The Third Claw of God (26 page)

This, at last, surprised him. “His staff?”

I ticked off my observations at a hammering staccato rate rate that barely permitted intake of breath.

“One: as I told Mr. Pescziuwicz earlier, Bocaians have never been especially known for their talent at learning languages beyond whatever native tongue they learned first. Two: in fact, they’re particularly bad at it. Three: despite that, the Khaajiir made part of his reputation as a scholar studying the past of another species, an endeavor that must have required substantial poring through primary sources. Four: he even demonstrated his fondness for multilingual puns, demonstrating several that required knowledge of extinct languages. Five: chatty as he was, the Khaajiir barely spoke at all during dinner, when his hands were so busy dealing with his meal that he could not retain a consistent grip on his staff. Six: when he did want to speak up, he grabbed his staff first. Seven: when he lost his staff upon falling to the floor, he asked for the staff in Bocaian. Eight: I’ve been told that I spoke Bocaian at some point today, not an impossible slip given that I grew up speaking the language, but still one sufficient to make me wonder how come I’m not aware of uttering words in a tongue I haven’t uttered since my childhood. Nine: just about everything else I said today was spoken in the presence of other people who had no difficulty understanding my words. Ten: the Khaajiir spoke directly to me while I was examining his staff, and I replied. Conclusion: during those few seconds it provided the same service for me that it provided for him. It translated for me. Corollary Number One: since it stores data, it might also contain information about his scholarly activities and about his mission here, information that may prove invaluable when it comes to determining just why an assassin of his species or any other would want to kill him. Corollary Number Two: since Jelaine’s actions after the emergency stop prove that the two of you have been apprised of its capabilities, you might as well take this opportunity to tell me anything I need to know about its operation or what data I should be looking for. I’ll have more pressing questions for you later, but that, at least, would be a fine start.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Dejah’s lips curled still further. Jelaine sipped from a drink that might not have been hers. Philip seemed to have woken up; he now sat up straighter, his eyes darting from his brother to his sister in furious search of the sensitive deduction I’d alluded to and which he must have wished he could share.

Jason wore no signs of defeat, just an increased sadness, as if my rejection of his friendship remained the most heartbreaking experience he’d been through all day. He spoke softly, as if placating a recalcitrant child. “The translation function is automatic, for anybody holding the staff by the friction strip. Opening the Khaajiir’s files requires the use of a Bocaian password phrase:‘Decch-taanil blaach nil Al-Vaafir.’

Speaking it out in a clear tone of voice, once, will train the internal software to recognize it when subvocalized. After that you’ll have permanent access.”

The closest Mercantile translation to the phrase he’d given me wasJudgment Denied the Heavenly Fathers , an odd combination of words given that no Bocaian sect I’d ever heard of had any orthodox creation myth. It didn’t matter; passwords are hardest to crack when random, and the Khaajiir would have been just as baffled by one I’d used to shield my personal files during one nasty dispute over interspecies jurisdiction:Pity the Fat Tchi with My Elbow up His Ass . I asked the Porrinyards, “Did you get that?”

“Decch-taanil,” Oscin began.

“Blaach nil Al-Vaafir,” Skye concluded.

“Great. Pick one of you to stay here and one of you to work on it on private.”

They nodded. Without any discussion, Skye remained where she was, while Oscin took the Khaajiir’s bloody staff down the stairs.

I tried not to let my satisfaction show on my face. It made sense for the Porrinyards to pore through the Khaajiir’s files; their data-absorption speed was so far beyond mine that relegating this job to them could save me hours in pursuing false leads. Still, there was no need to make them do more work than necessary, so I turned my attention back to Jason. “Anything in particular you think we should focus on?”

“Yes,” Jason said, his tone now determinedly upbeat, as if he could only be happy now that the strain of keeping secrets was safely in the past. “The Khaajiir’s writings relating K’cenhowten’s Enlightenment to his theory of historical momentum. A failed and then aborted Bettelhine project, from some three generations back, called Mjolnir, a reference to the hammer of the ancient-Earth Norse thunder deity, Thor. The writings and eventual fate of one Lillian Jane Bettelhine, my paternal aunt, now deceased. These are all things your friends would no doubt uncover within a couple of hours; you might as well find them now and then get back to me once you’re done, if you have any questions. Or, you could just take me aside and ask me. I won’t make you waste any more time.”

“You’re too late. Besides, I’ll have more questions for you soon enough.” A deep breath. “Right now I’d like a few minutes alone with your brother.”

Philip stirred himself and began to stand.

Vernon Wethers raised his hand. “Ummm…I object.”

It was the first time he’d spoken in quite a while. His soft, hesitant voice, an open apology for itself, startled in ways that angrier interjections might not have.

I said, “This is not a court of law, Mr. Wethers.”

His lips moved for a beat or two before words emerged. “No, but it is still my duty to stand for Philip Bettelhine’s interests, and I take that mission seriously. I must insist on being present during any consultation.”

I liked that:consultation rather thanquestioning . Even his word choice cleansed any implication of guilt from the moment.

What I didn’t like was Wethers. The man was a shadow, not just in terms of his habitual proximity to his employer, but also in personality as well. I had sensed no structure to him, no emotional depth that did not exist except as an imprint of the man he served. It would be dangerous to conclude from this that handling Philip would amount to handling him as well. Fanatics always have their own trajectories. But now that he’d spoken up…“Very well. Understand that some of my questions will be of a personal, and perhaps embarrassing, nature. You might find yourself intruding on Mr. Bettelhine’s feelings.”

Wethers dabbed at the corners of his lips with a napkin, then stood, adjusting his jacket to bring it incrementally back in line with the character-deprived perfection he owed the Bettelhine empire. “That is all right. Mr. Bettelhine knows that wherever his personal life is concerned, it has never been my function to form opinions…”

Philip Bettelhine sat on the edge of the couch in the outer suite, downcast, his wrists propped on his knees and his hands dangling like dead fish. His eyes avoided mine, making contact only long enough to establish that every instant of the process was being catalogued for future resentment. His creature Wethers stood against what would have been the panoramic window, his arms folded over his chest and his colorless eyes maintaining a strict focus on his employer that suggested years of reading volumes from every micro-alteration in Philip’s facial expressions. I would have found constant appraisal of that kind both off-putting and creepy, but Philip seemed used to it, and accepted his vassal’s gaze as his due even as he took mine as impudent intrusion.

Paakth-Doy, uncomfortable in this company, sat apart from all of us, trying not to make eye contact. I said, “Mr. Bettelhine, you don’t like me very much, do you?”

He looked tired, the question already pushing him to the limits of his patience. “From what I’ve been able to determine, not all that many people do.”

“Your brother and sister seem to.”

“Is that what this discussion’s going to be? Juvenile tallies of who likes whom? Please. I know I’m comfortable disliking you, I know you’re comfortable disliking me, and I think you and I have much more pressing business to talk about.”

He didn’t know it, but I found myself respecting him more after that little speech than I had at any point since meeting him. Honest dislike is always a breath of fresh air. “You don’t know why they invited me.”

“They didn’t invite you. My father invited you. But no.”

“You resent my presence.”

“I resent you strutting around like you own the place, especially when I’m the bastard who owns the place. Your actual presence doesn’t bother me one way or the other.”

“What do you think of me being the honored guest of your father?”

His tone dulled. “It baffles me.”

“The same would go for his close association with the Khaajiir.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t know what that’s about, either?”

“If my father wanted me to know, my father would have told me.”

“Have you asked him?”

“He has let me know that he considers the matter classified.”

“Is this typical of your relationship?”

Philip rubbed his eyes, as much, I think, to continue avoiding mine as to alleviate any strain he may have felt over the disasters of the evening. “My father and I have more than one relationship, Counselor. As a father with a respected and accomplished son, he has often been very close to me. As Chief Executive Officer commanding one of his chief lieutenants, he has sometimes been obliged to keep information flow on a need-to-know basis. I understand this. It is not atypical.”

“And yet,” I said, leaning in close, “as an accomplished executive in your own right, one often assumed to be your father’s most likely successor, who would at the very least hope to be groomed for greater and greater responsibility as you rise in the family profession, you would also expect to become privy to more classified and secret material as the years passed and the time of succession grew ever closer.”

“Yes, that would follow.”

“So the significance of the few secrets still being kept from you would also be increasing throughout this time?”

“Yes.”

“These secrets would currently include the reasons for my visit, or Dejah Shapiro’s, or for the Khaajiir’s long stay, or for the involvement of your siblings Jason and Jelaine?”

“Yes.”

I excused myself, went to the bathroom, poured myself a glass of water, and downed it to the dregs before returning. When I came back, he was still where I’d left him, neither his position, nor Vernon Wethers’s, having moved a millimeter. It was impossible not to wonder how many strings bound these two men, and how many misdeeds they’d plotted in rooms as luxurious as this one. I smiled at him. Like most of my smiles, it was not meant to be a pleasant one. “A number of years ago Jason went missing.”

“That’s common knowledge,” Philip said.

“He returned after what are alleged to have been hellish experiences on a crumbling wheelworld called Deriflys, and was welcomed back into the bosom of his family. How did you feel about that?”

The question didn’t surprise him, but the color rose in his cheeks, and his eyes blasted me with still-gathering heat of his resentment. “How do you think I felt about that? He’s my brother. I was older, and had a different mother, so I hadn’t spent as much time with him while he was growing up as Jelaine and some of the children closer to his own age, but he was still important to me. Nobody was happier than me when Jelaine was able to straighten him out, and he was able to find some purpose in his life.”

“It didn’t bother you that he’d been welcomed back when you’d been a loyal, dependable son all along?”

More anger. “Maybe it would have, if I’d been a selfish brat insecure about my own place in the family’s affections.”

“And were you?”

“Which, a selfish brat or insecure in my family’s affections? I’ll cop to the first, at least sometimes; it’s an occupational hazard of being wealthy. But never to the second.”

“There was no question of jealousy?”

He rolled his eyes, spared a do-you-believe-this-bitch look for the impassive Wethers, and then faced me again. “There it is. The most noxious cliché ever concocted about wealthy families. The siblings are always corrupt caricatures, sniping at each other as they jockey for favor. The parents are always malignant, domineering old farts, emitting a constant barrage of slicing remarks as they threaten to exclude the unfit among their offspring. Is that how you like to picture us, Counselor?” He snorted.

“Unfortunately for your preconceptions, that’s never been true of the Bettelhines. Whatever you may think of the way my family treats other people, we’ve always cared for our own.”

“So no sibling rivalry.”

“None? Please. We’re human. Just none of the kind you’re positing.”

“Not even when you lost Jelaine?”

He scowled. “I haven’t lost Jelaine.”

“True,” I allowed, “but Jason and Jelaine appear to be a closed unit that excludes you, not just from whatever they’ve been doing with your father and the Khaajiir, and not just from the business divisions they’ve been able to wrest from you, but also from any emotional connection to them as siblings. They don’t seem to hate you. They just don’t seem to have need of your presence. Are you going to claim that doesn’t bother you, either?”

I almost expected him to deny that as well, and for a moment he seemed about to, but then he glanced at Wethers again, and exhaled a lungful of hoarded breath. “No. I won’t claim that. I resent the hell out of it. Are you satisfied?”

“How did it happen, Mr, Bettelhine?”

He was angry again, but not at me. “I’m not sure that any of this is your goddamn business, Counselor, and we’ll have to talk about making sure you don’t take it anywhere outside this room, but when Jason returned from that place, he was not quite right. Oh, sure, he said the things he was expected to say, and did the things he was expected to do, and even managed to charm the eligible ladies when our parents threw a weekend ball in his honor, but he never really reconnected with us or with the life he’d thrown away. He was just playacting, giving us what he thought we wanted from him, and though it was goddamned convincing much of the time, we couldn’t spend time in his presence without seeing the look that came into his eyes whenever he thought we weren’t watching. I still don’t know everything that happened to him, during those years—it’s one of the many things he hasn’t seen fit to share with me—but I can tell you that we all knew it was still happening. I thought the family was going to lose him again, one way or the other.”