Sword of the Lamb (11 page)

“Adrien, I know all about the courtship game. Most of the Serras delight in it; it’s their whole purpose in life. But for you, it seems a waste.”

She laughed. “And what other purpose have I? No, Alex, if you pity me, you must also pity yourself. You’re as much on the auction stand as I. You won’t find it necessary to work so hard at pleasing your potential mates—by custom that’s their function—but you’re still on the stand. You were born to that as you were born to power. The Lords of the Concord are no more free than their Bonds.”

They reached the end of the terrace, but Alexand was hardly aware of the pond below or the graceful black birds with their scarlet beaks, whose passages sent Vs of ripples across the glassy surface.

“Is there no answer to that—our serfdom or that of the Bonds?”

He was thinking of Theron Rovere.
A tree must bend with the winds of change
. . . .

She looked up at him. “An answer? I doubt it, and certainly I can’t complain about this particular get-acquainted encounter.”

“Nor can I. It’s probably the only way I’d have learned your name.”

“You’d probably have learned it sooner or later.”

“I’d have tried.” He recognized that as truth now; he would never have been satisfied until he knew.

“Would you? Why?”

He shrugged. “To assuage my curiosity, I suppose; to answer some questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

He turned and leaned back against the balustrade, watching her and being watchcd, and not caring.

“It’s hard to put into words. Questions like why you remind me so much of Rich. I call him my linked-twin soul. Sometimes we can all but read each other’s minds. I wonder why I feel that same rapport with you.”

She didn’t speak for some time, and when at length she did reply, her voice was nearly a whisper.

“If you find the answer to that, Alex, tell me. Perhaps it would explain why I feel the same way about you.”

Her eyes were so black they were paradoxical; like fathomless waters, the surface reflecting lights and almost opaque, but beneath it, revealed in passing shadows, were unexpected, vertiginous deeps.

He looked away; alarms were shrieking in his head.

Your best defense is doubt
. . . .

I am a human being. By the God, I am a human being and choice is my birthright, or I cease to be human.

But he had another birthright, and so did Adrien. There would be no choice for either of them.

Only hope.

Hope for what? He didn’t know Adrien Eliseer. There could be untold factors within her mind and being that would shatter illusions and turn hope to gall. Yet he’d already made himself vulnerable to her; vulnerable to shattering along with the illusions.

“Alex, there’s no joy in safety; it’s only comfortable.”

His head came up, he stared at her, and he felt stripped. Only Rich was capable of that, of responding to words he hadn’t spoken.

“There’s something to be said for comfort.”

She nodded soberly. “And a great deal to be said for responsibility, but I’ll still make room for hope. I’m strong enough to withstand pain, and willing to accept the risk, and I can’t live without hope.”

Alexand felt the tension draining from him. Adrien Eliseer. Tuck, his Bond valet, would say she had the witching way; the Beyond power. Some things were by their very nature irrational: they could not be comprehended on a rational level.

The wind drew a strand of her hair across her forehead. He started to push it back, but stopped, remembering the watching eyes on the terrace. She smiled at that and pushed it back herself.

“Yes, I’d almost forgotten our purpose here, but that’s the source of my hope. I’ll tell you this, and I know it isn’t . . . ladylike, but if you’re the kind of human being I think you are, you’ll understand. We’re here because your father and mine are considering a House alliance; a marriage. Whether it will ever come about remains to be seen, and the decision will be predicated almost entirely on such impersonal factors as economics and politics. Whatever my father decides, I’ll accept for the sake of the House. But I’ll still hold this hope: on a very personal level, Ser Alexand, I’ll hold the hope that one day I’ll be your Lady.”

He searched vainly for words, gripping the balustrade against the urge to reach out and take her hand.

“Adrien, you have more courage than I.” He paused, then, “Serra Adrien, I share your hope.”

Her eyes closed briefly, and even when she opened them again, they were still shadowed by her downcast lashes. Then she looked up at him with a whisper of a smile.

“Alex, we don’t really know each other. I’ve only expressed a hope. Nothing more.”

“In other words, you ask no commitments of me.” He laughed softly. “You don’t have to
ask
, Adrien.”

He looked down at the pond, watching the intersecting patterns of ripples in the wakes of two swans. Long after they passed each other, the wavelets meshed and crossed, the pattern expanding endlessly across the water.

Alexand had learned the art of escape at an early age, but as he grew older he found it increasingly difficult. Size, for one thing, was against him; it wasn’t so easy now to slip unnoticed out of a crowd. But if the crowd was large enough and clamorous enough, he could still manage it, and now he was alone on the first storage level, looking down through one of the many openings giving visual access to the assembly lines on the level below, where thousands of scarlet-and-black-clad Bonds, under the close eye of Fesh techs and overseers, manned the rows of moving belts carrying to completion the complex mechanisms that would transmit voices, images, and impulses across micromillimeters or light years.

A humming sound caught his attention. He turned and saw a dekaton loader moving along the aisles between the storage shelves, the Bond driver riding high above the plasifoam cartons. These were all yellow; they were keyed by color to the shelves where they were to be deposited.

Except for an occasional passing loader, this level was deserted, and Alexand was enjoying the privacy and the opportunity to study the assembly processes without benefit of a pressing mob of nervous executechs, managers, foremen, and overseers all vying to convince their Lord of their worth.

The Montril factory was DeKoven Woolf’s third largest; only the Concordia and Bonaires plants rivaled it in size and output. The House owned outright all but four of its fifty manufacturing sites, and Montril was one of those four, which made it—or, rather, Lord Charles Desmon Fallor—a constant thorn in his father’s side.

Alexand thought of Adrien Eliseer’s cool assessment of the situation. The lease was a lever on Woolf, but a lever tilts both ways. Unfortunately, there were factors in this case that qualified that theoretical truth. Phillip Woolf might hint at abandoning the Montril site in negotiating with Fallor, but he’d do a great deal of compromising before he carried out that threat. DeKoven Woolf couldn’t afford the disastrous capital loss. Not in light of the mushrooming annual increases in Concord tax levies. The House had last year surrendered half a billion ’cords, twenty thousand conscript Fesh, and fifty thousand tax Bonds to the Concord; nearly twice the previous year’s levy.

But no House was free of that ever increasing burden. Some Lords, Alexand knew, and suspected Fallor was one, reduced the strain on their capital reserves—or their opulent life styles—by shifting the burden to their Fesh in House tax levies, or by cutting maintenance expenditures for their Bonds. Shortsighted, Phillip Woolf pronounced, and Alexand found the truth in that self-evident, but apparently few members of the Court of Lords did.

A tree must bend with the winds of change
. Theron Rovere. You’ll haunt me till I die.

He leaned forward to rest his arms on the railing, feeling the ache of tension in his shoulders.

Perhaps that was one reason this tour of inspection seemed such an enervating experience. He kept seeing everything through Lector Theron’s eyes, seeing the signs of stubborn calcification that wouldn’t let this tree bend.

Signs like VisLord Kelmet Woolf, Phillip Woolf’s cousin, resident Lord in charge of the Montril plant; its production and profit figures attested to his efficiency. Yet Alexand’s initial reaction to Kelmet was mistrust. Perhaps it was because he was so arrogantly obsequious, or because he had organized Woolf’s itinerary so minutely, scheduling exactly what he would see exactly when.

Something else set Alexand’s teeth on edge. The first subject Kelmet broached, once the amenities were concluded, was enlarging the compound guard here. That, Woolf argued, would mean a new guard conscript, which wouldn’t set well with House Fesh after last year’s large Concord conscript.

Kelmet had only shrugged and said, “The price of order, my lord.”

That wasn’t original to him. It had become a catchphrase, a glib rationale passed down from the Directorate to the Court of Lords to the Fesh with every new tax levy demanded to finance every new expansion of Conpol and Confieet. Alexand distrusted the rationale, although he had heard it on his father’s lips. He particularly distrusted it coming from Kelmet Woolf.

But perhaps he was doing the man an injustice, simply projecting his resentment at being here. And he was tired. It was afternoon here, but his inner clock half a year behind. It was autumn in Montril, and the city was gray with snow, which everyone insisted was unusually early. It had been a long day and the worst was yet to come: the dinner reception at the Fallor Estate. Not an inviting prospect with the Fallor and their assorted kith and kin. And Julia.

Julia Fallor was a living cliché, and, perversely, every time he thought of her, he was reminded of Adrien Eliseer.

He wondered how Julia would have responded to Rich’s cruel baiting at the Galinin Estate, and knew she’d have been among those laughing on cue with Karlis Selasis.

He frowned, concentrating on the assembly lines, trying to put out of his thoughts the memories of Adrien and the sharp sense of solitude created by Rich’s absence.

Rich might have come along on this trip, but he had a choice, and Alexand knew, although neither of them had spoken of it, that Concord Day marked the last time Rich would ever appear in public except at his parents’ insistence. That insistence, Alexand had no doubt, would not be forthcoming.

Rich had a choice. So, let him make a recluse of himself; let him close himself behind the walls of the Estate. He had his studies, which consumed him and always would, even without Lector Theron. And he was loved there.

Alexand didn’t have a choice; this was his apprenticeship, and it would entail numberless separations from Rich in the future. And when he reached Age of Rights—

Four years. His hands contracted into fists. Those would be Rich’s last years.

But custom commands.

Every Elite male upon reaching Age of Rights by time-hoared custom paid his due to the Concord in the coin of four years service in Confleet, and not even Phillip Woolf could spare his son those four years. Directorate seats, although in practice hereditary, were by law elective by the Directors or the Court of Lords. Such a breach in traditional custom might precipitate the unseating of a House, while ineptitude or corruption would be blithely tolerated.

For the same reason, Mathis Galinin, Chairman of the Directorate, was equally helpless, although he had lost his younger son to the custom. Confleet protected its Elite conscripts as best it could, but a few didn’t survive, and that risk was constantly increasing. For years after the Fall of the Peladeen Republic, Confleet’s only real function had been controlling the pirate fleets of the Brotherhood and other Outsider clans, or the enigmatic Society of the Phoenix, but neither the Brotherhood nor the Phoenix accounted for the frequent Confleet expansions in recent years. Confleet was becoming an adjunct of Conpol, policing not the remote reaches of space, but the Concord.

Rather, the Bonds.

Uprisings, they were called, apparently causeless and aimless, but always incredibly costly in lives and damage. DeKoven Woolf had suffered only three minor uprisings in the last year.
Minor
. Catastrophes thus qualified only in relation to those suffered by other Houses, which were too violent on too large a scale to be controlled by House guards, necessitating Conpol and Confleet intervention.

Yet by hallowed tradition, when he was twenty, when he became a Lord, he would enter the Confleet Academy in Sidny to learn the lordly arts of war. Against Bonds. He would practice those lordly arts while his brother—

The hum of a loader distracted him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw it moving toward him—a small, mobile mountain of plasifoam cartons, these all blue. But the aisle was six meters wide; there was ample room for it to pass.

At any rate, he reminded himself, he still had five years’ grace before he reached Age of Rights, but only a few more minutes’ grace here before he must rejoin the entourage surrounding his father. Kelmet, he noted, had joined the group, but at the moment Woolf was occupied with Master Camden, the plant manager, who was speaking earnestly, hands constantly in motion. Alexand smiled at his father’s intent, probing expression. Camden would get no easy pats on the back from his Lord.

The hum of the loader was louder now, and he heard a shift in tone that signaled an increase in speed.

He looked around. The loader was twenty meters away.

Again, he turned his attention to his father’s progress. Undoubtedly the Bonds, like the Fesh, had been warned of their Lord’s impending visit. They kept at their work assiduously, but Alexand saw the furtive glances cast toward Woolf, and there was much in them that disturbed him. Sometimes there was awe, as if they were witnessing the passing of a lesser god, but too often there was fear and resentment.

The hum of the loader impinged on his consciousness again, but this time it sounded the inner alarm of instinct, the adrenalin surge that hit at the solar plexus.

He spun around, his back to the railing.

And it was only now, with the machine closing the space between them by milliseconds, that he recognized the threat underlying that shift in speed, this unswerving approach.

Blue. Blue plasifoam. That was all he could see. He still couldn’t make sense of the fact that the loader with its dekaton of cartons was on a collision course with the railing at exactly the spot where he stood. It was only when his eyes met those of the man at the controls of the loader that he understood.

The Bond meant to kill him.

The wall of blue loomed, the hum became a shrieking whine. He saw that face in minute detail, every sweating pore magnified, and he saw glaring from the pale eyes something desperately brutal, agonized, insensate, insane, and terrifying.

From somewhere within him the question echoed.

“
Why
?”

He wasn’t conscious of his cry. He vaulted to one side in a vain effort to remove himself from the point of impact.

And in the last split-second he saw a sudden change in that face: bestial hatred turning to horror and disbelief.

The loader skewed about, brakes screaming, the Bond twisted out of his seat in his violent effort to stop the juggernaut he had himself set in motion.

He turned the loader
.

That fact existed in Alexand’s mind like a bolt of lightning, as brief and as awesome.

But the turn, even though it averted the collision with the railing, threw the load, tossing cartons like feathers in a whirlwind, and Alexand hit the floor at the same instant the first cartons came smashing down.

Footsteps, voices; jangling, shuffling around him.

“Sirra, it—it was an accident! I swear by the holy saints! I—I never
saw
him! He run out in
front
of me!”

“ ’Zion, it’s Ser Alexand—”

“What happened here? What
happened
?”

Damn, would they be quiet? The Bond—where was he?

“An accident! Sirra, I swear it!” The man was sobbing.

Alexand pulled himself up into a sitting position head pounding, trying to order his muddled senses in the welter of movements and voices surrounding him.

He must see that man
.

“Holy God, what’s going on here?”

“—the Lord Woolf’s first born!”

“An accident, sirra! An
accident
!”

“. . . get this mess cleared before—”

“He’s coming! The Lord Woolf is coming!”

Alexand forced his eyes into focus on the wreckage of smashed cartons and shards of delicate machinery littering the floor; the silent hulk of the loader loomed over the disjointed activities of Fesh overseers and House guards.

“Ser Alexand?”

A hand on his right arm; one of the guards. Alexand pulled away. That grip was agonizing.

Yet he wouldn’t let the guard see the pain.

“Ser, let me help you.”

“No! I’m . . . all right.” He turned, reached for the railing with his left hand, and levered himself to his feet.

“The Lord
Woolf
. . .”

The approaching entourage sounded like a marching Confleet squad.

Fenn Lacroy called it stress-pain training, and Alexand put it to the test now. The breathing first, slow and deep, one breath for every five heartbeats; the ordered shift in concentration outward to the imminent threat. Alexand couldn’t let his father, or anyone, know he’d been injured. He wasn’t sure why. Only that it was necessary.

And he
had
been hurt. His right shoulder. It might be nothing more than a bad bruise or sprain; he was only sure that it was painful. He crossed his arms under his cloak so he could support his right arm with his left without making it obvious.

His father was moving toward him in the van of a wide-eyed cluster of officials and guards, with Kelmet Woolf only a pace behind him, but Alexand was intent now on the Bond. He was on his knees in the debris on the floor, flanked by two guards and an overseer with the meter-long, double-tongued rod of a charged lash ready in his fisted hand. The Bond observed his Lord’s approach with slack jaw, his face bloodless. He looked as close to death as any man Alexand had ever seen. And he was.

An accident. The whole thing was so badly thought out, there couldn’t have been any conscious planning behind it. Yet neither could Alexand doubt that this man had intended to kill him.

Why
? That question must be answered.

And another question. At the last moment, the Bond had turned the loader. That must be answered, too. But not here; not now.

“Alexand! Are you all right?”

He turned to find his father close to him, the eagle visage a closed mask.

“Yes, Father.” He spoke carefully to avoid slurring the words. The pain was getting worse.

Woolf’s eyes narrowed, then moved in a comprehensive arc, taking in the wreckage, the loader, finally fixing on the Bond; his voice was ominously subdued.

“What are you called?”

The Bond cringed, then answered in a stumbling rush, “Quin, my lord. “Q-quin Selm. Oh, my lord, it—it was an accident! I swear—I swear by all . . . I never . . . meant . . .”