by L D Inman
“What’s the time?” He cleared his throat. “What’s the news?”
“No change in the standoff,” she told him. She put down her book and her wineglass and lifted the cover off his dish: savory biscuits, a half-consumed boule of spreadable cheese, and grapes, frozen till a few hours ago and now betraying soft wrinkles. “Alsburg is due back in another half hour. Some numbers are coming in from the impact site, and Wernhier has a comprehensive evaluation of our aerial forces when you’re ready for it.”
“Yes.” He accepted the glass of wine she poured him. “Any change on the domestic front?”
“People are calming down,” Ingrid said. “I have met with Seneschal Didmer and Commander Falkras; the House Alliance and the Estuary Guard are well in hand. Provost Vincent has responded with commendable alacrity to my invitation to come to Bernhelm; and Master Helder is already traveling here from Marhaim. If you direct me to, I will call a meeting of the Executive Committee when they are all here.”
“Do so.” Du Rau spread a generous pat of cheese on a biscuit and took a bite.
“Certainly, my lord. Shall I serve as your representative at the meeting, or do you want to attend yourself?”
“I think that will depend on where we are militarily in the next two days. In the meantime, I will put you on record as my executive officer for domestic affairs and let you handle the details. You can entertain me between Alsburg’s briefings with descriptions of the House Alliance’s howls.”
“More whimpers at present,” Ingrid said with a smile. “Herval’s death has rocked them badly. I think they will not gainsay you—or me. The Estuary Guard has proven remarkably loyal, Reynard tells me, and the Alliance know better than to move without their support.”
Du Rau was quietly gratified to hear further confirmation that the Estuary Guard had stuck with him, instead of flocking to one of the highborn military who had risen in their ranks as he had. “I must give them a suitable commendation,” he told Ingrid. “Are you sorry you left your House to marry a rag-tailed general?”
He asked Ingrid this question from time to time, making light of her father’s dismissive description of him all those years ago; it had become a sort of ritual between them.
“Not as sorry as my House is to lose me,” Ingrid replied, as she always did. In this quiet hour, the question and answer held a somber tinge, humor reflecting itself in ice: all that he had done, he had done to make his country safe and stable, and now…. They smiled sadly at one another and lifted their glasses for a silent pledge.
Du Rau made short work of his meal, then retired to his and Ingrid’s private rooms to wash his face and change. On his way back to his office on the floor above, he paused on the landing to look out at the palace square.
The first hard frost had fallen on Bernhelm, and in the pre-dawn light du Rau could see the gathering of rime on the windows of the Lantern Tower. Just in view from this side of it, he could see the outline of Barklay’s corpse hanging still and stiff; below him, the frozen ashes of Barklay’s soldiers were already half-blown away by the frigid wind that had come and gone. The heat of his anger, too, had passed: his chosen course would now be sustained by cool arithmetic.
The early morning was indeed full of numbers: numbers of dead at Vardray Reservoir, numbers of people needing to cut their water rations, numbers of scudders shot down, numbers of men landed, numbers needed for aerial support. Alsburg came with his briefing; then he came again. Du Rau worked on, triaging battle plans, approving organization for volunteer emergency personnel in Bernhelm city, conferring with Wernhier and Guiscard…. Reynard was running back and forth, maintaining security in the palace and supporting the Estuary Guard in keeping order outside of it—he would have to see that Reynard got some rest soon—
Alsburg was back in his doorway. Du Rau glanced at the clock—it wasn’t yet the top of the hour. “Yes, Alsburg?”
“My lord…there’s a bit of a quandary in the comms room. A Verlaker has contacted us on an open line, asking to speak to you.”
“Is it surrender?”
“Ah…it doesn’t sound like it. He made some reference to Section 4 in the international code, but other than that all he will say is that he wants to speak to Lord Bernhelm. He’s been kicked up the ladder several times and he won’t say anything else.”
“Can’t they handle it?” du Rau said impatiently, hardly looking up. “It’s not Lord Commander Selkirk, is it?”
“No, my lord. I don’t think it’s anyone in the Verlaker Central Command. He calls himself—” Alsburg glanced at a scrap of paper in his hand— “Admiral Douglas.”
Du Rau gave a sigh. “Tell them to handle it. I’m not interested in any parley that isn’t about Verlac’s surrender.” But as Alsburg retreated and turned to go, du Rau’s head came up. “Wait. What did you say his name was?”
Alsburg consulted the paper again. “Admiral Walter Hale Douglas.”
Ask Douglas, Ahrens had said. “And where does his signal originate?”
“I would have to ask, my lord.”
Du Rau gestured; Alsburg darted out. He was back in a moment. “The signal comes via Estuary Province Tower Five and Ilona Central Station Two, origin Ryswyck One.”
“It’s a plague of Ryswyckians,” du Rau muttered, and to Alsburg, “Put him through. I could use some entertainment.”
As he waited for the signal to be put through, du Rau glanced at the hilt of Barklay’s combat knife, still peeking from the napkin on his desk where Ingrid had laid it. Then the projection flicked up, and revealed a young man in Verlac army black blinking calmly back at him. Du Rau supposed at first the boy was there to hold the admiral’s place until contact was made; but then he saw that the insignia on the epaulets of his black tunic were not properly army insignia at all.
Still, it wouldn’t do to give up a potential advantage. “I’m told there is an Admiral Douglas who wants to speak with me.”
Either the young man didn’t know the bait was there, or he was very skilled in not rising to it. “I’m Admiral Douglas,” he answered, unoffended. “Are you Lord Bernhelm?”
For answer du Rau opened one hand, in range of the projection pickup field. “I will spare you a moment of my attention. What did you want to say to me?”
“I wish to invoke Section 4 of the international general military code,” Douglas began, in an educated accent that did not wholly conceal its brambly rural origins. Du Rau thought he might even be able to place the district, if he listened carefully. Somewhere north of Killness Pass, certainly.
“The section dealing with prisoner exchange,” du Rau said.
“Prisoner and dead exchange, sir. Under those guidelines I request that General Barklay’s remains be returned to Ilona, to be buried at Ryswyck.”
There was a long silence. Du Rau sat very still and stared at the young man’s bland expression. Then he sighed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Tell me…Admiral,” he said. “Does Thaddeys Barklay teach all his students such prodigious gall, or does he merely recruit them for it?”
“I can only suppose it’s a little of both, sir,” Douglas answered, seriously—and possibly, du Rau thought, with a touch of irony. Though it was hard to tell.
“And who,” du Rau went on, “are you, that you ask Bernhelm for such a thing?”
“I’m the commander of the installation at Ryswyck Academy, sir.”
“So Barklay left you in charge.”
“Lord Commander Selkirk put me in charge here, sir,” Douglas said.
“Didn’t he have anyone older?” du Rau asked dryly.
A faint smile touched the young admiral’s lips. “I believe he thought this the best use of me, sir.”
This, more than anything else, assured du Rau that Alban Selkirk was listening to this conversation. Therefore he had approved the request, or at least, approved Douglas making it.
“Lord Selkirk certainly makes interesting uses of General Barklay’s students,” du Rau said. “Why, he sent a
weapons engineer to support General Barklay in his fool’s errand on this side of the strait. It seems odd to waste the talent and potential of a young man like Captain Ahrens. Especially since he had already contributed significantly to your little missile project. Incidentally, Admiral Douglas, under what section of the international code would we locate the use of biological weapons? Captain Ahrens did seem to have some misgivings about that.” Du Rau was watching Douglas as he spoke: the young man’s expression did not change, but he grew pale, and indefinably quieter as du Rau went on.
“Mind you,” he continued, “I don’t know for sure if a biological warhead is active and ready to launch at one of my people’s reservoirs, but it doesn’t do to trust to the honor of one’s enemy, does it? Not even if they send earnest and courteous youths to give one fair warning.”
“Captain Ahrens seems to have been remarkably confiding in his conversation with you, Lord Bernhelm,” Admiral Douglas said coolly.
“He had very little choice, at the end,” du Rau said. This got only the faintest of blinks in response, but du Rau suspected he had finally angered the boy. Still, the answer Douglas gave was steady.
“Then, may be I should be asking you for Captain Ahrens’s remains as well.”
“You are welcome to come to Bernhelm and run your finger about the corners of the palace square for some of his dust.”
“That is very generous of you, sir,” Douglas said. “I will settle for taking delivery of General Barklay’s body so I may bury him at Ryswyck.”
Unmitigated gall. “Would you accept a battalion of my troops at Ryswyck instead?”
“Well, I do have some of your troops already,” Douglas said. “Not quite a battalion, and not in very good shape, but we’ve converted the training floor to an infirmary to accommodate them.”
Du Rau had abruptly had enough. “You are wasting your time, Admiral Douglas. I won’t allow you to waste any more of mine. Unless you are prepared to offer me Verlac’s surrender, we have nothing more to discuss. Good day to you. Bernhelm out.”
He cut the projection and sat still for a moment. Then his eye lit once again on the covered knife. He reached to draw it out, let the morning light and the lamplight race together across the blade. With deliberate movements, he opened the cleaning wipe Ingrid had brought with it, and carefully wiped the knife clean of the dried smears of blood. When it was clean to his satisfaction, he disposed of the soiled wipe and rose to his feet, turning the blade once more to catch the light.
Then, swiftly, fiercely, he drove it down into the hard wood of his desk, and let it stand there, blurring with the force like a tuning fork as he left the room.
10
“Well,” said Lord Selkirk, “that went about as expected.”
Douglas was scarcely listening. He stared through Selkirk’s image where it had flicked up to replace Lord Bernhelm’s, thinking furiously—thinking and furious. You always know what you feel and think, Speir had said enviously—but Speir also knew unerringly what Douglas felt and thought. He wished Speir were here; he felt alone in his own head.
“He’s going to call back,” Douglas heard himself say.
Selkirk gave a longsuffering sigh. “I was about to ask if you were satisfied, but I have my answer, so never mind. I think it is much more likely that the next half hour will see a massive force of scudders gathering for full attack.”
“Can’t be that massive,” Douglas answered. “Speir and the force at Colmhaven took out at least fifty of them before icefall arrived. And nothing has changed.”
“Nothing,” Selkirk said, “except that you’ve now made du Rau angry.”
“Did you not enjoy seeing him struck speechless?” Douglas said, bringing his gaze to focus at last on his commander. “Yes, I made him angry. I meant to. He’s going to call me back. You’ll gate him through to me, I trust, my lord.”
There was a brief second of deadly silence. Then Selkirk said: “Douglas. Do not push me.”
Douglas’s anger rose. “You did not tell me, my lord,” he said, “that Captain Ahrens had joined Barklay’s mission.”
Selkirk was not afraid to meet the challenge of Douglas’s gaze. “It was not your business to know.”
“It became my business when you gave me leave to call Bernhelm.”
Selkirk flushed. “Captain Ahrens,” he said, “found out that Barklay was running a mission across the strait. He came to Central Command and insisted on being added to it. Against my better judgment I did so. It’s just as well, considering the event, that he wasn’t working on any part of the project that could tell du Rau where those missiles are. Isn’t it?”
“And are we raising a biological threat against Berenian civilians?”
“If he’s going to put a sword to our throat,” Selkirk said, in a dead-even voice Douglas recognized, “he’s going to feel one at his.”
“And that’s why you didn’t bother to finish Commander Jarrow off,” Douglas said. “The whole mission was a misdirection to begin with.”
There was another silence; longer this time.
“If you’re quite finished, Admiral Douglas,” Selkirk said, “I do have a little bit of work to do today.”
Douglas felt his anger hardening, like ice. “I am much obliged to you for your time, my lord.”
“Try not to forget it. Selkirk out.”
Douglas got up abruptly from his chair. This was still Barklay’s office; the chair remembered Barklay’s backside, not his; open doors and open drapes could only do so much. He went out, and out of the general office into the main hall, and pushed into the cloister, working up the long strides that he used to cross fells and fields at home. His steps took him to the arena complex; as soon as he opened the door to the training room he was met by a miasma of warm, moist air laden with the stench of old mud and vomit and saturated with sobbing cries. Cots were laid out in neat rows, and a shift of cadets were attending their occupants with grim faces. Douglas found Captain Wallis hunched over a supply trolley, stabbing feebly at a tablet with his stylus.
“We’re running out of serum at an alarming rate,” he reported. “I’m going to have to start cutting doses if we’re going to treat these soldiers at all.” Wallis was a professional as well as a Ryswyckian: he spoke as if it were settled that the Berenians in this room would be given the best treatment available, though Douglas knew it was not uniformly settled in everyone’s minds. It was just as well, he thought, that most of the Ilonians had been found first. Barklay would have drawn them to that commitment as easily as breathing—or he would have, before the scandal had bit deep into Ryswyck’s morale. There was no telling how it would be if Barklay were here now. The only thing Douglas knew to do was set an example; and he felt himself a feeble example at that. What did he possess in himself, to set against that image of Barklay stripped and suspended?
Douglas found himself standing beside the cot of a Berenian infantryman. He was breathing shallowly against pain, his good hand twisted whitely in the blanket that covered him. As Douglas watched, the man’s gaze depolarized and focused on him: mere revulsion came into his face, and he would have recoiled if he had had the strength.
Douglas had nothing to set against that, either. He thought of Barklay and the man he had tried to save at Solham Fray. That shared gaze had led, inevitably, to this one; and what had been resolved in those twenty years? Vision was not enough. It was only a place to start from.
“I see you,” Douglas said to the Berenian soldier, knowing it would be no comfort. As he expected, the revulsion in his eyes intensified to hatred; then to helpless anguish as a fresh surge of pain overtook him. The Berenian shut his eyes and fought down a moan.
“Carry on, Captain Wallis,” Douglas said. “I’ll try to get these men home.”
“How?” Wallis said. Douglas left without answering.
“Is Stevens up?” he asked when he got back to the comms ranks in the outer office. Stevens had not taken the image from Bernhelm well; Marag had given u
p his sleep shift, and Douglas his, and together they had insisted Stevens sleep double.
Acting on the suggestion of the comms crew, Douglas found Stevens in the nearly-empty mess hall, finishing a bowl of farina. He perched on the bench across from him; Stevens looked up, calm and alert. The extra sleep seemed to have helped.
“Can you spell me an hour or two?” he asked. “I want to lie down for a bit.”
“You could even be extravagant and sleep, sir,” Stevens suggested.
Douglas shook his head. “I need to think.”
Stevens made a wry mouth and shoved back to take his tray. As they returned to Barklay’s office together, Douglas asked, not altogether casually: “Had you talked to Ahrens at all since Selkirk’s council?”
“No,” Stevens said. “Why?”
“I’m trying to gauge what’s got off this campus in the way of news.”
“All of it, I should imagine,” Stevens said. “What with people activating their directives and sending home messages by shuttle that Central didn’t have time to censor—I warrant there’s little that’s not known across Ilona by now.”
“I was afraid of that,” Douglas sighed.
“Why?”
Douglas only shook his head.
“Don’t think about it, D—sir. Just get some sleep.”
Douglas went through the outer office and into Barklay’s quarters. His own home banner on the wall definitely made it worse, he decided. He shrugged out of his tunic, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on the bunk. He expected, with his headful of thoughts, that he would stay fully awake: but the dim room, and the murmur of activity in the outer office, lulled him into something like a heavy doze, so that his eyes snapped open when someone shook his shoulder.
The door was open, and cutting its light was the shape of a cadet with a com headset around his neck. “Admiral Douglas, sir. It’s Central One for you.”
