Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (31 page)

“You’re a good girl, Arrhae,” said H’daen suddenly. “I like you.”

Arrhae set down the wine most carefully, not spilling any, and made the little half bow of courteous acceptance customary when presenting food or drink, to acknowledge the thanks of the recipient. It might also have acknowledged H’daen’s compliment—or then again, it might not have. It was always safer to be equivocal.

“You run my household well, Arrhae,” H’daen continued eventually, “and I trust you.”

He touched the shuttered reader with one fingertip, unaware of the worried look that had crept into her eyes. A plainly confidential communication, and unexpected talk of trust and liking, made up an uneasy conjunction of which she would as soon have no part. It had the poisonous taint of intrigue about it, of meddling in the affairs of the great and powerful; of hazard, and danger, and death. Arrhae began to feel afraid.

H’daen tr’Khellian tapped out a code on the reader’s touchpad, and its screen rose once more from the desk’s recess. He read again what glowed there in amber on black, shifted so that he could give Arrhae his full attention, and smiled at her. She kept the roil of emotion off her face with a great effort, and succeeded in looking only intent and eager as a good head-of-servants should. H’daen’s smile seemed to promise so many things that she wanted no part of that when he finally spoke, the truth was anticlimactic.

“It appears that this house will have important guests before nightfall. There is much requiring my attention before I”—the smile crossed his face again—“have to play the host, so I leave all the arrangements for their reception in your hands. It is most important to me, to this House, and to everyone in it. Don’t fail me, Arrhae. Don’t fail us.”

H’daen turned away to scan the reader-screen one last time, and so didn’t notice the undisguised relief on Arrhae’s face.

Ch’Rihan was a perilous place; it had always been so—plotting and subtlety was almost an integral part of both private and political life—but now with the new, youthful aggressiveness in the Senate and the High Command, suicide, execution, and simple, plain natural causes were far more frequent than they had ever been before, and neither lowly rank nor lofty were any defense. With what she already knew about H’daen’s ambition, it would have horrified but not really surprised her had she been asked to slip poison into someone’s food or drink….

Some vestige of concern must have manifested itself in her face, because H’daen was staring at her strangely when her attention returned to him. “Uh, yes, my Lord,” she ventured as noncommittally as she dared, trying not to sound as if she had missed anything else he had said to her.

“Then ‘yes’ let it be!” The acerbic edge was back in his voice, a tone far more familiar to her—to any in House Khellian—than the almost-friendly fashion in which he had spoken before. “I told you to do it, not think about it, and certainly not on my time or in my private rooms. Go!”

Arrhae went.

There had been guests at the house many times before, and both intimate dinners for a few and banquets for many; but this was the first time that Arrhae had been given so little notice of the event. At least she had complete control of organization and—more important—purchase of produce. Armed with an estimate of numbers of attending, quantities required, and a list of possible dishes that she had taken care to have approved, she set out with the chastened chief cook to do a little shopping.

The expedition involved more and harder work in a shorter time than Arrhae had experienced in a very long while—but it did have certain advantages. Foremost among those was the flitter. H’daen’s authorization to use his personal vehicle was waiting for Arrhae when she emerged from the stores and pantries with a sheaf of notes in her hand and tr’Aimne in tow, and that authorization did as much to instill respect for her in the chief cook as any amount of severity and harsh language. None of the household staff were overly fond of H’daen tr’Khellian—but his temper had earned him wide respect.

Arrhae checked the usage-clearance documents several times before going closer than arm’s length to the vehicle. Oh, she knew how to drive one—who didn’t?—but given the present mood of the inner-city constables, she would sooner find an error or an oversight in the authorizations herself than let it be found by one of the traffic-control troopers. She listened to gossip, of course—again, who didn’t?—but she gave small credence to the stories she had overheard from other high-house servants of strange goings-on in Command. Though there was always the possibility that Lhaesl tr’Khev had just been trying to impress her.

Arrhae smiled at
that
particular memory as she went through the vehicle-status sections of the documentation. Lhaesl was a good-looking young man, very good-looking indeed if one’s tastes ran to floppy, clumsily endearing baby animals. He tried so very hard to be grown-up, and always failed—by not having lived long enough. On the last occasion that they met, he had managed to talk like a more or less sensible person in the intervals of fetching her a cup of ale and that plate of sticky little sweetmeats that had taken her so long to scrub from her fingers. She hadn’t even liked the ale much, its harshness always left her throat feeling abraded, but to refuse the youngster’s attentions with the brutality needed to make him notice would have been on the same level as kicking a puppy. So Arrhae had sat, sipping and coughing slightly, nibbling and adhering to things, and being a good listener as working for H’daen had taught her how. It was all nonsense, of course, a garble of starships and secrets, with important names scattered grandly through the narrative that would have meant much more to Arrhae had she known who these doubtless-worthy people were.

But gossip apart, there was an unspecified something wrong in i’Ramnau. Arrhae had visited the city twice in recent months, not then to buy and carry, but merely to supervise purchases that would later be delivered. Because of that she had traveled by
yhfiss’ue,
the less-than-loved public transport tubes. They always smelled—not bad, exactly, but odd; musty, as if they were overdue for a thorough washing inside and out. There had been times, especially when Eisn burned hot and close in the summer sky, when Arrhae would have dearly loved the supervising of the sanitary staff. That, however, was by the way. What had remained with her about those last journeys to the inner city was the difference between them. The first had been like all the others, boring, occasionally bumpy, and completely unremarkable. But the second…

That had been when the three tubecars had stopped, and settled, and been invaded by both city constables and military personnel, all with drawn sidearms. Arrhae had been very frightened. Her previous encounters with the Rihannsu military had been decorous meetings with officers of moderately high rank in House Khellian, where they were guests and she was responsible for their comfort. Then, looking down the bore of an issue blaster, the realization had been hammered home that not all soldiers were officers, and indeed that not all officers were gentlemen. What such uniformed brutes would do if they found her in a private flitter without complete and correct documentation didn’t bear considering….

She carded the papers at last and slipped them securely into her travel-tunic’s pocket, then glanced at tr’Aimne, the cook. “Well, what are you waiting for?” she said in a fair imitation of H’daen tr’Khellian at his most irritable. “Get in!”

Without waiting for him, she popped the canopy and slipped sideways into the flitter’s prime-chair, mentally reviewing the warmup protocols as she made herself comfortable. Once learned, never forgotten; while tr’Aimne was securing himself in the next seat—and being, she thought, as ostentatious as he dared about fastening his restraint harness—her fingers were already entering the clearance codes that would release the flitter’s controls. Instrumentation lit up; all of it touch-pad operated systems rather than the modern voice-activators. H’daen’s flitter might have been beautifully appointed inside, and fitted with a great many luxuries, but it was still, unmistakably, several years out-of-date. No matter, for today, old or not, it was hers.

Arrhae shifted the driver into first and felt a tiny lurch as A/G linears came on line to lift the flitter from its cradle. Ahead and above, the doors at the top of the ramp slid open, accompanying their movement with a dignified chime of warning gongs rather than the raucous hooting of sirens. H’daen was a man of taste, or considered himself as such, anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, Arrhae caught sight of tr’Aimne tightening his straps, and his lips moving silently. Tr’Aimne was not fond of driving, and little good at being driven. “You could get in the back if you really wanted to,” Arrhae said. “That way you wouldn’t have to watch….”

Tr’Aimne said nothing, and didn’t even look at her, but his knuckles went very pale where they gripped the harness-straps while his face flushed dark bronze-green. Arrhae shrugged, willing to let him brazen it out, and took the flitter out of the garage.

She didn’t even do it as fast as she might have, but nonetheless tr’Aimne changed complexion again, for the worse. “Sorry,” she said. It was of course too late to change the speed parameters—the master system had them, and in accordance with local speed laws, wouldn’t let them be changed without groundbased countermand. “It won’t be long,” she said, but tr’Aimne made no reply. He was too busy holding on to the restraint straps and the grab-handles inside the flitter. Arrhae for her own part shrugged and kept her hands on the controls, just in case manual override might be needed. The system was fairly reliable, but sometimes it overloaded: and this was, after all, a holiday….

With this in mind she had let the i’Ramnau traffic-control net have them from the very start of the trip rather than free-driving it: people did forget to file driveplans, and there had been some ugly accidents in the recent past on the city’s high-level accessways. One of them had in fact resulted in her appointment as
hru’hfe s’Khellian,
and she would as soon not provide someone else with advancement by the same means.

The flitter brought them to i’Ramnau far faster than
yhfiss’ue
would have, and too fast for Arrhae’s liking; she was enjoying herself as she had rarely since she began working for House Khellian. Both lifter and driver of the Varrhan-series flitters were more powerful than warranted by their size, and they were less vehicles to drive than to fly. Arrhae flew it, with great enthusiasm and considerable skill. When they grounded in the flitpark, and the far door popped, followed by tr’Aimne leaning out and making most unfortunate noises, she busied herself with her own straps and lists, and carefully didn’t “notice.”

Finally he was straightening his clothes and had most of his color back. “Are you all right?” she said.

“I…yes,
hru’hfe.
I think so.” He coughed again, and then spat—close enough to her feet for insult’s sake, and yet not close enough to let her make an issue of it.

Well, there it was, he certainly
had
taken it personally; and she didn’t need a quarrel with the chief cook, not today of all days. Arrhae glanced at the spittle briefly, just long enough to make it clear she had noticed that its placing was no accident, and then looked at him wryly. “If I had
wanted
to make you unwell,” she said, “I wouldn’t have done so poor a job of it—you wouldn’t be able to stand. Come, chief cook, pardon my eagerness. I so love to drive.”

He nodded rather curtly, and together they gathered up the netbags for the few things they would be needing and headed for the market. Arrhae pushed the pace. They were already later than she would have preferred to be.

It was annoying that she had to be in such a Powers-driven hurry on Eitreih’hveinn, one of the nine major religious festivals of the Rihannsu year. No matter that the Farmers’ Festival was one of her favorites: she had no time to enjoy it today. There was only one good thing about it, and Arrhae took full advantage—the produce for sale was going to be superb.

Tr’Aimne, to her mild annoyance, refused to enjoy the shopping trip. One would have thought the sight of so much gorgeous food would have filled any decent cook with joy, but he generally dragged along behind Arrhae rather like a wet cloak trailed on the ground.
Maybe he’s still not well,
she thought, and slowed down a little for his sake. But it made no difference, tr’Aimne was incivility itself at the merchants’ and farmers’ booths, and his manners began to improve only as they got closer to the expensive, exclusive stores near the city center. By that time they had acquired most of the staples they needed, in one form or another, and had begun to shop for the luxuries that made H’daen tr’Khellian’s formal dinners the well-attended functions they were.

Rare delicacies, fine vintages, fragrant blossoms for the tables and the dining chamber. Some were easy to find—Arrhae enjoyed the simple pleasure of being able to point at anything that took her fancy regardless of its price, and striking the Khellian house-sigil nonchalantly onto whatever bills were pushed toward her—but others proved much more difficult. And one or two were quite impossible.

“What do you mean, out of stock? You always had
hlai’vnau
before, so why not now?”

The shopkeeper went through all the appropriate expressions and movements of regret—none of which, of course, put any cuts of meat in the empty cool-trays or did anything to calm Arrhae down. She had all but promised that the traditional holiday foods would be served at H’daen’s table, and now here was this bucolic idiot telling her that he had sold every last scrap of wild
hlai
in the city. She was sure enough of that sweeping statement, because it could be bought nowhere else, at least nowhere else on this particular day. Only merchants approved by priestly mandate and subjected each year to the most stringent examinations were permitted to sell wild game on the day set aside to honor domestic produce and the people who provided it, and this man held the single such approval in i’Ramnau.