"I will . . . contact you when and how I can, Barrayaran." Slowly, one pale hand caressed the control pad on the arm of the float-chair, and a dim gray mist coalesced around her like a fairy spell of seeming.
The ba servitor returned to the pavilion to escort not Miles but its mistress away. Miles was left to stumble back through the dark to Yenaro's estate alone.
It was raining.
Miles was not surprised to find that the ghem-woman was no longer waiting on the bench by the red-enameled gate. He let himself in quietly, and paused just outside the lighted garden doors to brush as many of the water droplets as possible off his formal blacks, and to wipe his face. He then sacrificed the handkerchief to the redemption of his boots, and quietly dropped the sodden object behind a bush. He slipped back inside.
No one noticed his entry. The party was continuing, a little louder, with a few new faces replacing some of the previous ones. The Cetagandans did not use alcohol for inebriation, but some of the guests had a late-party dissociated air about them similar to over-indulgers Miles had witnessed at home. If intelligent conversation had been difficult before, it was clearly hopeless now. He felt himself no better off than the ghemlings, drunk on information, dizzy with intrigue. Everyone to their own secret addictions, I suppose. He wanted to collect Ivan and escape, as swiftly as possible, before his head exploded.
"Ah, there you are, Lord Vorkosigan." Lord Yenaro appeared at Miles's elbow, looking faintly anxious. "I could not find you."
"I took a long walk with a lady," Miles said. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. "Where is my cousin?"
"Lord Vorpatril is taking a tour of the house with Lady Arvan and Lady Benello," said Yenaro. He glanced through a wide archway at the room's opposite side, which framed a spiral staircase in a hall beyond. "They've been gone ... an astonishingly long time." Yenaro's smile attempted to be knowing, but came out oddly puzzled. "Since before you ... I don't quite . . . ah, well. Would you care for a drink?"
"Yes, please," said Miles distractedly. He took it from Yenaro's hand and gulped without hesitation. His eyes almost crossed, considering the possibilities of Ivan plus two beautiful ghem-women. Though to his haut-dazzled senses, all the ghem-women in the room looked as coarse and dull as backcountry slatterns just now. The effect would wear off with time, he hoped. He dreaded the thought of his own next encounter with a mirror. What had the haut Rian Degtiar seen, looking at him? A simian black-clad gnome, twitching and babbling? He pulled up a chair and sat rather abruptly, the spiral staircase bracketed in his sights. Ivan, hurry up!
Yenaro lingered by his side, and began a disjointed conversation about proportional theories of architecture through history, art and the senses, and the natural esters trade on Barrayar, but Miles swore the man was as focused on the staircase as he was. Miles finished his first drink and most of a second before Ivan appeared in the shadows at the top of the stairs.
Ivan hesitated in the dimness, his hand checking the fit of his green uniform, which appeared fully assembled. Or re-assembled. He was alone. He descended with one hand clutching the curving rail, which floated without apparent support in echo of the stair's arc. He jerked a stiff frown into a stiff smile before entering the main room and the light. His head swiveled till he spotted Miles, toward whom he made a straight line.
"Lord Vorpatril," Yenaro greeted him. "You had a long tour. Did you see everything?"
Ivan bared his teeth. "Everything. Even the light."
Yenaro's smile did not slip, but his eyes seemed to fill with questions. "I'm ... so glad." A guest called to him from across the room, and Yenaro was momentarily distracted.
Ivan bent down to whisper behind his hand into Miles's ear, "Get us the hell out of here. I think I've been poisoned."
Miles looked up, startled. "D'you want to call down the lightflyer?"
"No. Just back to the embassy in the groundcar."
"But—"
"No, dammit," Ivan hissed. "Just quietly. Before that smirking bastard goes upstairs." He nodded toward
Yenaro, who was now standing at the foot of the staircase, gazing upward.
"I take it you don't think it is acute."
"Oh, it was cute all right," Ivan snarled.
"You didn't murder anybody up there, did you?"
"No. But I thought they'd never . . . Tell you in the car."
"You'd better." Miles clambered to his feet. They perforce had to pass Yenaro, who attached himself to them like a good host, and saw them to his front door with suitably polite farewells. Ivan's good-byes might have been etched in acid.
As soon as the canopy sealed over their heads, Miles commanded, "Give, Ivan!"
Ivan settled back, still seething. "I was set up."
This comes as a surprise to you, coz? "By Lady Arvan and Lady Benello?"
"They were the setup. Yenaro was behind it, I'm sure of it. You're right about that damned fountain being a trap, Miles, I see it now. Beauty as bait, all over again."
"What happened to you?"
"You know all those rumors about Cetagandan aphrodisiacs?"
"Yes . . ."
"Well, sometime this evening that son-of-a-bitch Yenaro slipped me an anti-aphrodisiac."
"Urn . . . are you sure? I mean, there are natural causes for these moments, I'm told. . . ."
"It was a setup. I didn't seduce them, they seduced me! Wafted me upstairs to this amazing room—it had to have been all arranged in advance. God, it was, it was . . ." His voice broke in a sigh, "it was glorious. For a little while. And then I realized I couldn't, like, perform."
"What did you do?"
"It was too late to get out gracefully. So I winged it. It was all I could do to keep 'em from noticing."
"What?"
"I made up a lot of instant barbarian folklore—I told 'em a Vor prides himself on self-control, that it's not considered polite on Barrayar for a man to, you know, before his lady has. Three times. It was considered insulting to her. I stroked, I rubbed, I scratched, I recited poetry, I nuzzled and nibbled and—cripes, my fingers are cramped." His speech was a bit slurred, too, Miles noticed. "I thought they'd never fall asleep." Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. "But they were smiling, when they finally did." The smirk faded into a look of bleak dismay. "What do you want to bet those two are the biggest female ghem-gossips on Eta Ceta?"
"No takers here," said Miles, fascinated. Let the punishment fit the crime. Or, in this case, the trap fit the prey. Someone had studied his weaknesses. And someone just as clearly had studied Ivan's. "We could have the ImpSec office do a data sweep for the tale, over the next few days."
"If you breathe a word of this I'll wring your scrawny neck! If I can find it."
"You've got to confess to the embassy physician. Blood tests—"
"Oh, yes. I want a chemical scan the instant I hit the door. What if the effect's permanent?"
"Ba Vorpatril?" Miles intoned, eyes alight.
"Dammit, I didn't laugh at you."
"No. That's true, you didn't," Miles sighed. "I expect the physician will find whatever it was metabolizes rapidly. Or Yenaro wouldn't have drunk the stuff himself."
"You think?"
"Remember the zlati ale? I'd bet my ImpSec silver eyes that was the vector."