Divine Right

by C. J. Cherryh

  "What about lunch, m'ser. Shall I have the kitchen wait lunch for you?''

  Houses were bound to their servants, just as servants were bound to the house. Richard had to stop where he could see the stairs that led, ultimately, to the sanctuary of his office. "No, Ashe, I don't know when I'll be back—"

  "Is something wrong, m'ser. . . ?"

  "No, Ashe, nothing's wrong. Nothing."

  Richard hurried toward the St. John stairs without having convinced either himself or Ashe. He stopped when Kamat was out of sight and did his best to make himself presentable: refolding the pleats of his sleeves, mopping his face with soft linen. He wasn't a believing Revenantist—he didn't know anyone, including the cardinals, who was—but he was a behaving one, and if you behaved long enough, believing didn't matter.

  On the other hand, eventually all karmic anxiety gave way to fatalism: what would be, would be. Every act contained all its consequences. Each man's stream flowed toward the sea, and it was best not to swim upstream. What would happen had already been spun out by karma's wheel. There was no use worrying. There was nothing that m'ser Vega Boregy could do to Richard in person that he couldn't do just as easily from afar.

  Richard's breath steadied. He crossed the bridge to Boregy's island with a firm, resolute stride and gave his name to the doormaster. The woman glanced at the appointment register.

  "We're a bit behind today, m'ser Kamat," she grimaced. "What with m'sera Cassie, you know."

  In point of fact, Richard did not know, but he was heartened that Boregy's servants would think he did. The ramrod doormaster ushered him into the dim library where, until his eyes adjusted, Richard thought he was alone.

  "Did you get rid of the bitch?"

  Richard was on his feet, fists made, peering into the darkest corner.

  "My humblest apologies, m'ser. I mistook you for someone else."

  Confounded by what he saw, Richard's mind filled with irrelevancies. Revenantism, he realized, was a winter religion. How else to explain the high boots, puffed vests, and embroidered collars? A cardinal or a professor at the College might strip down to cham-brys— Family dignity was, after all, deeper than religion. But the sweaty pear-shaped man was only a deacon, and his careful enunciation couldn't quite conceal his canalside origins. All he had, everything he hoped to be, was woven into those garments; he dared not remove them, even though, in this weather, they made him look like a melting art-candle.

  Richard relaxed, and grew instantly curious. Deacons were useful creatures, but hardly the sort of folk he expected to find taking up space in Boregy's library. Moreover, who was the bitch and who had he been mistaken for? "My apologies, per. I was lost in my own thoughts. I had a ten o'clock meeting with m'ser Boregy. Now . . ." He frowned with his best co-conspiratorial concern. "They said m'sera Cassie. ..." Not that any low-College functionary was likely to call Casseopeia Boregy a bitch.

  On cue the deacon leaned forward in his chair. "The baby's whole, unmarked, and healthy," he confided, which was news enough to Richard who had not heard that the widely-discussed pregnancy had finally come to its conclusion. "What more do they need? The cardinal told them that karma was vindicated—and that there was no need for that Nev Heretic to remain."

  "Her husband?" Richard asked. The only other Nev Hetteker he knew with connections to Boregy was Tom.

  The deacon's face puckered sourly. "Doctor Danielle Lambert, Nev Heretic Obstetrics and Lying-In, with her tool chest full of glass, metal, and plastic."

  Richard suppressed a sad grin: as far as the College was concerned, no good, not even the saving of innocent lives, could come from such unnatural technology as plastic. He knew who the bitch had to be. "Everyone was very worried about Cassie. I'm sure m'ser Vega only did what he did through a father's natural worry—"

  "The Angel Himself watches over m'sera Casseo-peia. He has given her great work to do. M'ser Boregy would do better to worry about his own karma if he can't see that for himself." The bloated little man was full of the self-righteousness of those who will never be heard or obeyed.

  There were two windows in the library. Both were wide open, but they caught none of the morning's wind—only the stench of tangle-lily rising from the canal. The air was as heavy as the fried food churning slowly through Richard's stomach and, quite suddenly, he knew he'd better sit down.

  The deacon misinterpreted both the gesture and the grimace that spread across Richard's face. Belatedly he realized that he might be speaking to someone of importance. "I'm Bryan Neil, Cardinal Ito Boregy's amanuensis," he stressed his own insignificance. "I was with the cardinal when m'ser Vega sent word that m'sera Cassie was delirious. We came shortly before dawn. They've been together in the chapel since then."

  A war began in Richard's gut. The first volley was fire, the second was a crab with claws that pulled and twisted. He hid one hand behind the other, massaging the spasm, and tried to concentrate on the deacon's nonsense.

  He'd been to one of Cassie's carefully-staged oracles, and been repelled rather than awed. Kamat knew deathangel addiction when he saw it, because he'd seen it every night in the family dining room, staring out of his mother's eyes. No man, or god, had the right to destroy a soul as deathangel did. If the Angel of Merovingen spoke through deathangel, then Richard would prefer to rot in a Sharrist hell. Twice he'd sent Andromeda out of the city, but both times when she'd returned to the house, she'd returned to the drug as well. In the end he'd turned to the College for help.

  "Did the cardinal bring the dysmutase?" e Bryan Neil turned white and swabbed his face with a scented handkerchief. He still didn't recognize Richard, but he'd begun to realize he wasn't orating at another secretary. Deathangel toxin wasn't, strictly speaking, illegal—but addiction to the toxin was illegal, sinful, and usually fatal. Officially, the College held that deathangel addiction was its own reward-just like karma—and equally irreversible. Officially. Unofficially, more than one cardinal had succumbed to the drug's recreational temptations, and so the College brewed up a cure for its afflicted brethren: dysmutase.

  They extended the cure, for a price, to that segment of Merovingen whose discretion could be trusted absolutely. The rest of the city barely suspected the enzyme's existence. To mention it out loud, as Richard had done, was a naked declaration of highest privilege and status.

  "No. Cassie fits the cardinal's plan. The deathangel is a means to an end. The child is healthy—karma— everybody's karma: Cassie's karma, the cardinal's karma, all Boregy's karma, everybody's karma—is served by what Cassie can do. But Vega's fallen prey to Adventist heresy, first with a Nev Hettek contract for her, now with that damned obstetrician and her mechanic friends. . . .

  "The girl herself understands."

  The agony in Richard's gut subsided to a persistent ache. He tried to stay perfectly still, fearing that any movement would restart the battle, and knowing that if he felt better he'd throttle the sanctimonious little prig.

  He'd never cared for Boregy's Heiress. She was pretty enough. She knew everything that she was supposed to know, and not an iota more. As exasperated as Richard could get with Marina, he'd rather have a dozen lively women like his sister under his roof than one decorative, obedient female like Cassie. He imagined Marina in Cassie's place and a shiver shot up his back.

  "More power to m'ser Vega, then, if he's the only one who values Cassie's life and sanity. And if it takes a Nev Hettek doctor, then more power to her, too. Have you ever seen what deathangel can do to a person, Bryan Neil?" Richard leaned over his folded arms. Pain added extra intensity to his expression. "Maybe it is a miracle that the child's not addicted, too, but if it'd been left to me, I wouldn't have taken the risk. No addiction. No baby."

  "That's heresy, m'ser."

  Richard was in no mood or condition to be lectured by a fat, sweaty deacon who rolled his R's. "That's the right of the head of Kamat or any other House to preserve and protect itself. A man's House is his castle. Our right; our karma. No College and no h
eresy."

  Neil reassessed the situation: so this was Richard Kamat, the young turk whose stock was rising fast and whose name had reached the inner sanctums of the College itself. He didn't seem particularly impressive at that moment, in fact, he looked a bit like a man with a deathangel problem himself. The deacon saw an opportunity that might never pass his way again.

  At the cardinal's insistence, Boregy had opened its salon to the better class of true believers during Cassie's labor. Neil and others had been there leading prayers, holding hands, taking attendence. Marina Kamat had been there from the beginning; the House staff said she'd been alone with Cassie earlier in the evening, before all the excitement began. But she wasn't there when word came that the baby girl was whole and living, and she hadn't joined in any of the prayers.

  No one thought anything of it. Marina was pregnant herself, and brooding women—especially brooding women who didn't seem to have a lover or a contract-were notoriously hysterical. Neil's talent—the sole reason Ito Boregy had lifted him out of the gutters and sponsored him to the lowest level of the hierarchy-was an innate ability to transform circumstance into scandal.

  "And does your sister feel the same way? About deathangel and abortion?"

  Kamat's outrage was boundless—notwithstanding that he didn't know where his sister had been any night since Sunday. A volcano erupted in his stomach. An earthquake tore through his gut. He wanted to crush the deacon's neck with his bare hands until the viper's tongue turned black and his eyes bulged out of their sockets. And he would have, had there not been something that he absolutely had to do first.

  With a growl Richard bolted from the library.

  The founders had left Merovin with legends of star-travel, of worlds beyond imagination, and of technology that lifted mankind above bodily needs. Schematic drawings for self-contained organic recyclers, molecular incinerators, and flush toilets were still preserved in the College library, but the best anyone in Merovingen could hope for was an oubliette with a bright porcelain bucket or, more likely, a malodorous shaft descending straight to the canals.

  Every house had dozens of them, and there was sure to be one within dashing distance of the library, but Boregy, like Kamat, took great care that the little rooms did not advertise their presence. Richard scanned the paneling, looking for a latch, a knob, a handle—anything before it became too late.

  The world was turning gray and he swallowed bile before he spotted the one piece of molding that stood apart from the rest. He lifted the dog's leg and slammed the door behind him. The worst was over before he found the oil lamp and the hand sparker lying beside it. On the second try he got the lamp lit and was completely dismayed by the sight revealed in the mirror. He looked like a student after his first flask of Suvalen whiskey—except Richard's stomach had never betrayed him so thoroughly while he was at college.

  And neither had Marina.

  It was not quite unthinkable that his sister would have brought an abortificant to Boregy. Doctor Jonathan's simple cautions that a pregnant woman should avoid recreational drugs had grown like the tangle-lilies. Marina had become a fanatic about her own diet and a crusader against deathangel since the beginning of the summer . . . And she'd been to every one of Cassie's public performances.

  Richard had been reduced to the dry heaves by the time he'd convinced himself that Marina could not have actually done anything. He stripped to the waist, then sponged off in the basin to reconstruct his appearance and his nerves. He hoped to slip out of the house unnoticed, but there was an unfamiliar face staring at him as he opened the door.

  "You had another five minutes before I called someone to break down the door," she greeted him. "You gave the cardinal's pet quite a scare."

  "M'sera Lambert?" Richard guessed from her accent and her manner that she was the Nev Hettek physician Deacon Neil had described so unfavorably.

  She frowned slightly. "Doctor Lambert, thank you. I've been asked to make certain you're not contagious or apt to die before you leave Boregy."

  Richard shrank in his shoes. "It wasn't anything. I'll leave my apologies for m'ser Vega and just go home. You don't need to bother."

  "I'll be the judge of that. We're both guests here, and proprieties are so very important in Merovingen, aren't they?"

  The deacon would hardly have gone running to the Nev Hettek doctor on his own. He'd have gone to the House servants, or perhaps the cardinal. Either way, Vega Boregy would have been told that Richard was indisposed in the library oubliette. Doubtless Dr. Lambert knew exactly who he was. There was no point in arguing and he followed her meekly up the stairs.

  They stopped in Cassie's sitting room—judging by the adolescent frills and thick piles of absorbent cloths. The doctor produced a leather satchel not unlike Richard's and studied him as if he were a dissection specimen. Richard remembered that she'd been brought here for Cassie.

  "For your sake," she said with a touch of wry humor, "I certainly hope you're right. I haven't given a medical examination to a man in a good, long time. Off with your shirt."

  Danielle Lambert chose her words carefully. She was no stranger to men's bodies, though she'd had little cause to examine them in her professional capacity. Under different circumstances she might have been tempted to set her duties aside. Richard Kamat, stripped to his skivvies, had nothing to be ashamed of. He was a good ten years younger than she, but that in itself wouldn't have been enough to deter her. In the end she turned away and told him to get dressed.

  Richard obeyed as he had obeyed her other commands. For a moment, while she had the horn against his chest, he'd feared that things were about to get out of hand; he was just as glad that they hadn't. There was something about her—something that reminded him of Tom Mondragon. They were both from Nev Hettek. Richard didn't know many people from up-river, but it was odd that she didn't remind him at all of his mother.

  "You'll live," she said with her back still turned. "No thanks to your breakfast, though. If you don't want to wind up like half the men in this city, eat your fish broiled—not fried, and not smothered in cream sauces."

  "I have it plain . . . sometimes." He tried to remember the last time he had.

  "And I'll bet there's someone in your house right now with his foot on a pillow. How much brandy do you drink each night? One glass? Two glasses? Half a bottle?"

  Richard buttoned his shirt and masked his discomfort. Both his father and his uncle Patrik suffered from gout; it was one of those things a man of a certain position had to expect. As for the brandy ... He found himself in sympathy with the deacon. Merovingen physicians—House physicians—healed their patients; they didn't lecture them. He headed for the door.

  "Ser Vega wants to see you before you go."

  "How do I get there from here?" He turned around for the instructions.

  She told him which corridors to take, then, while she still had his attention repeated her warnings. "You're a young man, ser Kamat, don't waste what you've got."

  He reassured her as he would have mollified his mother, and with about as much sincerity. He told himself he wouldn't remember a thing she'd said, and knew that meant he'd be unable to forget.

  Vega Boregy's private office was larger than Richard's. The younger man had been duly awed the first few times he'd been admitted to Boregy's inner sanctum, but after a dozen or more visits he understood the carefully constructed drama and was unmoved by it. He ignored the leather chairs that looked so comfortable and guaranteed he would be looking up whenever he looked at Vega, and towed a rail-back chair from the corner by the door instead.

  A mechanical fan kept a breeze circulating though nothing could completely purge the reek of tangle-lily from the air. For a moment Richard thought his stomach was going to churn again, then when he passed Vega the financial report he calmed down.

  Richard Kamat might never learn the intricacies of intrigue. He might never be able to meet the Vegas, Anastasis and Tom Mondragons of the world on their own grounds, but he was very g
ood at what he did. The Samurai were efficient. They weren't profitable yet, but he hadn't intended them to be. They were right where they were supposed to be and Richard knew that no other man could have done better.

  Vega Boregy grunted his confirmation as he scanned the columns of figures and paragraphs of analysis. ' 'You're right on target, Richard.'' He squared the paper and put it on a shelf behind him. "Now, in your own words, what next?"

  Clearing his throat and sitting erect in the chair, Richard began his recitation. It was like being in college again—but what Vega taught couldn't be learned for any price in the Revenantist College. The young man unveiled his plans and measured their wisdom by the minute changes in his mentor's expression. He described his encounter with Martushev; his hopes for assignments in the private warehouses; the dyes Kamat was developing which were proof against the most common forgeries. Vega smiled and nodded.

  "We've double-hired some customs clerks—"

  Boregy shot up in his chair. "Who's we?"

  Not why put clerks on the Samurai payroll without taking them off the customs payroll. Not what did he hope to accomplish by such subterfuge. Not even when had he done it. Richard gave himself a passing mark for attention and a second one for covering his tracks.

  "You and I, acting on behalf of all the subscribers."

  "Just you, then, making the decisions, no one else? No one on the roll or off?"

  Everyone knew that a heartbeat could make all the difference in a duel. Vega had taught Richard that the same rules applied in trade. Now Richard applied those rules. He lied, not fully understanding why it was necessary to lie, and assured his mentor that he was working absolutely alone.

  "You know, Richard, what's going to make the difference between the Samurai and the blacklegs is how clean they are. Your men have got to be clean down to their soles. It's a very delicate situation there at the Customs House—making certain that everything goes where it's supposed to go. Not every man understands where something's supposed to go . . ."