Chapter Twenty-six

"If you'll step this way, milady," suggested the voice of Kumiswari, Hansen's new servant. "The tent with the gold battlesuit before it. And no finer suit in the host, not the armor of King Wenceslas himself."

Lamplight gleamed through the stitches of the pony-leather tent. Hansen bumped his head on the ridgepole while pulling on his linen breeches. The tent was twenty centimeters shorter than Hansen was, a hard fact to remember when he was in a hurry. He swore quietly.

Krita must have escaped.

The flap rustled as Kumiswari undid the upper set of ties. "Lord Hansen?" the servant called. He was one of the pair of slaves Wenceslas had assigned to Hansen—like the tent itself—from his own establishment. "There's a lady to see you, sir."

"All right," Hansen said, checking—not that there was the least danger—that the dagger with the spiked handguard was unobtrusively available in the sheath hanging from the head of his cot. A 'lady' looking for Hansen here had to be Krita—or a messenger from North, and North would not send an assassin.

Would North send an assassin?

The only light in the tent was a candle of mammoth tallow, held at reading height by a meter-long spike jabbed into the ground beside the cot. The wavering yellow flame had an animal odor which Hansen found surprisingly pleasant when he'd gotten used to it.

Kumiswari opened the tent with a flourish degraded by the fact that the woman still had to stoop to step past the end pole. This was too big a tent for one man's field use, but that didn't make it a palace reception room.

Backlit by the servant's lantern, the woman's hair glowed red/blond. She wasn't Krita, and she wasn't anybody Hansen knew—

Until she turned and said to Kumiswari, "You may go now—and if you know your master as well as you should, you won't linger too close."

Lucille. Lord Salles' . . . cousin, hadn't he said?

"Of course, milady," Kumiswari murmured. The light behind Lucille quivered as the servant bowed. His voice faded as he added, "Milord? If you call loudly, I will come."

She had only been around him for a few days, in the rebels' camp. Why had she put her threat to the servant in that particular way, as if she knew Commissioner Nils Hansen?

"Fine, that's fine," Hansen agreed. The woman bent forward to refasten the ties, reaching between the flaps.

He looked around the tent and grimaced, not that he'd asked for a visitor.

He wasn't really a hard-handed bastard like his reputation. He didn't lose his temper very often; and when he did, it was always a cold passion. As cold as Death himself.

The only furniture within the tent was the cot and the round of treetrunk that Hansen used as a stool. He'd been sitting on the wood, wrapped in a black bearskin and staring through the Matrix at distant places, when he was interrupted. A notebook made from thin plates of beechwood lay on the cot beside him, to explain to a servant or visitor what Lord Hansen was doing in his tent.

Lucille turned. Her head cleared the ridgepole by the thickness of the cowl which she had thrown back over her shoulders. Hansen, awkward because he had to hunch until he sat down again, gestured toward the stool and cot in a single sweep. "Please," he offered. "I'm not set up for this."

She settled, like a cat curling onto the end of the bed. There was no obvious hesitation. Hansen thankfully sat on the stool. He thought of flipping the bearskin over his legs again; but thought better of it.

"I . . . hoped you might know whether any of the others escaped from the—the attack," Lucille asked. She was minutely less self-possessed than she had been a moment before.

"Your cousin, you mean?" Hansen said. "No, lady. They all opened their suits and surrendered. I ran."

True enough, though not on his legs.

"Lord Salles was beside me when it happened," he said aloud.

Candid ignorance was the best choice. She could denounce him, if she chose.

"He shouted that we mustn't fight against the emperor," Hansen continued. "And he surrendered. I thought the servants and dependents had been captured also."

Lucille nodded curtly. "Most of them were," she said. "My sister is a lord's wife here in Mirala, and I—"

Her face was warmer and more textured than it had been when Hansen met her in the rebels' camp, but it suddenly went gray even in the candle's tawny light.

"—have had as much of the emperor's hospitality as my body could stand." She forced a smile. "Or my soul."

"I'm sorry," Hansen said truthfully. "I wish I could give you better news."

The woman wore a scarlet-lined cape of heavy blue wool. The dress beneath was brown and cream, with lace at the throat and bodice seams. Either her brother-in-law was wealthy as well as being noble, or Lucille had escaped from the wreck of the rebel cause with an unlikely quantity of belongings.

She had escaped because she had kin outside the West Kingdom. It was no treason to Venkatna that a woman visit her sister. The Web—and the slaves controlling the Web—carried out the emperor's instructions as precisely as a crossbow slammed its bolt down a trajectory determined by aim and physics when the trigger was pulled.

"It was the Web," Lucille said, correctly and to Hansen's surprise. Her fingers toyed with the bearskin Hansen had tossed onto the cot. "The thing in that demon's palace. There are rumors—"

She stared at Hansen, as if expecting confirmation or denial. "—and they're true."

He shrugged. He was just here to fight. "I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Did—" something changed in the woman's expression, though Hansen wasn't sure what "—Kriton escape also?"

"No," Hansen said flatly.

He'd been watching Krita when Kumiswari announced the visitor. She and the remainder of the Peace Rock rebels were imperial troops now. For the time being they carried out evolutions and battle training on the practice fields outside Frekka, but the real fight would come soon enough. . . .

"I asked . . . ," Lucille said to her hands. The fingers were so thin that the knuckles seemed unusually prominent, although they were not enlarged. "Because I know that she's a woman."

"I think," Hansen said quietly, "that you're mistaken."

"Oh, it's all right," the woman said hastily. "I won't tell anyone—I haven't, after all. But if Kriton was here, I wouldn't have . . ."

She looked up and met Hansen's eyes. He cleared his throat.

Lucille leaned forward and took his hands in hers. Her fingers felt cold even to him, sitting in breeches and a shirt of thin gray wool. "Will we defeat him?" she demanded. "The devil Venkatna?"

"I'm not the comman—" Hansen began.

"Don't!" Lucille snapped. "Milord, I don't know who you are, but you know things. I saw you in the camp, I watched you. You should be commanding this army and you're not, but you can tell me the truth!"

Hansen grimaced. At the direction of one part of his conscious mind, he began rubbing the woman's hands. "We've got enough troops to do it," he said. "A quick, straight shot at Frekka like we're planning—"

Thanks to the 'merchant prince from Simplain.'

"—could do the job."

"But," Lucille said. She shifted slightly, so that Hansen's right hand lay on her thigh and her own hand held it there.

He was a man, God knew. Whatever else he was, he was a man. . . .

"But," Hansen agreed, staring at the soft wool that bunched as his fingers kneaded gently, "we won't move fast. We've got twice the baggage and a quarter the speed of the same number of Venkatna's troops. We won't take them by surprise, and when we join battle—"

He raised his eyes.

"—they'll fight like an army, and we'll fight like a mob."

"Why are you here, Lord Hansen?" she asked softly.

Because I'm responsible for the problem. Because if I can't cure it, I can—

Die trying.

Die.

"I've fought enough battles," he said aloud, "to know that there's always a chance the other guy's going to fuck up bigtime. Let's hope, shall we?"

"I hope you survive, Lord Hansen," Lucille said as if she were replying to the words he spoke only in his mind. "But you may not—"

She lifted his right hand. He started to draw back, surprised and embarrassed, but the woman swept her skirt waist-high with her free hand.

"—and I've wanted you from the first time I saw you in camp." She smiled. Her eyes were unfocused. "It was like watching a leopard around those poor housecats my cousin led."

Her lips half-parted as she pulled Hansen toward her.

He wondered why he had thought her hair was brown. It gleamed golden in the candlelight, and the down above her thighs was pure blond.