Martinez blinked. “That’s blunt,” he said.
“I’m allowed to be blunt. I understand my position very well.” She looked at him. “You know about my family?”
Martinez gave a cautious nod. “I’ve seen your file.”
“Then you know that the military is the only career I’m allowed. But even though I’m a clan head, there’s no clan for me to be head of, so there will be no powerful relatives to help me get promotions. I can get a lieutenancy on my own, but once I pass the exam, that’s about all I can expect. If I astonish everyone with my genius, I might be promoted to elcap, and if I make full captain, it will probably happen only on retirement.” She gave a cold smile. “The consolation of my position is that I can say what I damn well please,” she said. “None of it will change anything.” She looked thoughtful. “Except…” she began.
“Yes?”
“If I do an absolutely brilliant exam. Sometimes senior officers take an interest in the cadet who scores first. Or even second.”
Martinez nodded. It had been known to happen. Even commoners could do well if they had the right patron. “I wish you the best of luck,” he said.
“I hope luck has nothing to do with it,” Sula said. “I’ve never got anywhere by counting on luck.”
“Fine,” Martinez said amiably. “No luck to you, then.”
She smiled. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
There was a brief silence, and then Sula said, “In the last couple days, since I’ve arrived on Zanshaa, I’ve started getting messages from people. People who say they were friends of my parents.” She shook her head. “I don’t remember any of them. I don’t remember things very well from that period.”
“You should meet them.”
“Why?”
“Maybe they could help you. They may feel that they owe your parents that.”
Sula considered this for a moment, and then her eyes hardened. She shook her head. “It’s the job of the dead to stay dead,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
SIX
Sula raged inwardly against her certainty that everything she said was wrong. She was making a botch of the whole evening, and all because she didn’t know how to talk to someone who liked her.
She had been another person once, and then decided not to be that person again, and to avoid anything, like alcohol, that might bring that person back. But she didn’t know how to be this new person very well, and she kept getting it wrong.
It’s the job of the dead to stay dead. Nice light cocktail-bar conversation, that.
She reminded herself that Martinez was only trying to help.
Of course, he was also trying very hard to get her into bed. This prospect wasn’t entirely without its attractions, though she’d been chaste for so long that she wondered if she’d have any idea how to behave with a man. It would be on a par with everything else this evening to somehow make a total botch of it.
Martinez could probably handle any problem that would arise, she decided. She could trust to his efficiency that way.
She might as well surrender. It wasn’t as if chastity had benefited her in any way that she could see, and Martinez could hardly make her life worse than it was.
Fortunately, entertainment began before she could completely poison the conversation. A pair of singers and a band mounted the stage and began a series of dance tunes, and Martinez seemed pleased that it was she who asked him to dance and not the other way around.
Sula had once enjoyed dancing, but her only practice in recent years had been at the academy, where everyone stood nervous and perspiring in dress uniforms and hampered by a rigid etiquette. She was out of practice at dancing for pleasure, but fortunately, Martinez was an able partner—those stumpy legs knew their business, she decided—and his expertise neutralized her initial awkwardness. She discovered in herself a tendency to bounce on the balls of her feet with each step, but reminded herself that the whole point was to keep a low center of gravity, and told herself sternly to glide, not bound like an eager puppy.
As the evening progressed her awkwardness faded and she relaxed into the movements, the steps, and Martinez’s arms. Their bodies moved into a close synchrony, and she found herself responding easily to the merest suggestion of his touch, the lightest impulse on her palm or hip or back. Her body molded to his during the slow dances, and warm blood flushed her skin at his nearness. There seemed progressively less point to the whole chastity business.
They danced for an hour and then stepped outside to cool off. Clouds scudded low overhead, obscuring Zanshaa’s ring, and gusts of wind blustered around the corners of the buildings. A pleasure boat floated past on the canal, darkened, but with its contours outlined in cool blue neon—it looked like a skeleton boat, a visitation from another plane. Martinez dabbed sweat from his brow with a handkerchief and opened his high uniform collar. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll wear civvies.”
“Thank you for reminding me how much fun this is,” Sula said. “I’ve only been to formal balls for—oh, years.”
“Service dances?” He looked at her. “Theycan be deadly, can’t they?” He turned to the canal, saw the neon-lit pleasure boat floating past, and his eyes lit with an idea. “I have a notion. Would you like to go for a ride on the canal?”
“I—”
“Come on!” He took her by the hand and set off at a trot. She followed, the wind tearing a laugh from her lips.
There was a stand for excursion boats a short distance ahead. Martinez showed the elderly Torminel attendant his credentials and was shown to a small, two-person canal boat, with strands of colored lights hanging from its stumpy mast and its canopy folded halfway back over a sofa seat. Martinez wiped water from the seat with his handkerchief, then helped Sula down from the stone quay—the light, resinous hull swayed as she stepped in, and water made a viscous sucking sound against the moss-draped stone—and then he seated himself next to her and instructed the autopilot.
Iodine, weed and moss, bird droppings, things that were dead and floating in the chill dark water—the scent of the canal struck like a bludgeon at Sula’s memory. She hadn’t tasted air like this in a long time. Suddenly she wanted to protest the whole excursion, but Martinez was near and smiling, happy in his adventure; and she didn’t want to ruin the evening, not after it had finally begun to go well.
The silent electric motor accelerated smoothly. Sula tried to relax against Martinez’s arm. “There’s a lovely view of the High City coming up,” he said in her ear.
Put him in the river,Gredel had said, years of pent-up hatred burning in her words.
The High City was obscured by low cloud. Martinez murmured his disappointment. “I’ll have to show it to you another time,” he said.
A chill wind shivered along Sula’s bones. She thought of the body slipping in silence beneath the surface of the Iola, streetlight shimmering gold on the spreading, dying ripples, the water rising over the mouth and nose, the vision rising in Sula’s mind like the obdurate flood of memory, the scent of river and time and death.
Lady Sula?
She wasn’t even Lady Caro, she was LadySula. She wasn’t just any Peer, she was head of the whole Sula clan.
Lamey’s fury faded away quickly—it did that, came and went with lightning speed—and he picked Caro up in his arms and carried her to the elevator while the doorman fussed around him. When they arrived on the top floor, the doorman opened Caro’s apartment, and Lamey walked in as if he paid the rent himself and carried Caro to her bedroom. There, he put Caro down on her bed and had Gredel draw off the tall boots while he covered her with a comforter.