"So," he said as I scrambled to my feet, "you're the one."
"Sir?" I asked, not entirely sure what he meant and not daring to make any assumptions.
"The young man who discovered that new verloren group," he amplified. "Good work, that and excellent follow-up."
"Thank you, sir," I said, trying not to stutter. Praise for underlings was almost unheard of in Convocant Sutherlan's office.
"You're quite welcome." Devaro nodded toward the calix, sitting on a corner of my desk where I placed it every morning when I came in. "I take it that's the sculpture you brought back?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "It's called a calix. Uh... would you like...?"
"Thank you," he said, crossing around behind the desk. Sliding a hand beneath the calix—he was wearing informal daytime gloves, I noticed—he picked it up.
For a long moment he gazed at and into it. I stood silently, fighting the urge to plead with him to be careful. He turned it around one way and then the other, then set it back on its stand. "Interesting," he said, turning to me again.
"Your report said the Kailth accept these as part of the verlorens' tribute."
"According to Tawni, it's all they take," I told him, breathing a little easier now that the calix was safe. "They must like art."
"Yes," he murmured, gazing at me with a thoughtful intensity that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. "Interesting. Well, good day."
"Good day, Convocant Devaro," I said.
I watched him stride out, feeling the other aides' looks of envy on the back of my neck as I basked in the warm glow of triumph, small though it might be.
Finally, someone in authority who'd actually noted and appreciated what I'd done.
The warm glow lasted the rest of the day, through the evening, and right up until I opened my eyes the next morning.
To find the calix gone from my night table. There were four separate reception stations along the approach to Devaro's inner offices. I strode past all four of them without stopping, to the consternation of the various receptionists, and was about two steps ahead of Convocation Security when I shoved open the ornate doors and stomped into Devaro's presence.
"Ah—there you are," he said before I could even get a word out. "Come in; I've been expecting you."
"Where is it?" I demanded, starting toward him.
"It's perfectly safe," he assured me, his eyes shifting to a spot over my shoulder. "No, it's all right—let him be. And leave us."
I looked behind me, to see two guards reluctantly lower their tranglers and back out of the room. "Now," Devaro said as they closed the doors. "You seem upset."
"You had my calix stolen from my apartment," I said, turning back to glare at him. "Don't try to deny it."
His eyebrows lifted slightly, as if denial was the furthest thing from his mind.
"I had it borrowed," he corrected. "I wanted to run a few tests on it, and that seemed the quietest way to go about it."
My heart momentarily seized up. "What kind of tests? What are you doing to it?"
"It's perfectly safe," Devaro said again, standing up. From across the office a
door opened and two white-jacketed women stepped into the room. "Don't worry, we'll return it to you soon. While we're waiting, we'd like to run some tests on you."
"What sort of tests?" I asked, eying the doctors warily.
"Painless ones, I assure you," Devaro said, crossing to me and taking my arm in a friendly but compelling grip. "You'll need to sign some forms first—the doctors will show you."
"But I'm supposed to be working," I protested as he led me over to the door where the doctors waited. "Convocant Sutherlan is expecting me to be at my desk—"
"I've already taken care of Convocant Sutherlan," Devaro said. "Come, now.
You won't feel a thing." I didn't, but that was probably only because the first thing they did when we got to the examination room was put me to sleep.
I woke to find myself lying on a rolltable moving down a deserted corridor.
There was an empty growling in my stomach, an unpleasant tingling in my fingertips and forehead, and a strange difficulty in focusing my eyes. One of the two doctors was riding along with me, watching my face as I came to, and considered asking her where we were going. But I didn't feel like talking, and anyway her expression didn't encourage questions.
A few minutes later we passed through a door and I found myself back in Devaro's office. The Convocant was sitting in his chair, feet propped up informally, gazing at his desk display. "Ah—there you are," he said as the rolltable crossed to him. "That will be all, Doctor."
"Yes, sir," she said, waiting until the rolltable had come to a halt beside the desk before stepping off and disappearing back through the door.
"It's been a long day," Devaro commented. "How are you feeling?"
"A little groggy," I said, carefully sitting up on the edge of the rolltable.
There was a moment of dizziness, but it passed quickly. "How long was I out?"
"As I said, all day," Devaro said, nodding toward his window. To my shock, I saw it was black with night. "It's a little after eight-thirty."
No wonder my stomach was growling. "Can I go home now?" I asked.
"You'll want to eat first," Devaro said. "I'm having some food sent up. Tell me, have you ever had a brainscan done before?"
"I don't think so," I said. "Is that what they did to me in there?"
"Oh, they did a little of everything," he said. "A complete brainscan, including a neural network mapping and a personality matrix profile. Do you always hold the calix at the same spots?"
"Usually," I said. "Not always. Why?"
"Did your friend Tawnikakalina ever tell you how she and her people learned Anglish?"
The abrupt changes of subject were starting to make my head hurt. "She didn't know," I told him. "All she knew was that the Kailth had some of her group learn the language when they decided to set up a colony on Quibsh."
Devaro's lip twisted in a grimace. "It was the Church," he said, spitting the word out like a curse. "One of those illegal little under-the-table deals they're always making with alien governments. The Kailth apparently took a group of priestians in to Sagtt'a a few years ago to inspect the verloren colony."
"I see," I said, keeping my voice neutral. The Convocation and Church were always going head-to-head on something, usually with the Church taking the government to task for violating some basic humanitarian principle. The fact that the majority of UnEthHu citizens generally supported the Church on those issues irritated the Convocants no end. "So then you already knew about those verlorens."
"Hardly," Devaro growled. "The Church hadn't deigned to tell us about them. I did some backtracking after your report came in and was able to put the pieces together. Tell me, how does the calix make you feel?"
Another abrupt change of topic. With an effort, I tried to think. "It's soothing, mostly. Helps me relax when I'm tense."
"Does it ever do the opposite?" he asked. "Invigorate you when you're tired?"
"Well..." I frowned. "Actually, yes. It does, sometimes."
"In other words," Devaro said, his eyes hard on me, "it creates two completely opposite effects. Doesn't that strike you as a little strange?"
It was odd, come to think about it. "I suppose so," I said, a little lamely.
"I guess I just assumed it was mirroring my moods somehow."
He smiled, a tight humorless expression. "Not mirroring them," he said softly.
"Creating them."
The skin on the back of my neck began to crawl. "What do you mean?"
He reached over and swiveled his desk display around to face me. There was a graph there, with a bewildering array of multicolored curves. "We did a full analysis of the calix," he said. "Paying particular attention to the places where you say you always hold it. We took some five-micron core samples from the wood fibers there; and it turns out they have an interesting and distinctive substratum chemical composition."