The Gathering Flame (20 page)
Read The Gathering Flame Online
Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald
She left on Nivome’s arm, and Hafrey watched her go. The Ministry of Internal Security reckoned among its visible duties the supervision of those Palace departments which worked with ceremony and protocol, and if the minister himself—now that his ambitions had come to naught—resented the effort he’d expended in making everything ready, he didn’t show it.
When the palace doors had closed behind Nivome and the Domina, Hafrey turned back to Jos Metadi. The privateer captain was dressed in all the customary finery of his trade—crimson velvet and gold buttons and high, polished boots, with a heavy blaster in a leather holster tied down to one thigh. Hafrey, who had long since investigated Metadi’s habits, knew that the gaudy display was not put on by chance. Away from the privateer ports, the captain dressed as soberly as any man of business from the Gyfferan merchant class.
This man denies nothing
, the armsmaster thought.
He changes nothing. He believes that etiquette and protocol will change themselves instead to suit him.
, the armsmaster thought.
He changes nothing. He believes that etiquette and protocol will change themselves instead to suit him.
And his belief in his own luck is strong enough that he may indeed be right.
Hafrey kept his thoughts to himself, as he had always done. “Welcome to Entibor, General. I am at your service.” “The first thing I need is a translator,” Metadi said; in passable Galcenian—grammar and syntax were clear enough, but overlaid with a strong home-world accent. Some people at the Domina’s court would find it amusing; but Hafrey doubted that Metadi would care. “For Galcenian and Gyfferan both. If the translator knows something about life along the spacelanes, that’s even better.”
Hafrey nodded. He’d heard more outrageous requests in his time, from men and women far more nobly born than Captain—now General—Jos Metadi. “When will you require the translator?”
“Right now,” Metadi said. “If I’m General of the Armies of Entibor, then I’m going to inspect my command.”
Fleet Admiral Efrayn Pallit frowned at the sheets of flimsy scattered across his desk. Ever since word of the young Domina’s arrival in-system had reached Central, he’d been working on the Fleet’s official message of greeting. First impressions were vital, and Her Dignity was something of an unknown quality—
All those years on Galcen
, Pallit thought uneasily;
as if Entibor didn’t have enough good schools of its own
—the combination made him bite the end of his stylus and strike out line after line.
All those years on Galcen
, Pallit thought uneasily;
as if Entibor didn’t have enough good schools of its own
—the combination made him bite the end of his stylus and strike out line after line.
And there was his own court presentation speech to polish after this message was done, not to mention some appropriate remarks of condolence for the old Domina’s public burning.
So much work; so little time
. He had waited too long to begin. He had, perhaps, not believed that she was going to come? He wished that he could assign writing the messages to a subordinate—but that would reveal his lack of preparation. That would give someone power over him. He turned back to the message blank.
So much work; so little time
. He had waited too long to begin. He had, perhaps, not believed that she was going to come? He wished that he could assign writing the messages to a subordinate—but that would reveal his lack of preparation. That would give someone power over him. He turned back to the message blank.
The sound of voices outside the closed door of his office broke into his concentration. Someone was talking very loudly. He couldn’t make out the words. The office door slid open. Pallit’s aide, red-faced, stood in the opening.
“Admiral,” she said helplessly, “I tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen—”
Two more people stepped in past him before he could finish speaking. The first was a tall man in a jacket of crimson velvet. The gold in the buttons would have paid the admiral’s aide for a month. He carried a blaster loosely in one hand. The second man Pallit recognized immediately as Ser Hafrey, the Domina’s armsmaster.
The man in the crimson jacket began speaking in the same language Pallit had heard before. Without the office door to block noise, the admiral had little trouble recognizing the words as Gyfferan.
“You,” said the man. “Are you the commanding officer of the Fleet?”
Ser Hafrey echoed him in gently spoken Entiboran. “You. Are you the—”
Pallit held up his hand. “Please,” he said in Gyfferan. “I speak this man’s language well enough to understand his question. Yes, I command here. And you are under arrest.”
“Wrong,” said the man. He raised his blaster and pointed it at Pallit. “My name is Jos Metadi. I’m the General of the Armies of Entibor, and as of now you work for me.” The blaster didn’t waver. “Tell me quickly—what are you doing right now to take the war to the Mages?”
Pallit glanced over at Ser Hafrey, then back at the man in the crimson jacket. “Right now,” he said, “we are defending ourselves whenever the Mages attack. Given the constraints of our resources, that is all we can do.”
“In that case,” said Metadi, “I accept your resignation.”
He turned to Pallit’s aide. “Mark down the admiral as ‘retired,’ and take me to the next person in the chain of command.”
Before Pallit could raise his voice in protest, the Gyfferan had turned away and was striding down the hall, leaving Ser Hafrey to translate the last order in a hasty whisper for the aide’s benefit. The aide looked startled and hurried after Metadi; Hafrey followed at a more leisurely pace.
After an instant of stunned silence, Pallit went after them. He arrived at the office of Admiral Tallyn, his second-in-command, just as Hafrey was translating again for General Metadi: “‘Mark down the admiral as retired. Take me to the next person in the chain of command.’”
The group swept out of the office, and went on to the office of Admiral Leivogen. Feeling at wits’ end, Pallit followed—as did several of the other people who had been in Tallyn’s outer office, including a handful of junior officers who almost seemed to be smirking at the sudden changes in the upper staff.
Metadi was a quick study. By the time he’d cleared the third office along the main hallway, he no longer needed a translator. He’d already learned how to say, “Mark down the admiral as retired,” in passable—if strongly accented—Entiboran.
“Well,” Tres Brehant said, in the resolutely cheerful tones of someone who has decided to look on the positive side of things even if it kills him, “at least we’re in Fleet detention and not some wretched civilian holding pen.”
“At least,” agreed Gala wearily.
The room they were in now, somewhere in the depths of Central Command’s main headquarters building, wasn’t quite a cell—it had two chairs and a desk, and even a separate ’fresher cubicle—but it was plainly the last stop before the brig. For one thing, the ID plate was on the other side of the door, and the door was locked.
Gala slumped in her seat and frowned at the toes of her highly polished boots. “Damn it, Tres—we got so close!”
“Yeah.” Brehant’s attempt at positive thinking appeared to have been short-lived. “The palace and everything. Who
was
the old guy, anyhow?”
was
the old guy, anyhow?”
“What he said. Armsmaster to House Rosselin.”
“I know, I know—but what did he want to talk to us for?”
Gala sighed. “In theory, the armsmaster is supposed to do things like take care of the antiques in the palace gunroom and teach rapier-and-dagger fencing and other useless sports to whatever members of the Ruling House happen to show an interest. In practice …” She shrugged. “He’s said to be very powerful, and to have the confidence of any number of people.”
“And let me guess—Internal Security hates his guts.”
“You noticed,” said Gala. She clenched her fist and pounded it, almost absentmindedly, on the metal arm of her chair. “Damn them.
Both
of them, for dragging us back and forth like counters in their stupid political games, when the raiders could be hitting the outplanets this very minute.”
Both
of them, for dragging us back and forth like counters in their stupid political games, when the raiders could be hitting the outplanets this very minute.”
Brehant’s attempt at good humor vanished altogether. Even his mustache seemed to droop. “So what do we do?”
“Eventually the folks on the top floor will remember that Internal Security sent us over here,” she said, “and order somebody to come around and write up the charges. When they show up, I’m going to demand a court-martial.”
“Make them listen to us before they shoot us?”
“It’s likely to be the only chance we’ll get. And we knew it might come to this when we left Parezul.”
“I know. The things we do for crown and country.”
The conversation lagged. Gala went back to studying the toes of her boots. Tres chewed at the ends of his mustache. The only sound in the room was the faint whisper of circulating air in the environmental-control system.
Brehant stiffened. “Someone’s coming.”
He was right; there was noise in the hall outside the closed door. Feet, a whole crowd of them, and voices. Gala stood up and straightened her tunic.
The door slid open. The hall outside was full of Fleet uniforms. The man who came into the room, though, wasn’t Fleet at all—not even an officer in mufti. His clothes were too gaudy, his hair too untrimmed, and his whole bearing too casual. But he carried a sidearm like a man accustomed; and Gala wondered, after taking in the Ogre Mark VI heavy-duty blaster, if the man had come on a specialized errand for the Minster of Internal Security.
Too many witnesses,
she told herself.
Work like that gets done privately. And besides
—she looked again at the crowd of other faces, and recognized one that she had seen for the first time only that morning—
the armsmaster is with him
.
she told herself.
Work like that gets done privately. And besides
—she looked again at the crowd of other faces, and recognized one that she had seen for the first time only that morning—
the armsmaster is with him
.
The man with the blaster was saying something in slow, badly accented Entiboran. “You. Who is senior here?”
“We’re both under arrest,” Gala said, “so I suppose neither one of us has any rank at the moment. But until this morning, I was senior.”
Ser Hafrey spoke rapidly in an undertone—translating, Gala supposed. The man with the blaster listened, sharp hazel eyes fixed on Gala and Brehant. When Hafrey was done, the man spoke again, this time rapping out a question in a language Gala didn’t recognize.
Again the armsmaster translated. “Tell me quickly: what have you done to take the war to the Mages?”
Gala heard Brehant’s quick intake of breath, but she didn’t dare turn around. The man with the blaster had chosen to emphasize Ser Hafrey’s translation by raising the weapon and aiming it at her head. She looked at the hard line of his mouth and knew that he wasn’t one of those people who would hesitate to fire.
Hell with it. Neither am I. He can have the truth, and if he doesn’t like it he can choke on it.
“Until this morning,” she said, “the two of us were working on getting ships for an expedition—and trying to find out whether Central has any idea about the location of the Mage home worlds.”
On a hunch, she’d answered the man’s question this time in rusty schoolgirl Galcenian. The Mark VI blaster was a free-spacer’s weapon, and Standard Galcenian was the closest thing to a common tongue that you could find on the commercial spacelanes. The hunch paid off. The man’s face broke into a wide grin and he slid the blaster back into its holster.
“Finally,” he said. His Galcenian, she noted, was considerably better than her own. “I’m Jos Metadi, General of the Armies of Entibor, and you’re the fleet admiral.”
“Ah … no, sir. I’m Captain-of-Frigates Galaret Lachiel, commander of Fleet operations in the Parezulan sector.”
“Not anymore. Admiral Pallit decided to take an early retirement, and you’ve been promoted to fill his position. I want your plan of operations on my desk by local noon tomorrow.”
What is it the old grannies say—“be careful what you ask for; somebody may give it to you”?
“Yes, sir,” Gala said.
“Good,” said Metadi.
He turned and strode out, with Ser Hafrey at his heels. The crowd of Fleet personnel parted to let him pass. Soon there was nobody left in the room except for the two original occupants. Gala took a deep breath.
“All right,” she said to Brehant. “For my first official act, I pardon you and make you my second-in-command. Come on.”
Tres was staring at the open door. “Where do we go?”
“My new office,” Gala said. “Somewhere on the top floor. If we’re want to have an OpPlan by tomorrow, we’re going to be working all night.”
(GALCENIAN DATING 967 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 31 VERATINA)
P
ERADA STUFFED the last pullover tunic into her carrybag and sealed the bag shut. Then she shoved the carrybag underneath her bed. Nobody was going to expect her to be ready for hours and hours, not when she was supposed to be going home this time with Zusala Reeth. Zusala had never in her life finished packing on time, and she wasn’t going to change because a friend was coming along with her.
ERADA STUFFED the last pullover tunic into her carrybag and sealed the bag shut. Then she shoved the carrybag underneath her bed. Nobody was going to expect her to be ready for hours and hours, not when she was supposed to be going home this time with Zusala Reeth. Zusala had never in her life finished packing on time, and she wasn’t going to change because a friend was coming along with her.
After four years at Zeri Delaven’s academy on Galcen, Perada had grown accustomed to spending the holidays with one schoolmate or another. There was always somebody, she had discovered, whose parents or guardians liked the idea of saying later that one of the Rosselins of Entibor had been their houseguest for Midsummer or Winterend. She’d even stayed once with Elli Oldigaard, though neither she nor Elli had enjoyed it much; she suspected that the whole thing had been arranged by the grown-ups for their own reasons.
“Politics,” she said aloud.
Everything grown-ups did was politics of one kind or another—Perada had figured that out as soon as she learned the word in Gentlesir Carden’s third-year history class. It was politics that kept her stuck on Galcen during the long holidays, when all the other off-planet students got to go home, and it was politics that kept her from staying very often with schoolmates that she actually liked.
Some of them, like redheaded Vixy Dahl from Suivi Point, where everybody lived under big pressurized domes and never had summer or winter at all, weren’t “suitable” enough. Vixy had asked, more than once, and Perada had sent pleading messages home to Entibor begging to be allowed, but the result had always been the same. And some others
never
asked, like S‘yeze Chastyn, who was Perada’s best friend on the girls’ side of the school. S’yeze was a scholarship student, Zeri Delaven had explained to Perada one day in private, and her family couldn’t afford a Rosselin of Entibor for a houseguest.
never
asked, like S‘yeze Chastyn, who was Perada’s best friend on the girls’ side of the school. S’yeze was a scholarship student, Zeri Delaven had explained to Perada one day in private, and her family couldn’t afford a Rosselin of Entibor for a houseguest.
Perada hadn’t thought much of the reason at the time—a Rosselin of Entibor didn’t eat any more food than anybody else—but most grown-up reasons didn’t make sense if you looked at them too hard anyway. So she spent her holidays with people like Elli and Zusala and Gryl, and wished, sometimes, that she wasn’t a Rosselin of Entibor at all.
That wasn’t a thing that she could change, though, and she didn’t let herself think about it too much. Now, with the carrybag tucked away under her bed, she decided to go downstairs and see if Garen Tarveet had finished packing yet.
She crossed the room and reached out to brush her hand across the lockplate on the door. The door opened before she could touch it, and Zeri Delaven stood in the hall outside.
Perada took a step back. The last time Mistress Delaven had come to her room before holidays started … she didn’t want to think about
that
, either.
that
, either.
“I’m all packed,” she said. Her voice sounded faint and croaky, like something that belonged to one of the prickly brown dust-crickets in the Academy garden. “If Zusula’s ready—”
Mistress Delaven shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans.”
“Oh.” Perada took another step backward, and another. The edge of her bed hit the back of her knees, and she sat down hard on the firm mattress. “What—”
Zeri Delaven’s thin mouth turned upward for a moment in a not-unkindly smile. “It’s all right, child. Nothing bad has happened this time.”
Perada blinked her eyes hard to keep from crying for no reason. “Then why aren’t I going home with Zusala?”
“Because you’ll be spending the long holiday on Entibor this year,” Zeri Delaven replied. “Your Great-Aunt Veratina has named you heir to the Iron Crown, and the Armsmaster of House Rosselin has come to take you back to An-Jemayne for. your formal investiture as Domina-in-Waiting.”
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