For Finister, though, it was very definitely personal. Her interest in the Gallowglass family amounted to an obsession, but her interest in Geoffrey was very definitely a vivid example of lust adulterated only by hatred. Taken all together, it made him fascinating.
The clanging and clattering stopped; the cow ceased her terrified mooing, and the chickens sought their roosts again. Finister knelt in the hay, panting, hair dishevelled, amidst random straws that slowly drifted down into the mow. Slowly, clear thoughts returned, foremost among them being the fact that the yeoman who owned the barn was bound to come running in alarm to see what all the commotion had been. It would make things easier if she were not there.
She ran to the ladder, swung down to the earthen floor, then dodged out the small door at the back, where Agent Grommet was waiting with her cloak. He was looking considerably happier than when she had left him. "No luck?" he asked cheerily.
Finister was used to her male agents' suppressed sexual jealousy; she couldn't really resent it, since their desire was so useful for keeping them in line. That didn't mean, of course, that she couldn't torment them a little. "A great deal of success," she countered, and waited just long enough for his disappointment to harden into a wooden mask before she let him off the hook: "Until some weasel of an elf called him away for a conference!"
Grommet relaxed—relieved, Finister saw darkly. Like herself, he was a "home agent"—a local recruit, who had been found on the doorstep of an agent who had a reputation for taking in foundlings. In fact, it was his primary role in the organization, and he did it very well, raising local Gramarye children to believe in the goals and methods of SPITE, while nurturing their resentment against the society that had abandoned them. In Finister, that resentment had deepened into hatred, and the Gallowglasses had proved the perfect target for it. Her adoptive father had also recognized her psionic talents, and proved very adept at helping her train them, though he himself had none. He had turned her loose as a mature agent of SPITE at sixteen, and she had risen rapidly, being given her first assignment to hamstring a Gallowglass at the tender age of nineteen.
Grommet draped her cloak over her shoulders, grumbling, "I don't see why you have to pay so much attention to that musclebound oaf, anyway."
The reminder of Geoffrey's muscles stirred a thrill of desire in Finister, making her a bit more snappish than she needed to be as she answered, "Yes, you do—to make sure the influence of that viper, Rod Gallowglass, won't keep going after his death."
"Well, yes, I understand that," Grommet griped. "But why do we have to do it by making sure none of his children reproduce?"
"Because we've tried every other way," Finister fumed. "Assassination, rebellion, poisoning his mind with a psychoactive drug—and none of them worked. Between that horse of his and that wife..." She made the word an obscenity. "... he's just too well guarded."
She could have added the elves to the list of Rod's guardians, but she preferred not to think of them just now. Rod Gallowglass was an agent for the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms, an organization dedicated to promulgating democracy by sniffing out dictatorships and other forms of oppressive government, and steering them onto the road toward democracy in one of its many forms. As such, Rod was the bitter enemy of all SPITE'S agents—because this planet of Gramarye was absolutely vital to the future of democracy. By a fluke of genetic selection, it contained more active telepaths than all the rest of the Terran-colonized planets combined—and if those telepaths could be swayed toward believing in democracy, they would become the communications system for a galaxywide federation of democratic governments.
In fact, that was exactly what had happened—or would happen, in the future. Centuries down the timeline, an interstellar democratic government ruled the Terran Sphere, with Gramarye's telepaths as its communications network. The anarchists had lost—as had their equally virulent enemies, the future totalitarians—so both groups had sent agents back in time, to try to change their own past and Gramarye's future, by swaying the planet toward anarchy on the one hand, or totalitarianism on the other. As Rod Gallowglass and his local allies had frustrated one plot after another and used each challenge to put the planet more firmly than ever on the road to democracy, the futurians had become less and less picky—they no longer cared much what kind of government Gramarye had, so long as it wasn't democratic.
In fact, both organizations had pretty well resigned themselves to having lost the fight, as long as Rod Gallowglass lived. The totalitarians were biding their time, plotting for the day after he died—but the anarchists, under Finister's leadership, were taking action now.
"How else do you think we're going to keep Gallowglass from polluting the future with his asinine democracy?" she demanded.
Grommet was silent for a few strides, face darkening. Finally, he had to admit, "Not much else I can see."
Finister felt a stab of vindictive satisfaction. "No other way at all—and so far, I haven't done too badly."
"Well, you made a good start, anyway," Grommet admitted, "and I can't deny you were the perfect agent to assign to the Magnus Gallowglass case."
"Yes, I certainly was," Finister purred. In three separate encounters, she had given Magnus such a nightmarish view of sex that it was highly doubtful he would ever do more than think of reproduction, and that only in the most clinical way. In fact, he had left the planet to get away from her (at least, she was sure that was the reason), and she thought it was all for the best. His siblings had to be much less effective without him. He was the eldest, after all, and the one they all looked up to, though she knew Geoffrey would have hated to admit it.
Cordelia would have, too, being the second child and the only girl. Finister's eyes flashed as she thought of the moralistic chit, and it didn't help that Grommet chose just that moment to mutter, "You didn't do too well when it came to Cordelia, though."
"Of course not! She's female, after all!"
"True," Grommet grated, and started to say something else, but caught his tongue in time.
And a good thing, too, Finister thought grimlyespecially if he'd been about to remind her that, though Cordelia might not have been susceptible to Finister's wiles, her fiance, the Crown Prince Alain, certainly was not. "I almost had him," she said between her teeth, "but the bitch used some kind of witchcraft on him that I don't know about."
Not surprising that she didn't, Grommet reflected, since the magic in question was called "love." From personal experience, he knew that Finister equated the word with "sex," and thought everything else associated with it was sentimental hypocrisy. She didn't really have the concept, and Grommet wondered why. He knew she had had a rough childhood before being dumped on the SPITE agent's doorstep, being batted back and forth from one relative to another, then to foster parent after foster parent, before someone had finally remembered that there was a couple in one village who seemed willing to take all and any children, no questions asked. Fortunately, the SPITE agent's cover identity as a merchant let him support all those hungry mouths with no one wondering where the money came from, though there had been plenty of gossip about how well the grown-ups could have lived if they hadn't had such an expensive hobby. The local lord must have realized that there was enormous untapped potential for taxation there, but they were solving a problem for him that might otherwise have cost him even more, directly or through the Church's charities, so he had left the brooding couple alone.