On foot, then. And close by.
Faral and Jens would have spotted a cambio in Fracini Square, if they’d been alert—it was the only such place in the neighborhood with a visible sign. That gave her a logical place to start looking.
She was right, too. When she arrived opposite the cambio, she saw two figures inside the shop, dimly visible through the armor-glass of the front window.
Miza frowned. Tourists who got more than a double fifty-chit from Barapan’s establishment would meet a mugger later in the day, all but guaranteed. If the sum advanced to the off-worlders was sufficient—and Miza, who had made out the letters of credit herself, felt certain that it would be—Barapan might even have sent for the strongarms already.
She changed position to another spot, this one not so advantageous for watching Barapan’s cambio, but somewhat better for watching watchers. Then she waited.
Yes … there they were, halfway up the street in either direction: a man in a grey hat, window-shopping, and a woman carrying a bouquet of flowers, pausing to arrange her bustier. Miza couldn’t see the backup team, but she knew that the strongarms would have one lurking a block away, ready to swing onto whatever path Faral and Jens took when they left the cambio. In only a couple of minutes, half of Barapan’s money would be heading back into his personal accounts, with the other half going to the robbers.
Now what do I do?
she wondered. She wasn’t a physical operative, and she didn’t want to be. She was an analyst, and knew that someday she’d be a damned good one, but violence had never been part of her training. If the two off-worlders were depending on her …
There they come now.
Faral and Jens came out of the shop, their pockets bulging with what must have been every decimal-bit the letters of credit would allow, and took a right-hand turn onto the street. Miza followed, walking fast but trying not to be conspicuous in her hurry. Over on the other side of the street, and a little bit ahead of them, the gentlelady with the armful of fresh flowers and the embroidered bustier was drifting in the same direction at a deceptively easy pace.
The two young off-worlders didn’t seem to notice. They ought to have had “tourist” written on their shirts in three different alphabets and five different languages, Miza reflected, the way they were gazing at shopwindows and ambling along as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
The lady with the flowers was still following them. So was Miza—far enough behind to watch, but not close enough to appear part of the group. With any luck, when the inevitable happened, no one would be hurt. Then she could get back to taking the two young men down to the port, perhaps a little chastened and easier to handle for their misadventure.
The blaster
, she thought suddenly.
You’re forgetting about that blaster. If Jens is foolish enough to go for it in the scuffle
…
He won’t have time to get it out.
Up ahead, in another of the Old Quarter’s little parks, a tree-lined bower opened its shadowed mouth onto the street.
That’s where it’ll all happen
, Miza thought. She strove to observe everything and remember it clearly. If she made a good report to Huool afterward, maybe her grades wouldn’t suffer too much.
The woman with the flowers crossed the street and headed back in the direction of the young off-worlders. Their paths converged at the opening of the bower. The woman, feigning surprise and clumsiness, lost her grip on the bouquet, scattering white and yellow josquiths all over the pavement. At the same time, a pair of muscular gentlemen stepped from the shadows and reached out to lay violent hands on the two young men.
And then—Jens spun and kicked high, his yellow hair flying as he moved, and the point of his boot struck the nearer of the two muggers on the jaw. The man fell. At the same time, Faral grabbed the woman by her upper arms and dropped, using the momentum thus created to throw her against the second mugger. Thief and decoy collapsed together onto the grass inside the bower, entangled as if caught in the midst of some bizarre assignation.
Miza hurried forward, but before she could reach the spot, she felt herself caught, spun, and thrown against the trunk of a tree, with Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin pressing the business end of a blaster into the flesh of her throat.
I was wrong
, she thought.
He
did
have enough time to get it out.
“Are you with these people?” he asked. His blue eyes had a dangerous brightness to them. “Is there a good reason why I shouldn’t stun you now and leave you here while my cousin and I make our complaint to local security?”
Miza drew a deep breath. It wouldn’t do to have her voice squeak with fright like a Roti’s breakfast. A few feet away, she could see Faral going through the pockets of the fallen men. Both the strongarms were lying quite still, though their chests were moving. The woman had, apparently, recovered herself and fled, leaving her flowers scattered broadcast across the pavement.
“Well?” said Jens.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “I’m on your side.”
Faral made a noise of satisfaction and straightened up from his search of the unconscious men. “ID,” he said, brandishing their personal card cases triumphantly. “We were wondering where we’d find some new stuff.”
“Good,” said Jens, without looking away from Miza. “If you’re on our side—name a city within an hour’s travel of Sombrelír.”
“Nanáli. Duvize is closer, but more links go to Nanáli.”
He made the blaster vanish. “Great. Let’s go to Nanáli. You lead, we follow. Just don’t try to get to a public comm booth—I don’t want to lose you again.”
Miza gave him what she hoped was a scornful glance. “I wasn’t the one who decided to break away from the guided tour, remember?”
“Foster-brother,” Faral said to Jens in an undertone. “I think we need to leave here in a hurry. People are starting to talk.”
Miza saw that he was right. Passersby were already gathering in a knot a discreet distance away from the altercation.
These two
, she thought,
desperately need a good courier.
“This way,” she said, and stepped over the pair of recumbent strongarms toward the back of the bower, not looking to see if Jens and Faral came after her. The front steps and doorway a private house lay on the other side of the shadowed arch of greenery. Over to one side, and conveniently invisible from the street, a wrought-iron fence marked the edge of another bower, this one cleverly planted to look like a patch of untamed woodland.
Jens looked at the fence with approval. “Very nice design.”
“We don’t admire it,” Miza said. “We climb over it. Quickly.”
“You heard the gentlelady,” Faral said. “Let’s go.”
“They’re right about off-worlders on Khesat,” Jens said, vaulting lightly over the fence. “No taste for the finer things in life. None at all.”
“This place you want me to go into,” said Mael Taleion. “I cannot.”
Klea pressed her lips together for a moment before answering. Of all the problems she had anticipated from this unwelcome alliance, she hadn’t expected to encounter a Magelord with philosophical scruples.
“Then you’ll have to camp on the street,” she said finally. “And in this district, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
She knew intellectually that Mages were only human. Just the same, she’d never liked dealing with them. All the time she’d been growing up on Nammerin, in between the first war and the second, the Magelords had been bogeys to scare small children—stock villains of a thousand holovids, requiring no motivation for the basest crimes other than the fact of their Magery.
Nothing in her childhood, or in what came afterward, had prepared her for this: a quiet, unassuming man whose calm demeanor failed to disguise the fact that he was as dubious about their situation as she was. In spite of what she had told Mael Taleion, she knew that staying outside was not an option. The Sombrelír Guildhouse occupied an otherwise empty block in a neighborhood that had once been fashionable. Now the area was an industrial slum. The Guildhouse, with its grounds and garden, stood like a lonely sentinel amid the encroaching sterility of prefab warehouses and manufacturing bays.
“Come on,” she said. “If I can work with you, you can go in there with me. Not that this place is anything special, as Guildhouses go. I suppose Ophel is lucky to have one at all.”
Mael sighed. “For the sake of the greater good,” he said, and made a hand gesture that Klea supposed was meant to avert evil. Not only did Mages have an unconscionable belief in luck, but they were superstitious as well. Since Mael was technically Klea’s guest, she tried hard to suppress the discourteous thought.
The Magelord drew his cloak around him and settled his mask over his face. Then, with a defiant air, he took his staff and attached it to a belt clip. “Let us go in.”
“Are you sure you want to wear—”
“I will not pretend to be other than what I am.”
Even under the distorting effect of the featureless plastic mask, Klea could hear the stubborn voice of a man who has made all the concessions he has it in him to make. She abandoned the subject and pushed open the Guild-yard gate. It squeaked on its hinges. She frowned at the noise—
if these people neglect the upkeep of house and grounds, what else do they neglect?
—and side by side with Mael Taleion she strode up the gravel walkway to the high doors of the main house.
They hadn’t gone a dozen steps before an apprentice emerged from inside the Guildhouse and held out his hand in a minatory gesture.
“
Guira dán!
” he said in Ophelan—a warning of some sort, Klea supposed, from his tone and his expression.
“And good afternoon to you, too,” she replied in Galcenian. She took another step forward.
“Mistress!” the apprentice said. “You don’t want to—you can’t—he’s a
Mage
!” The apprentice’s voice went up about an octave, and he flung out a hand to point at Mael’s chest.
“The fact has not escaped my notice,” Klea said. “Now, either call your Masters or let me pass, but don’t just stand there gabbling.”
The door opened again, and more hurrying footsteps crunched in the gravel ahead of them. A man in the garments of an Adept was running toward them, his fat cheeks bouncing in his haste. He was trying to seal his tunic and fasten his belt at the same time, and making little progress with either.
“Are all Guildhouses thus?” Mael asked in a quiet voice. Klea couldn’t be sure, but she thought that he sounded amused.
She ignored his comment and turned to face the newcomer, now coming to a panting halt before her. “Master Evanh,” she said. “I know you, and you know me. Now, enough nonsense. I have a great need of secure communications and information banks, and this Guildhouse has both. And while you’re taking us to them, you can explain why you’ve let your guard down here. And where’s your staff?”
“Mistress,” Master Evanh said, taking a deep breath, “that man—he’s a Mage!”
“Yes,” Klea said patiently, “he’s a Mage. He is the Second of all their Circles, and he is under my protection. When he speaks you hear my voice. Do you understand?”
“Under
your
protection?” Mael said, while at the same time Master Evanh said, “Mistress, you forget yourself. This is my Guildhouse and I am the Master here.”
Klea shook her head. “That may not last much longer. Be aware that two of the Guild Master’s nephews are on this world, and that I am sent to guard them. If you had been at your meditations rather than asleep in the middle of the day, you would have felt the currents of Power shifting at the very moment they were lost.”
Evanh stared at her, eyes round and fishlike with incomprehension. “Lost?”
“You heard me. Reach out and test the currents yourself if you don’t believe it. And while you’re doing that, give me leave to use your communications setup. Master Owen must be kept apprised. Stand aside.”
On the southern hemisphere of Cracanth, deep in the night sector, candles flickered around the perimeter of a circle. Two had burned all the way down and guttered out. The room was painted black, with black hangings to muffle any sounds made within, and a white circle glimmered against the black-painted floor. Around the circle lay bundles of dark cloth, tossed here and there like dirty laundry. But inside each bundle was what remained of a man or a woman. Dead.
Eiadon sus-Gefael, First of the Circle of Bareiath Ai, looked down on them. He had seen the twisting of the cords, and had come as quickly as he could. Other members of his Circle, roused from their beds to accompany him, were searching the rest of the house. Outside, the domestic security forces waited until he had declared the house fit for them to enter, in case this turned out to be a material crime. He rather doubted that it was.