Songmaster (20 page)

If the Freemen of Eire had not been guilty, would they have fired on the first imperial troops to come questioning them at their supposedly secret base in Antrim? Some said not. But the Chamberlain said, “It’s too stupid to believe.”

The Captain of the guard held his temper. “It all fit. The accent pinpointed them to Antrim. Seventeen members of the group had been in Eastamerica for one reason or another during most or all of the time Ansset was kidnapped. And they opened fire the moment they saw the troops.”

“There isn’t a nationalist group that wouldn’t have opened fire.”

“There are many nationalist groups that haven’t.”

“Too convenient, I think,” the Chamberlain insisted, not looking at Mikal because he had long since learned that looking at Mikal did not help at all to persuade him. “Every damn one of the Freemen of Eire were killed. Every one!”

“They started killing themselves, when they saw they would lose.”

“And I think that Ansset is still a danger to Mikal!”

“I’ve found the conspiracy and destroyed it!”

And then silence, as Mikal considered. “Has Ansset been able to recognize any of the men you killed?”

The Captain turned a little red in the face. “There was a fire. Few of the bodies were recognizable. I showed him pictures, and he thinks that two or three might have been—”

“Might have been,” scoffed the Chamberlain.

“Might very well have been members of the crew on the ship. I did the best I could. I command fleets, dammit, not small mop-up crews!”

Mikal looked at him coldly. “Then, Captain, you should have let someone command who knew what he was doing.”

“I wanted to make—to make sure there weren’t any mistakes.”

Neither Mikal nor the Chamberlain needed to say anything to that. “What’s done is done,” said the Chamberlain. “But I don’t think we ought to get complacent. The enemy was clever enough to get Ansset in the first place and keep him for five months where we couldn’t find him. I suspect that even if some or all of the crew were Freemen of Eire, the conspiracy didn’t originate with them. They were too easy to find. From the accent. Remember, the kidnapper was able to hide every single day from Ansset’s memory and our best probing. If he hadn’t wanted us to find the Freemen, he would have blocked those memories, too.”

The Captain was not one to cling to defeated arguments. “You’re exactly right. I was taken in.”

“So were we all, at one time or another,” Mikal said, which did much to ease the Captain’s discomfort. “You may leave,” Mikal told him, and the Captain bowed his head and got up and left. The Chamberlain was alone with Mikal in the meeting room, except for the three trusted guards who watched every movement.

“I’m concerned,” said Mikal.

“And so am I.”

“No doubt. I’m worried because the Captain is not a stupid man, and he has been behaving stupidly. I assume you’ve been having men follow him ever since he was appointed.”

The Chamberlain tried to protest.

“If you haven’t been following him, you haven’t been doing a very good job.”

“I’ve been having him followed.”

“Get the records and correlate them with Ansset’s kidnapping. See what you find.”

The Chamberlain nodded. Waited a moment, and then, when Mikal seemed to have lost interest in him, got up and left.

When Mikal was alone (except for the guards, but he had learned to dismiss them from his mind, except for the constant watch against an unwary word), he sighed, stretched his arms, heard his joints pop. His joints had never popped until he was over a hundred years old. “Where’s Ansset?” he asked, and one of the guards answered, “I’ll get him.”

“Don’t get him. Tell me where he is.”

And the guard cocked his head, listening to the constant stream of reports coming into his ear implant. “In the garden. With three guards. Near the river.”

“Take me to him.”

The guards tried not to betray their surprise. Mikal hadn’t gone outside the palace in years. But they moved efficiently, and with five guards and an unseen hundred more patrolling the garden, Mikal left the palace and walked to where Ansset sat on the riverbank. Ansset arose when he saw Mikal coming, and they sat together, the guards many meters off, watching carefully, as imperial flits passed overhead.

“I feel like an invader,” Mikal said. “I have to take two guards with me when I take a shit.”

“The birds of Earth sing beautiful songs,” Ansset answered. “Listen.”

Mikal listened for a while, but his ear was not so finely tuned as Ansset’s, and he grew impatient.

“There are plots within plots,” Mikal said. “Sing to me of the plans and plots of foolish men.”

So Ansset sang to him a story he had heard only a few days before from a biochemist working in poison control. It was about an ancient researcher who had finally succeeded in crossing a pig with a chicken, so that the creature could lay ham and eggs together, saving a great deal of time at breakfast. The animals laid plenty of eggs, and they were all the researcher had hoped they’d be. The trouble was, the eggs didn’t hatch, so the animal couldn’t reproduce. The blunt-snouted pickens (or chigs?) couldn’t break the eggs, and so the experiment failed. Mikal was amused, and felt much better. “But you know, Ansset, there was a solution. He should have taught them to screw out with their tails.”

But Mikal’s face soon grew sour again, and he said, “My days are numbered, Ansset. Sing to me of numbered days.” For all his attempts, Ansset had never understood mortality in the way the old understand it. So he had to sing Mikal’s own feelings on the matter back to him. They were no comfort at all. But at least Mikal thought that he was understood, and he felt better as he lay in the grass, watching the Susquehanna rush by.

“We have to take Ansset along. He’s the only one who might recognize anyone.”

“I won’t have any chance of Ansset being taken away from me again.”

The Chamberlain was stubborn on this point. “I don’t want to leave it to chance. There are too many ways evidence can be destroyed.”

Mikal was angry. “I won’t have the boy caught up in any more of this. He came to Earth to sing, dammit!”

“Then I refuse to try anything more,” the Chamberlain said. “I can’t accomplish the tasks you set for me if you tie my hands!”

“Take him, then. But you’ll have to take me, too.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“But the security arrangements—”

“Damn the security arrangements. Nobody expects me to be along on something like this. Surprise is the best security of all.”

“But, my Lord, you’d be risking your life—”

“Chamberlain! Before you were born I had risked my life in far more dangerous circumstances than these! I bet my own life that I could build an empire and I damn near lost the bet a hundred times. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, my Lord,” said the Chamberlain. He left quickly, to get everything ready, but as he walked out of Mikal’s room, he was trembling. He had never dared argue with the emperor that way before. What had he been thinking of? And now the emperor was going with him. If anything happened to Mikal while he was in the Chamberlain’s care, the Chamberlain was doomed. No one would agree on anything after Mikal’s death except that the Chamberlain must die.

Mikal and Ansset came to the troop flesket together. The soldiers were petrified about going on an operation with the emperor himself. But the Chamberlain noticed that Mikal was buoyant, excited. Probably remembering the glories of past days, the Chamberlain supposed, when he had conquered everybody. Well, he’s not much of a conqueror now, and I wish to hell he had let me handle this. One of the dangers of being so close to the center of power—one had to accept the whims of the powerful.

The child, however, seemed to feel nothing at all. It wasn’t the first time the Chamberlain had envied Ansset his iron self-control. The ability to hide every feeling from one’s enemies and friends—the group was often undistinguishable—would be a greater weapon than any number of lasers.

The flesket went down the Susquehanna River at an unusually high speed, which took it over the normal river traffic. They reached Hisper in an hour, then went another hour beyond, left the river, and crossed farmland and marshes until they reached a much broader river. “The Delaware,” the Chamberlain whispered to Mikal and Ansset. Mikal nodded, but said, “Keep your esoterica to yourself.” He sounded irritable, which meant he was enjoying himself immensely.

It wasn’t long before the Chamberlain had the lieutenant pull the flesket to the shore. “There’s a path here that leads where we want to go.” The ground was soggy and two soldiers led the column along the path, finding firm ground. It was a long walk, but Mikal did not ask them to go slowly. The Chamberlain wanted to stop and rest, but did not dare ask the column to halt. It would be too much of a victory for Mikal. If the old man can keep it up, thought the Chamberlain, so can I.

The path led to a fenced field, and beyond the field was a group of farmhouses. The nearest house was a colonial revival, which made it about a hundred years old. Only a hundred meters off was the river, and moored to a pile there was a flatboat rocking gently with the currents.

“That’s the house,” said the Chamberlain, “and that’s the boat.”

The field between them and the house was not large, and it was overgrown with bushes, so that they were able to reach the house without being too easily noticeable. But the house was empty, and when they rushed the flatboat the only man on board aimed a laser at his own face and blasted it to a cinder. Not before Ansset had recognized him, though.

“That was Husk,” Ansset said, looking at the body without any sign of feeling. “He’s the man who fed me.”

Then Mikal and the Chamberlain followed Ansset through the boat. “It’s not the same,” Ansset said.

“Of course not,” said the Chamberlain. “They’ve been trying to disguise it. The paint is fresh. And there’s a smell of new wood. They’ve been remodeling. But is there anything familiar?”

There was. Ansset found a tiny room that could have been his cell, though now it was painted bright yellow and a new window let sunlight flood into the room. Mikal examined the windowframe. “New,” the emperor pronounced. And by trying to imagine the interior of the flatboat as it might have been, unpainted, Ansset was able to find the large room where he had sung on his last evening in captivity. There was no table. But the room seemed the same size, and Ansset agreed that this could very well have been the place he was held.

Down in Ansset’s cell they heard the laughter of children and a flesket passing on the river, full of revelers singing. “Quite a populated area,” Mikal said to the Chamberlain.

“That’s why I had us come in through the woods. So we wouldn’t be noticed.”

“If you wanted to avoid being noticed,” Mikal said, “it would have been better to come in on a civilian bus. Nothing’s more conspicuous than soldiers hiding in the woods.”

The Chamberlain felt Mikal’s criticism like a blow. “I’m not a tactician,” he said.

“Tactician enough,” said Mikal, letting the Chamberlain relax a bit. “We’ll go back to the palace now. Do you have anyone you can trust to make the arrest?”

“Yes,” the Chamberlain said. “They’re already warned not to let him leave the palace.”

“Who?” Ansset asked. “Who are you arresting?”

For a moment they seemed reluctant to answer. Finally Mikal said, “The Captain of the guard.”

“He was behind the kidnapping?”

“Apparently so,” said the Chamberlain.

“I don’t believe it,” Ansset said, for he had thought he knew the Captain’s voice, and hadn’t heard any songs except loyalty in it. But the Chamberlain wouldn’t understand that. It wasn’t evidence. And this was the boat, which seemed to prove something to them. So Ansset said nothing more about the Captain until it was too late.