wilds, three hundred kilometres south of my home, a lonely, remote spot that I had found conducive to meditation over the years.
Using the shuttle's servitors, I placed the warded cargo pod containing the daemonhost in the tower's crypt, made the necessary rituals of holding, and activated the simple but efficient alarm perimeter I had installed in the tower when I first purchased it.
It would do for the while. Later, I would be very thankful I had made that decision.
My home was a dignified estate out on the Insume headland, twenty minutes' flight time from the venerable lagoon city of Dorsay. Called Spaeton after the feudal family that had built it, it was an H-plan villa constructed of grey ouslite stone with a green copper-tile roof. There were adjoining garages and stables, an aviary, a drone-hive, a famous landscaped garden and maze laid out mathematically by Utility Krauss, a water dock down on the private inlet and a perfect sulleq lawn. It was surrounded to the north and east by untenanted woods, fruit orchards and ample paddocks, and from the terrace it had clear views over the Bay of Bisheen.
Jarat, my housekeeper, welcomed us back. It was late evening and the residence was warm, clean and ready for occupation. Plump and dressed in her trademark grey gown-robe and white-veiled black cap, Jarat was very old by then. Alongside her were Jubal Kircher, my head of security, and Aldemar Psullus, my rabricator and librarian. Beside them, Eleena Koi of the Distaff and the astropath Jekud Vance. The rest of the house staff, thirty of them, maids, ostlers, gardeners, cooks, sommeliers, eltuaniers and laun-derers, were lined up in fresh-pressed white uniforms behind them, along with the five black-armoured officers of the security detail. I greeted each one personally. Jarat and Kircher had employed several newcomers since I had last been there, and I made a point of talking to them and learning their names: Litu, a perky junior chambermaid; Kronsky, a new member of the security detail; Altwald, a new head groundsman inheriting his job from his father, who had retired.
I wondered when Jarat would retire. Or Kircher, come to that. In the case of Jarat, probably never, I decided.
My first act was to open the stronghold oubliette in the basement. I shut down the shields and deactivated the locks, and then spent a long time obliterating all traces of what the oubliette had been used for. I used a flamer to scour the walls and burn away the runic inscriptions. The grisly remains of Cherubael's previous host form, now an empty husk, lay amid the slack chains, and I cremated that too. The host form had been a vat-grown organic vessel I had privately commissioned for use in the original summoning. At the time, it had been a hard enough decision just to use a synthetic body.
I thought of Verveuk and shivered. I burned everything.
Then I bathed, and stayed a long time in the hot water.
* * *
Two weeks I spent, recuperating at Spaeton. I had tried to rest, or at least recover, during the voyage home, but there is a tension in travel itself and my concerns about the daemonhost's rudimentary confinement had prevented me from relaxing.
Now, I could rest at last.
I took long walks around the headland's paths, or stood on the point watching the waves crash into the rocks at the fringe of the inlet. I sat reading in the gardens during the warm evenings. I helped junior staff members collect early windfalls into wicker drowsies in the orchards.
I went nowhere near the library, the maze or my office. Alizebeth was never far from my thoughts.
Aemos served as secretary during that period, a job that Bequin would previously have undertaken. Around breakfast time every morning, he would inform me of the number of communiques received overnight, and I would tell him to handle them. He responded to general letters, filed private ones for my later attention, and stalled anything official. He knew there were only a few kinds of communique that I would permit myself to be troubled with if they arrived: word of Bequin, a direct communication from the Ordos, or anything from Fis-chig.
On a bright morning early in my third week there, with dawn mist fuming off the lawns where the early sun caught it, I was sparring with Jubal Kircher in the pugnaseum.
It was the third morning we had done so. Realising how out of condition I felt, I had commenced a regime of light combat work to tone myself up. We were dressed in bodygloves with quilted shield-sleeves, and circled each other on the mat with scorae, basket-hiked practice weapons from Carthae.
Jubal was a weapons master but he was getting a little old, and on peak form I had no trouble besting him. Where he truly excelled me was in combat-lore and the techniques of military science, which he had studied all his life. He used those that morning, preying on my softness and slowness, overwhelming my superior strength and speed with patient expertise.
Three quarters of an hour, five rounds, five touches to him. His old lined face was glowing with perspiration, but he was five times the winner I was.
'Enough for today, sir?' he asked.
'You're going easy on me, Jubal.'
'Beating you five love straight is going easy?'
I hung my scorae over my belt and adjusted the straps of my sleeve-shield. 'If I was one of your security detail in training, I'd have five bruises now to go with my five losses.'
Kircher smiled and nodded. 'You would. But an ex-Guard bravo or a slumboy trying to make my grade needs the bruises to remind him that work here isn't some well-paid retirement. I don't believe you need to learn that sort of lesson.'
'None of us are too wise to learn.' We both looked and saw Medea entering the pugnaseum. She wandered around the edge of the mat, one moment in the shadows of the wall panels, the next in the glaring yellow oblongs cast by the skylights. She looked at me.
'Just repeating one of your many aphorisms.'
I could tell something was up with her. Kircher shifted uncomfortably.
'Let me spar with him,' she said. I nodded to Jubal, who saluted, Carthaen style, with his scora and left the circular room.
Medea took off her father's cerise jacket and hung it on a window knob.
'What'll it be?' I asked, taking a sip of water from a beaker on the decanter stand.
She walked over to the armoury terminal and keyed on the screen, jump-cutting rapidly through the graphic templates the monitor displayed. She was dressed in a tight, semi-armoured bodyglove and her feet were clad in training slippers. She had prepared for this, I realised.
'Blades and power-bucklers,' she announced, stopping the menu and keying the authority stud.
There was a distant rattle and whirr as automated systems in the armoury under the floor processed the selected weapons from their racks and elevated them up into the ready rack in the wall next to the terminal. Two buckler modules. Two swords, matching, each the length of an adult human femur, single-edged and slightly curved with a knuckle-bar around the grip. She tossed one to me and I caught it neatly.
I walked over to join her, placing my scorae in the rack that would return it to storage. Then I took my buckler. It strapped around the left forearm, supporting a round, machined emitter the size of a pocket watch. Engaged, it projected a disc of shield energy the size of a banquet plate above the back of my hand and forearm.
'Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force. Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force…' The terminal issued the notice in soft but urgent repeats.
I shut it off with a key-press.
'We can use full body shields, if you're worried,' she said.
'Why would I be worried? This is just sparring.'
We engaged our power-bucklers and faced each other across the centre of the
