They were following a wide beaten path through the grey-green woods, up the slope out of the crater's bowl.
'I wanted to apologize for questioning you under drugs. I know it offended you deeply. Need drove me. It was a military necessity.'
'You have nothing to apologize for.' She glanced back at Illyan. I must know … 'Quite literally nothing, I eventually realized.'
He was silent. 'I see,' he said at last. 'You are very acute.'
'On the contrary, I am very baffled.'
He swung to face Illyan. 'Lieutenant, I crave a boon from you. I wish a few minutes alone with this lady to discuss a very personal matter.'
'I shouldn't, sir. You know that.'
'I once asked her to marry me. She never gave me her answer. If I give you my word that we will discuss nothing but what touches on that, may we have a few moments' privacy?'
'Oh …' Illyan frowned. 'Your word, sir?'
'My word. As Vorkosigan.'
'Well—I guess it's all right then.' Illyan seated himself glumly on a fallen log to wait, and they walked on up the path.
They came out, at the top, on a familiar promontory overlooking the crater, the very spot where Vorkosigan had planned the repossession of his ship, so long ago. They seated themselves on the ground, watching the activity of the camp made silent by distance.
'Time was you would never have done that,' Cordelia observed. 'Pledged your word falsely.'
'Times change.'
'Nor lied to me.'
'That is so.'
'Nor shot a man out of hand for crimes he didn't participate in.'
'It wasn't out of hand. He had a summary court-martial first. And it did get things straightened around in a hurry. Anyway, it will satisfy the Interstellar Judiciary's commission. I'll have them on my hands too, come tomorrow. Investigating prisoner abuses.'
'I think you're getting blood-glutted. Individual lives are losing their meaning for you.'
'Yes. There have been so many. It's nearly time to quit.' Expression was deadened in his face and words.
'How did the Emperor buy you for that—extraordinary assassination? You of all men. Was it your idea? Or his?'
He did not evade, or deny. 'His idea, and Negri's. I am but his agent.'
His fingers pulled gently on the grass stems, breaking them off delicately one by one. 'He didn't come out with it directly. First he asked me to take command of the Escobar invasion. He started with a bribe—the viceroyalty of this planet, in fact, when it's colonized. I turned him down. Then he tried a threat, said he'd throw me to Grishnov, let him have me up for treason, and no Imperial pardon. I told him to go to hell, not in so many words. That was a bad moment, between us. Then he apologized. Called me Lord Vorkosigan. He called me Captain when he wished to be offensive. Then he called in Captain Negri, with a file that didn't even have a name, and the playacting stopped.
'Reason. Logic. Argument. Evidence. We sat in that green silk room in the Imperial Residence at Vorbarr Sultana one whole mortal week, the Emperor and Negri and I, going over it, while Illyan kicked his heels in the hall, studying the Emperor's art collection. You are correct in your deduction about Illyan, by the way. He knows nothing about the real purpose of the invasion.
'You saw the Prince, briefly. I may add that you saw him at his best. Vorrutyer may have been his teacher once, but the Prince surpassed him some time ago. But if only he had had some saving notion of political service, I think his father would have forgiven him even his vilest personal vices.
'He was not balanced, and he surrounded himself with men whose interests lay in making him even less balanced. A true nephew of his Uncle Yuri. Grishnov meant to rule Barrayar through him when he came to the throne. On his own—Grishnov would have been willing to wait, I think—the Prince had engineered two assassination attempts on his father in the last eighteen months.'
Cordelia whistled soundlessly. 'I almost begin to see. But why not just put him out of the way quietly? Surely the Emperor and your Captain Negri could have managed it between them, if anyone could.'
'The idea was discussed. God help me, I even volunteered to lend myself to it, as an alternative to this— bloodbath.'
He paused. 'The Emperor is dying. He has run out of time to wait for the problem to solve itself. It's become an obsession with him, to try to leave his house in order.
'The problem is the Prince's son. He's only four. Sixteen years is a long time for a Regency government. With the Prince dead Grishnov and the whole Ministerial party would just slide right into the power vacuum, if they were left intact.
'It was not enough to kill the Prince. The Emperor felt he had to destroy the whole war party, so effectively that it would not rise again for another generation. So first there was me, bitching about the strategic problems with Escobar. Then the information about the plasma mirrors came through Negri's own intelligence network. Military intelligence didn't have it. Then me again, with the news that surprise had been lost. Do you know, he suppressed part of that, too? It could only be a disaster. And then there was Grishnov, and the war party, and the Prince, all crying for glory. He had only to step aside and let them rush to their doom.' Grass was being pulled up in bunches now.
'It all fit so well, there was a hypnotizing fascination to it. But chancy. There was even a possibility, leaving events to themselves, that everyone might be killed but the Prince. I was placed where I was to see the script was followed. Goading the Prince, making sure he got to the front lines at the right time. Hence that little scene you witnessed in my cabin. I never lost my temper. I was just putting another nail in the coffin.'
'I suppose I can see why the other agent was—the chief surgeon?'
'Quite.'
'Lovely.'
'Isn't it, though.' He lay back on the grass, looking through the turquoise sky. 'I couldn't even be an honest assassin. Do you recall me saying I wanted to go into politics? I believe I'm cured of that ambition.'
'What about Vorrutyer? Were you supposed to get him killed, too?'
'No. In the original script he was cast as the scapegoat. It would have been his part, after the disaster, to apologize to the Emperor for the mess, in the full old Japanese sense of the phrase, as part of the general collapse of the war party. For all he was the Prince's spiritual advisor, I did not envy him his future. All the while he was riding me, I could see the ground crumbling away beneath his feet. It baffled him. He always used to be able to make me lose my temper. It was great sport for him, when we were younger. He couldn't understand why he'd lost his touch.' His eyes remained focused somewhere in the high blue emptiness, not meeting hers.
'For what it's worth to you, his death just then saved a great many lives. He would have tried to continue the fight much longer, to save his political skin. That was the price that bought me, in the end. I thought, if only I were in the right place at the right time, I could do a better job of running the pullout than anyone else on the General Staff.'
'So we are, all of us, just Ezar Vorbarra's tools,' said Cordelia slowly, belly-sick. 'Me and my convoy, you, the Escobarans—even old Vorrutyer. So much for patriotic hoopla and righteous wrath. All a charade.'
'That's right.'
'It makes me feel very cold. Was the Prince really that bad?'
'There was no doubt of it. I shall not sicken you with the details of Negri's reports … But the Emperor said if it wasn't done now, we would all be trying to do it ourselves, five or ten years down the road, and probably botching the job and getting all our friends killed, in a full-scale planet-wide civil war. He's seen two, in his lifetime. That was the nightmare that haunted him. A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.
'The Emperor spares himself nothing. Reads the reports over and over—he had them all nearly word- perfect. This wasn't something undertaken lightly, or casually. Wrongly, perhaps, but not lightly. He didn't want him
