The Fall (31 page)
The human took a seat on one of the benches. A sleeping mat lay spread in the rear, covered with blankets and cushions. Bertie gave it a tired glance. The evening had grown old; it had taken most of the day to negotiate an arrival at the Suralia stronghold, and his friend had given himself a hard workout in the arena.
“Sleep if you like.”
“Do you mind?”
“I am accustomed to the solitude. When I travel as my father’s ambassador, a servant may sometimes accompany me, but I am often alone.”
Bertie threw himself onto the mat. “Strange, that,” he said, settling onto his back. His voice grew thick. “Our ambassadors go everywhere with armed bodyguards.”
“I go without guards to demonstrate good will. The Sural guarantees my safety once I reach his province, but I must first arrive there. Hence we travel from one ally to another.”
“Like hopscotch.” He yawned, closed his eyes, and plummeted into sleep, one hand curled on his chest and the other thrown over his head.
The pod had left Tarasia and was headed north, halfway through the journey, before Bertie stirred again. He sat up, rubbing his face.
“You had plenty of guards with you when you ventured into Alliance space,” he said, as if the conversation had not been interrupted by such a thing as a lengthy nap. He threw out his chest in a stretch and squeezed his eyes shut. “Was that a demonstration?”
Farric pulled himself out of communion with the pod and grinned. “You must know better than I how far to trust Central Command.” He left the pod’s controls and sprawled across one of the benches.
“I notice you didn’t say you trust our honored government.”
“I am Monralar’s ambassador. I do as he instructs.”
“Ah, so it’s Dad who doesn’t trust Central Command.”
“Does anyone trust Earth’s government?”
Bertie twitched a lop-sided smile. “Let me poll a few… billion… people and see if I can find someone.” He glanced through the pod’s transparent skin at the blur of the tunnel wall. “Shouldn’t you be driving?”
“The pod knows where to go next.”
The human’s eyebrows went up his forehead. “Is that your way of saying you programmed in a destination, or do you mean it really
knows
?”
“It is a living creature,” Farric said.
“Bloo—never mind. At some point, you Tolari will stop surprising me. How the
hell
can a vehicle be alive?”
“Did your people not use animals as transportation during their history?”
“Yes,” Bertie replied. “Horses, camels, donkeys, thorps, what-have-you. We still ride them for recreation, but we sit
on
them, not
in
them.”
“I have read about your horses. Our transport pods are little different.” He stroked its inner skin. “Give them good care, and they wish to please.”
“I swan,” the human murmured, patting the floor, “you people are strange.” He glanced around the pod. “Say, do we have anything that will serve as a table?”
“The pod can form one low and small, perhaps. To what purpose?”
“First, I want to eat. Even my dull old human nose can smell what’s in that basket, and I’m hungry. Then,” he said, patting a rectangular bulge in his garments, “I’m going to teach you how to play five-card.”
* * *
“Call.” Farric placed five cards of one
suit
on the table and chuckled at Bertie’s scowl. “Flush.”
“Rotting bastage,” the human said, laying down a hand with two pairs. “How do you always tell when I’m bluffing?”
“You are not difficult to read.”
“Remind me never to play cards with you for real stakes.”
As Farric grinned, the pod tickled his senses. “We near Suralia,” he said, leaving the game to take more direct control of the pod.
Bertie gathered up the cards and slipped them into an ornate silver case. “Do you suppose the Sural’s human wife might have taught him to play cards?”
Farric laughed. “You should hope not. No one can read the Sural.”
“Dear me.” His friend stood and straightened his garments.
The pod slowed, came up at the Suralia city hub—surrounded by guards in pale blue—and slid sideways. Curiosity and hostility followed them in equal measure until they disappeared into the well-guarded tunnel to the stronghold. Farric breathed a sigh.
“That bad?”
He shot Bertie a sharp glance. The man hid a keenly observant eye behind his careless manner. “It is unpleasant to be in an enemy province.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
He shook his head. “There will be more antipathy at the stronghold itself. Suralia keeps a large staff and an unseemly number of guards.”
They entered the shaft up to the stronghold and hurtled upward longer than Bertie seemed to expect. “Damn,” he muttered. “What must the trip down be like?”
The pod emerged into the Sural’s transit room. Farric ignored the visible and scowling guards and occupied himself with soothing the fatigued vehicle. “Rest and refresh yourself,” he murmured, giving its skin a gentle pat to ask for a door. “My gratitude.”
The creature crooned as he and Bertie, shoulder bag in hand, exited. The Suralian technician nodded grudging approval as the pod drifted toward an unoccupied nutrient bath in a rest bay.
Farric led Bertie into the stronghold’s main corridor.
“Looks just like yours, except for the color of the stone,” the human murmured.
“Indeed,” he said, stepping to one side. “Leave your bag here—a servant will take care of it. You remember the protocol?”
“Stay behind you, don’t speak until spoken to.” Bertie dropped his bag. “Rather like the daily ordeal with His Nibs at home.”
Farric spared his friend a half-grin. “This introduction will be short—it is past the night meridian here. Tomorrow in the morning we will get down to business, as you say, but the Sural cannot allow the heir to an enemy province to arrive without proper welcome.”
“
Just
like His Nibs,” Bertie mumbled.
Farric stopped at the doorway to the audience room. “Prepare yourself.”
Bertie followed him in—behind and to his left, rather than directly behind or to his right. Farric’s mouth almost twitched. He had told the human what the position meant, but let the Sural think what he would. When Farric reached the dais, he gave a deep bow, which Bertie imitated.
The Sural did not make him wait. “I am the Sural,” he said, in English. With one hand, he indicated a sleepy child with drooping eyelids, sitting behind him and to his right. “My daughter and heir, Kyza.”
The girl sat up straighter and regarded her father’s guests with a carefully bland expression. Farric offered her another deep bow, hiding a smile. During his own childhood, his father had many times required him to stay awake for a late arrival, as part of his training. On other occasions, he had attended without being summoned, seeking to prove himself despite his exhaustion. Either could be the case now for the heir to Suralia.
“You honor me, dear ones,” Farric said. “I am Farric, heir to Monralar. My financial advisor, Lord Albert St. John Rembrandt, son of Alistair Montjoy Rembrandt, Duke of New Norfolk of the human colony world of Britannia.”
The Sural inclined his head. “Be welcome in Suralia, and I will not keep you from your rest. My seneschal will take you to guest quarters. Enjoy the hospitality of my stronghold.”
“Dear one.” Farric bowed again and turned as Bertie straightened from another bow.
The seneschal met them in the corridor and led them to a guest suite with two sleeping rooms.
“You did that deliberately,” Farric said after the seneschal left them. “He thinks you my lover.”
“Horrors.” Bertie broke into a wicked grin.
Farric snorted.
Bertie threw himself onto a divan. “I did it so he wouldn’t separate us. Can’t get me alone to soften me up, as it were.”
“He cares too much for his honor to act in such a manner,” Farric said, with another snort. “But as you know so little of our ways, he is unlikely to take offense.”
“He needn’t find out.”
“He hears every word we say within his stronghold.”
“Damn. I should have known.”
Farric chuckled. “Unlike you, I did not nap during the journey, and I am quite fatigued. I suggest you try to sleep.”
* * *
Pale winter light streamed through the high windows as Bertie glanced around the refectory. The Suralian stronghold’s dark gray stone gave it a more somber air than the lighter rock used in Monralar, but it otherwise looked the same. Round tables populated the room, and in the middle sat the raised, rectangular high table they occupied, with a throne-like chair at one end. That was currently claimed by the looming giant in embroidered pale blue who ruled this place. Bertie had never met a man who made him feel so small.
To the Sural’s right sat his little girl Kyza. Then came Farric, directly across from Bertie, and then another young girl, this one in brown and perhaps a little older than Kyza, who ate her breakfast with shy glances around the table.
The meal included the spiciest roll he’d ever tasted. As he took a second bite, the burn from the first turned his mouth and throat into a fusion reactor.
“Drink your tea,” the Sural said, with a light, unidentifiable accent. One corner of his mouth twitched up, and the girls giggled. “I have been told it helps.”
“My word,” he gasped, when he caught his breath. He lay the roll on the table in front of him and pushed it away. “And I thought the rolls in Monralar were spicy. I’m afraid I can’t quite manage this one.”
“Try the fruit,” Kyza said in perfect English. She pointed. “The Marann says that one tastes like
banana
.”
Bertie eyed the purple-skinned globe she indicated, the size of a large orange, lying on the tray of foods the Sural had declared safe for humans. “Your English is excellent,” he said, grabbing the fruit.
Kyza grinned. “Thank you. I learned from the Marann.”
“Do you mean Marianne Woolsey?” He found a dimple in the skin and began to peel it.
The Sural nodded. “My bond-partner. Or wife, if you prefer.”
“She is visiting Parania because the Paran’s bond-partner was injured, and they are friends,” Kyza added. “Human women do that.”
Bertie chuckled. “Yes, they do, don’t they?” He took a nibble of the fruit’s inner flesh, and then took a larger bite—it did indeed taste like a banana, with an aftertaste of something unfamiliar but sweet. He swallowed. “Delightful. Parania is just next door to Monralar, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Farric replied.
“Pity to have missed her. I wish I’d known she was there. I wouldn’t mind talking to another human, get another perspective on living here.”
Farric tore a roll in half. “You are free to visit Parania. We are allied with them.”
“But not with Suralia?”
“Regrettably, the Monral does not count us among his allies,” the Sural answered. “As long as you live under his protection, he may object to further visits here.”
Bertie shook his head. Politics. It was all rubbish, but there was no telling that to a politician. He took another bite of the banana-like fruit and waggled his fingers at the girl in brown. “Hallo.”
Her eyes darted to the Sural, then back to Bertie. “Good morning,” she said, her accent strong and exotic, like a cross between Chinese and Norwegian.
“What’s your name?”
“I am Thela.”
“Enchanted. I’m Lord Albert St. John Rembrandt—quite the mouthful, don’t you think? You can call me Bertie. That’s much easier for me to remember. What do you do around here?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Do? I live here. I study. I am not the heir.”
“We have something in common, then!”
The girl flashed a shy smile and turned her attention back to her food, seemingly content not to talk. Bertie let her alone and filled up on fruit while listening to Farric strike up a conversation with Kyza. The Tolari high ones danced around each other and spoke about mutual allies, mainly one called Vedelar, which they said had experienced catastrophic flooding the previous summer and needed assistance to make it through the winter without widespread starvation.
After a time, the Sural fired off something business-like in his own language, and the girls slipped off their chairs. Thela went to the Sural and threw her arms around him briefly before running off after Kyza. When the two girls dashed through the doorway, they nearly ran into a man in an indigo blue robe. He called something stern after them, and they called back without stopping, their giggles fading with distance.
The Sural stood and nodded at the new arrival. “Farric, Lord Albert, come with me.”
He led them back to the audience room where he’d greeted them the night before and through it to a small office with a desk surrounded by a number of graceful, padded wood chairs. The Sural settled himself in the chair behind the desk while the man in dark blue took up a stance at his right shoulder; Bertie waited for Farric to sit before choosing a seat for himself.
“My chief advisor, Storaas,” the Sural said. He tilted his head toward Storaas, then nodded toward his guests. “Lord Albert Saint John Rembrandt, Monralar’s financial advisor, a man I believe may prove of great value to us all in the near future, and Farric, heir to Monralar, whom the Monral has seen fit to name Tolar’s representative to the Trade Alliance.”
Farric shut his barriers as much as he could, though it would not be enough to shield him from the man reputed to be the most powerful sensitive on Tolar or from a notoriously clever grandchild of the Jorann, enemies both. One misstep, and he would not come away from this alive.
Sense-blind though he was, Bertie’s face stiffened. “At your service,” he said, bowing in his seat.
“You may speak freely,” Farric told him, unsure whether to be relieved or alarmed that the Sural had signaled his intent to discuss Bertie’s potential value to Suralia first.
The human’s eyes flicked from one man to another. Then he seemed to come to a conclusion and leaned forward, still taut. “When Farric approached me on Capella Station, I must say I was stunned. I’d heard of your people, of course, but if your technology really is as advanced as you say, there are far more powerful men who would be happy to take advantage of what you have to offer.”