Smuggler's Gold

  The two men stared at each other in shocked recognition.

  "Tellon... Have you seen my brother Nikki?" Pietor blurted suddenly, voicing the first thing that came to his mind.

  The Hannon blinked in surprise and bewilderment.

  "The artist? No, I haven't... You're asking me?"

  The absurdity of the situation began to creep into Pietor's mind. Here he was, seeking assistance from a Hannon, the very ones he feared were threatening Nikki. Still, he had blundered into a conversation with one of the Gregori's arch rivals, and he set himself to make the most of it.

  "That's right. The young fool is out here somewhere.... Say, Tellon, while we're talking... I wanted to tell you how sorry I was about your sister's death."

  "Teryl?" Tellon's bewilderment changed to a scowl.

  "Why should you be sorry? I heard the Gregoris paid for her murder."

  "My father did," Pietor admitted, "but even he didn't order it. I'm the head of the House now, and... Look, my father was killed by your family, but I'm still willing to talk. Can't we. . . ?"

  "We had nothing to do with your father's death," Tellon said. "I won't try to tell you we wouldn't have killed him if we had the chance, but no one from my House is laying claim to that death."

  "Really? See what I mean? No,... I'm saying this badly. Look, Tellon, can you tell Helwein that I'd like to meet with him? If we can't stop this feud, maybe we can at least modify..."

  "Pietor! There's no sign of Nikki at the..."

  Demitri Gregori halted his approach and his news in mid-step as he realized who his brother was speaking to. His hand flew to his sword hilt at Tellon drew back, mirroring the move with his own weapon.

  "Stop it! Both of you!" Pietor ordered sharply, stepping between them. "Demitri. Take your hand off your sword! We were just talking. I was telling Tellon here how sorry I was about Teryl's death."

  "Teryl?"

  Demitri blanched at the name, his shoulders tightening as if expecting a physical blow.

  "That's right," Pietor continued hurriedly, wondering what was ailing his brother. "You remember Teryl. She was..."

  "Tellon! 'Ware!"

  They all started, then turned toward the hail. No less than eight Hannons were hurrying toward them across the bridge.

  " 'Ware the Gregoris! It's an ambush!"

  "What?" Pietor gaped. "No! Wait!"

  Tellon's sword leapt from its scabbard as he backed away from the Gregoris, his head turning back and forth between the two groups in confusion.

  Demitri stepped forward, shoving Pietor toward the upstairs of the Pile as he fumbled for his own weapon.

  "Run for it, Pietor!" he hissed. "I'll try to hold them here!"

  "Stop, Demitri!" Pietor cried desperately, seizing his brother's arm in an attempt to keep him from drawing his weapon. "We've got to..."

  "Let go, dammit! I can't. . ."

  That was how they died when the Hannons swept over them... Demitri trying to do something right, even if it meant sacrificing his life to save his brother, —and Pietor struggling to keep a Gregori sword in its scabbard.

  "It were terrible," Old Michael returned to the House to report—

  Which report stopped cold midway, at the sight of Nikki Gregori on the stairs, paint-smeared and smelling of turpentine.

  Everyone stopped... of those servants who were there to hear. And Anna Gregori, who came from the parlor to hear the account.

  Nearly a dozen had been killed, mostly Gregoris... though a few Hannons as well as innocent bystanders had been cut down in the fighting that had ebbed and swirled through the walkways near the College for nearly an hour.

  Pietor lost, his brother Demitri—both killed. The servants, realizing the status of things—gave new deference to Anna, who cast a look of amazement and outrage in Nikki's direction.

  "Where did you come from?" Anna asked; and Nikki, puzzled, answered his new Househead.

  "Upstairs____"

  —It being that he had left the House only briefly, to turn back when he realized the afternoon light was perfect, falling on the face of the upper tiers opposite his studio window—and his study arrangements with Rhajmurti in the College had been informal at best.

  Damn you, Anna might have said. But Anna said nothing at all. Anna only stared at him.

  And Nikki Gregori, who had a houseful of such stares to face, instead went upstairs and methodically put away his paints, folded down his easel, and threw his latest work down from the topmost tier into the dark of the canals.

  He took his disused sword from the armoire then— his middle brother had given him the blade—and sat down on the bed, taking up a discarded canvas-knife to scratch a name patiently and deep into the shining metal.

  Tellon Hannon, it said.

  MYSTERY

  by Chris and Janet Morris

  Early spring in Merovingen was cold and wet—that was normal enough, nothing to ruffle hightown feathers or put canalers on their guard; not even enough on its own to trouble Tom Mondragon, who never slept soundly in his exile's bed, whether that bed was, on any given night, in luxurious Boregy House, or filthy cold Moghi's, or stilt-leaning Petrescu.

  But there was plenty this spring to trouble Mondragon besides the damp, which bit to his very bones and made his white skin whiter among the dark folk of Merovingen.

  After the winter of the sharrh's overflight, of Sword of God attacks on the noble houses—attacks that had culminated in the assassination of a daughter of Nikolaev House—Adventist nerves were frayed and Revenantist thoughts were turning to Retribution in all its guises. And Retribution troubled Mondragon, as a concept and as a reality: he was a fugitive, a hunted man, an ex-Sword agent caught up in Merovingen politics; he was as guilty as you could be in Merovingen. When Retribution came, it would have his name on it.

  He knew it in his soul as he knew his time was short and his leash here shortening. He had too many masters with too many conflicting agendas, and no one to count on but himself and a canal-rat named Jones... sometimes. He knew it as he knew the way to Petrescu, and the way to the safe-house used by Jones' canalers when things were too desperate to risk any of their usual haunts.

  On his way to the safe-house, he didn't have to think about the direction in which his feet were taking him, or the shabby clothes appropriate to the lower tiers, or the hunched posture of the hopeless that must accompany such clothes: all these were second nature to him now.

  This winter in Merovingen had nearly killed him; he'd taken sick and in that miasma of illness, he'd made enough mistakes to kill any but a very lucky man. A part of the spirit that had always sustained him might well have died. His luck surely had died in the cold, exhausted and pushed beyond human forbearance—as was the rest of the tall, pale man who floated between the worlds of Merovingen like a wraith.

  He was so tired that he couldn't summon even the strength to be angry at the boy who'd used codes reserved for real emergencies to call Mondragon, a once-noble son of Nev Hettek, into the slums for this meeting.

  God in all his manifold attributes and bis myriad guises was testing Merovingen, so the faithful said and looked forward to being reborn into a better life. Mondragon knew that God had tested Merovingen long ago, found it wanting and gone away—gone somewhere pleasant where people were civilized and the air didn't stink; where buildings weren't built on teetering pilings and tied to each other with rotting, spindly bridges; where people weren't so desperate or so selfish or so sure of their afterlives that they failed to tend to their present lives.

  Sometimes Mondragon thought that the concept of reincarnation was the chain binding Merovingians in their hopeless servitude, which kept them spinning on the wheel of misery that they called the hope of rebirth. Without the promise of a better life next time, perhaps these folk would do something about the lives of misery they currently led.

  Mondragon shook his pale head, shouldering by a fish stall where fries could be purchased with coin he didn't have. The smell tortured h
im momentarily. Then it was gone, replaced by the stench of the canals that, this year, was somehow different in the thaw: sweeter, less reminiscent of a garbage dump.

  The sharrh, aliens of unparalleled power, had come from beyond the sky and blasted the planet of Merovin back to the early industrial age. It was afraid to recover, afraid that technology would act as a beacon to the sharrh. In their fear, Merovingians had found religions to comfort them in a night they wouldn't hold back with electricity or knowledge.

  Reincarnation was the Revenantist creed, and the people packed like fish in the multitiered stilt city dreamed technodreams of being reborn where there were fields of waving wheat, bright lights, fragrant springs, and a chance once more to fly among the stars.

  Until that time of change and rebirth, the citizens of Merovin had only themselves to blame for their sad estate. They fought among themselves over everything: over religion, over politics, over a scrap of tech or a crust of bread or, in Merovingen, over a home on the highest of the tiers.

  Change was what they wanted, they thought. The Sword of God, a revolutionary front, had changed Nev Hettek and wanted to change Merovingen, destroy entrenched and repressive power structures—to entrench new ones.

  Mondragon didn't blame the Merovingians for resisting the change that the Sword offered. Mondragon had resisted the Sword, and now Mondragon was nearly run to ground, his back against the wall that was Merovingen, facing Sword vengeance as sure as death.

  If Mondragon had been a Revenantist, maybe he wouldn't have been so worried. Or so tired. Maybe he'd have been looking forward to rebirth in a better place. But he didn't believe in Revenantism, or in Adventism, or in Janism, or in any other -ism. Once he had believed in the Sword of God, when he and Karl Fon had tried to liberate Nev Hettek and succeeded in liberating only their own greed. So revolution was not the answer, Mondragon was certain—and that certainty was one that had made him a marked man in the eyes of Sword agents in Merovingen.

  Whether or not reincarnation was the answer, the way that the Revenantists said it was, life in Merovingen was changing; on this everyone was agreed. And no one Mondragon knew, in Merovingen-above or Mero-vingen-below, liked the coming changes any more than he did.

  First had come the lights in the sky, wakening long-dormant fears—as the Sword of God had intended when it faked the lights that the superstitious mistook for the returning sharrh.

  These lights in the sky, which some called the return of the sharrh from heaven, might have been enough by themselves to galvanize the superstitious into fundamentalist fervor, but other things had happened— troubling things, ominous things, things no one could quite forget or quite ignore.

  Things that Thomas Mondragon knew, from careful investigation, were not the work of the Sword Of God: the Janes had dumped something into the canals, before winter's grip grew tight, and now that something was beginning to sprout.

  Whether the plants would flower, no one knew; whether their roots would choke the canals, none could say. But the plants were already changing the smell of Merovingen and the look of Merovingen. And the saltwater-loving deathangel, a rare fish prized for its flesh and the drugs extracted from that flesh and its spines, had been spotted darting among the proliferating roots where deathangel fish had never ventured before.

  "Get me deathangel, Denny," an acolyte of the Revenantist College had commanded the young drug-running juvenile delinquent, and Denny had had no choice but to obey.

  "Get me deathangel," Vega Boregy had demanded of Thomas Mondragon, and Mondragon had had no choice but to obey.

  "Get me deathangel," Mondragon had demanded of Altair Jones, and Jones had said, "Hey, get it yourself. I dunno nothin' about the College's druggie games and don't wanta."

  This was another change come to Merovingen: the College was growing bold, and its sudden hunger for a fish whose spines produced a lethal poison was only one inscrutable indication of the changes going on among the hightowners out on the Rock, in the Justiciary and across the bridge in the College itself.

  The Revenantist College had gone into the business of dispensing portents, it was whispered—dispensing them to the ruling mercantilists, to the Boregys and the Nikolaevs and the Kamats... and to the family of Governor Iosef Kalugin himself.

  Down at canalside, all the changes going on in Merovingen-above were a matter of rumor and innuendo, of resultant pressure and unintended distress.

  Here the changes were impenetrable in their motive, if not their effect. First had come the census, to mark everyone and give each soul a number; then had come the canal-rats hunting the sharrh for a bounty posted by the College. Then (or was it simultaneously?) had come the Janes doing their dirty work of "salvation" that had changed the pollution of the canals to something else.

  Some said this was a different sort of pollution, nothing more. Some said that the disturbances that trickled down from Merovingen-above were nothing shocking, just signs that the Kalugin dynasty was coming to an end.

  But all of those folk discounted the hand of the Sword of God in Merovingen affairs, as Mondragon was too wise to do.

  And none of those folk had looked closely at Altair Jones' private war against the slavers of Megary, as Mondragon made it his business to do.

  Nor had any of them noticed Mondragon's late-night scurryings, hither and thither on his masters' errands like a rat in a Boregy-constructed maze. And none but Mondragon, it seemed, had remarked on the way that the Kamat family was quietly strengthening its defense force, or that the Boregys were doing the same.

  And not a single soul among those who protested that this spring would be like any other, that the rising tide of fundamental Revenantism and Jane-spawned revolutionary fervor and Adventist buttressing of defenses already more than sufficient—none of those folk were privy to the information gathered by Thomas Mondragon. Or by the Sword of God.

  Sword agents swarmed Merovingen, gathering news like ants collecting crumbs. And every crumb they gathered went back to the Sword's Chance Magruder, on-site tactical officer, who sat in his embassy's office, a few hundred yards of Nev Hettek property smack in the middle of Merovingen, like a queen in a hive, and wrote reports that went, by diplomatic pouch on Chamoun Shipping vessels, straight to Governor Karl Fon in Nev Hettek.

  One such report had it that Cassiopeia Boregy, wife of Michael Chamoun, one of the Sword's agents in Merovingen, was subject to mantic fits of prophecy under the direction of Cardinal Ito Boregy, high official of the Revenantist College. Mondragon knew this because Magruder had asked him to confirm or deny the truth of it, though he'd done neither.

  Another dispatch had it that Cassie Boregy was pregnant by her husband, and that the child's survival— and the strength of the merger between Boregy House and the Chamoun family of Nev Hettek—was imperiled by the drugs the cardinals were giving her to bring on the visions of her prophecies. This intelligence was no more than what every privy party in hightown was whispering.

  Yet another report, scrawled hastily in Ambassador Magruder's own hand, suggested that Thomas Mondragon, once Sword agent in good standing and now Boregy confidant and Sword pawn by virtue of blackmail and maneuver, was "out of money, out of luck, and out of time. Vega Boregy, Cassie's father, is using Mondragon to smuggle deathangel spine poison into the house—a clear sign that the Boregys consider him expendable at the moment, since Ito Boregy's College faction has a stranglehold on the deathangel catch in town. If Ito finds out that his brother-in-law Vega is using Mondragon to smuggle deathangel meant for the College into Boregy House, Mondragon is dead in the water. Although the flesh of the fish isn't illegal, possession of poison extracted from the spines is a Judiciary offense. My recommendation to Karl Fon is that we use Mondragon now, to secure more than reports— use him against the College and whatever it thinks to do with Cassiopeia Boregy—before we lose him to Collegiate justice."

  This was what Thomas Mondragon had come all the way down here to read? This was the reason for the urgent summons? For
the danger of exposure he'd sustained, just by coming here in broad daylight? For the possible unmasking of the safe-house?

  For a moment Mondragon thought he was rightly and solely angry. Then his denial crumpled and fear took hold.

  He'd been winded from climbing the stairs. This objective fact bothered him suddenly—bothered him so much he couldn't concentrate on the import of the document he held. He wasn't in good shape. He wasn't in good shape at all. He was too weak, still, to run again—if he could think of any place to run. Which he couldn't.

  He had to make his stand in Merovingen. He had to. He had to be up to the task, up to the exertion, up to a duel of wits with Magruder, who was far from unarmed.

  His hands were shaking. He stared at them until they steadied, then tried to use a similar discipline to clear his head. He should be accustomed to stairs by now, but the fever he'd had this winter had scarred his lungs, or his fear was binding his chest so that he couldn't take decently deep breaths. He focused on a point on the horizon, far distant, and took three painfully deep breaths, each of which he held for a count of ten before exhaling slowly.

  He'd come quickly, quietly, and carefully. He had made no mistakes so far. Upon arrival, without a word he'd taken the document from the hand holding it, reserving judgment. This, too, was action free from error.

  But that was before he'd read what was on this piece of paper. Even steeled to confront the indictment he held, his heart skipped a beat when he reread it.

  Now Mondragon nearly crumpled the report in his hand as he leaned on the safe-house balcony overlooking Fishmarket, trying to think clearly—trying to think at all. The report was damning; coming here to read it was twice so. Better admit that much, and go on from here.

  He could stop this report from going to Nev Hettek, but that wouldn't stop Chance Magruder, Nev Hettek's Ambassador to Merovingen, the Trade and Tariffs man who was covertly the Sword of God's tactical officer. The only thing that would stop Magruder's hounding of Mondragon was death—Mondragon's, or Magruder's.