“Thank you for your motivating remarks,” Shaa told him. “As long as you’re here, you might as well do something useful.”
“I’ll go rescue Maximillian. He does need rescuing, right?”
“That might not be so useful.”
“I thought he was your partner. Where I come from when your partner’s in trouble you -”
“This has been a long story,” said Shaa, “of which you have missed the last several volumes. Trust me on this.”
“You’re all a pack of nitwits!” the Lion bellowed. This latest outburst froze his offspring in their tracks. The next-generation Monts had been edging tentatively closer to the group, looking somewhat the worse for wear from their own private reunion with their sire, and were now clearly reconsidering the idea of remaining anywhere in the same city with him at the moment.
“That may be true,” Shaa said, considering the imposition of a curse of his own, “but is still largely irrelevant. In any case there is an important mission at hand for you.”
“I’ll accept no missions from you while Maximillian rots in the pit!” With that, the Lion turned on his heel and stalked off again, with the aggressive glower of a man looking for someone to kick.
Shaa gazed after him for a moment, then turned back to his sister. Eden got the conversational jump on him this time, though. “You’re not sending me off on some errand so I’ll miss seeing what happens to our brother,” she declared. “I’m sure the thought’s crossed your mind, so just tell it to head right out again.”
“Are you finished?” Shaa said. “Although it is true that a plan of sorts is consolidating even as we speak, what you accuse was not one of its features. Trust,” he told her in an only-between-us tone of voice, “is a commodity in danger of short supply. Among all these actors who can be depended on implicitly?”
“Arznaak?”
“Hm, you have a point. But what we can trust our brother for is to act as directly as possible against our interests. While there may be some use to be gained there it’s not much to build a counter-strategy around. Indeed -”
“Why is all we seem to do just stand around and talk?” ranted the Great Karlini, from his new position barely an arm’s-length away. “Arznaak’s the only one who’s out accomplishing things.”
“Thank you for coming over,” Shaa said mildly, wondering whether to inquire after Haddo’s employment status, and for that matter health. But no, there was Haddo lurking along behind him, doing his imitation of a shadow draped over an ambulating rock. “I was just about to get you, since you play such a central role in the plan at hand. My own skill is too rusty to trust, and someone must ensure that the experiments in your late facility remain suppressed.”
Some might deem it cruel to dispatch him to the scene of recent trauma. Shaa, however, had the thin hope some catharsis might result, in addition to the satisfaction of the explicit requirements of the mission. Unfortunately, Karlini was not particularly amenable to the plan. In his uncharacteristically belligerent manner, he shoved his face close to Shaa’s and snarled, “You’re not going to park me in some corner where nothing’s happening, so you can just give up trying. I’m not about to nose over and fall apart.”
Is there an echo in here? Shaa wondered. He seemed to recall hearing a surprisingly similar statement mere moments before. He draped an arm over Karlini’s shoulder and led him - dragged him, to be more precise - a few steps away, while murmuring in his ear. “The sector of your laboratory is scarcely a backwater,” Shaa told him. “You recall my earlier misgivings, I’m sure, so you will appreciate I do not proclaim this to everyone, but I am not confident that all of your engineered microbes have been destroyed. My own abilities were insufficient to detect residual signs of activity, but consider this - if any of these pets survive to enter the population, the plague of unconstrained second-quantum level effects could wreak untold havoc. Who else here can I trust to make certain they are all well and truly dead? It may require an extended watch, in case any of them are lurking below, waiting for the right moment to escape surveillance and spring again to action.”
“I’m sure everything’s dead,” Karlini said morosely, although not, Shaa was pleased to note, with the same combative anger directed at him. “Even if something survived, you’re treating it like it’s intelligent, like it can plan ahead. You’re anthropomorphizing something you can’t even see.”
“Intelligent or not, the end result might be the same unfortunate one either way. Take an escort with you just in case. Perhaps Tildamire and her untimely father?”
“Urr,,” grumbled Karlini, but this time he didn’t say no. Good, that took care of one theater of operations, and three of their players. The other Mont could go along with Svin and Dortonn. On to Haddo and Wroclaw, then, or to be more precise Haddo-and-Wroclaw together now, followed by a private word to Wroclaw before they set off.
“I would like some intelligence,” Shaa told the pair, “and please be so kind as to omit the obvious disparagements, hm? There are questions on the table concerning the ‘how’ of my brother’s inexorable ascent. I believe your pal Favored has channels to the gods, yes? Gashanatantra and Jill-tang have been incompletely forthcoming, and prudence would dictate consulting an outside source regardless. Whatever your status at the moment with the Great one, this is in your own interest too,” he added.
“Agree do I,” said Haddo, in a note of compliance astonishing for its contradiction of the current dismal tide. What nefarious purpose could lie behind his sudden affability? Other than Shaa’s growing feeling, warranted though it was by the circumstances, that they were all out to harass him to death? But be that as it might, he was left with Eden, and the crustacean brother of the Archivist, and for that matter the Archivist herself. Well, he would handle that one. If -
Someone he had been trying to ignore pugnaciously cleared his throat. “Very well,” Shaa told the Jill-tang agent, impatiently glowering atop his restive horse, “here is my message for you. Does anyone have a pen?”
CHAPTER 17
“Thank you for the escort,” Leen told the leader of the troop of the Emperor’s Own who had accompanied her back from the dungeon to her apartment. She had always suspected that the wide-ranging catacombs, of which the dungeons and the Archives were both prominent constituents, formed a common basement stretching beneath many of the individual above-ground buildings of the palace complex, but she had never witnessed the objective evidence until now. She had gone underground in the Hall of Memories which housed the Archives and had now emerged into her own residence wing several edifices to the west.
“You’re quite welcome, mum,” said the captain. His courtliness did not improve her mood; all it underlined was the elite nature of her chaperones. These were the dragoons who appeared when it was necessary to cart off a member of the elite. They were clearly expert in preserving appearances and the crust of formality, but there was little doubt in her mind that their martial skills were not lessened by their attention to manners. Quite the opposite, most logically.
But manners were manners. The captain watched as she unlocked the door, then made to enter just behind her. Leen had anticipated the move, however, and had been considering how to turn it to her advantage. “Captain!” she protested. “I am here to change clothes, at least those were my orders. Surely yours were restricted to accompanying me from place to place, not assisting me directly with my gown.”
The captain scrutinized her for a moment. “As my orders are to ensure you arrive in a safe and timely manner at the Imperial box, appropriately attired and coiffed, I suppose there is that room for interpretation. Allow my men to inspect your rooms first, to warrant against any lurking eventuality that might interfere. Following that, we will remain at your disposal, in case you need any assistance with hooks or stays, or in the unlikely event that our mutual schedule becomes pressed. In this way decorum may be balanced against the demands of duty.”