The Gathering Flame (22 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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Nannla tossed back the last of her punch and switched the empty goblet for a full one from the tray carried by a passing footman. “Well,
somebody
has to be the poor guy’s family. I don’t think he’s got anyone else.” She nodded toward the line of notables waiting to make their speeches of welcome to the new Domina. “Even Ferrda agrees. Take a look at him.”
Tillijen followed the gesture with her eyes. The
’Hammer
’s engineer had decked himself out for the reception in a formal coat of metallic bronze body-paint. A line of solid gold and silver studs ornamented the crest that flared atop his rounded skull. He towered over the diplomats and hangers-on like one of the Great Trees of his home world, and appeared oblivious to the comment his presence was generating.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Tilly demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Nannla. “But it must be important to him or he wouldn’t have spent all that time with the paint pot.”
 
Errec Ransome caught sight of his reflection in one of the tall casement windows—an unexpected encounter, as he emerged from behind a thicket of ornamental bushes in gilded porcelain planters—and thought for a moment that he saw not himself, but another. The clothes he wore, plain black and white cut after the free-spacer’s style, were not his own, but a gift of sorts from the Palace. A messenger in blue and silver livery had delivered them to the
‘Hammer
without explanation that afternoon. Jos was probably the one responsible; the Domina had no way of knowing that Errec’s clothes locker held mostly castoffs from the
’Hammer
’s slop chest.
Errec had come to the reception unarmed, as always. Jos would have a weapon on him somewhere—Jos was never unarmed, even if you couldn’t see what he was carrying—but Errec knew for a fact that Tillijen and Nannla didn’t have anything on them more deadly than boot knives and pocket stunners. Ferrdacorr had claws and fangs and his own massive strength under all the body-paint; there wouldn’t be any need to worry about him. Errec didn’t bother asking himself why he should be worried in the first place, or why the sudden glimpse of his own dark-clad mirror image should have affected him so much. For now, he had other things to do: there were Mages at work in An-Jemayne.
He moved back into the shadow of the indoor greenery. He’d always had the knack of effacing himself when he chose to do so, and he’d watched with sympathy Tillijen’s self-conscious efforts to remain unnoticed. People almost never saw Errec unless he wanted them to; even in deep space, in the safety of the ’
Hammer
’s common room, he found it difficult to relax his guard completely. When he desired, as now, to be invisible, nobody looked in his direction at all.
Once he was safely out of the common view, he closed his eyes and let his mind go free, seeking those knots and distortions in the currents of Power which betrayed the workings of the Mages. It didn’t take him long to find them.
Yes. There. I can feel it begin … .
 
“A word with you, my lady?”
Tillijen glanced around in surprise. She’d only left Nannla for a few minutes to search out the ladies’ retiring room, and hadn’t expected anybody to take note of her comings and goings.
The speaker turned out to be Nivome do’Evaan, the big, dark-browed Rolnian who served as Perada Rosselin’s Minister of Internal Security. Jos Metadi had described Nivome, with more charity than she’d expected, as a tough guy in a thankless job. Errec Ransome, on the other hand, had called him dangerous.
Right now, Tillijen felt inclined to agree. She looked at Nivome without saying anything, hoping that the Rolnian would take the hint and go away. She’d heard enough, in her occasional fleeting contacts with old acquaintances over the years, to know that anything more than casual involvement with the Minister of Internal Security would lead to more trouble than anyone really needed.
“Tillijen Chereeve,” the minister continued in his rumbling voice. He paused. “Or should I say Lady Chereeve? Your presence at Her Dignity’s accession is an unexpected pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine, I assure you,” Tillijen said automatically. She scanned the throng of guests in the reception hall as she spoke. Where in the name of space and all the shining stars had Nannla gotten to?
“Not all of it, surely,” Nivome said.
Again he paused. Tillijen decided that the minister used the silent spaces between his utterances for deliberate effect—the mind flinched away from what came next, like bruised flesh anticipating a second blow. And sure enough, here it came.
“Is your illustrious family aware of your return? Unless I’m mistaken, House Chereeve still pays its remittance to your bank account on Ophel, contingent on your agreement not to come back to Entibor or any of its colonies during your lifetime.”
“Consider me as being here incognito,” Tillijen said at last, after the silence had stretched out farther than she could stand. “House Chereeve doesn’t need to concern itself with an Ophelan free-spacer who isn’t related to them anymore.”
“I understand,” Nivome said. “Rest assured that your secret is safe with me—it would distress House Chereeve no end to learn that you’d come back.”
He bowed, and left. Tillijen stood thinking, wondering exactly what the Rolnian had meant by his hints and veiled accusations. A threat? Almost certainly. Her last formal exchanges with House Chereeve, years ago now, hadn’t been pleasant for anybody involved. Blackmail? Maybe. But he hadn’t asked for anything; he’d just talked.
Or was Perada’s Minister of Internal Security merely amusing himself by playing dominance games with a wandering free-spacer who didn’t have the power to send him away?
That
, she thought as she spotted Nannla at last and hurried to join her,
sounds a lot more likely. But he’s nobody to get mixed up with, all the same.
 
In the black-draped room on the far side of An-Jemayne, two of the Circle-Mages rose to take hold of the man their leader had indicated. Their caution was unnecessary. The man made no attempt to flee. The leader spoke again.
“You were the Second of our Circle,” he said. “But this person”—he gestured toward the bound man lying next to the curtains—“tells me that you have taken the coin of the agents of Internal Security. Now, as First, I call on you to make repayment. Offer your life to break the Domina and keep the Circle one.”
“My lord,” said the Second. He took a step away from the two who were holding him, moving into the center of the painted circle on the floor. “I am at your service. But what if it’s not my life that gets taken?”
“Then the working has my energy to strengthen it, and you have the Circle to do with as you will.” The First raised his staff in a quick salute. “Until, of course, some other member comes forward to challenge you for it.”
“Of course,” echoed the Second. If he was afraid, it didn’t show in his voice—and behind the black mask, his expression could have shown anything at all. He raised his staff in his right hand, bringing it up to the vertical in front of his face. At the same time he took a step backward and bent his knees. “And so, we begin.”
The First moved closer, his staff held loosely in his right hand, its tip pointing toward the floor. The Second pivoted, keeping his own staff vertical. The First took another step inward—and the Second lunged, sweeping down with his staff at the First’s unprotected skull.
But the First was no longer standing where he had been. Black robe swirling with the movement, he pivoted and punched out with his staff, knocking the blow aside. Before the other man could recover, the First struck again, slamming his staff backhanded into the Second’s mask, smashing broken plastic into the man’s eyes—crushing, also, the bone underneath. There was no outcry, but the staff in the Second’s hand clattered to the floor. The air around the two men began to glow first a dull purple, then a clear violet, and at last a brilliant blue.
The First took another step forward to stand behind his blinded opponent. He slipped his staff across the Second’s throat and reached across to seize the free end with his left hand, so that his arms formed a scissors behind the other’s neck. Then he began to pull up and backward, pressing his staff against the Second’s windpipe until bone and cartilage cracked beneath the assault.
The Second dangled there helpless, his body limned in tongues of blue flame and his breath stopped in his ruined throat. Then he stiffened, his back arching and his feet kicking out in a last convulsion. The blue light that surrounded him pulsed, then flared up into a cyan blaze as the First let his body drop into the center of the painted circle.
“It’s done,” said the First. “Our working is finished.”
He lowered his staff and turned to the outsider in the Circle, the bound and bleeding man who had come spying for the Minister of Internal Security. He brought his staff up again so that the man could see how it glowed all along its length.
“Have you seen enough?” he asked. “Or would you like to see more? Come, we have much to show you.”
 
“How extraordinary!”
Mistress Vasari’s voice was light as always, but the slim fingers that had rested with perfect formality on Aringher’s coat sleeve moved downward to take his hand. He looked over at her curiously.
“What’s extraordinary, my dear?”
“That painted personage looming over the rest of the reception line,” she said. While she spoke, her fingers tightened and released in the rhythms of the pulse-code:
The man standing by the windows. The one in black. I know him.
“A Selvaur,” said Aringher. “From Maraghai. A Lord among the Forest Lords, or so I hear.”
Unobtrusively, he squeezed her hand in return.
I hadn’t noticed him until you pointed him out. Dare I ask where you know him from?
“Someone told me they all call themselves that,” Vasari said. “The Selvaurs, I mean. Bigger snobs than the Khesa-tans.”
There was more tension in Vasari’s long fingers than could be accounted for by the presence of a nonhuman ambassador to planetary royalty.
Where do you
think
I know him from?
“Yes, but they say this one really means it,” Aringher replied, while in pulse-code he said,
Maybe he’s supposed to be here. You can’t be the only one with an interest.
“I wonder what he wants to say to the Domina.” Vasari’s tension hadn’t eased; Aringher, who had always thought her imperturbable, found this curiosity disturbing. Her fingers, cold against his own, said,
You don’t understand.
“It doesn’t matter what our scaly friend tells Her Dignity,” Aringher said; and in the pulse-code,
What don’t I understand?
Aloud, in counterpoint, he added, “What matters is that the Selvaurs haven’t sent so much as an unofficial envoy to anyplace in years.”
Vasari’s hand lay motionless in his. “They say he’s a friend of the Consort.”
“I
knew
it had to be more than the good captain’s looks that Her Dignity was interested in,” said Aringher, and pressed the code-rhythms urgently into Vasari’s palm a second time:
What is it that I don’t understand?
“Not that there’s anything wrong with Metadi’s looks, mind you,” Vasari said. Her hand trembled as she answered:
That man died four years ago.
 
Tillijen glanced uneasily about the reception hall. Khrysil Gandeluc wasn’t anywhere in sight, thank fortune—
Maybe she got bored and went home; she wouldn’t have stuck out a party this dead for fifteen minutes back in the old days
—but Nivome do’Evaan was still there, and she’d felt his dark eyes following her more than once, making her feel more than ever like an alien masquerader amid familiar surroundings.
She wondered if the rest of the ’
Hammer
’s crew felt anything like the same way she did. Nannla didn’t, obviously; the number-one gunner was on her third glass of punch, and her dashing costume was drawing admiring looks from even the most staid of court matrons. As for the flaming youth of An-Jemayne, they’d be wearing ruffles and leather before the week was out.
Ferrda was another one who took stares for granted, and seemed to enjoy them. He’d made his speech to the Domina—not bowing, which caused a delighted, scandalized murmur to run through the banqueting hall—and now he stood to one side watching the crowd. Once in a while he would look over at where Jos Metadi stood behind the Domina’s chair of state, and his jewel-studded crest would spread itself higher for an instant in the true Selvauran expression of amusement.
Tillijen didn’t know if Metadi noticed the Selvaur’s reaction or not. The captain—
the General, now; I’ll have to remember that
—was wearing his best don’t-scare-the-dirtsiders outfit, something plain black and expensive cut in the conservative Entiboran style. The notables who came to offer their greetings to the Domina sometimes spoke with him and sometimes ignored him; he maintained the same politely impassive demeanor in either case.

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