The immense room beyond was paneled with embroidery that followed rock curves ten meters upward to join a translucent dome that seemed to admit cold winter sunlight. A throne—a throne! Subtwo almost laughed aloud—stood on a golden platform at the opposite end of the hemispherical chamber, but it was empty.
"Where is he?"
The guard looked from Subone to Subtwo and back again, as though trying to determine which had spoken: not an unusual reaction. "He's coming," she said; Subtwo detected an uncertain bravado and was pleased that his arrival had caused consternation and confusion.
"I—" Subone said, and corrected himself. "We don't wait."
Subtwo turned with him; they crossed the throne room, still in step. They both had had trouble learning the first-person plural pronouns: such a strange usage, like verbal sexual intercourse. They climbed the steps to the throne and passed through the curtains beyond it. The young guard hesitated, then sprinted after them. "Just a minute—" She caught Subone's elbow. Using the whole force of his powerful shoulders, he swung back his arm and caught her across the ribs, tossing her against a tapestried wall. They continued; behind them, she cursed.
They had been told the layout of Stone Palace: Blaisse's suite connected directly to the throne room. Of course they met no stationed guards, coming as they did from this direction, in the winter. The young woman caught up with them as they entered Blaisse's bedroom.
Blaisse appeared to be asleep, but an alien humanoid sat up in his bed beside him and stared at the pseudosibs, terror in her face. Subtwo identified her species, her world, the customs of her people: parents raised themselves from abject poverty by selling their children into slavery. It was not a Sphere world. Subtwo realized he was probably looking at a slave, the first true, classical slave he had ever seen despite his travels. With difficulty, he controlled a wave of annoyance, directed toward the sleeping man.
"You'll have to wait in the anteroom."
Subtwo turned to the uniformed young woman. "But we never wait," he
said, quite reasonably.
"You will now." She touched the cross-holstered laser pistol with her left hand. "No more games."
"What are you going to do?" asked Subone. "Shoot me and hit him with your cast?"
The jibe angered but did not fluster her: in her hand, the lance was steady. "In the anteroom."
Subtwo's wide peripheral vision showed Subone glancing at him, though he himself did not have to turn. He did not see any necessity for a confrontation with an underling. He shrugged—a gesture he had consciously learned and practiced—and followed the direction of her pistol. In the next chamber, a sitting room built on a comparatively modest scale, he waited, disturbed by the absence of doors, of privacy. That told him much about the people who lived here: the rulers did not impinge frequently on each other's living space, and the servants were not important enough for their opinions to matter. These facts conflicted grossly with Subtwo's roseate image of the way reality should be, an image that dulled and contorted as by successive approximation Subtwo altered it to conform to the way things were.
Subone began to wander about the room, opening drawers and cabinets.
"What are you finding?"
"Nothing," Subone said. "Alcoholic beverages. Dirty old books."
"Books—printed books?"
"Very amusing."
"What's the meaning of this?" The Lord held himself poised in the doorway, only partly dressed, wearing leather pants.
Subtwo did not react to the theatrical entrance. "We understood that your hospitality is granted to shipowners of a certain type."
"And you are shipowners? Of that, type?"
The slave, naked, knelt before Blaisse, fastened the top button of his pants, and clasped a silver belt around his waist. He seemed not to notice her, despite her unflawed form and the strange blue of her skin and hair, the sky-silver of her eyes. Gazing at her, Subtwo wanted to pull her to her feet and ask her if she had no pride or dignity. Then she fastened a stained, coiled whip to Blaisse's filigree belt, and Subtwo put aside his questions of dignity.
"Our ship is on the field," Subtwo said.
Blaisse looked past him to the turned-out drawers and disarrayed
shelves. "What is this farce? Yale!"
The guard came in, scowling.
"I thought I made it clear: no one from Center is allowed here."
"They just landed," she said.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"They landed a ship. On the landing field. In the storm."
Subtwo watched the changes in Blaisse's expression as the Lord took his time putting on the leather jacket his slave held for him: anger, astonishment colored by skepticism, and finally curiosity. He took a sharp breath and straightened, as if to reprimand them, but suddenly stepped toward them. "In the storm?"
"Yes," Subtwo said.
Blaisse's attitude changed again. "I don't believe it."
Subone's voice was a sculpture. "You would be well advised," he said, "not to call us liars."
"Don't threaten me."
"We came to talk," Subtwo said. Blaisse was right, in his way: it was not yet the time for threats. "Merely to talk." This did not seem to be the man they had been told about; he had been described with contempt, but Subtwo was not facing a contemptible man. Unpredictable, perhaps, and distasteful, but there were power and assurance in him, though they blended strangely with childishness and cruelty.
"What did you come to talk about?"
"Division of power."
The young guard, Yale, caught her breath, and touched the handle of the laser lance again; she, at least, was taking those words as threat. But Blaisse hardly reacted. "This is mine," he said calmly. "Here you take my orders."
"That's what he said you'd say."
Subtwo wished Subone had not spoken, but he could not do anything now; he was affected by his pseudosib's excitement at the prospect of violence. But Subone's excitement could not obliterate Subtwo's increasing perceptions of guilt.
"Who?"
"A shipowner allied to you. You did lose a ship, recently—?"
"You—!"
"Shut up, Yale."
Sullenly, she obeyed. Blaisse's developing anger seemed to have been dissipated by hers; he sat down in a soft chair and stretched out his legs. "We assumed Sphere officials had killed it." He waved toward misshapen hulks of furniture. "Sit down. Have you names?"
"I am Subtwo. My pseudosib is Subone."
Blaisse raised an eyebrow, whether from the strangeness of the designations or because he was familiar with them, Subtwo did not know. He sat down on a couch with room for Subone next to him, but Subone sat farther away, watching the young guard and smiling slightly so his teeth showed past his thin lips.
"We'll have a drink. Saita!"
Dressed in silver and sapphires, the slave appeared almost instantly. She served first Blaisse, then the pseudosibs, with a thick blue liqueur. She did not offer anything to the guard.
Blaisse sipped from his crystal goblet. Subtwo raised his, to sniff the volatiles: heavy, varied, incompatible with organic life. He did not drink; he did not choose to dissolve the nerve sheaths of his brain cells with ethanol. But nearby, Subone tasted the offering.
"Now," Blaisse said.
"You are undefended. We have our whole crew."
"I'm not entirely alone."
"Twelve people hardly make an army."
Blaisse raised his head, an involuntary minuscule motion of surprise. Subtwo felt sure that he now believed that the pseudosibs, not the Sphere, had killed his ship.
"They guard me adequately in the winter. When my ships return in the spring, my forces are more than sufficient."
"The crews—even the shipowners—would follow us."