Forge of Heaven (48 page)

He put his arms around her and they lay down together, he lapping his robes across her, and hers across him.

In the dearth of information from the heavens, who alone had a 3 1 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

comprehensive view of the situation, it became the only sane choice: get as much rest as they could before the weather turned, then pack up and climb back to relative safety. They would have to find the boys and walk down off the ridge, at the best speed they could manage, with their two beshti to carry canvas and supplies.

They might see their new sea. They only hoped not to see it yet.

11

T H E H A L C YO N S A I D it didn’t take credit cards, which was just crazy. Every place in the universe took credit cards. But the Hal-cyon said it didn’t, wouldn’t, or maybe the manager just meant this card, which could be risky to raise a louder fuss about, Mignette thought, if her father had finally put a limit, or worse, a trace, on it. So she shut up, near to tears.

She was tired, she’d had a drink, she felt a little sick, and scared, and she and Noble were going to do it together if she could get a room at all, which at this point didn’t look as likely as before.

Michaelangelo’s had turned out to be shut to anybody but current tenants. She was sure her father had done that, likely looking for her and making an untidy amount of noise about it.

That meant all the people that might have been partying late at Michaelangelo’s, where they were supposed to meet Tink and Random as a last resort, were all scattered out all up and down Blunt, maybe competing for other rooms, which could mean there weren’t that many to be had up and down the street. Someone said all the other places with rooms had raised the single night rate, because of Michaelangelo’s shutdown. And they’d only found this one room, here, in a place they ought to be able to afford, a place that wasn’t too dirty, and now the stupid asses who ran it decided they didn’t want to take her card. She just wanted to scream, and didn’t dare. It was only her self-restraint that brought her close to tears. It was pure temper, and the effort not to curse them up one side and down the other.

3 1 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

They had no actual cash, she and Noble. She’d never handled cash in her life, beyond a few chits for street fairs, and here she and Noble were trying to have their romantic night, which was supposed to be so special, and now she was so upset from arguing with a fool with disgusting cologne about a not-very-good room that she felt like throwing up. Now Noble was mad about the room situation—he was scowling and looking off at the bar, with his hands in his pockets. He was about to sulk and get rude to everybody around him, she saw it coming, and he had no sense when he got mad. He scared her.

Desperate, she left Noble and went back to the front desk to try again. “We’ve just got to have a room,” she said, and burst all the way into tears. Tears sometimes worked. They did with her father.

“Well, I could do something for you,” the man at the desk said,

“if you do something for me.”

“What’s that?” she asked, and the man got off his stool and moved over to the office door.

“Come in here,” he said.

She was stunned. “No!” she said, not half believing she’d just been propositioned by an old man in a cheap sweatshirt. She was outraged. Her face burned.

“Then get out of here,” the man said. “Out!”

She was embarrassed to death to be crying in front of this man.

“Come on,” she said to Noble, and he still stood there like a lump with his hands in his pockets. She grabbed his elbow hard and tried to pull him out onto the street. He stood like a piece of the scenery and resisted going anywhere, being an ass.

“So what are we going to do, walk the streets all night?” he asked her.

She was furious. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but I’m not going to sleep with that pig to get us a room!”

Noble took his hands out of his pockets and looked back at the front desk, as if he’d just waked up to the world.

He didn’t, however, offer to go back to the desk and beat hell out of the pig.

“So where are we going to go?” he asked her.

“Well, you don’t blame me, do you?” Her face had gone embarrassingly red, she knew it had, and people were staring at them, Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 1 5

watchers all around the shadowy lobby with its imitation plants and its imitation wood. They’d become the show of the evening.

People were sniggering. “They don’t take cards, they won’t talk, and when my father hears about this, oh, I promise you, that bastard is going to be looking for a ticket to Orb!” She said the last so the bastard would hear, but when she turned around, dragging Noble toward a dramatic exit, she ran straight into a living shadow, one of the Stylists, it had to be, that she had nearly bumped into. One of the beautiful people. Her embarrassment was complete.

“Well,” this vision of beauty said.

Male voice. Silken voice. The face was red as blood on the left side, black as space on the right, with tendrils wandering actively between. The eyes glowed with red, inner fire.

And this person, this Stylist, took her hand and held it, a warm, a wonderful touch. “A genuine damsel in distress.”

“Just a little trouble,” she said shakily, letting go of Noble. She was unwilling to admit to this vision what an embarrassing financial trouble they were in—out of money and out of ideas.

“Do you need a place to stay tonight, lovely?”

“Myself—” She didn’t want to admit to this gorgeous creature that she was attached to the sullen, unstylish teenaged lump sulking behind her with his hands in his pockets, but she had come here with Noble and she found herself standing by that fact.

Maybe it was a sense of honor, even if it drove this gorgeous being away. Maybe it was fear. Noble was her safety, her barrier against transactions she didn’t altogether understand. She said shakily:

“
And
him.”

“Oh, well. One, two, no difficulty.” An ink black, fire-shot hand lifted to brush an airy touch across her cheek. “He can come along, too. But who are you, pretty thing?”

“Mignette.” A Stylist thought she was pretty. Her heart raced, fluttered, raced. “I’m Mignette. He’s Noble.”

“Algol,” her vision said, and flourished a gesture toward the outer door.

She walked with him out onto the street. Noble slouched along at their heels.

“An inconvenience, this disturbance up and down the street,”

3 1 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Algol said, “but not to those of us with forethought and connections. You tried Michaelangelo’s.”

“It’s shut,” she protested.

“Oh, not to those of us who live there. You’re new to the street, aren’t you?”

She had to admit it. “I just arrived. Noble and I—”

“Oh, well, and the police have to show their authority now and again, darling girl. It’s this Earth visitor that has them buzzing about. But their orders don’t apply upstairs, to private apartments.

Dear girl, we who have the keys to the place do as we please. We always have, always will. Such pretty eyes you have.”

The contacts were just commercial, off the rack. She didn’t feel constrained to blurt that out. She looked really good. She hadn’t known how good. Her heart skipped and danced as they walked, together, in beautiful company.

Algol led them not to the front of Michaelangelo’s, but around the side of the frontage to the service nook. She was uncertain that was safe, until she saw a delivery door.

He had a key.

“We’re supposed to find Random and Tink,” Noble objected from the background. She knew it wasn’t Random and Tink that concerned him. Clearly Noble didn’t at all like the way things were going. He would rather strand them back on the street with no place at all, than take help from a source that cast him in the background. But she didn’t pay any attention. They had a personal invitation from a Stylist, and a place to go that had real cachet, and she wanted to go where the beautiful people went. She hadn’t deserted Noble. She’d kept faith with him. So he could be mad for an hour. This was important. A prince of the Trend had swooped down for a rescue, because of her. This was a way into a rarefied society.

She stepped through the door that Algol opened for them, and Noble had no real choice but follow.

A L I Z A R D WAT C H E D a gnat, bubble-world confrontation above a rotting flower. Reaux, late-night in his office, watched the lizard, distracting himself as best he could from the quandary he had Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 1 7

landed in, trying to have caff and a long-delayed sandwich in peace. Jewel was in one outer conference room, silent the last while, fed and supplied with reading material, concealed from any officials who might come and go.

Since Brazis’s warning, he no longer dared rely on Dortland—nor dared he rely on Brazis, entirely. He had his own heavily paid plainclothes guard sitting watch on Gide.

Gide’s associates on the
Southern Cross
were asking hard questions about the attack, and he had had to admit that there was as yet no word on Jeremy Stafford. So he said—while hoping there wouldn’t be.

Dortland’s men were watching Stafford’s parents. He couldn’t pull Dortland’s whole force off the search for Stafford without rousing suspicions and getting
that
fact reported to Earth—very directly so, if Dortland was talking to that ship on secret channels.

But he had two others of his own bodyguard, men who owed nothing to Dortland, watching down on Grozny, too, with no success yet in finding Stafford. Tracking anyone in the Trend tended to meet with resistance and deliberate misdirection. There were sightings. There had been three. But they didn’t pan out.

Find my daughter,
he’d asked Dortland personally, hours ago, when he’d gotten him on the phone.
There’ve been new threats.

Never mind the threats were from his wife.
I want her back. Now.

Kathy was the best distraction he could offer, and he felt more than guilty doing it—as he felt guilty and frustrated in distrusting Dortland on Brazis’s say-so. He felt ashamed of his current situation, and scared, increasingly isolated in the exercise of the power he did have, wondering even what Ernst thought of the orders that had come out of his office.

And increasingly he wondered, now, whether he would find Kathy before something disastrous happened . . . before he got a call from some hospital . . . or before she became a pawn in this covert maneuvering of powers Kathy had no idea of.

To add to his troubles, that phone call from Judy. She threatened to go down to the streets and look for Kathy herself—the very last thing that would help the situation, and she had cried when he told her so. Judy was furious about the police outside the apartment. She was furious that he hadn’t dropped everything and 3 1 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

come home to be with her at supper. She was doubly furious that he’d had all her calls routed to Ernst. “Not even to you,” she’d cried, when he had, in desperation and compassion, talked to her.

And at a screaming pitch: “How dare you?”

Well, he dared do it, as other things, because he had no damned choice. What he prayed for was a peaceable end to this situation, one that involved Stafford somehow turning up safely where he belonged, so they didn’t have a blowup with Brazis.

And he prayed for a solution that didn’t involve Andreas Gide setting up what Gide would try to expand into a shadow government on his station. But in the darkness of the hour, it didn’t seem likely that he could prevent Gide trying it, and, despite his speech to Gide, he wasn’t utterly confident he could keep power out of Gide’s hands.

He wanted his former relationship with Brazis back, uncomplicated by Brazis’s confidences. He wanted things the way they had been. Until he had better information, he wasn’t sure he could trust anybody in the universe, even Ernst.

He rather thought of sending Dortland to Gide’s new office, tied up with a bow, with recommendations of employment, once this was all over and that ship left. But with Dortland wearing his right colors, he’d still have to ask himself constantly which ministers, which councillors were in Gide’s pocket—and those pockets, with every annual ship from Earth, could prove very deep indeed.

He could tell Gide privately that Dortland had engineered the attack. That might be interesting.

The lizard snapped his jaws in threat. The anoles never won.

The gnats collectively never lost. System in perfect balance, as long as light came into the sphere and the temperature stayed moderate.

So had Concord been in perfect balance, for long, long ages. And did Earth or the Treaty Board itself think it was going to win something new if it came in here disrupting what worked just because some politician on the homeworld had a theory?

He saw the heart of the situation now: distrust had found a way onto his station, distrust of Brazis had moved Earth to send an agent here, Apex had sent an agent for the same reason, and to create their new trustable system—Earth now corrupted his agents, Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 1 9

his office, his peaceful situation. No foreign assassins. None from Brazis’s office. He was absolutely convinced now that Gide’s arrival was a ploy, an elaborate, sacrificial ploy, unknown even to Gide, to land a Treaty Board office on his station and create yet one more power, one they hoped could override him and create trouble for Brazis.

And if Gide hadn’t had a clue what they meant to do to him, Dortland being behind the attack made an unwelcome sort of sense. The mobile unit was slagged, to tell them nothing. Gide was only slightly injured. There’d been a launcher in the garden, yes, and yes, there’d been a projectile from outside, but had it killed Gide? No. Could it have killed Gide? Unknown, without examining the machine before the damage its own security systems had done to it. But he doubted it would have. Everything added up to Dortland, who would have killed two of his own men. And that meant Brazis was telling him the truth, that Dortland was working to bring him down.