Cetaganda

my lord,' she murmured.

'By—' whom? he choked off. Vorob'yev, I fear. ''Bye,' he finished instead, rapped the table cheerily, and retreated back to his proper place. Vorob'yev watched Miles seat himself with a slightly dangerous look in his eyes that suggested he was thinking of putting a leash on the peripatetic young envoy soon, but he made no comment aloud.

By the time they had eaten their way through about twenty courses of tiny delicacies, which more than made up in numbers what they lacked in volume, the Cetagandans had reorganized themselves. The haut-lord majordomo was apparently one of those commanders who was never more masterly than when in retreat, for he managed to get everyone marshaled in the correct order of seniority again even though the line was now being cycled through the rotunda in reverse. One sensed the majordomo would be cutting his throat later, in the proper place and with the proper ceremony, and not in this dreadful harum-scarum fashion.

Miles laid down the maplewood box on the malachite floor in the second turning of the growing spiral of gifts, about a meter from where Ba Lura had poured out its life. The unmarked, perfectly polished floor wasn't even damp. And had the Cetagandan security people had time to do a forensics scan before the cleanup? Or had someone been counting on the hasty destruction of the subtler evidence? Damn, I wish I could have been in charge of this, just now.

The white float-cars were waiting on the other side of the Eastern Pavilion, to carry the emissaries back to the gates of the Celestial Garden. The entire ceremony had run only about an hour late, but Miles's sense of time was inverted from his first whimsical vision of Xanadu as Faerie. He felt as if a hundred years had gone by inside the dome, while only morning had passed in the outside world. He winced painfully in the bright afternoon light, as Vorob'yev's sergeant-driver brought the embassy aircar to their pickup point. Miles fell gratefully into his seat.

I think they're going to have to cut these bloody boots off, when we get back home.

CHAPTER FOUR

'Pull,' Miles said, and set his teeth.

Ivan grasped his boot by the ankle and heel, braced his knee against the end of the couch upon which Miles lay, and yanked dutifully.

'Yeow!'

Ivan stopped. 'Does that hurt?'

'Yes, keep going, dammit.'

Ivan glanced around Miles's personal suite. 'Maybe you ought to go downstairs to the embassy infirmary again.'

'Later. I am not going to let that butcher of a physician dissect my best boots. Pull.'

Ivan put his back into it, and the boot at last came free. He studied it in his hand a moment, and smiled slowly. 'You know, you're not going to be able to get the other one off without me,' he observed.

'So?'

'So . . . give.'

'Give what?'

'Knowing your usual humor, I'd have thought you'd be as amused by the idea of an extra corpse in the funeral chamber as Vorob'yev was, but you came back looking like you'd just seen your grandfather's ghost.'

'The Ba had cut its throat. It was a messy scene.'

'I think you've seen messier corpses.'

Oh, yes. Miles eyed his remaining booted leg, which was throbbing, and pictured himself limping through the corridors of the embassy seeking a less demanding valet. No. He sighed. 'Messier, but no stranger. You'd have twitched too. We met the Ba yesterday, you and I. You wrestled with it in the personnel pod.'

Ivan glanced toward the comconsole desk drawer where the mysterious rod remained concealed, and swore. 'That does it. We've got to report this to Vorob'yev.'

'If it was the same Ba,' Miles put in hastily. 'For all I know, the Cetagandans clone their servants in batches, and the one we saw yesterday was this one's twin or something.'

Ivan hesitated. 'You think so?'

'I don't know, but I know where I can find out. Just let me have one more pass at this, before we send up the flag, please? I've asked Mia Maz from the Vervani embassy to stop in and see me. If you wait . . . I'll let you sit in.'

Ivan contemplated this bribe. 'Boot!' Miles demanded, while he was thinking. Somewhat absently, Ivan helped pull it off.

'All right,' he said at last, 'but after we talk to her, we report to ImpSec.'

'Ivan, I am ImpSec,' snapped Miles. 'Three years of training and field experience, remember? Do me the honor of grasping that I may just possibly know what I'm doing!' I wish to hell I knew what I was doing. Intuition was nothing but the subconscious processing of subliminal clues, he was fairly sure, but I feel it in my bones made too uncomfortably thin a public defense for his actions. How can you know something before you know it? 'Give me a chance.'

Ivan departed for his own room to change clothes without making any promises. Freed of the boots, Miles staggered to his washroom to gulp down some more painkillers, and skin out of his formal House mourning and into loose black fatigues. Judging by the embassy's protocol list, Miles's private chamber was going to be the only place he could wear the fatigues.

Ivan returned all too soon, breezily trim in undress greens, but before he could continue asking questions Miles couldn't answer or demanding justifications Miles couldn't offer, the comconsole chimed. It was the staffer from the embassy's lobby, downstairs.

'Mia Maz is here to see you, Lord Vorkosigan,' the man reported. 'She says she has an appointment.'

'That's correct. Uh . . . can you bring her up here, please?' Was his suite monitored by embassy security? He wasn't about to draw attention by inquiring. But no. If ImpSec were eavesdropping, he'd certainly have had to deal with some stiff interrogation from their offices below-stairs by now, either via Vorob'yev or directly. They were extending him the courtesy of privacy, as yet, in his personal space—though probably not on his comconsole. Every public forum in the building was guaranteed to be bugged, though.

The staffer ushered Maz to Miles's door in a few moments, and Miles and Ivan hastened to get her comfortably seated. She too had stopped to change clothes, and was now wearing a formfitting jump suit and knee-length vest suitable for street wear. Even at forty-odd her form supported the style very nicely. Miles got rid of the staffer by sending him off with an order for tea and, at Ivan's request, wine.

Miles settled down on the other end of the couch and smiled hopefully at the Vervani woman. Ivan was forced offsides to a nearby chair. 'Milady Maz. Thank you for coming.'

'Just Maz, please,' she smiled in return. 'We Vervani don't use such titles. I'm afraid we have trouble taking them seriously.'

'You must be good at keeping a straight face, or you could not function so well here.'

Her dimple winked at him. 'Yes, my lord.'

Ah yes, Vervain was one of those so-called democracies; not quite as insanely egalitarian as the Betans, but they had a definite cultural drift in that direction. 'My mother would agree with you,' Miles conceded. 'She would have seen no inherent difference between the two corpses in the rotunda. Except their method of arriving there, of course. I take it this suicide was an unusual and unexpected event?'

'Unprecedented,' said Maz, 'and if you know Cetagandans, you know just how strong a term that is.'

'So Cetagandan servants do not routinely accompany their masters in death like a pagan sacrifice.'

'I suppose the Ba Lura was unusually close to the Empress, it had served her for so long,' said the Vervani