and the storm continued to rage outside. Inside, fire illuminated them. The gray rock walls of the cave curved up into darkness, their surface rippled and rough as though some ancient chill had frozen them in the midst of movement. The air seemed close and harsh against her throat. Smoke settled in her lungs. The part of her farthest from the fire felt perpetually chilled, so she shifted frequently. She yawned.
'At least they'll never follow us in this storm,' she mumbled. She glanced up. Bakhtiian lay slumped over his knees.
She got on her trousers and shirt through a combination of habit and fear and circled the fire to kneel beside him. The blanket had fallen down, revealing the strong curve of his shoulders, and as she tugged it up with sudden prudishness, his eyes fluttered and opened. He stared at her, confused. His hands closed on her waist. The blanket slipped to reveal his naked torso. Tess jerked back.
He clutched the blanket and pulled it tight around his chest. 'I passed out,' he said.
'Your clothes are dry.' She turned and walked across the cave to converse with the horses. Over the next several minutes he swore three times in a very low voice. The fire flared briefly. She heard him moving, but she did not look. Then it was quiet. Myshla nosed at her ear. She shivered. Rain drummed softly outside. Inside, it was freezing.
'Soerensen.' His tone was sharp.
She turned. The fire was still bright enough that she could see Bakhtiian. He had taken the blankets and cloaks and the hunter's clothing and layered them on the couch of branches she had laid, and dragged himself on top of them.
He met her eyes. He was flushed, and his mouth was drawn in a severe line. 'Come here.'
She did not move. 'If you give me the two cloaks, I'll be warm enough.'
Bakhtiian swallowed. He looked as if his greatest desire at that moment was to pass out again. 'I beg pardon for my immodesty, but in a storm like this, in our condition, we need the warmth.'
Tess shivered and rubbed her hands along her arms. It was hard to speak, her lips were so cold. 'You're right, of course. We don't have any other choice.'
'I would never have said it otherwise,' he replied with considerable reserve.
She kicked the coals of the fire into a smaller circle and stared at them. Finally she walked over to Ilya. 'Well,' she said.
He was already lying on his side, left leg resting on the uninjured one. 'Share the blankets.' He rested his head on a pillow of dry grass and shut his eyes. Gingerly, she settled down next to him. 'No,' he mumbled, 'on your side. Back to me. There, so if I shift, my leg won't move.'
She rolled up on her side, angling her legs so that they supported his. Yawning, blinking back sleep, she tucked the blankets around their legs.
'Lie against me,' he whispered. 'I'll get the last blankets. Gods, woman, you're shaking with the cold.'
He had folded his arms tight between his chest and her back, but otherwise she lay against him. This couch of branches was not the most comfortable bed she had ever slept on, but he was warm. She heard, like a counterpoint to the furious storm, a distant slide of loose rock, the thin crack of breaking branches and, to her left, the slow drip of water pooling somewhere under the overhang. Heat crept into her shoulders and knees and hips. She slept.
Odys had no colors but brown and gray and the faded green of its reeds. It had no heights and no valleys, except in the archipelagoes where no one had any reason to live. It was a drowned world, the sea and the massif almost one, the mud flats interminable, stretching out in all directions from the only slab of ground that stood above the waves, the Oanao Plateau.
But the palace and the port and the city of Odys Central itself had heights and valleys in profusion. Perhaps the architecture here was deliberate, to provide contrast with the terrain; perhaps all Chapalii architecture was this way, on all imperial planets. No human survey had been allowed to ascertain which was true.
And there was color as well. Color especially in the vast greenhouse, acres broad, that jutted off the fourth spoke of the ducal palace. Charles stood among the irises, chatting amiably with his head gardener about economic theory in preindustrial Earth cultures as contrasted to the development of communal theory on pre-space Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai.
'Ah, there he is, Jamsetji,' said Charles. 'I must go. Come to dinner tonight, and we'll finish arguing this out.'
Jamsetji tipped his cap back and glanced toward the gazebo half hidden by the wisteria and trailing roses. 'That the merchant who speaks Anglais? Cursed trouble, if you ask me.'
'Is this one of your hunches?'
'Might say it was. But that's not saying you don't want to get involved with it either.'
'Or that I have any choice,' added Charles. 'Listen in.' He strolled off down a winding turf path and came by a circular route to the little gazebo. Hon Echido sat on a wrought iron bench in the gazebo, directing two stewards in the placement of cups and saucers and a kettle and a pitcher on the little round table before him. He saw Charles and stood up, bowing to the precise degree.
Charles acknowledged him and entered, sitting down on the bench opposite. He dabbed sweat from his forehead and accepted a cool drink from one of the stewards. The stewards retreated out of earshot. 'Please, Hon Echido, sit down.'
Echido sat. Pink flushed his skin but quickly faded. 'You do me a great honor, to meet me here, Tai-en,' he said in Anglais.
'It is a beautiful spot.' Charles gazed for a moment at the far lines of vegetation: the clustering flowers nearby, the vegetable flats, the grain fields, the tasseled rows of corn, the orchards farther off, and the distant line of trees, demarking the park and exercise ground for those humans serving voluntary exile on Odys with Soerensen. Scent hung here like something one could touch, overpowering, yet at the same time reassuring. 'Although it's hot.'
Swathed in robes, Echido looked comfortable. He sipped from his cup, steaming liquid that smelled of cloves and aniseed and tar. 'The layout is from a human plan, I see. There is a certain disorder, artful, indeed, but disorder all the same that precludes these grounds being of Chapalii design.'
'You speak Anglais remarkably well, Hon Echido.'
'Your praise is generous, Tai-en.'
'As well as being perfectly true. I have enjoyed our discussions of the various trade and mineral rights available for exploitation in my fief. Yet I feel that for the Keinaba family, whose wealth and acumen is known and admired throughout the Empire, to instruct one of their own to learn Anglais, one as high-ranking, as valuable, and as perceptive as yourself, Hon Echido, means that there is a more delicate matter you wish to broach.''
Echido arranged his hands in Merchant's Humility. 'The Tai-en honors us with his attention to such an insignificant family as our own.'
Since the Keinaba merchant house was one of the wealthiest merchant houses in an empire where wealth counted as a marker of rank, Charles simply waited. In the distance, he could hear Jamsetji singing an afternoon raga in a reedy voice.
The merchant's skin shaded to violet, the color of mortification, and his fingers altered slightly to add the emphasis of Shame to the arrangement of Humility. ' 'I beg of you, Tai-en, to allow me to explain before you cast me out of your presence, as any lord would feel every right, every compulsion, to do. For time uncounted, for years beyond years, Keinaba has served the Yaotai Kobara princely house and the Tai Kaonobi dukes. We served well and faithfully, as any merchant house ought.'
The violet shade to his skin deepened. 'Yet now we are shamed and utterly cast down. I do not presume to know the doings of the Yaochaliien, may peace be with the Sun's Child, but the Kobara princely house and the Kaonobi ducal house are no more. Their names have been obliterated from the imperial view, and they are as if they had never been. With a full sense of our disgrace, I mention them now, but for the last time.'
Charles arched one eyebrow. This was, perhaps, the most interesting news he had gotten out of the Chapalii since his own elevation to the nobility. 'I am surprised, then, that the name of Keinaba may still be spoken.'
Echido's skin was all violet by now: deep, and rather attractive against the white-washed lattice walls of the gazebo and the purple flowering wisteria trailing down to the ground. 'The Yaochalii himself, may peace surround his name, conducted the investigation into the charges of conspiracy and breach of protocol against the prince whose name may no longer be heard, and although the Tai line was tainted by the stain, it was found that Keinaba
