The Reformer

'Oh, you're so strong,' Keffrine said, batting her eyes upward. 'Don't you think you should have a back rub, after all that exercise, though?'

'Can it, Keffie,' Helga replied with a half-amused, half-exasperated twist of her lips. 'I'm not that desperate yet.'

'I can wait,' the younger girl grinned. 'Nobody's going anywhere.'

Helga suppressed a shudder at that; even when the Director died, nobody in the hareem would go anywhere but into retirement. . which meant they'd be shut up together until the last of them died of old age, and they'd never see another entire male until the day they did die-not even a loathsome toad like the Director. She pushed her mind back into the present, recoiling from the waste of years that stretched ahead. It could be worse; not so many generations ago, the hareem of an Islander magnate accompanied him to the tomb, with a cup of hemlock if they were lucky.

I wonder what that noise is? Helga thought. And: Sky-Father Almighty, I'm tired of waiting.

She hadn't thought that being sold into the hareem of a pirate chief would be tedious-other things, but not that. The Director of Vase was an old, fat, worried, overworked pirate chief, though, with the fifty concubines that custom and prestige demanded. After the brutality of the pirate crew-exactly according to legend-and the transit here, she'd thought that a deliverance. . for the first four months in this velvet-cushioned, lavender-scented prison where nothing, absolutely nothing ever happened. There was a pool, where she could swim about six paces; there were a few chess sets and card decks; there were no books at all-it would never occur to an Islander chief that a woman would want to read. After a full year, only keeping up her training regimen and pretending she was going to escape had preserved her sanity and kept her from strangling someone at the seven hundredth repetition of the same inane gossip, the same shrill giggling at the same stupid jokes, the same fatuous cow-eyed flirting, the same. .

Being summoned to the Director's quarters at least meant she got out for an evening, even if under guard. Usually the old heap of lard couldn't do anything anyway.

'Smoke from the harbor,' Helga said meditatively. 'And I think I can hear. . yes, that's an alarm drum.'

There was a section of garden and wall below the window, just visible. A dozen men trotted through it; archers, in brass-scale hauberks and spiked helmets, led by an officer with his saber drawn.

The young Confed woman released the bars and dropped back, her lips shaping a soundless whistle.

'War, I think,' she said. 'Wasn't there a rumor that the Director was having trouble with the King in Chalice?'

Keffrine nodded eagerly, blond bangs swinging around her ears and releasing a strong waft of verbena. Helga wrinkled her nose a little; she still didn't like the way Islander women slathered themselves with scent. That and cosmetics were the main pastimes here, along with intrigue and love affairs; one couldn't even dress up much, since tradition mandated hareem occupants wear filmy trousers and spangled halter tops.

'Isn't it exciting?' Keffrine squealed.

Helga sighed. Well, what can you expect. Keffrine was a gift from Sub-Director Deneuve, and born in his hareem. This sort of environment was all she'd ever known. And I thought I'd led a sheltered life.

'It may get more exciting than you'd like,' Helga said. 'Come on, we'd better go talk to the Eldest Sister.'

The old bat was a harridan of the first order, but she'd been here since the Director was sixteen, and he told her things. If anyone knew. .

'Yes, let's!' Keffrine grabbed her hand and pulled her out into the corridor, past arches and mosaics, into the main circular room where a dozen or so of the others lounged on couches, nibbled snacks, or paddled languidly in the pool about the carved youth whose seashell spouted warm scented water. The light from above was filtered through a fretwork stone dome.

Helga felt her heart beat faster. More exciting than they'd care for, she thought. But any change is an opportunity. I've been here far, far too long.

Keffrine was really starting to look tempting, for instance.

Far, far too long.

* * *

'Oh, what a beautiful, beautiful position,' Simun wheezed.

Adrian nodded, breathless himself despite being twenty years younger and less burdened. The tower was ruined in the sense that some of the internal floors had collapsed, fire or rot destroying the beams. The central spiral staircase was stone, though, and still reasonably sound. So was the uppermost floor, and the crenellations were still waist-high. That would give the arquebusiers cover and excellent rests for their weapons; they were setting up now, with a little amiable squabbling for the best shooting spots. The infantry from the Sea Strikers had taken up ground around the tower's base, blending in to the maquis-covered slopes. The air had a slight brimstone smell from the black powder in grenades and cartridge boxes, and a wild spicy scent of crushed herbs from the ground around. It was warm now, and insects buzzed through the flowers; fliers darted by snapping at them.

Vase was laid out before them like a relief map, too-he could see men hurrying in and out of the two towers that anchored the citadel's harborward wall, others massing on the wall itself, still more movement in the narrow twisting streets beyond. Overhead the sky was a hot white-blue; he could even see the banners snapping on the gunboats in the harbor beyond, and the foam where the measured centipede stroke of their oars churned up the water. As he watched, a puff of smoke came from the lead craft. A measurable time later the flat deep thudump reached his ears, like a very large door slamming far away. A slightly louder explosion came from among the warcraft packed along the docks in front of the sea wall; they were firing shell initially, then. Smoke and fragments vomited up over the harbor defenses, and a slender galley began to burn and sink at its moorings, spine snapped. It couldn't sink far, in water only six feet deep under its keel, but that served to put the fire mostly out.

By the time the fourth round had hit, the remaining crews were scrambling ashore, tiny as ants as they swarmed through the sally ports next to the main gates.

'Ah, already spooked from the forts at the outer harbor, sor,' Simun chuckled. 'Ah, this is a fight how I loik it, sor,' the middle-aged mercenary went on. 'No risk, none of that there nasty hand-to-hand stuff.'

Adrian smiled in turn. Odd, he thought. This man and he had as little in common as two beings of the same species, gender and nationality could, yet in a way they'd become good friends. .

Comes of risking your lives together, son, Raj thought, amused. One of the things that, unfortunately, makes war possible.

'Sort of a commentary on humankind, I suppose,' Adrian muttered.

'What was thot, sor?'

'Just regretting you weren't a beautiful woman, underofficer,' he said briskly.

Simun chuckled. 'Well, then I'd be out of place here, eh, sor? Place for everything, yis, yis.' He looked at the minarets, domes, gardens of the palace citadel ahead of them. 'Though they say hareem girls smells tasty enough, yis. Hey, sor, you oughtn't to be doing that, now!'

Adrian ignored the hand that anchored the back of his weapons belt as he leaned over the crumbling sawtooth outer wall of the tower. 'Simun,' he said sharply. 'Take a look there-do you see a mark in the ground there, leading from the tower to the citadel wall?'

The noncom respectfully but firmly pulled him back, then leaned over and peered himself. 'Hmmm, now that you point it out sor, so I do, indeed. Old wall, mebbe? Hard to see why, though-just the one-tis not a walled way to this here tower, that would make sense, though. .'

Adrian craned his neck. The line through the scrub was irregular, as much a trace-mark in the vegetation as anything, an absence of the low thorny scrub trees in the middle and a thicker line of them on either side.

He froze as Center's icy presence seized his eyes. For a moment the world became a maze of lines and points and moving dots, a glimpse of something too vast and alien for him to comprehend. Then it settled down to a schematic-clear white lines outlining the trace through the slope, and a cross-diagram beside it showing a tunnel with an arched stone roof.

covered way, sunken to escape detection. The machine intelligence sounded inhumanly confident. . but then, it always did, even when confessing a rare error. since the tower went out of regular