With the Lightnings (7 page)

Markos was not an invited guest at the time she'd checked the list. The Alliance delegate at table four was supposed to be Captain Crowell, a female ground-forces officer; and she should have been two seats down from the Cinnabar bureaucrat.

An ensemble of Kostroman flautists playing both straight and transverse instruments stood on an internal balcony at second-floor level. Their music echoed as a high, insectile overtone in the huge room. Adele found the effect surprisingly pleasant when mixed with conversation and the clink of the dinner service.

A light-skinned, tow-haired servant, a native of one of the impoverished northern islands, set the next course in front of Adele. It was minced
something
on a bed of lettuce. Kostroman lizard was her best guess, but some of the planet's insect equivalents got very large also.

Beggars can't be choosers, and the tiny portions hadn't yet managed to slake the fires of three weeks of hunger. Adele took a bite and found the meat tasteless but the sauce intriguingly spicy.

"Do you keep in touch with Mistress Boileau, mistress?" Markos asked pleasantly.

Adele's head jerked sideways. Markos took another forkful of food, his attention apparently focused on his meal. He glanced toward her with a bland smile.

Aloud Adele said, "I haven't as yet. When I settle in"—she suppressed a grim smile—"I'll let her know how things are going."

She cut a wedge from the mince, noting with pleasure that the fork didn't tremble in her fingers. "You haven't been on Kostroma long, Mr. Markos?" she added. She turned to look at him again, her lips wearing the muted smile of strangers talking at a dinner party.

Markos's expression didn't change, but shutters closed behind his eyes. Adele chewed with tiny movements of her jaw. The food was sawdust now.

He's deciding what to say. Whether to tell the truth or to lie, and if a lie—which one. 
 

Oh, she knew the type very well. They came to the Collections not infrequently—and trembled since they couldn't use a system so complex without help, but they feared to ask for help because their questions could become weapons to use against them. They were folk to whom the truth was always a thing to be determined on the basis of advantage, never spoken for its own sake.

"Only a matter of hours, mistress," Markos said with a tinge of grudging approval in his tone. "I arrived on the
Goetz von Berlichingen
this afternoon. Perhaps you saw us land? The dispatch vessel."

"I was busy in the palace all day," Adele said truthfully. "I have no interest in anything that takes place beyond the library. Not that I could tell one ship from another anyway."

She went back to her meal, wishing that she could taste it. Markos had proved he knew her background to see how she'd react; she'd reacted by showing that she knew things about him also. Because of the sort of person he was, Markos would twist like a worm on the hook of
how much
Adele Mundy knew about him. It should keep him from picking at her during the remainder of the dinner.

In fact Adele knew almost nothing, and certainly she didn't know the answer that mattered most to her. It was inevitable that the Alliance delegation would include a high-level intelligence agent.

What Adele really wanted to know was why the agent had arranged to be seated next to
her
.

The latrine was in the apartment building's courtyard, adjacent to the kitchen facilities. Daniel opened the latrine door and stepped out, feeling a great deal easier than he had a few moments before. He'd had a strong temptation to walk onto his suite's minuscule balcony to save himself a trip down the unlighted stairs.

He wouldn't have been the first, of that he was sure, but naval training had held. Personal hygiene was a matter of greater concern in a starship's close quarters than anyone raised on a country estate could imagine.

Hogg was in the kitchen, removing another bottle of brandy from the locked pantry. He grinned at Daniel, bobbed his head in salute, and said, "The arrangements're to your taste, I hope, sir?"

"Hogg, you're the wonder of the universe," Daniel said. He bowed to the servant in drunken formality.
A naval officer was never too drunk to carry out his duties. .
. .

Though that raised a question that Daniel supposed he had to address sometime. "But say, Hogg," he said. There was enough still to drink upstairs that his guests weren't going to miss him—or the fresh bottle—for a minute longer. "I don't mean to complain, but are there going to be questions raised about . . . ?"

He dipped his chin in what could be read as a gesture toward the brandy bottle.

"Oh, don't worry yourself, sir," Hogg said. He eyed the bottle with critical pride. "They'll all be filled, resealed so's the vineyard couldn't tell, and put back neat as you please. The local slosh is plenty good for a jumped-up grocer like Admiral Lasowski anyhow."

Daniel grimaced. He thought of saying something about the unopened bottle, but he decided that would be too much like refusing to kiss the girl good-bye in the morning.

"Ah, not to pry . . . ?" he said instead, prying. Compliance of the purser and stewards in something this blatant couldn't simply have been bought.

"One of the stewards thought she could play poker," said Hogg with a reminiscent smile. "She and her buddies fleeced me all the way out from Cinnabar in florin-limit games, they did. When we got here, I told them I'd gotten into my master's private funds and could play for real money."

Daniel snorted. "My private funds would just about stretch to a florin-limit game, that's so," he said.

"Ah, but they didn't know," Hogg said. "Take my word for it, sir: the best investment you can make is convincing some snooty bastard that he knows what really he don't know. The stewards got the purser to back them with the big money, so that made things a good deal simpler."

Oh, yes. A purser dipping into his ship's accounts could spend the rest of his life on a prison asteroid. That was much more of a problem than questions about a dozen bottles of wine souring on a long voyage.

Daniel laughed loudly. He eyed the stairs, then said, "Go on ahead, Hogg. I'm going to wait a minute to let my head clear before I navigate my way up."

Hogg bobbed again obsequiously and shuffled away on the narrow treads. The servant had probably drunk as much as any member of the dinner party, but he had a lifetime of training besides his barrel-shaped body with plenty of mass to stabilize the alcohol. Daniel drank like a naval officer, but Hogg drank like an admiral.

Two women came out of the landlord's apartments, talking quickly in a local dialect. They were heavily muffled; in the darkness Daniel wasn't sure whether they were sisters, nieces, or some combination. He walked farther into the courtyard so as not to be loitering at the door of the latrine.

Kostroma City had no street lighting, and the citizens shuttered their windows at night. The stars shone as bright as they did in Bantry, but they weren't the stars of Daniel's childhood. The "bird" flitting around the eaves tracked its prey by heat-sensitive pits in its snout, not echo location like its equivalent nightflyers on Cinnabar and Earth.

Even Kostroma's seawater tasted strange on Daniel's tongue. It was tinged with a different mixture of salts and less of them in total than the fluid that lapped the shore of Bantry.

Anger and Uncle Stacey's stories had taken Daniel Leary far from home. Standing here in the night, though, he knew he'd found another home: the stars in all their wonderful profusion.

Adele nibbled through the dozen thin slices of meats and vegetables set before her on a wooden skewer with charred tips. The provisions merchant had listed the ingredients in a voice pitched to be heard by the aristocrat from a minor island seated across from him. If Adele heard correctly—gathering information was instinctive for her, both a blessing and a curse—one of the slices was "poisonous love-apple."

She smiled despite herself. "Poisonous" would cover most of the love affairs she'd seen played out; though that was a subject of which she had only academic knowledge or interest.

They'd consumed twenty-two of the menu's thirty dishes. Because Adele had never attended a Kostroman banquet before, she hadn't realized each dish would be a separate course. At this rate it would be well after midnight before the gathering concluded.

Most of the guests were accompanied by an aide who stood near the main doorway, chatting with others in the same boring circumstances. If a message came for the guest, a palace servant informed the aide, who in turn passed the information on to his or her principal. Occasionally a diner rose after such a consultation and left the salon to deal with the crisis.

Much more frequently a guest staggered out to the temporary toilet facilities curtained off in the hallway. Kostroman society was very advanced in many respects, but Adele considered the sanitary arrangements of even the ruling class to be barely minimal.

The menu hadn't listed the ocean of wines, beers, and distilled liquor that flowed with the food, probably because that went without saying on Kostroma. Adele had neither a taste nor the head for alcohol; she would have drunk with great care even if this function were not a matter of her duty as a member of the Elector's staff.

Part of the reason for the banquet was to honor the two delegations bidding for Kostroma's friendship—and to put them on their mettle by bringing them face to face in public. Equally important from the Elector's point of view was to display his power to the politically important folk of Kostroma. Most of the two hundred guests were Kostromans being shown to be subservient to Walter III.

Because collating information was Adele's life as well as her vocation, she found the actual order of precedence at the tables to differ strikingly from that planned in the original guest list. Something had gone seriously wrong within the ruling coalition.

Kostroman political life was a shuffling of clans which were more or less congruent with individual islands. Kostroma Island was a melting pot where virtually all the politicians lived, but those worthies had their power bases elsewhere on the planet.

Walter III had come to power through an alliance of his Hajas clan with the chief personages of the Zojiras, another large clan. Both major parties had collaterals, minor clans that looked to them for leadership and protection and which in turn could supply support and manpower.

The winning coalition had shared out offices following Walter's victory. Adele's staff was a typical mixture of folk owing allegiance to either Hajas or Zojira, granted their places for reasons that had nothing to do with their enthusiasms or their ability to make a library function.

Adele didn't know the banquet guests by sight—she knew almost no one on the planet—but all of them wore their clan colors as collar flashes or in their headgear. The Zojiras and their collaterals were consistently three places below where they'd been seated in the original plan. The change was minor in one sense—the food was the same, whichever chair the diner sat in. In context the change was comparable to shifting a decimal point in an equation.

The woman to Adele's immediate right was a Zojira collateral; her beret was quartered orange and horizon blue, but the pompon topping it was Zojira black and yellow to indicate affiliation. She was well-dressed and had put more emphasis on style than on cost, but Adele knew nothing else about her. The woman had sat with rage mottling her complexion throughout the meal. At a guess, she should have been sitting above the Hajas supporter now two places to her right.

Between the silently contemplative Markos and the silently furious woman on the other side, Adele was having a quiet meal. Her lips quirked in a tiny smile. She couldn't complain about being bored during dinner either. Boredom was one of those things that improved with absence.

"Now, many of my competitors make the sauce from any fish at all," whined the provisions merchant. "Fish
parts
I suspect in—"

Leonidas Zojira, the head of the clan, leaped to his feet at the high table. The servant behind him prevented his chair from hitting the floor with a crash. Not to be balked of a scene, Leonidas picked up his plate and hurled it into the serving tray. He stalked toward the hallway doors.

As though Leonidas had snagged a line, scores of other diners got up. All wore black and gold either as their primary colors or as quarterings. The woman beside Adele stood, leaned forward deliberately, and spat in the dish of her Hajas rival before she joined the exodus from the Grand Salon.

"Rather to be expected," Markos said to Adele in tones of suave amusement. The trouble appeared to have restored his good humor. "The whole history of Kostroma indicates that no alliance lasts much longer than the common enemy. A mercurial folk, the Kostromans."

The table decorations were stemless flowers floating in silver bowls. In reflection, Adele saw the Alliance spy waggle a finger toward the main doors. A youngish woman came toward him from the gaggle of aides there. She wore Kostroman business dress, out of place to a degree among the bright livery of those with whom she'd been waiting.

The woman bent over Markos and whispered in his ear. He nodded solemnly and said to Adele, "You'll have to excuse me, Mistress Mundy. My secretary tells me I have an urgent call. Perhaps we'll meet again."

"Good day," Adele said without inflection. She watched Markos leave the hall with a lengthening stride.

The Cinnabar "Navy Office" functionary was already out the door because he hadn't bothered with the fiction of being summoned by an aide. If Adele hadn't seen Markos's gesture, even she might have accepted his charade at face value.

The Alliance and Cinnabar delegates were frantically signaling for their aides. Le Golif of the
Aglaia
looked startled and concerned. He wasn't a diplomat, and he had no idea what had happened.

Adele went back to the dish which had been put before her at the instant of the Zojira exodus. It was sliced vegetables in a very spicy red sauce; she wouldn't have guessed the sauce had anything to do with fish were it not for the merchant's description.