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The Baron Nikusha Seppanen stood at a viewport of the grounded lighter he was using as a command post. Out of the port he saw the flame-lit night of Mat E'trov. His attention focused on the distant Barrier Wall where his secret weapon was doing its work.
Cannonballs.
The big cannons nibbled at the caves where the Duke's fighting men had retreated for a last-ditch stand. Slowly measured bites of orange glare, showers of rock and dust in the brief illumination---and the Duke's men were being sealed off to die of starvation, caught like animals in their burrows.
The Baron could feel the distant chomping---a drumbeat carried to him through the ship's metal: broomp---broomp. Then: BROOMP-broomp!
Who would think of reviving cannons in this age of barriers? The thought was a chuckle in his mind. But it was predictable that the Duke's men would run for those caves. And the Sultan will appreciate my cleverness in preserving the lives of our mutual force.
He adjusted one of the little suspensors that guarded his fat body against the pull of gravity. A smile creased his mouth, pulled at the lines of his jowls.
What a pity to waste such fighting men as the Duke's, he thought. He smiled more broadly, laughing at himself. Pity should be cruel! He nodded. Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions. The uncertain rabbits had to be exposed, made to run for their burrows. You couldn't control them and breed them otherwise. He pictured his troops as bees routing the rabbits. And he thought: The day hums sweetly when you have sufficient bees working for you.
A door opened behind him. The Baron studied the reflection in the night-blackened viewport before turning.
Yakov Sverdlov advanced into the chamber followed by Alberto Anzor, the captain of the Baron's personal guard. There was a motion of men just beyond the door, the pug faces of his guard, their expressions carefully sheeplike in his presence.
The Baron turned.
Yakov touched finger to forelock in his mocking salute. "Good news, milord. The Sordoi have brought in the Duke."
"I should hope so," the Baron rumbled.
He studied the somber mask of villainy on Yakov's effeminate face. And the eyes: those shades of blue-in-blue.
Soon I will eliminate him, the Baron thought. He's outlived his usefulness, reached the point of absolute danger to my person. First, though, he must make the people of Dyuna hate him. Then they will welcome my darling Ram-Gurgen as a savior.
The Baron shifted his attention to the guard captain---Alberto Anzor: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe---a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.
"First, where's the traitor who gave me the Duke?" the Baron asked. "I must give him his reward."
Yakov turned on one toe, motioned to the guard outside.
A bit of black movement there and Rasputin walked through. His motions were stiff and stringy. The mustache drooped beside his purple lips. Only the old eyes seemed alive. Rasputin came to a stop three paces into the room, obeying a motion from Yakov, and stood there staring across the open space at the Baron."
"Ah-h-h-h-h, Dr. Rasputin."
"Milord Seppanen."
"You gave us the Duke, I'm told."
The Baron looked at Yakov.
Yakov nodded.
The Baron looked back at Seppanen. "The letter of the bargain, yes? And I...." He spat out the words: "What was I to do in return?"
"You remember quite well, milord Seppanen."
Rasputin allowed himself to think now, hearing the loud silence of clocks in his mind. He'd seen the subtle betrayals in the Baron's manner. Ashura was indeed dead---gone far beyond their reach. Otherwise, there'd still be a hold on the weak doctor. The Baron's manner showed there was no hold; it was ended.
"I do?" the Baron asked.
"You promised to deliver my Ashura from her agony."
The Baron nodded. "Oh, yes. Now I remember. I did; that was my promise. That was how we bent the Imperial Conditioning. You couldn't endure seeing your Bala Garrasaid sorceress grovel in Yakov's pain amplifiers. Well, the Baron Nikusha Seppanen always keeps his promises. I told you I'd free her from the agony and allow you to join her. So be it." He waved a hand at Yakov.
Yakov's blue eyes took a glazed look. His movement was catlike in its sudden fluidity. The knife in his hand glistened like a claw as it flashed into Rasputin's back.
The old man stiffened, never taking his attention from the Baron.
"Join her!" the Baron spat.
Rasputin stood, swaying. HIs lips moved with careful precision, and his voice came in oddly measured cadence: "You---think---you---de---feated---me? You---think---I---did---not----know---what---I---bought---for---my----Ashura?"
He toppled. No bending or softening. It was like a tree falling.
"Join her," the Baron repeated. But his words were like a wimpy echo.
Rasputin had filled him with a sense of foreboding. He whipped his attention to Yakov, watched the man wipe the blade on a scrap of cloth, watched the creamy look of satisfaction in the blue eyes.
So that's how he kills by his own hand, the Baron thought. It's well to know.
"He did give us the Duke?" the Baron asked.
"Of a certainty, milord," Yakov said.
"Then get him into my sight!"
Yakov glanced at the guard captain, who whirled to obey.
The Baron looked down at Rasputin. From the way the man had fallen, you could suspect wood in him instead of bones.
"I never could bring myself to trust a traitor," the Baron said. "Not even one that I created."
He glanced at the night-shrouded viewport. That black bag of stillness outside was his, the Baron knew. There was no more crump of artillery against the Barrier Wall caves; the burrow traps were sealed off. Quite suddenly, the Baron's mind could conceive of nothing more beautiful than that utter emptiness of black. Unless it were white upon black. Plated white on the black. Porcelain white.
But there was still the feeling of doubt.
What had the old fool doctor meant? Of course, he'd probably known what would happen to him in the end. But that bit about thinking he'd been defeated: "You think you defeated me."
What had he meant?
The Duke Nicholas Romanov came through the door. His arms were bound in chains, the eagle face streaked with dirt. His uniform was torn where someone had ripped off his insignia. There were tatters at his waist where the barrier belt had been removed without first freeing the uniform ties. The Duke's eyes held a glazed, deranged look.
"Well-l-l-l," the Baron said. He hesitated, drawing in a deep breath. He knew he'd spoken too loudly. This moment, long-envisioned, had lost some of its savor.
Damn that accursed doctor through all eternity!
"I think the good Duke is drugged," Yakov said. "That's how Rasputin caught him for us." Yakov turned to the Duke. "Aren't you drugged, my dear Duke?"
The voice was whispering its grit in his mouth. But sounds were dull, hidden by a cottony blanket. And he saw only dim shapes through the blanket.
"What about the woman and the boy, Yakov?" the Baron asked. "Any word yet?"
Yakov's tongue darted over his lips.
"You've heard something!" the Baron snapped. "What?"
Yakov glanced at the guard captain, back to the Baron. "The men who were sent to do the job, milord---they've---ah---been---ah---found."
"Well, did they report anything satisfactory?"
"They're dead, milord."
"I know that! What I want to know is..."
"They were dead when found, milord."
The Baron's face went livid. "And the woman and the boy?"
"Unaccounted for, milord, but there was a wurm. It came while the scene was being investigated. Maybe it's as we wished---an accident. Maybe..."
"We have no time to waste on possibilities, Yakov. What of the missing 'majigger? Does that suggest anything to my Technopath?"
"One of the Duke's men obviously escaped in it, milord. Killed our pilot and escaped."
"Which of the Duke's men?"
"It was a clean, quiet killing, milord. Botkin, maybe, or that Vasa one. Maybe Ukrainia. Or any top lieutenant."
"Possibilities," the Baron muttered. He glanced at the swaying, drugged figure of the Duke.
"The situation is in hand, milord," Yakov said.
"It most assuredly is not! Where is that idiot planetologist? Where is that man Holstein?"
"We've word where to find him and he's been summoned, milord."
"I don't like the way the Sultan's servant is helping us," the Baron muttered.
They were words through a gauzy blanket, but some of them burned in Nicholas's mind. Woman and boy---no sign. Alexei and Alexandra had escaped. And the fate of Botkin, Vasa and Ukrainia remained to be seen. There was still hope!
"Where's the ducal signet ring?" the Baron demanded. "His finger is bare."
"The Sordoi say it wasn't on him when he was taken, milord," the guard captain said.
"You killed the doctor too soon," the Baron said. "That was a mistake. You should've warned me, Yakov. You moved too fast for the good of our enterprise." He scowled. "Possibilities!"
The thought hung like a sine wave in Nicholas mind: Alexei and Alexandra have escaped! There was something else in his memory: a bargain. He could almost remember it.
The tooth!
He remembered part of it now: a pill of poison gas shaped into a false tooth.
Someone had told him to remember the tooth. The tooth was in his mouth. He could feel its shape with his tongue. All he had to do was bite sharply on it.
No! Not yet!
The someone had told him to wait until he was near the Baron. Who had told him? If only he could remember....
"How long will he remain under the influence?" the Baron asked.
"Maybe another hour, milord."
"Maybe," the Baron muttered. Again, he turned to the night-blackened window. "I'm hungry."
That's the Baron, that fuzzy gray shape there, Nicholas thought. The shape danced to and fro, swaying with the movement of the room. And the room expanded and contracted. It grew brighter and darker. It folded into blackness and faded.
Time became a sequence of layers for the Duke. He drifted up through them. I must wait.
There was a table. Nicholas saw the table quite clearly. And a gross, fat man on the other side of the table, the remains of a meal in front of him. Nicholas felt himself sitting in a chair from the fat man, felt the chains, the straps that held his tingling body in the chair. He was aware that there had been a passage of time, but its length escaped him.
"I think he's coming out of it, Baron."
A silky voice, that one. That was Yakov.
"I can see that, Yakov."
A rumbling basso: the Baron.
Nicholas sensed increasing definition in his surroundings. The chair beneath him took on firmness, the bindings were sharper.
And he saw the Baron clearly now. Nicholas watched the movements of the man's hands: compulsive touchings---the edge of a plate, the handle of a spoon, a finger tracing the fold of a jowl.
Nicholas watched the moving hand, fascinated by it.
"You can hear me, Duke Nicholas," the Baron said. "I know you can hear me. We want to know from you where to find your concubine and the child you sired by her."
No sign escaped Nicholas, but the words were a wash of calmness through him. It's true, then: they don't have Alexei and Alexandra.
"This is not a child's game we play," the Baron rumbled. "You must know that." He leaned towards Nicholas, studying the face. It pained the Baron that this could not be handled privately, just between the two of them. To have others see royalty in such straits set a bad precedent.
Nicholas could feel his strength returning. And now, the memory of the false tooth stood out in his mind like a steeple in a flat landscape. The nerve-shaped capsule within that tooth---the poison gas--he remembered who'd put the deadly weapon in his mouth.
Rasputin!
Drug-fogged memory of seeing a limp corpse dragged past him in this room hung like a vapor in Nichola's mind. He knew it'd been Rasputin.
"Do you hear that noise, Duke Nicholas?" the Baron asked.
Nicholas grew conscious of a frog sound, the burred mewling of someone's agony.
"We caught one of your men disguised as a Szgany," the Baron said. "We penetrated the disguise quite easily: the eyes, you know. He insists he was sent among the Szganys to spy on them. I've lived for a time on this planet, cher cousin. One does not spy on those ragged scum of the desert. Tell me, did you buy their help? did you send your woman and son to them?"
Nicholas felt fear tighten up in his chest. If Rasputin sent them to the desert fold, the search won't stop until they're found!
"Come, come," the Baron said. "We don't have much time and pain is quick. Please don't bring it to this, my dear Duke." The Baron looked up at Yakov who stood at Nicholas's shoulder. "Yakov doesn't have all his tools here, but I'm sure he could improvise."
"Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron."
Oh, that silky, insinuating voice! Nicholas heard it at his ear.
"You had an emergency plan," the Baron said. "Where have your woman and boy been sent?" He looked at Nicholas's hand. "Your ring is missing. Does the boy have it?"
The Baron looked up, stared into Nicholas's eyes.
"You don't answer," he said. "Will you force me to do a thing I do not want to do? Yakov will use simple, direct methods. I agree they're sometimes the best, but it's not good that you should be subjected to such things."
"Hot Kashouvian oil on the back, perhaps, or on the eyelids," Yakov said. "Maybe on other portions of the body. It's especially effective when the subject doesn't know where the oil will fall next. It's a good method and there's a kind of beauty in the pattern of pus-white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?"
"Exquisite," the Baron said, and his voice sounded bitter.
Those touching fingers! Nicholas watched the fat hands, the glittering jewels on baby-fat hands---their compulsive wandering.
The sounds of agony coming through the door behind him gnawed at the Duke's nerves. Who is it they've caught? he wondered. Could it have been Ukrainia?
"Trust me, cher cousin," the Baron said. "I do not want it to come to this."
"You think of nerve couriers racing to summon help that cannot come," Yakov said. "There's an artistry in this, you know."
"You're a superb artist," the Baron growled. "Now have the decency to shut up."
Nicholas suddenly recalled something Gustav Vasa had once said, seeing a picture of the Baron: " 'And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea. And upon his head is writ the word blasphemy.'"
"We're wasting time, Baron," Yakov said.
"Or, perhaps, not." The Baron nodded. "You know, my dear Nicholas, you'll tell us in the end where they are. There's a level of pain guaranteed to loosen your tongue."
He's most likely correct, Nicholas thought. If it weren't for the tooth, and the fact that I truly don't know where they are.
The Baron picked up a sliver of mutton, pressed the morsel into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. We must try a new tack, he thought.
"Observe this prize person who denies that he can be bought," the Baron said. "Observe him, Yakov."
And the Baron thought: Yes! See him there, this man who thinks he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles ever second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he'd rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference does it make how he dies now?
The frog sounds in the background ceased.
The Baron saw Alberto Anzor, the guard captain, appear in the doorway across the room, shake his head. The captive hadn't produced the needed information. Another failure. Time to quit stalling with this idiot Duke, this stupid soft fool who didn't realize how much hell there was so near him, only a nerve's thickness away.
This thought calmed the Baron, overcoming his reluctance to have a royal person subjected to pain. He saw himself suddenly as a surgeon exercising endless supple scissor dissections, cutting away the masks from fools, exposing the hell beneath.
Rabbits, all of them!
And how they cowered when they saw the carnivore!
Nicholas stared across the table, wondering why he waited. The tooth would end it all quickly. Still, it'd been good, much of this life. He found himself remembering an antenna kite updangling in the shell-blue sky of Eser, and Alexei laughing with joy at the sight of it. And he remembered sunrise here on Dyuna; colored strata of the Barrier Wall mellowed by dust haze.
"Too bad," the Baron muttered. He pushed himself back from the table, stood up lightly in his suspensors and hesitated, seeing a change come over the Duke. He saw the man draw in deep breath, the jawline stiffen, the ripple of a muscle there as the Duke clamped his mouth shut.
How he fears me! the Baron thought.
Shocked by fear that the Baron might escape him, Nicholas bit sharply on the capsule tooth, felt it break. He opened his mouth, expelled the biting vapor he could taste as it formed on his tongue. The Baron grew smaller, a figure seen in a tightening tunnel. Nicholas heard a gasp beside his ear; the silky voiced one: Yakov.
It got him, too!
"Yakov! What's the matter?"
The rumbling voice was far away.
Nicholas sensed memories rolling in his mind---the old toothless mutterings of hags. The room, the table, the Baron, a pair of terrified eyes---blue within blue, the eyes---all compressed around him in ruined symmetry.
There was a man with a boot-toe chin, a toy man falling. The toy man had a broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat metronome caught forever at the start of an upward stroke. Nicholas heard the crash of crockery---so distant---a roaring in his ears. His mind was a bin without end, catching everything. Everything that had ever been: every shout, whisper and silence.
One thought remained to him. Nicholas saw it in formless light upon rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thoughts struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.
Silence.
The Baron stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole behind the table. He'd slammed it on a room full of dead men. His senses took in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself. Whatever it was in there, did it get me, too?
Sounds returned to him---and reason. He heard someone shouting orders---gas masks----keep a door closed---get blowers going.
The others fell quickly, he thought. I'm still standing. I'm still breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!
He could analyze it now. His barrier had been turned on, set low but still sufficient to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table...that and Yakov's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.
Chance and the warning in a dying man's gasp----these had saved him.
The Baron felt no gratitude to Yakov. The fool had got himself killed. And that stupid guard captain! He'd said he'd scoped everyone before bringing them into the Baron's presence! How had it been possible for the Duke...? No warning. Not even from the poison sniffer over the table---until it was too late. How?
Well, no matter now, the Baron thought, his mind firming. The next guard captain will begin by finding answers to these questions.i
He grew aware of more activity down the hall---around the corner at the other door to that room of death. The Baron pushed himself away from his own door, studied the lackeys around him. They stood there staring, silent, waiting for the Baron's reaction.
Would the Baron be angry?
And the Baron realized just a few seconds had passed since his flight from that horrible room.
Some of the guards had weapons leveled at the door. Some were directing their ferocity towards the empty hall that stretched away towards the noises around the corner to their right.
A man came striding around that corner, his gas mask dangling by its straps at his neck, his eyes intent on the overhead poison sniffers that lined this corridor. He was yellow-haired, flat of face with green eyes. Crisp lines radiated from his thick-lipped mouth. He looked like some water creature misplaced among those who walked the land.
The Baron stared at the approaching man, recalling the name: Edvin. Mazhar Edvin. Guard corporal. Edvin was addicted to ranide, the drug-music combination that played itself in the deepest consciousness. A useful form of information, that.
The man stopped in front of the Baron, saluted. "Corridor's clear, milord. I was outside watching and saw that it must be poison gas. Ventilators in your room were pulling air in from these corridors." He glanced up at the detector over the Baron's head. "None of the stuff escaped. We've got the room cleaned out now. What are your orders?"
The Baron recognized the man's voice---the one who'd been shouting orders. Efficient, this corporal, he thought.
"They're all dead in there?" the Baron asked.
"Yes, milord."
Well, we must adapt, the Baron thought.
"First," he said, "let me congratulate you, Edvin. You're the new captain of my guard. And I hope you'll take to heart the lessons to be learned from the fate of your predecessor."
The Baron watched the awareness grow in his newly promoted guardsman. Edvin knew he'd never again be without his ranide.
Edvin nodded. "Milord knows I'll devote myself entirely to his safety."
"Yes. Well, to cases. I suspect the Duke had something in his mouth. You are to find out what that something was, how it was used, who helped him put it there. You are to take every precaution..."
He broke off, his chain of thought broken by a ruckus in the corridor behind him.....guards at the door of the lift from the lower levels of the battle cruiser trying to hold back a tall colonel hetman who'd just emerged from the lift.
The Baron couldn't place the colonel hetman's face: thin with a mouth like a slash in leather, twin ink spots for eyes.
"Get your hands off me, you pack of carrion-eaters!" the man roared, and he dashed the guards aside.
Ah-h-h-h, one of the Sordoi, the Baron thought.
The colonel hetman came striding towards the Baron, whose eyes went to slits of apprehension. The Sordoi officers filled him with unease. They all seemed to look like relatives of the Duke---the late Duke, that is. And their manners with the Baron!
The Baron noted the absence of salute, the disdain of the Sordoi's manner, and his unease grew. There was only one legion of them locally---ten brigades---reinforcing the Seppanen legions, but the Baron didn't fool himself. That one legion was perfectly capable of turning against the Seppanens and overcoming them.
"Tell your men they are forbidden to prevent me from seeing you, Baron," the Sordoi growled. "My men brought you the Romanov Duke before I could discuss his fate with you. I will have that discussion now!"
I mustn't lose face before my men, the Baron thought.
"So?" It was a coldly controlled word, and the Baron took pride in it.
"My Sultan has charged me to make sure that his royal cousin dies cleanly without agony," the colonel hetman said.
"Such were the Imperial orders to me," the Baron lied. "Think you that I would disobey them?"
"I'm to report to my Sultan what I see with my own eyes," the Sordoi said.
"The Duke's already dead," the Baron snapped, and he waved a hand to dismiss the fellow.
The colonel hetman remained planted facing the Baron. Not by flicker of eye or muscle did he acknowledge he'd been dismissed. "How?" he growled.
Really! the Baron thought. This is too much.
"By his own hand, if you must know," the Baron said. "He took poison."
"I will see the body now," the colonel hetman said.
The Baron raised his gaze to the ceiling in feigned exasperation as his thoughts raced. Damnation! This sharp-eyed Sordoi will see that room before a thing's been changed!
"Now," the Sordoi growled. "I'll see it with my own eyes."
There was no stopping it, the Baron realized. The Sordoi would see all. He'd know the Duke had killed Seppanen men...that the Baron most likely had escaped by a narrow margin. There was the evidence of the dinner remnants on the table, and the dead Duke across it with destruction around him.
No stopping it at all.
"I will not be put off!" the colonel hetman snarled.
"Put off? You?" the Baron said, and he stared into the Sordoi's obsidian eyes. "Perish the thought! I hide nothing from my Sultan." He nodded to Edvin. "The colonel hetman is to see everything, at once. Take him in by the door where you stand, Mazhar."
"This way, sir," Mazhar said.
Slowly, insolently, the Sordoi moved around the Baron, shouldered a way through the guardsmen.
Insufferable, thought the Baron. Now, the Sultan will know how I goofed up. He'll recognize it as a sign of weakness.171Please respect copyright.PENANA3b8M38oqr4
How agonizing it was to realize that the Sultan and his Sordoi were alike in their distaste for weakness. The Baron chewed at his lower lip, consoling himself that the Sultan, at least, had not learned of the Romanov raid on G'ob' Prime, the destruction of the Seppanen spice stores there.171Please respect copyright.PENANArNCTgHvIUH
Damn that slippery Duke!171Please respect copyright.PENANAvwkfQtEhig
The Baron watched the retreating backs---the arrogant Sordoi and the stocky, efficient Edvin.171Please respect copyright.PENANApb6lqqab6a
We must adjust, thought the Baron. I'll have to put Gurgan over this damnable planet once more. Without restraint. I must spend my own Seppanen blood to put Dyuna into a proper condition for accepting Ram-Gurgen. Damn that Yakov for being stupid enough to get himself killed before I was finished with him!171Please respect copyright.PENANAJzCfcN78ig
The Baron sighed.171Please respect copyright.PENANAGNqyvHwL6g
And I must send at once to Troaroav for a new Technopath. They undoubtedly have the new one ready for me by now.171Please respect copyright.PENANAQ1uOO03ANh
"Yes, milord."171Please respect copyright.PENANAAtQYuSNjWU
The Baron turned away, started moving with his bouncing, suspensor-buoyed pace towards his chambers. Yes, he thought. The one with the lovely eyes, the one who looks so much like the young Alexei Romanov.
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