The warrior's apprentice (29 page)

“Look, when a General Staff Admiral calls a cadet in the middle of the night and says go, you go. You don’t stop to debate with him. He wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“Well—what did your recorded orders say?”

“Come to think or it, I never saw my recorded orders. I assumed Admiral Hessman must have given them to Captain Dimir personally.”

Miles decided his uneasiness stemmed from the number of times the phrase “I assumed” was turning up in this conversation. There was something else—he almost had it... “Hessman? Hessman gave you your orders?”

“In person,” Ivan said proudly.

“Hessman doesn’t have anything to do with either Intelligence or Security. He’s in charge of Procurement. Ivan, this is getting screwier and screwier.”

“An Admiral is an Admiral.”

“This Admiral is on my father’s shit list, though. For one thing, he’s Count Vordrozda’s pipeline to Imperial Service Headquarters, and Father hates his officers getting involved in party politics. Father also suspects him of peculating Service funds, some kind of sleight-ofhand in shipbuilding contracts. At the time I left home, he was itchy enough to put Captain Illyan on it personally, and you know he wouldn’t waste Illyan’s talents on anything minor.”

“All that’s way over my head. I’ve got enough problems with navigational math.”

“It shouldn’t be over your head. Oh, as a cadet, sure— but you’re also Lord Vorpatril. If anything happened to me, you’d inherit the Countship of our district from my father.”

“God forbid,” said Ivan. “I want to be an officer, and travel around, and pick up girls. Not chase around through those mountains trying to collect taxes from homicidal illiterates and keep chicken-stealing cases from turning into minor guerilla wars. No insult intended, but your district is the most intractable on Barrayar. Miles, there are people back behind Dendarii Gorge who live in caves.” Ivan shuddered. “And they like it.”

“There are some great caves back there,” Miles agreed. “Gorgeous colors when you get the right light on the rock formations.” Homesick remembrance twinged through him.

“Well, if I ever inherit a Countship, I’m praying it will be of a city,” Ivan concluded.

“You’re not in line for any I can think of,” grinned Miles. He tried to recapture the thread of their conversation, but Ivan’s remarks made lines of inheritance map themselves in his head. He traced his own descent through his Grandmother Vorkosigan to Prince Xav to Emperor Dorca Vorbarra himself. Had the great Emperor ever foreseen what a turn his law, that finally broke the private armies and the private wars of the Counts forever, would give his great-great-grandson?

“Who’s your heir, Ivan?” Miles asked idly, staring out at the Dendarii ships, but dreaming of the Dendarii Mountains. “Lord Vortaine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I expect to outlive the old boy any minute. His health wasn’t too good, last I heard. Too bad this inheritance thing doesn’t work backwards, I’d be in for a bundle.”

“Who does get his bundle?”

“His daughter, I guess. His titles go to—let me think— Count Vordrozda, who doesn’t even need ‘em. From what I’ve heard of Vordrozda, he’d rather have the money. Don’t know if he’d go as far as marrying the daughter to get it, though, she’s about fifty years old.”

They both gazed into space.

“God,” said Ivan after a while, “I hope those orders Dimir got when I ducked out weren’t to go home or something. They’ll think I’ve been AWOL for three weeks—there won’t be enough room on my record for all the demerits. Thank God they’ve eliminated the oldstyle discipline parades.”

“You were there when Dimir got his orders? And you didn’t stick around to see what they were?” asked Miles, astonished.

“It was like pulling teeth to get that pass out of him. I didn’t want to risk it. There was this girl, you see—I wish now I’d taken my beeper.”

“You left your comm link?”

“There was this girl—I really did almost really forget it. But he was opening the stuff by then, and I didn’t want to go back in and get nabbed.”

Miles shook his head hopelessly. “Can you remember anything unusual about the orders? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Oh, sure. It was the damndest packet. In the first place, it was delivered by an Imperial Household courier in full livery. Lessee, four data discs, one green for Intelligence, two red for Security, one blue for Operations. And the parchment, of course.”

Ivan had the family memory, at least. What would it be like to have a mind that retained nearly everything, but never bothered to put it any kind of order? Exactly like living in Ivan’s room, Miles decided. “Parchment? “ he said. “Parchment?”

“Yeah, I thought that was kind of unusual.”

“Do you have any idea how bloody—” he surged up, sat back down, squeezed his temples with the heels of his hands in an effort to get his brain into motion. Not only was Ivan an idiot, but he generated a telepathic damping field that turned people nearby into idiots too. He would point this out to Barrayaran Intelligence, who would make of his cousin the newest weapon in their arsenal—if anyone could be found who could remember what they were doing once they closed on him... “Ivan, there are only three kinds of thing written on parchment any more. Imperial edicts, the originals of the official edicts from the Council of Counts and from the Council of Ministers, and certain orders from the Council of Counts to their own members.”

“I know that.”

“As my father’s heir, I am a cadet member of that Council.”

“You have my sympathy,” said Ivan, his gaze wandering back to the window. “Which of those ships out there is the fastest, d’you think, the Illyrican cruiser or the—”

“Ivan, I’m psychic,” Miles announced suddenly. “I’m so psychic, I can tell what color the ribbon was on that parchment without even seeing it.”

“I know what color it was,” said Ivan irritably. “It was— “

“Black,” Miles cut across him. “Black, you idiot! And you never thought to mention it!”

“Look, I have to take that stuff from my mother and your father, I don’t have to take it from you, too—” Ivan paused. “How did you know?”

“I know the color because I know the contents.” Miles rose to pace uncontrollably back and forth. “You know them too, or you would if you ever stopped to think. I’ve got a joke for you. What’s white, taken from the back of a sheep, tied up with black bows, shipped thousands of light years, and lost?”

“If that’s your idea of a joke, you’re weirder than—”

“Death.” Miles’s voice fell to a whisper, making Ivan jump. “Treason. Civil war. Betrayal, sabotage, almost certainly murder. Evil...”

“You haven’t had any more of that sedative you’re allergic to, have you?” asked Ivan anxiously.

Miles’s pacing was becoming frenetic. The urge to pick Ivan up and shake him, in the hope that all that information floating randomly around inside his head would start to polymerize into some chain of reason, was almost overwhelming.

“If Dimir’s courier ship’s Necklin rods were sabotaged during the stopover at Beta Colony, it would be weeks before the ship was missed. For all the Barrayaran embassy would know, it left on its mission, made the jump—no way for Beta Colony to know if it came out the other side or not. What a thorough way to get rid of the evidence.” Miles imagined the dismay and terror of the men aboard as the jump began to go wrong, as their bodies began to run and smear like watercolors in the rain—he forced his mind back to abstract reason.

“I don’t understand. Where d’you think Dimir is?” asked Ivan.

“Dead. Quite thoroughly dead. You were meant to be quite thoroughly dead too, but you missed the boat.” A high, wheeing laugh escaped Miles. He took hold of himself, literally, wrapping his arms around his torso. “I guess they figured if they were going to all that trouble to get rid of that parchment, they’d throw you in at the same time. There’s a certain economy in the plot—you might expect it from a mind that ended up in Procurement.”

“Back up,” demanded Ivan. “What do you figure the parchment was, anyway—and who the devil are ‘they’? You’re beginning to sound as paranoid as old Bothari.”

“The black ribbon. It had to have been a capital charge. An Imperial order for my arrest on a capital charge laid in the Council of Counts. The charge? You said it yourself. Violation of Vorloupulous’s law. Treason, Ivan! Now ask yourself—who would benefit by my conviction for treason?”

“Nobody,” said Ivan promptly.

“All right,” Miles rolled his eyes upward. “Try it this way. Who would suffer by my conviction for treason?”

“Oh, it would destroy your father, of course. I mean, his office overlooks the Great Square. He could stand at his window and watch you starve to death every working day.” An embarrassed laugh escaped Ivan. “It would have to about drive him crazy.”

Miles paced. “Take his heir, by execution or exile, break his morale, bring him down and his Centrist coalition with him—or— force him to make the false charges real, attempting my rescue. Then bring him down for treason as well. What a demonic fork!” His intellect admired the plot’s abstract perfection, even while rage at its cruelty nearly took his breath away.

Ivan snook his head. “How could anything like that get this far and not be quashed by your father? I mean, he may be famous for impartiality, but there are limits even for him.”

“You saw the parchment. If Gregor himself had been worked over into a state of suspicion...” Miles spoke slowly. “A trial clears as well as convicts. If I showed up voluntarily, it would go a long way toward proving I had no treasonable intent. That cuts both ways, of course—if I don’t show, it’s a strong presumption of

guilt. But I could hardly show up if I weren’t informed it was taking place, could I?”

“The Council of Counts is such a cantankerous body of old relics,” argued Ivan. “Your plotters would be taking an awful chance they could swing the vote their way. Nobody would want to get caught voting for the losing side in something like that. Either way, there’d be blood drawn at the end.”

“Maybe they were forced. Maybe my father and Illyan finally moved in on Hessman, and he figured the best defense would be a counterattack.”

“So what’s in it for Vordrozda? Why doesn’t he just throw Hessman to the wolves?”

“Ah,” said Miles. “There I’m... I really wonder if I haven’t gone a little paro, but—follow this chain. Count Vordrozda, Lord Vortaine, you, me, my father—who is my father heir to?”

‘Your grandfather. He’s dead, remember? Miles, you can’t convince me that Count Vordrozda would knock off five people to inherit the Dendarii Province. He’s the Count of Lorimel, for God’s sakes! He’s a rich man. Dendarii would drain his purse, not fill it.”

“Not my grandfather. We’re talking about another title altogether. Ivan, there is a large faction of historically-minded people on Barrayar who claim, defensibly, that the salic bar to Imperial inheritance has no foundation in Barrayaran law or custom. Dorca himself inherited through his mother, after all.”

“Yes, and your father would like to ship every one of that faction off to, er, summer camp.”

“Who is Gregor’s heir?”

“Right now, nobody, which is why everybody is on his back to marry and start swiving—”

“If salic descent were allowed, who would be his heir?”

Ivan refused to be stampeded. “Your father. Everybody knows that. Everybody also knows he wouldn’t touch the Imperium with a stick, so what? This is pretty wild, Miles.”

“Can you think of another theory that will account or the facts?”

“Sure,” said Ivan, happily continuing the role of devil’s advocate. “Easy. Maybe that parchment was addressed to someone else. Damir took it to him, which is why he hasn’t shown up here. Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor, Miles?”

“It sounds simpler, until you start to think about it. Ivan, listen. Think back on the exact circumstances of your midnight departure from the Imperial Academy, and that dawn lift-off. Who signed you out? Who saw you go? Who do you know, for certain, who knows where you are right now? Why didn’t my father give you any personal messages for me—or my mother or Captain Illyan either, for that matter?” His voice became insistant. “If Admiral Hessman took you off to some quiet, isolated place right now and offered you a glass of wine with his own hands, would you drink it?”

Ivan was silent for a long, thoughtful time, staring out at the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet. When he turned back to Miles, his face was painfully somber. “No.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

*
     
*
     
*

He tracked them down finally in the crew’s mess of the Triumph, now parked in Docking Bay 9. It was an off-hour for meals, and the mess was nearly empty but for a few die-hard caffeine addicts swilling an assortment of brews.

They sat, dark heads close, opposite each other. Baz’s hand lay open, palm-up, on the small table as he leaned forward. Elena’s shoulders were hunched, her hands shredding a napkin in her lap. Neither looked happy.

Miles took a deep breath, carefully adjusted his own expression to one of benevolent good cheer, and sauntered up to them. He no longer bled inside, the surgeon had assured him. Couldn’t prove it now. “Hi.”

They both started. Elena, still hunched, shot him a look of resentment. Baz answered with a hesitant, dismayed “My lord?” that made Miles feel very small indeed. He suppressed an urge to turn tail and slither out under the door.

“I’ve been thinking over what you said,” Miles began, leaning against an adjoining table in a pose of nonchalance. “Your arguments made a lot of sense, when I came to really examine them. I’ve changed my opinion. For what it’s worth, you’re welcome to my blessing.”

Baz’s face lit with honest delight. Elena’s posture opened like a daylily in sudden noon, and as suddenly closed again. The winged brows drew down in puzzlement. She looked at him directly, he felt, for the first time in weeks. “Really?”

He supplied her with a chipper grin. “Really. And we shall satisfy all the forms of etiquette, as well. All it takes is a little ingenuity.”

He pulled a colored scarf from his pocket, secreted there for the occasion, and walked around to Baz’s side of the table. “We’ll start over, on the right foot this time. Picture, if you will, this banal plastic table bolted to the floor before you as a starlit balcony, with a pierced lattice window crawling with those little flowers with the long sharp thorns that make you itch like fire, behind which is, rightly and properly, concealed your heart’s desire. Got that? Now—Armsman Jesek, speaking as your leige lord, I understand you have a request.”

Miles’s pantomime gestures cued the engineer. Baz leaned back with a grin, and picked up his lead.

“My lord I ask your permission and aid to wed the first daughter of Armsman Konstantine Bothari, that my sons may serve you.”

Miles cocked his head, and smirked. “Ah, good, we’ve all been watching the same vid dramas, I see. Yes, certainly, Armsman; may they all serve me as well as you do. I shall send the Baba.”

He flipped the scarf into a triangle and tied it around his head. Leaning on an imaginary cane, he hobbled arthritically over to Elena’s side of the table, muttering in a cracked falsetto. Once there, he removed the scarf and reverted to the role of Elena’s liege lord and guardian, and grilled the Baba as to the suitability of the suitor she represented. The Baba was sent bobbing back twice to Baz’s leige commander, to personally check and guarantee his a) continued employment prospects and b) personal hygiene and absence of head-lice.

Muttering obscene little old lady imprecations, the Baba returned at last to Elena’s side of the table to conclude her transaction. Baz by this time was cackling with laughter at assorted Barrayaran in-jokes, and Elena’s smile had at last reached her eyes.

When his clowning was over and the last somewhat scrambled formula was completed, Miles hooked a third chair into its floor bolts and fell into it.

“Whew! No wonder the custom is dying out. That’s exhausting.”

Elena grinned. “I’ve always had the impression you were trying to be three people. Perhaps you’ve found your calling.”

“What, one-man shows? I’ve had enough of them lately to last a lifetime.” Miles sighed, and grew serious. “You may consider yourselves well and officially betrothed, at any rate. When do you plan to register your marriage?”

“Soon,” said Baz, and “I’m not sure,” said Elena.

“May I suggest tonight?”

“Why—why...” stammered Baz. His eyes sought his lady’s. “Elena? Could we?”

“I...” she searched Miles’s face. “Why, my lord?”

“Because I want to dance at your wedding and fill your bed with buckwheat groats, if I can find any on this benighted space station. You may have to settle for gravel, they’ve got plenty of that. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Three words should not be so hard to grasp as all that. ..

“What?” cried Baz.

“Why?” repeated Elena in a shocked whisper.

“I have some obligations to pursue,” Miles shrugged. “There’s Tav Calhoun to pay off, and—and the Sergeant’s burial.” And, very possibly, my own...

“You don’t have to go in person, do you?” protested Elena. “Can’t you send Calhoun a draft, and ship the body? Why go back? What is there for you?”

“The Dendarii Mercenaries,” said Baz. “How can they function without you?”

“I expect them to function quite well, because I am appointing you, Baz, as their commander, and you, Elena, as his executive officer—and apprentice. Commodore Tung will be your chief of staff. You understand that, Baz? I’m going to charge you and Tung jointly with her training, and I expect it to be the best.”

“I—I—” gasped the engineer. “My lord, the honor—I couldn’t—”

“You’ll find that you can, because you must. And besides, a lady should have a dowry worthy of her. That’s what a dowry is for, after all, to provide for the bride’s support. Bad form for the bridegroom to squander it, note. And you’ll still be working for me, after all.”

Baz looked relieved. “Oh—you’ll be coming back, then. I thought—never mind. When will you return, my lord?”

“I’ll catch up with you sometime,” Miles said vaguely. Sometime, never... “That’s the other thing. I want you to clear out of Tau Verde local space. Pick any direction away from Barrayar, and go. Find employment when you get there, but go soon. The Dendarii Mercenaries have had enough of this Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee war. It’s bad for morale when it gets too hard to remember which side you’re working for this week. Your next contract should have clearly defined objectives that will weld this motley bunch into a single force, under your command. No more committee warfare. Its weaknesses have been amply demonstrated, I trust—”

Miles went on with instructions and advice until he began to sound like a pint-sized Polonius in his own ears. There was no way he could anticipate every contingency. When the time came to leap in faith, whether you had your eyes open or closed or screamed all the way down or not made no practical difference.

His heart cringed from his next interview even more than from the last, but he forced his feet to carry him to it anyway. He found the comm link technician at work at the electron microscope bench of the Triumph’s engineering repairs section. Elena Visconti frowned at his gesture of invitation, but turned the work over to her assistant and came slowly to Miles’s side.

“Sir?”

“Trainee Visconti. Ma’am. Can we take a walk?”

“What for?”

“Just to talk.”

“If it’s what I think, you may as well save your breath. I can’t go to her.”

“I’m not any more comfortable talking about it than you are, but it’s an obligation I cannot honorably evade.”

“I’ve spent eighteen years trying to put what happened at Escobar behind me. Must I be dragged through it again?”

“This is the last time, I promise. I’m leaving tomorrow. The Dendarii fleet will follow soon after. All you short-contract people will be dropped off at Dalton Station, where you can take ship for Tau Ceti or wherever you want. I suppose you’ll be going home?”

She fell in reluctantly beside him, and they paced down the corridor. “Yes, my employers will doubtless be astonished at how much back pay they owe me.”

“I owe you something myself. Baz says you were outstanding on the mission.”

She shrugged. “Straightforward stuff.”

“He didn’t mean just your technical efforts. Anyway, I didn’t want to leave Elena—my Elena—up in the air like this, you see,” he began. “She ought to at least have something, to replace what was taken from her. Some little crumb of comfort.”

“The only thing she lost was some illusion. And believe me, Admiral Naismith, or whatever you are, the only thing I could give her would be another illusion. Maybe if she didn’t look so much like him... Anyway, I don’t want her following me around, or showing up at my door.”

“Whatever Sergeant Bothari was guilty of, she is surely innocent.”

Elena Visconti rubbed her forehead wearily with the back of her hand. “I’m not saying you’re not right. I’m just saying I can’t. For me, she radiates nightmares.”

Miles chewed his lip gently. They turned out of the Triumph into a flex tube and walked across the quiet docking bay. Only a few techs were busy at some small tasks.

“An illusion...” he mused. “You could live a long time on an illusion,” he offered. “Maybe even a lifetime, if you’re lucky. Would it be so difficult, to do a few days—even a few minutes—of acting? I’m going to have to dip some Dendarii funds anyway to pay for a dead ship, and buy a lady a new face. I could make it worth your time.”

He regretted his words immediately at the loathing

that flashed across her face, but the look she finally gave him was ironically thoughtful.

“You really care about that girl, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought she was making time with your chief engineer.”

“Suits me.”

“Pardon my slowness, but that does not compute.”

“Association with me could be lethal, where I’m going next. I’d rather she were travelling in the opposite direction.”

The next docking bay was busy and noisy with a Felician freighter being loaded with ingots of refined rare metals, vital to the Felician war industries. They avoided it, and searched out another quiet corridor. Miles found himself fingering the bright scarf in his pocket.

“He dreamed of you for eighteen years too, you know,” he said suddenly. It wasn’t what he meant to say. “He had this fantasy. You were his wife, in all honor. He held it so hard, I think it was real to him, at least part of the time. That’s how he made it so real for Elena. You can touch hallucinations. Hallucinations can even touch you.”

The Escobaran woman, pale, paused to lean against the wall and swallow. Miles pulled the scarf from his pocket and crumpled it anxiously in his hands; he had an absurd impulse to offer it to her, heaven knew what for—a basin?

“I’m sorry,” Elena said at last. “But the very thought that he was pawing over me in his twisted imagination all these years makes me ill.”

“He was never an easy person...” Miles began inanely, then cut himself off. He paced, frustrated, two steps, turn, two steps. He then took a gulp of air, and flung himself to one knee before the Escobaran woman.

“Ma’am. Konstantine Bothari sends me to beg your forgiveness for the wrongs he did you. Keep your revenge, if you will—it is your just right—but be satisfied,” he implored her. “At least give me a death-offering to burn for him, some token. I give him aid in this as his go-between by my right as his leige lord, his friend, and, as he was a father’s hand, held over me in protection all my life, as his son.”

Elena Visconti was backed up against the wall as though cornered. Miles, still on one knee, shuffled back a step and shrank into himself, as if to crush all hint of pride and coercion to the deck.

“Damned if I’m not starting to think you’re as weird— you’re no Betan,” she muttered. “Oh, do get up. What if somebody comes down this corridor?”

“Not until you give me a death-offering,” he said firmly.

“What do you want from me? What’s a death-offering?”

“Something of yourself, that you burn, for the peace of the soul of the dead. Sometimes you burn it for friends or relatives, sometimes for the souls of slain enemies, so they don’t come back to haunt you. A lock of hair would do.” He ran his hand over a short gap in his own crown. “That wedge represents twenty-two dead Pelians last month.”

“Some local superstition, is it?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Superstition, custom—I’ve always thought of myself as an agnostic. It’s only lately that I’ve come to—to need for men to have souls. Please. I won’t bother you any more.”

She blew out her breath in troubled exasperation. “Well—well... Give me that knife in your belt, then. But get up.”

He rose, and handed her his grandfather’s dagger. She sawed off a short curl. “Is that enough?”

“Yes, that’s fine.” He took it in his palm, cool and silken like water, and closed his fingers over it. “Thank you.”

She shook her head. “Crazy...” Wistfulness stole over her face. “It allays ghosts, does it?”

“It is said,” replied Miles gently. “I’ll make it a proper offering. My word on it.” He inhaled shakily. “And as I have given you my word, I’ll bother you no more. Excuse me, ma’am. We both have other duties.”

“Sir.”

They passed through the flex tube to the Triumph, turned each away. But the Escobaran woman looked back over her shoulder.

“You are mistaken, little man,” she called softly. “I believe you’re going to bother me for a long time yet.”