The Gathering Flame (30 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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The armsmaster fired a single bolt at the wall ahead, where a closed door blocked the way to safety. The door swung open. Garen saw Perada throwing herself into the dark interior. A moment later—without ever having a very clear memory of how he traversed the open ground to get there—Garen was inside the building also, with the armsmaster close behind him.
Perada was breathing hard and the color was high in her cheeks. “Are they likely to come after us?”
“Not immediately,” said Hafrey. “Once the targets are out of the killing ground, most ambushes are useless. But we may be dealing with optimists; pending arrival of security troops, I suggest we relocate ourselves.”
“Very well,” Perada said.
Garen, for his part, was happy to defer to the armsmaster’s expertise in the matter. They were in the downstairs vestibule of what looked like a low-rent office block. A flatvid notice display filled the back wall with a list of suites and occupants. There was a set of lift doors on one side of the vestibule and another door on the opposite side with a label on it in Entiboran block letters. Judging by the graphic posted next to the label, the door opened onto the emergency stairs.
The armsmaster gestured in that direction. “Up,” he said. “And back.”
They headed up the narrow stairway. Another emergency door opened onto the second-floor landing; Hafrey pushed the door open and they went out into an empty corridor. Perada spoke for the first time since they had left the downstairs lobby.
“Who knew where we were going?”
She had her breath back, and her face was set and pale. Her voice had an edge to it that Garen had never heard her use before. He realized, with a sense of shock, that Perada was no longer a schoolgirl excited by her close escape, or even a young and frightened woman. She was the absolute ruler of a planet and all its colonies, and she was angry.
“Who knew?” she demanded again.
The armsmaster remained calm. “I knew,” he said. “The driver knew. Anybody who was eavesdropping on our private communications also knew.”
“And somebody tried to kill me. Do you think it was done out of general discontent with me and my policies, or do you think there was a specific cause?”
Hafrey remained unruffled. He was palming lockplates and rattling doors on either side of the corridor—looking, Garen guessed, for a door that would open and let them through.
“It could be either one, my lady. But if you’re asking me for a professional opinion, I’d say it was specific, and designed to prevent you from meeting with this new Galcenian.”
“Who does that leave us with?”
Hafrey shrugged. “Anyone who knows or can guess at the Galcenian’s mission. Nor can we leave out the possibility that the Galcenians themselves sent this ambassador, for no other reason than to draw you away from the palace without a guard.”
“I see,” said Perada. “You will provide me with a list of suspects, in order of likelihood. And include on your list yourself, with a convincing reason why it couldn’t be you who arranged this affair.”
“My lady—” Hafrey began.
Perada ignored his protest. “After all, Ser Hafrey, I’m certain that the Minster of Internal Security will be eager to provide me with a convincing reason as to why you
could.”
Nivome do’Evaan didn’t wait to see if the officer at Fleet headquarters obeyed his order. Later, if the man failed him, there would be time for making the entire Fleet regret the oversight—but right now there was too much else to do. Instead, the Minister of Internal Security turned and strode back to his hovercar.
“Get me to my office,” he told the driver. “The one in the old Executive building—
not
the palace. Stay well clear of the palace.”
The hovercar rose and surged forward through the city streets with a flagrant disregard for safety and traffic regulations. The driver had worked for Nivome long enough to know that the wrath of the Interior Minister was more to be feared than any slight problem with the officers of Domestic Security.
Nivome spent the time during the ride drumming on his thigh with his fingers. Once inside the Executive building, he snapped to the receptionist, “Get all the department heads in my office. Immediately.”
By the time he’d taken the lift to his top-floor suite, the department heads—who hadn’t needed to come as far—were all assembled in the outer waiting room.
“Right,” he began at once, not bothering to move on into the inner office. “Who has a location on the Domina?”
“She left the palace a few minutes ago in an unmarked hovercar,” said the head of Royal Intelligence. “She was with Hafrey and that friend of hers from Pleyver. Garen somebody.”
“I didn’t ask where she isn’t,” Nivome snapped. “I want to know where she is.”
The head of Royal Intelligence flushed and pulled out his pocketlink. “One moment.”
Nivome cut him off with a chopping gesture. “No electronic discussions. Face-to-face only.”
The head of Royal Intelligence left, and Nivome turned back to the others. “All right, the rest of you. I am issuing arrest warrants for Hafrey the armsmaster and for the Galcenian ambassador—both Galcenian ambassadors—hell, any damned Galcenian you can find. I want to know what happened to communications with the palace, and I want to know who in this office is leaking information to Hafrey and the Fleet.”
“All of that without using electronic comms?” said the chief of staff.
“All without electronic comms. Now get to work!”
The department heads scattered like leaves before the wind. The head of Royal Intelligence, returning, had to fight his way through the crush at the office door. Nivome regarded him impatiently.
“Well?”
The other man caught his breath. “Her Dignity’s hovercar has been located at the intersection of Fairing Street and Mercers’ Row. The car is on fire and the Domina herself has not been located.”
“Locate her. Wait. You and I are going to locate her. But first—”
Nivome stepped into his inner office. There was a safe on one wall, disguised as a framed scrap of late-Diffusionist tapestry. He hit the safe’s ID plate with one hand and reached inside with the other as soon as the door slid open, bringing out a heavy blaster on a dark leather gunbelt. He strapped on the belt, then reached into the safe again to pull out another, smaller weapon.
“Here,” he said to the head of Royal Intelligence. “Take this. We’re going to the intersection of Fairing and Mercers’.”
 
“What am I to do with my wretched reputation?” Festen Arlingher asked himself. The open countryside blurring at high speed past the windows of the railcar obstinately refused to supply him with an answer.
Even to him, his decision to buy a ticket on the first available pod-rail leaving Wippeldon for An-Jemayne looked like he was going to break his long personal rule against getting involved with politics.
“Imagine. To be thought reliable. By politicians.”
He shook his head and told himself not to be so hasty. Not every plan launched by the Galcenian Council came to fruition. They prepared for potential events as much as for real ones. The chances were that no call would ever arrive on that little machine now packed among the socks in his carrybag.
“A philosopher. I should be more of a philosopher,” he said at last, as the railcar slid into its berth at the An-Jemayne Transit Hub.
He left the hub pod-rail station and ambled through the main concourse like a man with nothing in particular on his mind. Behind the façade, he chewed frantically over the questions of where to go and whom to speak with in order to gain an audience—informal and private—with the Domina. He could hint at great knowledge. He could strike up an acquaintance with a familiar and attempt to worm his way in that manner. He could disguise himself as a lady’s maid and go to the employment office … .
This wasn’t getting him anywhere. With an effort, he forced his wayward mind into more sober channels. By the time he reached the front entrance of the concourse, he had something that passed for an idea. He summoned a hovercab and requested transit to the Palace Major. By the time the cab was halfway to the palace, he had worked up the idea into a definite plan—thanks in part to the young man from the vintners’ guild. He rummaged for a moment in his carrybag, looking underneath the textcomm and the extra change of clothes to pull out a folded piece of black velvet.
I knew this would come in handy.
Aringher smiled a little to himself as he drew one of his personal cards from his jacket pocket and wrote a note on the back: “One whom you helped to tie up with curtain cords requests the honor of your ear for five minutes’ time.”
He tucked the note inside the folded cloth. Now to see if the young Domina in fact had the mischievous sense of humor he thought he’d glimpsed in her that night in Waycross. He’d been wrong about people’s characters before, but not often—with luck, he hadn’t lost the knack.
The hovercab bumped to a stop and settled to the ground. Aringher rapped with his knuckles on the panel separating him from the driver.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“Don’t know. Traffic’s stopped.”
Aringher craned his neck to look beyond the grounded cabs and buses lined up ahead of them. He didn’t like what he saw. From the direction of the Palace Major, itself out of sight beyond the tall buildings close by, something that looked like a column of smoke was drifting lazily skyward.
He popped open the hovercab door and stood on the mounting step for a better view. It was smoke, all right—and unless he’d lost his eye for distance completely, the bottom of the cloud was somewhere close to the palace itself.
Then he heard on the wind, from somewhere off to the right, the sound of blasters firing.
“What do you know,” he muttered. “My mother did raise a fool.”
He stripped off a twelve-octime note and tossed it to the driver, and sprinted toward the sound of the guns.
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 967 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 31 VERATINA)
 
T
HE ARMSMASTER, Ser Hafrey, was an elderly man—almost as old as Zeri Delaven. Perada hadn’t met him before. She supposed that Felshang Province hadn’t been important enough for someone from the Palace to bother with.
She
hadn’t been important enough, not until now.
The library at school had genealogies and tables of succession for every planetary monarchy in the civilized galaxy. In the years between her mother’s death and now, Perada had studied the ones for Entibor over and over again. House Rosselin … House Chereeve … House Lachiel … Whenever somebody died, the pattern changed. But she’d never expected to find herself Domina-in-Waiting; there were too many people left alive to get in the way.
Something must have happened
, she thought.
But what?
As soon as the courier ship reached hyperspace and the “danger” light over her stateroom door quit flashing red, she went in search of Ser Hafrey to ask him questions.
The armsmaster wasn’t in any of the staterooms, nor in the dining salon, nor on the observation deck, where curving walls of armor-glass made windows onto a field of stars. A year or two ago, Perada would have thought the stars were real; now she was old enough to know better. There wasn’t anything visible in hyper—“just funny-looking grey stuff all over the place,” Garen had said—so the view of deep space outside the glass walls of the observation deck must be a holovid.
An iron staircase led in a tight spiral down from the observation deck to the deck below. Keeping a firm hold on the railing, she descended. There was a force field at the bottom of the staircase, probably to keep idle passengers from disturbing
Crystal World’s
crew. An abstract holovid that looked like a colored waterfall hid whatever parts of the ship lay beyond that point.
Perada halted on the second step from the bottom. “Ser Hafrey?”
“A moment, my lady,” came the armsmaster’s voice from beyond the shifting colors of the holovid. “If you will be so good as to wait for me on the observation deck …”
Perada felt disappointed—she’d hoped for a chance to see what the working part of a starship looked like—but she said, “Yes, Armsmaster,” and went back up the steps. She sat and watched the imitation starfield until the sound of footsteps on metal told her that Ser Hafrey was coming up the iron stair.
He came onto the observation deck and bowed to her, a very deep bow, the way the majordomo at home had always bowed to her mother. Perada wasn’t certain she liked it. Nobody at school bowed to anybody else; it was one of Zeri Delaven’s rules, like always packing your own bags.
“You wished to speak with me, my lady?”
“Yes,” she said. “Ser Hafrey, why am I the Domina-in-Waiting?”
“It pleased the Domina Veratina to make you so,” the armsmaster said. “She has the right to name whomever she chooses, since she has no heir of her body.”
“I know about
that
,” Perada said impatiently. “They even talked about it at school.”
Ser Hafrey looked disapproving. “The matter is scarcely fit gossip for schoolgirls, my lady.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “It was a class in the upper division. ‘The Entiboran Succession Crisis,’ they called it. Because people kept dying.”
Mother too
, she thought, but didn’t say.
And Dadda. And the baby.
She’d figured that much out for herself already, from listening to the upper-division students and from reading the archived newsfiles and holos in the school library. Zeri Delaven had never spoken to Perada of how her family had died, but the newsfiles had told her more than enough. Maybe aircars did explode by accident sometimes—but Perada didn’t think so.
“Exactly, my lady,” said Ser Hafrey. “The Domina named you as the heir to put a stop to talk like that.”
Perada frowned. The armsmaster was being stupid, not understanding what she was trying to say politely, the way Zeri Delaven said that people should talk. And she didn’t think the armsmaster was a stupid man, which meant that he was doing it on purpose.
I don’t like that,
she thought, and decided not to bother with being polite anymore.
“She wanted to stop people killing each other, didn’t she?”
Hafrey looked at her for a moment, up and down. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Yes, my lady,” he said. “When quarrels among the Great Houses disturb the citizens and become casual gossip in schoolrooms across the galaxy, a Domina must take action.”
“But why did Great-Aunt ’Tina pick
me
?” she demanded. “There’s
lots
of other people she could have named instead.”
“None of the others are Shaja Rosselin’s child.”
As answers went, it was no answer, and Perada knew it. She also knew—the charts at school had made a lot of things clear to her—that she was the only candidate with no family, except for Veratina, living.
So she doesn’t have to worry about Mother, or Dadda, or little Beka. Only about me.
Perada nodded. Let Ser Hafrey think she was agreeing with him; she was really agreeing with herself.
“But what if the other people don’t want me to be Domina-in-Waiting?” she asked. “Won’t they try to kill me, too?”
The armsmaster smiled faintly, for the first time.
“No, my lady,” he said. “I am charged with your safety. Regardless of what the rivals among the Great Houses might wish, none of them are likely to dare an attempt.”

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