Ivan relaxed slightly, obviously relieved at this professional analysis. After a minute he added, "Yenaro's done you now, and he's done me. Third time's a charm. What's next, do you suppose? And can we do him first?"
Miles was silent for a long time. "That depends," he said at last, "on whether Yenaro's merely amusing himself, or whether he too is being . . . set up. And on whether there's any connection between Yenaro's backer and the death of Ba Lura."
"Connection? What possible connection?"
"We are the connection, Ivan. A couple of Barrayaran backcountry boys come to the big city, and ripe for the plucking. Somebody is using us. And I think somebody . . . has just made a major mistake in his choice of tools." Or fools.
Ivan stared at his venomous tone. "Have you got rid of that little toy you're packing yet?" he demanded suspiciously.
"Yes . . . and no."
"Oh, shit. I knew better than to trust—what the hell do you mean by Yes and no? Either you have or you haven't, right?"
"The object has been returned, yes."
"That's that, then."
"No. Not quite."
"Miles . . . You had better start talking to me."
"Yes, I think I better had," Miles sighed. They were approaching the legation district. "After you're done in the infirmary, I have a few confessions to make. But if—when—you talk to the ImpSec night-duty officer about Yenaro, don't mention the other. Yet."
"Oh?" drawled Ivan in a tone of deep suspicion.
"Things have gotten . . . complex."
"You think they were simple before?"
"I mean complex beyond the scope of mere security concerns, into genuine diplomatic ones. Of extreme delicacy. Maybe too delicate to submit to the sort of booted paranoids who sometimes end up running local ImpSec offices. That's a judgment call . . . that I'll have to make myself. When I'm sure I'm ready. But this isn't a game anymore, and it's no longer feasible for me to run without backup." I need help, God help me.
"We knew that yesterday."
"Oh, yes. But it's even deeper than I first thought."
"Over our heads?"
Miles hesitated, and smiled sourly. "I don't know, Ivan. How good are you at treading water?"
Alone in his suite's bathroom, Miles slowly peeled off his black House uniform, now in desperate need of attention from the embassy's laundry. He glanced at himself sideways in the mirror, then resolutely looked away. He considered the problem, as he stood in the shower. To the haut, all normal humans doubtless looked like some lower life-form. From the haut Rian Degtiar's foreshortened perspective, perhaps there was little to choose between him and, say, Ivan.
And ghem-lords did win haut wives, from time to time, for great deeds. And the Vor and the ghem-lords were very much alike. Even Maz had said so.
How great a deed? Very great. Well . . . he'd always wanted to save the Empire. The Cetagandan just wasn't the empire he'd pictured, was all. Life was like that, always throwing you curveballs.
You've gone mad, you know. To hope, to even think it . . .
If he defeated the late Dowager Empress's plot, might the Cetagandan emperor be grateful enough to ... give him Rian's hand? If he advanced the late Dowager Empress's plot, might the haut Rian Degtiar be grateful enough to ... give him her love? To do both simultaneously would be a tactical feat of supernatural scope.
Barrayar's interests lay, unusually, squarely with the interests of the Cetagandan emperor. Obviously, it was his clear ImpSec duty to foil the girl and save the villain.
Right. My head hurts.
Reason was returning to him, slowly, the astonishing effect of the haut Rian Degtiar wearing off. Wasn't it? She hadn't exactly tried to suborn him, after all. Even if Rian was as ugly as the witch Baba Yaga, he'd still have to be following up on this. To a point. He needed to prove Barrayar had not filched the Great Key, and the only certain way of doing that was to find its real thief. He wondered if one could get a hangover from excess passion. If so, his was apparently starting while he was still drunk, which did not seem quite fair.
Eight Cetagandan satrap governors had been led into treason by the late empress. Optimistic, to think that only one could be a murderer. But only one possessed the real Great Key.
Lord X? Seven chances of guessing wrong, against one of guessing right. Not favorable odds.
I'll . . . figure something out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ivan was taking a long time, downstairs in the infirmary. Miles shucked on his black fatigues and, barefoot, fired up his comconsole for a quick review of the eight haut-lord satrap governors.
The satrap governors were all chosen from a pool of men who were close Imperial relations, half-brothers and uncles and great-uncles, in both paternal and maternal lines. Two current office-holders were of the Degtiar constellation. Each ruled his satrapy for a set term of only five years, then he was required to shift—sometimes to permanent retirement back at the capital on Eta Ceta, sometimes to another satrapy. A couple of the older and more experienced men had cycled this way through the entire empire. The purpose of the term limitation, of course, was to prevent the build-up of a personal local power base to anyone who might harbor secret Imperial pretensions. So far so sensible.
So ... which among them had been tempted into hubris by the dowager empress, and Ba Lura? For that matter, how had she contacted them all? If she'd been working on her plan for twenty years, she'd had lots of time . . . still, that long ago, how could she have predicted which men would be satrap governors on the unknown date of her death? The governors must have all been brought into the plot quite recently.
Miles stared narrow-eyed at the list of his eight suspects. I have to cut this down somehow. Several somehows. If he assumed Lord X had personally murdered the Ba Lura, he could eliminate the weakest and most fragile elderly men ... a premature assumption. Any of the haut-lords might possess a ghem-guard both loyal and capable enough to be delegated the task, while the satrap governor lingered front and center in the bier-gifting ceremonies, his alibi established before dozens of witnesses.
No disloyalty to Barrayar intended, but Miles found himself wishing he were a Cetagandan security man right now—specifically, the one in charge of whatever investigation was progressing on Ba Lura's supposed suicide. But there was no way he could insert himself inconspicuously into that data flow. And he wasn't sure Rian had the mind-set for it, not to mention the urgent necessity of keeping Cetagandan security's attention as far from her as possible. Miles sighed in frustration.
It wasn't his task to solve the Ba's murder anyway. It was his task to locate the real Great Key. Well, he knew in general where it was—in orbit, aboard one of the satrap governors' flagships. How else to finger the right one?
A chime at his door interrupted his furious meditations. He hastily shut down the comconsole and called, "Enter."
Ivan trod within, looking extremely dyspeptic.
"How did it go?" Miles asked, waving him to a chair. Ivan dragged a heavy and comfortable armchair up to the comconsole, and flung himself across it sideways, scowling. He was still wearing his undress greens.
"You were right. It was taken by mouth, and it metabolizes rapidly. Not so rapidly that our medics couldn't get a sample, though." Ivan rubbed his arm. "They said it would have been untraceable by morning."