Lehmann turned, looking at Soucek directly, understanding what the other man was saying. He, too, had missed the danger. Missed that feeling of extending himself—of putting himself at risk. It had all been too easy. Too safe.
"You're right, Jiri. We have been sleeping. Letting events drift when we should have been seizing the moment and shaping it. Playing at being kings when we should have been stoking the fire beneath the throne. But now it's time to change that."
Soucek had been staring at the tree line far below. Now he looked back at Lehmann. "What do you mean?"
"I mean we ought to push a little and see what happens."
"Push?"
He turned, looking to the east, as if he could see beyond the mountains, beyond the great sweep of Eastern Europe and the Urals, right to where Li Yuan sat at his desk in Tongjiang.
"Push. Create pressure in the House. Ferment trouble among the African Banners. Assassinate some of Li Yuan's leading officials. That kind of thing."
"And his offer?"
Lehmann shrugged. He didn't know. He was tempted to say no, to defy Li Yuan and see what he did. But maybe that would be too direct.
"I don't think he wants to go to war. I don't think he has the will. Besides, he'll wait on his cousins—see what they say first. No, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced we should play a double game. Play loyal subject to his face while undermining him at every opportunity."
"And if we're wrong?"
"Then we fight."
He stopped, looking past Soucek, then relaxed. It was one of his own men. "What is it, Stewart?"
Stewart stopped and bowed his head. "There's no sign of Visak," he said breathlessly. "No one's seen him since six. He was due to meet some of our people in Osnabriick but ... he didn't show."
"I see." He dismissed the man, then turned to Soucek. "What do you think?"
"Think?"
But it was clear what Soucek thought. His eyes gave him away. He thought Visak had gone over—sold them out—and if Soucek thought that, then maybe it was true. But he would find out first. Make sure before he acted.
"You know what I think?" he said, looking up at the moon hanging there like a great white stone in the sky. "I think we'd better get back. I think the game's begun."
"Daddy?"
Jelka pushed the door open with her knee, then stepped inside into the darkness, the tray balanced carefully between her hands.
Her father was sitting in his chair, the holo-viewer on the floor in front of him, the control module in his lap, the golden fingers of his right hand wrapped about it. In the air before him stood the boy, dressed in a miniature of the Marshal's uniform.
She went across and set the tray down, then stood behind him.
It was something they had recorded only weeks ago; part of the great Kakvala she herself had set to music. Watching it she felt once again the sharp pain of Pauli's absence, that awful, gnawing uncertainty of not knowing where he was, nor what was happening to him.
Pauli stood there, straight and tall and proud, his dark hair combed neatly across his forehead, his whole body lifted slightly on the balls of his feet as he sang, his eyes staring into the distance as he concentrated on the words.
"Hereupon the bird spoke language,
And the hawk at once made answer:
'O thou smith, O Ilmarinen,
Thou the most industrious craftsman!
Truly art thou very skillful,
And a most accomplished craftsman!'
Thereupon smith Ilmarinen Answered in the words that follow:
'But indeed 'tis not a wonder,
If I am a skillful craftsman,
For 'twas I who forged the heavens,
And the arch of air who welded.' "
He sang on, his pure high voice seeming to capture the very essence of those ancient days—of that distant time before the City had been built over the land, before the World was cloaked in ice. Looking at him, she realized with a start of surprise how very like his father he was—not the Hans Ebert she had known on Chung Kuo, the one who had almost married her, but the one she had met on Mars—"the Changeling," as she liked to think of him. She shivered, strangely moved by the thought. Her father had brought the boy up well. There was nothing spoiled about him, nothing impetuous or soft—nothing corrupt. His voice was like a light shining out from deep within, revealing the perfect pitch of his inner being, resonant with innocence and hope. So strange that was, so utterly strange, considering that his father had been a traitor, his mother a madwoman and a whore. But the boy . . . She listened as he finished, entranced and deeply moved, the ancient tale made new in his song.
The old man froze the image, a tremor passing through him, tears on his cheeks. She laid her hands gently on his shoulders. He turned, looking up at her, then reached up, grasping her hands tightly in his '1 own. She squeezed them, for once not bothered by the cool, metallic feel of his left hand.
"We'll get him back," she said, fighting down the tears. "You know we will."
"It's not that easy," he said, his face hardening. "Things are changing by the hour."
He released her hands, then stood, turning to face her, all softness gone from him suddenly. "Things are bad, my love. We could be at war within the week."
She stared at him. "War?"
He nodded. "I asked the T'ang for Karr, but he refused. Things are happening. Pauli . . . Well, Pauli's but a single stone in the great game. We"—his voice faltered, then carried on—"we must deal with this matter ourselves."
She frowned, not understanding. "Deal with it? How?"
He turned his head, looking athis desk and the tray there. "Is that soup?"
"Yes . . . but answer me, Daddy. How? How are you going to deal with this?"
He looked back at her, a sour smile on his lips. "I have not been a soldier sixty years for nothing. I know people. . . ."
"People?"
Again he looked away. "It's best you don't ask."
Best? She shivered, seeing there, in her father's eyes, a steely hardness, a determination which she recognized from the past—that same determination that had made him defy his T'ang and kill Lehmann before the whole House—that same iron-hard spirit that would wreck a world before it allowed harm to one of his own.
Maybe it is best 1 don't know what you are planning, she thought. Then, reaching up, she gently stroked the drying tears from his face.
THE CELL WAS DARK, the dull red glow of the LOCKED signal above the studded door the only source of illumination. On the bunk in the corner lay the boy, a rough blanket covering his nakedness. Two guards patrolled the corridor outside. He could hear their booted footsteps click and echo in the silence.
Cold. It was so cold here.
He huddled into himself, conscious of the camera somewhere in the dark above him watching his every move. Infrared it was—he knew that. Uncle Knut had told him all about such things. He turned over, facing the wall, trying to relax, trying not to cry. He had done so well. Throughout it all he had held his head up and been brave, like he'd been taught. But now, alone in the darkness, it was suddenly much harder.
No, he told himself, swallowing hard. They're watching me, waiting for me to break down, so 1 mustn't. For Uncle Knut's sake, I mustn't.
For a moment his thoughts wandered and he imagined himself in his own bed, back in the Mansion; imagined that the footsteps were those of the servants; then he remembered. The servants were all dead: he had seen them die, Chang Mu and Shih Chih-o, Li Ho-nien and his favorite, the young Ma Ch'ing, the last in his room, fighting them vainly, trying to stop them from taking him.