“Well, you’ve been fooled,” burst from Kossara. “I’m here to, to disprove those exact same charges against us. The Gospodar, our head of state, he’s my uncle and he sent me as his personal agent. I should know, shouldn’t I? And I tell you, he’s loyal. We are!”
“Why doesn’t he proclaim it?” Johnson asked.
“Oh, he is making official representations. But what are they worth? Across four hundred light-years—We need proof. We need to learn who’s been blackening us and why.” Kossara paused for a sad smile. “I don’t pretend I can find out much. I’m here as a, a forerunner, a scout. Maybe that special Navy team working out of Thursday Landing—have you heard about them?—maybe they’ll exonerate us without our doing anything. Maybe they already have. The commander didn’t act suspicious of me.”
Johnson patted her hand. “I believe you’re honest, Mademoiselle,” he said. “And you may well be correct, too. Let’s exchange what we’ve discovered—and, in between, give you some outdoor recreation. You look space-worn.”
The next three darkling springtime days were pleasant. Kossara and Trohdwyr stopped wearing weapons in the cave.}
Flandry sighed. “Aycharaych.” He had told her something of his old antagonist. “Who else? Masks within masks, shadows that cast shadows … Merseian operatives posing as Esperancians posing as Dennitzans whose comrades had formerly posed as Avalonians, while other Merseian creatures are in fact the Terran personnel they claim to be. Yes, I’ll bet my chance of a peaceful death that Aycharaych is the engineer of the whole diablerie.”
He drew on a cigarette, rolled acridity over his tongue and streamed it out his nostrils, as if this mordant would give reality a fast hold on him. He and she sat side by side on a saloon bench. Before them was the table, where stood glasses and a bottle of Demerara rum. Beyond was the viewscreen, full of night and stars. They had left the shining nebula behind; an unlit mass of cosmic dust reared thunderhead tall across the Milky Way. The ship’s clocks declared the hour was late. Likewise did the silence around, above the hum which had gone so deep into their bones that they heard it no more.
Kossara wore a housedress whose brevity made him all too aware of long legs, broad bosom, a vein lifting blue from the dearest hollow that her shoulderbones made at the base of her throat. She shivered a trifle and leaned near him, unperfumed now except for a sunny odor of woman. “Monstrous,” she mumbled.
“N-no … well, I can’t say.” Why do I defend him? Flandry wondered, and knew: I see in my mirror the specter of him. Though who of us is flesh and who image? “I’ll admit I can’t hate him, even for what he did to you and will do to your whole people and mine if he can. I’ll kill him the instant I’m able, but—Hm, I suppose you never saw or heard of a coral snake. It’s venomous but very beautiful, and strikes without malice … Not that I really know what drives Aycharaych. Maybe he’s an artist of overriding genius. That’s a kind of monster, isn’t it?”
She reached for her glass, withdrew her hand—she was a light drinker—and gripped the table edge instead, till the ends of her nails turned white. “Can such a labyrinth of a scheme work? Aren’t there hopelessly many chances for something to go wrong?”
Flandry found solace in a return to pragmatics, regardless of what bitterness lay behind. “If the whole thing collapses, Merseia hasn’t lost much. Not Hans nor any Emperor can make the Terran aristocrats give up their luxuries—first and foremost, their credo that eventual accommodation is possible—and go after the root of the menace. He couldn’t manage anything more than a note of protest and perhaps the suspension of a few negotiations about trade and the like. His underlings would depose him before they allowed serious talk about singeing the beard the Roidhun hasn’t got.”
His cigarette butt scorched his fingers. He tossed it away and took a drink of his own. The piratical pungency heartened him till he could speak in detachment, almost amusement: “Any plotter must allow for his machine losing occasional nuts and bolts. You’re an example. Your likely fate as a slave was meant to outrage every man on Dennitza when the news arrived there. By chance, I heard about you in the well-known and deservedly popular nick of time—I, not someone less cautious—”
“Less noble,” She stroked his arm. It shone inside.
Nonetheless he grinned and said, “True, I may lack scruples, but not warm blood. I’m a truncated romantic. A mystery, a lovely girl, an exotic planet—could I resist hallooing off—”
It jarred through him:—off into whatever trap was set by a person who knew me? His tongue went on. “However, prudence, not virtue, was what made me careful to do nothing irrevocable” to you, darling; I praise the Void that nothing irrevocable happened to you. “And we did luck out, we did destroy the main Merseian wart on Diomedes.” Was the luck poor silly Susette and her husband’s convenient absence? Otherwise I’d have stayed longer at Thursday Landing, playing sleuth—long enough to give an assassin, who was expecting me specifically, a chance at me.
No! This is fantastic! Forget it!
“Wasn’t that a disaster to the enemy?” Kossara asked.
“ ’Fraid not. I don’t imagine they’ll get their Diomedean insurgency. But that’s a minor disappointment. I’m sure the whole operation was chiefly a means to the end of maneuvering Terra into forcing Dennitza to revolt And those false clues have long since been planted and let sprout; the false authoritative report has been filed; in short, about as much damage has been done on the planet as they could reasonably expect.”
Anguish: “Do you think … we will find civil war?”
He laid an arm around her. She leaned into the curve of it, against his side. “The Empire seldom bumbles fast,” he comforted her. “Remember, Hans himself didn’t want to move without more information. He saw no grounds for doubting the Maspes report—that Dennitzans were involved—but he realized they weren’t necessarily the Gospodar’s Dennitzans. That’s why I got recruited, to check further. In addition, plain old bureaucratic inertia works in our favor. Yes, as far as the problems created on Diomedes are concerned, I’m pretty sure well get you home in time.”
“Thanks to you, Dominic.” Her murmur trembled. “To none but you.”
He did not remind her that Diomedes was not, could never have been the only world on which the enemy had worked, and that events on Dennitza would not have been frozen. This was no moment for reminders, when she kissed him.
Her shyness in it made him afraid to pursue. But they sat together a spell, mute before the stars, until she bade him goodnight.
{On the tundra far north of the Kazan, Bodin Miyatovich kept a hunting lodge. Thence he rode forth on horseback, hounds clamorous around him, in quest of gromatz, yegyupka, or ice troll. At other times he and his guests boated on wild waters, skied on glacier slopes, sat indoors by a giant hearthfire talking, drinking, playing chess, playing music, harking to blizzard winds outside. Since her father bore her cradle from aircar to door, Kossara had loved coming here.