Cetaganda

charged with transporting the precious object, loses the Great Key to some outlander barbarians, confesses its disgrace to its mistress, and kills itself in expiation. Wrap. Miles felt ill. 'So … if the key was that important, why wasn't the Ba traveling with a squadron of Imperial ghem-guards?'

'God Miles, I wish it had been!'

A firm knock sounded on Miles's door. Miles hastily shut down the comconsole and unsealed the door lock. 'Come in.'

Ambassador Vorob'yev entered, and favored him with a semi-cordial nod. He held a sheaf of delicately colored, scented papers in his hand.

'Hello, my lords. Did you find your tutorial with Maz useful?'

'Yes, sir,' said Miles.

'Good. I thought you would. She's excellent.' Vorobyev held up the colored papers. 'While you were in session, this invitation arrived for you both, from Lord Yenaro. Along with assorted profound apologies for last night's incident. Embassy security has opened, scanned, and chemically analyzed it. They report the organic esters harmless.' With this safety pronouncement, he handed the papers across to Miles. 'It is up to you, whether or not to accept. If you concur that the unfortunate side-effect of the sculpture's power field was an accident, your attendance might be a good thing. It would complete the apology, repairing face all around.'

'Oh, we'll go, sure.' The apology and invitation were hand-calligraphed in the best Cetagandan style. 'But I'll keep my eyes open. Ah . . . wasn't Colonel Vorreedi due back today?'

Vorob'yev grimaced. 'He's run into some tedious complications. But in view of that odd incident at the Marilacan embassy, I've sent a subordinate to replace him. He should be back tomorrow. Perhaps … do you wish a bodyguard? Not openly, of course, that would be another insult.'

'Mm . . . we'll have a driver, right? Let him be one of your trained men, have backup on call, give us both comm links, and have him wait for us nearby.'

'Very well, Lord Vorkosigan. I'll make arrangements,' Vorob'yev nodded. 'And . . . regarding the incident in the rotunda earlier today—'

Miles's heart pounded. 'Yes?'

'Please don't break ranks like that again.'

'Did you receive a complaint?' And from whom?

'One learns to interpret certain pained looks. The Cetagandans would consider it impolite to protest—but should unpleasant incidents pile high enough, not too impolite for them to take some sort of indirect and arcane retaliation. You two will be gone in ten days, but I will still be here. Please don't make my job any more difficult than it already is, eh?'

'Understood, sir,' said Miles brightly. Ivan was looking intensely worried—was he going to bolt, pour out confessions to Vorob'yev? Not yet, evidently, for the ambassador waved himself back out without Ivan throwing himself at his feet.

'Nearby doesn't cut it, for a bodyguard,' Ivan pointed out, as soon as the door sealed again.

'Oh, you're beginning to see it my way now, are you? But if we go to Yenaro's at all, I can't avoid risk. I have to eat, drink, and breathe—all routes for attack an armed guard can't do much about. Anyway, my greatest defense is that it would be a grievous insult to the Cetagandan emperor for anyone to seriously harm a galactic delegate to his august mother's funeral. I predict, should another accident occur, it will be equally subtle and non- fatal.' And equally infuriating.

'Oh, yeah? When there's been one fatality already?' Ivan stood silent for a long time. 'Do you think . . . all these incidents could possibly be related?' Ivan nodded toward the perfumed papers still in Miles's hand, and toward the comconsole desk drawer. 'I admit, I don't see how.'

'Do you think they could possibly all be unrelated coincidences?'

'Hm.' Ivan frowned, digesting this. 'So tell me,' he pointed again to the desk drawer, 'how are you planning to get rid of the Empress's dildo?'

Miles's mouth twitched, stifling a grin at the Ivan-diplomatic turn of phrase. 'I can't tell you.' Mostly because I don't know yet myself. But the haut Rian Degtiar had to be scrambling, right now. He fingered, as if absently, the silver eye-of-Horus ImpSec insignia pinned to his black collar. 'There's a lady's reputation involved.'

Ivan's eyes narrowed in scorn of this obvious appeal to Ivan's own brand of personal affairs. 'Horseshit. Are you running some kind of secret rig for Simon Illyan?'

'If I were, I couldn't tell you, now could I?'

'Damned if I know.' Ivan stared at him in frustration for another moment, then shrugged. 'Well, it's your funeral.'

CHAPTER FIVE

'Stop here,' Miles instructed the groundcar's driver. The car swung smoothly to the side of the street and with a sigh of its fans settled to the pavement. Miles peered at the layout of Lord Yenaro's suburban mansion in the gathering dusk, mentally pairing the visual reality with the map he had studied back at the Barrayaran embassy.

The barriers around the estate, serpentine garden walls and concealing landscaping, were visual and symbolic rather than effective. The place had never been designed as a fortress of anything but privilege. A few higher sections of the rambling house glimmered through the trees, but even they seemed to focus inward rather than outward.

'Comm link check, my lords?' the driver requested. Miles and Ivan both pulled the devices from their pockets and ran through the codes with him. 'Very good, my lords.'

'What's our backup?' Miles asked him.

'I have three units, arranged within call.'

'I trust we've included a medic.'

'In the lightflyer, fully equipped. I can put him down inside Lord Yenaro's courtyard in forty-five seconds.'

'That should be sufficient. I don't expect a frontal assault. But I wouldn't be surprised if I encountered another little 'accident' of some sort. We'll walk from here, I think. I want to get the feel of the place.'

'Yes, my lord.' The driver popped the canopy for them, and Miles and Ivan exited.

'Is this what you call genteel poverty?' Ivan inquired, looking around as they strolled through open, unguarded gates and up Yenaro's curving drive.

Ah yes. The style might be different, but the scent of aristocratic decay was universal. Little signs of neglect were all around: unrepaired damage to the gates and walls, overgrown shrubbery, what appeared to be three-quarters of the mansion dark and closed-off.

'Vorob'yev had the embassy's ImpSec office make a background check of Lord Yenaro,' Miles said. 'Yenaro's grandfather, the failed ghem-general, left him the house but not the means to keep it up, having consumed his capital in his extended and presumably embittered old age. Yenaro's been in sole possession for about four years. He runs with an artsy crowd of young and unemployed ghem-lordlings, so his story holds up to that extent. But that thing in the Marilacan embassy's lobby was the first sculpture Yenaro's ever been known to produce. Curiously advanced, for a first try, don't you think?'

'If you're so convinced it was a trap, why are you sticking your hand in to try and trip another one?'

'No risk, no reward, Ivan.'

'Just what reward are you envisioning?'

'Truth. Beauty. Who knows? Embassy security is also running a check on the workmen who actually built the sculpture. I expect it to be revealing.'