Dragon in Exile - eARC (4 page)

The aisles were crowded this morning; though way was made for herself and Tolly, and they completed a circuit in good time and order.

It was then that they entered the second area; a common room, where those who had purchased samples of local food and drink might consume them, and where others might sit down and work out arrangements of sale, or where still others might rest quietly for a moment.

The common room was considerably less crowded than the bazaar floor. Hazenthull went to the left, Tolly to the right, marching in truth, making a show of detailed scrutiny of each occupant.

“Yxtrang!” The scream was as raw as a war-cry, and she reacted to it as she would have done, had she been on the field of honor.

She spun, knees flexed, sidearm in her hand, scanning the crowd—it was all instinct and reaction; her body completed the moves before her brain recalled that
she
was no longer Yxtrang,
she
was a member of the yos’Phelium House Guard, serving under Captain Miri Robertson and Scout Commander Val Con yos’Phelium.

She had him in her eye now—a man past the prime of his life, with lank grey hair, dressed in an insulated orange coat.

“Yxtrang!” He yelled again. “Killer!”

Carefully, she straightened to her full height, and slid her gun into its holster.

“I am not an Yxtrang,” she said, trying for Tolly’s tone of calm reason. “I am attached to the household of the Road Boss, and I am employed as Security by Surebleak Port.”

“Road Boss ain’t nothing but a killer hisself!” the man in orange coat jeered. “Allya oughta be shot for war crimes, or run off planet. Start with you, since you’re here. Hey! Yxtrang on port! Who’s gonna help me, here?”

“I’ll help you, friend,” said a calm voice. The sound of a safety being released was very loud in the quiet area.

The man in the orange coat froze; Hazenthull saw the whites of his eyes.

Tolly moved, gun pointed at the man’s chest.

“What you want to do is put your hands on top of your head, slow and easy, or else I might think you were going for a weapon and I’d have to shoot you. That’s my first bit of help.”

“Yeah, OK, I get it,” the man in the orange coat said with a grin. “Joke’s gone too far. I’ll be gettin’ on.”

“No,” Tolly said, his voice hard, and sounding so un-Tolly-like that Hazenthull turned her head to stare at him. “You’ll put your hands on your head and you’ll stand there while my partner searches you. If you don’t do that, I’ll consider you a high-level threat and I will shoot you. Got that?”

The man stared, then, slowly, put his hands on his head. He was, Hazenthull saw, starting to sweat.

“Haz, you wanna search this guy?”

She moved forward, staying out of Tolly’s line of fire, and divested the prisoner of the weapon on his belt, and the folding knife in the pocket of his pants. Neither weapon was of professional grade, or even particularly clean. She patted him down, not gently, ignoring his, “Hey, watch it there; I need that!” and stepped back.

“He is clean,” she told Tolly.

He nodded.

“Cuff him.”

She shot a glance at him, saw his tiny nod, and stepped forward again to cuff the man’s wrists behind his back.

“Hey, gimme a break! It was a joke, all right?”

“In fact, it’s not all right to try to call a lynch mob down on a port security officer during her rounds. It’s not all right to assert that a port security officer in pursuit of her duty is a
killer
.”

“Well, fine me, then! Ain’t nothin’ here for cuffs! Just playin’ a joke, like I said. Friend—” He stopped, and Tolly tipped his head slightly.

“Friend?” he prompted.

“Nothin’. Slip o’the tongue. C’mon Security, get these things off me. I’ll pay the fine.”

“Not my call,” Tolly said. “You can tell it to the Port Security Chief. You might find it interesting to find out how she feels about random port-scrum calling down mayhem on one of her officers as a joke.” He moved the gun, very slightly.

“Let’s go, Haz.”

“Yes,” she said, and nudged the prisoner. “Walk.”

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 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 considered 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, recalled herself, 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 Liz 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. “OK, 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 Delms’ 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 was 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’ house, and proceeded to capture a respectable clientele. Conrad had spoken to her only a few week’s 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 he should have held safe in his 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’ ’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?”