The Sundering (22 page)

Her eyes narrowed. “And in return for this, I’ll have to do what exactly?”

“Pry open some doors in the High City that are otherwise closed to provincials.”

She gave a bemused shrug. “I’m much more a blunt instrument than I am a pry bar,” she said. “I could get the doors open, maybe, but I wouldn’t answer for what the folk on the other side might think about it.”

“Best let Roland work that out on his own.”

Sula gave a sudden bright laugh and swung herself like a child on the end of his arm, shoes skipping on the pavement. “So what happens next?”

“We could make the announcement tomorrow afternoon at the reception after Vipsania’s wedding.” He grinned at her. “That’ll serve her right for diverting the guests’ attention at
my
party.” He swung her laughing on the end of his arm. “And before that, in the morning, we could pay our visit to the Peers’ Gene Bank and get the paperwork out of the way.”

She gave him a startled, half-believing look and dropped his hand. “The
what
?”

“Don’t worry. They just take a drop of blood.”

“The
what
bank?” Her voice turned insistent.

“The Peers’ Gene Bank,” Martinez said. “Just to get all the bloodlines on record.”

She turned down the street, and he fell into step with her. He saw her face reflected in window glass, a wavy dark-eyed ghost. Skepticism invaded her face. “Is this strictly necessary?” she asked. “I never heard of this place.”

“I don’t suppose the Gene Bank advertises,” Martinez shrugged. “But then they don’t have to. It’s the law, at least here on Zanshaa, if you’re a Peer and want to marry. We have a gene bank on Laredo, too, though it’s not just for Peers.”

“There wasn’t anything like that on Spannan.” The planet, Martinez knew, where she’d been fostered after the execution of her parents.

“Some Peers care more about their bloodlines than others, I suppose,” Martinez said. “It’s a stupid old institution, but what can you do?”

They came to one of the Lower Town’s canals and turned left to the bridge they could see in the distance. The scent of the canal filled the air, iodine and decay.

Sula’s face hardened. “So what happens to the drop of blood once they draw it?”

“Nothing. It just goes into the record.”

“And who consults the record?”

A canal barge chugged by, its running lights shimmering on the dark water. The greasy wake slopped against the stone quay. Martinez raised his voice against the sound. “No one consults it, I imagine. Not unless there’s some question about the parentage of the children.” He slipped up behind her as they walked and wrapped her in his arms. He nuzzled close to Sula’s ear and said, “You’re not planning on having children by anyone but me, are you?”

He could feel surprising tension in her shoulders, and then the deliberate attempt at relaxation. “No one but you,” she said abstractly. She slowed her walk, then turned to him and gave him a quick kiss. “This is so sudden,” she said. “A few minutes ago I was just a woman with a medal and no job, and now—”

“Now you’re my partner for life,” he said, and was unable to restrain his grin.

She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “You’re not getting carried away in some kind of stampede, are you? How many marriages are going on in your family, anyway?”

“You and I will make three. Or four, but I’m not sure Sempronia rightly counts, and I don’t know if she’s actually getting married or just threatening to.”

Her arms tautened around him like wire, and she pressed her cheek hard to his chest. Sandama Twilight floated through the air. “Three marriages at once,” she said. “Isn’t that unlucky?”

“It sounds lucky to
me,
” Martinez said.

“I can hear your heart beating,” Sula murmured irrelevantly. He stroked her pale gold hair. A cold gust chilled him. Water slopped against the quay.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

There was a moment’s silence, and Martinez felt a wariness touch his nerves. She loosened her arms and looked up at him.

“Look,” she said. “This is all very sudden. I’m not used to the idea yet.”

He looked at her with the dizzying sensation that he had just stepped onto the edge of an abyss, and that a single misstep would send him spinning into the void.

“What,” he said carefully, “are you trying to tell me?”

She gave him a gentle kiss and offered a tentative smile. “Can’t we just go on as we are for a while?”

He looked at her. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want this to happen before…”

A door opened ahead of them, and music boomed out. Torminel in the brown uniforms of the civil service spilled into the doorway, then stood there calling to one another while the music shouted out around them, stringed instruments shrieking in a minor key. Sula bent her head, put her hands over her ears as discordant cymbals crashed.

“I need to
think,
” she insisted over the noise.

Sudden anger drew a hot slash across Martinez’s chest. He found himself raising his voice over the blaring music.

“I’ll spare you the trouble,” he said. “A moment’s thought would tell you that this is your best chance for security and the restoration of your family name, not to mention your difficulty in finding a patron in the service. So my own brief analysis would seem to indicate that your problem isn’t the money or the palace or the place in the country, your problem lies with
me
….”

Sula’s eyes lifted to his, wide and sea-green and cold. “Spare the commentary,” she said in a voice hard as diamond. “You don’t know
anything
about my problems.”

Martinez felt his spine stiffen under Sula’s gaze. His mind raced, a dark turmoil illuminated by jagged flashes of anger. “I beg to differ, my lady,” he said. “Your problem is that you lost your money and your position and all the people that you loved. And now you’re afraid to let anyone love you, because—”

“I won’t hear this!
” Sula’s voice cut like a lash. Her hands were still flat over her ears. The gold light that poured from the open door glowed in her eyes like angry fire. “I don’t
need
this pompous idiocy now! You don’t know
anything
!”

The Torminel were staring at them now with their huge nocturnal eyes. Cymbals, tuned to strange minor keys, crashed again and again in Martinez’s ears.

“I—”

“
It’s not about you!
” Sula shouted.
“Will you please get it into your head that it’s not about
you!”

Then she spun on her heel and marched away, pale legs flashing beneath the hem of her black dress as she shouldered her way through the Torminel. Martinez stood on the pavement and watched her, a wild disbelief throbbing through his veins.

It was happening
again.

Once before he had watched Sula walk away through the night, her heels emphatic on the surface of the street while the lights of the Lower Town gilded her hair. Once before he had stood stupidly and watched while she walked out of his life, while a cold morning wind blustered along the canal and his heart filled with a mixture of bewilderment and anger and knife-edge anguish.

Not a third time,
Martinez swore to himself. His fists clenched.
Not again.

It’s not about you!
she had cried. A reassurance he found pleasing.

It was all Sula’s mess. Let her find her own way out of it.

Martinez let himself into the Shelley Palace, threw his overcoat over the ugly bronze Lai-own on the newel post, and made his silent way up the stairs. It was sheer bad luck that he encountered Roland, who was putting the remains of a late supper into the hallway on its tray so that a servant could pick it up in the morning. Roland straightened, adjusted his dressing gown, and gazed at Martinez with cool interest.

“Matrimonial ambitions thwarted, I take it?”

“Oh be silent for once, can’t you?” Martinez brushed past Roland toward his room.

Roland’s voice pursued him. “Would you like me to take up your cause?”

Martinez paused at his door as a savage laugh rose to his throat. “You? Talk to Lady Sula on my behalf?”

“Talk to
someone,
” Curiosity entered Roland’s mild gaze. “What’s the problem, exactly? I would have thought she’d leap at the chance you offered her.”

“The problem,” Martinez said through clenched teeth, “is that she’s crazy.”

“Better to find out now rather than later,” Roland said. His tone was sympathetic.

The last thing Martinez needed was Roland’s sympathy, or his help either, so he bade his brother good night and went into his room. He tore off his jacket and flung it on the bed in anger, then hopped on alternate legs while he yanked off his shoes and kicked them under pieces of furniture.

She called
me,
he thought in cold fury. It had been Sula who had initiated contact after her previous flight. It was she who had come up the skyhook to meet him as he stepped off
Corona.
She had pursued
him.

Well. The pursuit was clearly over.

Martinez glared at the wallpaper for a while, and then he found his eyes sliding to the comm unit.

Call her, he thought. Call her and
demand
an explanation.

He took a step to the comm, then stopped. She hadn’t given him an explanation the first time she’d walked out on him; what made him think she’d give him an explanation now?

He stepped away from the comm, then sat on the bed, his big hands dangling uselessly between his legs.

He stood up again. Then sat down. Then he lunged for the comm.

Sula didn’t answer. When the automated message service clicked on, Martinez broke the connection.

He didn’t want to leave a message. A message was something she could laugh at.

Better to find out now rather than later.
Roland’s words echoed in his skull.

Martinez called again after twenty minutes. And again after an hour.

He knew that Sula had no place to be but at her apartment. He pictured her sitting before her comm display, contempt glimmering in her green eyes as she watched the system log one call after another…

Martinez went to the window and stared out at the dark, empty street, and over the sound of the wind skirling against the eaves he could distinctly hear the sound of dreams quietly crumbling to dust.

Sula lay curled on her side in the great ugly Sevigny bed and pressed a pillow to her chest as if it were a lover. The morning light shone bright through a crack in the drawn curtains. Her eyes felt hot and sore. The scent of Martinez was still faint in the bed, and the pillow was moist with her tears.

She hadn’t cried in all the years since she had taken a pillow very like this one and pressed it over Caro Sula’s face. That effort had wrung the last tears out of her, had made her stony, like a high, cold mountain desert. She had adopted Sula’s rank and position and moved into the place that had been reserved for her, and all the while she had despised those she’d duped, those who, like Jeremy Foote, considered themselves the epitome of creation. She had seen what the High City called worldly, and known that none of those supposed sophisticates had seen what she had seen, done what she had done, or would have dared to make the choices she had gladly embraced.

But all that had ended with Martinez. At his appearance she had felt the first fall of rain on the arid wilderness she called her heart. She had greened under his touch, blossomed like the desert after the first rains.

And now the moisture was being squeezed out of her again, drop by drop, by the relentless hand of remorse.

Why couldn’t I trust him?
Anger curled her hands into fists, and she battered the pillow as if she were hammering the life out of an enemy.

Her alarm chimed, reminding her that she had to give her deposition in the Blitsharts trial. She doubted she had slept at all. She rose from her bed and felt a stab of pain in the stiffened, clenched muscles of her back.

Sula showered and donned her undress uniform. She made a pot of tea but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. The comm display glowed at her from the desk in the front room: at some point in the long despairing hours of the night, she’d told the comm to refuse all calls and to devote itself exclusively to calling up all available information on the Peers’ Gene Bank. She downloaded the information into her sleeve display and reviewed it in the taxi, and while waiting to give the deposition.

Rage began to simmer in her as she discovered the law to be just as Martinez had described it. A drop of blood was required for Peers not just on on Zanshaa, but on the accelerator ring and in the unlikely event that Peers married somewhere else in the system. She set out to find worlds where Peers did without a gene bank, and found nearly thirty, including Dandaphis, Magaria, Felarus, Terra, and Spannan, the planet of her birth.

Sula could hardly accept Martinez’s proposal with the proviso that they had to travel to one of these obscure worlds for the marriage. There
had
to be an exception to the regulation, and she set her computer to seek through every available database for every rule and paragraph and picture and article ever written about the Peers’ Gene Bank.

Then it was time to give her deposition, and found that the attorney for the insurance company provided a suitable target for her wrath.
“Haven’t you asked that question twice already? Didn’t you hear my answer the first time? Are you deaf or an idiot?”

The attorney for the Blitsharts, though feigning disapproval, seemed to enjoy the flaying of his colleague, at least until it was his turn.
“What kind of imbecile question is that? If I had a cadet as thick as you are, I’d order him to defect to the Naxids and let him sabotage
them.
”

The savagery had made her feel better for an instant, and afterward empty. She returned to her apartment, drank a cup of cold tea, and ate some of the food she had acquired in the expectation of sharing it with Martinez.