Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“You’re tired, Del, or you wouldn’t say something so stupid.”

She scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. “Right. I need a stim.”

“Well,” Barker said, “Hay’s offer’s still open.”

“Adelaar aici Arash, meet one Tomi Wolvesson, we call him the Barker for reasons I won’t go into now. She’s Adelaris Securities, Bark, a client.”

“Naturally a client, otherwise this lovely respectable femme wouldn’t be in a mile of you, old bear.” Without taking his elbows from the wood he managed a bow and a swagger, grinning up at both of us. “If you’ll take my arm, dear lady, we shall go searching for that stim.” He backed away, swept another bow and crooked his arm ready for her hand. “File your reports, my son, and join us in the bar.”

Amused by his rattle and wanting to be away from this place, Adelaar went down the ramp, took his arm and left me to deal with all the nonsense the bureaucrats demanded once a duel was done. Especially when there was a corpse or two as a result. The Ref tapped me on the shoulder, took me to his office and started on the umpteen reports he was going to have to make. It was the ultimate in futility, there were no penalties for the duels or the deaths. Running out on the reports, though, that was serious. I knew better than to waste time complaining, the sooner the business was done, the sooner I could climb into the trucetel medicell and after that into a long hot bath.

Ti Vnok looked like an absurdist’s idea of a cross between a spider monkey and a praying mantis; his movements alternated between the stillness of mantis-at-rest and the frenetic energy of monkey-at-full-cry. He was a general-purpose agent, there to link anyone with an itch to anyone who could perhaps scratch that itch, never involved with either side, silent as stones about his clients’ business, never challenged because in his busy little way he was as useful as Helvetia herself. And a friend of mine. Which didn’t mean he’d whisper secrets in my ear, just that he’d steer things my way if he saw a chance, might even hint oh-so-delicately if I was about to put my foot in something that stank. There are worse kinds of friends.

Kumari reported that when she reached him to change the time of our meet, he looked unusually fidgety and wouldn’t commit to anything over the com, said he’d get a message round to her. Which he did about an hour later. One of the street kids that infested the undercity like mites on a dog’s belly got past tel security somehow and up to the floor where our unit was, hand-carrying a flashnote, time and place scribbled on it and a reminder I was to come careful and alone; the flash was quicker than usual, she just had time to read the thing before it dissolved.

I left the trucetel an hour early, spent a good part of the time jumping flea runs, mixing that with trots around the block up top where the sun was hot and the mirrors busy. Several times I wished I had Pels along, times when I was almost but not quite sure I’d dropped my ticks, but regret only gives you ulcers and Adelaar needed him more than I did. When she’d crawled out of the medicell and into bed, Kumari, Pels and I had a short confa about the morrow, I played them over the duel and the parade to the jits afterward and the shadows rustling round us-we’d ’ve had to scramble to reach the jits if it weren’t for Barker and the rest. It was clear enough that Bolodo wasn’t giving up, just changing tactics. The most likely next step was pointing assassins at us. “Remember Bustus?” I said.

“I remember something closer to a Crawler’s soul,” Kumari said, “Bolodo has more money than god herself.”

“What, pay out all those golden gelders, those slippery succulent little darlins just for me? No, the Prime target’ll be Adelaar.”

Bolodo wouldn’t sic Crawlers on me unless they had to, because it’d cost them a lot. Couple years ago I was after a University contract advertised on Helvetia and this character decided it would make a good cover for some other things he was doing and I was his only serious competition, so he dropped their price on a NightCrawler cobben and pointed them at me. I got seriously annoyed at this interference, also at having the hair singed off half my head. A lethal friend of mine happened to be on Helvetia right then, arguing an Escrow Closing; she’d just finished a Hunt and was getting the fee released, a complicated business since her fees tended to be in the range of the gross yearly income of your average world economy. Lovely gentle woman, she gets upset when she kills someone or maims them a little, but not when they target someone she’s fond of. She’s redheaded and has the temper to go with it. We did some bloody housecleaning and she laid down a warning, mess with her friends and she’d come Hunting without a commission. Since then the NightCrawlers walk wide of me, so like I said, Bolodo might have some trouble recruiting a cobben, a reputation’s a handy thing. But like Kumari said, Bolodo’s got the gelt; they’ll buy some nerve and stuff it up some Crawler’s spine. What else is money for, eh?

By now Adelaar and my crew were in the City also, sitting in an office at Del’s bank, temporarily safe from attack. Or so I hoped. As shipsecond and official MOM and holding my signature, Kumari could endorse the contracts for me and stamp the escrow agreements; she usually handled that kind of thing, she was sharper than either Pels or me when it came to words and the twists that gentlebeings could put on them. Adelaar would be imprinting the contracts with her bank, the Register Circuit and the Escrow Board. It had to be done in the proper office, with the proper officials in attendance, everything fotted and entered in octuplets or more. Helvetian rules. She intended to evoke Privacy on the terms, but I had more faith in Bolodo’s persistence than in Helvetian tech, so I figured the local execs would know what we were after in a few hours. And when they did, when they discovered I was agreeing to rescue the daughter, they’d really get serious about taking us out. That’s all they needed to be sure I either had their stinking secret or was so close to finding it, the little bit left made no difference at all.

Ti Vnok was waiting at the back of one of the larger arbors; it was close to ground level and had enough exits to satisfy a claustrophobic paranoid. I’d felt clean the past five minutes or so and I’d pulled every trick I knew to test the feeling out, so I strolled into the cool and shifting shadows and wandered about a minute or so longer. No bells rang. I drifted over to Vnok’s alcove and slid onto the bench across the table from him.

He sat mantis still, his eyes expressionless as obsidian marbles, but the two short feathery antennas that served as eyebrows were doing a nervous dance.

“Far as I can tell, I’m clean,” I said. “I spent the last hour getting that way.”

He rubbed his wrists together, the callus patches there making a faint skrikking sound; the expression came back into his eyes and his monkey face dissolved into the sort of grin that makes you want to grin back. “I’ve got some cover for meeting you, Swarda, a man came to see me last night, said he had a message for you.” He didn’t waste time asking if I wanted to hear it. He leaned forward, the weight of his torso balanced on his forearms. “Drop this business and certain people will see you won’t be hurting for it. One hundred thousand gelders. No bidding, please. That was the deal.”

“No deal,” I said. “You bring the list?”

“Only the freshest names.” He thrust two fingers in his throat pouch and brought out a small black packet. “The whole list would herniate a bumphel.”

“Even flaked?”