Mantagnes moved out from behind her desk, offered her her own seat with a silent gesture. The anger that she read in his eyes made her skin prickle. He was a Kharemoughi, like the Chief Justice — Kharemoughis tended to rise to the top in the foreign service; not surprisingly, since their homeworld dominated it. She knew that on Kharemough women enjoyed relative social equality, since their society valued skill and class status more than sheer physical strength. But the foreign service, which included a wide variety of recruits from less enlightened worlds, seemed to attract the most regressive and autocratic Kharemoughis as well — Mantagnes included. She didn’t know anything about Hovanesse, the Chief Justice, but she could read nothing encouraging in his expression. She went to the desk and sat down, the feel of familiar territory easing her fear a little. She glanced from wall to wall, wished with more than usual feeling that the room had a window.
They were still standing. “You’re probably wondering why we’re here, Inspector PalaThion,” Hovanesse said, with pitiless banality.
She fought down a sudden, monstrous urge to laughter. // that isn’t the understatement of the millennium. “Yes, I certainly am, Your Honor.” She folded her hands on the gray-lettered keyboard of her terminal, watched her knuckles whiten as they formed a hopeless prayer gesture. She noticed a battered parcel sitting at the corner of the desk, read her name; considered absently that she did not know the handwriting. Her name was misspelled. I hope it’s a bomb.
“I understand that — former Commander LiouxSked and his family left Tiamat today. You saw them off?”
“Yes, Your Honor. They left on schedule.”
“The gods go with them.” He looked down grimly at the stained, ancient ceramic floor tiles. “How could he do such a thing to his family, and his good name!”
“Your Honor, I can’t believe—” She felt Mantagnes’s hostile gaze catch her, and faltered. They want to believe it; he wasn’t a Kharemoughi.
The Chief Justice tugged sharply at his tailored doublet. Jerusha pulled surreptitiously at the collar of her own tunic. It secretly surprised her to see him looking so ill at ease. Kharemoughis were made to wear uniforms; it was the Newhavenese who were miserable in the formality of any clothing. “As you know, Inspector, Commander LiouxSked’s… departure leaves us without an official head of the police force on Tiamat. Naturally, we need to fill the post as soon as possible, for reasons of morale. The responsibility for filling that post belongs to me. But of course it has always been the policy of the Hegemony to allow local rulers some say in the choosing of officials who will work most closely with them.”
Jerusha leaned back into her chair as Mantagnes’s expression darkened further.
“The Snow Queen has asked — has demanded — that I appoint you as the new Commander.”
“Me?” She caught at the desk edge. “Is this… is this a joke?”
“A monumental joke,” Mantagnes said sourly. “And we’re the butt of it.”
“You mean, you’re going along with it? You want me to accept the position?” She could not believe the words when she said them.
“Of course you’ll accept the position,” Hovanesse said tonelessly. “If this is what she wants from the police force that protects her people, this is what she’ll get,” suggesting that he thought Arienrhod had chosen her own punishment.
Jerusha pushed slowly up out of her seat, leaned across the desk. “You’re ordering me to become Commander, then. I don’t have any choice.”
Mantagnes put his hands behind him. “You had no objection to being made an inspector over men who deserved it, to please the Queen.” It was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged it openly. “I’d think you’d jump at the chance to become Commander of Police just because you’re female.”
“It’s better than never being promoted at all just because I’m female.” She felt pressure growing in her chest, until she thought her heart would stop. “But I don’t want this! Damn it, I don’t like the Queen any better than you do, I don’t want to be Commander — not if it only means being a puppet!” A trap, this is a trap
“That isn’t up to you, Commander PalaThion… unless of course you resign,” Hovanesse said. “But I’ll see that your doubts about your ability to do a satisfactory job as Commander are duly recorded.”
She said nothing, unable to think of a single appropriate response.
Mantagnes reached up to his collar, unfastened the insignia he had plainly been expecting to wear forever. He threw them down on her desk; she put out a hand just in time to stop one of them from skidding over the edge. “Congratulations.” He saluted with utter precision.
She bent her head stiffly. “Dismissed… Inspector Mantagnes.”
The two men left the room without a word.
Jerusha sat down again in her seat. Her hands closed over the winged Commander’s badges, felt them cut into her palms. This was Arienrhod’s doing, Arienrhod’s revenge. Commander PalaThion ,… The Queen had hung her up to twist in the wind, thrown a challenge at her that Arienrhod expected would ruin her career.
But by the Bastard Boatman, she hadn’t gotten to be a Blue by being a weakling or a quitter. So she was Commander PalaThion now — well, damn it, shed make the most of it! She reached up with great deliberateness and pinned the badges to her collar. “If you think you’re going to ruin me, if you think I’m going to fail,” she said aloud to the Queen of the Air, “then that’s your second mistake.” But her hands trembled. I won’t jail! I’m as good as any man! feeling the pain of old, deep wounds that weakened her self-belief.
She pulled open the drawer in front of her, reaching for the pack of iestas. But the image of LiouxSked’s agony crossed her vision, and her hand closed over itself instead. She shut the drawer. She had not touched the pack of iestas in all the time since his overdose.
Her glance found the mysterious parcel again; she pulled it across the desk instead, to give her hands and her mind a focus. She untied the twine, unwrapped the rough brown cloth that covered a crude box. It looked like something that had come from the outback on a trader’s ship; and there was no one out there whom she could envision sending a parcel to an inspector of police.
She opened the box and lifted the contents out carefully: a shell the size of her two open hands, with one of the spiny fingers broken off of its fragile crest. It was the color of sunrise, and its surface had been patiently burnished until it glowed like the dawn sky. She had seen it last, and admired it, on the mantel over the fireplace at Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe’s plantation house… while she stood listening to the flames crack in the easy silence, sipping the strong black tea Ngenet had urged on her before she went on her way to Carbuncle. That surprisingly peaceful moment came back to her now quite clearly, soothing her. Ironic to think that the only pleasant social visit she could remember since coming to this world ten years ago had been fifteen minutes spent in the company of a man who was probably breaking the law…
She probed inside the shell with her fingers, dumped the packing out of the box; but there was no message for her. She sighed — not sure what she had been expecting, only disappointed that it wasn’t there. “Congratulations on your promotion, Geia Jerusha,” she said wearily. She picked up the shell again, closed her eyes; held it against her ear in the way Ngenet had shown her, listening for the voice of the Sea.