CHAPTER FOUR
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
“She thanked me.”
It was the first thing he’d said in over an hour, after a terse report of what had happened with Melsilee bar’Abit. He’d shut down after that. The pattern of him, that she could see in her head, gone dark and . . . off-center in a way she could see and feel, without being able to quantify.
Not for the first time, she wished that the lifemate link was stronger on the details, and less . . . definite on the emotions. If there’d been anything useful to the punch in the gut she had gotten out of nowhere this afternoon—about the time, so she knew now, that he’d been ambushed—she couldn’t figure what it was.
Knowing that he was upset—horrified, she guessed covered it—wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though she could probably have figured that out for herself, after hearing him tell it.
What would be really useful, though, was if she had any clue about what was going on inside that twisty mind of his, while he sat silent, face averted, in the corner of the couch.
Still, she figured it was a win, that he stayed with her, instead of vanishing into the music room, or the garden—or, worse, down into town—even if he wasn’t talking.
And now he was talking again—and it was new information, which meant he’d been sitting there turning the situation over and over in his head, sifting through the details again—but that’s what he’d been trained to do, in every part of his life: as a First-In Scout, as the delm’s heir, and, yeah, as an Agent of Change. Details killed. Details saved. A smart man—and let there be no doubt about who wasn’t the dummy in the room—a smart man ignored the details at his very great peril.
So.
“She thanked you?” she repeated, soft-voiced.
He turned his head to look at her straight for the first time in more than an hour.
“When I first entered her cell, she rose, and bowed in acknowledgment of a debt, and she thanked me, for coming to her.”
Miri blinked—and blinked again as she suddenly got what he was telling her. “So she knew you were going to kill her?”
“Her whole intention was that I kill her. She planned the entire thing, meticulously.”
“How’d she hide it from the Healers?”
“That is where we see brilliance.”
She saw tears start to his eyes; he drew a hard breath and looked away. When he met her eyes again, his were dry.
“Melsilee bar’Abit began to meditate; the Healers report this. Very likely, she was meditating in order to reaffirm her purpose as the Department’s tool. Possibly the discovery of the protocol by which the Department imbeds the phrase that may be used to control . . . recalcitrant agents—possibly that was an accident. I am not, you understand, inclined to accept accident or happenstance with regard to anything touching the Department’s training.”
“So she could’ve gone looking for it.”
“Indeed. We cannot know if that was the case, and for the purpose of the final sum, it does not matter. She located the protocol, and she used it to embed a control phrase.”
Miri nodded. An Agent of Change had tried to use a control phrase to bring Val Con back under the Department’s influence, way back on Vandar. Would’ve worked, too, except Val Con had done some meditating of his own and replaced the Department’s code with his own.
“Once she had the control phrase in place, she used her meditations to hide what she had done from her waking mind. That procedure produced a trance state, which the Healers saw as tranquility, and calm.
“When all was firm, she sent a message to me, with the control phrase embedded. She asked, after she had thanked me, if I would remind her why she had wished to see me. Whereupon, I gave her the phrase that released her to action.”
He closed his eyes again. “I am a fool.”
“No, you ain’t. She was a smart woman, and she didn’t have nothing to do all day every day except sit and think how was she going to get out of this mess she was in. You’d’ve done the same.”
He looked at her, face bleak.
“I would have intended to escape. Her whole intention was to die. She knew my level; she knew that she could not prevail in a confrontation between us. It was necessary to her purpose that I not withdraw before the telling blow had been struck. She therefore needed to guide my responses, which she did, until there was only one choice possible. The Fist of Malann . . .” He took a hard breath.
“It was well chosen.”
Silence fell again, though he seemed less . . . askew; more centered.
That was a good thing. Good enough that she decided to push a tiny bit toward normal.
“You want a glass of wine?”
He smiled slightly.
“A glass of wine would be pleasant. Shall we sit out?”
“Why not? After all, it’s summer.”
“A joke’s all it was, Chief. Guy gives me twenty cash, says to rib the big port cop. Call ’er Yxtrang, he says, that always gets ’er laughing. She’ll know where it come from, that’s what he said. Ain’t my fault her partner’s got no sense o’humor. You don’t arrest a man for having a joke.”
Port Security Chief Liz Lizardi considered the man in the orange coat as one might consider an insect found in a half-eaten ration bar.
“I might not arrest a man for having a joke. But I do—and I require my security officers to—arrest people who are inciting to riot and disturbing the peace of this port.”
“Riot! I wasn’t no such—”
“Shut up,” Commander Lizardi told him.
He did so, his red face getting redder.
“The actions of my security officers aren’t in question. They saw a clear threat to the peace and security of the Bazaar and they acted to contain it. That’s their job, and they did just fine. You, on the other hand—you’re ass-deep in slush, friend. What was the name of this fella with the sense of humor?”
He shrugged, and jerked his head at Hazenthull, where she stood at guard by his side, directly before the commander’s desk.
“Ask her; she’s the one s’posed to know all about it.”
Commander Lizardi glanced at her. “Security Officer? You know who this guy’s talking about?”
“Commander, I do not,” she stated.
“Nobody you got a standing joke with, about you being an Yxtrang?”
Hazenthull shook her head and stated, “No, Commander.”
She hesitated, considering troop wisdom with regard to volunteering, and decided that additional information would be helpful to this case. “I am not known for my sense of humor, Commander.”
She heard a small sound from the other side of the prisoner, as if Tolly had sneezed. Commander Lizardi pressed her lips together firmly, and nodded.
“Thank you, Officer,” she said gravely.
“I believe my officer,” she said. “She served under my command in action, and I know her to be a truthful and stalwart soldier. You, though”—she glanced down at her screen—“you got quite a record on port, Mr. Kipler. Petty thievin’, havin’ a few too many beers and busting stuff up, decking security at the Emerald. Spent the night in the Whosegow for that one, I see, and paid the fine.”
The prisoner laughed suddenly.
“Is that what this is about? You want your piece? Why’n’t you just say so? The cash is in my left inside pocket. You can gimme change.”
The commander sighed and shook her head.
“You’re not getting it, Kipler. I’ve got you on conspiracy to start a riot in the Bazaar. That goes right up to the Bosses, on account the Bazaar’s counted as Surebleak turf, not port turf. Conspiracy to riot is something the Bosses take real serious, and unless you come up with the name of that free-spending fella, you’re gonna take whatever they dish out all on yourself.” She paused, head to one side, as if considering.
“Seems a lot to take on, for twenty cash.”
The prisoner’s shoulders tensed as he tried his strength against the cuffs, but they held firm.
“I dunno who it was,” he said, voice urgent. “Some guy, is all. Twenty cash for doin’ nothing much—you don’t turn that down, now, do you?”
“But it turns out not to be nothing much,” the commander pointed out. “Was he Liaden?”
“Nah, no! Sleet! What do I gotta do with Liadens? Guy was as local as me.”
“Now, there’s something useful already. If you cooperate with the Bosses, they might let you off light. Officer Jones?”
“Commander Liz?”
“Will you and your partner please escort Mr. Kipler to the Whosegow and see him signed in. Tell the watch officer that he’s in custody of the Council of Bosses.”
“Yes ma’am,” Tolly said. “Okay, Mr. Kipler, let’s go. Turn around.”
The man in the orange coat hesitated, as if he would argue—or as if he had thought of something else useful to tell the commander. He turned at last, however, shoulders slumping.
Hazenthull fell in behind, with Tolly ahead and slightly to the left, the prisoner between. And so they left the commander’s office in good order.
They were on the balcony. Neither had felt like moving chairs out, so they were sitting on the floor, companionably hip to hip, legs dangling over the inner garden, enjoying a soft breeze that was considerably warmer than the summer air outside the walls. Val Con’s theory was that the Tree was influencing the garden temperature, as for years it had influenced its ecosystem. The tree, in Miri’s private opinion, was way too fond of meddling with stuff that ought to be outside of a tree’s natural concerns.
“Commander ven’Rathan counsels us to end the prisoners’ suffering,” Val Con murmured.
That meant, Miri translated, that Commander ven’Rathan had come down on the side of killing the six remaining prisoners. She had a point; they were dangerous; they were expensive; and their training gave them protection against much that Healers did. Anthora and Natesa had managed to break loose a name or two, and a couple of locations, but that was the extent of the information they’d been able to harvest.
Though, as far as Val Con was concerned, it wasn’t about the information that could be gotten from the agents.
It was about the agents, themselves.
“What do the Healers think?” she asked.
“They think that the prisoners cannot be restored to their former . . . selves. They think—because they have seen it happen—that any attempt to forcefully remove training . . . kills the agent. Horribly.”
He sighed, and raised his glass for a sip of wine.
Eventually, he spoke again, his voice expressionless, the way it was when he cared too much about something.
“The Healers, in a word, believe that continuing to hold the prisoners under such conditions, knowing that they can never be cured, is a cruelty. Master Healer Mithin herself sends to me that she will undertake the . . . necessary releases. She waits upon the Delm’s Word.”
Miri had been a soldier. She’d seen executions; she’d been, a couple times, part of a firing squad. There wasn’t much objective evidence supporting the supposition that the prisoners in hand were innocent of any particular crime that could be named. They were a drain on resources, and an unacceptable risk with every breath they drew.
And yet . . .
If they killed—terminated, released—the prisoners, they weren’t any better than the DOI.
And that small flaw in the pattern that was Val Con, inside of her head—that would never be mended.
She sighed, like he’d done, and sipped her wine.
“Let’s sleep on it,” she said.
“He said he was collectin’ insurance, Boss.”
Vessa Quill had been among the first to move into Boss Conrad’s turf when the tollbooths were closed. She had immediately set up a bread bakery in a storefront half a block away from the Boss’s house, and proceeded to capture a respectable clientele. Conrad had spoken to her only a few weeks ago, during one of his walks through his turf, and her plans had all been for expansion: hiring another baker, and perhaps branching out into pastries.
Now, she was angry, her arms crossed over her chest, and her pale face hard. Nor did the Boss particularly fault her for being angry.
“We do not collect insurance,” he told her, keeping his voice smooth. “None of the Bosses on the council collect insurance. It is, in fact, illegal, to collect insurance.”
“Illegal” was not, perhaps, a concept that sat easily with Baker Quill. Indeed, to most of the residents of Surebleak, the concepts of allowed and disallowed behavior were . . . alien to their everyday lives. The reality of the streets had, for several generations, been that strength prevailed. The strongest of all—in terms that favored brute force over mindfulness, or even mere cleverness—rose to become Boss.
In a rational system, the Boss would have then exerted herself to protect those weaker than herself. On Surebleak, however, the Boss had preyed upon those she should have held safe in her care. In particular, Bosses sold insurance—protection from their own spite—and made examples of those who did not, or could not, pay.
The sale of insurance had been the very first thing that the Council of Bosses had forbidden in its new table of laws.
“He said,” Baker Quill continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “He said he’d burn down my place, if I didn’t have the vig when he come back, in two-day. He’d take some of it in bread, he said, but he wants six hunnert, cash. I ain’t got that kind o’money, and if I did, I wouldn’t pay it. My mam, she paid the insurance money, and what’d it get her? Broke an’ made a zample, ’cause the Boss’s ’hand put ’er money in his pocket an’ tole the Boss she didn’t pay.”
He bowed his head slightly.
“I am sorry to hear of your mother’s tragedy. You are very right to bring this matter to me. The Bosses no longer collect insurance, and there is a law”—another uneasy word—“that forbids the collecting of insurance. Anyone caught doing it will be taken up by the Watch, and will be assessed fines.”
“Fines,” she repeated, and he could believe that she was measuring fines against the loss of her livelihood, and possibly her life.
“There are other deterrents, for those who persist, but yes, for a first offense, fines. Now. You say that this insurance salesman has promised to return for his payment in two days?”
“That’s what he said.” She hesitated, then added, “My old turf, sometimes they come back early; and if you didn’t have the money, they added a surcharge.”
Gods, what a planet.
He nodded.
“Here is what we shall do, if you will consent to it. I shall ask Mr. McFarland, my head ’hand, to assign one of my own security staff to you. This person will leave with you this evening, and will remain at your side until the insurance collector returns for the money. At that point, my staff member will remove this person from your orbit, using what force is necessary, and will bear him to the Watch, where he will be imprisoned until the Bosses call upon him to explain himself.”
He paused, considering her set face, and asked, gently, “Does this proposed course of action satisfy you?”
To her credit, she took time for consideration. He folded his hands atop the desk and waited.
Eventually, she said, “That’ll cover, ’s’long’s he don’t have backup. If he’s got backup . . .”
“You are correct; that is something which should not be left to chance. We will not leave you without protection. Instead, your security will call the Watch to retrieve the insurance salesman, and will remain with you until it had been ascertained that he is either working alone, or his partner has also been apprehended.”
She nodded once, decisively. “That’ll do it, then.”
“Excellent. Let us bring Mr. McFarland in our conference.”
He touched a button on his desk. The office door opened almost immediately, and Mr. pel’Tolian stepped within.
“Sir?”
“Please tell Mr. McFarland that we have need of his expertise in my office. And please ask Cook if we may have refreshments.”
“Yes, sir; at once.”
Mr. pel’Tolian withdrew.
“Is there anyone else—a family member, or a close friend—who might also be in danger from this person who is selling insurance?”
Baker Quill frowned.
“I’m by myself,” she said slowly. “But it comes to me, Boss, that fella must’ve been up and down the whole street with this; not just me.”
“Indeed,” he replied. “We shall make certain of that tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but why am I the only one here, talking to you about this?”
That was an excellent question and likely had something to do with enculturation. or an instinct toward denial, or . . . Val Con would be able to tell him. It would, perhaps, be useful to know. For now, he could only offer the simplest probability.
“Perhaps they were afraid,” he said to Baker Quill, and turned his head as the door opened to admit Cheever McFarland’s not inconsiderable bulk.
“Evenin’, Boss. You wanted to see me?”
Mr. McFarland had taken the baker away, leaving him blessedly alone. He closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and wondered if Natesa had returned home yet, from her tasks in town. Perhaps they might have a quiet dinner, alone. Quin was with Luken, helping with the arrangement of the port annex shop . . .
The door to his office opened.
He opened his eyes and in the same instant snapped to his feet—and relaxed, feeling foolish, as his lifemate closed the door behind her and turned to face him, elegant brows arched above ebon eyes.
“Did I wake you?”
“Very nearly,” he answered, going across the room to her.
She entered his embrace with enthusiasm and kissed him thoroughly. Arm in arm, they walked toward his desk.
“I wonder if we might dine in our room,” she said. “I am . . . somewhat weary.”
He laughed softly. “I was only just thinking the same thing. Yes, of course—Quin and Luken will be dining at the port. But, what has happened to tire you?”
Natesa rarely admitted to weariness; to hear her say so concerned him . . . not a little.
“Stupidity tires me,” she said. She released him and sat on the corner of his desk. He sank into his chair, looking up into her face.
“What happened?” he asked again.
“Why, some fool had declared an entire street to be Juntavas turf. She proposed that all the shopkeepers would henceforth pay her a percentage of their business, and further let it be known that she had the means to enforce this. I heard of it from Jerfin Marx when I stopped by to find if his son had fully recovered from his misadventure. She had apparently only left him, but she moved fast. I found her three blocks distant, informing a bewildered greengrocer of these new arrangements, and asserting that she had the whole might of the Juntavas behind her.
“Naturally, I needed to hear more, so I took her aside to ask for her code number. She denied having any such thing. I then asked for her handle, and she denied having one. She is now being held by the Watch until the answer to my inquiry through the Judges’ office is answered.”
She sighed, and closed her eyes. “I fear that we are beset by amateurs, my love.”
“I fear it, also.” He rose, and took her hand. “Come, let us retire. I will ask Mr. pel’Tolian to bring us a cold dinner and a bottle of wine.”
“Two bottles of wine and you have a bargain.”
“Done!” he said, with a grin, and raised her hand to his lips.