Conqueror

Suzette cleared her throat 'Not a thing, glorious Lady. There's an unpleasant smell, though.'

'Send for incense,' the Consort said. Turning back to Rihvera, her expression serious. 'Now, Illustrious-'

'You have a toad's mouth, Oh Illustrious Deyago-

Bug eyes, too:

Oh toad-mouthed, bug-eyed one!'

This time the silver bells were accompanied by several realistic croaking sounds.

I wonder how long he can take it? Suzette thought, slowly waving her fan.

His hands were trembling as he began again.

'Are you well, my dear?' Suzette asked anxiously, when the petitioners and attendants were gone.

'It's nothing,' Anne Clerett said briskly. 'A bit of a grippe.'

The Governor's lady looked a little thinner than usual, and worn now that the amusement had died away from her face. She was a tall woman, who wore her own long dark-red hair wound with pearls in defiance of Court fashion and protocol. For the rest she wore the tiara and jewelled bodice, flounced silk split skirt, leggings and slippers as if she had been born to them. Instead of working her way up from acrobat and child-whore down by the Camidrome and the Circus. .

Suzette took off her own blond wig and let the spring breeze through the tall doors riffle her sweat-dampened black hair. It carried scents of greenery and flowers from the courtyard and the Palace gardens, with an undertaste of smoke from the city beyond.

'Thank you,' she said to Anne. There was no need to specify, between them.

Anne Clerett shrugged. 'It's nothing,' she said. 'I advise Barholm for his own good-and putting Raj in charge is the best move.' She hesitated: 'I realize my husband can be. . difficult, at times.'

He can be hysterical, Suzette thought coldly as she smiled and patted Anne's hand. In a raving funk back during the Victory Riots, when the city factions tried to throw out the Cleretts, Anne had told him to run if he wanted to, that she'd stay and burn the Palace around her rather than go back to the docks. That had put some backbone into him, that and Raj taking command of the Guards and putting down the riots with volley-fire and grapeshot and bayonet charges to clear the barricades.

He can also be a paranoid menace. Barholm was the finest administrator to sit the Chair in generations, and a demon for work-but he suspected everyone except Anne. Nor had he ever been much of a fighting man, and his jealousy of Raj was poisoning what was left of his good sense on the subject. A Governor was theoretically quasi-divine, with power of life and death over his subjects. In practice he held that power until he used it too often on too many influential subjects, enough to frighten the rest into killing him despite the dangerous uncertainty that always followed a coup. Barholm hadn't come anywhere near that.

Yet.

'Besides,' Anne went on, 'I stand by my friends.'

Which was true. When Anne was merely the tart old Governor Vernier Clerett's nephew had unaccountably married, the other Messas of the Palace had barely noticed her. Except in the way they might have scraped something nasty off their shoes. Suzette had had better sense than those more conventional gentlewomen. Or perhaps just less snobbery, she thought. Her family was as ancient as any in the City; they had been nobles when the Cleretts and Whitehalls were minor bandit chiefs in the Descott hills. They had also been quite thoroughly poor by the time she came of age, years before she met Raj. The last few farms had been mortgaged to buy the gowns and jewels she needed to appear at Court.

'You'll be accompanying Raj again?' Anne asked.

'Always,' Suzette replied.

Anne nodded. 'We both,' she said, 'have able husbands. But even the most able of men-'

'— needs help,' Suzette replied. The Governor's Lady raised a fingertip and servants appeared with cigarettes in holders of carved sauroid ivory.

'I may need help with young Cabot,' Suzette said. 'He hasn't been much at Court?'

'Mostly back in Descott,' Anne said 'Keeping the Barholm name warm on the ancestral estates.'

Which were meagre things in themselves. Descott was remote, a month's journey on dogback east and north of the capital, a poor upland County of volcanic plateaus and badlands. Mostly grazing country, with few products beyond wool, riding dogs and ornamental stone. Its other export was fighting men, proud poor backland squires and their followings of tough vakaros and yeoman-tenant ranchers, men born to the rifle and saddle, to the hunt and the blood feud. Utterly unlike the tax-broken peons of the central provinces. Only a fraction of the Civil Government's people lived there, but one in five of the elite mounted dragoons were Descotters. Most of the rest came from similar frontier areas, or were mercenaries from the barbaricum.

It was no accident that Descotters had held the Chair so often of late, nor that the Cleretts were anxious to keep first-hand ties with the clannish County gentry.

'Seriously, my dear,' Anne went on, 'you should look after young Clerett. He's. . well, he's been champing at the bridle of late. Twenty, and a head full of romantic yeast and old stories. Quite likely to get himself killed-which would be a disaster. Barholm, ah, is quite attached to him.'

The two women exchanged a look; both childless, both without illusion. It said a great deal for Anne that Barholm had not put her aside for not giving him an heir of his body, which was sufficient cause for divorce under Civil Government law.

'I'll try to see he comes back, Anne,' Suzette said. If possible, she added to herself with clinical detachment. Romantic, ambitious young noblemen were not difficult to control; she had found that out long before her marriage. They could also be trouble when serious business was in question, such as the welfare of one's husband.

'I'm sure you can handle Cabot,' Anne said. That sort of manipulation was skill they shared, in their somewhat different contexts.

'Poplanich needn't come back,' Anne went on.

She smiled; Suzette looked away with a well-concealed shudder. A strayed ox might have noticed an expression like that on the last carnosauroid it ever saw.

Anne clapped her hands. 'Thom Poplanich, Des Poplanich-Ehwardo would make a beautiful matched set, don't you think?' And it would leave the Poplanich gens without an adult male of note. Thom's grandsire had been a well-loved Governor.

'Des was a rebel,' Suzette said carefully. 'I've never known what happened to Thom. Ehwardo is a loyal officer.'

'Of course, of course,' Anne said, chuckling and giving Suzette's hand a squeeze.

Raj's wife chuckled herself. There's irony for you, she thought: I really don't know what happened to Thom.

Raj simply refused to discuss it, and he had been different ever since he came back from the tunnels they'd gone exploring in; the ground under East Residence was honeycombed with them. Suzette might have advised quietly braining Thom Poplanich and leaving him in the catacombs, as a career move and personal insurance-except that she knew that Raj would never have considered it. He had changed, but not like that.

You are too good for this Fallen world, my angel, she thought toward the absent Raj. It is not made for so honorable a knight.

Then Lady Clerett's mouth twisted; she covered it with her palms and coughed rackingly.

'Anne!' Suzette cried, rising.

'It's nothing,' she said, biting her lip. 'Go on; you'll have a lot to do. Just a cough, it'll pass off with the spring. I'll deal with it.'

There was blood on her fingers, hidden imperfectly by their fierce clench. Suzette made the minimal bow and withdrew.

'At the narrow passage there is no brother, no friend,' she quoted softly to herself. And no allies against some enemies.

* * *

'So, what do we get?' Colonel Grammeck Dinnalsyn said; the artillery specialist had seen to his beloved 75mm field-guns, and was ready to take an interest in the less technical side of the next Expeditionary Force.