
“It was yours.”
“That is as may be. But whoever Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett was, she is not the me that I am now. And I do not think that I want to be her.”
“Then who will you be?” I said.
“I do not know. Not yet. But that is up to me to decide.”
An argument against her position occurred to me, but I saw no point in advancing it. I left her and returned to my room and my work.
“I can tell you,” the integrator said, when we were alone, “that as of ten years ago there was a reference to a person named who now would be roughly the same age as our client. She was the product of a union between two Broons, one of them a Paskett, the other a Minderhowth. The liaison did not last and neither parent claimed the offspring. The clan elders sent the girl to be raised by cousins who had a small holding near Sandwynd. They raised firhogs, selling the meat and hides to a local factor.”
“Is that all?” I said.
“Amazingly, yes,” it said. “However, I can add a conjecture based on a few other scraps of information.”
“Do so.”
“It seems that Irmyrlene was not happy with her placement. As soon as she was old enough, she left the cousins and sought paid employment on various farms across the island. She never stayed long in any one situation. The local word that might best describe her temperament is ‘stroppy.’ Then the Grange arrived and bought up many of the farms and feedlots for high prices. Those who were lucky enough to have land to sell took their windfalls and departed for regions where life is easier, abandoning their laborers. A few of the latter were offered menial employment serving the new owner. Irmyrlene Broon-Paskett was one of these.”
“What about the Grange’s records? What can you glean from their web?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” I said. “I thought I built you better than that.”
“I can glean nothing because there is no web to winnow through,” my assistant said. “The Grange has no access at all to any connectivity. It is entirely self-contained.”
A ch
ill went through me. The only people I had ever found living unconnected had been practitioners of magic. And sympathetic association was the last complication I wanted to appear in this discrimination, especially when I was close to resolving it.
But my assistant assuaged my apprehension. “I detect no signs of magic,” it said. “The Grange is unconnected because its owner wishes it to be proof against inquiry.”
“He has a secret to protect,” I said.
“Indeed.”
“The secret of the singular cream.”
“And perhaps others. He would not reveal even his name.”
I steepled my fingers and touched them to my pursed lips, as I was wont to do when thinking. “Hypothesis,” I said. “Hespira—or Irmyrlene, as she was then—learned something she should not have, possibly to do with the mysterious cream. We know she recognized the odor of it. She was induced to leave the Grange’s territory, being paid ‘substantial benefits’ and also likely being threatened with unpleasant consequences not recorded in the agreement she signed. Once she was at Wathers, safely distant from the Grange, she was set upon by its minions, who had followed her. They seized her and stole her memory, thus making sure that the secret would not be revealed.”
“The hypothesis is tenable,” said my assistant, “but not strong.”
“Indeed,” I agreed. “The plucking away of memory seems an unnecessarily mild-mannered solution to the Grange’s problem, considering the old man’s shortness of temper. He could far more easily have had her killed. The man with him certainly looked capable and not the type to question the order.”
“I concur,” said the integrator. “There was no hesitation in dealing harshly with Chumblot on Ikkibal nor with Big Tooth at Wathers. Why would they piddlepeddle about with a troublesome farm girl?”
“Unless,” I said, “the matters are not related.”
“There is no evidence to indicate that.”
“But there are gaps in the evidence. The old man’s retainer could have been the fellow who ‘dealt expeditiously’ with an attempted robbery at Wathers, but who was the woman? And the man who shadowed us at Razham, and presumably did for Chumblot, has also not reappeared.”
Hespira Page 19
