there in Zanshaa High City that’s worth selling your sister to PJ Ngeni?”
Roland’s chin lifted. “We’re playing for our proper place in the order of the empire,” he said. “What else is worth the game?” His mild brown eyes rose to gaze at Martinez. “And what about yourself, Gare? I haven’t noticed that you’re free of ambition.You devised this sham engagement in part to benefit yourself—and now it’s Walpurga who pays when it goes wrong.”
Fury blazed in Martinez’s blood. He took another step toward Roland and raised a fist.
Roland made no move, and he regarded Martinez with a kind of dispassionate, studious interest. Then Martinez turned to Walpurga, and he slowly lowered the fist.
“I’m not going to fight for you if you won’t,” he said.
Walpurga said nothing, just turned to Roland. “Make the call,” she said.
“You’re all insane!” Martinez offered, and stormed from the room.
He bounded up the stairs to his room, still humid with the scent of hops, and stalked for a long moment in a tight angry circuit at the foot of his bed. Then he raised his arm and triggered the comm display.
“Urgent to Lieutenant Lord Nikkul Shankaracharya,” he said. “This is Captain Martinez. You are to contact me immediately.”
The answering call came in a few minutes, and it was from Sempronia. Her narrowed eyes looked at him from out of the sleeve display.
“Too late,” she said.
“It’s not,” Martinez said. “Your arrangement with PJ was a joke—no one ever intended for you to go through with it. I don’t care what you do with Shankaracharya, and maybe even PJ doesn’t—but now that you’ve run off, Walpurga is actually going to have to go through withyour marriage .”
Sempronia gave a contemptuous little puff of anger through pursed lips. “Good,” she said. “Walpurga had no problem with PJ whenI was engaged to him—now lether entertain him for a change.”
“Proney—”
“I’m not your pawn any more, Gareth!” Anger came hissing off Sempronia’s tongue. “Youshackled me to PJ! Andthen you wrecked Nikkul’s career!” The display whirled, and Martinez saw a flash of ceiling, of floor, of a table behind which sat the wide-eyed, meek figure of Shankaracharya. There was the sound of something crumpling near the sound pickup, and then Sempronia flickered back into the frame, holding a large, official certificate, all gold ink and elegant calligraphy, that she brandished before the camera.
“There!” she said. “We’ve both been to the Peers’ Gene Bank! Our visit will be posted in the official record tomorrow. We can get married now.” She offered the camera a defiant glare. “You told me to help Nikkul choose another path. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“You can’t marry without permission,” Martinez said, fearing as he said it that this would only provoke another storm.
“Then the family will give permission,” Sempronia said. “Or if you won’t, then we’ll just live together until we can marry on our own.” She dropped the certificate out of frame. “The one thing you won’t do is stop us. Because if you interfere with our arrangement, people will start to hear about some of Roland’s dealings, particularly with the likes of Lord Ummir or Lady Convocate Khaa.”
Perfectly respectable Naxids,as Roland had called them. Martinez suspected others might disagree with Roland’s description.
“May I speak to Lieutenant Shankaracharya?” Martinez asked.
He heard Shankaracharya murmur something in the background, but Sempronia was quick to answer. “No. You may not. He actually respects you, but I know better. Comm: end transmission.”
The orange end-stamp appeared in the display. “Comm,” Martinez said grimly, “save transmission.”
He called Roland. “Sempronia’s with a Lieutenant Lord Nikkul Shankaracharya.”
Roland’s brow clouded. “Isn’t he one ofyour officers?”
“He’s Sempronia’s officer now,” Martinez said. “I’m forwarding you the recording of the conversation I just had with her. I suggest you pay particular attention to the threat she made at the end.”
He sent the recording, then erased it from his own array’s memory and blanked the display, the chameleon- weave fabric returning to its normal viridian green.
Martinez stood in the silence of his room for a long moment, his anger burning.Isn’t he one of yourofficers? It was becoming clear who was going to get the blame for Sempronia’s defection.
He decided not to stay around to wait for the blame to descend on his head. He changed into civilian evening dress, brushed his hair, and descended the stair in silence. The doors to the parlor were still closed, he saw; the family conference was still going on, with marriages and condemnation being assigned on every hand.
Martinez felt his spirits lift the second he was outside of the palace and into the mellow twilight. In the pre- dinner hour there was little traffic on the streets, and few walkers. A scattering of stars were visible in the darkening sky, and Zanshaa’s shadow had cut a wide slice out of the silver accelerator ring. A ship’s antimatter torch blazed directly overhead, brighter than anything in the sky, and heading—Martinez guessed—for Wormhole 4 and Seizho. Thoughts of Sula set his nerves tingling.
Martinez bought an armful of flowers from the Torminel pushcart vendor on the corner—a carnivore selling blossoms—then turned the corner and walked on to Sula’s building. She met him at the door of her apartment, fading surprise still in her eyes.
“You’re early,” she said. She wore a green Fleet fatigue coverall, apparently her usual dress at home.
“Sorry,” Martinez said. “I couldn’t wait.” He offered her the flowers. “I thought I’d replace those stolen daffodils.”
Sula looked at the extravagant bouquet with bemused pleasure. “You’re going to have to give me a lot more vases at this rate,” she said.
He stood in the hideous Sevigny extravagance of the front room while Sula busied herself filling some vases, equally hideous, that had been sitting empty on stands, intended apparently as objects of admiration. Fleet officers, raised in a tradition in which every object had its proper drawer or bay or locker, were a tidy breed, but Sula’s room was preternaturally neat: even papers with arithmetical jottings, worksheets from her hobby of mathematical puzzles, were squared neatly on a table, slightly offset so that the numbers on the upper right corners were visible. Aside from the vases with their flowers there was no indication that Martinez had ever been present in the room at all, something that sent a waft of depression sighing through him.
“I was just about to take a bath and change,” Sula said as she returned a vase to its stand.
Martinez brightened. “Would you like company in the bath?”
“Good grief, no,” she said. Martinez blinked in surprise.
And then, as if Sula had begun to suspect she’d been too blunt, she stepped close to him and put her arms around him. “My baths are for me alone,” she said. “It’s one of those things I’m fussy about. Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Martinez said. How Sula’s standards of privacy could possibly have been maintained in the Fleet was something he couldn’t imagine.
He kissed her. “Would you mind terribly if I left my family and joined yours?”
She gave him a curious look. “My family’s dead,” she said.
“There are advantages to that,” Martinez said. “And in any case it’s you I want to join.”
Her expression softened. He kissed her again, and her hands cupped the back of his head to hold his kiss to hers.
Join Sula’s family? he thought.
He could. He believed he could.
EIGHT
Sula watched as the juggler spun and danced in the center of a whirl of blades. Torchlight glowed on keen- edged steel. The knives were attached by elastic to the juggler’s wrists, ankles, and hips, and snapped back as she threw them out over the heads of her audience. To control them she had to catch them and throw them again, or let the elastic wrap around her limbs or body or head, and then cast the knives off with a jerk of the head or a spin of the body.
The timing was exquisite, and breathtaking. One slip and the girl would be cut, or if the elastic was cut instead someone in the audience could get a knife in the eye.
Sula’s breath frosted in the chill midnight air. Martinez’s arms coil around her from behind, and she leaned
