Palace

PALACE

KATHARINE KERR & MARK KREIGHBAUM

A Novel of the Pinch

For Tad Williams for all kinds of reasons

Voyager

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

Special overseas edition 1996 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers
1996

Copyright © Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum 1996

The Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work ISBN 0 00 648263 5

AUTHORS’ NOTE

We wanted to make clear that what you have in this book is a very old-fashioned collaboration. Trends in writing come and go, and these days the word ‘collaboration’ often means that one writer, usually the better known, writes a detailed outline, from which the second writer produces the book. Not so here - both of us worked on developing the concepts of the book, the world, the characters, the plot, and so on, and both of us did a share of the actual writing.

Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum

He stood where he liked standing, alone on the edge of the crowd and watching, above the crowd, too, on a ramp halfway up and curling round the dome of the Spaceport terminal. Checking tickets, carrying luggage, herding children, sapients rushed past in both directions, but no-one more than glanced his way. He was hidden in plain sight by his clothes, the finely tailored but utterly undistinguished suit of a merchant. Pale soft shirt, grey short-tunic, and a slashed kilt of the same grey - human trousers, graceless wear for a stub-ugly species, did you no good when you carried a tail, even a short stump of one like his. In one hand he held a sample case, splashed with colour and the name of an importing firm. Inside lay jewellery, artificial amber from the planet of Souk, opals from Kephalon, providing him with both a cover story and money to live while he got his real job done.

He leaned on the railing of the ramp and looked down at the swarming terminal, where sapients of half a dozen races milled around or squabbled over the scanty seating. He heard the crowd as a roar and babble, half a dozen languages mixed with the flat tones of Gen, the official trade-talk of that region of the galaxy known as the Pinch. Over it all a booming noise sounded, as if a thunderstorm were gathering under the forcedome far above. He could see the source of the booms: hundreds of saccules, the short and pouchy native race of Palace, scurried and dodged through the crowd. Dressed in simple shifts, as if they were children ready for bed, they carried luggage, offered refreshments, cleared paths for their human masters, while they boomed and squealed and did their best to mimic real speech with the throat sacs and pouches clustering round their eating mouths. Their odour reached him as well, even up as high as he stood. The saccules gave off a smell-babble of scents that had earned them their nickname, Stinkers.

In his mind, though, the real stench came from the humans who swarmed thick below, all soft and somehow pulpy with their pale tan or dark brown skins stretched over fat and flesh. His own race glittered with grey-green scales, smooth and hard and pure, not tufted with dirty hair or clotted with the stuff, hanging limp from round skulls. Unclean - he stopped himself from spitting on the ramp just in time. He was here for vengeance, after all. He could follow their ugly little customs and courtesies as part of the game. He’d have his revenge, that is, provided he could get past the autogates that led from the terminal into the city. Although his view was partially obscured by a bank of vidscreens displaying a constant barrage of news footage, from his distance the gates looked deceptively simple, a pair of featureless vertical rods a few yards high and set about five feet apart, but each one contained a sophisticated array of scanners, all tuned to different frequencies, as well as password protected, encrypted, and monitored round the clock by highly trained customs agents. No-one but a fool would try and pass through them with contraband or weapons. His prospective employer had promised him safe passage so long as he carried the photonic token he’d been given, but he found it hard to believe, when you couldn’t even to bribe your way through. The AI in charge kept the locking codes secret from the agents and changed them daily for good measure.

For a better look he leaned forward, frowning with a twist of his long mouth; then he felt, rather than heard, someone stop behind him. A slight pressure from a hand touching the case he held, a faint draught of moving air - no more than that. The thief was good, but Vi-Kata, the deadliest assassin in the Pinch, was better. In utter silence he spun, kicked low, saw a human face grimacing with pain, its mouth open for a scream - grabbed with his free hand and flung - the shriek rang shrill as the thief flipped over the railing and plunged down, still screaming, his scream drowned in other screams when he hit headfirst, splattering across the floor.

‘Stop him!’ Kata yelled in Gen. ‘The murderer! That way! Police! Police!’

Yelling, pointing, Kata raced down the ramp. A few young human men followed him, calling for the police as they chased their imaginary murderer. Down below, chaos swirled around the corpse. Muttering weeping sapients shrank back from the bloody mess on the floor or else stared, frozen in horror, blocking the way of the security guards trying to cordon off the corpse. Everywhere clots of saccules clutched each other and boomed. Their fear smelled like old vomit. Police sirens sounded, shrill and urgent. Kata had no trouble losing his impromptu posse as the confusion spread and swelled. He slipped off to one side and strode for the gates. Up close, he could see that every exit stood guarded by not just one gate, but a series, a long tunnel of autogates stretching toward the grey light of outside and safety. Behind him, he could hear a police loudspeaker shouting for order and commanding everyone to stay where they were. Now or never. One customs officer, a pale pinkish human, had stepped a few paces away from his gate to stare slack-jawed at the cluster of police around the corpse. A perfect chance, but Kata hesitated for the briefest of seconds. He was under sentence of death on more than one world, and the police of all of those worlds had encoded his DNA signature into their security systems. He stepped forward, hesitated again, then shrugged and walked through, strode through, swinging his sample case, his skull crest raised at a jaunty angle. Kight gates passed, nine, ten, and then the door ahead, opening with a hiss of air.

None of them gave an alarm.

Kata walked out into a cold, grey light. Overhead, clouds swirled with the perpetual fog of Palace, where a sunny day meant a celebration. He paused on the walkway to button his short-tunic.

‘Hey! Watch it!’ A voice, a human voice, snarled from behind him. ‘Clumsy Lep bastard.’

Kata turned and considered the speaker, paunchy and red-faced. Here on the public walkway - no, too many other sapients around, too many witnesses.

‘My apologies, Se,’ Kata said.

‘Yeah?’ The human pushed past him. ‘Your kind should go back where you belong!’ He trotted off, heading for the movebelt crawling along the far side of the street. Kata turned on his heel and strode off down the walkway. Although he had, of course, carried luggage onboard the liner -the stewards would have noticed and wondered if he hadn’t

- it could rot in the claim area for all he cared now. Ja Vin Hepo the jewel importer was due for his bloodless death just as soon as Kata made a few purchases with his imaginary line of credit. He passed a vidscreen, glanced at it, then swore and stopped to watch. Looping on the six-foot-high screen was footage of the thief falling and hitting, the splash of blood and the panic in the crowd. When had that slimy filth of a pix started recording? Did they have frames of him on that holotape? He’d forgotten how intakes and pix swarmed over Palace like lice, working for the newsgrids that practically ruled the planet. Kata’s luck had held - the pix had looked up just as the thief screamed, apparently, because the loop started with the man arching over the railing. At the top of the frame Kata could just make himself out, but he was so obscured that he could have been any Lep in a business suit. He hurried on. Around a corner stood a rack of sleek black robocabs and a queue of passengers, waiting their turn under the officious eye of a blue-skinned saccule dispatcher. The entire queue had their heads tipped back, staring in fascination at that same wretched loop on the vidscreen hanging above. In the queue stood other members of Kata’s own race, the Ty Onar Lep, but these wore clothes better fitted for humans. Long tunics with sleeves and high collars, heavily draped kilts - they all hid the unique patterns of iridescent scales that marked a Lep as the member of a family line. Kata noted with disgust that one fellow even wore a human-style headband with his gene-glyph displayed, just as if his own scales weren’t enough for him. Imitation humans! he thought - then reminded himself that they had their reasons for blending in to a human world. Some fourteen years past, at the end of a long war, the homeworld Ty Onar Lep had tried to invade Palace; they’d failed, but the Lep on planet, whose families after all had been citizens of Palace for centuries, still felt the lash of old suspicions, old contempt, no matter how loyal to the government they truly were. And he himself, for all his pride, for all that he wore the traditional Lep websling around his waist over the traditional slashed skirts - was he any better after what he’d done? He’d dyed and altered his own bright scalings, changed them to match the pattern of an obscure line, denied and spat upon his own heritage, his own ancestors, all because of his work, all because of his family’s shame. His own brother had gone over to the enemy, his own brother had sworn a vow to someday bring him to justice - and his own brother lived on Palace. Under his kilt Kata’s tail lashed, just once, an involuntary gesture that he stopped with a spasm of sheer will.

The job was too good to pass up, he reminded himself, despite the risk. Already, in that matter of the autogates, his employer had shown him how powerful he was. His contact on Souk, the Lep who had actually offered Kata the job, had given him proof that this mysterious employer had some ancient technology at his command, devices lost in the rest of the Pinch for hundreds of years. If Kata could trust this unbelievably rich sapient’s promises, soon the Line of Tal would be raised high again; he would have his true name back, not this Vi-Kata which meant, at root, the Outcast One and nothing more. If he could trust his new employer’s word about his plans,
if
there would be no more humans in the Pinch, soon and forever. Kata changed robocabs three times, then stopped at a store on the Street of Rags to buy himself second-hand clothes and a leather shoulder-sack for the contents of his sample case. The case and the business suit ended up in a public recycler. Wearing a shabby slashed kilt, a short-tunic, and a wrap jacket several sizes too large - he kept the shoulder-sack hidden under it - he hailed another cab, changed it again, and fetched up at last at the gates of the Lep quarter, Finance Sect.

Flecked gold with lamplit windows, tall white multi-levels rose from narrow streets, darkening in the fading grey light of afternoon. High above him, strung back and forth from the balconies and protrusions of the multi-levels, hung tattered rope webs, as grey as the sky, a shabby mockery of the great green webs that spanned entire cities on Ri, the homeworld. The smell of cooking grease hung thick in the air. Finance Sect, once so prosperous, had taken a flood of refugees when the Government had passed new laws limiting where Lep families could live.

On the ground the squalor hit him like a stink. Dirty, silver-coloured children ran wild in the alleys, yelling, shoving each other, playing incomprehensible human games instead of proper dance-fights. As Kata walked through, cursing and slapping them out of his way, he noticed their scale patterns, each different - so! things had sunk so low that children of separate nests played together. Where were the
mahtis,
the keepers of the children? How could they leave the future of their lines exposed to all kinds of dangers, here in streets littered with shed scales and garbage? With shit, too, he noticed - maybe from the children, maybe from the half-starved animals, jadewing lizards and dogs, that slunk out of his way as he passed, but most likely from both.

Talking among themselves, a gaggle of young males strutted toward him. They held their sleek heads high to let anyone who might want to look see their red throats. Vi-Kata stepped into a doorway to make sure they passed by without touching him. The shame of it! How could any decent female accept such a blatant mating-offer! Or were there any decent females around here? He walked on, glancing round. Where were the grandmothers, wearing their immense coils of knotted silk, each knot marking an event in their family’s history? Back home the grandmothers crouched on the polished and inlaid porches of their homes, or sat up in the webs, taking the sun while they tested each knot and sang of things past. And where were the grandfathers, their necks hung with gold chains and medallions, the wealth of their lines? Someone needed to slash a little sense into these stinking children. Someone needed to slice open one of those shameless red throats to make an example for all the other younglings. He only wished it could be he.