Off Armageddon Reef (18 page)

So that's the bastard who screwed all of our plans to hell and gone
, he thought sourly. He still didn't have a clue how the mysterious civilian had gotten wind of the operation in the first place, or how his highly paid mercenaries could have been so inept as to allow a single busybody to completely negate so many days of careful planning.

It ought to have worked—it
would
have worked—if not for him.
Lahang kept his bitter anger out of his expression, but it was harder than usual to make sure his face said only what he wanted it to say. Prince Nahrmahn was going to be…displeased.

He watched the cavalcade move on up the street towards the palace, then turned away from the window. He crossed the main chamber of his modest, if comfortable, lodgings and climbed the stairs to the roof.

A chorus of whistling hisses and clicking jaws greeted him, and he smiled with genuine pleasure, his frustration and anger fading, and hissed back. The wyverns in the big, subdivided rooftop coop pressed against the latticework, crowding together as they whistled for treats, and he chuckled and reached through the lattice to rub skulls and stroke necks. It was, in many ways, a foolhardy thing to do. Some of the wyverns in that coop had wingspans of over four feet. They could have removed a finger with a single snap of their serrated jaws, but Lahang wasn't worried.

He made a comfortable living, without ever having to touch the funds his prince could have made available to him, by raising and training hunting and racing wyverns for the Charisian nobility and wealthier merchants. And the wyverns in these coops were not only his friends and pets, but also his cover, in more than one way. They provided his income, and his profession explained why he had a constant influx of new wyverns to replace those he sold. Which conveniently hid the fact that two or three in each shipment he received were homing wyverns from Prince Nahrmahn's own coop in Eraystor.

Now Lahang took the enciphered report from his tunic pocket. It was written on the finest Harchong paper, incredibly thin and tough, and commensurately expensive, although that was the least of his concerns as he opened the coop door and crooned a distinctive sequence of notes.

One of the wyverns inside the coop whistled imperiously at its companions. A couple of them were slow to move aside, and it slapped them smartly with its forward wings until they bent their heads obsequiously and got out of its way. Then it stood in the coop door, stretching its long neck so that Lahang could scratch its scaly throat while it crooned back to him.

He spent a few moments petting the creature, then lifted it out of the coop and closed and carefully secured the door behind it. The wyvern perched on top of the coop, obediently extending one leg and watching alertly, head cocked, as he affixed the report to the message-holding ring. He made sure it was securely in position, then gathered the wyvern in both arms and walked to the corner of the roof.

“Fly well,” he whispered in its ear, and tossed it upward.

The wyvern whistled back to him as it flew one complete circle around the rooftop. Then it went arrowing off to the north.

He gazed after it for a moment, then drew a deep breath and turned back towards the stairs. His preliminary report would be in Prince Nahrmahn's hands within the next six days, but he knew his master well. The prince was going to want full details of how the plan to assassinate the Charisian heir had failed, and that meant it was going to be up to Braidee Lahang to find out what had happened.

Hopefully without losing his own head in the process.

The man called Merlin Athrawes looked around the sitting room of his guest suite in the royal palace of Tellesberg, capital of the Kingdom of Charis. It was a pleasant, airy chamber, with the high ceilings favored in warm climates, on the second level of Queen Marytha's Tower. It was also comfortably furnished and had an excellent view of the harbor, and a room in Queen Marytha's Tower was an indication of high respect. The tower, where foreign ambassadors were customarily lodged, lay on the boundary between the royal family's personal section of the palace and its more public precincts.

Of course, there were no doors which led directly from the tower into the royal family's quarters, and there just happened to be that permanently manned guard post at the tower's only entrance and exit. Solely, no doubt, to protect the ambassadors' highly respected persons.

Merlin smiled and strolled across to the mirror above the beautifully inlaid chest of drawers in the suite's bedchamber. The mirror was of silver-backed glass, and he studied the surprisingly clear, sharp reflection in its slightly wavery depths almost as if it were a stranger's.

Which, after all, it was in many ways.

He grimaced, then chuckled ruefully and ran a fingertip along one of his waxed mustachios. It was, he was forced to admit, a masterful disguise.

One of the features of a full-capability, last-generation PICA had been its owner's ability to physically reconfigure it. It wasn't a feature Nimue Alban had ever used, but, then, she hadn't used her PICA at all, very often. Certainly not as much as her father had hoped she would. To be honest, she'd known, he would have vastly preferred for her never to have joined the Navy in the first place, and he'd deeply resented the demands it had placed upon her time. He'd loved her very much, and a man of his wealth and position had known the truth about the ultimate hopelessness of the Federation's position early on. She'd suspected that he hadn't intentionally brought her into a doomed world in the first place. That her birth had been an “accident” her mother had arranged, which very probably helped explain their divorce when she was only a child. Even if her suspicions were correct, that hadn't kept him from loving her once she'd been born, but he'd been afraid that as a serving officer in the Navy, she would die sooner than she had to. He'd wanted her to live as long as she could, and to pack as much living as possible into the time she had, before the inevitable happened.

Well
, Merlin thought, his smile going bittersweet,
it looks like your decision to give me a PICA worked out after all. I'm going to have a very long time to live, indeed, Daddy
.

He gazed deep into his own reflected blue eyes, looking for some sign of the biological person he once had been, then brushed that thought aside and gave his mustachio another twirl.

Nimue Alban had never been tempted to shift genders, either in her own biological case, or even temporarily, using her PICA. Others had been rather more adventurous, however, and PICAs had been designed to be fully functional in every sense. And since the technology had been available, the PICA designers had seen no reason not to allow their customers to reconfigure the gender, as well as the general physical appearance, of their marvelous, expensive toys.

Given the male-dominated nature of Safeholdian society, Nimue finally had used the capability.

There were, inevitably, some limitations for even the most capable technology. A PICA couldn't be made significantly shorter or taller than it already was. There was some flex, but not a great deal. Shoulders could be broadened, hips could be narrowed, genitalia and pelvic structures could be rearranged, but the basic physical size of the PICA itself was pretty much fixed by the size of its original human model. Fortunately, Nimue Alban had been a woman of rather more than average height even for her birth society, whose members had been blessed with excellent medical care and adequate diet from childhood. As a woman on Safehold, she would have been a giantess, and “Merlin” was quite a bit taller than most of the men he might meet.

Nimue had added several judiciously placed scars here and there, like the one on Merlin's cheek, as well. Merlin was a warrior, and she hadn't wanted anyone to wonder how someone had attained his years and prowess without ever even being wounded.

The decision to become male hadn't been an easy one, despite the logic which made it effectively inevitable. Nimue Alban had never
wanted
to be a man, nor had she ever felt any particular physical attraction to women, and looking at Merlin's nude, undeniably male—and very masculine—physique in a full-length mirror for the first time had left “him” with very mixed feelings. Fortunately, Nimue had allowed herself—or, rather, had allowed Merlin—two of Safehold's thirty-day months to become accustomed to “his” new body.

In light of the plan Nimue had evolved, Merlin was impressively muscled. Not so much for brute strength as for endurance and staying power. The fact that a PICA's basic frame and musculature were stressed to approximately ten times the strength and toughness of a normal human and that a PICA never tired were simply two of the little secrets Merlin intended to hold in reserve.

At the same time, accomplishing his mission would require him to earn the respect of those about him, and this was a muscle-powered society in which a man who aspired to influence must be prepared to demonstrate his own prowess. Enough wealth might buy respect, but Merlin couldn't simply appear with bags full of gold, and he certainly had no patent of nobility. His chosen
seijin
's role would help in that respect, but he would have to demonstrate its reality, and that meant living up to a
seijin
's reputation, which almost any flesh-and-blood human being would have found…difficult.

That was why Merlin had spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the governors on his basic physical capabilities. Nimue had never done a great deal of that, but Merlin was likely to find himself in much higher-risk environments than any into which Nimue had ever ventured in her PICA. More to the point, Merlin's survival was far more important than Nimue Alban's had ever been. So he'd set his reaction speed to a level about twenty percent higher than any human could have matched. He could have set it higher still—
his
nervous impulses traveled at light speed, through molecular circuitry and along fiber-optic conduits, without the chemical transmission processes upon which biological nerves depended—and he still had that extra speed in reserve for emergencies. But it was
only
for emergencies, and fairly dire ones, at that; even a
seijin
would be looked at askance if he seemed
too
quick and agile.

By the same token, Merlin had adjusted his strength to about twenty percent above what might have been expected out of a protoplasmic human with the same apparent musculature. That left him with quite a lot of literally superhuman strength in reserve, as well, and he'd set the overrides to let him call upon it at need.

It had taken him every day of the five-days Nimue had allowed to learn not simply to move like a man, but to adjust for his enhanced reaction speed and strength. Well, that and the fact that his body's center of gravity had moved vertically upward quite a bit.

He'd spent a lot of that time working out with the katana and wakazashi he'd used Pei Kau-yung's fabrication module to build. He'd had Owl design and actually fabricate the weapons, and he'd cheated just a little bit with them, too. The blades looked like the work of a Harchong master swordsmith, with the characteristic ripple pattern of what Old Earth had called “Damascus steel.” They even carried the proof marks of Hanyk Rynhaard, one of the legendary swordmakers of Harchong, but they were actually made of battle steel, orders of magnitude harder and tougher than any purely metallic alloy. Merlin could have had Owl give them an edge which was literally a molecule wide, but he'd resisted that temptation. Instead, he'd settled for one which was “only” as sharp as a Safehold surgeon's finest scalpel for the katana. The wakazashi was quite a bit “sharper” than that, since he anticipated using it only in dire emergencies. The katana would be Merlin's primary weapon, and since it was made of battle steel, he could do little things like using his reserve strength to slice completely through the assassin leader's blade without worrying about nicking or dulling his own.

He intended to make very certain no one but he ever cared for either of those weapons. He also intended to spend quite a lot of time carefully inspecting their edges, honing them on a regular basis, seeing to it that they were properly oiled and guarded against rust, and everything else a blade made of true steel would have required. On the other hand, a
seijin
was supposed to be a mysterious figure, with more than merely mortal capabilities, and Merlin had no objection to carrying a sword which evoked at least a little awe. That was one reason he'd stayed with the katana, which had no exact counterpart on Safehold. The fact that it was specifically suited to the only style of fencing Nimue Alban had ever studied was another factor, but its exotic appearance should contribute to the image he needed to create.

He chuckled again, then turned away from the mirror with a final stroke for his absolutely genuine—in as much as
any
of him could be called “genuine”—mustachio. A PICA had fully functional taste buds and a “stomach,” so that its owner could sample novel cuisine while running it in remote mode. And since it might well have organic material in the aforesaid stomach, the designers had seen no reason not to utilize that material as efficiently as possible. The nanotech built into what passed for Merlin's digestive tract was fully capable of converting any food he ate into naturally “growing” fingernails, toenails, and hair. It couldn't begin to use all of the food an organic human being consumed in a day, however, and if Merlin was going to be forced to eat regularly—which he undoubtedly was—he'd have to dispose of the unused material at regular intervals.

So I guess I'll still have to hit the head after all, from time to time
, he thought with a grin as he strolled back across to the window.

Although Queen Marytha's Tower had long since been renovated into comfortable, modern guest quarters, it had been a portion of the original royal castle's outer walls when it had first been built. The wall of the tower itself was a good meter and a half thick—
five feet
, he corrected himself irritably, once again cursing that maniac Langhorne for abandoning the metric system—and he pushed the diamond-paned windows open and leaned his elbows on the immensely deep windowsill.

The city made an impressive sight. It was built mainly of stone and brick—the Kingdom of Charis had far better uses for good timber than wasting it building houses—and the area near the waterfront was a vast sprawl of substantial warehouses, shipyards, ropewalks, chandlers, and business offices. Farther inland, away from the warren of taverns, bistros, and bordellos which served the mariners who manned the kingdom's merchant vessels, were the homes of the thousands of workmen who labored in those same warehouses and other establishments. And farther inland still, on the rising land moving away from the harbor along the banks of the Telles River towards the Palace itself, were the townhouses and mansions of noblemen and wealthy merchants.

The city's total population was in the vicinity of a hundred thousand, which made it huge for Charis and much more than merely respectable for Safehold generally. It also meant Tellesberg was completely ringed by farmland whose sole purpose was to keep the city's population fed. Even so, it was necessary to import vast quantities of food on a regular basis. The Charisian merchant marine was more than equal to the task, as long as the Royal Charisian Navy maintained control of Howell Bay, but a hundred thousand was still an enormous population for a city built by a civilization powered only by wind, water, and muscle.

It was also a remarkably clean city. Safeholdian notions of public hygiene and waste disposal were far more stringent than anything Old Earth had known at any comparable technology level. Merlin was delighted that they were, too. The sorts of pestilences and plagues which had routinely swept through preindustrial Old Earth cities were very rare occurrences on Safehold. Besides, it also meant Tellesberg
smelled
far better than its Old Earth counterparts ever had.

He smiled, but then the smile faded as he saw the church spires which dominated the city's low-lying skyline. He could see literally dozens of them from where he stood, and every one of them was part of the lie which had brought him to Charis in the first place.

On the other hand
, he thought,
every single one of them has at least one bell in its tower, too. Big ones, at that, and that means foundries. Lots and lots of foundries.
That's
going to come in handy as hell in the not-too-distant
.

The dark blue waters of Howell Bay stretched northward as far as even his eyes could see. The bay was very nearly half the size of Old Earth's Mediterranean. If the body of water called “The Throat” were added, their combined length would have been eighty percent of the Mediterranean's, although they would also have been much narrower. Like the Mediterranean, The Throat and Howell Bay were almost completely landlocked, except where The Throat opened onto the Charis Sea, and they—and the Charis Sea—were utterly dominated by the Royal Charisian Navy.

At the moment.

Merlin pursed his lips and whistled tunelessly as he considered King Haarahld VII's dilemma.

The Kingdom of Charis was one of Safehold's more substantial kingdoms. It had grown, although the local histories didn't remember it exactly that way, out of one of the original colonial enclaves. In fact, the original site for the city of Tellesberg had been chosen by Pei Shan-wei herself, during her terraforming operations.