Endgame

  Cassie was the only person in Merovingen whom Mikhail trusted impurity. She would look up at him from her sickbed, her beautiful eyes huge and her hair spread upon her pillow, and say the truth to him from between her pale lips.

  Mikhail Kalugin had heard more truth in the last few weeks from the young girl in her bedroom festooned with ormolu cherubs than from all the counselors his father had appointed to tutor him.

  When Mikhail became his father's successor, as Cassie had assured him he would, then Mikhail would declare Cassie Boregy's marriage to the Nev Hetteker, Michael Chamoun, null and void.

  After all, Vega Boregy would understand that a merger not to the interest of Merovingen—a merger with a foreign power—was one the state could nullify, on the request of the woman in question.

  If not for the baby—Michael Chamoun's baby— Mikhail would have convinced Cassie to see things his way by now.

  He couldn't stand the thought of that lout of a foreigner in Cassie's bed. She was so ethereal, so delicate. He almost wished he could believe that her baby had been immaculately conceived.

  Mikhail wanted Cassie only for her mind, to see those eyes look into his soul and tell him the truth. Together, they would remake Merovingen. He had promised her. And the time was nigh.

  Papa was not well. Sister Tatty and 'Stasi were becoming daily more bold. The cardinal in her lair was acting as if she was the government of Merovingen, terrorizing the populace. And Cassie had looked up at Mikhail and told him, "You are the only one who can stop the terror, Mikhail. By sacrificing yourself, you can bring Merovingen into balance with its karma, to make things the way the universe wants them. It will be fiery, and bloody, and we will not—"

  Then she'd broken off and bitten her pale lip.

  "We will not what, dear prophetess? Tell me. Tell me. I can take it."

  But Cassie would never tell him what horrors she saw when her eyes grew wide and she shut her mouth. She'd only turn her head away.

  Tonight, Mikhail was determined, he would hear the rest of the prophecy. He'd sent word two days ago to Vega to announce his coming, formally. He was determined to enter Boregy House without subterfuge. He was demanding an audience with his seeress.

  And he'd let all and sundry know he was determined to have one.

  But the night seemed to be telling him that he'd been too bold. The tiers of the city hunched over the canalways seemed to be trying to close over his head. Merovingen's very buildings were crowding him, as if they could conspire to shut him away from the sky, the sunset, and Cassie.

  Of course, it couldn't be that inanimates were inimical. The canals were just spewing mist, a thick mist that made visibility difficult, traveling treacherous, and spun out the sunset into a fey fantasy that seemed drenched in blood.

  The fancy boat throttled down, approaching an intersection. Someone lost in the mist shouted, " 'Ware!"

  Beware, was right. Beware the night. Beware the might of right in the night. Beware the arms of fate holding you tight, tonight, beloved. . . .

  If karma had been kinder, Mikhail would have been a poet. But true talent had been denied him. So he made clocks, in homage to the wheel of fate and to propitiate time itself, which always to him had seemed to be chasing him like hunters on his track, soon, embracing him, enlacing him, facing him to eternity's grim smile. . . .

  Mikhail pulled his cloak tighter around him and stamped his feet on the deck to warm them. He was not going to Boregy House like a furtive lover, or a thief in the night. He was standing tall in the night. He was standing tall in the stern of his boat and he would be standing so when they pulled into the Watergate of Boregy House.

  He was, after all, a Kalugin, not just in blood, but in nature. He was conscious that what he did was the stuff of history. He liked the poetic, historic figure he made, cloak wrapped about him, standing, feet widespread, in the stern of his boat wrapped in mist. A painting of this moment would adorn the governor's office some day. And as with all State portraits, in it his shoulders would be broader, his jaw firmer, his hairline lower and fuller, and his gaze more commanding, than it was tonight.

  But his head would be no higher. Mikhail was going into Boregy House with his head high, and if anyone tried to stop him from partaking of Cassie's counsel, he was prepared to demand that the prophetess come live in his father's house, as counselor to the State. He had it all planned.

  He—

  A crack sounded, a sharp bang that bounced off the surface of the water and boxed his ears with a painful loudness. No sound could be that loud but the sound of a collision—

  The sound came again, and this time the pain that accompanied it was hot, red, direct, and blew his skull apart so fast that only the beginning of the pain telegraphed from his skull to his brain before his brain, itself, ruptured and splattered out through the back of his skull like the pulp of a melon.

  Mikhail Kalugin fell. Heavy as stone, he collapsed from his standing position in the back of his fancy boat, backward, to hang limp over the stern with what was left of his head trailing in the water.

  The shot had blown out the back of his skull, but the small entry hole above his eyes looked, at first glance, like no more than a penance mark at festival. The bullet hole was like a black smudge, centered over lifeless eyes staring through the swirling mist at the setting sun and the leaning towers of Merovingen-above.

  But those who scrambled from the bow of the fan-cyboat to catch the corpse before it slid into the water knew what they'd witnessed.

  The boat that sped away in the mist, carrying cowled assassins, safely out of reach, had the unmistakable insignia of Cardinal Exeter on its stern.

  If an argument hadn't broken out on the fancyboat, among the retainers, as to whether Mikhail's body might still have a breath of life in it, the governor's boat might have given chase and followed the assassins.

  But it did not, and those who'd seen Exeter's blazon on the stern of the boat duly reported what had happened as soon as they returned with the corpse.

  Thomas Mondragon kept looking out the window of his room in the Nev Hettek Embassy, waiting for his boat to show.

  All the while he dressed, in new, warm, velvet and leather that Magruder's people had provided, Tom Mondragon watched the waterway for a sign of the boat. Even while he cleaned his sword and belted it on, while he counted the gold that Magruder's smug staffer had left him, he watched for that boat.

  If it didn't come, then Magruder had betrayed him—would betray him. Again.

  It wouldn't be a surprise, given their history. But it would be a disappointment that Mondragon truly feared more than death. He didn't know why he'd let Magruder suck him into this scheme of final destruction and bloodshed. He regretted everything, as he waited. Mostly, he regretted being a part of some plan he didn't understand.

  Nothing new about that. Every fool repeats the errors that marked him inarguably a fool in the first place.

  Mondragon had come down to Merovingen to get away from Revolution, away from Karl Fon and Chance Magruder and jail cells and inquisitions and hostile factions and sharp blades in the night.

  Run to Merovingen just in time to watch it happen all over again. From the beginning. He'd run scared, and he'd run right into the most extended déjà vu of his career. Sometimes he thought this nightmare was truly a dream—that he was mad, in some cell somewhere, creating a punishment for himself to fit his endless crimes. But then he'd admit to himself that although he was a good duelist and a passable operator, he wasn't creative enough to have conjured Chance Magruder, et al, from whole cloth.

  When Mondragon had seen Dani Lambert come down to Merovingen, and set up shop by Magruder's machinations in Boregy House, attending to Cassie Boregy's new baby, he'd known,that the end was near.

  Dani Lambert was the most capable woman he'd ever met. She was Revolution's mistress. Some said she'd slept with every major player in Nev Hettek's revolution, until she'd ended up at the top, with Karl Fon himself. Mondragon didn't know if
she had; she'd never slept with him, when he was high in the Nev Hettek revolution's hierarchy.

  But Mondragon did know that Karl Fon would never have sent Dani down here to do a situation report firsthand if he wasn't tired of waiting for Magruder to show results.

  Mondragon had fallen out of favor with Fon, and out of love with Fon's tactics, and all the misery he'd lived subsequently had been a direct result of that.

  When Fon frowned on you, people died. When Karl got impatient, blood flowed in the streets. And now Magruder was going to help Mondragon: "Escape Merovingen, save that canal-girl of yours while there's still time."

  Still time? Magruder said this to him? Chance, who'd nearly killed him when first they'd met in Merovingen, used him and abused him, manipulated him and sent him out this final, pay-all time?

  The top was about to pop on this revolutionary brew, and Mondragon knew it. He just wished he knew what benefit Magruder saw to letting him run ahead of the tide of death.

  Maybe, just maybe, Chance was getting old and sentimental. More likely, Thomas Mondragon was a distraction to misdirect the energies of any of a number of players and factions.

  For all Mondragon knew, Magruder would pass the word in certain quarters that he'd escaped, forsaken the sanctuary of the embassy. Magruder would probably announce it, as soon as Mondragon had enough of a start to make a chase interesting.

  So Mondragon wanted to change the game plan just a little. As soon as he saw that boat come in, he was going to slip down to the water gate. Nobody would stop him: everybody in the embassy knew what was about to come down. With luck, nobody would even see him.

  When he got there, he was going to take the little boat ahead of schedule. Maybe he'd need to kill to do that. But to stay alive, he needed a head start on whatever Magruder had in mind for him.

  He was ready to kill if he must. He had two daggers as well as his borrowed sword in its scabbard, and extra blades in his kit bag. And doubt as he tried to believe Chance's story—he had to take it for the only hope he had in the kind of violence that had to be at the heart of whatever Magruder was planning.

  Mondragon knew Chance's style. If he hadn't known it so well, he'd have been dead long ago. Staying alive had become Tom Mondragon's profession.

  If he lived through this, he was going to add to his professional skills the skill of staying out of jail, out of penury, and out of trouble. But first things first. Since he was incapable of staying out of love, he was going to do what he could to bring that dirty, arrogant, semiliterate brat of a Jones out alive—out of Merovingen altogether and into an unknown future that was, by any reckoning, better than what lay in store for Merovingen now that Karl Fon had grown tired of waiting for Revolution to catch fire here on its own.

  Beyond the window, Mondragon thought he saw the white curl of wake on the waterway. It was hard to be sure at first, because of the thick mist. Visibility was a problem now. It could be his salvation later.

  He looked harder. He opened the window to the foggy cold and peered out, staring until his eyes ached from the effort.

  Still, he couldn't be sure.

  But his pulse was pounding in his ears and the urge to act was on him like a physical ache that he couldn't endure.

  Every muscle in his body would cramp from inactivity if he didn't do something soon.

  So he did. He circled the room once, like a doubtful cat, snatched up his kit bag and shouldered it, and swung open the unlocked door. Simple, everyday movements.

  Not the sort of thing to dry your mouth and constrict your throat and make your fingers tremble— unless you knew what those actions signified. When you were a prisoner taking refuge in the embassy of Chance Magruder, you understood what was dangerous and what was foolhardy.

  It was foolhardy to be at the Watergate too early. Foolhardy to be caught with your kitbag on the stairs. But it was dangerous in the extreme to do exactly what Magruder suggested, on the Sword's own timetable.

  Chance would spend Mondragon in a second, without blinking an eye, for the smallest possible advantage. Mondragon had learned that when he'd been accused of treason back in Nev Hettek and Chance had led the team that came to apprehend him.

  Clouds of memory, which had mercifully obscured those details for so many years, parted and Mondragon was once again at home—the only home he'd ever known—on the day, long ago, when Chance and his thugs came bursting in, weapons ready.

  A million years. A cat's eight lives out of nine. In that sudden, painfully clear moment of memory, the present dissolved. And:

  "Move," Chance suggested in that death-rattle voice. "Just give me an excuse to save the revolution the time and trouble of trying you publicly. Traitor."

  Mondragon saw Chance's eyes again and realized again that Chance hadn't believed a word of what he said or what Mondragon heard. Chance's eyes that day had been full of ice and calculation—and a sort of abstract pity.

  One revolutionary mover was offering another a chance at suicide. Only a formal gesture. A suggestion. A courtesy extended to a man once his peer.

  Mondragon had never shared Chance's cavalier attitude toward life.

  Tom Mondragon struggled back to his present, and his present danger. He'd never shared Chance's expe-dientist nature. He didn't share it now. But Mondragon still didn't know if Chance had been right to offer him a quick, clean death that day, and whether he'd been wrong to choose life at whatever cost, only to face death so many times and cheat it so many times, thereafter.

  After all, death would win in the end. The game was fixed. The dice were weighted. The deck was stacked.

  Death would come, finally. It always came. Mondragon reminded himself he mustn't fear death, only men anxious to mete it out.

  Death would come when it willed. He must be ready.

  Some Merovingen cultures believed that the quality and success of a man's life could only be judged at the moment of his death, and by that death. So when Chance had come, a few scant hours ago, as he had once so long ago, offering Mondragon escape—salvation, an opportunity to cut and run—Mondragon had looked over his shoulder and said, "What's this, Chance? History repeating itself?"

  "Could be. That's up to you. Make a move, Mondragon. Do what benefits us both. It beats sitting around waiting for misfortune to befall you."

  They both knew that malevolence, rather than simple misfortune,, was at issue. Misfortune didn't come into it—unless you cared what happened to Merovingen or its folk.

  Chance didn't. He'd come here and moved only among the powerful, mentally twisted, amoral players of hightown, who used the beliefs of the ignorant and religious as crowd control mechanisms. No wonder Chance despised those he'd met here.

  Mondragon had found good folk down on the canals, in Merovingen-below. But he couldn't argue that their ignorance made them slaves and that they were unwilling to give up that comforting ignorance: freedom wasn't granted from without, Mondragon had learned. And it came at great price. To free these folk, rather than just herd them toward new masters or toward death itself, you'd have to wrench from them all the comfort of their primitive belief systems— without offering any replacement but the revolutionary ethic.

  And Mondragon, a product of that ethic, knew it wasn't enough. But he didn't know what was enough. Unless it was love.

  So, for love, he was letting Chance manipulate him one more time.

  Time to go. Time to roll the dice. Time to test your luck.

  Luck, like time, runs out.

  Out in the halls of the Nev Hettek embassy, he felt naked, exposed. Every footfall was painfully loud. His breathing was far too fast.

  At somewhere shy of thirty, he was getting old. Too old for revolution. Too old for brazen feats of derring do and hair-rasing escapes from the jaws of death. All were young men's games.

  He moved down the hall with every muscle in his body aching as he asked it for stealth and it reacted too slowly, too clumsily.

  A door opened as he reached the landing and he s
topped breathing altogether.

  If it was Chance, who saw him like this, it was all for nothing. Chance could look at him, read the signs, and kill him on the spot in that tight, decisive rage of the thwarted operator.

  But it wasn't Chance, only one of the Nev Hetteker chambermaids. She smiled a countryman's smile and he smiled back, then hurried on.

  Hurry. Don't creak a floorboard with a misplaced step. Come on, body, behave and earn the right to breathe another day.

  Take me safely out of here. Carry me, one more time, through the danger ahead and I promise, I'll treat you better. Feed you. Keep you warm. Let you rest.

  He was floating above his body as if it belonged to somebody else. As if he could survive, somehow, even if it perished.

  But he knew all too well that he couldn't.

  Steps. Steps winding down. Steps to hell or steps to salvation.

  Down a flight of steps, onto another landing. Here were voices, those of the staffers who lived on this floor. Here he could not hope to avoid questions if discovered.

  He started down another flight, and his ears produced a high, internal tone which was loud at first, then fading: the tone was his body's reaction to the stress of not bolting down the stairs three at a time.

  He kept trying to envision Jone's pinched, dirty face, eyes wide- at seeing him.

  What would it be like to hold her again?

  He gave himself the promise of her flesh against his, of her touch, of the smell of her hair, as if he could bribe his body into giving him the strength and quickness he needed for this one more, desperate deed.

  And then he was down those steps, on the lowest working floor of the embassy. He heard a woman's voice, a throaty laugh. Dani? Tatiana? Chance played dangerous games in his bedroom these days. If Karl Fon had left Chance here much longer unsupervised, Chance might have ended up in the Merovingian seat of power, with Tatiana on his lap.

  Karl had realized it, no doubt, and thus sent Dani to keep watch and tabs on Chance. If Mondragon had been Karl Fon, he'd have worried more about Chance installing himself as Merovingen's ruler than about any religious state with fanatical tendencies on his border.