House of the Sun (24 page)

"Is this sufficient proof?" asked the dragon.

14

The big worm. The fragging bakeware.

That's who it had to be, didn't it? Ryumyo the fragging Great Dragon. Great fragging Christ on a crutch. Whatever happened to a low fragging profile?

My hands were shaking, making it harder to hot-wire the car I was boosting—a nice, nondescript Volkswagen Elektro, rusted out here and there. I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the back of my hand and tried not to drek myself.

A nice, relaxing sojourn in the islands. Just deliver a message, soak up a few rays, get wasted on mai-tais, then it's all over. That's how Barnard had pitched it to me.

Yeah,
right
. Ryumyo, the fragging dragon, had it chipped, didn't he?
"
You've become involved in matters much too weighty for you," that's what he'd told me. No drek. Corps and yaks and terrorists, oh my. And now kings and fragging
dragons
... Oh yes, and we can't forget the insect spirits, can we? My dance card was already full, and more guests kept showing up at the cotillion. Frag it to hell and back. I must have been something
real
nasty in a past life—nun-rapist, maybe, mass murderer, or perhaps tax collector—to warrant this kind of drekky karma.

I finally managed to get the Elektro to admit that I
did
have the right keycode, and the little flywheel deep in the car's guts spun up to speed. I tried to burn rubber, but the mobile coffin just whined at me accusingly and pulled away from the curb at a slow walk. (According to some Volkswagen propaganda I'd scanned a while back, the Electro is supposed to have a top end of 75 klicks.
Sure,
chummer. The Volkswagen engineers must have dropped the fragging thing off a bridge to get that figure.) I pointed the Elektro east, and cruised through the noontime traffic.

Spirits ... I would purely
loooove
to take the nice dragon's friendly advice and just butt the hell out of all this. It hadn't been my choice to stick my nose into anyone's biz. Now, if I made one wrong step, my nose was probably the largest fragment of my anatomy anyone would find left in one piece. Maybe after I'd talked to King Kamehameha V. Yeah, right.

I was ten minutes early for my appointment—audience?—when I pulled into the public parking facility a block from the lolani Palace. I bid a less-than-fond farewell to the Elektro—Volkswagen's ergonomic gurus must have left it up to a band of munchkins to spec out the headroom—and took the elevator up to street level.

And that's where I stopped and listened for a minute or two to my pulse beating a wild tattoo in my ears. Logic fought with instinct. It was instinct that told me to use all the tradecraft I knew, to look for shadows and tails, to watch my hoop, to approach my target without being spotted. Logic told me that was a load of bollocks. I was going to be jandering into a fragging
palace
. Lot of good tradecraft was going to do me there. And anyway, I recalled, looking down at the nicks the window composite had left in my finger, Gordon Ho's sniper had given me convincing evidence that the
Ali'i
didn't want me dead yet. Still, it took a good two minutes for logic to suppress the whimperings of reflex. Finally. I strode across the road—almost getting greased by a courier on a pedal-bike, despite the fact that I had the light—and toward the lolani Palace.

The building itself sat in the middle of more than half a hectare of grassy turf, almost indecently green and vibrant. It didn't look big enough to be the capitol of a sovereign nation. Frag, you couldn't fit more than a hundred bureaucrats and datapushers into the place. But then I glanced across the road at the
Haleaka-
something
,
the big, ferrocrete Government House. I supposed it made sense; separate the day-today biz of the government from the symbolic, ritualistic drek. The wrought iron gate leading onto the grounds was open, flanked by four guards—all big boys, trolls or orks dressed in white uniforms that were almost blinding in the brilliant sun. (
Stupid,
I thought at first, but then I realized these guys were just symbolic. If you're going to stand at attention out in the beating tropical sun, white gear makes a lot more sense than dark camo. The
real
hard-men would be out of sight, somewhere in the shade, but able to respond to trouble in an instant.) I jandered on through. One of the trolls gave me my daily dose of stink-eye, and I saw his big, horny knuckles whiten on the forestock of his H&K assault rifle. Chummer, I just
smiled
. At the moment trolls with assault rifles were low on my priority list of things to drek myself over.

Up the driveway I jandered, up the low steps, in the front door. And into the blissful cool of a lobby/reception area. Scott had told me the Iolani Palace was about a hundred and fifty years old, and now I could really
feel
it. Not that the place looked rundown. Far from it, it was perfectly maintained. But the very feel of the air hinted at the history that had passed through its doors, up its stairways, across its dark wood floors.

There were four more white-clad ceremonial guards—trolls, again—one in each corner of the room. More stink-eye. In front of me was a huge reception desk made from the same dark wood as the floor. Behind it sat a young Polynesian woman, her attractiveness undiminished by the fact that she was an ork. No stink-eye here. She was watching me with a welcoming smile that, under other circumstances, might have had me running around in circles, dragging a wing and whimpering. I walked up to the desk. "My name's Dirk Montgomery," I told her.

"Yes?" Then she blinked and looked down at a 'puter flatscreen set into the desktop. "Oh, yes," she said brightly, "I'm sorry, Mr. Montgomery, you
are
expected, of course. If you'll just wait a moment ..." Her eyes rolled up in her head, and for the first time I noticed that a fiber-optic line connected her to the desktop system. In a couple of heartbeats her dark eyes were smiling up into mine again. "Mr. Ortega will be with you momentarily," she told me.

When she said, "momentarily," she meant it. I'd barely finished thanking her when a door in the wall behind her opened and a suit emerged.

Not "suit" as in "corp." No, "suit" as in Zoe or one of the other upper-tier designers. When Mr. Ortega came through the door, it was the suit I noticed first, and only as an afterthought the man who was wearing it. A pasty-faced little guy, pale skin, salt-and-pepper hair. He looked kind of dusty, like a librarian who hadn't been let out of the stacks for a couple of years. But the suit and the eyes—flinty-hard, rather like the
Ali'i'
s, I thought suddenly—were enough to tell me this was a honcho with real juice.

Those eyes gave me the top-to-toe scan, sizing me up ... and narrowing as though he didn't particularly like the conclusions he'd reached. "Mr. Montgomery," he said politely, but with no human warmth. He extended a thin hand. "Your weapon, please."

Out the corner of my eye, I saw the white-suits stiffen as I reached—
very
slowly, with my left hand—under my shirt-tails and pulled out my Manhunter. I safed the weapon, going so far as to pop out the clip before I handed it over to Ortega. Distastefully, as though I'd offered him a dead fish, he took it and passed it in turn to the receptionist, who made it disappear into a drawer. "You will, of course, receive it back once your business is concluded," Ortega told me. Then he turned his back and strode toward the door, the lines of his narrow shoulders indicating he fully expected me to follow.

Follow I did, through the door—through a sophisticated suite of metal detectors and chemsniffers, I had no doubt—and into a kind of anteroom with three doors. Ortega turned around again, and again he gave me the top-to-bottom scan. "Yes, well," he said at last, "you must, of course, wear a jacket and tie for an audience with the
Ali'i
." I almost chuckled aloud—the last time I'd heard words to that effect I'd been trying to sleaze my way into a restaurant called La Maison d'Indochine back in Seattle—but suppressed my amusement. Aide de camp, maitre d'—I guess there
wasn't
that much difference, when you thought about it. I watched the laser-eyed little man, surprised that he didn't look even slightly Polynesian, as he opened a closet set into the richly paneled walls and pulled out some clothes. "A one-oh-five regular should fit." (This seemed to be my week for meeting people with a haberdasher's eye.) He handed over a double-breasted jacket—deep blue with a conservative emerald pinstripe—and a white-and-navy paisley tie. And then he waited.

The collar of my tropical shirt wasn't made for a tie, and if the jacket actually was a one-oh-five regular, I'd put on some weight. But I made do the best I could, and did a model's turn for Ortega. "Yes," he said dryly—I suppose a sense of humor wasn't
de
rigueur
this season—and turned his back on me once more.

I followed him through another door and down a short hallway. We stopped at yet another door—some dark, dynamically grained wood this time—and paused. He turned back to me, gave me one last once-over—his frown telling me he didn't like what he saw any better this time—and started in on a protocol lecture. "The
Ali'i
will acknowledge you," he said. "Until that point you will stand with your eyes averted. You will not speak unless addressed, and then you will limit yourself to answers to the
Ali'i
's questions. You will not—"

Mr. Manners was cut off by a click as the door opened behind him. He shot me a scowl—didn't appreciate
pedantus
interruptus,
apparently—but turned to whisper something to the white-suit who'd opened the door. After a quiet exchange Ortega stepped aside and gestured for me to go ahead. I did, but not before wishing I had a small-denomination coin handy to tip him (and
really
slot him off). I walked through the door .. .

. . . And into a throne room. I mean a
real
throne room, complete with throne, up on a low dais at the far end. Like a magnet the figure on the throne drew my gaze. A bronzeskinned warrior god—that was my first impression. Tall, muscular, in the prime of his vibrant, vigorous life. He wore pretty much the same getup as the statue of Kamehameha the Great that Scott had shown me: loincloth, a cape of brilliant yellow feathers hung over his shoulders, and a big forward-curving headdress also covered with feathers. His chest was bare, well-muscled, and decorated here and there with tattoos of a geometrical design. If he'd held a spear or a war club in his big hands, it would have looked totally appropriate. In fact, however, what he held was a sophisticated pocket 'puter on which he was taking notes. He looked up as the door clicked shut behind me, and those flinty eyes seemed to pierce me to the core.

It was Gordon Ho—it had taken me this long, a couple of seconds, to recognize him in his glory. Gordon Ho, King Kamehameha V,
Ali'i
of the Kingdom of Hawai'i. When I'd seen him on the telecom screen, my mental impression had been of a young, up-and-coming corporate exec. The telecom hadn't conveyed the size of him—just shy of two meters tall, I guessed; not up to Kamehameha the Great's standard, but still one big boy—and it certainly hadn't done justice to his ... his
aura
. (I hate the word, but it's the only one that fits.) I could
feel
his personality, his strength of will, like radiant heat penetrating to my core. I'd never met a king before, and for the first time I realized there might be something more to this monarchy drek than a title and—maybe—congenital defects from inbreeding.

He glanced back to his computer, and the removal of his gaze seemed to free me from a spell. For the first time since I'd stepped through the door, I was able to look around at the rest of the room.

It wasn't big, this throne room, about the size of a major corporate boardroom. The floor was hardwood, the walls paneled in the same rich-grained wood as the door I'd passed through. On the wall behind the
Ali'i
was a large coat of arms or seal or something—circular, with words around its circumference.
Ua
mau
ke
ea
a
ka
aina
i
ka
pono,
I managed to pick out . . . whatever the frag that was supposed to mean. In the center of the seal was some kind of emblem incorporating a hibiscuslike flower, a tree that looked like a banyan, and—I drek you not—a fragging
goose
. Framing it were drapes of rich maroon velvet.

Beside and to the left of King Kamehameha another man was on the dais—standing; the only seat in the room was filled with
Ali'i
. An older man, he was, scrawny and weathered, looking like he'd been carved from nut brown wood. He too wore a cape—no feathers, just red fabric—and a loincloth. Around his brow was a headband, and a single feather of some kind protruded from the back, to sag forward—forlornly, I thought—over his forehead. An advisor of some kind, I figured at once. What had Scott called these guys?
Kahunas
, that was it. The
kahuna
looked only a couple of years younger than God himself, but he had the same steely edge in his eyes as Gordon Ho. Not a slag to trifle with.

Two white-suits flanked the dais, and another loomed over me and Ortega, who'd joined me in the room. These boys
were
holding spears, but I noted they also had big-time handguns holstered on their belts.

And then there were the three . . . visitors? supplicants? what would you call them? They stood before the dais, eyes averted as I'd forgotten to do. All humans, all Polynesians . . . and all suits (in the corp sense, this time). One of them turned and shot me a bad look—I was getting pretty goddamned tired of stink-eye by this time—before getting back to his averting.