She felt cold, and dry, and vanishingly small. 'I'm afraid I'll have to leave that to the Infinitely Merciful. You exceed my capacity.'
'Later in the week,' he promised, mistaking her defeat for flippancy, and clearly excited by what he took for a continued show of resistance.
Sergeant Bothari had been mooning around the room, head moving from side to side and narrow jaw working, as Cordelia had seen it once before, a sign of agitation. Vorrutyer, intent on Cordelia, paid no attention to the movements behind him. So his moment of utter astonishment was very brief when the Sergeant grabbed him by his curly hair, yanked his head back, and drew the jeweled knife most expertly around his neck, slicing through all four of the major vessels in a swift double movement. The blood spurted over Cordelia in a fountain, horribly hot and flowing.
Vorrutyer gave one convulsive twist and lost consciousness as the blood pressure in his brain fell to nothing. Sergeant Bothari let go of the hair, and Vorrutyer dropped between her legs and slithered down out of sight over the end of the bed.
The Sergeant stood hulkingly, breathing heavily, by the end of the bed. Cordelia could not remember if she'd screamed. No matter, odds were no one paid much attention to screams coming out of this room anyway. She felt frozen and bloodless in her hands, face, feet; her heart hammered.
She cleared her throat. 'Uh, thank you, Sergeant Bothari. That was a very, uh, knightly deed. Do you suppose you could unbuckle me, too?' Her voice squeaked uncontrollably, and she swallowed, irritated at it.
She regarded Bothari with terrorized fascination. There was absolutely no way of predicting what he might do next. Muttering to himself, with a look of bewilderment on his face, he fumbled apart the buckle on her left wrist. Swiftly, stiffly, she rolled over and loosed the right wrist, then sat up and undid the ankles. She sat cross—legged a moment in the center of the bed, stark naked and dripping with blood, rubbing ankles and wrists and trying to get her paralyzed brain into motion.
'Clothes. Clothes,' she muttered to herself. She peeked over the end of the bed at the crumpled form of the late Admiral Vorrutyer, pants about his ankles and his last look of surprise frozen on his face. The great brown eyes had lost their liquid glow, and were already beginning to film over.
She slipped out of the side of the bed away from Bothari and began searching frantically through the metal drawers and cupboards that lined the room. A couple of the drawers contained his toy collection, and she shut them hastily, nauseated, finally understanding what he'd meant by his last words. The man's taste in perversions had certainly had remarkable scope. Some uniforms, all with too much yellow insignia. At last she found a set of plain black fatigues. She wiped the blood from her body with a soft dressing gown, and flung them on.
Sergeant Bothari meanwhile had sat on the floor, curled up with his head resting on his knees, talking under his breath. She knelt beside him. Was he starting to hallucinate? She had to get him to his feet, and out of here. They could not count on being undiscovered much longer. Yet where could they hide? Or was it adrenaline, not reason, that demanded flight? Was there a better option?
As she hesitated, the door slammed suddenly open. She cried out for the first time. But the man standing white—faced in the aperture with the plasma arc in his hand was Vorkosigan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She sighed shakily at the sight of him, and the paralyzing panic streamed out of her in that long breath. 'My God, you almost gave me heart failure,' she managed in a small tight voice. 'Come in, and close the door.'
His lips moved silently around the shape of her name, and he entered, a sudden panic in his face almost matching her own. Then she saw he was followed by another officer, a lieutenant with brown hair and a bland puppy face. So she did not fling herself upon him and shriek into his shoulder, as she passionately wished, but said instead cautiously, 'There's been an accident.'
'Close the door, Illyan,' said Vorkosigan to the lieutenant. His features became tightly controlled as the young man came even with him. 'You're going to have to witness this with the greatest attention.'
His lips pressed to a white slit, Vorkosigan walked slowly around the room, noting the details, some of which he pointed out silently to his companion. The lieutenant said, 'Er, ah,' at the first gesture, which was with the plasma arc. Vorkosigan stopped before the body, looked at the weapon in his hand as though seeing it for the first time, and put it in its holster.
'Been reading the Marquis again, have you?' he addressed the corpse with a sigh. He turned it over with the toe of his boot, and a little more blood ran out of the meaty slice in its neck. 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' He glanced up at Cordelia. 'Which of you should I congratulate?'
She moistened her lips. 'I'm not sure. How annoyed is everyone going to be about this?'
The lieutenant was going through Vorrutyer's drawers and cupboards also, using a handkerchief to open them, and from his expression finding that his cosmopolitan education was not so complete as he had supposed. He remained staring for a long time into the drawer that Cordelia had shut so hastily.
'The Emperor, for one, will be delighted,' said Vorkosigan. 'But—strictly in private.'
'In fact, I was tied up at the time. Sergeant Bothari, uh, did the honors.'
Vorkosigan glanced at Bothari, still sitting curled up on the floor. 'Hm.' He gazed around the room one last time. 'There's something about this that reminds me forcibly of that remarkable scene when we broke into my engine room. It has your personal signature. My grandmother had a phrase for it—something about late, and a dollar …'
'A day late and a dollar short?' suggested Cordelia involuntarily.
'Yes, that was it.' He bit an ironic twist from his lips. 'A very Betan remark—I begin to see why.' His face maintained a mask of cool neutrality, but his eyes searched her in secret agony. 'Was I, ah, short?'
'Not at all,' she reassured him. 'You're, um, very timely. I was just dithering around in a panic, wondering what to do next.'
He was facing away from Illyan, and a quickly suppressed grin crinkled his eyes briefly. 'It seems I am rescuing my fleet from you, then,' he murmured between his teeth. 'Not exactly what I had in mind when I came up here, but I'm glad to rescue something.' He raised his voice. 'As soon as you're done, Illyan, I suggest we adjourn to my cabin for further discussion.'
Vorkosigan knelt by Bothari, studying him. 'That bloody bastard has about ruined him again,' he growled. 'He was almost well, after his time with me. Sergeant Bothari,' he said more gently, 'can you walk a little way with me?'
Bothari muttered something unintelligible into his knees.
'Come here, Cordelia,' said Vorkosigan. It was the first time she had heard her first name in his mouth. 'See if you can get him up. I don't think I'd better touch him, just now.'
She got down into the line of his sight. 'Bothari. Bothari, look at me. You've got to get up, and walk a little way.' She took his blood-coated hand, and tried to think of a line of reason, or more likely unreason, that might reach him. She tried a smile. 'Look. See? You're washed in blood. Blood washes away sin, right? You're going to be all right now. Uh, the bad man is gone, and in a little while the bad voices will go away too. So you come along with me, and I'll take you where you can rest.'
During this speech he gradually focused on her, and at the end he nodded, and stood. Still holding his hand, she followed Vorkosigan out, Illyan bringing up the rear. She hoped her psychological band-aid would hold; an alarm of any sort might touch him off like a bomb.
She was astonished when Vorkosigan's cabin proved to be just one door down, across the corridor.
'Are you captain of this ship?' she asked. His collar tabs, now that she got a better look at them, proclaimed him a commodore now. 'Were you here all the time?'
'No, I'm on the Staff. My courier just got in from the front a few hours ago. I've been in conference with Admiral Vorhalas and the Prince ever since. It just broke up. I came up straight away when the guard told me about Vorrutyer's new prisoner. You—in my foulest nightmare, I never dreamed it might be you.'
Vorkosigan's cabin seemed tranquil as a monk's cell compared to the carnage they had left across the hall. Everything regulation, a proper soldier's room. Vorkosigan locked the door behind them. He rubbed his face and sighed, drinking her in. 'Are you sure you're all right?'
