Warring States Read online

  “One assigns oneself extra laps, Stoshik, and takes a cold shower.” Parties. On the Ragnarok. The very idea. Yes, he’d had a going-away party as he was leaving for his visit home — ultimately cut short; the visit, not the party, which had been going strong when he’d left it. “We are all sober and hard-working and abstemious here and have no recreation to offer Malcontents.”

  Oh, as soon as Andrej said it he wished that he had not. Hastening to continue before Stoshi could make an impertinent remark about one’s Chief of Security, Andrej grasped at the thought uppermost in his mind and voiced it with a sort of desperation. “What is it that you have been doing, to find the Bench specialist? Dame Ivers would very much like news of her companion.”

  Stoshi shook his head. “I am prevented by my promise to Karol Aphon, Derush, who feels that it is up to him decide when he is ready to return from Gonebeyond space. Where he’s been courting the Flag Captain, the Walton Agenis, and I’m fond of the man who has been married to her niece even if he is a Sarvaw born and bred. No. I’ve been to Rudistal, and borrowed some resources from the Church there that you might remember if I asked you for a pocket-handkerchief that had no hole in it.”

  As references went this was one of Stoshi’s more obscure, but whether by premeditation or accident it hit on things that had been very much on Andrej’s mind recently since his work with Dawson’s people down on Connaught Station. Handkerchief. Kaydence, one of the bond-involuntaries who had been with Andrej at Rudistal, a man granted revocation of Bond for his role in saving the Scylla during the battle over Eild. The nun at Rudistal that Andrej had hired out of the service house and installed to pray for Joslire’s spirit; Kaydence had taken up with her, with Ailynn, Kaydence who had so frequently been on Chief Warrant Officer Caleigh Samon’s disgraced list for a worn spot in his boot-stocking or failure to produce a clean, mended white-square. So that was it.

  “Dangerous avenue for investigation, surely.” Kaydence had been Bonded for incautious play in security systems; it was something he apparently found very difficult to control, his passion for getting into computing systems that were none of his business just to see what might be there. Andrej had invoked those skills at the Domitt Prison to discover the horrifying truth about how Administrator Geltoi had been stoking his furnaces all of that time to save on fuel.

  Now Kaydence was a man reborn, a privileged citizen of the Bench exempted by the Bench instruction from most taxes and legally immune to many forms of punishment for petty civil transgressions; but warrants were Bench instruments, and if Kaydence was investigating that meant that he would necessarily be at play in Bench judicial systems, and how could he risk it? How could Stoshi permit such reckless behavior?

  “I have my own resources dedicated to special areas of the hunt, Derush, do not become concerned. We would not endanger either the person at Rudistal or the one with whom he consorts. No, we rely on that person for advice and strategy. Technique. In order to ensure that the Saint may not be associated with the smuggling of Nurail, which is none of the Saint’s business.”

  Andrej closed his eyes with a grimace of pain. Oh, Kaydence. A grown man, and one who had survived horrors that Andrej could not even imagine — though he had been responsible for several — and involved with the smuggling of persons out of Bench control? Nurail refugees, escaping to Gonebeyond.

  Joslire would be proud to have his name associated with such an enterprise. And that of course led Andrej back very naturally to his concern, in seeing Stoshi, the reason Stoshi had come, the thing that Andrej needed Stoshi for. “That cannot be condoned. To attempt to cheat the Bench of the lawfully adjudicated punishment that a man has earned by his own crimes? It cannot be tolerated.”

  Stoshi nodded enthusiastically. “Indeed not, Drushik.” But it can be arranged. Andrej was counting on Stoshi to have done just that. “And desperate men are no respecters of property, either, not chattel or goods or transport, whether in Chambers or the city or in Church.” Or somewhere close to the memorial barrow where Joslire’s ashes had been laid to rest, where his tablet was to be found. Andrej meant to visit Joslire’s tablet, if there was one.

  “You know how it is sometimes, Derush,” Stoshi continued. “A man knows that he should not say thus and such a word, because it will inspire an idea that might not have occurred otherwise to a person of weak character. It would be best if you held this carefully in mind, because it may be that there is a Khabardi small-freighter that must stop over near the city of Jeltaria, and you would not be the man to introduce the concept of wrong-doing to one who is only his assigned duty currently performing.”

  So Stoshi had done as Andrej had asked him. There would be a ship, loaded, fueled, waiting, with a pre-approved exit trajectory through the dar-Nevan vector for a perfectly innocuous destination that it would never reach. All that was left now for Andrej to do was to explain to his gentlemen and wave good-bye as they left, because it was not to be imagined that a man once freed of his governor would wait meekly for the day when he would be enslaved again in so horrible a fashion.

  “You have not answered my question.” He couldn’t keep the gratitude out of his voice; but he would wait, to weep, until his gentles were gone from him. “At home. My son. Marana. Tell me how it goes.”

  Leaning forward Stoshi reached for his courier-pack and opened it. “Letters, Derush. Your parents. House-masters’ reports. Here is the one that you want, though, I think.”

  Yes. A heavy square of thick white paper folded very carefully by a young person, its face inscribed with a deliberate hand whose hesitation of line, and the thickness of it, spoke of a young lord with a large stylus being as careful as he could manage with the dangerously wet ink. To my lord father, Andrej Ulexeievitch Koscuisko, of our family prince and heir.

  He’d had letters from Anton from time to time in the past, but seeing this one had quite a different impact on Andrej than they had before. It was so formal. And now that he had met the child his longing to have him in his arms right here, right now, was almost too heart-piercing to be borne.

  “Also, these.” Stoshi had not ceased to draw letters out of his bag. “The lady sends to you, Derush. I do not know if she speaks here of Ferinc, but he has never in all of the years that I have known him been so close to happy. I am grateful to you for this, because I have become very fond of him, though he is not of the Blood.”

  No, Cousin Ferinc was not of the Blood. Cousin Ferinc was Stoshi’s pet animal, and pets were not evaluated according to their pedigree. The issue was a sore one with Andrej; he had known Cousin Ferinc by another name before the man had fled to the protection of the Malcontent, the only off-worlder — in Andrej’s knowledge — to have been granted the protection of the Saint. It was because of his own fault, his crime against the man. And yet to return home and find a criminal — one whose crimes were so sordid, whose punishment had been more sordid still — so closely associated with his own now-wife Marana, and loved so tenderly by his own son . . .

  “In all of that time believing that I had duty, Stoshik,” Andrej said. “I was losing something that I did not even understand. Day by day. It is not only my honor and my sleep that Fleet has cost me. My son’s life, Stoshik, my son, and thy Ferinc has been a better father to him than I will ever be, forever after.”

  “And yet what do you imagine would have been different if you had been at home, Derush? Thick-headed. Your father would have married you to that Ichogatra princess, and the respected lady Marana would have been separate from you until you’d bred a boy to your princess wife regardless. And also there would not have been Ferinc, for whom you have finally done what I have sought to do and failed all of these years, Andrej, and freed him from himself at last.”

  Tapping Anton’s letter against the fingertips of his right hand with an abstracted sort of confusion Andrej tested Stoshi’s claim against his own knowledge of his birth-culture for some flaw, and was unable to find one. The failure gave him no comfort. He looked down at Anton�
��s letter, seeking understanding, but just looking at it made Andrej want to weep for all the time he could have had, had he but realized much sooner that he had no one to blame for the stubbornness that had kept him at his post except himself. Oh, and perhaps the fact that it was treason in the first degree for a man who held the Writ to Inquire to quit his post — but even that perhaps could have been gotten ‘round.

  “‘Yes, good, thank you, Andrej, my special charge in the name of the Saint is now much happier keeping warm the bed of your wife, and loving your son.’” Andrej couldn’t keep a species of savagery out of his voice, though he could see the humor. And Stanoczk, shameless and heartless alike, actually laughed, and leaned back in his chair to sup his rhyti.

  “Yes, and shows that there is a wolf I had not suspected after all who bares his teeth at your family and sets them all at bay. It is impressive. He could not fight for Marana and your child any more ferociously if they were his, Drushik, and not on loan.”

  Oh, this was intolerable. “And this is comforting to me?” Andrej demanded. “What sort of new challenge do I face when I can go home, Stanoczk, a duel for the affections of my own Marana? There is strange comfort in this missionary work.”

  Closing one eye to obtain a better focus Stoshi peered into the depths of his rhyti-flask, and clearly found it wanting in its emptiness. But Stoshi was clever, and accustomed to doing for himself; rose to his feet and started across the room toward the rhyti-brewer.

  “I can’t speak for your lady-wife, Derush,” he said with his back turned to Andrej, drawing a fresh flask. “But you need have no fear for the place you have in Anton’s heart. He adores you like a saint under Canopy. Surely it is just as well, if you can’t say when you will go home. You know that your family has much of an adjustment to accomplish. Marana needs a wolf.”

  He didn’t want the place of a saint under Canopy in Anton’s heart. He wanted Ferinc’s place. It should be his, to be the wolf to protect his wife and child. How could he call himself a man, and let another do it?

  “What else have you for me?” Andrej asked, putting away his morose self-pity for the time being. Malcontents had no patience with self-pity. If there was anybody in this room with genuine cause to feel sorry for himself surely it was his cousin Stanoczk, condemned to choose between a life of fear and lies on the one hand and the total loss of family, property, rights as a citizen, even title to his own person on the other, and all because he had been born both Dolgorukij and a man who desired the caresses of other men.

  For that Stoshi had elected the Malcontent and a life as a slave, albeit a peculiarly privileged one, rather than attempt to deny his own nature which the Holy Mother herself had decreed for him at the moment of his soul’s rebirth; and there were so many other places where he could have been born instead, in which a man’s choice of a partner to love and cherish was not restricted to the opposite sex.

  “Oh, this? This is for your Kerenko, Derush, Anton has written to him about the sparrows. Something about the sparrows in the gutter outside of his bed-room. I will go and find him and deliver it myself, I have promised very solemnly.”

  A much thinner letter, to be sure, and the same thick childish hand — but with much more assurance in the lettering. Right trusty and well beloved. It was a formula that had been ancient when the Blood had come to Azanry from wherever it was that they had come from. Andrej didn’t know which of the theories about that he preferred, but he didn’t mean to be distracted from the point that this raised.

  “He is a dutiful child.” The highest praise a parent could bestow: dutiful. Filial. But Anton was so much more, and duty was so trivial a thing beside loyalty and love. “Also very charitable, to remember Lek. It gives me hope for the day when he comes to understand exactly what I am. My family — they mustn’t be allowed to spoil that.”

  It hadn’t mattered to him so much before he’d met his child. So long as his son was an abstraction in his mind, a stranger with a limited vocabulary and no learning to speak of, the knowledge that some day his child would understand the shameful truth behind the spectacular acts of cruelty attributed to Andrej’s name had been one that had troubled him only on an abstract level.

  He had lost perspective. He had met Anton. If he was a lucky man he would be dead before he had to face the horror in his child’s face, and try to condense an answer to the inevitable “How?” out of the fog of blood that filled his brain.

  “You will go home, Andrej, and protect him yourself. What does it matter, in the end, who is to be First Judge? There will be famine in Supicor if we cannot reach them with grain, but they are not Dolgorukij in Supicor, so do we honestly so much care?” Yes, he did, but Andrej knew what point Stanoczk was making. “What may happen on Sarvaw should the selection pend for very much longer, though, I cannot say. And that reminds me.”

  Stoshi bowed over the table to pass the flask of rhyti to Andrej, as if it was the most gracious gesture under Canopy to give a man a flask of his own rhyti — in a glass to which some forward Malcontent had already pressed his notoriously filthy mouth, and where that had been recently, Andrej did not wish to so much as speculate — when he had not finished the entirely adequate flask he had himself started out with.

  “I will carry this away to your Kerenko, and see how you have exercised your good lordship since you have returned. And then I shall have a word to say to thy Stildyne. You will find me on the thula when you want me, Derush, so long as you do not finish your letters within the next six to eight hours.”

  Your Kerenko, but thy Stildyne. The variance in intimacy was all too telling. “I wish you good hunting,” Andrej said, a little sourly. Surely it was in poor taste for Stoshi to flaunt his religious duty in Andrej’s face in this manner. But that was part of the privilege of the Malcontent, after all, no one expected any good of such depraved souls — which only made Anton’s fondness for Ferinc all the more galling. Andrej knew how depraved a soul Ferinc had been, once upon a time. And for any crime Ferinc had done there were worse crimes to be laid against Andrej’s own account, and so many of them.

  “Stoshik, I — ”

  He didn’t want to go back out to Secured Medical. They would expect him to wish to avoid it; all except Wheatfields, perhaps. Of all the people on board it was the Ship’s Engineer who was most likely to guess at Andrej’s secret. It would not surprise Wheatfields if he guessed. It would not surprise Andrej either.

  “It is only Stanoczk, Derush, not Stoshik-eye.” But Stoshi had stopped, halfway across the room, and very conveniently still within the privacy barrier, too. A Malcontent was shameless, but discreet. “What is it that you say to me? Bearing in mind that you and I can talk, but later, because I have my rounds to do.”

  Andrej would not go to Secured Medical alone. He was not even permitted to do that; so he was proof against the trouble of his own spirit. If he attempted to creep back into that place at some odd moment, he would be discovered. And then he would be expected to explain.

  “It does not import. Go on about your disgusting Saint’s disgusting business, Stoshi.” He tried to lighten his tone. Stoshi would not be fooled; but Stoshi would respect Andrej’s desire to talk about it later. Stoshi waved and was gone, trotting briskly out into the corridor with the letter Anton had written to Kerenko in his hand. One of the Security that had accompanied them from the docking bay to the staff meeting and thence back to this office would be jogging after Stoshi, trying to keep up. Should he check in with Engineering, and see how things went? Should he perhaps seek out Brachi Stildyne?

  No. Stildyne would have other things on his mind. And perhaps he didn’t even really want someone who knew him as well as Stildyne did to be there when he went back to Secured Medical for the first time since he’d placed that record into evidence.

  The first time while he was awake, at any rate. He had been to Secured Medical in his dreams, and that was no particular innovation; it was the emotion that accompanied the visits that had changed. Regret, but not
for what he had done; for the fact that it was over. He missed it. He knew exactly what had been on that man Birrin’s mind. He missed the overwhelming passion and the savage joy, transcendent pleasure that was so much more than merely sexual.

  It was humorous. It was a good joke. He had taken secondary honors in psychopharmacology. He was supposed to understand the mechanics of addiction, physical and psychological. Why hadn’t he, of all people, realized that a man could not take in so powerful a drug as mastery for all those years, and not feel its lack keenly when it was no longer available to him?

  There would be good to come of this, surely. Some year perhaps Farilk or some other qualified psychiatric doctor would write about the combination of hormones or the brain chemistry that made torture so irresistible a drug for flawed souls like his. It would assist in the diagnosis and treatment of sociopathology and the criminally insane, perhaps.

  Only just for now and even in the midst of so many so much more important things Andrej was suffering withdrawal from the habit of the past eight years, and did not know how he was to live through it without bringing shame on himself and everyone around him.

  ###

  Chapter Five

  Brisinje

  The ground-car and its escort had loaded, left. Shona Ise-I’let sat at his station in the wheelhouse of his courier, waiting; where was his refuel, where was his atmosphere refresh, his ground crew?

  The landing management people had completed their checklist and gone. Yes, the courier had landed. Yes, the engines were safe to hot-fire. Yes, he had sustained no thermal damage, at least none that mattered to any of the standard diagnostics. He’d be happy when he got home and had Emandis diagnostics; they were much more thorough. Fleet said unnecessarily so, but it wasn’t Fleet’s courier. Fleet just borrowed it from time to time. He’d been at Chilleau. He’d wanted to get back to his home Judiciary anyway. It didn’t bother him to ferry a Bench specialist on his way. He’d ferried Bench specialists before. Interesting people.