Endgame

by C. J. Cherryh

  "It's the least you can do, m'ser, to protect your karma as well as your House," Richard had said to Christen St. John while pointedly stirring another glass of tea that had steeped so long it was black as the Det herself. "You'll hardly need it where you're going if you don't intend to look back."

  The transceiver itself could be hidden inside a nondescript wooden chest, but its generator and antenna—disguised these last few months as a copper-clad lightning rod—could be identified by the knowledgeable and were all the more eye-catching on the deck of a canaler chugging upstream as fast as its motor could move it. The battered, besieged College was not completely moribund and, as individual spies scurried to their individual masters, was not pleased by this public display of often-rumored, strictly-prohibited technology, though envy vied with orthodox outrage as the source of their displeasure. The College was, however, in disarray—as evidenced by the four separate messengers admitted through the blockade to Kamat's kitchen, each of whom claimed to speak for Willa Cardinal Exeter herself and each of whose warrants confiscated the technology in the name of a different, non-Exeter, house.

  Richard Kamat politely ignored them all.

  There were defeats as well as victories as the sun arced overhead. One of Kamat's messengers, her throat slit from ear to ear, was thrown from a speeding fancyboat. Two others had not come back at all. Despite Richard's personal arm-twisting, none of the other South Bank families decided to stand with Kamat; their heavily guarded convoy passed through the blockade several hours behind schedule, too late to catch the first watch tide. Gregor Kamat was with them in a Kamat-owned skip, along with his father, Richard's uncle, Patrik. This despite Richard's promise to send them to Bosnou when the Kamat packet boat returned in four days' time.

  "There won't be anything left in four days' time," Greg insisted, wedging another parcel of god-knew-what into the bulging cubby. "What the Sword doesn't destroy will be swallowed by the quakes and the sea."

  Richard didn't argue. The fewer nay-sayers he had in his own house, the better. He was hurt, though, to see Ashe among departees. Ashe was neither a client nor a tenant, merely the major-domo who opened the mid-level door and delivered the morning mail. He wouldn't even live on Kamat Island, though he'd worked long enough and loyally enough to earn sinecure housing. But he took Richard's offer to pay the passage for anyone under Kamat's shield. Richard had taken it for granted that the dour retainer would stay in Merovingen and the sight of him crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with the St. John entourage, clutching his life's possessions in a black canvas sack like some storm-racked refugee sapped the young househead's confidence.

  Richard's hands began to tremble as the convoy passed under the Kamat-Sofia bridge on its way to the Grand Canal. He rested them on the walkway railing as waves of nausea brought a cold sweat to his face and back. The planks shifted beneath his feet, as they had during the quake—but no one else noticed. He clutched the railing to keep from falling over and tried, unsuccessfully, to gulp back the bile rising from his stomach.

  It was the tea, he told himself. He'd had nothing to eat or drink all day except rot-gut tea with honey. He could taste it at the back of his throat. It was tea, not karma, that was making him weak in the knees. Tea and Bosnou's wedding brew which had scarred his stomach.

  "You look poorly, m'ser." A stout, motherly woman with her hair bound in a kerchief and with a stained white apron around her waist tried to guide him gently from the rail.

  Richard knew her—she was the family cook in whose kitchen he'd sat most of the day—but, for his life, he could not remember her name. The failure of memory was more disturbing than the thing forgotten. Meek and mute, the househead allowed himself to be led to a bench where he sat wondering if he had suddenly gone mad.

  The cook put a hard-crust knob of bread in his hand. "You didn't eat, m'ser, and you haven't slept. You've been strict enough with the others—keeping 'em fed and rested—but you're cheating on yourself."

  "Tonight will be crucial," Richard said, confiding in her because she was there and he was not fully aware of himself. "If we can keep the gangs out of South Bank—if we hold the farm— All ifs. There's no guessing what anyone else will do ... or who anyone else is. I can't let go, can't leave things to chance."

  "Might be better, m'ser." She caught the bread as it fell from his fingers. "Chance is even and, m'ser, you're not."

  Richard recalled her name. "Alice. Alice Maihall. You live above the kitchen . . . with your man and five children. ..." His skin was clammy and it seemed for a moment that his body's whole strength and purpose was dedicated to his heart which he could feel thumping rapidly against his breastbone. He wasn't going mad—he was having a coronary seizure. He was twenty-eight years old, and having a heart attack. Karma.

  "Dickon— Boy, what's the matter with you?" Richard stared into the face of the family's longtime physician, Dr. Jonathan.

  Alice said, "He's burned himself up." She brandished her fresh-baked roll for the doctor before putting it once again in Richard's hand. "Some fool scullion left the leaves to steep the whole live-long day and the tea's fit to stand a spoon in—and he's been drinking it like water."

  Dr. Jonathan's lips puckered at the thought. "That's the source of it, all right. Go upstairs, Dickon—m'ser, and have a bit of a rest until the acid passes."

  He was not going mad and he was not having a heart attack; it was the tea, after all, just as he had thought when the nausea struck him. He smiled wanly and tried to rise—thinking that knowing the cause of his illness was the same as being rid of it. Dr. Jonathan tapped his shoulder lightly and he sat back down with a thud.

  "Doctor's orders, m'ser Househead. I'll see you to your room as soon as you eat that nice fresh bread you've got in your hand."

  That, the eating part anyway, was suddenly irresistible. Richard tore off the shiny brown crust with his teeth and chewed it slowly. As the bread sweetened in his mouth, the nausea and the cold sweats retreated. "I'm all right," he insisted. He felt strong enough to push the doctor aside. "There's work to be done. I'll have something more to eat in the kitchen."

  "You'll have it upstairs," the physician disagreed, refusing to be shoved aside. "You're no good to anyone right now, m'ser."

  "There's no one else. Paul's up on the farm. Ashe is gone. I'm needed."

  "You're needed healthy, m'ser, not vibrating like an overheated skit. You are as important as you think you are, and this is no time for heroics."

  Richard could have ordered Dr. Jonathan to stand aside, and wanted to—except he knew the man was right. He'd done exactly what he'd forbidden Paul and the others to do: squander himself without food or sleep. And the over-steeped tea, coming on top of everything else, was the final insult.

  "The sooner you rest, the sooner you'll be yourself again," Dr. Jonathan said, putting his thumb on the proverbial scales.

  "All right—I'm going." He tore off another mouthful of bread.

  This time the doctor allowed Richard to rise, but kept his hand lightly on the younger man's arm to steady him.

  "Murfy's ghost," Richard complained, shrugging free. "I'm a grown man. I can get to my room by myself."

  The physician and the cook exchanged furtive glances, each confirming the other's diagnosis: too much tea, too much stress, and too far gone to know it. But neither of them wanted to cause a scene—not outside the house where there'd be a hundred witnesses and who knew what in the way of disastrous consequences.

  Dr. Jonathan held the door open. "You could use my room, if you prefer, m'ser. It's below the mid-level—not so far to climb."

  Richard shook his head and, chewing on the last of the bread, began the long climb up the back stairs to his private quarters in the tallest spire of the island. He regretted his stubbornness before he was above the mid-level, especially when he heard the ropes and pulleys of the dumb-waiter ferrying his dinner to the heights above him. He'd burned through the bread; the nausea was back, though not as bad as before. His hair st
uck to his forehead and he was panting by the time he reached the landing where the back stairway joined the main stairway for the final twelve-step ascent to his bedroom suite.

  Eleanora Slade was waiting for him. "I heard the food trays . . . Dickon—you look terrible!"

  Wiping his sweaty face on his sleeve, Richard decided Eleanora didn't look much better: her face was pale and tight with anxiety. But he wasn't so far gone that he'd say that to her. "Tea's gone acid on me," he said instead. "Nothing worse than that. A few hours, a bit of spongy food in my stomach—"

  "Can you come upstairs to your office, then? Your uncle's been hammering up a storm on the wireless."

  Richard's weight settled on his heels. He gripped the handrail and pulled himself forward, upward: twenty-four steps instead of twelve.

  The wireless, using bits and pieces of approved tech from in-house tappers, completely covered a large table in Richard's office. The generator, with its banks of acid storage batteries, was outside on the walkway under its own shelter, and the antenna, like St. John's, had been incorporated into the lightning rod. The hammering to which Eleanora had referred came from a brass device inside a glass dome. The device recorded incoming messages by translating the electronic code into marks on a narrow strip of paper, which fed through the dome from a neatly wound roll to a tangled heap on the floor.

  Eleanora gave the tangle an unfriendly look. She came from a different stratum of Merovingen society, a layer where Revenantist teachings about the evils of progressive technology went unchallenged. The wireless was certainly progressive technology. In the part of her that still lived in an airless two-room flat, Eleanora knew a telegraph was one thing—the Houses did use them (even between Isles, what time that thieves hadn't made off with the wire). But a transceiver— that, she knew was a monster and evil, and apt to draw the sharrh back from wherever they were waiting. Still, the part of her that had been raised up to share Dickon's life—a househead's life—bravely resisted that knowledge: Richard trusted her as much as he loved her and so, when circumstances had dictated that he conduct Kamat's urgent business from the kitchen, he'd sent her up to his office to transcribe the messages coming in from the North Flat and everywhere else.

  "May I wait for you downstairs?" she asked, her Revenantist fear of the machine showing clearly now that Richard was here to lift the responsibility from her shoulders.

  The weighted, balanced, and razor-sharp brass arm within the glass dome began to chatter. Paper spewed out of the dome's base and the snaky mass on the carpet began to rustle with its own false life.

  "I'll take care of it," Richard assured his unacknowledged wife. "You go ahead downstairs and relax. You've earned it."

  She was gone before he drew another breath. The brass arm rose too high, striking a restraining bar which even casual observation could tell was a jury-rigged afterthought. The paper strip jammed. Richard sighed with resignation, not panic, and disconnected the toggle switch that directed the electric signal from the transceiver to the recording device. Perching over a clerk's high stool, he reached for a set of leather and wire earmuffs and fastened them over his head. Then he winced and fiddled with one of the many odd-shaped knobs.

  The Voice of Doom, Bosnou Kamat had named it when Richard brought him to the spire for a demonstration after Marina's wedding—when the crews and construction necessary to install it were indistinguishable from those repairing the damage the wedding feast had caused.

  The Voice of Doom—but that hadn't stopped the old man from learning the archaic moss code it used to reduce words to electric impulses. Moss code, so called, one presumed, because moss plants were as primitive and spreading as the signals the wireless transmitted. Bosnou swore he'd never permit the wireless into his house—and he'd kept his word. The stan-cia transceiver was in its own building on a hilltop almost a kilometer from the main house.

  Richard wondered why—unless his great uncle wanted to escape from his ever-expanding family. Bosnou sent all the messages himself—there was no mistaking his heavy hand on the spark-key, which, coupled with the position of the antenna made the stancia signal one of the strongest and clearest ones in the newborn network. It blasted everything else in the sky, including Paul's signal from the much, much closer North Flat farm.

  Richard opened the log book and began transcribing the message.

  —Wrong. Kamat home, this is uncle. Where are you. What is wrong. Kamat—

  He held the spark-key down for a five-count—the conventional request for quiet. He'd gotten no more than a few words into a terse, cautious response when his ears were assaulted again.

  F-O-R-G-E-T K-A-L-U-G-I-N!

  The wireless was ideal for the lightning-swift transmission of short messages: when the packet boat left, what it carried, when it would arrive with his niece and sister. It was less well-suited to conversation about subtle or sensitive matters. And, not to be forgotten, it was not private: the signal sent by one transceiver could be received by all the others. Could be, and probably was, and although Richard knew which families had taken custody of one or more of the devices he could not know if the other six in Merovingen itself remained in that custody or if they had fallen into other hands.

  One could do worse, short-term, than attract the attention of the sharrh.

  No questions, Richard hammered on the spark-key. We're safe. That's all. And concluded with an emphatic request for quiet, which Bosnou, for the moment, respected. Richard leaned on his elbows and pinched the bridge of his nose. A fainter message came to his ears:

  First watch. Farm quiet. Nothing moving on the Greve. Murfy he's got a heavy—

  Richard put his own fist on the spark-key to quiet Paul, then listened as one of the Wex estates identified itself and pleaded for information. Richard's hand hovered above the spark-key before he changed his mind and closed the toggle switch to reconnect the recording device. He was fixing the paper jam Bos-nou's heavy fist had caused when he realized he wasn't alone in the room: Denny Tai, born Deneb Takahashi and destined to be head of that house if he lived long enough, stood in the doorway with his arms wrapped around a wooden crate both longer and broader than he was himself.

  Denny's mouth was open. When the brass arm began to rise and fall for no reason or cause the boy could possibly fathom, he jumped and lost control of the crate. It crashed to the floor, shaking the whole spire and jamming the paper strip. Eleanora came up behind Denny at a run.

  "What's wrong?" she asked, though the answer was obvious.

  Richard sank heavily onto the stool, the wood-on-wood crash still echoing inside his head. Murfy— Murfy understood and, maybe, Murfy caused moments like this when one's self seemed a small frantic creature, utterly powerless against the circumstances of one's life. Circumstances which ranged from the green nausea billowing in his gut to the jammed recording device, to Eleanora's worried, disapproving face, to Denny himself, who was now a party to the wireless conspiracy, and that box lying at his feet, half-open and spilling sawdust, steel, and crimson velvet onto the carpet. One forgot, for the moment, the primary cause: Merovingen, Nev Hettek, the Sword of God, the Kalugins, anarchy, fire, earthquake, and the spate of gunshots once again reverberating through the canals.

  "Nothing," Richard murmured, pinching his nose again as he drew a deep breath which was supposed to help and didn't. The nausea shifted color to red and became a sharp pain that made him want to do nothing more than crawl into a corner to die.

  "You're ill," Eleanora said, seeking a way past the boy and the box. "Come, your food's waiting."

  "No. It's nothing! Go back downstairs. I'll be down to eat when I'm ready to eat." His voice was cruelly sharp, and he didn't care. The pain ebbed to bearable—and familiar. He had plaster-y pills in his lavatory below, that helped sometimes, and an amber elixir that was mostly brandy. The last thing he wanted right then was food.

  Eleanora retreated as if she'd been physically assaulted. The door to their shared bedroom slammed shut. At least she hadn't
gone running all the way down to the servants' quarters as she sometimes did when his frustration made her the tempting target.

  In the meantime, the paper had backed up until it triggered a nerve-rattling, thought-scattering buzzer. Richard flailed behind him until he found the main switch and shut everything off.

  Denny danced from side to side in the doorway. He was canny and clever. He had a fair idea of what he'd stumbled into and the instinct to run far and fast. But he was fascinated, too, and that, in a boy his age, was stronger than instinct.

  "What is that?" His eyes were riveted to the device-filled table behind Richard. "Wow—" He came across the carpet like a hooked fish.

  "It's a wireless transceiver," Richard said flatly, and told, by rote, its history.

  How after Willa Cardinal Exeter closed the College library to curb the overflow of progress and technology, students had begun smuggling the books themselves. And yes—Denny's older brother Raj probably smuggled a few himself. And no—Raj had nothing whatsoever to do with the books, or the conspiracy to build the transceivers, which brought an oddly mature sigh from the boy's bony chest.

  "Raj gets hisself involved" Denny said.

  Richard didn't respond, but concluded the much-abbreviated, nameless tale: "Once was enough, Deneb—" The boy was, after all, the heir of a trade house and in desperate need of education. "When we couldn't rely on civil authorities to look after our interests, we had to arrange to look after them ourselves. The Det Valley is too vital to all Merovin to become a political pawn. Karl Fon, the Kalugins—the whole lot of them—stand in the way of trade. And we will not—" Richard's eyes focused beyond the boy. "We will not lose what little we've gained in the past six hundred years."

  Denny nodded. "But no wires? How's it work?"

  "It sends messages," Richard said with a shrug. "Electrically ... On waves through the sky." The principles of operation had never been clear to him. Truth to tell: Richard had not tried very hard to understand them when Juarez Wex—disillusioned Juarez Wex who tried to teach physics at the college— had explained them. Richard didn't need to know how the wireless worked, any more than he needed to know how the phosphorescent plankton in the new moon tide fixed Kamat's indigo dyes into their trademark First-Bath blue. It was sufficient to know that they were reliable.