A Matter of Oaths (12 page)

The town was overflowing with liberty parties, the
dirtsiders making the most of the influx of fresh money by doubling their
normal prices. Rallya took a desultory look through one of the small shops:
nothing she had not seen before on maybe a hundred other worlds. Sixty years,
two or three different worlds every year. Yes, call it a hundred, and none of
them in any way memorable. Friends on half a dozen of them, retired webbers who
had found a world they liked, or claimed to like. Ex-friends. Once they were
forced to retire, there was always the loss of everything they had had in
common, the unspoken jealousy in the look they gave her web-bands: why has
she
still got her web? And always her
relief at the end of a visit, the escape from a reminder of her inevitable
future.

She shook herself irritably, stood with hands on hips in the
middle of the main street and glared along it. The best cure for morbid
thoughts was a drink, and at least this dirtball did not have restrictive
drinking laws. For the hundredth time, she wondered why she had bothered to
accompany a liberty party, and answered herself: it was simply good sense to
have one of the Three on hand if anybody got into real trouble. Not that
anybody from
Bhattya
would dare get
into real trouble, but there was always a first time.

She chose one of the quieter bars, found that she could eat
there too and ordered a meal. The food tasted heavily of the local spices but
was better than she had expected. From her seat on the veranda, she could see
all the activity along the main street. She ordered another beer — also better
than she expected — and lifted her feet onto the rail around the veranda. With
another nine hours to kill, there was no need to hurry anywhere.

One of the dirtsiders drifted over to join her, wanting to
know if the tales about webbers were true without actually saying as much. A
nice looking lad, about a third of Rallya’s age. She considered accepting his
offer, to fill an hour or so, then decided against it. He would find somebody
to tumble with: there were enough webbers in town. Maybe Lilimya: she was
renowned for being generous to the curious. Rallya told him she was old enough
to be his grandmother and pointed him in the direction of the most brightly lit
bar, amusing herself by being gentle with him. There were plenty of dirtsiders
she had dismissed hot-faced with the question: does your mother know you’re
out?

“Excuse me, ma’am. Have you seen Captain Sajan?”

Hajolir, Rallya remembered with an effort, Sajan’s Third.
She had met him briefly back on Aramas station. A tall man, tall enough to give
her a pain in the neck and the sun in her eyes if she looked up at him.

“Didn’t know she was dirtside,” she answered.

“She came down with the rest of us eleven hours ago, but we
were due to return an hour ago and she hasn’t turned up for the shuttle.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Yes, ma’am. Very.”

“Might she be sleeping off a drunk? Or too busy in the local
joy-house to notice the time?” Rallya suggested the two most common reasons for
overstaying a liberty, although Sajan had not seemed that irresponsible a
woman.

“We’ve checked the joy-house. She hasn’t been there. And we’re
checking all the bars now,” Hajolir said. “The last time anybody saw her was
eight hours ago. That was in one of the shops on the north edge of town,
looking at cloth.”

Rallya frowned. “Shopkeeper see her leave?”

“She says so. And that’s the respectable side of town, the
dirtsiders tell me.”

Hajolir had obviously run out of ideas, was hoping for
guidance. Rallya swore and dropped her feet to the ground.

“If she turns up drunk, or tumbling, Hajolir, I’ll have your
ears to make my next wrist-bands. And hers to make the neck-band,” she
threatened. “This is not how I planned to spend my liberty. Go find every
webber able to stand, including the ones who are currently horizontal. I want
them here within thirty minutes. Refer any arguments to me.” She glanced at the
position of the sun. “We’ve two hours left of good light — we’ll sweep the
town. Every street, every alleyway, every public building.” She watched him
dash off, relieved that the responsibility for finding Sajan was no longer his.
“Hell, if my liberty is going to be ruined, so is everybody else’s,” she
muttered angrily.

Thirty minutes later there was a crowd of webbers blocking
the main street and an irate leader of the local peace-force complaining that
Rallya was not going through the right channels. Rallya spared him enough time
to inform him that Sajan was a webber; that the right channels were the webbers
waiting for instructions; and that he could either shut up and keep out of the
way, or make some constructive suggestions about what might have happened to
Sajan in his town. He made a few more noises of protest, then suggested that
they start their sweep on the west side of town, which was not quite as
respectable as the rest.

It was forty minutes before Lilimya’s group found Sajan’s
body. She had been dragged to the end of an alley and covered with the refuse
from the eating-house that backed onto it from the main street. She had been
stabbed once in the back, the knife nowhere close by, and robbed of everything
she had been carrying. Naturally, nobody in the eating-house had seen anything
or heard anything. Naturally, the leader of the peace-force was aghast that a
webber had been murdered, would make every effort to bring the killer to
justice. Rallya cut through his platitudes, told him curtly that the other
members of Sajan’s Three would be in touch to make arrangements for disposal of
the body and left him to mouth his apologies to Hajolir, who had no choice but
to stay.

Back in the bar, she bought herself a drink of Jalset’s
firewater, then one for Lilimya, who wandered up with Fadir in tow and no
inclination to drift on. The main street was full of webbers in angry groups.
Rallya watched them carefully, alert for any sign that they might vent their
anger on local people or property. It would not be the first time it happened.

“Lilimya, go back to the shuttleground and call Commander
Noromi,” she ordered. “Tell him that I said to cancel all liberty throughout
the convoy and recall existing liberty parties at once. Fadir, you stay here,
in case I need a runner. Or are you too drunk to run?”

“No, ma’am,” he said indignantly.

“Good. What are you waiting for, Lilimya?”

“On my way, ma’am!”

Rallya watched her go. “Fifteen minutes, then we’ll spread
the good news,” she told Fadir absently. “Do you want a beer?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“Have one anyway. It might stop you fidgeting.” She bought
the beer from a anxious-looking owner. “Don’t worry,” she told him drily. “Yours
is the safest bar on the street, with me in it.” It did not seem to reassure
him.

“Do you think there will be trouble, ma’am?” Fadir asked nervously.

“There already has been,” Rallya reminded him. “Emperors, if
you’ve got enough sense to stay out of dark alleys with strangers — and I’m
assuming you have — then Sajan should have known better too!”

It was not only the waste of it that angered Rallya, it was
the stupidity. Sajan was a veteran, with as much experience as the party of
webbers who had found her body all taken together. It was sheer negligence to
let a dirtsider kill her so easily.

“It didn’t look as if she’d put up a fight, did it, ma’am?”
Fadir ventured.

Rallya looked at him sharply; she had not realized he had
seen the body. It explained why he was so pale. “Difficult to put up a fight
when you’ve been stabbed in the back,” she commented.

Fadir flushed. “Yes, ma’am, but…”

“Go on. I’ve nothing better to do with my ears than listen
to you.”

“Wouldn’t she have known better than to let somebody come up
behind her like that?”

Rallya shrugged. “Yes. If she had been sober. If she hadn’t
been distracted by somebody else. If she hadn’t been with somebody she thought
she could trust.” She finished her drink, gestured at Fadir’s untouched beer. “If
you want that, drink up before we round everybody up and get them out of here.”

She watched him drink, realizing that for Fadir, Jalset’s World
would be memorable, the place he had seen his first dead body. It was faintly
annoying that she could not remember where she had had the same experience, and
that she suspected she would forget about Jalset’s World as easily.

“You’ve done all right today, Fadir,” she told him roughly. “Don’t
spoil it by growing roots in that seat.”

“You know it has to be another
webber, and I know it has to be another webber, but we’ll never get the Convoy
Commander to agree. According to him, there isn’t a single member of the Guild
who’d give another webber a bloody nose, let alone stab one in the back. Their
precious Oath doesn’t allow it.”

“Why are we wasting our time worrying about it? If the
murderer is aboard one of the ships, that’s the Guild’s problem, not ours.”

“We have to arrest somebody, to keep the Guild happy.
Especially now, with this damned Outsider trouble. If they decide to stop the
convoys…”

“They can’t. Half the Imperial Court uses blissdream.”

“They’d find something to replace it quickly enough, and if
they didn’t, the Guild wouldn’t care. Listen, we didn’t arrest Chalir until the
day after the webber was killed, did we?”

“No.”

“Talk to him. Persuade him to confess to killing the webber
as well as his partner, and concoct a believable story to pass on to the Convoy
Commander.”

“What do I offer Chalir?”

“Whatever it takes.”

Joshim hid a smile as Churi ran out of words and resorted
to enthusiastic but imprecise gestures to complete his answer.

“You’ve worked hard at that since your last assessment,” he
said instead.

“Yes, sir. Although I didn’t really understand it until Rafe
explained about compound feedback. Once I understood that, the rest was simple.
Well, easier,” Churi corrected himself. “It wasn’t that Rafe’s explanation was
better than yours,” he added, belatedly remembering the two hours that Joshim
had spent explaining the same subject to him. “It just made more sense to me.”

Joshim did smile at that. “Have you explored the mathematics
of it yet?” he asked.

“No, sir. Rafe said I should concentrate on getting the
ideas right first.”

“When you’re ready to try the maths, tell me and I’ll start
you off. Or ask Rafe, if you want.”

“I’ll do that, sir.”

Churi had moved forward to the edge of his seat in nervous
anticipation of Joshim’s verdict. A Webmaster’s assessment was always an ordeal
for a junior in training, and particularly so when they had done badly in their
last assessment, as Churi had. A consistently poor performance could cost a
junior their berth aboard
Bhattya
, or
in an extreme case their web. A webber had to have an instinctive understanding
of the way the web worked, of its possibilities and limitations, of the
consequences of their actions within it. Without that instinct, they might
think when there was no time to think, or act when action was the worst choice
they could make. Few webbers were born with the instinct, but all of them had
to acquire it or lose their place in the web, and Joshim was the final judge
aboard
Bhattya
of who had it and who
did not.

“You’ve made good progress this quarter year,” Joshim said
encouragingly. “Especially since you’ve learned that there are no shortcuts.”

Churi relaxed visibly. “Yes, sir. I think it’s because Rafe
has helped me a lot, particularly when we’re in the web.”

Rafe had plenty of time to spare in the web, Joshim thought
unhappily as Churi left, time he would not have if he were allowed to take the
key-position again. That decision would have to be reviewed soon, before Rafe’s
brevet promotion was made substantive; no ship could have a First — or any
senior — barred from the key-position. And without any new evidence, Joshim did
not know how he could reverse his decision.

It did not help that Rafe would not discuss the matter. He
had referred to it once — obliquely — since Joshim had imposed the restriction,
when he asked for permission to fit some training sessions into their shared
web-shift, the training sessions which had helped Churi so much. The irony was
that it took a high degree of web-skill to combine the number two position in
the web with a teaching role without disturbing the work of the active team. By
giving permission, Joshim was showing a rare level of confidence in Rafe, and
deflecting questions from the rest of the web-room about the restriction placed
upon him. Which was probably one reason why Rafe had suggested it.

Salu’i’kamai would never have had this problem, Joshim
thought ruefully. She would have followed her gut feeling, certain that it was
the voice of her Goddess prompting her; no conflicts for her between duty and
desire. A direct link to a deity was an advantage best appreciated when it had
been lost; prayers, to which the answers were unclear or unrecognized, were a
poor substitute which so far had produced no solution to Joshim’s dilemma. Or
if they had, it was not the solution that Joshim hoped for and so he had not
seen it. That was another problem with prayers: it was permissible to pray for
what you wanted, but what you got was what the gods wanted, and there was no
guarantee that the two would coincide. And if the gods had no interest in your
problem, you got nothing, not even an indication that it was yours alone to
deal with.

The door alert sounded, reminding Joshim of another problem,
one which had been wished on him by the assignment clerks and — as far as he
knew — not by any higher authority. Elanis was punctual to the second, not out
of simple good manners but from his policy of investing the exact minimum of
effort necessary to escape criticism from his seniors. He had been given ample
time to realize that it was not an approach that would be tolerated aboard
Bhattya
; he had failed to change it, so
now he was due for a warning. Unless he produced an acceptable explanation,
Joshim reminded himself scrupulously.