Hellflower (v1.1) (18 page)

"I will do as you wish,
alarthme
. I cannot be more in your debt and live." He was tired and hurting and scared and alone. I’d won. Terrific. I went and popped the
arthame
out of where I’d put it. I could hear Pally not saying anything in the way that means he thinks I’m making a serious mistake.

"Say," I prompted, holding the knife up where Tiggy could see it and feeling like a childcrimer.

"
Alarthme
San’Cyr, I will stay beside you in
comites
until you return me to my father, and I will not leave," Tiggy halfway whispered.

"
Comites
: the special relationship between an alMayne war-leader and his followers. Valijon Starbringer is promising you the obedience he would offer to his lord," Paladin said before shutting up tight again.

And all for a damn hunk of iron that wouldn’t care. "Now say your hellflower words, che-bai."

"Dzain’domere,
San’Cyr. I pledge and give my word," Tiggy managed. I pretended I couldn’t see the tears.

I handed him his knife and held him until he stopped shaking. He didn’t push me away. He had to trust me now. I was the only thing he had left.

But I still had Paladin.

The rest of day-into-night got spent catching up on my sleep, working the battledrug residue out of my system, and reviewing my options. Most of them boiled down to "promise Silver Dagger anything to get the hold order lifted and run like hell." The hired help gave me the standard runaround when I called Mother Night’s trying to talk to her, and landlines is too corrupt to do bidness on anyway. I’d have to meet Silver Dagger in person to get anything out of her.

But I wanted to make one more try at Fenrir before I did. A little information never hurt anybody and I wanted to know which category he fit: lost, stolen, or strayed.

Tiggy spent the day eating, sleeping, and ignoring me. The clothes I’d got fit him fine, even with the biopak on his leg, but they looked funny. Hellflowers is gaudy dressers; in stardancer’s drag he looked like there was something missing. But he looked alive.

It wasn’t long before I found out I really put my foot in it with that "cleave to me only" farcing. When I got up to leave, Tiggy was standing (here covered in guns and knives and the odd alMayne
flechet,
and coked lightly on field kit goodies. He was going with me, he said. He didn’t let me chase strange
chaudatu
on my lonesome, he said. It wouldn’t be honorable, he said. I didn’t need Paladin to remind me that if Tiggy decided he couldn’t live with what I’d done to him and his honor already I was going to go first.

I didn’t think he could stay on his feet, for true, but he was determined, and if we got off Kiffit alive it was going to be sheer luck and not skill anyway, so out of respect for injured innocence and my valuable time I took Tiggy and a floater to the address of the little bit of heaven Dommie called home.

Dominich Fenrir, Kiffit’s premier bent Teaser, was, in the greater galactic scheme of things (leaving out the bent), a mid-level Phoenix Empire cratty. The place Paladin directed me to was above his touch for damn sure and no place me and mine belonged-the looks Tiggy and me got crossing the lobby of the Cotov Arms made sure we’d be remembered.

Paladin still confirmed the place was deserted, so I did a shimcrib on the lock and rolled the door back.

"What are you doing, San’Cyr?" Tiggy asked in shatteringly audible tones.

"Dommie and me is such old friends I just know he wouldn’t want us to wait in the hall. Now c’mon before anyone sees us," I said all on one breath and dragged him inside.

Tiggy came, still looking puzzled and reminding me of the wide social gap between our stations in life. I slid the door shut behind us and made it lock, then did a quick recce just to make sure the people Pally didn’t hear wasn’t corpses or borgs or something else that didn’t breathe. Was nobody home, seemingly, so I sat down to toss Dommie’s desk. Tiggy looked over my shoulder, a fund of innocent curiosity.

"Just make sure nobody comes in through that door," I told him, because it wouldn’t do any good to ask him to look for Dommie’s safe. "And Tiggy-bai—"

"Don’t shoot the people?" Tiggy suggested. "Would be nice."

"Alarthme,
how am I supposed to keep you alive in honor when you will not allow me to defend us?"

"You’ll think of something. I’d be right delighted to let you defend yourself if it didn’t involve more wetwork than Assassins Guild could shake a charter at."

Tiggy thought that was almost amusing, which was nice, and I sat down to Dommie’s comp to see if I could get around his hold order without bothering him. Would of been easier if I could ask Paladin to do it, but there wasn’t any way he could access a self-contained database like this without me bringing in a real bag of tricks. That was half the reason I was here, doing something so damn illegal it made my back teeth hurt.

Dommie had lots of nice things in his files, protected from everything but somebody like me getting their hands on the main input port with a variable value generating compkey. There was no way around the. "eyes-only" release of the hold order, not that I’d really expected there would be. I started dumping Dommie’s database into cassettes. He didn’t have a voder on his computer, the paranoid
noke-ma’ashki, so
what he had in his files’d have to stay a mystery until Pally could read it to me. I looked at three or four of the latest entries, but they didn’t seem to have anything to do with
Firecat.

Then I started on his hard copy files. If I couldn’t get the hold order lifted without him, I wanted to know where he was.

It was just too bad about my interrupted education, because he had lots of thermofax and I couldn’t read it worth a damn. Imperial records are kept in Standard, not Intersign. It might as well of been Old Federation Script for all I could make of it.

Then I came to a word I thought I recognized. I spelled it out, slow
. Library.
It was on a fax that looked real official, but a copy, not the original.

Library.

"Tiggy, c’mere! Can you read this?"

My hellflower lovestar ankled over to where I was and peered at the thermofax.

"Of course. Even a ‘hellfiower’ can read Standard,
alarthme, "
he said, toplofty. "But why?"

"Just read it to me, oke? And don’t ask any stupid questions."

"It says-it is an official transcript of a warrant from Kyrl Mantow, the Sector Governor for the Directorates of Darkhammer, Crysoprase and Tangervel-that includes Kiffit, where you say we are now-allowing an investigation of Kiffit citizen Kroon’Vannet under Chapter 5 of the Revised Inappropriate Technology Act of the nine hundred and seventy-fifth Year of Imperial Grace. All Imperial officials are directed to provide all assistance in the performance of—" I waved him on to the end. I knew the wording on a Chapter 5 writ by heart. "This order also says that there is an attached list of specific charges, but I do not see it here. Chapter 5—"

"I know what it is, dammit. High Book."

And Dommie, that son-of-a-Librarian, was in it up to his tousled head. He was a business associate of Vannet’s, after all, and a High Book investigation makes an alMayne seven-ring vendetta look like kiss-my-hand. If Dommie was involved in Library Science with Vannet, he wasn’t just chop-and-channeling the Pax Imperador on Kiffit. He’d sold the whole damn planet.

"Butterfly, I can hear Valijon through the access terminal in the apartment. If Dominich Fenrir is involved in a ongoing Chapter 5 investigation, it would not be a wise idea to remain in Kiffit-Port until such time as you are called on to assist in the investigation."

Paladin always did have a gift for understatement. This left me with just one problem.

"Alarthme,
are you well?"

Until this exact moment neither Paladin or me had known there was a High Book investigation going on here-and since
Firecat’d
planeted, Paladin’d been through every computer in Borderline. Twice. So there was no investigation. Yet.

Was the coming High Book rap a secret only Dommie knew? Had he told Vannet? Was that why Vannet’d kyted and Dommie followed him? Why would Vannet go off leaving orders behind to make me especially dead? Why would Dommie put a hold order on
Firecat
to keep me here? I’d bet my back teeth Rimini could get
Firecat
up if it suited her, and I bet paying her price’d make High Book look fun. Paladin and me knew next to damn-all about Libraries the way the Empire believed in them, but from what the talkingbooks said I thought nobody’d willingly have anything to do with machines hellishly forged in the likeness etcetera, and here two people was. Together. Two people can’t agree on where to have lunch, let alone how to commit treason.

"Alarthme?" Tiggy said again.

"I just hate thinking about High Book investigations, bai. C’mon, let’s you and me get t’hell out of here."

###

I’d left my rented floater waiting at the Cotov Arms, because hellflower or not, Tiggy couldn’t walk far on that leg. So I got in and he got in and we headed back to wondertown, with no fuss, no muss, and no bother from the
legitimates.
Paladin didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. From the moment I saw that High Book writ in Dommie’s files, my infinitely replicating options came down to two.

Go and dance with Silver Dagger.

Ignore the hold order, take off, and find another Empire. Just me and Pally. Alone.

It was his call. It was his life. And there wasn’t much choice to make.

###

Soon as we was in Kiffit-Port district I stopped.

"You. Hellflower-che-bai. You are going to stay in this thing and you are going to not move and you are going to not farce me any chaffer about honor. You will stay here until—" Hell. Until when?

"Tell Valijon you will meet him at Mother Night’s, Butterfly," said Paladin. "I will take control of the floater."

"-until I pick you up at Mother Night’s," I said without letting myself think about it too much. Fed credit to the on-board computer and punched up the destination code just for looks. Then I glared at Tiggy, who was getting all his arguments ready.

"Shut up. Don’t want to hear whatever you have to say. But you are going in floater, and I’m not. Threes and eights." I slammed the canopy back down and the floater rose to flight level.

" ‘Love and kisses?’ " said Paladin.

"He won’t know what it means. Less you think glitterborn education includes Gentry-legger transmission codes."

I started back to
Firecat.

"Butterfly, where are you going?" In the dark and the street it was easy to imagine him standing behind me. And if he could. . . .

I didn’t want to want what I wanted so much. If Paladin could just stand here with me. . . .

I never used to think about how Paladin was helpless. A starship isn’t helpless, and Paladin could fly
Firecat
by himself. But if I died, what would happen to him?

"Your decision-trees branch as follows: Either you ignore the hold order and take off illegally, or you cooperate with Rimini, who seems to he enabling the restriction. If you ignore the hold order you have the choice of departing with or without Valijon Starbringer, and in both cases you have the further choice of remaining within the Phoenix Empire or proceeding elsewhere. If—"

"Cut farcing, bai. There’s no choice. We pop hold order, we have m leave Empire-and we can’t do that with Tiggy." Not and stay alive -and I wouldn’t blame the kinchin-flower overmuch for killing me, neither.

"If you leave Valijon Starbringer alone on Kiffit, Butterfly, he will probably die."

I stopped, and looked all around at nighttime Kiffit, with all those sophonts and hominids, any twelve of which was probably out to kill the Third Person Peculiar of House Thingummy soon as may be. I thought about Tiggy, and what I’d made him promise, all blithe, and I didn’t like myself much.

"Right. Come on." I started walking again. Maybe I’d be lucky, and something’d kill me before I reached the port.

I’d promised him, dammit. And I’d made him promise me. And couldn’t none of it matter a candle to a microwave in the face of High Book.

"And if we deal with Lalage Rimini?" Paladin said. Took me a minute to realize what he was saying.

"Are you crazy, babby-bai? You think— this is some kind of legit illegal job she’s offering? I’m antique groceries the minute I set foot in Mother Night’s!" It wasn’t like Pally to farce me around this way. It hurt.

"You’re shouting," Paladin observed. I looked around. He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

"Bai, any job Rimini has for me is naturally going to have fatal as one of its parameters. Fatal means dead. De. Ed. Dead."

"But," says Paladin, serene like he’s come up with answer to where the missing cubic x-meters of the cargo went to, "she will have to lift the hold order on
Firecat
in order to employ you."

Terrific. And the worst of it was, I wanted to take Paladin’s way out so bad I could taste it. I turned down a side-street where I could ream him out in peace.

"She could just be waiting to take us for High Book-did you ever think that? Dommie could of shopped us to her to buy off Vannet, an—"

"That is a chance I am willing to take. Whether we stay or go concerns me too, Butterfly, and I would prefer that you meet with Silver Dagger, get the hold order legally removed from
Firecat,
and continue to protect Valijon Starbringer. Do you not wish to continue to protect Valijon?"

"Shut up," I said reasonably, but I knew that Pally already had his answer. The medical telemetry in the RTS saw to that. "Where is he?" I said after a minute.

"Circling Mother Night’s at the maximum permitted altitude for remote-controlled vehicles. His presence will begin to attract attention soon, and Valijon is beginning to suspect that the floater is dysfunctional. I suggest you join him with all due speed."