Lord of Janissaries (82 page)

“No, sir.”

“I could say it’s none of your business.”

“No sir, you couldn’t,” Mason said. “Very much my business. Anything happens to you, and I’m supposed to be in command. Only you know damned well it won’t work that way. Sergeant Major Elliot will choose your successor, and it may or may not be me.”

“Well, nothing’s going to happen to me tonight,” Rick said. He poured another goblet of wine and sipped at it. “We were drinking to proper procedures. Ever think where we’d be if we’d followed procedures? What the hell
is
the procedure for meeting a flying saucer?”

“Yeah. Well, we managed all right,” Mason said. “Bloody good thing it came along.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Guess, hell, Colonel. We were goners, and you know that better’n me.” Mason swept his hand in a wide gesture to indicate the stone walls, tapestries, fireplace, and primitive furnishings of the room. “This may not be all we ever wanted, but it’s sure as hell more’n the Cubans would have given us.”

“Yeah, I know, Art, but . . .” Rick let his voice trail off as he heard more shouts from outside. “Think we ought to look?”

“No, sir,” Mason said. “Fact is, that’s your biggest problem. Colonel, I grant you we’d have been finished a dozen times without you, and not much gets done except it’s in your name—but that doesn’t mean you got to do it all yourself. Procedures. Make policy, approve procedures, and then let somebody else do the work. You’re going to wear yourself out if you keep on the way you’re going.”

Rick sat at the massive table and fingered a stack of documents. An ornate dagger served as a paperweight. “Think I wouldn’t like to? Only how in hell can I make policy on stuff we’ve never done before? None of us have any experience handling primitives. And Romans. And barbarians. And—”

“Well, yes, sir, but—”

“And not even the locals have any experience living with a rogue star coming. Just legends.” Rick tossed off his goblet of wine and poured another. “Policy! Procedures! The whole goddamn planet’s going to hell, and all they’ve got is a bunch of legends. Legends and us. And we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Mason shrugged. “Colonel, for somebody who don’t know what he’s doing, you’ve done damned well. You must be doing something right, even if I do think you work too hard and drink too much.”

“I’ll—”

There was a loud knock at the door.

“Yeah?” Mason called. He took out a .45 automatic and glanced at the loads before returning it to its holster. “Who’s there?”

The voice belonged to Rick’s orderly. “The Star Lord Les wishes to speak with the Marshal of Drantos.”

Mason looked at Rick. Rick shrugged, then nodded. Mason went to the door, looked through the peephole, then opened it.

The man who entered was shorter than Rick, about Mason’s height. He didn’t look much different from the other two. A starman, Rick thought. A real one. Not a cheap imitation like me. So how should a starman look? God knows his bosses look weird enough.

“Hello, Les. Wine?” Rick offered.

“Hello. Yes, small glass—and, Major Mason, if you don’t mind—”

“Let him stay. He’s my deputy,” Rick protested.

“It’s all right, Colonel. I better go check out that commotion in the courtyard. I’ll be back to walk you to your meeting.”

“Don’t bother. Jamiy and the guards can do that.”

Mason nodded. It wasn’t hard to read his expression. Since Tylara’s man Caradoc had been killed in street riots, there weren’t as many locals Rick could trust to guard his back. Come to that, a lot of other things had changed for the worse.

“I’d rather you found out what the problem is down there.”

“Okay.” Mason threw half a salute and left without waiting for Rick to return it.

Rick poured wine and handed it to Les. They sat at the table and Rick lifted his goblet. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They sat in silence. Finally Les spoke. “I’ll be leaving in a day or so.”

“Back to Earth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose I can talk you into taking us with you.”

Les shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t want me to.” He wasn’t smiling.

“Try me.”

“You wouldn’t. What would you do? Go to the authorities? Tell them you were kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken across light-years to another planet just so you could grow drugs?”

“Well, that would have the great merit of being true—”

“And the serious demerit that no one would believe you,” Les said. “It would be worse if someone did. Either way you’d irritate the High Commission, make a deadly enemy of Inspector Agzaral, and spend the rest of your life dodging us. No, my friend, you do not want to be returned to Earth.”

“What if—suppose we promise to lay low? Never tell what happened to us?”

“No,” Les said.

“Yeah, well I suppose you can’t believe us—”

“Even if I did, I couldn’t hide the fact that I took you back to Earth. I could probably hide it from the Commission, but not from Agzaral. I don’t know what he’d do about it, but I don’t want to find out.” Les sipped at his wine. “There’s another reason. You may be safer on Tran.”

“What? Come off it! This planet is coming apart! It’s going to be fried by a rogue sun, the ice caps melt, coasts under water, migrations sparking wars everywhere, and your
Shalnuksi
friends are probably going to bomb the survivors back to the Stone Age anyway—and you say—”

“I say it may be safer than Earth,” Les repeated. “Things happen so fast. Atom bombs. Space travel. Big colliding beam accelerators. Huge lasers. Leave things alone and pretty soon Earth will have real space travel. There are factions on the Commission that don’t want that.”

“And they’d really bomb Earth?”

“I don’t know. They could.”

“You said Earth is the breeding ground for—for wild humans.”

“Wild. Not like me,” Les agreed. “Not slaves.”

“Slave soldiers. Janissaries.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Les said. “But yes, that’s as good a description as any.”

“And you run the whole damned empire—”

“It’s not an empire.”

“Confederation. But humans run it. You have all the military power, but you’re still slaves. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Put that way, maybe not. But you don’t have to make sense of it. Lay off, Rick. Just lay off.”

“Lay off. Look, I have to know. Are they going to bomb Earth? Us? Both?”

Les shook his head. “Rick, I don’t know. I don’t understand Federation politics. Agzaral may know what’s going on. He claims to. But he hasn’t told me.”

“You haven’t told me much, either,” Rick said.

“I know. Look at it my way. It’s all the
Shalnuksis
need, to find out Tran natives are discussing Federation politics! They’d sure know who told you.”

“How will they find out?”

“The next time one of their ships comes here they’ll see changes. More water mills. Your semaphore towers. They just might pick up some locals for questioning. One of your mercs. You, even. They’re pretty lazy. They probably won’t. But they could.”

“Do they own this planet, then?”

“It’s complicated,” Les said. “The Commission has rules about dealing with primitives, but they don’t seem to apply to this place. Most records of Tran have been lost. I expect the
Shalnuksis
paid plenty to lose them. There are rules, my friend, but who’ll enforce them?”

“Agzaral?”

“Maybe. If it’s to his interest.”

“What is his interest?”

Les shrugged and held his glass out to be refilled. “I do not know. He doesn’t tell me.”

“But—”

“But I do as he says anyway,” Les said. His voice fell and he grew more serious. “Agzaral’s all I’ve got. I think he’s doing his best to look out for humans. All humans, everywhere, and especially Earth. Think, hell. I don’t think it, I
know
it. He’s doing his best. Whether that’s good enough is another story, but he is trying.”

“Okay. But about the
Shalnuksis
—”

“They don’t exactly own the planet, but you better act like they do. And if Tran looks like it’s about to spring an industrial and scientific revolution, the Commission has some hard choices to make. They’d have to set up permanent surveillance, with an inspector. Like Agzaral’s operation on Earth’s Moon. That could be expensive. There’ll be some to argue that it’s cheaper and simpler to blast Tran back to the Early Iron Age.”

“Like they did before—”

“Like the
Shalnuksis
did before,” Les corrected. “Two or three times before. But that was their own work. If the Commission orders it, the bombardment will be a lot more thorough.”

“Will they do that?”

Les shook his head. “Insufficient data. The
Shalnuksis
don’t have as much influence in the Commission as they used to have. That’s the good side. And there’s Agzaral’s plan.”

“Whatever that is—”

Les nodded firmly. “Whatever that is. Because it’s about all we’ve got.”

* * *

By the light of the Demon Star the dead sentry looked uglier than the run of corpses. Lord Morrone knew that there was no such thing as a handsome corpse; for all that he had not seen his eleventh name-day he had been in enough battles to learn that. Even so, the sentry was an unwholesome sight, his face dark, tongue protruding, and his clothes fouled and stinking.
It’s not his look, it’s what this foretells
.

Morrone and his guardsmen whirled, hands to swords, at the sound of footsteps.

“Belay that.”

The voice was soft, but there was no mistaking it. “Lord Mason. Well come. I feared it was another.” Well come indeed, Morrone thought. Now work your star magic and discover who has done this—

“Who found him?”

“Guardsman Echaino. An accident. He came into this passage to relieve himself, found the sentry where you see him, and summoned the guard.”

“Did you leave the corpse, Echaino?”

“No, my lord.”

“Touch anything?”

Echaino shuddered. “No, my lord.”

“Good man.” Mason knelt by the body and took its wrist in his hand. He moved the dead arm back and forth. “Not dead long,” he muttered. He poked at the body for a moment and stood. “How many men have you got with you?”

Morrone’s lips tightened. That tone of command was not the proper way to address a Companion to the Wanax Ganton. Morrone let it pass. He had seen enough of the starmen and their peremptory ways. Strangely effective ways. There might yet be a reckoning over the place of the starmen in Drantos, but this was not the time for it.

“Twelve guardsmen and three of my own men-at-arms. You have brought nine. I fear we shall need more, if we are to search the Outer Bailey without making each searching party too small to defend itself.”

Mason nodded. “Right.” He turned to one of his men. “Lugh, take a message to Lieutenant Brionn. The ready platoon is to turn out in full kit and report to Lord Morrone at Hestia’s Fountain. Tell them to move quietly, and tell anyone who sees them that this is a drill.”

“Sir!” Lugh clicked his heels and hurried off. Morrone knew that Brionn would obey, for all that he was the son of a knight and his orders came to him by the son of a carpenter. A year ago Mason might have had to go himself to bring the platoon, but much had changed in that year. For the better or for the worse?

It couldn’t matter. The urgent need was for a thorough search. That wouldn’t be easy. Edron was the royal seat of Drantos, but it had never been planned as such. What had begun as a fortress tower had grown into a full castle, then into a city. The Outer Bailey was no open courtyard with few buildings set against the walls, but part of the city of Edron itself, walled off by the Wanax Ganton’s great-grandfather to provide more quarters for his men-at-arms, servants, and (so the tales ran) mistresses. Except for one broad street leading from the Outer Gate to the Great North Gate of the castle itself, the Outer Bailey was as much a warren as any part of the city outside the walls.

In war the defenders would fire this area and retreat behind the flames to the castle. That was hardly the answer here, though Morrone was tempted. “What plot is afoot?” he asked.

Mason chuckled. “Must be fifty of them, wouldn’t you say, my lord?”

“True enough.” The royal wedding of Wanax Ganton and the Roman Lady Octavia Caesar had drawn lords, senators, merchants, barons, knights, soldiers, and wealthy magnates from a dozen lands, half of them at war or nearly so with each other.

“We’ll be until the True Sun rises searching this lot,” Mason said. “Who’s out here?”

Morrone shrugged. “Am I a clerk? Those of rank who could not find room inside. Lords, retainers. Clergy. Great ones. Any might be the target of a plot.” Or be plotters themselves. “Wanax Ganton will not care to have his guests turned out on his last night unwed. Nor, I think, will Caesar care for the complaints of his senators.”

“Yeah. It’s a problem. Got any suggestions?”

Morrone looked up at the sky, but Yatar Dayfather did not appear with an answer to his dilemma. Only the baleful glare of the Demon Star—which did give enough light to make the searching easier, for all that its growing power over the nights on Tran meant that the Time was coming nearer. . . .

“I think it would be well if I turned out the rest of my men-at-arms who are fit for duty,” Morrone said. “Also—do you know who is quartered in this house?”

“Am I a clerk?” Mason said, but he was laughing, and turned to one of his Guardsmen, who produced a paper.

It was a list. Morrone took a mild pleasure in seeing that even starmen did not tax their memories with details more fit for clerks and scribes than for warriors.

“Nobody seems to be assigned to it,” Mason concluded. “But the one to the left is for Councilor Daettan of Dirstvaal, who’s Ambassador from Lord Gengrich. The one to the right is for the Lady Gwen, Lord Warner, and the rest of the University people. The one across the street is for Fabricius Maximus Valens, Marselius Caesar’s ambassador, but he hasn’t arrived yet. Too bad about that; I’d have liked to have seen these bastards take on some legionaries.”

“Do you doubt the valor of the men of Drantos?”

“Not at all. It’s just that if a legionary had been killed, we could have found more reliable troops for the searching parties without having to spread the word of what happened.”