The Tatja Grimm's World (11 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Tatja Grimm's World
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Finally his captors stopped. There was a creaking sound. Then he was sailing through the air. His hip struck the hard stone floor, adding extra fire to his pain. His head and shoulders were resting in a pile of straw. He smelted rot and blood. The door swung shut and he was in darkness.
There was a shuffling, and someone touched him. Cor! She held his shoulders and whispered what seemed a complete irrelevancy. “I’m sorry, Svir! I tried to warn you but they got me.” She was silent for a second, waiting for some response. He longed to put his arms around her. “Svir?” she whispered. “Are you all right? Svir!” He was so thoroughly paralyzed he couldn’t even croak.
“—realize we’re sitting beneath the keep artillery. To get out, we have to go around the peninsula past the entrance guns. And now you want me to send twenty people on a raid! When Benesh connects us with this scheme, we’ll be blown out of the water—if we’re lucky!” Kederichi Maccioso slammed his fist down on Tatja’s desk, jarring her drafting instruments an inch into the air.
“Relax, Ked, we aren’t suspected of anything. It’s still a state secret that the collection is one of the sacrifices. There’s—” She broke off and motioned Maccioso to be silent. Barely audible against the thrumming crowd sounds, there was scratching at her office window. Tatja pushed the window open and pulled a shivering, croaking Ancho into the room. She held him close, comforting him with low sounds. Maccioso sat down abruptly and stared at them, shocked.
“The dorfox wouldn’t come back alone unless Hedrigs had been taken.” It was an accusation.
Tatja smiled. “That’s right. Svir never had a chance, though he lasted longer than I thought he would.”
“So Benesh knows. We’ve—” Then he realized what Tatja had just said. “You knew all along he would fail.” His voice became flat, deadly. “For all that you’ve done for Tarulle, I knew there’d come a time you’d sacrifice the barge. Don’t think I haven’t planned for it.”
“Shut up, Ked,” Tatja said pleasantly. “You’re disturbing Ancho. I know all about the coup you and Brailly have had in reserve the last three years.” She set Ancho on her desk. “You know,” she said with apparent irrelevance, “I’ve studied dorfoxes. If they were just a little smarter or a little more mobile, they could take over the world. As it is, I can manipulate them—much to Hedrigs’s surprise, I’m sure. With him out of the way, Ancho will accept me as his new master.” She undid the clicker and laid it carefully on her desk. “Hand me that bottle of lacquer, will you?” She accepted the bottle and screwed an atomizer onto its cap. She inserted the nozzle into the clicker’s keyhole and puffed the volatile lacquer into the box. In spite of himself, Kederichi Maccioso leaned over the table to watch. Ancho moved to the corner of the table and munched the
klig
leaves that Tatja had thoughtfully provided.
“That should fix it.” She undid hidden catches and lifted the top off the box. “You know that picturemaker we’ve been using in our latest issues? I’ve made some refinements.”
Maccioso looked at the machine’s innards. It did resemble the
picturemaker Tarune used. In that device, light was focused on a cellulose plate coated with a special green dye. Wherever light fell on the plate, the dye faded toward transparency. If the plate were properly coated with fixing lacquer, a permanent picture resulted.
Tatja pointed. “See, this clock movement pulls the tape through the central area. Once every two seconds, this shutter flicks open. On alternate seconds, the shutter on the other side of the box takes a picture. So we have a record covering nearly three hundred degrees, a picture every second for ten minutes.” She pulled the reel out of the clicker and began to examine it under a large magnifying glass. Maccioso had a distorted view of the pictures through the same lens.
The first thirty pictures covered Svir’s approach to the keep. Every other picture was reversed, since it had been made on the opposite side of the cellulose. Despite this and the fact that the pictures weren’t as clear as ones made with one-shot devices, the sequence gave Maccioso the strange sensation that he was sitting on Svir’s shoulder. On every second frame, Svir’s head blocked out part of the picture.
Tatja carefully inspected each picture, becoming increasingly excited as they showed the interior of the keep. Here the exposure she had chosen was more effective and the pictures sharper. “See, the paneling, the paintings—they weren’t in any of the reports. And here, I’ll bet this is what snagged Hedrigs.”
Maccioso squinted at the tiny picture. It looked no different than the three or four previous. “That rectangle on the wall—it’s some kind of window. My guess is the guards have heard of those poison gases we saw in the Sutherseas. That little window is one
end of a periscope, and the observer is in another room, protected from the gas, and apparently beyond Ancho’s range.” They looked at the rest of the pictures, but the last ones were badly underexposed, showing nothing but vague green blurs. They saw something of the crown room. In one of the pictures, Tatja claimed she saw a group of men.
She reached for tiny dividers. “We know that Ancho can broadcast through almost twenty feet of porphyry.” She made some rapid measurements of relative sizes on the tape. “That periscope window is about three inches by three.” She sat back and her eyes unfocused for a moment. “Now assuming their optics are no better than elsewhere, that periscope can’t have a resolution better than half an inch.” She looked up and flashed Maccioso a dazzling smile. “I’m all set!”
Tatja got up and began to take off her clothes. Maccioso stood up too. Admiral, barge captain … helpless little boy. For almost five years he had loved and feared this woman. She had worked miracles for the Tarulle Company, magic that he knew must one day turn on them. As Tatja laid her shirt on the chair, he reached out a huge hand to grab her shoulder, forcing her face close to his.
“You never intended this scheme to save
Fantasie,
did you?”
Tatja shrugged. “You know the saying, Ked. ‘Things are not as they seen.’”
“What are you after, damn you?” He shook her, but received no answer. “Well, if you think we’re going to sit still for this, you’re mad!”
“Poor Ked,” Tatja said gently. Her hand moved softly up his arm, found a nerve in his elbow. As he jerked back, she slipped
from his hold. “It’s true. We’ve come to a … parting. And I have put you all at risk.” She reached into an alcove and drew out a full suit of black armor. The crown’s inspector general was about her height, but the armor had been designed for a male. In places it chafed tight, but she managed to get it on.
She slipped a steel-edged rapier into its sheath and picked up Ancho from the desk. At the door she turned to face him. “Your chances are good if you keep Brailly on a leash. And go through with the diversion. You really have no choice.”
Kederichi Maccioso stared at her for a moment, then nodded slowly. His voice came almost gentle. “That’s right, you … bitch.”
 
Seraph was in its last quarter, and the evening wake period was ending. Nearly a million people—the entire population of the capital—were crowded along the water’s edge. In the waning blue light the crowd was a mosaic carpet covering the streets and the roofs of the lower buildings. The festival was its noisiest as the Bayfastlings cheered the first sacrifices being towed into the bay. These were the secondary sacrifices, the appetizers. The barges formed a continuous train out to Sacrifice Island. They were stacked high with worked jade, optical devices, paintings. Hanging from the stern of each, an oil-wick torch lit the sacrifices.
A twisted smile crossed Tatja’s lips as she regarded the scene.
She descended to the sub-pier passageway reserved for official use, and five minutes later emerged on the city side of the crowd. There were plenty of people here, but there was no need to push through crowds. She spoke quietly to Ancho, petted him just so.
According to all her theories, Ancho would accept her as his new master, but this was the critical test. She couldn’t tell whether he was radiating or not. Certainly the signal was having no effect on her. Then she noticed that people came to attention as she walked past. Good Ancho.
She reached the keep without incident. The guardsmen looked her over very carefully, this being the second inspector general they had seen that day. But they let her through. As she stood in the darkness between the two doors, she moved the dorfox to her waist. The armor plates gave him good purchase, and now he was below the view of the periscopes.
As she came to the doors of the crown room, Tatja spoke in a low, masculine voice to fool any listening tubes. Even with her visor up, she knew the armor would deceive the hidden observers. And of course the guardsmen in the hall didn’t have a chance. With Ancho’s help, even her fingerprints passed inspection.
Once in the crown room she moved quickly to the royal records. She lifted out the drawer she wanted, thumbed through it, and pulled out a single sheet of vellum. Good. It was the same form as had been publicly displayed at the Assignation of the Regency. From her pouch she drew a seemingly identical paper, smudges and all, and slipped it into the file. She smiled to herself; she had spent hundreds of hours crafting the forgery. It was the high point of her brief career in the drafting arts—and totally beyond the skill of ordinary humans.
Then she left, ignoring the puzzled guards. They had expected the IG to supervise the removal of the prizes.
Tatja found the stairway to the Conciliar Facet unguarded.
This was unexpected good fortune. Perhaps Maccioso’s diversion had been more effective than she’d planned.
She removed the black resin armor and set the outfit on one of the display racks that lined the base of the stairwell. This was the most perilous part of her plan. Ancho would be a marginal use, an emergency escape tool at most.
From a cloth pouch she drew a white dress and jeweled sandals. She slipped them on, put Ancho on her shoulder, and ran up the stairs. This stairway wasn’t often used, since it was a single spiral ascending four hundred feet. Most people preferred to go by stages. Even so, Tatja kept the rapier. Except for that, and the dorfox clutching her shoulder, she might have been an Island girl at a communion picnic.
She took the steps three at a time, so fast that she had to lean toward the center of the spiral to keep her balance. After she first conceived this scheme, she spent much effort scouting Bayfast, studying the people and the keep. Tar Benesh had created the Festival of the Ostentatious Consumption to draw attention from a much more solemn event that took place every five years at the same time. The top people in the bureaucracy were scrupulously honest, but if she were even minutes late, she would have to wait five years—or possibly forever. taking the back way would avoid Renesh’s Special Men, but if she were wrong about the bureaucratic
esprit
of the rest, then she would likely die.
Tatja. took the four-hundred-foot stairs in a single sprint. At the top of that flight was an entrance to the Conciliar Facet, a pentagonal amphitheater that crowned the enormous polyhedron that was the keep. Beyond the next door was the final test. She slid the
door open and crept onto the uppermost tier of the amphitheater. There was a cool breeze, and Seraph blue covered everything. From the city came crowd sounds.
Less than a third of the seats in the facet were filled, and those were down in the center, by the podium and reading lamp. Virtually everyone here wore bureaucratic black. An important exception was the gross and colorful bulk of Tar Benesh, sitting in the first row before the podium.
Tatja glanced around the Facet. Maccioso’s diversion must have worked. Few of the guards appeared to be Benesh’s bully boys. There were only fifteen or twenty armed men present. Of course one of them might still be rotten, but that was a chance she must take. She noticed one man just five feet from her hiding place. The fellow leaned unprofessionally against the edge of the tier, blocking her entrance. She reversed the hilt of the rapier and moved swiftly forward, ramming the pommel into the base of the man’s neck. He collapsed quietly into her arms. She dragged him back, at the same time watching for signs that someone below had noticed.
The speaker’s voice came clearly to her. She knew there were about five minutes until the ceremony reached its critical point. She looked at her rapier. It was no longer an asset. Without putting herself in silhouette, she reached up and slid the weapon over the battlement. There was a faint scrape and clatter as it slid slowly down the side of the fifty-foot facet. Tatja set Ancho down, and petted him. Only the most subtle effects would be much use here. They waited.
The ceremony was nearing its end. On the podium stood the
Lord High Minister to the Crown, the highest bureaucratic officer of Crownesse. The man was old, but his body was lean, and his voice was clear and strong as he read from the curling parchment. He had the air of a man who was for the thousandth time repeating a fervent and sincere prayer, a prayer that had so often been fruitless that it had become almost perfunctory.
“And so in the Year of the Discovery nine hundred and seven did the Crown Prince Evard II and his sister, the Princess Marget, take themselves aboard the Royal Yacht
Avante
to tour the eastern reaches of their Dominions.
“And on the fifth day of their voyage a great storm sent their yacht upon the Rocks of the South—for so we have the word of the ship’s captain and those crewmen who survived the tragedy.”
Tatja stood up slowly, out of their view. She fluffed out her skirt and waited intently for the moment that would come.
“The royal children were never found. So it is that the regent continues to govern in their stead, until such time as our rulers are recovered. On this twenty-fifth anniversary of that storm, and by order of the regent, I ask that anyone with knowledge of the royal family step forth.” The Lord High Minister glanced about moodily. The ceremony was almost a legal fiction. It had been fifteen years since anyone had dared Tar Benesh’s revenge with a story of the lost children. It is not surprising that the minister almost fell off his stand when a clear, vibrant voice answered his call.

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