Mark almost swore her calm, academic voice concealed a savagely vengeful satisfaction. But her expression was as detached as ever.
A young man in a captain's uniform approached them, and split a nod of greeting between the Countess and Mark. "The Major of Protocol requests your presence, my lord," he murmured. The statement too seemed to hang indeterminately in the air between them. "This way, please."
They followed him out of the long reception room and up an ornately carved white marble staircase, down a corridor, and into an antechamber where half a dozen Counts or their official representatives were marshaled. Beyond a wide archway in the main chamber, Gregor was surrounded by a small constellation of men, mostly in red-and-blues, but three in dark Minister's robes.
The Emperor was seated on a plain folding stool, even less than a chair. "I was expecting a throne, somehow," Mark whispered to the Countess.
"It's a symbol," she whispered back. "And like most symbols, inherited. It's a standard-issue military officer's camp stool."
"Huh." Then he had to part from her, as the Major of Protocol herded him into his appointed place in line. The Vorkosigan's place. This is it. He had a moment of utter panic, thinking he'd somehow mislaid or dropped the bag of gold along the way, but it was still looped safely to his tunic. He undid the silken cords with sweaty fingers. This is a stupid little ceremony. Why should I be nervous now?
Turn, walk forward—his concentration was nearly shattered by an anonymous whisper from somewhere in the antechamber behind him, "My God, the Vorkosigans are really going to do it . . . !"—step up, salute, kneel on his left knee; he proffered the bag right-handed, palm correctly up, and stuttered out the formal words, feeling as if plasma arc beams were boring into his back from the gazes of the waiting witnesses behind him. Only then did he look up to meet the Emperor's eyes.
Gregor smiled, took the bag, and spoke the equally formal words of acceptance. He handed the bag aside to the Minister of Finance in his black velvet robe, but then waved the man away.
"So here you are after all—Lord Vorkosigan," murmured Gregor.
"Just Lord Mark," Mark pleaded hastily. "I'm not Lord Vorkosigan till Miles is, is . . ." the Countess's searing phrase came back to him, "dead and rotted. This doesn't mean anything. The Count and Countess wanted it. It didn't seem like the time to give them static."
"That's so." Gregor smiled sadly. "Thank you for that. How are you doing yourself?"
Gregor was the first person ever to ask after him instead of the Count. Mark blinked. But then, Gregor could get the real medical bulletins on his Prime Minister's condition hourly, if he wanted them. "All right, I guess." He shrugged. "Compared to everybody else, anyway."
"Mm," said Gregor. "You haven't used your comm card." At Mark's bewildered look he added gently, "I didn't give it to you for a souvenir."
"I . . . I haven't done you any favors that would allow me to presume upon you, sir."
"Your family has established a credit account with the Imperium of nearly infinite depth. You can draw on it, you know."
"I haven't asked for anything."
"I know. Honorable, but stupid. You may fit right in here yet."
"I don't want any favors."
"Many new businesses start with borrowed capital. They pay it back later, with interest."
"I tried that once," said Mark bitterly. "I borrowed the Dendarii Mercenaries, and bankrupted myself."
"Hm." Gregor's smile twisted. He glanced up, beyond Mark, at the throng no-doubt backing up in the antechamber. "We'll talk again. Enjoy your dinner." His nod became the Emperor's formal dismissal.
Mark creaked to his feet, saluted properly, and withdrew back to where the Countess waited for him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At the conclusion of the lengthy and tedious taxation ceremony, the Residence's staff served a banquet to a thousand people, spread through several chambers according to rank. Mark found himself dining just downstream from Gregor's own table. The wine and elaborate food gave him an excuse not to chat much with his neighbors. He chewed and sipped as slowly as possible. He still managed to end up uncomfortably overfed and dizzy from alcohol poisoning, till he noticed the Countess was making it through all the toasts by merely wetting her lips. He copied her strategy. He wished he'd noticed sooner, but at least he was able to walk and not crawl from the table afterwards, and the room only spun a little.
It could have been worse. I could have had to make it through all this while simultaneously pretending to be Miles Vorkosigan.
The Countess led him to a ballroom with a polished marquetry floor, which had been cleared for dancing, though no one was dancing yet. A live human orchestra, all men in Imperial Service uniforms, was arrayed in one corner. At the moment only a half dozen of its musicians were playing, a sort of preliminary chamber music. Long doors on one side of the room opened to the cool night air of a promenade. Mark noted them for future escape purposes. It would be an unutterable relief to be alone in the dark right now. He was even beginning to miss his cabin back aboard the Peregrine.
"Do you dance?" he asked the Countess.
"Only once tonight."
The explanation unfolded shortly when Emperor Gregor appeared, and with his usual serious smile led Countess Vorkosigan out onto the floor to officially open the dance. On the music's first repeat other couples began to join them. The Vor dances seemed to tend to the formal and slow, with couples arranged in complex groups rather than couples alone, and with far too many precise moves to memorize. Mark found it vaguely allegorical of how things were done here.
Thus stripped of his escort and protectress, Mark fled to a side chamber where the volume of the music was filtered to background level. Buffet tables with yet more food and drink lined one wall. For a moment, he longingly considered the attraction of anesthetic drinking. Blurred oblivion . . . Right, sure. Get publicly drunk, and then, no doubt, get publicly sick. Just what the Countess needed. He was halfway there already.
Instead he retreated to a window embrasure. His surly presence seemed enough to claim it against all comers. He leaned against the wall in the shadows, folded his arms, and set himself grimly to endure. Maybe he could persuade the Countess to take him home early, after her one dance. But she seemed to be working the crowd. For all that she appeared relaxed, social, cheerful, he hadn't heard a single word out of her mouth tonight that didn't serve her goals. So much self-control in one so secretly strained was almost disturbing.
His grim mood darkened further, as he brooded on the meaning of that empty cryo-chamber. ImpSec can't be everywhere, the Countess had once said. Dammit . . . ImpSec was supposed to be all-seeing. That was the intended implication of the sinister silver Horus-eye insignia on Illyan's collar. Was ImpSec's reputation just propaganda?
One thing was certain. Miles hadn't removed himself from that cryo-chamber. Whether or not Miles was rotted, disintegrated, or still frozen, a witness or witnesses must exist, somewhere. A thread, a string, a hook, a connection, a trail of bloody breadcrumbs, something. I believe it's going to kill me if there isn't. There had to be something.
"Lord Mark?" said a light voice.
He raised his eyes from blind contemplation of his boots to find himself facing a lovely cleavage, framed in raspberry pink gauze with white lace trim. Delicate line of collarbone, smooth swelling curves, and ivory skin made an almost abstract sculpture, a tilted topological landscape. He imagined himself shrunk to insect size, marching across those soft hills and valleys, barefoot—
"Lord Mark?" she repeated, less certainly.
He tilted his head back, hoping the shadows concealed the embarrassed flush in his cheeks, and managed at least the courtesy of eye contact. I can't help it, it's my height. Sorry. Her face was equally rewarding to the eye: electric blue eyes, curving lips. Short loose ash-blonde curls wreathed her head. As seemed the custom for young women, tiny pink flowers were braided into it, sacrificing their little vegetable lives for her evening's brief glory
. However, her hair was too short to hold them successfully, and several were on the verge of falling out.
"Yes?" It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, "Lady—?"
"Oh." She smiled. "I'm not Lady anything. I'm Kareen Koudelka."
His brow wrinkled. "Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?" A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan's senior staff officers. Galen's list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.
"He's my father," she said proudly.
"Uh . . . is he here?" Mark asked nervously.
The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. "No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute."
"Ah." To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren't because of the Prime Minister's condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he'd trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan's support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.
"You really don't look quite like Miles," she said, studying him with a critical eye—he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it—"your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?"
She does not know, he realized with a kind of horror. Doesn't know Miles is dead, doesn't know I killed him. "No," he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, "Were you in love with him too?"
"Me?" She laughed. "I haven't a chance. I have three older sisters, and they're all taller than I am. They call me the dwarf."
The top of his head was not quite level with the top of her shoulder, which meant that she was about average height for a Barrayaran woman. Her sisters must be valkyries. Just Miles's style. The perfume of her flowers, or her skin, rocked him in faint, delicate waves.
An agony of despair twisted all the way from his gut to behind his eyes. This could have been mine. If I hadn't screwed it up, this could have been my moment. She was friendly, open, smiling, only because she did not know what he had done. And suppose he lied, suppose he tried, suppose he found himself contrary to all reason walking in Ivan's most drunken dream with this girl, and she invited him mountain-climbing, like Miles—what then? How entertaining would it be for her, to watch him choke half to death in all his naked impotence? Hopeless, helpless, hapless—the mere anticipation of that pain and humiliation, again, made his vision darken. His shoulders hunched. "Oh, for God's sake go away," he moaned.
Her blue eyes widened in startled doubt. "Pym warned me you were moody . . . well, all right." She shrugged and turned, tossing her head.
A couple of the little pink flowers lost their moorings and bounced down. Spasmodically, Mark clutched at them. "Wait—!"
She turned back, still frowning. "What?"
"You dropped some of your flowers." He held them out to her in his two cupped hands, crushed pink blobs, and attempted a smile. He was afraid it came out as squashed as the blossoms.
"Oh." She took them back—long clean steady fingers, short undecorated nails, not an idle woman's hands—stared down at the blooms, and rolled up her eyes as if unsure how to reattach them. She finally stuffed them unceremoniously through a few curls on top of her head, out of order of their mates and more precarious than before. She began to turn away again.
Say something, or you'll lose your chance! "You don't wear your hair long, like the others," he blurted. Oh, no, she'd think he was criticizing—
"I don't have time to fool with it." Unconsciously compelled, her fingers raked a couple of curls, scattering more luckless vegetation.
"What do you do with your time?"
"Study, mostly." The vivacity his rebuff had so brutally suppressed began to leak back into her face. "Countess Vorkosigan has promised me, if I keep my class standing she'll send me to school on Beta Colony next year!" The light in her eyes focused to a laser-scalpel's edge. "And I can. I'll show them. If Miles can do what he does, I can do this."
"What do you know about what Miles does?" he asked, alarmed.
"He made it through the Imperial Service Academy, didn't he?" Her chin rose, inspired. "When everyone said he was too puny and sickly, and it was a waste, and he'd just die young. And then after he succeeded they said it was only his father's favor. But he graduated near the top of his class, and I don't think his father had anything to do with that." She nodded firmly, satisfied.
But they had the die-young part right. Clearly, she was not apprised of Miles's little private army.
"How old are you?" he asked her.
"Eighteen-standard."
"I'm, um, twenty-two."
"I know." She observed him, still interested, but more cautious. Her eye lit with sudden understanding. She lowered her voice. "You're very worried about Count Aral, aren't you?"
A most charitable explanation for his rudeness. "The Count my father," he echoed. That was Miles's one-breath phrase. "Among other things."
"Have you made any friends here?"
"I . . . don't quite know." Ivan? Gregor? His mother? Were any of them friends, exactly? "I've been too busy making relatives. I never had any relatives before, either."
Her brows went up. "Nor any friends?"
"No." It was an odd realization, strange and late. "I can't say as I missed friends. I always had more immediate problems." Still do.
"Miles always seems to have a lot of friends."
"I'm not Miles," Mark snapped, stung on the raw spot. No, it wasn't her fault, he was raw all over.
"I can see that . . ." She paused, as the music began again in the adjoining ballroom. "Would you like to dance?"
"I don't know any of your dances."
"That's a mirror dance. Anybody can do the mirror dance, it's not hard. You just copy everything your partner does."
He glanced through the archway, and thought of the tall doors to the promenade. "Maybe—maybe outside?"
"Why outside? You wouldn't be able to see me."
"Nobody would be able to see me, either." A suspicious thought struck him. "Did my mother ask you to do this?"
"No . . ."
"Lady Vorpatril?"
"No!" She laughed. "Why ever should they? Come on, or the music will be over!" She took him by the hand and towed him determinedly through the archway, dribbling a few more flowers in her wake. He caught a couple of buds against his tunic with his free hand, and slipped them surreptitiously into his trouser pocket. Help, I'm being kidnapped by an enthusiast . . . ! There were worse fates. A wry half-smile twitched his lips. "You don't mind dancing with a toad?"
"What?"
"Something Ivan said."
"Oh, Ivan." She shrugged a dismissive white shoulder. "Ignore Ivan, we all do."
Lady Cassia, you are avenged. Mark brightened still further, to medium-gloomy.
The mirror dance was going on as described, with partners facing each other, dipping and swaying and moving along in time to the music. The tempo was brisker and less stately than the large group dances, and had brought more younger couples out onto the floor.
Feeling hideously conspicuous, Mark plunged in with Kareen and began copying her motions, about half a beat behind. Just as she had promised, it took about fifteen seconds to get the hang of it. He began to smile, a little. The older couples were quite grave and elegant, but some of the younger ones were more creative. One young Vor took advantage of a hand-pass to bait his lady by briefly sticking one finger up his nose and wriggling the rest at her; she broke the rule and didn't follow, but he mirrored her look of outrage perfectly. Mark laughed.
"You look quite different when you laugh," Kareen said, sounding startled. She cocked her head in bemusement.
He cocked his head back at her. "Different from what?"
"I don't know. Not so . . . funereal. You looked as if you'd lost your best friend, when you were hiding back there in the corner."
If only you knew. She pirouetted; he pirouetted
. He swept her an exaggerated bow; looking surprised but pleased, she swept one back at him. The view was charming.
"I'll just have to make you laugh again," she decided firmly. So, perfectly deadpan, she proceeded to tell him three dirty jokes in rapid succession; he ended up laughing at the absurdity of their juxtaposition with her maidenly airs as much as anything else.
"Where did you learn those?"
"From my big sisters, of course." She shrugged.
He was actually sorry when the music came to an end. This time he took the lead and urged her back into the next room for something to drink, and then out onto the promenade. After the concentration of the dance was over he'd become uncomfortably conscious of just how many people were looking at him, and it wasn't paranoid dementia this time. They'd made a conspicuous couple, the beautiful Kareen and her Vorkosigan toad.
It was not as dark outside as he'd hoped. In addition to the lights spilling from the Residence windows, colored spotlights in the landscaping were diffused by the fog to a gentle general illumination. Below the stone balustrade the slope was almost woods-like with old-growth bushes and trees. Stone-paved walkways zig-zagged down, with granite benches inviting lingerers. Still, the night was chilly enough to keep most people inside, which helped.
It was a highly romantic setting, to be wasted on him. Why am I doing this? What good was it to bait a hunger that could not feed? Just looking at her hurt. He moved closer anyway, more dizzy with her scent than with the wine and the dancing. Her skin was radiantly warm with the exercise; she'd light up a sniper-scope like a torch. Morbid thought. Sex and death seemed too close-connected, somewhere in the bottom of his brain. He was afraid. Everything I touch, I destroy. I will not touch her. He set his glass on the stone railing and shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets. His left fingertips compulsively rotated the little flowers he'd secreted there.
"Lord Mark," she said, after a sip of wine, "you're almost a galactic. If you were married, and going to have children, would you want your wife to use a uterine replicator, or not?"