"Give me your comm link, and wait outside," haut Rian Degtiar ordered.
The little ba nodded, and turned the device over to her without question, and withdrew silently.
She held the comm link out to Miles. "I use this to communicate with my senior servitors, when they run errands outside the Celestial Garden for me. Here."
He wanted to touch her, but scarcely dared. He instead extended his cupped hands toward her like a shy man offering flowers to a G.o.ddess. She dropped the comm link into them gingerly, as into the hands of a leper. Or an enemy.
"Is it secured?" he dared to ask.
"Temporarily."
In other words, it was the lady"s private line only as long as no one in higher-level Cetagandan security troubled to break in. Right. He sighed. "It won"t work. You can"t send signals into my emba.s.sy without causing my superiors to ask a whole lot of questions I"d rather not answer just now. And I can"t give you my comm link either. I"m supposed to turn it in, and I don"t think I can get away with telling them I lost it." Reluctantly, he handed the link back to her. "But we have to meet again somehow." Yes, oh yes. "If I"m going to be risking my reputation and maybe my life on the validity of my reasoning, I"d like to prop it up with a few facts." One fact was almost certain. Someone with enough wit and nerve to murder one of the most senior Imperial servitors under the nose of Cetaganda"s own emperor would hardly balk at threatening a decidedly un-senior female Degtiar. The thought was obscene, hideous. A Barrayaran scion"s diplomatic immunity would be an even more useless shield, no doubt, but that was merely the price of the game. "I think you could be in grave danger. It might be better to play along for a bit-don"t reveal to anyone you have obtained this key from me. I have a funny feeling I"m not following his script, y"see." He paced nervously back and forth before her. "If you can find out anything at all about Ba Lura"s real activities in the few days before it died-don"t run afoul of your own security, though. They have to be following up on the Ba"s death."
"I will... contact you when and how I can, Barrayaran." Slowly, one pale hand caressed the control pad on the arm of the float-chair, and a dim gray mist coalesced around her like a fairy spell of seeming.
The ba servitor returned to the pavilion to escort not Miles but its mistress away. Miles was left to stumble back through the dark to Yenaro"s estate alone.
It was raining.
Miles was not surprised to find that the ghem-woman was no longer waiting on the bench by the red-enameled gate. He let himself in quietly, and paused just outside the lighted garden doors to brush as many of the water droplets as possible off his formal blacks, and to wipe his face. He then sacrificed the handkerchief to the redemption of his boots, and quietly dropped the sodden object behind a bush. He slipped back inside.
No one noticed his entry. The party was continuing, a little louder, with a few new faces replacing some of the previous ones. The Cetagandans did not use alcohol for inebriation, but some of the guests had a late-party dissociated air about them similar to over-indulgers Miles had witnessed at home. If intelligent conversation had been difficult before, it was clearly hopeless now. He felt himself no better off than the ghemlings, drunk on information, dizzy with intrigue. Everyone to their own secret addictions, I suppose. He wanted to collect Ivan and escape, as swiftly as possible, before his head exploded.
"Ah, there you are, Lord Vorkosigan." Lord Yenaro appeared at Miles"s elbow, looking faintly anxious. "I could not find you."
"I took a long walk with a lady," Miles said. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. "Where is my cousin?"
"Lord Vorpatril is taking a tour of the house with Lady Arvan and Lady Benello," said Yenaro. He glanced through a wide archway at the room"s opposite side, which framed a spiral staircase in a hall beyond. "They"ve been gone... an astonishingly long time." Yenaro"s smile attempted to be knowing, but came out oddly puzzled. "Since before you... I don"t quite... ah, well. Would you care for a drink?"
"Yes, please," said Miles distractedly. He took it from Yenaro"s hand and gulped without hesitation. His eyes almost crossed, considering the possibilities of Ivan plus two beautiful ghem-women. Though to his haut-dazzled senses, all the ghem-women in the room looked as coa.r.s.e and dull as backcountry slatterns just now. The effect would wear off with time, he hoped. He dreaded the thought of his own next encounter with a mirror. What had the haut Rian Degtiar seen, looking at him? A simian black-clad gnome, twitching and babbling? He pulled up a chair and sat rather abruptly, the spiral staircase bracketed in his sights. Ivan, hurry up!
Yenaro lingered by his side, and began a disjointed conversation about proportional theories of architecture through history, art and the senses, and the natural esters trade on Barrayar, but Miles swore the man was as focused on the staircase as he was. Miles finished his first drink and most of a second before Ivan appeared in the shadows at the top of the stairs.
Ivan hesitated in the dimness, his hand checking the fit of his green uniform, which appeared fully a.s.sembled. Or re-a.s.sembled. He was alone. He descended with one hand clutching the curving rail, which floated without apparent support in echo of the stair"s arc. He jerked a stiff frown into a stiff smile before entering the main room and the light. His head swiveled till he spotted Miles, toward whom he made a straight line.
"Lord Vorpatril," Yenaro greeted him. "You had a long tour. Did you see everything?"
Ivan bared his teeth. "Everything. Even the light."
Yenaro"s smile did not slip, but his eyes seemed to fill with questions. "I"m... so glad." A guest called to him from across the room, and Yenaro was momentarily distracted.
Ivan bent down to whisper behind his hand into Miles"s ear, "Get us the h.e.l.l out of here. I think I"ve been poisoned."
Miles looked up, startled. "D"you want to call down the lightflyer?"
"No. Just back to the emba.s.sy in the groundcar."
"But-"
"No, dammit," Ivan hissed. "Just quietly. Before that smirking b.a.s.t.a.r.d goes upstairs." He nodded toward Yenaro, who was now standing at the foot of the staircase, gazing upward.
"I take it you don"t think it is acute."
"Oh, it was cute all right," Ivan snarled.
"You didn"t murder anybody up there, did you?"
"No. But I thought they"d never... Tell you in the car." *
"You"d better." Miles clambered to his feet. They perforce had to pa.s.s Yenaro, who attached himself to them like a good host, and saw them to his front door with suitably polite farewells. Ivan"s good-byes might have been etched in acid.
As soon as the canopy sealed over their heads, Miles commanded, "Give, Ivan!"
Ivan settled back, still seething. "I was set up."
This comes as a surprise to you, coz? "By Lady Arvan and Lady Benello?"
"They were the setup. Yenaro was behind it, I"m sure of it. You"re right about that d.a.m.ned fountain being a trap, Miles, I see it now. Beauty as bait, all over again."
"What happened to you?"
"You know all those rumors about Cetagandan aphrodisiacs?"
"Yes..."
"Well, sometime this evening that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h Yenaro slipped me an anti-aphrodisiac."
"Urn... are you sure? I mean, there are natural causes for these moments, I"m told...."
"It was a setup. I didn"t seduce them, they seduced me! Wafted me upstairs to this amazing room-it had to have been all arranged in advance. G.o.d, it was, it was..." His voice broke in a sigh, "it was glorious. For a little while. And then I realized I couldn"t, like, perform."
"What did you do?"
"It was too late to get out gracefully. So I winged it. It was all I could do to keep "em from noticing." "What?"
"I made up a lot of instant barbarian folklore-I told "em a Vor prides himself on self-control, that it"s not considered polite on Barrayar for a man to, you know, before his lady has. Three times. It was considered insulting to her. I stroked, I rubbed, I scratched, I recited poetry, I nuzzled and nibbled and-cripes, my fingers are cramped." His speech was a bit slurred, too, Miles noticed. "I thought they"d never fall asleep." Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. "But they were smiling, when they finally did." The smirk faded into a look of bleak dismay. "What do you want to bet those two are the biggest female ghem-gossips on Eta Ceta?"
"No takers here," said Miles, fascinated. Let the punishment fit the crime. Or, in this case, the trap fit the prey. Someone had studied his weaknesses. And someone just as clearly had studied Ivan"s. "We could have the ImpSec office do a data sweep for the tale, over the next few days."
"If you breathe a word of this I"ll wring your scrawny neck! If I can find it."
"You"ve got to confess to the emba.s.sy physician. Blood tests-"
"Oh, yes. I want a chemical scan the instant I hit the door. What if the effect"s permanent?"
"Ba Vorpatril?" Miles intoned, eyes alight.
"Dammit, I didn"t laugh at you."
"No. That"s true, you didn"t," Miles sighed. "I expect the physician will find whatever it was metabolizes rapidly. Or Yenaro wouldn"t have drunk the stuff himself."
"You think?"
"Remember the zlati ale? I"d bet my ImpSec silver eyes that was the vector."
Ivan relaxed slightly, obviously relieved at this professional a.n.a.lysis. After a minute he added, "Yenaro"s done you now, and he"s done me. Third time"s a charm. What"s next, do you suppose? And can we do him first?"
Miles was silent for a long time. "That depends," he said at last, "on whether Yenaro"s merely amusing himself, or whether he too is being... set up. And on whether there"s any connection between Yenaro"s backer and the death of Ba Lura."
"Connection? What possible connection?"
"We are the connection, Ivan. A couple of Barrayaran backcountry boys come to the big city, and ripe for the plucking. Somebody is using us. And I think somebody... has just made a major mistake in his choice of tools." Or fools.
Ivan stared at his venomous tone. "Have you got rid of that little toy you"re packing yet?" he demanded suspiciously.
"Yes... and no."
"Oh, s.h.i.t. I knew better than to trust-what the h.e.l.l do you mean by Yes and no? Either you have or you haven"t, right?"
"The object has been returned, yes."
"That"s that, then."
"No. Not quite."
"Miles... You had better start talking to me."
"Yes, I think I better had," Miles sighed. They were approaching the legation district. "After you"re done in the infirmary, I have a few confessions to make. But if-when-you talk to the ImpSec night-duty officer about Yenaro, don"t mention the other. Yet."
"Oh?" drawled Ivan in a tone of deep suspicion.
"Things have gotten... complex."
"You think they were simple before?"
"I mean complex beyond the scope of mere security concerns, into genuine diplomatic ones. Of extreme delicacy. Maybe too delicate to submit to the sort of booted paranoids who sometimes end up running local ImpSec offices. That"s a judgment call... that I"ll have to make myself. When I"m sure I"m ready. But this isn"t a game anymore, and it"s no longer feasible for me to run without backup." I need help, G.o.d help me.
"We knew that yesterday."
"Oh, yes. But it"s even deeper than I first thought."
"Over our heads?"
Miles hesitated, and smiled sourly. "I don"t know, Ivan. How good are you at treading water?"
Alone in his suite"s bathroom, Miles slowly peeled off his black House uniform, now in desperate need of attention from the emba.s.sy"s laundry. He glanced at himself sideways in the mirror, then resolutely looked away. He considered the problem, as he stood in the shower. To the haut, all normal humans doubtless looked like some lower life-form. From the haut Rian Degtiar"s foreshortened perspective, perhaps there was little to choose between him and, say, Ivan.
And ghem-lords did win haut wives, from time to time, for great deeds. And the Vor and the ghem-lords were very much alike. Even Maz had said so.
How great a deed? Very great. Well... he"d always wanted to save the Empire. The Cetagandan just wasn"t the empire he"d pictured, was all. Life was like that, always throwing you curveb.a.l.l.s.
You"ve gone mad, you know. To hope, to even think it...
If he defeated the late Dowager Empress"s plot, might the Cetagandan emperor be grateful enough to... give him Rian"s hand? If he advanced the late Dowager Empress"s plot, might the haut Rian Degtiar be grateful enough to... give him her love? To do both simultaneously would be a tactical feat of supernatural scope.
Barrayar"s interests lay, unusually, squarely with the interests of the Cetagandan emperor. Obviously, it was his clear ImpSec duty to foil the girl and save the villain.
Right. My head hurts.
Reason was returning to him, slowly, the astonishing effect of the haut Rian Degtiar wearing off. Wasn"t it? She hadn"t exactly tried to suborn him, after all. Even if Rian was as ugly as the witch Baba Yaga, he"d still have to be following up on this. To a point. He needed to prove Barrayar had not filched the Great Key, and the only certain way of doing that was to find its real thief. He wondered if one could get a hangover from excess pa.s.sion. If so, his was apparently starting while he was still drunk, which did not seem quite fair.
Eight Cetagandan satrap governors had been led into treason by the late empress. Optimistic, to think that only one could be a murderer. But only one possessed the real Great Key.
Lord X? Seven chances of guessing wrong, against one of guessing right. Not favorable odds.
I"ll... figure something out.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
Ivan was taking a long time, downstairs in the infirmary. Miles shucked on his black fatigues and, barefoot, fired up his comconsole for a quick review of the eight haut-lord satrap governors.
The satrap governors were all chosen from a pool of men who were close Imperial relations, half-brothers and uncles and great-uncles, in both paternal and maternal lines. Two current office-holders were of the Degtiar constellation. Each ruled his satrapy for a set term of only five years, then he was required to shift-sometimes to permanent retirement back at the capital on Eta Ceta, sometimes to another satrapy. A couple of the older and more experienced men had cycled this way through the entire empire. The purpose of the term limitation, of course, was to prevent the build-up of a personal local power base to anyone who might harbor secret Imperial pretensions. So far so sensible.
So... which among them had been tempted into hubris by the dowager empress, and Ba Lura? For that matter, how had she contacted them all? If she"d been working on her plan for twenty years, she"d had lots of time... still, that long ago, how could she have predicted which men would be satrap governors on the unknown date of her death? The governors must have all been brought into the plot quite recently.
Miles stared narrow-eyed at the list of his eight suspects. I have to cut this down somehow. Several somehows. If he a.s.sumed Lord X had personally murdered the Ba Lura, he could eliminate the weakest and most fragile elderly men... a premature a.s.sumption. Any of the haut-lords might possess a ghem-guard both loyal and capable enough to be delegated the task, while the satrap governor lingered front and center in the bier-gifting ceremonies, his alibi established before dozens of witnesses.
No disloyalty to Barrayar intended, but Miles found himself wishing he were a Cetagandan security man right now-specifically, the one in charge of whatever investigation was progressing on Ba Lura"s supposed suicide. But there was no way he could insert himself inconspicuously into that data flow. And he wasn"t sure Rian had the mind-set for it, not to mention the urgent necessity of keeping Cetagandan security"s attention as far from her as possible. Miles sighed in frustration.
It wasn"t his task to solve the Ba"s murder anyway. It was his task to locate the real Great Key. Well, he knew in general where it was-in orbit, aboard one of the satrap governors" flagships. How else to finger the right one?
A chime at his door interrupted his furious meditations. He hastily shut down the comconsole and called, "Enter."
Ivan trod within, looking extremely dyspeptic.
"How did it go?" Miles asked, waving him to a chair. Ivan dragged a heavy and comfortable armchair up to the comconsole, and flung himself across it sideways, scowling. He was still wearing his undress greens.
"You were right. It was taken by mouth, and it metabolizes rapidly. Not so rapidly that our medics couldn"t get a sample, though." Ivan rubbed his arm. "They said it would have been untraceable by morning."
"No permanent harm done, then."
"Except to my reputation. Your Colonel Vorreedi just blew in, I thought you might like to know. At least he took me seriously. We had a long talk just now about Lord Yenaro. Vorreedi didn"t strike me as a booted paranoid, by the way." Ivan let the implication, So hadn"t you better go see him?, hang in the air; Miles left it there.