Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (39 page)

Byerly stared at the blank door with curiosity second only to Ivan’s own. “Well…Illyan. Presumably he has things in hand.”

“I’m not so sure. You were closer to that end of the table than I was. Did you get the impression that Shiv was
hustling
Simon? I mean, subtly, of course.”

By shrugged. “Well, of course. Arqua has to be hustling every possibility he sees, right about now. Trying to get support for his House in exile, in the interest of making it not in exile. It was less clear”—By hesitated—“why Simon seemed to be hustling him back. Even more subtly, note. Unless it was just habit, I suppose.”

“That’s a disturbing thought. The two of them, hustling each other.”

“Yeah. It was…kind of like watching two women trying to make each other pregnant.”

Ivan contemplated this arresting, not to mention distracting, metaphor for a moment. “That’s done. Technologically. Even on Barrayar, these days.”

Byerly waved a dissociating hand. “You see what I mean, though.”

“Yeah.” Ivan nibbled his lip. “Are you outed, by the way?”

“By Rish? I’m not yet sure. Do you know if Tej has told her family anything?”

“About your line of work? Not a clue. No one has given me any time to
talk with my wife
for the past day.” Ivan hesitated. “She has talked with them about something.”

“Well, try to find out, will you? Both,” By added in afterthought.

Ivan growled. “Spying is supposed to be your job.”

“I’m
trying
,” By bit out.

“Hey. You’re the one who outed yourself, back on Komarr. Surprised the hell out of me at the time. Were you trying to impress the pretty python with your daring dual identity, or what?”

“
At the time
, there were only the two of them, and I never imagined they’d ever get closer than five jumps to Vorbarr Sultana. It seemed a fair deal, and they seemed to agree. They weren’t going to blab to their enemies. Never pictured it lasting more than a couple of days before we went our separate ways. Or Rish having to choose me over her family, for God’s sake.”

Or Tej having to choose me over her family?
Ivan had just time to think, before a door slid open down the hall, and By’s teeth snapped shut. Tall and cinnamon Pidge emerged from the guest lav, began to stride back toward the living room, spied the two of them lingering, and hove to with a smile. Snazzy heels on her shoes positioned her to look Ivan directly in the eye, and down on Byerly, very Baronette Sophia Arqua. Strange courtesy title, that. Ivan kept hearing it as
bayonet
, which…might not be so wrong.

“Oh, Ivan Xav.” A nod included Byerly in the greeting. “What a very pleasant evening this has been, after the tensions of our travels.”

“I’m glad,” said Ivan. “Do tell my mother. Entertaining is an art form, to her.”

“I could see that,” said Pidge, with near-Cetagandan approval. “Your mother’s partner is an interesting fellow, too,” she went on. Yes, she had been closer to Simon’s end of the table, through dinner. In the place next to Tej that should have been Ivan’s, eh. “
Illyan
is a, what do you call your grubbers, a
prole
name, though, isn’t it? Not one of you Vor.”

“No twice-twenty-years Imperial Service man need yield to any Vor for his place in our military caste,” said Ivan firmly.

Pidge looked to Byerly for confirmation of this cultural detail; he nodded cordially.

“Still, a captain. Even after, what, forty years—why do you call it twice-twenty, I wonder? But isn’t that the same rank as you?”
“No,” said Ivan. “Chief of Imperial Security, which was his job title, technically isn’t a military rank at all, but a direct Imperial appointment. He froze his military rank at captain because his predecessor, Emperor Ezar’s security chief Captain Negri—the man they called Ezar’s Familiar—never took a higher rank, either. A political statement, that. It was, after all, a very political job.”

Pidge tilted her head. “And what did they call your Illyan?”

“Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog,” By put in, lips quirking with amusement.

“But…Vorkosigan wasn’t an emperor. Was he…?”

“Imperial Regent for sixteen years, you know, when Emperor Gregor was a minor,” Byerly charitably glossed for her outworlder benefit. “All of the work, none of the perqs.” Ivan wondered if that was a direct quote from Uncle Aral. Or Aunt Cordelia, more likely.

“And what do they call the current Chief of ImpSec?”

“Allegre? They call him the Chief of ImpSec.” Byerly cast her the hint of an apologetic bow. “I fear we live in less colorful times.”

Thank God
, Ivan thought. “Allegre was already a general at the time of his appointment. They didn’t make him give it back, so I suppose that’s the end of that tradition.”

Pidge’s generous mouth pursed, as she puzzled through this. “It seems quite odd. Are Barrayaran captains very well paid, then?”

“No,” said Ivan, sadly. He added, lest she think less of his um-stepfather, “Illyan was given a vice-admiral’s salary, though, which makes more sense considering the workload.” Or perhaps it didn’t—26.7 hours a day for thirty years, all-consuming? Such a pyre wasn’t something a man entered into for
pay
. “Half-salary, now he’s retired.”

“How much would that be?”

Ivan, who dealt with military payrolls regularly and could have recited the wage ranges for every IS-number/rank ever invented, current or historical, said, “I imagine you could look it up somewhere.” Byerly smiled a little; the sweep of his lashes invited Ivan to carry on.

“Then…is he rich independently?” Pidge persisted.

“I have no idea.”

Pidge tossed her head in surprise; the amber curls gathered in a clasp at her nape, far more controlled than Tej’s cloud, failed to bounce much. “How can you not know?”

“I expect he has his savings,” Byerly put in, stirring what imagined pot Ivan barely wanted to contemplate, but was probably going to have to. “He couldn’t have started out with much, as a young prole officer, but that social class tends to be frugal. And he had no visible vices.”

“Nor secret ones, either,” Ivan put in. “He wouldn’t have had
time
.” Not that Illyan hadn’t been good at secrets…many years of unrequited and largely unsuspected prole pining for Lady Alys, for example. Which had escaped Ivan’s attention entirely, till the shoes had dropped—both pairs…

Well, all right,
one
secret vice. They had both been
very
drunk at the Emperor’s Birthday celebration a couple of years ago, Ivan by habit and tradition, the retired Illyan because he’d always been on ImpSec duty before and had never, he said, had a
chance
to. Through a progression of subjects that were soon a blur in Ivan’s mind, they had somehow got on to just what Illyan did and did not recall or miss from his memory chip, at which point Ivan had learned just
where
the largest and most arcane pornography collection on Barrayar had been secreted…

It’s not as if I acquired most of it on purpose
, Illyan had protested.
But the damned chip didn’t allow me to delete anything, whether I picked it up inadvertently or in a moment of bad mood or bad judgment or bad company, and then I was stuck with it forever
.
Or in the line of work, oh, God, those were the worst. Do you have any
idea
how many truly appalling surveillance vids I had to review in forty years…?

There were some things, Ivan reflected, that no man should know about another, not even or perhaps especially his um-stepfather. People had occasionally—in Ivan’s hearing or even buttonholing him directly—speculated about just how long this matter between Illyan and Lady Alys had really been going on, since Illyan’s retirement when it had become…overt? Public? Not
flaunted
, Lady Alys didn’t
flaunt
, that would be tasteless. More like…they wore each other with well-earned pride. But it had occurred to Ivan then that the physical danger Illyan trailed from his work might not have been the
only
thing he’d been loath to take to bed with his esteemed Vor lady. Ivan had decided he was thankful when Illyan appeared to have forgotten the conversation the next day—hangovers were definitely for the young, the man had moaned—and didn’t remind him of it in
any way
.

And when Ivan had got over his own hangover, and the generational whiplash, and the unwanted lurid-but-maybe-not-even-lurid-enough imaginings, he’d finally decided that what it had mostly sounded like was
lonely
, actually.

Being married to a wife beat being married to a job, it seemed increasingly clear to Ivan.

“Captain Illyan is—or was—a clever man, was he not?” said Pidge. “I should have thought that a position as a security chief would have lent itself to considerable personal acquisition, in three decades. If not directly, then through clever use of inside information.”

It was a measure of…something…that this thought had never crossed Ivan’s mind till now. If nothing else, Illyan had spent vast tracts of time and wells of energy dealing with corrupt people and the effects of their corruptions; really, there could hardly be anything he hadn’t learned about the depravity of the human condition. And yet…just because Illyan took confessions didn’t make him a priest.

“No,” said Ivan after a moment, grabbing for his tilting certainty. “ImpSec
was
his passion; he didn’t need another. If he had a drug, it was adrenaline.”

Byerly’s brows rose. “Really?”

“God, yes. He only looked normal by contrast because he hung around with a pack of the biggest adrenaline-junkies on three worlds. All the great men have to be, to ride the Imperial Horse. I mean, think who Illyan used to
run
in covert ops. And at
whose
request.”

“That,” said Byerly, “is a point.”

“But he’s retired from all that now.”

“A modest frugal retirement for a loyal Imperial bureaucrat?” said Pidge. “And yet your mother so wealthy.”

“Doesn’t bother her,” Ivan said stoutly.

“But does it bother him?”

About to deny this with equal vehemence, Ivan realized that among the many things he didn’t know about Simon…that was another. “I am sure he has more important things on his mind.”

Pidge smiled at him. “Fascinating.” With a little Shiv-like wave of her fingers, she trailed away toward the party; Byerly, with one of his less-comprehensible grimaces, promptly trailed after.

Ivan gave the blank study door one last look of frustration, and followed.

Ivan still hadn’t had a chance to talk alone with Tej when the party broke up an hour later. Simon and Shiv had at last emerged from Simon’s lair. Byerly was fidgety from having been excluded from a long, all-female confabulation amongst Lady Vorpatril, Lady ghem Estif, and Baronne Cordonah, from which they’d emerged as
Alys
,
Moira
, and
Udine.
Wraps were produced in the hallway, even its generous proportions elbow-jostling for this crowd. Christos reappeared to guide everyone back to their respective groundcars.

Simon and Shiv parted with another of those disquieting handshakes. As the mob thinned, Simon gazed thoughtfully at the broad departing back, but turned with a slight smile to take Tej’s hand.

“Intriguing fellow, your Dada, Tej. The man could sell elephants to circus masters.”

She gave him a puzzled, gratified, and alarmed smile back. “I’d think circus masters would
want
to buy elephants, sir.”

Illyan’s smile stretched. “Quite so.”

*
 
*
 
*

Tej had successfully avoided Ivan Xav all evening, while the party swirled around her spinning head. A bass beat of
Cetagandan gold, Cetagandan gold, Cetagandan gold!
had thumped in her brain, with an occasional descant of
Buried treasure!
and discord wail of
But ImpSec…!
Dada, despite the lack of stepfather-in-law intel for which he had shot her that pointed look—and it
wasn’t her fault
that no one had let her explain earlier—seemed to have made a swift recovery and hit it off just fine with Simon. That had to be good. Didn’t it?

Normally, she looked forward to pillow talk with Ivan Xav, and what followed, for sheer aesthetic reasons if nothing else. It had become a very
comfortable
time of the day, something to anticipate with pleasure. Not this day. As they dodged around each other and Rish in and out of the bathroom, the conversation was utilitarian. Tej made it under the covers first. She didn’t have to pretend to be exhausted—if she just rolled over and closed her eyes…

“Tej…” The other side of the bed creaked and dipped as Ivan Xav sat down, but then he sighed, got up again, padded to the bedroom door, opened it, and called through, “Hey, Rish!”

“What?” Rish’s tired, irritated voice called back.

“Have you outed Byerly yet? About what he does for a living, I mean?”

“Of course not! That was the deal. Tacitly. I assumed.”

Ivan Xav’s tense shoulders relaxed. “Ah.”

“—just to my family, of course.”

The shoulders went from relaxed to slumped. “Of course,” Ivan Xav mumbled. He raised his voice again: “That would be, like, nine more people, yeah?”

“Great, the natural-boy can count.”

Ivan Xav growled, and let the door slide shut.

He returned to the bed and sat up against the headboard, looking down in the soft lamplight at Tej, who, under the press of the stare between her shoulder blades, rolled over onto her back.

“Tej,” he began again, hesitantly, “could your Dada possibly imagine that he could
suborn
Simon?”

How to deal with this…“Suborn, what a word,
suborn
. You’d only need to
suborn
someone for something, like, treasonous, or evil. Something political or military, bad for Barrayar.”
Financial
wasn’t
political or military
, right? “Of course Dada wouldn’t do something like
that
.”

“
Couldn’t
, I’d say. You do realize—Shiv must realize—Simon’s had thirty, forty years for his probity and loyalty to be tested by, by more pressure than anything your Dada could possibly bring to bear—maybe more than you or I can even imagine.”