Endgame

by C. J. Cherryh

  He stayed up there, with Chance, without talking, until they'd passed out the harbor and their way was clear ahead.

  Chance's eyes never wavered from the stern. When Chamoun realized that Magruder was going to spend the night there, keeping watch for pursuit or danger, he gave up and went belowdecks.

  Dani Lambert's cabin door was open. The baby was asleep there. As he passed by, she motioned to him and said softly, "Come on in, Chamoun. Have a drink. All's forgiven."

  "No, thanks," he told her. "I've had enough drinks to last the rest of my life. I've got to get some sleep."

  He tried to sleep. He really did. But every time he drifted off, he saw Cassie, his beautiful, crazy Merovingian wife, standing on the highest balcony of Boregy House as it burned, her arms raised to the sky, crying revolution to the heavens.

  Then he'd wake up, sweating and shivering, and remember where he was.

  On his way home. At last. And he'd remind himself that he wasn't Cassie; he didn't have to believe that every dream he had would come true.

  Cassie had the knack, not him. If only she'd listened when he tried to tell her to be careful what she wished for.

  But she hadn't. And it was over. He'd done a service to his country. And to the folk of Merovingen as well, probably, in the long run.

  But he'd never thought it would cost him his heart. His life, maybe, but not his heart.

  Sometime in that long night, once when he woke up yelling hoarsely, Chance was standing over him when he knuckled his eyes.

  The former ambassador to Merovingen sat on the foot of Chamoun's bunk for awhile, before he went back up to the foredeck to keep watch.

  Chance didn't say a word, the whole time he was in Chamoun's cabin. Not until he started to leave.

  Then Magruder said, "Freedom costs, kid. Just try to remember who you are and what you aren't."

  Chance left, and Michael Chamoun started trying, with all his might. Mike Chamoun was an agent of the Sword of God, who'd given all he had to bring revolution to Merovingen—given his heart and soul.

  So even if it hurt, because he'd done so damned well, then that was okay. He'd learned a lot. Learned about freedom. Learned about discipline. Learned about sacrifice. Subterfuge. Loss. Despair. Tragedy. Triumph.

  Tragedy and triumph were seemingly synonyms, right now. But he was still learning.

  He'd started out as Magruder's green protege, and ended up a revolutionary hero who drowned his guilt in drink and bumbled his way to success. Chance was right: he had to find himself, reclaim himself, and not let Cassie's ghost stalk him for the rest of his life.

  He'd learn how to manage, once he got home. Home to Nev Hettek.

  Chance was one hell of a teacher.

  ENDGAME (REPRISED)

  by C. J. Cherryh

  "Swallow this," Raj said. "It's cut with whiskey. Do you good."

  Jones took the bottle, not because she wanted the medicine, but because whiskey sounded like a good idea right now. Unconscious sounded like a good idea, but the whiskey burned her throat so she had to double over the tiller and wipe her eyes. "Lord." A cough, and another sip, that went down easier. Raj offered her a grimy handful of something fried, and she shook her head. Couldn't eat. Throat wouldn't work. But the whiskey was all right.

  Chased a rumor all the way to harborside, near killed themselves, and they hadn't a damned thing but the lights of those boats going out. And a sick fear.

  If he wasn't on one of those riverboats he could've been in some part of the embassy that she hadn't searched. She'd only been on that one floor, and Lord forgive a fool, the floor he'd been on wasn't likeliest, not after she'd gone and gotten things stirred up that night—they might have moved him. Where did they move people they were mad at but down where there weren't any windows. Or any way out. And that Isle had all burned, every stick of it, down to its sodden pilings, that was the report she'd had, not a thing left but a smoking ruin. And if he'd been in that, and died like that— God.

  She took another swallow. Sat there staring at the bottom of the boat, then staring at the powder barrels and thinking how, if Mondragon was gone, and dead like that, she didn't want to live in a city where she'd have to pass that place, and go one working and living and growing old like Mintaka Fahd, drinking her liver away and talking on and on about the handsome young men she'd loved and lost. Wasn't the life she wanted for herself. And she stared at those barrels and stared and thought how if Mondragon had died like that she'd have slim chance of tracking down Chance Magruder and making him pay. Or going to Nev Hettek and collecting from Karl Fon. She'd like to. But it wasn't real likely she could do that. Skip didn't handle worth much on the open Det. Didn't carry near enough fuel. Could sell the boat, maybe, get passage. Just her and a gun.

  Black, black thoughts before the dawn. Sipping whiskey and whatever Raj put in it. And, poor lad, he'd Kat Bolado running about collecting rumors and risking her boat and her neck and all, and he was probably scared about her, but here he was with his medical bag, doing such as they could in this stirred pot of a harbor—he gave out bandages, he gave away his medicines, while Kat was off somewhere like Rif and Cal, doing what they could.

  Meanwhile she had a boatful of gunpowder, the crying of kids in the dark, the stink of burning about this town she'd grown up in, and a sure knowledge of certain people responsible.

  Mondragon could've gotten free. Could've. He'd an eel's ways, she'd always said that. Like Merovingen's cats, he was fast and he knew when to lay low. He'd go to Moghi's, if he was looking for her. He'd use the back way. Nobody would see him there. And there'd been fire on Ventani, but they'd got that out, all right. He'd know. He'd go there. Which he hadn't, last she'd heard. And she'd sit there, except Cal and Rif had argued her into staying here and gone off searching about the harbor—she was to coordinate information, that was what Cal had called it. Meaning if they found him they'd bring him directly here, and here was about as easy to find her as there. So she waited, while her bruises went stiff and her bones ached.

  Finally she said, in her whisper of a voice, "If he's alive and if he ain't at Moghi's it's because he can't. And if he can't it's because he's hurt or he's up to somethin'. And if he's hurt, there's people he knows he could hail."

  "No question," Raj said earnestly.

  "An' if he's up t' somethin', it's politics. It's business. An' I know where t' look." She moved. First time she had moved in a while and it hurt. "We got to get us some fuel, boy. Got t' find someone who'll give us a tank or two." A glance at the barrels, innocent as the barrels she'd run all her life. "I got me a delivery to make."

  ONCE WAS ENOUGH

  by Lynn Abbey

  When a ruddy glow appeared in the eastern sky over Merovingen, Richard Kamat was not the only citizen whose eyes clouded with dread. After a long night manning hastily erected barricades, watching every passing boat with undisguised suspicion, and enduring the twin terrors of fire and earthquake, many exhausted residents mistook the ruddy aura of dawn for conflagration on Eastdyke. Self-conscious laughter erupted here and there as the sky brightened to a pale gold.

  "Hail, Murfy! We made it!" a workman exclaimed, clapping Richard on the shoulder with the familiarity and equality only shared nightmares could bring. "The worst is behind us."

  Richard grinned and returned the comradely salute, wondering as he did if the night of rioting would ever be behind them.

  Many hours ago, at the top of the second watch, Richard had commanded all the able-bodied folk under Kamat's protection to pile up barricades on all their bridges. There had been ample material on hand. Until yesterday evening Richard's foremost concern was ridding the family's island home of the wreckage from his sister Marina's wedding. That the island was a firetrap had nagged at the Househead's thoughts these last six weeks, but a seemingly endless parade of circumstances kept him from commissioning the workcrews. Now Kamat had what were undoubtedly the most daunting set of barricades in the entire South Bank quarter of the city.
/>   The folk of nearby Tyler came calling at midnight. They said Kamat owed karma and begged for lumber to shore up their own defenses. Richard offered them the remnants of a painter's scaffold and said nothing about the quirks of fortune that had left his family so well-prepared for the unforeseen. An old Revenantist proverb proclaimed that there were a thousand kinds of karma, then added only ten forms of karma could be perceived by mortal minds. If Kamat had karma, that karma was one of the 990 unnameable varieties.

  Kamat's barricades hadn't been seriously tested. Across the water on four of their five exposures, they were reinforced by mercantile houses as devoted to the preservation of life, order, and property as they were themselves. Kamat's primary concern—indeed one of the primary concerns of the whole South Bank quarter of Merovingen—was the abandoned Wayfarer's Hostel which Kamat faced alone on their fifth exposure, and that was where Richard spent the long hours between midnight and dawn.

  Somewhere in the middle of the third watch a rowdy gang tumbled out of the hostel carrying petrol-soaked torches and promising death to all oppressors. But the gang was fired by brandy, not revolution, and balked before any of them set foot on the fortified bridge.

  A torch had been thrown at the carved mid-level door, but that entrance—even more than the many, many others—had been thoroughly drenched with canal water. The torch had guttered before the bucket brigade could assemble itself. Richard did not know if their Eastdyke warehouse was similarly intact, but Kamat had survived the loss of its warehouse before.

  If the aftermath of Mikhail Kalugin's assassination could be compared to the aftermath of one of the fast-rising, powerful sea-storms of late summer, then the worst was indeed behind Kamat and all Merovingen. They could pick up the pieces, get on with their lives, and have the city almost back to normal by sundown. If last night's aftermath was comparable to a hurricane. If it was an aftermath at all and not, like the mild tremblors which rattled the city's foundations during the night, a pointed reminder that things could get much, much worse.

  For the moment, though, with the sky growing steadily brighter, Kamat's defenders listed toward cautious optimism. Cheers went up across the canal on Malvino Isle. The chorus was picked up by Tyler, St. John, and Kamat, but not by Kamat's weary househead.

  The usual morning mist was sticky and foul with soot. Richard coughed and covered his mouth, leaving another dark smear on his chin and cheek. His clothes were stained with canal water and sweat. He stared at the wispy pillars of smoke rising into the bright morning sky as if they were omens he alone could read.

  Merovingen had been a Revenantist city since its refounding. Its leading citizens however, with a few notable exceptions, wore then religion casually. Trade, they were wont to say, was more important than dogma. But Merovingen trade, with its ledgers and balance sheets, its credits and all-important debts, was inherently Revenantist. Richard Kamat could not watch the sun climb above the rooflines without calculating who had won during the night, who had lost, and who was to blame. He couldn't measure the winners or losers yet, but he certainly knew where to place the blame.

  Iosef Kalugin, the governor and protector of Merovingen, had been too busy protecting himself from the predatory children he'd sired and raised to do his duty to the city entrusted to him. Of all the night's rumors none had been more prevalent than that of Iosef, the Lion of Kalugin, abandoning the Signeury the moment he learned of Mischa's death, abandoning Merovingen to the partisans of his surviving children and worse.

  Yes, Iosef was to blame, but the Angel of Merovingen and the ghost of Murfy himself knew that there was blame to spare after the Lion took his portion. Tatiana Kalugin had completely corrupted the already tainted blacklegs. Along the way Tatiana laid the city open to Nev Hettek influences, including the thrice-damned Sword of God. Anastasi Kalugin was no better than his sister, but because he did not control the local blacklegs and had not, so far as anyone knew, gone to bed with Nev Hettek, he was somewhat more palatable to the mainline Merovingen Houses than Tatiana. Still, Anastasi looked out for his own welfare above all else and would sell Merovingen to the sharrh if the price were right. There was even a bit of blame left for feckless, assassinated, and unlamented Mikhail Kalugin who, no doubt, would still be alive and playing with his automata if he hadn't mistaken Willa Cardinal Exeter's attentions for admiration. Once Mischa started preaching his own garbled brand of Revenantist mysticism, his days were strictly numbered.

  All in all, Merovingen's anarchy had festered just out of sight for more than a year now. Everyone in trade agreed that the rivalry among the Kalugins was out of control. Everyone feared the growing Nev Hettek influence in their city. But the trade Houses hadn't done anything directly or in concert. The Samurai— the private security force Richard, himself, had founded—was an expedient compromise to protect mercantile property, not Merovingen itself.

  Richard shrugged his shoulders to accommodate his own portion of Merovingen's melancholy karma. He was one of the many who succumbed to omnipresent intrigue. He'd given Tom Mondragon—vanished Tom Mondragon, late of the Sword of God and the dungeons of Karl Fon—shelter within the Kamat house. He'd looked the other way throughout his sister's unrequited infatuation with the handsome, charismatic, and utterly amoral Nev Hetteker. And when the time came, he'd had no qualms in using his sister's innocent child, Tom's almost-acknowledged child, to further Kamat's fortunes in the great game being played throughout the Det River valley. In point of fact, Kamat's young, inexperienced Househead had been as smitten by Tom as his sister had been—or at least by the roguish aura of excitement surrounding the pale, deadly aristocrat.

  For a time, Richard had fancied himself a power in the dangerous game the Kalugin siblings played. In the smoky morning mist, he recognized that he'd been a pawn, not a power, and that, above all, when chess was played for Merovingen's future, the city lost no matter which individual or faction won.

  "All the barricades are secure, Dick," twenty-year-old Paul Kamat informed his twenty-eight-year-old cousin with breathless urgency.

  Throughout his life Richard had been Dickon to his intimates, Richard to his peers, and m'ser to everyone else. While some of his contemporaries had a new nickname every season, Richard resolutely refused to acknowledge them—until this summer when his cousin Paul graduated from school. In the usual course of events, Paul appeared on the audience side of the Househead's desk the following Monday morning to receive his first formal position in the family business. In the three years since his father's death, Richard had consolidated his position at the top of the family hierarchy and grown accustomed to both its power and its responsibilities, but in Paul he faced the first member of his family whose career was entirely in his hands.

  Paul was easily the cleverest, most aggressive of the Kamat cousins, the antithesis of his mousy, bookish father, Patrik. Richard had readily assigned Paul to the Underhead position which he, himself, held until Nikolay's sudden death. Paul was grateful. He devoted himself to his work, as Richard had when he was Underhead, but where Richard could always address his Househead with a correct and respectful Father, Paul seemed at a loss for the proper title. For a month Paul had initiated conversations with a mumble, then Dick appeared, and spread like fire through that small, but growing, group of contemporaries who owed their present and future positions to Richard Kamat, Househead.

  "I've been down to the kitchen, Dick. There's tea and breakfast ready for as many as want it. I checked the pumps: there's fresh water settling in all the filter-cisterns. One of the clients, Fowler, Canalside, asked me about moving supplies and barrels from his backroom to somewhere more secure. I didn't know what to tell him. No sense wasting time carting stuff all over the island, right? But we shipped a load of dyed wool around the Horn for weaving when the womenfolk left for the stancia the other day and the wool lofts are empty right now. They're about as secure as anywhere in the city. The clients could use them, if you thought they should. The tenants, too. If you thought it was necessar
y. What do you think, Dick? What should we—I do next?"

  A few moments passed before Richard's night-numbed brain made sense of Paul's rapid-fire words. "'We should get some sleep," Richard replied after grinding his knuckles against his eyes. "Wake up your brother and everyone else who went off guard at midnight. Tell them to eat a hearty meal, then come outside to relieve us so we can eat and sleep ourselves."

  Paul nodded. "I'll see to that, Dick. What should I tell Fowler?"

  The Kamat family's relationship to its eponymous island was typical for Merovingen. The family who gave the island its common name owned it outright from the below-water bilges and cisterns to the highest iron-crowned spires, but generally occupied only a small portion. Family clients operated their diverse businesses on every level except the highest. Independent tenants, who were often clients of other Merovingen Houses, rented the rest and had little contact with the island's ultimate owners. House Ventani had a generation-lease on Kamat's easterly exposure which predated Kamat's arrival in the city's aristocracy and from which they ran a wholesale produce market for the northeast quadrant of the city. Richard didn't need to know the names and numbers of the Ventani clients living above the market so long as Benjid Ventani paid the rent on time. But these were not normal times and Ventani over on the Grand Canal might just as well be across the ocean or amid the stars for all the good they'd do their clients right then. Romney and Amparo also held generation-leases; Richard racked his brain without success to remember where or why.

  "Remind me to tell Greg when he gets out here to conduct a census of the island. I want to know everyone who's here, what rights they've got, and what they might need from Kamat. Don't let me forget. In the meantime, if Fowler or anyone else asks, tell him he can haul whatever he wants to the lofts, so long as men don't leave the barricades to help him."

  "You don't think it's over, do you, Dick?"