Mirror Dance

“So here you are after all—Lord Vorkosigan,” murmured Gregor.

“Just Lord Mark,” Mark pleaded hastily. “I’m not Lord Vorkosigan till Miles is, is …” the Countess’s searing phrase came back to him, “dead and rotted. This doesn’t mean anything. The Count and Countess wanted it. It didn’t seem like the time to give them static.”

“That’s so.” Gregor smiled sadly. “Thank you for that. How are you doing yourself?”

Gregor was the first person ever to ask after him instead of the Count. Mark blinked. But then, Gregor could get the real medical bulletins on his Prime Minister’s condition hourly, if he wanted them. “All right, I guess,” he shrugged. “Compared to everybody else, anyway.”

“Mm,” said Gregor. “You haven’t used your comm card.” At Mark’s bewildered look he added gently, “I didn’t give it to you for a souvenir.”

“I … I haven’t done you any favors that would allow me to presume upon you, sir.”

“Your family has established a credit account with the Imperium of nearly infinite depth. You can draw on it, you know.”

“I haven’t asked for anything.”

“I know. Honorable, but stupid. You may fit right in here yet.”

“I don’t want any favors.”

“Many new businesses start with borrowed capital. They pay it back later, with interest.”

“I tried that once,” said Mark bitterly. “I borrowed the Dendarii Mercenaries, and bankrupted myself.”

“Hm.” Gregor’s smile twisted. He glanced up, beyond Mark, at the throng no-doubt backing up in the antechamber. “We’ll talk again. Enjoy your dinner.” His nod became the Emperor’s formal dismissal.

Mark creaked to his feet, saluted properly, and withdrew back to where the Countess waited for him.

Chapter Seventeen

At the conclusion of the lengthy and tedious taxation ceremony, the Residence’s staff served a banquet to a thousand people, spread through several chambers according to rank. Mark found himself dining just downstream from Gregor’s own table. The wine and elaborate food gave him an excuse not to chat much with his neighbors. He chewed and sipped as slowly as possible. He still managed to end up uncomfortably overfed and dizzy from alcohol poisoning, till he noticed the Countess was making it through all the toasts by merely wetting her lips. He copied her strategy. He wished he’d noticed sooner, but at least he was able to walk and not crawl from the table afterwards, and the room only spun a little.

It could have been worse. I could have had to make it through all this while simultaneously pretending to be Miles Vorkosigan.

The Countess led him to a ballroom with a polished marquetry floor, which had been cleared for dancing, though no one was dancing yet. A live human orchestra, all men in Imperial Service uniforms, was arrayed in one corner. At the moment only a half dozen of its musicians were playing, a sort of preliminary chamber music. Long doors on one side of the room opened to the cool night air of a promenade. Mark noted them for future escape purposes. It would be an unutterable relief to be alone in the dark right now. He was even beginning to miss his cabin back aboard the Peregrine.

“Do you dance?” he asked the Countess.

“Only once tonight.”

The explanation unfolded shortly when Emperor Gregor appeared, and with his usual serious smile led Countess Vorkosigan out onto the floor to officially open the dance. On the music’s first repeat other couples began to join them. The Vor dances seemed to tend to the formal and slow, with couples arranged in complex groups rather than couples alone, and with far too many precise moves to memorize. Mark found it vaguely allegorical of how things were done here.

Thus stripped of his escort and protectress, Mark fled to a side chamber where the volume of the music was filtered to background level. Buffet tables with yet more food and drink lined one wall. For a moment, he longingly considered the attraction of anesthetic drinking. Blurred oblivion … Right, sure. Get publicly drunk, and then, no doubt, get publicly sick. Just what the Countess needed. He was halfway there already.

Instead he retreated to a window embrasure. His surly presence seemed enough to claim it against all comers. He leaned against the wall in the shadows, folded his arms, and set himself grimly to endure. Maybe he could persuade the Countess to take him home early, after her one dance. But she seemed to be working the crowd. For all that she appeared relaxed, social, cheerful, he hadn’t heard a single word out of her mouth tonight that didn’t serve her goals. So much self-control in one so secretly strained was almost disturbing.

His grim mood darkened further, as he brooded on the meaning of that empty cryo-chamber. ImpSec can’t be everywhere, the Countess had once said. Dammit … ImpSec was supposed to be all-seeing. That was the intended implication of the sinister silver Horus-eye insignia on Illyan’s collar. Was ImpSec’s reputation just propaganda?

One thing was certain. Miles hadn’t removed himself from that cryo-chamber. Whether or not Miles was rotted, disintegrated, or still frozen, a witness or witnesses must exist, somewhere. A thread, a string, a hook, a connection, a trail of bloody breadcrumbs, something. I believe it’s going to kill me if there isn’t. There had to be something.

“Lord Mark?” said a light voice.

He raised his eyes from blind contemplation of his boots to find himself facing a lovely cleavage, framed in raspberry pink gauze with white lace trim. Delicate line of collarbone, smooth swelling curves, and ivory skin made an almost abstract sculpture, a tilted topological landscape. He imagined himself shrunk to insect size, marching across those soft hills and valleys, barefoot—

“Lord Mark?” she repeated, less certainly.

He tilted his head back, hoping the shadows concealed the embarrassed flush in his cheeks, and managed at least the courtesy of eye contact. I can’t help it, it’s my height. Sorry. Her face was equally rewarding to the eye: electric blue eyes, curving lips. Short loose ash-blonde curls wreathed her head. As seemed the custom for young women, tiny pink flowers were braided into it, sacrificing their little vegetable lives for her evening’s brief glory. However, her hair was too short to hold them successfully, and several were on the verge of falling out.

“Yes?” It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, “Lady—?”

“Oh,” she smiled, “I’m not Lady anything. I’m Kareen Koudelka.”

His brow wrinkled. “Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?” A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan’s senior staff officers. Galen’s list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.

“He’s my father,” she said proudly.

“Uh … is he here?” Mark asked nervously.

The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. “No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute.”

“Ah.” To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren’t because of the Prime Minister’s condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he’d trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan’s support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.

“You really don’t look quite like Miles,” she said, studying him with a critical eye—he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it—”your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?”

She does not know, he realized with a kind of horror. Doesn’t know Miles is dead, doesn’t know I killed him. “No,” he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, “Were you in love with him too?”

“Me?” She laughed. “I haven’t a chance. I have three older sisters, and they’re all