Cetaganda

same? '… let me see you again?'

'I don't . . . know.' Reminded, her hand drifted to the control on her float-chair for the concealing force- screen.

No, no, don't go. … 'We must have some way of communicating,' he said hastily, before she could disappear again behind that faintly humming barrier.

Her head tilted, considering this. She drew a small comm link from her robes. It was undecorated, utilitarian, but like the nerve disruptor he'd taken from Ba Lura perfectly designed in what Miles was beginning to recognize as the haut style. She whispered a command into it. In a moment, the androgynous ba appeared from its guard post beside the pond. Did its eyes widen just slightly, to see its mistress without her shell?

'Give me your comm link, and wait outside,' haut Rian Degtiar ordered.

The little ba nodded, and turned the device over to her without question, and withdrew silently.

She held the comm link out to Miles. 'I use this to communicate with my senior servitors, when they run errands outside the Celestial Garden for me. Here.'

He wanted to touch her, but scarcely dared. He instead extended his cupped hands toward her like a shy man offering flowers to a goddess. She dropped the comm link into them gingerly, as into the hands of a leper. Or an enemy.

'Is it secured?' he dared to ask.

'Temporarily.'

In other words, it was the lady's private line only as long as no one in higher-level Cetagandan security troubled to break in. Right. He sighed. 'It won't work. You can't send signals into my embassy without causing my superiors to ask a whole lot of questions I'd rather not answer just now. And I can't give you my comm link either. I'm supposed to turn it in, and I don't think I can get away with telling them I lost it.' Reluctantly, he handed the link back to her. 'But we have to meet again somehow.' Yes, oh yes. 'If I'm going to be risking my reputation and maybe my life on the validity of my reasoning, I'd like to prop it up with a few facts.' One fact was almost certain. Someone with enough wit and nerve to murder one of the most senior Imperial servitors under the nose of Cetaganda's own emperor would hardly balk at threatening a decidedly un-senior female Degtiar. The thought was obscene, hideous. A Barrayaran scion's diplomatic immunity would be an even more useless shield, no doubt, but that was merely the price of the game. 'I think you could be in grave danger. It might be better to play along for a bit—don't reveal to anyone you have obtained this key from me. I have a funny feeling I'm not following his script, y'see.' He paced nervously back and forth before her. 'If you can find out anything at all about Ba Lura's real activities in the few days before it died—don't run afoul of your own security, though. They have to be following up on the Ba's death.'

'I will . . . contact you when and how I can, Barrayaran.' Slowly, one pale hand caressed the control pad on the arm of the float-chair, and a dim gray mist coalesced around her like a fairy spell of seeming.

The ba servitor returned to the pavilion to escort not Miles but its mistress away. Miles was left to stumble back through the dark to Yenaro's estate alone.

It was raining.

Miles was not surprised to find that the ghem-woman was no longer waiting on the bench by the red- enameled gate. He let himself in quietly, and paused just outside the lighted garden doors to brush as many of the water droplets as possible off his formal blacks, and to wipe his face. He then sacrificed the handkerchief to the redemption of his boots, and quietly dropped the sodden object behind a bush. He slipped back inside.

No one noticed his entry. The party was continuing, a little louder, with a few new faces replacing some of the previous ones. The Cetagandans did not use alcohol for inebriation, but some of the guests had a late-party dissociated air about them similar to over-indulgers Miles had witnessed at home. If intelligent conversation had been difficult before, it was clearly hopeless now. He felt himself no better off than the ghemlings, drunk on information, dizzy with intrigue. Everyone to their own secret addictions, I suppose. He wanted to collect Ivan and escape, as swiftly as possible, before his head exploded.

'Ah, there you are, Lord Vorkosigan.' Lord Yenaro appeared at Miles's elbow, looking faintly anxious. 'I could not find you.'

'I took a long walk with a lady,' Miles said. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. 'Where is my cousin?'

'Lord Vorpatril is taking a tour of the house with Lady Arvan and Lady Benello,' said Yenaro. He glanced through a wide archway at the room's opposite side, which framed a spiral staircase in a hall beyond. 'They've been gone … an astonishingly long time.' Yenaro's smile attempted to be knowing, but came out oddly puzzled. 'Since before you … I don't quite . . . ah, well. Would you care for a drink?'

'Yes, please,' said Miles distractedly. He took it from Yenaro's hand and gulped without hesitation. His eyes almost crossed, considering the possibilities of Ivan plus two beautiful ghem-women. Though to his haut- dazzled senses, all the ghem-women in the room looked as coarse and dull as backcountry slatterns just now. The effect would wear off with time, he hoped. He dreaded the thought of his own next encounter with a mirror. What had the haut Rian Degtiar seen, looking at him? A simian black-clad gnome, twitching and babbling? He pulled up a chair and sat rather abruptly, the spiral staircase bracketed in his sights. Ivan, hurry up!

Yenaro lingered by his side, and began a disjointed conversation about proportional theories of architecture through history, art and the senses, and the natural esters trade on Barrayar, but Miles swore the man was as focused on the staircase as he was. Miles finished his first drink and most of a second before Ivan appeared in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

Ivan hesitated in the dimness, his hand checking the fit of his green uniform, which appeared fully assembled. Or re-assembled. He was alone. He descended with one hand clutching the curving rail, which floated without apparent support in echo of the stair's arc. He jerked a stiff frown into a stiff smile before entering the main room and the light. His head swiveled till he spotted Miles, toward whom he made a straight line.

'Lord Vorpatril,' Yenaro greeted him. 'You had a long tour. Did you see everything?'

Ivan bared his teeth. 'Everything. Even the light.'

Yenaro's smile did not slip, but his eyes seemed to fill with questions. 'I'm … so glad.' A guest called to him from across the room, and Yenaro was momentarily distracted.

Ivan bent down to whisper behind his hand into Miles's ear, 'Get us the hell out of here. I think I've been poisoned.'

Miles looked up, startled. 'D'you want to call down the lightflyer?'

'No. Just back to the embassy in the groundcar.'

'But—'

'No, dammit,' Ivan hissed. 'Just quietly. Before that smirking bastard goes upstairs.' He nodded toward

Yenaro, who was now standing at the foot of the staircase, gazing upward.

'I take it you don't think it is acute.'

'Oh, it was cute all right,' Ivan snarled.

'You didn't murder anybody up there, did you?'

'No. But I thought they'd never . . . Tell you in the car.' *

'You'd better.' Miles clambered to his feet. They perforce had to pass Yenaro, who attached himself to them like a good host, and saw them to his front door with suitably polite farewells. Ivan's good-byes might have been etched in acid.

As soon as the canopy sealed over their heads, Miles commanded, 'Give, Ivan!'

Ivan settled back, still seething. 'I was set up.'

This comes as a surprise to you, coz? 'By Lady Arvan and Lady Benello?'

'They were the setup. Yenaro was behind it, I'm sure of it. You're right about that damned fountain being a trap, Miles, I see it now. Beauty as bait, all over again.'

'What happened to you?'

'You know all those rumors about Cetagandan aphrodisiacs?'

'Yes . . .'

'Well, sometime this evening that son-of-a-bitch Yenaro slipped me an anti-aphrodisiac.'