139

Christopher Stasheff

lan started to answer, then stopped to think back.

So much had happened … “Two days, sir. Two days, and two nights.”

Gar nodded. “Yes, they will still think you are very close to home. Lord Murthren must have been searching beyond his own borders, out of sheer frustration. Whoever would believe a boy of twelve …

Ten? Very well, ten … could forge his way through the whole of the forest, alone and at night?” He turned away, chuckling again and shaking his head.

“Come, lad. Beds and hot porridge await us—

nowhere nearly such excellent fare as you had in the Sacred Place of the Old Ones, no doubt, but nonetheless most welcome after a long night of walking.”

lan stumbled after him, sodden with fatigue, but with his heart lightened. Gar had proved that he had indeed spoken with a man who had been inside an Old Ones’ place—for how else could he have known what lordly meals the guardian spirits prepared there?

Indeed, Magnus had spoken only the truth, though the man he had spoken of had been a merchant, not a soldier—Oswald Majorca. It had been one of the many anecdotes Master Oswald had related, to break the ice with his new agents while giving them some idea of the culture that had grown up on this outpost of inhumanity. But he had heard of the Safety Bases before that, from Allouene. She had finished up the briefing aboard ship—even in H-space, it took two weeks to reach Taxhaven.

That was two weeks together, with no one else to buffer personality clashes, and the cracks in the unit 140

began to show. Ragnar was growing impatient with Allouene’s occasional flirtations, especially since she never let him follow up, but always kept a wall of formality between them. Magnus kept the same kind of wall up from his side, too, so she spent larger portions of allure on him, the more so since, to all appearances, he wasn’t responding—at least, not as much as she wanted.

Inside, though, he was, and it was driving him crazy, and by that, he knew her for a flawed leader.

She was trying to bind her male agents to her by sexual attraction, not stopping to realize that she was creating rivalries that must sooner or later tear the group apart.

She was certainly tearing Magnus apart. He had to get away from the woman for a while—either that, or become very much closer; but whenever he thought about that last, something would slam shut within him, leaving him distanced from all emotions.

Lancorn was alert to every flirtation, every nuance, and resented it more and more with every day. Relations with her commander became very strained; they started being coldly polite to one another.

In short, Magnus expected them to be at each other’s throats by the time they reached Taxhaven—as they probably would have, if it hadn’t been for Siflot.

He always had a kind word for everyone, a comment that would make them all suddenly feel absurd to have been resentful, some quip or antic that would make tension explode in a burst -of laughter.

Siflot was the buffer, Siflot was the peacemaker—but 141

by the time they dropped back into normal space and Taxhaven showed a discernible disk, even he was beginning to look frazzled. Magnus wasn’t surprised—

the chafing of others’ emotions must have left him seriously abraded.

Siflot took refuge in playing his flute—a slender stalk that he carried hidden somewhere in his clothing. He hid himself away, either because it was a very private thing or because he knew that the lilting notes, sometimes shrill, could grate on others’

nerves. Presumably he played in the privacy of his own cabin—no one would have known; the walls were soundproofed—but their cubicles were claus-trophobic, so Magnus wasn’t surprised, in his rambles through the bowels of the ship, to hear flute music drifting out of a darkened corridor now and again.

He rambled for the same reason that Siflot played music—to release tension, and to get away from the others for a little. He was sure Siflot felt the same needs, so whenever he heard the skipping notes coming out of the dark, he turned aside.

But as the disk that was Taxhaven swelled in their viewscreens, the thought of taking on a whole world began to make their personal conflicts seem unim-portant, and they settled down for the last of the briefing.

“Why hasn’t the D.D.T. done something about this place before now?” Lancorn demanded.

“They’ve had more than a hundred years since they killed off PEST!”

“The Taxhaveners got to liking their life as petty 142

tyrants,” Allouene explained, “and as the economy of PEST ground down under its reactionary, isola-tionist policies, the lords sold off all their Terran Sphere assets and moved everything to Taxhaven.

The last few out did a very thorough job of burying the records—not hard to do, considering that there had been no official communication for five hundred years. The Interplanetary Police Force knew there was some kind of smuggling going on, but they were very firmly discouraged from pursuing it, so Taxhaven stayed buried in their files. The only trace of it was a standing joke that you’ve all probably heard gowing up—‘I’ll get so rich that I’ll move to Taxhaven!’ ”

“Well, sure, I heard that.” Lancorn frowned. “But I thought it just meant a tax haven.”

“That’s what we all thought,” Allouene said grimly. “But when the D.D.T. revitalized the Interplanetary Police and expanded them to interstellar, one of the first things they did was to assign someone to go through all the dead files, looking for unfinished business. Fifteen years ago, she found the mention of Taxhaven. Ten years ago, SCENT finally worked through its agenda far enough to start searching for the planet. They assigned Oswald Majorca to the job—and five years ago, he found it.

Last year, he finally admitted that he wasn’t going to be able to handle it by himself and called for help.”

“And we’re it.” Lancorn looked somber. “Just five of us and him, against a whole planet.”

“Not the whole planet.” Siflot looked pained.

“Just a few thousand aristocrats.”