Lois Bujold - Barrayar

Hatred hastened the rhythm of Vorhalas’s breathing as he glared at his intended victim. “You bastard. You snake-cold bastard. Sitting there cold as stone while they hacked off his head. Did you feel a thing? Or did you enjoy it, my Lord Regent? I swore I’d get you then.”

There was a long silence, then Vorkosigan leaned close to him, one arm extended past his head for support against the wall. He whispered hoarsely, “You missed me, Evon.”

Vorhalas spat in his face, spittle bloody from his injured mouth. Vorkosigan made no move to wipe it away. “You missed my wife,” he went on in a slow soft cadence. “But you got my son. Did you dream of sweet revenge? You have it. Look at her eyes, Evon. A man could drown in those sea-grey eyes. I’ll be looking at them every day for the rest of my life. So eat vengeance, Evon. Drink it. Fondle it. Wrap it round you in the night watch. It’s all yours. I will it all to you. For myself, I’ve gorged it to the gagging point, and have lost my stomach for it.”

Vorhalas looked up, then, for the first time, past him to Cordelia. She thought of the child in her belly, his delicate girdering of new cartilagenous bones perhaps even now beginning to rot, twist, slough, but could not hate Vorhalas, although she tried to for a moment. She couldn’t even find him baffling. She had a sense, as of a second sight, that she could see right through his wounded spirit the way doctors saw through a wounded body with their diagnostic viewers. Every twist and tear and emotional abrasion, every young cancer of resentment growing from them, and above all the great gash of his brother’s death seemed red-lined in her mind’s eye.

“He didn’t enjoy it, Evon,” she said. “What would you have had from him? Do you even know?”

“A little human pity,” he snarled. “He could have saved Carl. Even then he could have. I thought at first that was why he had come.”

“Oh, God,” said Vorkosigan. He looked sick at the flashing vision of the rise and fall of hopes these words conjured. “I don’t play theater with lives, Evon!”

Vorhalas held his hatred like a shield before him. “Go to hell.”

Vorkosigan sighed, and pushed away from the wall. The doctor was lingering to chivvy them to the waiting vehicle for the trip to the Imperial Military Hospital. “Take him away, Illyan,” said Vorkosigan wearily.

“Wait,” said Cordelia. “I need to know—I need to ask him something.”

Vorhalas eyed her sullenly.

“Was this the result you intended? I mean, when you chose that particular weapon? That specific poison?”

He looked away from her, speaking to the far wall. “It was what I could grab, going through the armory. I didn’t think you could identify it, and get the antidote all the way from ImpMil in time… .”

“You relieve me of a burden,” she whispered.

“The antidote came from the Imperial Residence,” Vorkosigan explained. “A quarter of the distance. The Emperor’s infirmary there has everything. As for identification … I was there, at the destruction of the Karian mutiny. Just about your age, I think, or a little younger. The smell brought it all back, just now. Boys coughing out their lungs in red blobs… .” He seemed to shrink into himself, into the past.

“I didn’t intend your death particularly. You were just in the way, between me and him.” Vorhalas gestured blindly at her swollen torso. “It wasn’t the result I intended. I meant to kill him. I didn’t even know for sure that you shared the same room at night.” He was looking everywhere, now, except her face. “I never thought about killing your …”

“Look at me,” she croaked, “and say the word out loud.”

“Baby,” he whispered, and burst into sudden, shocking sobs.

Vorkosigan stepped back, beside her. “Wish you hadn’t done that,” he whispered. “Reminds me of his brother. Why am I death to that family?”

“Still want him to eat vengeance?”

He leaned his forehead on her shoulder, briefly. “Not even that. You empty us all out, dear Captain. But, oh …” His hand reached out as if to cup her belly, then drew back in consciousness of their ring of silent watchers. He straightened. “Bring me a full report in the morning, Illyan,” he said, “at the hospital.”

He took her by the arm as they turned to follow the doctor. She could not tell if it was to support her or himself.

She was surrounded by helpers at the Imperial Military Hospital complex, carried along as on a river. Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, guards. Aral was separated from her at the door, and it made her uneasy and alone in the crowd. She said very little to them, empty courtesies, automatic as levers. She wished for shock to take her consciousness, numbness, reality—denying madness, hallucinations, anything. Instead she just felt tired.

The baby was moving within her, flutters, kneading turns; evidently the teratogenic antidote was a very slow-acting poison. They were still granted a little time together, it seemed, and she loved him through her skin, her fingertips moving in a slow massage over her abdomen. Welcome, my son, to Barrayar, the abode of cannibals; this place didn’t even wait the usual eighteen or twenty years to eat you. Ravenous planet.

She was bedded down in a luxurious private room in a VIP wing, hastily cleared for their exclusive use. She was relieved to discover Vorkosigan had been ensconced just across the hall. Dressed already in green military-issue pajamas, he came promptly over to see her tucked into bed. She managed a small smile for him, but did not attempt to sit up. The force of gravity was pulling her down into the center of the world. Only the rigidity of the bed, the building, the planets crust, held her up against it, not her will at all.

He was trailed by an anxious corpsman, saying, “Remember, sir, try not to talk so much, till after the doctor’s had a chance to give your throat the irrigation treatment.”

The grey light of dawn was making the windows pale. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, rubbing it. “You’re cold, dear Captain,” he whispered hoarsely. She nodded. Her chest ached, her throat was raw, and her sinuses burned.

“I should never have let them talk me into taking the job,” he went on. “So sorry …”

“I talked you into it, too. You tried to warn me. Not your fault. It seemed right for you. Is right.”

He shook his head. “Don’t talk. Makes scar tissue on the vocal cords.”

She gave vent to a joyless “Ha!” and laid a finger across his lips as he started to speak again. He nodded, resigned, and they remained looking at each other for a time. He pushed her tangled hair back gently from her face, and she captured the broad hand to hold against her cheek for comfort, until he was hunted out by a posse of doctors and technicians and driven off for a treatment. “We’ll be in to see you shortly, Milady,” their chieftain promised ominously.

They returned after a while, to make her gargle a nasty pink fluid, and breathe into a machine, then rumbled out again. A female nurse brought her breakfast, which she did not touch.

Then a committee of grim-faced doctors entered her room. The one who had come from the Imperial Residence in the night was now smartly groomed and neatly dressed in civilian clothes. Her own personal physician was flanked by a younger, black-browed man in Service greens with captain’s tabs on his collar. She gazed at their three faces and thought of Cerberus.

Her man introduced the stranger. “This is Captain Vaagen, of the Imperial Military Hospital’s research facility. He’s our resident expert on military poisons.”

“Inventing them, or cleaning up after them, Captain?” Cordelia asked.

“Both, Milady.” He stood at a sort of aggressive parade rest.