Cetaganda

'Sh. Tell you later. I've just had the most bizarre . . .' Miles struggled with the heavy maplewood box, and straightened it around into an appropriate presentational position. He marched forward across a courtyard paved with more carved jade, catching up at last with the delegation in front of them just as they reached the door to one of the high-towered buildings. They all filed into an echoing rotunda. Miles spied a few white bubbles in the line ahead, but there was no telling if one was his old haut-lady. The game plan called for everyone to slowly circle the bier, genuflect, and lay their gifts in a spiral pattern in order of seniority/status/clout, and file out the opposite doors to the Northern Pavilion (for the haut-lords and ghem-lords), or the Eastern Pavilion (for the galactic ambassadors) where a funereal luncheon would be served.

But the steady procession stopped, and began to pile up in the wide arched doorways. From the rotunda ahead, instead of quiet music and hushed, shuffling footsteps, a startled babble poured. Voices were raised in sharp astonishment, then other voices in even sharper command.

'What's gone wrong?' Ivan wondered, craning his neck. 'Did somebody faint or something?'

Since Miles's eye-level view was of the shoulders of the man ahead of him, he could scarcely answer this. With a lurch, the line began to proceed again. It reached the rotunda, but then was shunted out a door immediately to the left. A ghem-commander stood at the intersection, directing traffic with low-voiced instructions, repeated over and over, 'Please retain your gifts and proceed directly around the outside walkway to the Eastern Pavilion, please retain your gifts and proceed directly to the Eastern Pavilion, all will be re-ordered presently, please retain —'

At the center of the rotunda, above everyone's heads on a great catafalque, lay the Dowager Empress in state. Even in death outlander eyes were not invited to look upon her. Her bier was surrounded by a force-bubble, made translucent; only a shadow of her form was visible through it, as if through gauze, a white-clad, slight, sleeping ghost. A line of mixed ghem-guards apparently just drafted from the passing satrap governors stood in a row from catafalque to wall on either side of the bier, shielding something else from the passing eyes.

Miles couldn't stand it. After all, they can't massacre me here in front of everybody, can they? He jammed the maplewood box at Ivan, and ducked under the elbow of the ghem-officer trying to shoo everyone out the other door. Smiling pleasantly, his hands held open and empty, he slipped between two startled ghem-guards, who were clearly not expecting such a rude and impudent move.

On the other side of the catafalque, in the position reserved for the first, gift of the haut-lord of highest status, lay a dead body. Its throat was cut, and quantities of fresh red blood pooled on the shimmering green malachite floor all around, soaking into its gray and white palace servitor's uniform. A thin jeweled knife was clutched rigorously in its outflung right hand. It was exactly the term for the corpse, too. A bald, eyebrowless, man-shaped creature, elderly but not frail . . . Miles recognized their intruder from the personnel pod even without the false hair. His own heart seemed to stop in astonishment.

S omebody's just raised the stakes in this little game.

The highest-ranking ghem-officer in the room swooped down upon him. Even through the swirl of face paint his smile was fixed, the look of a man constrained to be polite to someone he would more naturally have preferred to bludgeon to the pavement. 'Lord Vorkosigan, would you rejoin your delegation, please?'

'Of course. Who was that poor fellow?'

The ghem-commander made little herding motions at him—the Cetagandan was not fool enough to actually touch him, of course—and Miles allowed himself to be moved off. Grateful, irate, and flustered, the man was actually surprised into an unguarded reply. 'It is Ba Lura, the Celestial Lady's most senior servitor. The Ba has served her for sixty years and more—it seems to have wished to follow on and serve her in death as well. A most tasteless gesture, to do it here . . .' The ghem-commander buffeted Miles near enough to the again-stopped line of delegates for Ivan's long arm to reach out, grab him, and pull him in, and march him doorward with a firm fist in the middle of his back.

'What the hell is going on?' Ivan bent his head to hiss in Miles's ear from behind.

And where were you when the murder took place, Lord Vorkosigan? Except that it didn't look like a murder, it really did look like a suicide. Done in a most archaic manner. Less than thirty minutes ago. While he had been off talking with the mysterious white bubble, who might or might not have been haut Rian Degtiar, how the hell was he to tell? The corridor seemed to be spinning, but Miles supposed it was only his brain.

'You should not have gotten out of line, my lord,' said Vorob'yev severely. 'Ah . . . what was it you saw?'

Miles's lip curled, but he tamped it back down. 'One of the late Dowager Empress's oldest ba servants has just cut its throat at the foot of her bier. I didn't know the Cetagandans made a fashion of human sacrifice. Not officially, anyway.'

Vorob'yev's lips pursed in a soundless whistle, then flashed a brief, instantly stifled grin. 'How awkward for them,' he purred. 'They are going to have an interesting scramble, trying to retrieve this ceremony.'

Yes. So if the creature was so loyal, why did it arrange what it must have known would be a major embarrassment for its masters? Posthumous revenge? Admittedly, with Cetagandans that's the safest kind ….

By the time they completed an interminable hike around the outside of the central towers to the pavilion on the eastern side, Miles's legs were killing him. In a huge hall, the several hundred galactic delegates were being seated at tables by an army of servitors, all moving just a little faster than strict dignity would have preferred. Since some of the bier-gifts the other delegates carried were even bulkier than the Barrayarans' maplewood box, the seating was going slowly and more awkwardly than planned, with a lot of people jumping up and down and re- arranging themselves, to the servitors' evident dismay. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the building Miles pictured a squadron of harried Cetagandan cooks swearing many colorful and obscene Cetagandan oaths.

Miles spotted the Vervani delegation being seated about a third of the way across the room. He took advantage of the confusion to slip out of his assigned chair, weave around several tables, and try to seize a word with Mia Maz.

He stood by her elbow, and smiled tensely. 'Good afternoon, m'lady Maz. I have to talk—'

'Lord Vorkosigan! I tried to talk with you—' they cut across each other's greetings.

'You first,' he ducked his head at her.

'I tried to call you at your embassy earlier, but you'd already left. What in the world happened in the rotunda, do you have any idea? For the Cetagandans to alter a ceremony of this magnitude in the middle—it's unheard of.'

'They didn't exactly have a choice. Well, I suppose they could have ignored the body and just carried on around it—I think that would have been much more impressive, personally—but evidently they decided to clean it up first.' Again Miles repeated what he was beginning to think of as 'the official version' of Ba Lura's suicide. He had the total attention of everyone within earshot. To hell with it, the rumors would be flying soon enough no matter what he said or didn't say.

'Did you have any luck with that little research question I posed to you last night?' Miles continued. 'I, uh . . . don't think this is the time or place to discuss it, but . . .'

'Yes, and yes,' Maz said.

And not over any holovid transmission channel on this planet, either, Miles thought, supposedly secured or not. 'Can you stop by the Barrayaran Embassy, directly after this? We'll . . . take tea, or something.'

'I think that would be very appropriate,' Maz said. She watched him with newly intensified curiosity in her dark eyes.

'I need a lesson in etiquette,' Miles added, for the benefit of their interested nearby listeners.

Maz's eyes twinkled in something that might have been suppressed amusement. 'So I have heard it said,