Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (475 page)

My head hurts
, thought Miles.

There was worse to come before the evening ended.

The new woman’s voice was grating, low and angry. “Don’t you talk down to me, Serg Karal. I got a right for one good look at this mutie lord.”

She was tall and stringy and tough.
Like her daughter,
Miles thought. She had made no attempt to freshen up. A faint reek of summer sweat hung about her working dress. And how far had she walked? Her gray hair hung in a switch down her back, a few strands escaping the tie. If Ma Csurik’s bitterness had been a stabbing pain behind the eyes, this one’s rage was a wringing knot in the gut.

She shook off Karal’s attempted restraint and stalked up to Miles in the lamplight. “So.”

“Uh…this is Ma Mattulich, m’lord,” Karal introduced her. “Harra’s mother.”

Miles rose to his feet, managed a short formal nod. “How do you do, madam.” He was very conscious of being a head shorter. She had once been of a height with Harra, Miles estimated, but her aging bones were beginning to pull her down.

She merely stared. She was a gum-leaf chewer, by the faint blackish stains around her mouth. Her jaw worked now on some small bit, tiny chomps, grinding too hard. She studied him openly, without subterfuge or the least hint of apology, taking in his head, his neck, his back, his short and crooked legs. Miles had the unpleasant illusion that she saw right through to all the healed cracks in his brittle bones as well. Miles’s chin jerked up twice in the twitchy, nervous-involuntary tic that he was sure made him look spastic, before he controlled it with an effort.

“All right,” said Karal roughly, “you’ve seen. Now come away, for God’s sake, Mara.” His hand opened in apology to Miles. “Mara, she’s been pretty distraught over all this, m’lord. Forgive her.”

“Your only grandchild,” said Miles to her, in an effort to be kind, though her peculiar anguish repelled kindness with a scraped and bleeding scorn. “I understand your distress, ma’am. But there will be justice for little Raina. That I have sworn.”

“How can there be justice
now?
” she raged, thick and low. “It’s too late—a world too late—for justice, mutie lordling. What use do I have for your damned justice
now?
”

“Enough, Mara!” Karal insisted. His brows drew down and his lips thinned, and he forced her away and escorted her firmly off his porch.

The last lingering remnant of visitors parted for her with an air of respectful mercy, except for two lean teenagers hanging on the fringes who drew away as if avoiding poison. Miles was forced to revise his mental image of the Brothers Csurik. If those two were another sample, there was no team of huge menacing hill hulks after all. They were a team of skinny menacing hill squirts instead. Not really an improvement; they looked as if they could move as fast as striking ferrets if they had to. Miles’s lips curled in frustration.

* * * *

T
he evening’s entertainments ended finally, thank God, close to midnight. Karal’s last cronies marched off into the woods by lantern light. The repaired and re-powered audio set was carried off by its owner with many thanks to Karal. Fortunately it had been a mature and sober crowd, even somber, no drunken brawls or anything. Pym got the Karal boys settled in the tent, took a last patrol around the cabin, and joined Miles and Dea in the loft. The pallets’ stuffing had been spiked with fresh scented native herbs, to which Miles hoped devoutly he was not allergic. Ma Karal had wanted to turn her own bedroom over to Miles’s exclusive lordly use, exiling herself and her husband to the porch, too, but fortunately Pym had been able to persuade her that putting Miles in the loft, flanked by Dea and himself, was to be preferred from a security standpoint.

Dea and Pym were soon snoring, but sleep eluded Miles. He tossed on his pallet as he turned his ploys of the day, such as they had been, over and over in his mind. Was he being too slow, too careful, too conservative? This wasn’t exactly good assault tactics, surprise with a superior force. The view he’d gained of the terrain from Karal’s porch tonight had been ambiguous at best.

On the other hand, it did no good to charge off across a swamp, as his fellow cadet and cousin Ivan Vorpatril had demonstrated so memorably once on summer maneuvers. It had taken a heavy hovercab with a crane to crank the six big, strong, healthy, fully field-equipped young men of Ivan’s patrol out of the chest-high gooey black mud. Ivan had got his revenge simultaneously, though, when the cadet ‘sniper’ they had been attacking fell out of his tree and broke his arm while laughing hysterically as they sank slowly and beautifully into the ooze. Ooze that a little guy, with his laser rifle wrapped in his loincloth, could swim across like a frog. The war games umpire had ruled it a draw. Miles rubbed his forearm and grinned in memory, and faded out at last.

* * * *

M
iles awoke abruptly and without transition deep in the night with a sense of something wrong. A faint orange glow shimmered in the blue darkness of the loft. Quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping companions, he rose on his pallet and peered over the edge into the main room. The glow was coming through the front window.

Miles swung onto the ladder and padded downstairs for a look outdoors. “Pym,” he called softly.

Pym shot awake with a snort. “M’lord?” he said, alarmed.

“Come down here. Quietly. Bring your stunner.”

Pym was by his side in seconds. He slept in his trousers with his stunner holster and boots by his pillow. “What the hell—?” Pym muttered, looking out too.

The glow was from fire. A pitchy torch, flung to the top of Miles’s tent set up in the yard, was burning quietly. Pym lurched toward the door, then controlled his movements as the same realization came to him as had to Miles. Theirs was a Service-issue tent, and its combat-rated synthetic fabric would neither melt nor burn.

Miles wondered if the person who’d heaved the torch had known that. Was this some arcane warning, or a singularly inept attack? If the tent had been ordinary fabric, and Miles in it, the intended result might not have been trivial. Worse with Karal’s boys in it—a bursting blossom of flame—Miles shuddered.

Pym loosened his stunner in his holster and stood poised by the front door. “How long?”

“I’m not sure. Could have been burning like that for ten minutes before it woke me.”

Pym shook his head, took a slight breath, raised his scanner, and vaulted into the fire-gilded darkness.

“Trouble, m’lord?” Speaker Karal’s anxious voice came from his bedroom door.

“Maybe. Wait—” Miles halted him as he plunged for the door. “Pym’s running a patrol with a scanner and a stunner. Wait’ll he calls the all-clear, I think. Your boys may be safer inside the tent.”

Karal came up to the window, caught his breath, and swore.

Pym returned in a few minutes. “There’s no one within a kilometer, now,” he reported shortly. He helped Karal take the goat bucket and douse the torch. The boys, who had slept through the fire, woke at its quenching.

“I think maybe it was a bad idea to lend them my tent,” said Miles from the porch in a choked voice. “I am profoundly sorry, Speaker Karal. I didn’t think.”

“This should never…”—Karal was spluttering with anger and delayed fright—“this should
never
have happened, m’lord. I apologize for…for Silvy Vale.” He turned helplessly, peering into the darkness. The night sky, star-flecked, lovely, was threatening now.

The boys, once the facts penetrated their sleepiness, thought it was all just great, and wanted to return to the tent and lie in wait for the next assassin. Ma Karal, shrill and firm, herded them indoors instead and made them bed down in the main room. It was an hour before they stopped complaining at the injustice of it and went back to sleep.

Miles, keyed up nearly to the point of gibbering, did not sleep at all. He lay stiffly on his pallet, listening to Dea, who slept breathing heavily, and Pym, feigning sleep for courtesy and scarcely seeming to breathe at all.

Miles was about to suggest to Pym that they give up and go out on the porch for the rest of the night when the silence was shattered by a shrill squeal, enormously loud, pain-edged, from outside.

“The horses!” Miles spasmed to his feet, heart racing, and beat Pym to the ladder. Pym cut ahead of him by dropping straight over the side of the loft into an elastic crouch, and beat him to the door. There, Pym’s trained bodyguard’s reflexes compelled him to try to thrust Miles back inside. Miles almost bit him. “Go, dammit! I’ve got a weapon!”

Pym, good intentions frustrated, swung out the cabin door with Miles on his heels. Halfway down the yard they split to each side as a massive snorting shape loomed out of the darkness and nearly ran them down; the sorrel mare, loose again. Another squeal pierced the night from the lines where the horses were tethered.

“Ninny?” Miles called, panicked. It was Ninny’s voice making those noises, the like of which Miles had not heard since the night a shed had burned down at Vorkosigan Surleau with a horse trapped inside. “Ninny!”

Another grunting squeal, and a thunk like someone splitting a watermelon with a mallet. Pym staggered back, inhaling with difficulty, a resonant deep stutter, and tripped to the ground where he lay curled up around himself. Not killed outright, apparently, because between gasps he was managing to swear lividly. Miles dropped to the ground beside him, checked his skull—no, thank God, it had been Pym’s chest Ninny’s hoof had hit with that alarming sound. The bodyguard only had the wind knocked out of him, maybe a cracked rib. Miles more sensibly ran around to the
front
of the horse lines. “Ninny!”

Fat Ninny was jerking his head against his rope, attempting to rear. He squealed again, his white-rimmed eyes gleaming in the darkness. Miles ran to his head. “Ninny, boy! What is it?” His left hand slid up the rope to Ninny’s halter, his right stretched to stroke Ninny’s shoulder soothingly. Fat Ninny flinched, but stopped trying to rear, and stood trembling. The horse shook his head. Miles’s face and chest were suddenly spattered with something hot and dark and sticky.

“Dea!” Miles yelled. “
Dea!
”

Nobody slept through this uproar. Six people tumbled off the porch and down the yard, and not one of them thought to bring a light…no, the brilliant flare of a cold light sprang from between Dr. Dea’s fingers, and Ma Karal was struggling even now to light a lantern. “Dea, get that damn light over here!” Miles demanded, and stopped to choke his voice back down an octave to its usual carefully cultivated deeper register.

Dea galloped up and thrust the light toward Miles, then gasped, his face draining. “My lord! Are you shot?” In the flare the dark liquid soaking Miles’s shirt glowed suddenly scarlet.

“Not me,” Miles said, looking down at his chest in horror. A flash of memory turned his stomach over, cold at the vision of another blood-soaked death, that of the late Sergeant Bothari whom Pym had replaced. Would never replace.

Dea spun. “Pym?”

“He’s all right,” said Miles. A long inhaling wheeze rose from the grass a few meters off, the exhalation punctuated with obscenities. “But he got kicked by the horse. Get your medkit!” Miles peeled Dea’s fingers off the cold light, and Dea dashed back to the cabin.

Miles held the light up to Ninny, and swore in a sick whisper. A huge cut, a third of a meter long and of unknown depth, scored Ninny’s glossy neck. Blood soaked his coat and runneled down his foreleg. Miles’s fingers touched the wound fearfully; his hands spread on either side, trying to push it closed, but the horse’s skin was elastic and it pulled apart and bled profusely as Fat Ninny shook his head in pain. Miles grabbed the horse’s nose—”Hold still, boy!” Somebody had been going for Ninny’s jugular. And had almost made it; Ninny—tame, petted, friendly, trusting Ninny—would not have moved from the touch until the knife bit deep.

Karal was helping Pym to his feet as Dr. Dea returned. Miles waited while Dea checked Pym over, then called, “Here, Dea!”

Zed, looking quite as horrified as Miles, helped to hold Ninny’s head as Dea made inspection of the cut. “I took tests,” Dea complained
sotto voce
as he worked. “I beat out twenty-six other applicants, for the honor of becoming the Prime Minister’s personal physician. I have practiced the procedures of seventy separate possible medical emergencies, from coronary thrombosis to attempted assassination. Nobody—
nobody
—told me my duties would include sewing up a damned horse’s neck in the middle of the night in the middle of a howling wilderness.…” But he kept working as he complained, so Miles didn’t quash him, but kept gently petting Ninny’s nose, and hypnotically rubbing the hidden pattern of his muscles, to soothe and still him. At last Ninny relaxed enough to rest his slobbery chin on Miles’s shoulder.