“Where is the Lady Dallona?” Verkan Vall asked. “From your use of the present tense, I assume you believe her to be still carnate.”
Klarnood looked at Verkan Vall keenly. “That’s a pretty blunt question, Lord Virzal,” he said. “I wish I knew a little more about you. When you and your Assassins started inquiring about the Lady Dallona, I tried to check up on you. I found out that you had come to Darsh from Ghamma on a ship of the family of Zorda, accompanied by Brarnend of Zorda himself. And that’s all I could find out. You claim to be a Venusian planter, and you might be. Any Terran who can handle weapons as you can would have come to my notice long ago. But you have no more ascertainable history than if you’d stepped out of another dimension.”
That was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. In fact, it was the truth. Verkan Vall laughed.
“Well, confidentially,” he said, “I’m from the Arcturus System. I followed the Lady Dallona here from our home planet, and when I have rescued her from among you Solarians, I shall, according to our customs, receive her hand in marriage. As she is the daughter of the Emperor of Arcturus, that’ll be quite a good thing for me.”
Klarnood chuckled. “You know, you’d only have to tell me that about three or four times and I’d start believing it,” he said. “And Dr. Harnosh of Hosh would believe it the first time; he’s been talking to himself ever since the Lady Dallona started her experimental work here. Lord Virzal, I’m going to take a chance on you. The Lady Dallona is still carnate, or was four days ago, and the same for Dirzed. They both went into hiding after the discarnation feast of Garnon of Roxor, to escape the enmity of the Statisticalists. Two days after they disappeared, Dirzed called Assassins’ Hall and reported this, but told us nothing more. I suppose, in about three or four days, I could reestablish contact with him. We want the public to think that the Statisticalists made away with the Lady Dallona, at least until the election’s over.”
Verkan Vall nodded. “I was pretty sure that was the situation,” he said. “It may be that they will get in touch with me; if they don’t, I’ll need your help in reaching them.”
“Why do you think the Lady Dallona will try to reach you?”
“She needs all the help she can get. She knows she can get plenty from me. Why do you think I interrupted my search for her, and risked my carnate existence, to fight those people over a matter of verbalisms and political propaganda?” Verkan Vall went to the newscast visiplate and snapped it on. “We’ll see if I’m getting results, yet.”
The plate lighted, and a handsome young man in a gold-laced green suit was speaking out of it:
“… where he is heavily guarded by Assassins. However, in an exclusive interview with representatives of this service, the Assassin Hirzif, one of the two who seconded the men the Lord Virzal fought, said that in his opinion all of the three were so outclassed as to have had no chance whatever, and that he had already refused an offer of ten thousand System Monetary Units to discarnate the Lord Virzal for the Statisticalist Party. ‘When I want to discarnate,’ Hirzif the Assassin said, ‘I’ll invite in my friends and do it properly; until I do, I wouldn’t go up against the Lord Virzal of Verkan for ten million S.M.U.’ ”
Verkan Vall snapped off the visiplate. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I fought those politicians just for the advertising. If Dallona and Dirzed are anywhere near a visiplate, they’ll know how to reach me.”
“Hirzif shouldn’t have talked about refusing that retainer,” Klarnood frowned. “That isn’t good Assassin ethics. Why, yes, Lord Virzal; that was cleverly planned. It ought to get results. But I wish you’d get the Lady Dallona out of Darsh, and preferably off Terra, as soon as you can. We’ve benefited by this, so far, but I shouldn’t like to see things go much further. A real civil war could develop out of this situation, and I don’t want that. Call on me for help; I’ll give you a code word to use at Assassins’ Hall.”
A real civil war was developing even as Klarnood spoke; by midmorning of the next day, the fighting that had been partially suppressed by the Constabulary had broken out anew. The Assassins employed by the Solar Hotel—heavily reinforced during the night—had fought a pitched battle with Statisticalist partisans on the landing stage above Verkan Vall’s suite, and now several Constabulary airboats were patrolling around the building. The rule on Constabulary interference seemed to be that while individuals had an unquestionable right to shoot out their differences among themselves, any fighting likely to endanger nonparticipants was taboo.
Just how successful in enforcing this rule the Constabulary were was open to some doubt. Ever since arising, Verkan Vall had heard the crash of small arms and the hammering of automatic weapons in other parts of the towering city unit. There hadn’t been a civil war on the Akor-Neb Sector for over five centuries, he knew, but then, Hadron Dalla, Doctor of Psychic Science, and intertemporal trouble-carrier extraordinary, had only been on this sector for a little under a year. If anything, he was surprised that the explosion had taken so long to occur.
One of the servants furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic.
“Lord Virzal, there is a masked Assassin in the hallway who brought this under Assassins’
