Shadow of the Warmaster

3

The compound was a walled-in oval of garden and walkways, fountains and arbors with a small one-story structure at one focus of the oval, a delicate airy house with pointed windows and walls of wood, not stone; from the security arrangements and the look of the place, it seemed reasonably clear that the Imperator had stashed his favorite courtesans here and spent more than a little time with them. There were four bedrooms with bathrooms attached, set like beads at the corners of an oblong brooch, the centerpiece a large well-lit common room. Tra Yarta had moved most of the furniture out of the common room and set up three work stations for them; these waited under dust sheets. A fire was crackling behind a pleated glass screen and comfortable leather-covered chairs were arranged in a shallow arc about the hearth. Behind these there was a dining table with a number of open backed chairs about it; a cold supper was set out on the table, several kinds of salad, fruit, shrimp and other seafood, bread and butter and a selection of jams and jellies, and finally, a hot fruit punch steaming in a large ceramic urn with mugs clustered about its base.

Aslan ran her hands through her hair, stretched, groaned. “Clean clothes. A bath. Food.” She laughed and went into the bedroom assigned to her.

Parnalee patted the solid slab of muscle over his stomach. “I like a good meal.” He chuckled, a basso rumble. “Yes, indeed. It’s why I usually travel worldship, the E Corini by choice. They raise the most succulent crustaceans known to palate.” He skewered a giant shrimp, inspected it with satisfaction and popped it in his mouth.

Churri shoved his chair back, its legs squealing painfully across the floor; he bounced to his feet, glared at Parnalee. With a scornful t’k of tongue against palate, he stumped to the urn, scraped out enough punch to fill his mug and crossed to the hearth. Though the alcoholic content of the punch was more imagination than reality, he’d eaten almost nothing and was awash with enough of it to exacerbate a mild misanthropy. He dropped into one of the easy chairs and sat glowering at the flames refracted through the folded panes of the firescreen.

Parnalee swallowed the last shrimp and got to his feet. He crossed to one of the many windows and pushed aside a translucent white curtain decorated extensively with delicate blackwork. It was a warm spring night with mist drifting in threads around the fountain and clouds blowing in from the west, though they were not yet clotted enough to diminish the soft pervasive glow from the moons. “I need exercise,” he said. “Take a walk with me, the two of you?”

Aslan joined him at the window. “It’s getting damp out there, I’ve had one bath, I don’t need another.”

“You won’t melt.”

She leaned against him, patted a yawn. “Way I feel, I might.”

“A little exercise will fix that.”

“I can think of pleasanter ways to get it.”

“Aslan, use your head, will you? Think!”

She giggled.

“T’sa!” He scooped her up, dumped her head down over his shoulder and carried her to the door. It was locked, but he closed his fingers about the latch handle and applied force. The latch creaked and gave. He shoved the door open and stalked outside with her.

At first Aslan was too startled to object, then too amused. She was giggling when he set her down and went back inside, still giggling (though mistwater dripping from the eaves rendered her considerably damper) when he came out with Churri tucked under one arm. Before the Bard woke up enough to react, he was on his feet beside Aslan, swaying and blinking, sputtering as a large drip landed in his left eye, building up to an explosion.

“We need to talk,” Parnalee rumbled at them. “Can’t inside.”

Aslan nodded. The fizzy good feeling born out of the food and the bath and having space to move in so her elbows could come away from her sides drained from her. She scrubbed a hand across her face, pushed dampening hair out of her eyes. Churri got rid of his anger and insult, peeling them away as if he peeled off his face to show another face beneath. He didn’t say anything, but Parnalee’s words had gotten through to him.

Hands clasped behind him, Parnalee trudged off, big head swinging as he hunted out a place where he’d feel secure enough to talk. Churri plunged after him. Aslan scratched her nose, looked over her shoulder at the warm red glow shimmering through the curtains; she sighed, hunched her shoulders against the strengthening wind and followed them.

Parnalee continued his prospecting until he came to one of the fountains. A slender column of water rose, broke, tumbled noisily from basin to basin scattered like bronze petals down a manufactured slope; he climbed halfway up the slope, knelt beside a rough wooden bench without a back and ran his hands over it. He stood, frowned at the bench, then dropped onto one end of it, the end nearest the stream. Churri clasped his hands behind his back and stood facing Parnalee, teetering atop a rock.

Aslan settled herself beside Parnalee, put her hand on his arm; it was rock hard. He looked as relaxed as ever, but she could feel a tension in him which surprised her; in the belly of the Bolodo transport he’d seemed such a casual, easy-going man. She took her hand away. “If you expect me to lay down and let that deviate clean his feet on me…”

“I expect you to do what you’ve been trained to do. Use your reason. You’re supposed to be intelligent. What I was buying back there was time.”

Churri grunted, kicked at the rock with the heel of his sandal.

Aslan sniffed. “You really think Tra Yarta’s going to keep his side of the bargain?”

“Look at it this way. We produce, the trouble (whatever it is) goes away, what happens to us?”

Aslan dug a hole in the dirt with her toes, watched it fill with water dripping over the edge of the nearest basin. “What I know from cultures like this says we’d be an embarrassment to him. So…” She knifed her hand across her throat.

“And if we don’t produce?”

“All right, if you have to hear it, same thing, a lot sooner.”

“Aslan, how long were you at Weersyll?”

“Six months less three days.”

“Churri?”

The short bald man didn’t answer for a minute, he frowned past Parnalee, then he nodded. “Two months, something like that.” He stuck his thumbs behind his belt and teetered on the rock. “You were already there.”

“Right. They’re a methodical bunch, Bolodo, I’d say they go out twice a year. Which means it’ll be somewhere around six months standard before the next transport arrives. We need information, weapons, some kind of plan. Like I said, we need time.”

Churri looked up as a brief flurry of raindrops blew into his face. “I say we take advantage of this slop and go over the wall. There’re mountains on the far side of the lake, we can go to ground there, live off the land.”

Aslan snorted. “You think Huvved and Hordar both won’t turn on us? Except for Bolodo this is a closed world. You want to see some raging xenophobia…” She frowned at her mud-splashed feet. “It’s a thought, though, if things get difficult here…”

Parnalee yawned. “With you and the Bard glowering like twin fumeroles, maybe Tra Yarta took my offer seriously. Let’s hope he did and turns his attention elsewhere.” The rain was coming down harder. He brushed at his hair, soft brown hair that shed the water like seal fur. His hand covered his face for a moment, lingered a breath longer than the gesture required. Aslan wondered about that, remembering the tension in his arm. “The first part is up to you, Aslan, you have to be convincing. I can play with this and that, work up projections, but until I’ve got your data, I can’t get down to serious work, at least, I can make a good case for idleness. Find out… mm… we’ll need a pilot, someone who can handle the engines, someone who can figure out where the… um… hell we are and how to get back to civilized parts.”

“If no one else turns up we can trust, I can get the ship back, close enough anyway to put out a mercycall.” Aslan scraped rain off her face. “Something I’d better say. Whatever Tra Yarta thinks, whatever the records say, I can’t do what he wants. I can describe, analyze, compare societies, tease them to bits under the scope of technique, if you want it in the pretentious jargon the man seems to prefer. Manipulate them? Nonsense. I wouldn’t know the first thing about that.” She got up, went a short way up the slope, came back. “What happens when he finds out?”

Parnalee brushed at his hair again. When his hand dropped, he was smiling. “You weren’t listening. That’s my part of the job. You analyze, I put your data to work, Churri adds the frills. That’s what the man said. Not altogether a bad idea. Comes close to my usual practice. Maybe Bolodo told him, maybe he thought it up his little self.”

“He did say you were a propagandist.”

“Event designer. Sounds better.”

“All that talk about dirtying one’s self-esteem?”

“He wanted to hear that, so I gave it to him. Bargaining chip. Ah, all right, a bit more than that. I do not like being coerced.” The last phrase was spoken slowly with an angry emphasis on each word. “I choose where and when I’m going to work, not some tin god on a backwater world.”

Aslan folded her arms across her breasts, rubbed her fingers slowly up and down her biceps. “Um. Maybe I don’t need to say it.” She scowled at him. “Maybe I do. Don’t underestimate the locals, Par. I’ve seen a lot of that places I was working. Travelers come through and just because the locals don’t think the same way or know about the same gadgets, they think they’re stupid. My mother talks like that, I think it’s because she knows it irritates me. She and her friends have been around a lot, it gives them illusions of…” she laughed, tasted ram on her lips, “you said it, tingodishness. According to them the locals haven’t got the brains or the get-up to suck a tit. These Huvved, maybe the Hordar too, they’ve been isolated a long time, but they’re not stupid and I doubt if they’re unsophisticated in the art of the cabal. Tra Yarta wouldn’t be sweating like he is if they were easy to handle. He thinks he’s got us locked, that we can’t make trouble for him whatever we get up to. I hope he’s wrong. But we’d better be damn clever.” She pushed at soggy hair, drew her hand rapidly back and forth across her nostrils. “And I’m catching pneumonia out here, can’t we go in where it’s warm?”

“Right.” Parnalee stood. “I’ve said what I had to say. Aslan, I agree with you on most of that. We won’t fool him if we fake it; we have to do it straight until we’re ready to jump, whether we jump at the ship or into the mountains, otherwise we’re in shit to our eyeballs. I’m going to get out of this one way or another. Don’t either of you screw me up; I’ll twist the neck of the one who tries it.”