Dragonback 05 Dragon and Judge (6 page)

Mustache's hand got there first. "I'll take this," he said. He
started to put it in his pocket, then paused. "Let's check, shall we,
just for the fun of it?" Clicking it on, he held it to his own collar.
"Hello, Virgil?"

Alison held her breath. But from the wry pucker of Mustache's lips
she could tell that Uncle Virge had anticipated this possibility. "I
see you like classical music," he said. "Beethoven, isn't it?"

He handed the comm clip to her. Alison held it against her collar,
to find that Uncle Virge had piped in the feed from one
of
Semaline's music broadcasts. "Schubert, actually," she said, starting
to fasten it back on.

"Don't bother," Mustache said, taking back the clip and shutting
it off again as he put it into his pocket. "There won't be any news or
music broadcasts for you to listen to along the way."

"Come on, girl," Sideburns said, gesturing toward the door.
"You're in the big time now. Don't want to keep them waiting."

Alison shivered. "No," she murmured. "Of course not."

The stone bridge was just steep enough that Jack decided he didn't
want to try walking down it face first. Instead, he backed his way
down, wondering whether this was the sort of thing a grand exalted Jupa
would do.

By the time he reached the ground, a half-dozen Golvins had
gathered at the foot of the bridge. One of them, who Jack tentatively
identified as the one who had first accosted him at the spaceport, was
clutching a handful of small notebooks. "Jupa Jack," he said, his eyes
bright. "I bring you the lists."

"Thanks," Jack said, eyeing the notebooks with a sinking feeling.
Specs and records from the mine Draycos had spotted upstairs? "Just,
uh, just put them in my apartment, will you?"

"As you wish, Honored Jupa," the other said, selecting one of the
notebooks and handing it to him. "I thought you might wish to study the
list of uprights right away."

"Good idea," Jack said, opening it to a page at random. There was
nothing but lists of numbers down the left-hand side of each page,
along with some sort of chicken scratchings beside them that was
probably the local writing.

"We have not yet had time to translate them into Broad-speak," the
Golvin said apologetically. "But rest assured that all those listed are
uprights. And the lists themselves have all been done in Broadspeak, as
the Jupa Stuart taught us to do."

"That's good," Jack said. He eyed the list of numbers again, a
sneaking suspicion beginning to tug at him. If the head man here was
called the One . . . "What's your name, by the way?"

"I am One-Four-Seven Among Many," the Golvin said proudly. "But if
your wisdom shows the path, I may soon be raised to a higher—"

"Onfose!" one of the others cut him off, clearly shocked. "How
dare
you suggest such a thing?"

One-Four-Seven—Onfose?—cringed. "I meant nothing, Nionei," he said
hastily. "I merely meant—"

"You will allow Jupa Jack to make his own decisions, at his own
time, in his own way," Nionei said firmly. "
And
not with you and
he alone, but with all present and sided."

"Of course," Onfose said. "My most abject apologies, Jupa Jack."

"He really does mean no harm," the critic said, still looking a
little cross as he glared at Onfose. "But you will note
his
name does not appear among the uprights."

Jack flipped a few pages over. Sure enough, between 135 and 177
there were no entries. "I'll keep that in mind," he said. "If you'll
take the rest of the notes to my apartment as I asked, I'd like to walk
around a little. Get a feel for the place."

"As you desire, Honored Jupa," Onfose said. "Do you wish an
escort?"

"So that you can try again to speak your side?" one of the other
Golvins asked dryly.

"I don't think I'll get lost," Jack assured him. Picking a
direction at random, he set off, making sure to stay on the paths and
off the crop plants. The Golvins, to his quiet relief, made no move to
follow.

"Interesting," Draycos murmured from his shoulder as Jack reached
one of the narrow irrigation channels and took a long step over it.
"Did you notice how they form their names?"

"What names?" Jack countered. "They're nothing but a bunch of
numbers."

"Though the listing is apparently not simply by birth order or any
such random assignment," Draycos pointed out. "Recall that Onfose
appeared to think a decision by you could change his number."

Jack thought back to the conversation. "Okay, I guess I can buy
that," he said. "So they're ranked by status or position or nearness to
the throne. Or whatever the One sits on."

"Note too how they simplify the awkwardness of long numbers,"
Draycos went on. "They take the first two letters of each number and
form a name from them."

"The two-letter abbreviation thing is actually pretty common
across the Orion Arm," Jack said, thinking back again. The critic who'd
jumped all over One-Four-Seven had called him Onfose. So that made
Nionei—"So Nionei is Nine-One-Eight?"

"That would appear to be the pattern," Draycos agreed.

On a hunch, Jack flipped open his notebook again. "Looks like our
friend Nionei is an upright," he said. "I wonder what they are."

"I don't know," Draycos said. "But the direction I was going with
this—"

"
Jupa
," Jack said as it suddenly hit him.

"Exactly," Draycos said. "If they're following their usual
pattern,
Jupa
is likely a contraction of two words:
Ju
something and
Pa
something."

Jack ran the two syllables through his mind. But nothing leaped
out at him. "Sorry," he said. "But I already told you I don't know the
first thing about mining."

"Jupa Jack?" a voice called.

Jack turned to see another Golvin hurrying toward him, a
paper-wrapped bundle clutched in his hands. "I have brought you your
attire," he said, panting a little as he trotted to a halt. "I do not
know if it will fit—Jupa Stuart was somewhat taller than you. I will
adjust it later if it does not."

"Thank you," Jack said, frowning as he unwrapped the paper and
pulled out the items one by one. On top was a light gray robe with
vertical pleats equipped with a wide black sash fastened with a brushed
silver clasp. Next came a black sleeveless duster with angled royal
blue stripes on the shoulders and sleeves. Tall gray boots of some soft
material were wrapped in a package of their own; and between them, also
in its own paper wrapping—

Jack's breath froze in his lungs as he stared down at the
black-and-royal-blue hat folded neatly in its packaging. Part tricorne
and part biretta, the old description ran through his numbed mind. Part
tricorne and part biretta . . .

"Jupa Jack?" the Golvin asked into his thoughts.

"Yes," Jack managed, forcing his mind back to the present. "Yes.
Go ahead and take the—take everything back to my apartment. Except
this," he added, snatching the hat as the Golvin started to close up
the paper.

"As you wish, Jupa Jack," the Golvin said. "There will be a dinner
in your honor at the twelfth hour, two hours from now, at the Great
Assembly Hall."

Jack forced moisture into his suddenly dry mouth. "Fine."

The Golvin made as if to say something else, apparently thought
better of it, and headed back toward the pillars.

"Jack?" Draycos asked quietly, his voice anxious.

"I'm all right," Jack said, gazing down at the hat cupped in his
hands. "I just . . ." He took a deep breath. "This is it, Draycos. This
is the hat I remember my parents wearing."

The K'da shifted on his skin, and Jack felt a slight pressure
against his shirt as the gold-scaled head pressed against the material
for a better look. "Are you certain?"

"Absolutely," Jack said, memories flashing once again across his
mind. "I actually had one of them for a year or so until Uncle Virgil
found it and took it away."

"And he told you it was a miner's helmet?"

"Yes," Jack said, frowning. "But it can't be, can it?"

"Unlikely," Draycos said. "The material is too soft for protection
against dangerous impacts."

"Unless it's a topside boss's hat," Jack suggested.

"It does indeed look like a symbol of authority," Draycos said.
"But you said Uncle Virgil had told you specifically that your parents
were miners."

"Right, he did," Jack admitted. "Anyway, how could they have been
killed in a mine explosion if they were topside bosses? So Uncle Virgil
lied. Wouldn't be the first time. But if it's not a miner's helmet,
what is it?"

"We know that the job of Jupa involves decisions of some sort,"
Draycos said. "As well as Golvins in a group speaking their sides.
Could it be some sort of mediator or arbitrator?"

"That would fit with Onfose's ham-handed attempt to cozy up to
me," Jack agreed. "And if your Golvin naming theory is right, it starts
with Ju and Pa."

And for the second time in two minutes Jack felt his breath catch.
He held the hat up, staring at it as if seeing it for the first time.
Which, in a sense, he was. "
Ju Pa
, Draycos.
Judge-Paladin
.

"My parents were members of the highest-ranking judicial group in
the entire Orion Arm."

Draycos stared out through the opening in Jack's shirt, gazing at
the hat with new respect. He had always thought Jack's character was
out of balance with that of the thief who had raised him. The logical
solution was that his parents had instilled their values in him before
their deaths.

But for Jack to have come from
this
kind of heritage was a
twist he'd never expected. "That's incredible," he murmured. "How could
Uncle Virgil have kept such a secret from you all these years?"

"Easily," Jack said, still sounding a little dazed. "All my book
learning came from the
Essenay
's computer." Beneath his
flattened body, Draycos felt the boy's muscles tighten again. "
Essenay
.
'S and A.' Stuart and Ariel."

"Exactly as Alison suggested back on Rho Scorvi," Draycos reminded
him.

"I'm sure she'll love hearing she was right about that," Jack
said. "I wonder what my real last name is. Anyway, like I was saying,
everything I ever learned about the Judge-Paladins came from the
Essenay
's
computer. It would have been easy enough for Uncle Virgil to delete any
pictures from the ship's encyclopedias."

"Yes," Draycos murmured. "I know you've mentioned Judge-Paladins
before, I believe in conjunction with the ongoing slave trade. But
you've never told me exactly who and what they are."

"It's not a secret," Jack said, turning the hat over in his hands.
"They were the Internos answer to the lack of courts and proper judges
in some of the less populated worlds. Kind of like the old circuit
riders they used to have back on Earth. They'd travel from planet to
planet, region to region, dealing with whatever cases had accumulated
since the last time they'd been there."

"What went wrong?"

Jack shrugged. "Nothing, as far as I know, except that there
aren't nearly enough of them to go around. It started as just a human
thing, like I said, on just the Internos worlds. But a lot of the alien
governments in the rest of the Trade Association decided they liked the
idea, and the Judge-Paladin project was extended to pretty much the
whole Orion Arm. They fly around in these—"

He broke off with a snort. "In these really high-class ships with
InterWorld transmitters and high-level P/S personality simulator
computers," he went on. "Blast it all—Alison was right again. The
Essenay
really
is
way out of Uncle Virgil's class."

"Which leads to the question of how he acquired it," Draycos said.

And immediately wished he'd kept his jaws shut. There was one
obvious answer as to how a thief and con man like Virgil Morgan might
have done that, and at the moment it wasn't a possibility Draycos
really wanted to burden Jack with.

Fortunately, Jack's own thoughts were already headed off in an
entirely different direction. "Which leads
me
to the question
of how come Alison's so smart," he growled. "
Way
too smart for
someone who claims she's just running cons on mercenary groups."

"Perhaps there is more to her than we know," Draycos murmured.

"Bet on that, buddy." Jack looked up at the sky above them. "
I
just wonder what she's doing back there all alone with my ship."

"Uncle Virge answers to you, not her," Draycos reminded him. "What
I don't understand is why your parents were not missed."

"I don't know," Jack said. "Maybe their schedule was random enough
that no one could pin down where they'd been when they disappeared." He
hissed between his teeth. "Or maybe no one tried very hard."

"You said the alien governments all approve of the program."

"The central governments do, yes," Jack said grimly. "But not all
the local top hats like the idea of outsiders poking around their
territories."

"Hence the
Essenay
's built-in weaponry?"

Jack shrugged. "I assumed that was part of the stuff Uncle Virgil
added afterward, like the chameleon hull-wrap," he said. "But now; who
knows?" He hunched his shoulders. "For that matter, I don't even know
why
I'm
still alive."

The sky was growing noticeably darker, Draycos noted as he peered
up through the opening in Jack's shirt. They should be heading back
soon. "That poem your mother used to sing to you," he said. "The one
that contained the unknown word?"

"You mean
drue
?" Jack asked. " 'We stand before, we stand
behind, we seek the
drue
with heart and mind'?"

"Yes, that one," Draycos said. "I wonder if perhaps you simply
remembered the word wrong."