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Chapter Ten
Dharampal on Kalapriya

Indukanta Jagat was in a foul temper by the time he was admitted to the audience chambers in Dharampal, but he knew better than to show his anger at being kept waiting too openly. Instead he bowed deeply and praised the Vakil's even-handedness and independence and expressed his certainty that the Barents Resident in Dharampal would have been admitted no sooner than the representative of Udara.

"I fear you have been misinformed," said Yadleen. "Unlike Udara, the independent state of Dharampal has accepted no resident representative of the Barents Trading Society. So the issue of equal treatment does not really arise—does it? You are here. The outlanders are not."

And anybody who took that as an expression that Yadleen favored Udara over the foreign trading company was . . . doing exactly what the Vakil wanted, no doubt.

The Vakil of Dharampal was a slender young man, not yet thirty, whose slight build and clean-shaven face deceived many into thinking him a mere boy who would do whatever his senior counsellors advised. Jagat was not such a fool; this "boy" had maintained Dharampal's perilous neutrality between the growing powers of the Barents Trading Society and the Bashirate of Udara for the five long and difficult years since his accession to the throne, with half his council leaning toward Barents and the other half toward Udara. It had not been an easy balance to maintain; and though Jagat intended to make it considerably more difficult, if not impossible, for Dharampal to remain neutral, he had a grudging respect for the Vakil for having pulled it off this long.

"If they are not here yet, they will be soon," Jagat countered.

Yadleen's calm expression did not change. "Forgive me," he asked in dulcet tones, "but has the honored envoy from Udara been favored with news that has escaped the Vakil of Dharampal? I was not aware that I had accepted a Barents Trading Society Resident. Or does the Society now send its armies against a peaceful state that has given them no cause for offense?"

Indukanta Jagat folded his hands before him and bowed his head like a mourner at a state funeral. Privately he thought the pose deliciously apt: this meeting was indeed the first stage of the funeral of a state. Dharampal could no longer maintain its neutrality, not with Udara at its northern border. "The ways of the Trading Society are well known, Vakil. First they establish the excuse, then come the armies. Traveling toward Dharampal now are two agents of the Society. They will find some excuse to claim insult in your treatment of them; the armies will follow."

"Foreknowledge of the future is no doubt an excellent gift," said the Vakil tranquilly, "but one which the gods have not seen fit to grant me. Our relations with the Barents Trading Society are peaceful, and Gabrel Eskelinen has proven himself sympathetic to our position. He shall be received as an honored guest; what happens thereafter is in the lap of the gods. And I think our country might be rather difficult for the outlander armies."

Jagat endeavoured to keep his face from showing alarm. If the Vakil knew that Eskelinen was one of the approaching envoys, what else did he know of them—or of their mission? The Bashir's instructions as to what he was to tell the Vakil were quite clear. They did not cover the eventuality that Yadleen might know he was lying.

"Young Eskelinen in himself would be no problem," Jagat finally replied, "but the woman he escorts will not be so easy to deal with. Does the Vakil know of the Diplomatai?" He used the outlander word but gave it a Kalapriyan plural, and was pleased to see a slight frown appear on Yadleen's smooth tan countenance.

"Is this another race of star-traveling beings?"

"Almost, Vakil," Jagat replied. "Almost another race, indeed. These Diplomatai begin life as human as you or I, but they are selected young and given special training and magical powers which render them as difficult to overpower as a djinn of the air. They speak all languages fluently, carry maps in their heads, can render an armed man helpless with their secret fighting magic, and conceal on their persons offworld weapons more terrible than any you have seen. Indeed, they had better have been called Nagai, serpent-people! They are customarily sent into places the outlanders have found difficult to conquer by normal means; their mission is to stir up trouble, weaken the state, and prepare the way for outlander armies." The description of the Diplos came from the Barents Resident in Udara; the explanation of the mission was Jagat's own invention. In any case, the Vakil could hardly prove he was lying. He might know of the travelers' movements, but who could speak for their intentions?

"Shocking!" Yadleen said. His voice was tranquil as ever, but Jagat could see one lean bronzed hand tensing and relaxing, very slightly. Good—the Vakil was at least troubled by his arguments. He could build on that. "And is this how the Barents Trading Society obtained the Bashir's permission to install a Resident in Udara? My friend, you have my condolences. I had no idea that the Bashir was so frightened of outlander armies that have yet to reach Dharampal, let alone Udara."

"Udara's situation is quite different," Jagat said. "We have . . . mutually beneficial relations with the Barents Trading Society."

"A friendly arrangement, in fact."

"Just so."

"Yet you doubt that their relations with Dharampal would be equally . . . friendly?"

"These Diplomatai," Jagat said, "are quite a different breed from the men of the Barents Society. Why do they send one to you, if not to foment distrust and discord?" Gods take the boy! He was arguing the matter as if it were no more than a puzzle in statecraft from some dead history . . . and Jagat was losing the argument! He had to find some way to touch Yadleen's emotions again, to make fear of the unknown overpower this cool logic. "My lord, the Bashir has always felt good will toward Dharampal," he began feeling his way toward another approach.

"As he felt good will toward Thamboon and Narumalar?"

If Yadleen expected Jagat to be discomposed by this reference to the two formerly independent states most recently absorbed into the Bashirate of Udara, he misunderstood his man. "Exactly so," Jagat replied. "The Bashir was gravely distressed by the internal instability of those states, which forced him to take over their rule lest his own lands be threatened. I am certain he would be no less distressed should his friend the Vakil of Dharampal allow troublemakers to travel freely through his territory."

"In short, you offer me a choice—offend the Barents Trading Society, or offend the Bashir." Yadleen's right hand clenched on the carved armrest of his throne.

Jagat bowed. After a moment's respectful silence he ventured an apposite proverb from the times of the Empire. " 'My neighbor is at my right hand, and the Emperor is far away as the summer skies.' "

"You mean," Yadleen said drily, "that the Bashir's armies are at my border—now that Thamboon is no longer independent—and the Trading Society . . ."

"As your Majesty said, this land might be rather difficult for their armies." Jagat bowed again.

"A certain number of refugees from Thamboon came to Dharampal," Yadleen said. "They had wild tales to tell of sorcery in the Bashir's armies, magical nets of light that entangled men and left them helpless to the swords of their enemies, silent demons that killed invisibly. But then, men will always exaggerate the powers of those who conquer them, will they not? I have read that in the time of the Empire, ignorant people ascribed the Emperor's knowledge of the land to secret spies in the form of birds, rather than to the excellent system of roads and couriers which the Empire created as it grew."

"It would be impossible," Jagat said sincerely, "to underestimate the resources available to my master." Granted, the Consortium had not approved the conquest of Dharampal; having no limestone caves, it was not seen as a profitable area for the Consortium's business. But—"My neighbor is at my right hand, and the Emperor is as far away as the summer skies." Having supplied the Bashir's armies with their sorcerous weapons, the Consortium could hardly dictate from distant Valentin the use to which they were put.

Yadleen drummed his fingers on the armrest. "The visitors will be detained and questioned as to their purposes," he said at last, "but if we determine that they mean no harm, then we cannot in conscience harm them; they will be set free, even as Emperor Dhatacharya set free the rebel soldier Eshana when he swore fealty, and Eshana became Dhatacharya's most trusted man. History teaches us that we cannot build trust by treachery, nor loyalty by deceit."

The boy's conscience, Jagat thought, was what would destroy him. His tutor had given him too many ancient histories of the Empire to read, with their men in white gowns making noble speeches in white-walled palaces. He should rather have been sent out for a year or two of rough living with the tribesmen, to hear the blood-red songs of this century's feuds and tragedies and to bloody his own hands in a minor border skirmish or two.

"My master the Bashir will no doubt be overjoyed to hear your decision," Jagat said with a low bow. "If it pleases the Vakil, this humble one begs the privilege of remaining until the outlanders are brought in for questioning, that he may better understand their motives. It may well be that we in Udara are grown too suspicious of strangers; the Bashir would be only to happy to have your reassurance that these two mean no harm to our lands." And once Yadleen had the outlanders detained, Jagat would find it easy enough to make certain that they did not survive to trouble the Bashir.

Valentin on Kalapriya

After the assassination attempt that night, Gabrel thought their best course was to leave immediately. Clearly somebody in Valentin—somebody in the Society, not just a native!—didn't want a Diplomat investigating upcountry. Which made it seem more likely that there was some truth in Orlando Montoyasana's allegations, or at the very least, something that should be investigated and stopped.

Strictly speaking, Gabrel should have consulted his superior officers in the Society's private army before setting forth on this expedition. But what if they were part of the group trying to stop Calandra's inquiry? It seemed better to leave as quickly as they could, and without mentioning the fact to anybody official in Valentin.

Anuman, the Kalapriyan merchant who'd outfitted Gabrel for previous upcountry treks, was a friend as well as a trader; he was good-natured about being awakened in the middle of the night and almost as amiable about accepting Gabrel's chit in payment for food, traveling clothes, and other supplies. Of course, he increased the cost of everything by at least fifty percent; that was understood as the price of being in a hurry, and no doubt contributed to Anuman's amiability.

Gabrel's best friend in the regiment, Leutnant Moylen Cornelis, was not quite so pleased about having his quarters invaded in the dark hours before dawn. But after a few jibes about the unusual duties involved in being the assigned escort of a Diplo, and a few remarks about the possible rewards thereof—which, couched as they were in Barents slang, Gabrel devoutly hoped Diplomat Vissi had not understood—he emptied his purse for them willingly enough and even volunteered the services of his groom for the first part of the journey.

"Moylen, you're too good," Gabrel protested.

"Not in the least, dear fellow. Naturally you'll take my spare mounts as far as you can ride, and I'll want Sanouk to bring them back. And you'll need gold to pay for a couple of ghaya to carry your things into the hills. I don't want you being tempted to sell my racing string to some hill-country Vakil of two villages and a farm in trade for his pack animals."

Moylen Cornelis was Old Trader Family on both sides and could well afford to keep a string of racing turagai and otherwise live in the style befitting an Old Family scion; his monthly pay as Leutnant in the Society army wouldn't have paid his mess bill for a week. So Gabrel, whose father's military pension had to cover not only family expenses but also the education of his three younger brothers, was able to accept his friend's generosity without too great a struggle with his own pride and conscience.

"Besides," Moylen had added as the clinching argument, "if Sanouk's with you, he can't gossip about this in the bazaar. Your departure will remain a mystery for at least four more days."

"How did you know I wanted it kept secret?" Gabrel demanded, suddenly feeling suspicious even of Moylen. Kaspar Slevinen—whose body would be discovered tomorrow—had been close to Haars Huyberts and Stoffelsen. Whatever was going on, at least those two of the Old Trader Families were involved in it. Was House Cornelis also part of the plot?

Moylen gave him a mocking smile. "Dear boy, officers planning to travel upcountry on legitimate missions don't take off in the middle of the night with a pretty girl in tow."

"Diplomat Vissi," Gabrel said stiffly, "and she's not exactly a girl."

Moylen cocked an eye at Calandra, who was tactfully standing a few feet away and pretending deafness while studying the maps tacked to Moylen's sitting-room wall. She hadn't had time to change into the anonymous traveling clothes provided by Anuman; the borrowed ball dress, with its gauzy panels of peach and lavender dampened by sweat, clung to and emphasized the lines of her slender figure. Her hair was a mass of black curls, also damp with sweat and making a frame of ringlets around a delicate oval face. "No? But hardly a doddering old lady yet, wouldn't you say? Also, official missions don't begin with somebody half strangling my groom and scratching at my bedchamber door. I don't know what you're up to, Gabrel, and something tells me I don't want to know, but—be careful, will you? The regiment would be damned dull without you."

In the event, it had hardly been worthwhile borrowing Moylen's turagai; Calandra had never ridden before. At the end of the first day Gabrel had had to lift her from the saddle, and she'd managed only a few steps before her legs failed her and he had to carry her the rest of the way to their rooms in the Vaisee village where he'd planned to stop for the first night.

"Why didn't you tell me you couldn't ride?" he scolded her.

"Why didn't you tell me it was so bunu hard? Anyway, I'm learning. I'll do better tomorrow."

"You will not," Gabrel contradicted her, and walked out to make other arrangements.

Selling one of the turagai to a Rohini caravan leader provided enough extra money to pay both their passages on a boat going up the broad reaches of the Vaisee-jara as far as it was navigable, and left a little over for Sanouk to remain in the village a few days before returning to his master with the remaining two beasts. Gabrel hoped Sanouk's reluctance to tell Moylen that one of his prized racing turagai had been sold after all would keep him in the village until his money ran out; he hoped Moylen would understand the necessity and forgive him when they returned; come to think of it, he hoped they would return. He'd traveled upcountry before, but always as an officer of the Barents Trading Society's army, with all the might and support of Barents behind him. Now he was traveling as one half of a young, anonymous offworld couple with an inexplicable curiosity to sample Kalapriyan life outside the coastal enclaves. The difference was evident in the attitude of the innkeeper, who'd wanted payment in advance at three times the going rate; Gabrel had to waste time haggling with the man, demonstrating his fluent Kalapriyan and his intimate knowledge of both lodging rates and Kalapriyan curses, to get the price down to a mere one and a half times what a native would pay. The other purchases he made in the local market before returning to Calandra required a similarly protracted spell of bargaining; chaffering was Kalapriya's unofficial planetary sport, and if a Kalapriyan Olympics were ever organized, the herbalist in the market could have chaffered for Vaisee.

"Here," he said on his return, tossing the herbalist's round leather box at Calandra, "put this on your—um—where it's sore." He unstopped the stiff leather bag that had been his other purchase and took a drink of the contents to cover his embarrassment. The local madira burned like fire going down his throat; he was out of practice. "That salve will numb you up and help the skin heal over, and you'll have time to heal in the next few days; we're leaving the turagai here and taking a boat up the Vaisee-jara."

"All the way to whatsit—Darample?"

"Dharampal," Gabrel corrected, wondering what incompetent slob had created the Kalapriyan maps in the Diplomat's download. "And not all the way, naturally, the river's unnavigable once we reach the foothills. But you can't take turagai into the mountains. We'll have to buy a couple of ghaya to carry our packs, and we'll walk."

"All right by me," declared Calandra cheerfully, but her grin faded when she tried to stand up. "Um—I think I might need some help . . ."

It turned out that Calandra needed help not only to get from the rug she'd collapsed on to her narrow bed, but also to get the herbalist's salve on all the places that were sore, some of them being quite hard to reach in her present stiffened condition. Gabrel told himself that he should have thought of that and hired a girl from the marketplace to aid Calandra, then told himself that he'd have been an idiot to do any such thing. It was hard enough for a couple of outlanders to travel inconspicuously outside the coastal enclaves without setting any extra mouths chattering, and there was no impropriety in helping out a fellow traveler in difficulties. Then he concentrated on thinking of his fellow traveler as Diplomat Vissi rather than as the laughing girl he'd danced with the previous night. It took some strenuous thinking about other things to keep his reactions under control while he smoothed the salve onto the backs of her thighs. Every once in a while he stopped and took a drink from the leather sack of madira, not so much because he needed it as for an excuse to take his hands off the Diplo before they wandered where they shouldn't. Diplos probably had extremely effective ways of warding off unwanted attentions . . . And doing sums in his head wasn't enough distraction. He would have to find something else to recite . . . but the only poem he could think of offhand was the ballad of Rusala's adventures with the seven daughters of King Death. Not a good choice; Rusala had had entirely too much fun with those girls despite their unfortunate parentage.

"You don't have to curse," Maris said, her voice slightly muffled by the pillow she was biting.

"I wasn't cursing." Gabrel drew a blanket over the slender, girlish form and stood up, wiping little droplets of sweat from his brow. "I was—um—reviewing Kalapriyan grammar. Ishti-class verbs. In the past subjunctive."

"Find you get a lot of use for the past subjunctive, do you?" The Diplo had stopped chewing on the pillow and was propped up on her elbows, regarding him with a bird's bright inquisitive glance from under her mop of black curls.

"Easy for you to sneer," Gabrel said, finding a heaven-sent evasion for just why he'd felt it necessary to chant ishti-class verb conjugations for the last ten minutes, "but us ordinary citizens don't get whole languages downloaded into special chips in our heads. We have to learn them the old-fashioned way, by repetition and sweat."

Maris flopped back onto her pillow, facedown. "Those language chips aren't as great as everybody assumes," she said through the red and black embroidered pillow cover. "We don't come out, like, talking the language fluently or anythin'."

"Oh. More like a running start on learning the language?"

Maris sputtered into the woolen pillow cover. "Oh, yes. You could definitely say I got a running start." She shook with suppressed laughter.

"Now what's so funny about that?" Gabrel demanded.

Probably not a good idea to explain. "Uh, nothing. The, the salve burns a little bit," Maris improvised.

"That should stop soon. At least, the stuff my Gran used on nettle stings always burned at first and then made the skin go numb, and this smells like the same mixture." Gabrel sniffed at the pot of greenish-yellow grease. That and the fumes of the madira smelled like home to him, a rich mixture of stinging and floral perfumes that Barents could never match. Reminded of the madira, he upended the bag and took another mouthful. It didn't burn so much now. "Made it up from Kalapriyan herbs she gathered up in the Hills, she did, and never would tell me what went into it."

"I thought you were from Barents?" Maris propped herself up on both elbows and rested her chin in her hands; she wasn't ready to risk sitting up yet, but it was impossible to conduct a conversation with one's face in a pillow.

"In a manner of speaking," Gabrel said. "I'm the third generation of career military in our family. My grandfather was in on the pacification of the plains states. He did his best to see people treated fairly when they came under Barents law, and some of them remembered that when he retired. The ex-Vakil of Latacharya offered him a house on the slopes of the foothills, looking up at the mountains. I used to stay with him and Gran a lot when I was a kid; by that time my dad was in the Service here." He smiled, remembering those enchanted days in the freedom of Latacharya, and toasted them with another swallow of madira.

"And your mother stayed on Barents, did she?"

"Oh, no. Not Mam!" Gabrel chuckled. "She followed Dad wherever he was assigned. But—they were both only children, you see, and her parents hadn't approved of her marrying into the military; they were minor Barents nobility and as high in the instep as only impoverished minor nobles can be. So I think she planned on building her own extended family. I had three younger brothers, all born here on Kalapriya. Only trouble was, every time Mam was expecting she got hellish sick, so they'd send us kids up to Latacharya for the duration. And after my second brother was born Gran suggested we just stay there where she could school us until Mam was through with her family-building." Gabrel smiled reminiscently. "It's not like being in the true Hills, Latacharya isn't, but it's got that smell of conifers and snow-melt, and when the traders came through for a fair we kids used to sneak away from Gran and hang around the caravanserai all day, learning Kalapriyan words—some of which got our mouths washed out with soap when we tried them out at dinner, because Gran and Grandfather knew the language well enough themselves! And when I was ten I got my own hawk with her perch in Grandfather's mews; I was going to train her myself and go hawking with the native boys . . ."

"What happened?" Maris could tell from the way Gabrel's voice slowed that something had interrupted the idyll.

"My Dad took a saber cut across the thigh, dealing with some bandits along the river who hadn't quite understood that Vaisee was under Barents protection now. He didn't lose the leg, but—he couldn't ride anymore. They offered him early retirement and three-quarters pension, and he decided it was time for us all to go back to Barents. He thought the climate in the plains might have been part of Mam's trouble . . . she lost two babies after Number Three was born. And he may have been right," Gabrel said, "because Number Four came along ten months after we moved back to Barents, only then the doctors said she mustn't try to have any more. So she's been saving her expansionist ideas for the next generation. She wants me to get married to a nice fertile girl with a big family. She must be the only mother on Barents who wants a lot of in-laws . . . Sorry, I don't know why I'm boring you with all this nonsense."

"Keep talking," Maris urged. "It takes my mind off." Not to mention that when he was telling her about his past, he wasn't asking her any embarrassing questions. "So how did you wind up back on Kalapriya?"

"Told you," Gabrel said. Or had he? For some reason he was finding it hard to remember exactly what he had and hadn't said. "Career military. Oldest son, naturally follow in m'father's footsteps. Grandfather's too. Besides, cheapest education on Barents is military academy. For us army brats, that is. With four sons to raise on a pension, m'father couldn't very well feature sending any of us anywhere else. Besides, got me back to Kalapriya." He tilted the leather bag and was disappointed to find that only a few drops of madira trickled out. Oh well. No need to sit up if he wasn't drinking. He lay back on the rug and stared at the criscrossing wooden rafters above them. "More chance of promotion here, never know, could be we'll have to take over the hill states, nice little war. Peacetime on Barents, nothing to do but get older waiting for your superior officers to get older and retire. No kind of career for a soldier." He tossed the empty bag up in the air, failed to catch it, and winked at Maris. "They think that's why I volunteered for Kalapriya, y'see? Young fire-eater, looking for action. Actually . . ." He yawned. "Actually I jus' love the place. Would've come back anyway. But don't tell m'colonel that."

"I promise not to tell your colonel that you like Kalapriya," Maris said, "and . . . don't you think you'd better take your boots off before you go to sleep?"

But her suggestion had come too late.

Apart from his headache the next morning and the mystery of why he'd downed an entire bag of madira when he didn't even like drinking, Gabrel found the days of the boat trip upriver uneventful enough. Calandra was clearly still stiff on the first morning, but she assured Gabrel that the salve had worked wonders and that she would be able to apply it herself from then on.

The boat wasn't really designed for passengers; it was more of a one-size-fits-all, carrying crates of salt fish and tropical fruits and spices upriver, presumably returning with boxes of nuts from the mountain orchards and bales of the coarse, bright fabrics the hill people wove from the long hair of their ghaya. It veered from one side of the Vaisee-jara to the other, stopping at every little village along the river on either bank. An old grandmother took the boat back after a visit downriver to see the newest grandchild, a slightly younger midwife traveled upriver to attend the accouchement of a minor hill-Vakil's third wife; a Rohini jewel trader squatted over his brass-bound box of gilt-filigree trifles and scowled suspiciously at the Rudhrani soldier, on leave from his post with the Vaisee Royal Guard, who demeaned himself to take the boat for a visit with his upcountry family because, as he cheerfully explained, his last turag had lost her race with a colleague's gelding and had become that colleague's property, and he now meant to apply in person to his father for a loan to finance another string of racers.

Gabrel slouched against a stack of crates, his gold hair covered by an anonymous loose felt hat, his fair skin turning brown in the hot sun over the river, his height at least somewhat disguised by his slouch and by a coarse blanket of hill-country weave thrown over his shoulders. He breathed in the spice-scented air and the babble of dialects and felt himself at home in a way he never felt in Valentin, much less on Barents itself. This was where he belonged, in the field, soaking up local lore and stories. He listened to the midwife and the grandmother trading competing stories of difficult births, and learned much that a Barents Trading Society officer would not normally understand about the importance of a red cord under the bed and the disastrous possibilities inherent in offending Vasanti of the Three Breasts by leaving cooking implements in view during an accouchement. When a curtained box was carried on board by four dark southern men who stationed themselves at its corners, glaring at all passengers impartially, he recognized that a bride of good family was being sent north and understood, with regret, the old ladies' unspoken decision to stop telling childbirth stories for a while.

Soon enough their place was taken by a Rohini star-gazer who offered to make the pilot's birth-chart in trade for passage to the next village, and who explained with great fluency the effects of the stars Lokaishana and Kanchana in guiding the pilot to a water trade, and the necessity of the man's placating the water demons also ruled by Lokaishana. This led to a theological argument with a dour man who now revealed himself as a hill-priest returning home from pilgrimage to the holy mouth of the Vaisee-jara, and who asserted categorically that demons could not be placated by offerings but must be controlled by amulets containing sacred writings. He just happened to have a supply of such amulets stitched into the seams of his bedroll and might be willing to part with some for an appropriate price.

The discussion became lively enough for Gabrel to pick up several interesting new terms of abuse concerning the ancestors, personal habits, and sexual preferences of both holy men; he felt some regret when the bride's guards bought up the hill-priest's entire stock of amulets, engaged him on the spot to protect them against malign influences, and took their cortege off the boat when it tied up for the night just downstream from the Ford of the Dead Emperors. Oh well, this part of their journey was nearly over anyway; half a day more would bring them to the rapids where the Dharam-jara joined the Vaisee-jara and created a river deep enough for boat travel, and from there on they would have to go on foot.

He had to admit that Calandra's presence had been a help on this part of the journey, rather than the unmitigated nuisance he had expected. She didn't complain about having to squat on the deck of a creaking packet boat steaming slowly against the current; she didn't say anything about the clouds of midges that descended with the evening sun, or the burning heat of midday; she didn't object to scooping her share of the midday lentils and spiced sauce from the communal bowl with two fingers of her right hand or to washing them down with slightly muddy spice tea. In fact, for the first two days she said remarkably little; like Gabrel, she sat and listened. Unlike him, she bounced up and down with excitement at the sights revealed by the river: the painted villages gay with their patterns of red and black and ochre mud drawn on the walls; a troop of horned bhagghi drinking at a ford and throwing up their heads and fleeing into the forest as the boat approached; the great grey ruined walls and crumbling carvings of a long-abandoned palace of the First Empire. Somehow he had expected a Diplomat to be scornfully blasé about the sights of Kalapriya. He liked Calandra even better for her unabashed enthusiasm.

And the combination of silence and visible enthusiasm helped immeasurably, as the chattering old women decided that this quiet girl who looked so thrilled at what they considered everyday sights must be another bride, this one from a village too small to name, being escorted upriver to some mountain state whose ruler was wealthy enough to hire an outlander soldier as her guard. Gabrel felt a little chagrin that they'd seen through his disguise so easily—but what matter, as long as they told themselves a story that accounted for his presence in a way that wouldn't come to the ears of the Society representatives? It was their good fortune that Calandra was slim and dark enough to pass for an exceptionally tall and pale-skinned Rudhrani, and beautiful enough to make it plausible that she'd been sold as a bride to some mountain Vakil or Wazir. And it was his good fortune that she must have picked up on the old ladies' gossip and decided to help it along; all through the first day she spoke only to him, and that in an undertone, which helped immeasurably in creating her character as a shy girl being sent away from her home to an unknown husband.

Private conversation was all but impossible on the crowded boat; even at night the passengers slept shoulder to shoulder, rolled into their traveling rugs and crowded so close on the deck that the nightmares of one became the property of all. But toward the end of that first day, during the splashing and colorful curses that accompanied the off-loading of some crates onto a half-rotted village quay Gabrel found a chance to speak quietly to Calandra and to compliment her on helping him out. "You're acting the shy village bride very well. Keep it up; they made me for an outlander, and the explanation they've given themselves for my presence will do very well as long as they think you're a Rudhrani, too proud and too shy to speak to any common passengers."

Also, their blatant speculation about her probable destination helped to fill him in on the current political situation in the hill country. He knew, of course, that Thamboon and Narumalar had been taken over by Udara; that was the source of Orlando Montoyasana's complaints. He claimed that the Udaran army was using weapons of prohibited technology that could only have been smuggled in from offworld. But when Gabrel was called back from Dharampal to dance attendance on the Diplomat, there'd been no hint that Udara was menacing that state as well. Now the old women chattered about an Udaran envoy to Dharampal, assessed the probability that the young Vakil of Dharampal would meekly give in to the Bashir's demands and that his state would become another vassal state of Greater Udara, and debated the possibility that the Vakil was making a marriage alliance with Calandra's village as an excuse to bring in a whole troop of outlander soldiers against the Udaran threat.

The land where the Dharam-jara joined the Vaisee-jara was too rocky and precipitous to support a village, but over the years a small outdoor bazaar had grown up to meet the needs of traders and travelers. Here one could purchase anything—intricately carved nut shells with magic words carved into them to protect the wearer from evil spirits, sweet syrup with dozy-juice for a fretful baby, poison for a brutal husband, a birth-chart from a native astrologer or an earful of gossip about the doings of the hill kings. Having no particular desire to add more than necessary to the gossip of the bazaar, Gabrel overpaid for a pair of ghaya and refused the offer of overpriced lodgings in the mud-walled serai behind the bazaar. The sooner he and Calandra were out of here, he thought, the less chance there was that anybody would recognize her for an outlander.

That happy belief was rudely shaken by the gratitude of the trader who sold him the ghaya. While Gabrel was adjusting the harness on the great, shaggy beasts and demanding ointment for the sores left on their backs by the previous owner, the trader approached him and said quietly, "For the ointment, one tul; for a word more precious than all ointments, you have already paid enough. Two outlander men on turagai were here two days past, demanding word of an outlander couple, a man and a woman, whom they believed to have ridden this way. At the time, naturally, no one knew anything of interest to them."

"The noble lady whom I escort to her wedding . . ." Gabrel began.

The trader spat sideways into the mud around the ghaya stalls. "The noble lady," he said, "speaks Kalapriyan like a child of four years, and had never seen ghaya before, nor eaten yao pai. You may have dyed her hair and tinted her skin to make her pass for Rudhrani, but she is too ignorant to be anything but another outlander. I have no love for the men of Barents, but you have paid me well and those others offered little enough; I have no reason to babble tales of what I surmise to them. But they will be back, and some other will have noticed as much as I did and will tell it them for a handful of tulai. Get her out of here, and have your trouble with the other outlanders somewhere else, not in my bazaar."

The trail that snaked along the rocky side of the Dharam-jara was quite rough enough if one took it directly from the place where the two streams met. After the trader's warning, Gabrel thought it prudent to follow the narrow stream that was the origin of the Vaisee-jara east from the bazaar until they were well behind the first range of hills, and then to cut back across the barren, rocky country to intercept the trail they really wanted. That made for some interesting and strenuous walking, interrupted periodically by the necessity to persuade the ghaya that they did want to take the thorny uphill path and did not want to lie down and roll on the thorns, luxuriously scratching their thick hairy hides and squashing the packs they bore. And in many places there was no path at all. Gabrel consulted his compass frequently, watched the passage of the sun closely, and wished devoutly that he had not packed his maps so carefully at the very bottom of one of the long leather rolls now bound in the pack-harness of the larger ghay. But there'd been no need to consult a map while they were on the boat, and—he hadn't exactly planned to leave the bazaar so precipitately, or in a direction so different from that he really wanted. He envied Calandra her Diplomat's head, doubtless loaded with detailed maps of Kalapriya as well as vocabulary, grammar, and whatever other information Rezerval had thought she might need. But he didn't want to ask her for help, as if he were such an idiot as to get lost as soon as he was out of sight of the Vaisee-jara. Besides, he knew where they were. Approximately. More or less. With reasonable certainty . . . oh, devils, what was that crag of rock doing in front of them? He'd intended to cut across in a westerly direction, to meet the Dharam-jara well before they got anywhere near the Old Man's Head, but the steep eroded gullies had forced them north and north again. Now, to reach the smoother going of the trail along the river before nightfall, they were going to have to go right across that eerily eroded hill.

The Dharampalis believed that such hills were the homes of the serpent-people, the Nagai and Takshakai, avoided by all right-thinking hill people, and that was just the good part; what really worried Gabrel was the maze of water-drilled holes that splashed across the surface of the limestone rock, perfect for catching and breaking a pack-ghaya's leg, and the narrow fissures that ran across the rock and gave homes to poisonous snakes.

Gabrel studied his compass again, squinted at the sun, and tried to convince himself that they could afford the time to backtrack and pick up the Dharam-jara somewhere south of the Old Man's Head. Even if they didn't quite reach the river this night, wasn't camping among the rocks better than crossing this pockmarked disaster area? No—the ghaya needed water, were used to drinking their fill twice a day, and there was barely enough water in the gullies they'd passed, this time of year, to keep a snake alive. Besides, he wasn't entirely sure they could find a better way through the hills; there was a reason why this triangle of land between the Dharam-jara and the Vaisee-jara was so empty. Only a madman or an outlander would attempt to cross it.

He caught Calandra studying him, a slight frown between her dark brows, and snapped, "If you know a better way to get back to the Dharam-jara, feel free to mention it!"

"If you feel we should go this way, I'm sure you're right," she said cheerfully. "Much farther now?"

"You know as well as I do. About three hours more to get back to the river." If they were lucky, if neither men nor beasts broke a leg crossing the Old Man's Head, if his guess as to their position was right.

In the event, it was nearly four hours, and the sun was down before they had a fire to light their campsite, and Gabrel was not quite sure that they had reached the Dharam-jara at the point he had been aiming for, well north of the two villages upstream from the bazaar but south of the Dharampal border. And he did not find leisure to study his map until all the work of camping for the night was done: pack beasts fed and watered, tent up, firewood collected. As he had expected, Diplomat Vissi had been quite useless at all these tasks; as he had not expected, she had been cheerfully ready to pitch in where she could and to learn what he wanted to tell her. She was hopeless with the pack animals, of course, probably had spent all her life on high-tech worlds; he had to tell her several times that they weren't machines where you punched a button and got a response.

"Got that," the woman said the third time he made this explanation. "They're dumber than machines."

"That too," Gabrel acknowledged with a smile. Nobody had ever accused Kalapriya's native ghaya of high intelligence. But they were strong, tireless, and reasonably obedient when handled by somebody who understood their limitations. "But they'll take us up into the High Jagirs on paths none of your machines could negotiate."

"Flitter could, though," Calandra said.

Gabrel mimed astonishment. "What, you'd take a flitter over these mountains and give these simple hillmen the surprise of their lives? And you here to investigate allegations of inappropriate technology importation? I'm shocked, Diplomat Vissi, shocked!"

"Didn't say I wanted to," Calandra pointed out. "Just said a flitter could do it. And a sight easier and faster than these ghays."

"Right. The plural, in case you're interested, is ghaya." Gabrel studied the Diplomat's face in the uncertain firelight. "I would've thought your language implant would tell you that much."

Calandra looked down. "I told you, the chips ain't like magic."

"That's clear," Gabrel said meanly. "The chap who sold me these beasts said you speak Kalapriyan like a four-year-old."

Calandra blinked hard and Gabrel wondered at his own snappiness. The woman had really behaved quite well; why was he suddenly being bitchy at her? He felt desperately uneasy and couldn't quite put a finger on the reason.

" 'Scuse me, I gotta . . ." Without saying exactly what it was she suddenly needed to do, Calandra crawled into her tent and dropped the flap. Leaving Gabrel on his own to prepare their meal. Well, what had he expected of a pampered offworlder? It must have been quite a shock for Diplomat Vissi to live under the primitive conditions of Kalapriya outside the coastal enclaves; she'd taken the boat journey well enough, but trekking on foot over the High Jagirs with only the supplies a pair of ghaya could carry might well be more than she'd bargained for.

In the privacy of her tent, Maris stuck a plug into her right ear and settled down to concentrated study of the audio plugs of Kalapriyan for Dummies that she'd boosted from Moylen Cornelis's rooms. That had been a lucky find, but it wouldn't do her much good if she didn't get more time to use the plugs. The slow, lazy days of the boat journey upriver had been a gift from the gods; both Gabrel and the other passengers had invented their own story for why she didn't say much, and with her curly hair worn loose to cover the plug in one ear she'd been able to listen her way through a good half of the language lessons. By the time they reached the bazaar she had acquired enough vocabulary to get the gist of most conversations. If the people were speaking slowly. If she already had a good idea what they were talking about.

Was that enough to pass for a Diplomat's downloaded language capabilities? It would make sense that the download would help more with understanding than with talking; nothing substituted for actual real-time talking with real people, but apparently she hadn't learned enough yet. Okay, she would pretend exhaustion, spend as much time as possible in the minuscule tent, get a good grasp of ishti-class verbs. Just as well not to spend the evening out by the fire, chatting with Gabrel, anyway; the more she said, the greater was the chance that he'd catch on to her imposture. It was exhausting, watching every word she said, always trying to guess how a highly educated Diplo would react to these surroundings.

It was exhausting, remembering not to trust Gabrel.

It had been easy at first, when he was so stiff and full of resentment toward her. But that had started to change at the ball—and after, the attack in the dark alley—they worked together well, Maris thought sleepily. Concealing the body, cleaning up the mess, getting out of town fast and inconspicuously . . . the man had a natural talent for her kind of work, a talent that probably didn't get much exercise in the confines of the Society's military branch. No wonder he preferred slightly covert upcountry assignments, no wonder he'd resented being pulled back from the field to dance attendance on an offworld VIP. Johnivans would have tried to recruit him as a natural talent . . . but Johnivans wouldn't have had much luck, would he? There was something about Gabrel Eskelinen that would never bend to the sort of underhanded dealing Maris had grown used to on Tasman. He could lie fast and fluently, he could disguise himself, he could dispose of a corpse, and Maris didn't think he would have much compunction about killing somebody who attacked him. But she couldn't imagine him stabbing somebody in the back, or arranging . . . arranging to have a girl killed just because her dead body was more useful to him than her living self.

She swallowed hard. Ishti-class verbs in the past conditional chattered unheard in her right ear while the memory of her last hours on Tasman swamped her. Who did she think she was to make guesses about Gabrel's character? She had trusted Johnivans absolutely, damn near worshipped him ever since he'd seen a talent in her that made it worthwhile for him to take her into his gang and save her from working the corridors as a child-whore . . . and all the time she'd been nothing to him, less than nothing, a card to be played when convenient. And now she was tempted to trust Gabrel as she'd trusted Johnivans, to confess her imposture to him, because something about him felt straight and true and she was hating her lies more every day. Idiot! So she didn't feel that Gabrel Eskelinen would dump her if he knew the truth, so what? She hadn't felt any warning about Johnivans either, had she? Face it, she had no judgment for people. The only thing she knew was that she knew nothing and could trust nobody.

"Calandra?"

"Dhulaishta, I would have betrayed—dhulaishtami, you would have betrayed—dhulaishtaiyen, he, she, it would have betrayed—dhulaishtamai, no, you leave it out in first- and second-persons plural—dhulamai, we would have betrayed," Maris muttered under her breath, wishing whoever wrote the language plugs had picked a different example of ishti-class verbs. She'd already conjugated betrayal in present, simple past, simple future, and present conditional, and with each tense the choice of verb seemed more personal.

"Calandra!"

"Dhulamiye, you plural would have, oh shit." Between Gabrel's ratty mood and the ishti-class conjugations, Maris had temporarily forgotten her assumed name. She jerked the plug out of her ear and stuffed it into a fold of the embroidered sash that held her coarse woven shirt and leggings together, backed out of the tent and tried not to think about the impossibility of exiting these tiny tents with any degree of grace. Sitting up, she scowled at Gabrel and pushed her hair back. "What is it?" No great emergency, obviously; he was leaning against the broad back of a resting ghay while peering at some folding papers in the firelight.

"I just wanted you to compare this map with the ones your people downloaded to you," he said, holding out a page covered with spidery brown lines.

"Thought you knew this country backwards and forwards," Maris said.

"Last time I visited Dharampal," Gabrel said patiently, "I was officially there on official business, and I could simply follow the Dharam-jara upstream. This time I thought we might save time by cutting across where the river loops, here—" he pointed to a curved double line "—and then we could drop down from here to water the ghaya. Looks like about a day's travel, and then go back off-trail again and straight for Dharamvai—the Vakil's city. But I didn't make this map, some clerk in Valentin drew it up from Orlando Montoyasana's notes last time the man visited the Enclave, and he just might have left out a few little things like hostile villages or impassable cliffs on the route I'm thinking of taking. So I wanted to check it against what you know of the territory."

Oh, shit indeed! Maris blinked and stared into space, looking as she thought somebody with database chips and maps and languages planted in their head might look, and then said, "Looks all right to me, but then why wouldn't it? Rezerval doesn't have any more detailed maps of this area than you do."

"I thought the satellite scans might show some details of the terrain."

"Well, they don't," Maris said. "They're really not very clear at all. Sorry I can't help you and all that." She took the stick Gabrel had been pointing with, thrust it into the bubbling mess in the cook-pot on the fire, and stirred vigorously—perhaps a little too vigorously; the stuff slopped over and a few drops sizzled on the hot stones.

"Better let me do that," Gabrel said, dropping the map to rescue their dinner.

"I'm not much help to you, am I?"

"Well," Gabrel said, stirring the pot almost as vigorously as she had done, "it's not supposed to work that way, is it? I've been assigned to help you. Anyway, I don't suppose a Diplo's normal training covers situations quite this primitive."

"You could say that," Maris allowed. For sure she couldn't contradict it, anyway!

"And I think you more than did your share on this trip the night we started," Gabrel added.

"I—? Oh, that." Maris suppressed an internal shudder as she remembered the soft mushy place her rock had left in Kaspar Slevinen's skull. She averted her gaze from the anonymous glop boiling in the cooking pot.

"Saving my life," Gabrel said with a straight face, "is usually good for one ticket into upcountry Kalapriya, all expenses paid, pack beasts managed, meals prepared, and tents erected. And you didn't even use any of your special weapons! You Rezerval types take this tech prohibition seriously, don't you?"

"Oh. Ummm . . ." Of course, a real Diplo would have done something much more elegant than bashing Slevinen over the head with a rock. Maris looked for a way to change the subject. "Would that be a one-way ticket, or round trip?"

"You don't think I can bring us out safely?"

"I've no worries at all about that," she lied, "just wondering whether I would have to save your life again in Udara or else learn to lead ghaya and set up me own—my own tent."

"I'd enjoy watching you attempt the latter," Gabrel said, "but the ghaya might not like it! Let's agree that you've earned a free ticket back to Valentin. Although if there is any useful information in those satellite maps in your head, to supplement my trail notes, I'd appreciate your sharing it. For instance, how do they show the elevation of Dharamvai? I'd estimated it at about six thousand meters, when I was there treating with the Vakil, but of course I was restricted to the kind of prehistoric measurement instruments allowed under the technology prohibitions. I'm sure your mapping programs are much more accurate. How high above sea level would you say the city lies?"

"Oh, six thousand sounds like a pretty good estimate," Maris mumbled. Time for another change of subject. "Is that stuff ready yet? I'm so hungry I could eat a ghay!"

"I wouldn't recommend it," Gabrel said, "the meat tastes really sour. Something about the native grasses they eat. Or does your training as a Diplomat include a course in swallowing anything you're offered with a smile? You never have told me much about your studies. What exactly do Diplomats learn in that school?"

"Umm. It's mostly classified," Maris offered wildly. "Y'know, don't want to give away our systems and all that."

"Including what you had for dinner?"

"Ahh, just the usual. You know." At least she hoped he did. Maris herself didn't have the faintest idea what toppies would eat in a fancy school, but she was pretty sure it didn't resemble the hodgepodge of dryfood stolen from shipping crates and odd dishes liberated from a Tasman dining hall on which Johnivans fed his gang. "I'd rather hear about how you found out that ghay meat tastes sour. I bet there's a story behind that?"

"Reconnoitering trip that went bad." Gabrel accepted the change of subject gracefully, leaned back against his bedroll, and launched into a tale of travels into uncharted territory, a native "guide" who'd never been more than a day's journey from his home village, and an early blizzard that effectively closed what he'd thought was the only pass back through the High Jagirs from their campsite.

Later that night, after the campfire was banked to a rock-encircled bed of slumbering embers and they had crawled into their separate tents, Gabrel lay awake with arms folded behind his head and considered the riddle of Calandra.

Basically, he liked the woman. She'd been a good companion so far on this journey upcountry, accepting the difficulties of travel without any of the whining he'd have heard from most of his colleagues in Valentin—and that was the men; he shuddered to think what a gently bred Barents lady, even one accustomed to the "hardships" of life in Valentin, would have made of a trip by turag, native packet boat, and foot into the foothills of the Jagirs. And—remembering that last night in Valentin—she was a damned good companion to have at one's back in a fight. Quick reflexes; if it had been up to him, they'd both have been trussed helpless in the tanglenet before he knew what was happening. Not that Slevinen would have left him alive long enough to be embarrassed by his stupidity, but that was scant comfort. Well, she was an offworlder and a Diplomat; she was used to watching for high-tech weaponry. He hadn't expected any such thing. No, that was no excuse, not after reading Orlando Montoyasana's letters about the prohibited technology he'd stumbled on in Udara. The fact was, he hadn't taken Montoyasana seriously, hadn't taken the whole mission seriously until Slevinen's attack on them. Putting that together with the trader's tale of the two Barents Society men who'd tried to cut them off at the junction of the Dharam-jara and the Vaisee-jara, Gabrel no longer had any doubt that there was something in the mountains that somebody didn't want them to find. And given Slevinen's use of a tangler, it seemed very likely that Montoyasana had been exactly right about what was going on in Udara.

What was keeping Gabrel awake tonight, though, was his inability to figure out what was going on right here and now with Calandra . . . if that was really her name! From the first she had not been what he expected in a Diplomat; but then, one of the things you expected was that Diplos would keep you off balance. So he had deliberately not worried about the fact that she seemed too young and innocent, and talked too bluntly, to be a Rezerval-trained Diplo. That could have been part of the training, a way to keep you off guard.

And on that day of her arrival, he'd hardly had time to think about it much. What with formal dinners, ball gowns, and assassination attempts, not to mention scrambling to get out of Valentin at least half a step ahead of whoever had it in for them, the occasional oddities in Calandra's behavior had been the least of his worries.

The days of travel, though, had given him time to observe . . . and think.

Calandra definitely did not behave like anything Gabrel had heard of Diplos. Put that down to his ignorance, if you would; but how could you explain the way she changed the subject whenever he asked anything about her background and training? And since she wouldn't tell him anything, what could he go on but the rumors that passed for common knowledge?

Diplos were supposed to have chips in their heads that could be loaded with the basics of any language they were likely to need. Calandra herself admitted that, but her statement that the language downloads weren't all they might be was a gross understatement. She spoke Kalapriyan, as the trader had pointed out, like a four-year-old or worse. And she seemed to spend all her spare time muttering verb conjugations.

Diplos toured many different worlds and were exposed to many varied civilizations before they graduated into active assignment work; Calandra reacted to the sights of Kalapriya like a kid who'd never seen anything outside the four walls of a study cubicle.

Diplos carried weapons unlike anything you'd ever imagined secreted on their persons and in their clothes; Calandra had bashed Kaspar Slevinen's head in with a handy rock. Wasn't there such a thing as carrying respect for prohibited technology a bit too far?

Was she some impostor posing as a Diplo? Obviously there were some Barents Trading Society people involved in the transfer of prohibited weapons to Udara; could they have disposed of the real Calandra Vissi and substituted one of their offword accomplices? Would such a woman have been cold-blooded enough to murder Slevinen—a coconspirator of hers, according to this thesis—just to establish her credibility in Gabrel's eyes?

Some women might. All Gabrel's experience of Calandra, though, said that she wasn't capable of such an act.

Besides—he remembered with relief—she had to have passed the routine spaceport ID checks in transit to Kalapriya. She had Calandra Vissi's retinas, fingerprints, and DNA. Gabrel shook his head. No, whatever the woman was or wasn't, she had to be Calandra Vissi of Rezerval. Pure logic, Occam's Razor, dictated against multiplying improbabilities in the service of his private paranoia; to suppose this woman an impostor was piling impossibility upon improbability.

So what was she? Perhaps a Diplomat in training, posing as a full graduate to improve her standing on Valentin. Someone who hadn't had the final tours yet, hadn't been issued the mysterious weapons, maybe didn't even have all the implant chips necessary to download languages and maps.

Gabrel chuckled quietly to himself. Yes, that made sense. Orlando Montoyasana's reputation as the galaxy's most paranoid and quarrelsome anthropologist had preceded him to Kalapriya. Probably the man had been pestering Rezerval for years, complaining about every world he studied. They weren't going to waste a real Diplo on a mission purely for show, to placate a crazy anthropologist; they'd use it as a training mission for one of the students.

And, of course, they wouldn't feel it necessary to mention to Montoyasana—much less to the Barents Trading Society—that the kid they were sending out wasn't a real Diplo.

Unfortunately, it seemed that she'd stumbled into a real conspiracy. So what was he going to do about it? Head back to Valentin and demand a real Diplo, and preferably a contingent of Rezerval Guards, to investigate Udaran weaponry? With what that trader had said of Barentsians hunting for him, Gabrel had serious doubts as to whether they'd even get back to Valentin, much less get access to the ansible to contact Rezerval.

Pushing ahead seemed the better of the two alternatives. Anyway, if Gabrel had taken Montoyasana's complaints seriously, he wouldn't have wasted his time going back to Valentin and whining for a Diplo's assistance, would he? No, he would have started investigating on his own, right there where he was in Dharampal—close enough to Udara, and with his good Dharampali friends to help him.

No reason he couldn't do the same thing now. The only difference was, Calandra's arrival had caused the conspirators inside the Barents Trading Society to tip their hand. After Slevinen's attack and the trader's warning, Gabrel knew he couldn't risk taking any evidence he discovered to his superiors in the Society—not until he knew exactly who was involved, and how.

Calandra would come in handy there too; with her contacts in the Diplomatic School, she could take his report directly to Rezerval and hand it over to authorities who would think nothing of arresting half a dozen top officials in the Society, who would have the resources to clean up the nasty mess of corruption and cultural contamination they seemed to be stumbling into.

All he had to do, Gabrel reckoned, was penetrate a hostile Indigenous Tribal Territory, collect evidence of their use of prohibited offworld technology, find some leads as to who was supplying the weapons, get himself and Calandra back to the coastal enclaves, and smuggle her off-planet to deliver the report. Without the backup that a fully trained and armed Diplo could have provided. He smiled grimly. Wasn't there a character in some ancient children's book who believed in doing six impossible things before breakfast? At least he didn't have to do all this before breakfast—and now he thought about it, the phrase had been "believe six impossible things before breakfast." Fine, he'd start by believing they could accomplish their tasks with no difficulty.

But as he drifted off to sleep, he wasn't worrying about the dangers ahead of him; a life of alternately soldiering and spying had taught Gabrel Eskelinen not to stay awake over next week's problems when there was a reasonably good chance tomorrow might kill you before you had to face them.

The one thing that really bothered him was that he wished, irrationally, that Calandra would trust him with the truth about herself.

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Contents
Framed

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Contents

Chapter Ten
Dharampal on Kalapriya

Indukanta Jagat was in a foul temper by the time he was admitted to the audience chambers in Dharampal, but he knew better than to show his anger at being kept waiting too openly. Instead he bowed deeply and praised the Vakil's even-handedness and independence and expressed his certainty that the Barents Resident in Dharampal would have been admitted no sooner than the representative of Udara.

"I fear you have been misinformed," said Yadleen. "Unlike Udara, the independent state of Dharampal has accepted no resident representative of the Barents Trading Society. So the issue of equal treatment does not really arise—does it? You are here. The outlanders are not."

And anybody who took that as an expression that Yadleen favored Udara over the foreign trading company was . . . doing exactly what the Vakil wanted, no doubt.

The Vakil of Dharampal was a slender young man, not yet thirty, whose slight build and clean-shaven face deceived many into thinking him a mere boy who would do whatever his senior counsellors advised. Jagat was not such a fool; this "boy" had maintained Dharampal's perilous neutrality between the growing powers of the Barents Trading Society and the Bashirate of Udara for the five long and difficult years since his accession to the throne, with half his council leaning toward Barents and the other half toward Udara. It had not been an easy balance to maintain; and though Jagat intended to make it considerably more difficult, if not impossible, for Dharampal to remain neutral, he had a grudging respect for the Vakil for having pulled it off this long.

"If they are not here yet, they will be soon," Jagat countered.

Yadleen's calm expression did not change. "Forgive me," he asked in dulcet tones, "but has the honored envoy from Udara been favored with news that has escaped the Vakil of Dharampal? I was not aware that I had accepted a Barents Trading Society Resident. Or does the Society now send its armies against a peaceful state that has given them no cause for offense?"

Indukanta Jagat folded his hands before him and bowed his head like a mourner at a state funeral. Privately he thought the pose deliciously apt: this meeting was indeed the first stage of the funeral of a state. Dharampal could no longer maintain its neutrality, not with Udara at its northern border. "The ways of the Trading Society are well known, Vakil. First they establish the excuse, then come the armies. Traveling toward Dharampal now are two agents of the Society. They will find some excuse to claim insult in your treatment of them; the armies will follow."

"Foreknowledge of the future is no doubt an excellent gift," said the Vakil tranquilly, "but one which the gods have not seen fit to grant me. Our relations with the Barents Trading Society are peaceful, and Gabrel Eskelinen has proven himself sympathetic to our position. He shall be received as an honored guest; what happens thereafter is in the lap of the gods. And I think our country might be rather difficult for the outlander armies."

Jagat endeavoured to keep his face from showing alarm. If the Vakil knew that Eskelinen was one of the approaching envoys, what else did he know of them—or of their mission? The Bashir's instructions as to what he was to tell the Vakil were quite clear. They did not cover the eventuality that Yadleen might know he was lying.

"Young Eskelinen in himself would be no problem," Jagat finally replied, "but the woman he escorts will not be so easy to deal with. Does the Vakil know of the Diplomatai?" He used the outlander word but gave it a Kalapriyan plural, and was pleased to see a slight frown appear on Yadleen's smooth tan countenance.

"Is this another race of star-traveling beings?"

"Almost, Vakil," Jagat replied. "Almost another race, indeed. These Diplomatai begin life as human as you or I, but they are selected young and given special training and magical powers which render them as difficult to overpower as a djinn of the air. They speak all languages fluently, carry maps in their heads, can render an armed man helpless with their secret fighting magic, and conceal on their persons offworld weapons more terrible than any you have seen. Indeed, they had better have been called Nagai, serpent-people! They are customarily sent into places the outlanders have found difficult to conquer by normal means; their mission is to stir up trouble, weaken the state, and prepare the way for outlander armies." The description of the Diplos came from the Barents Resident in Udara; the explanation of the mission was Jagat's own invention. In any case, the Vakil could hardly prove he was lying. He might know of the travelers' movements, but who could speak for their intentions?

"Shocking!" Yadleen said. His voice was tranquil as ever, but Jagat could see one lean bronzed hand tensing and relaxing, very slightly. Good—the Vakil was at least troubled by his arguments. He could build on that. "And is this how the Barents Trading Society obtained the Bashir's permission to install a Resident in Udara? My friend, you have my condolences. I had no idea that the Bashir was so frightened of outlander armies that have yet to reach Dharampal, let alone Udara."

"Udara's situation is quite different," Jagat said. "We have . . . mutually beneficial relations with the Barents Trading Society."

"A friendly arrangement, in fact."

"Just so."

"Yet you doubt that their relations with Dharampal would be equally . . . friendly?"

"These Diplomatai," Jagat said, "are quite a different breed from the men of the Barents Society. Why do they send one to you, if not to foment distrust and discord?" Gods take the boy! He was arguing the matter as if it were no more than a puzzle in statecraft from some dead history . . . and Jagat was losing the argument! He had to find some way to touch Yadleen's emotions again, to make fear of the unknown overpower this cool logic. "My lord, the Bashir has always felt good will toward Dharampal," he began feeling his way toward another approach.

"As he felt good will toward Thamboon and Narumalar?"

If Yadleen expected Jagat to be discomposed by this reference to the two formerly independent states most recently absorbed into the Bashirate of Udara, he misunderstood his man. "Exactly so," Jagat replied. "The Bashir was gravely distressed by the internal instability of those states, which forced him to take over their rule lest his own lands be threatened. I am certain he would be no less distressed should his friend the Vakil of Dharampal allow troublemakers to travel freely through his territory."

"In short, you offer me a choice—offend the Barents Trading Society, or offend the Bashir." Yadleen's right hand clenched on the carved armrest of his throne.

Jagat bowed. After a moment's respectful silence he ventured an apposite proverb from the times of the Empire. " 'My neighbor is at my right hand, and the Emperor is far away as the summer skies.' "

"You mean," Yadleen said drily, "that the Bashir's armies are at my border—now that Thamboon is no longer independent—and the Trading Society . . ."

"As your Majesty said, this land might be rather difficult for their armies." Jagat bowed again.

"A certain number of refugees from Thamboon came to Dharampal," Yadleen said. "They had wild tales to tell of sorcery in the Bashir's armies, magical nets of light that entangled men and left them helpless to the swords of their enemies, silent demons that killed invisibly. But then, men will always exaggerate the powers of those who conquer them, will they not? I have read that in the time of the Empire, ignorant people ascribed the Emperor's knowledge of the land to secret spies in the form of birds, rather than to the excellent system of roads and couriers which the Empire created as it grew."

"It would be impossible," Jagat said sincerely, "to underestimate the resources available to my master." Granted, the Consortium had not approved the conquest of Dharampal; having no limestone caves, it was not seen as a profitable area for the Consortium's business. But—"My neighbor is at my right hand, and the Emperor is as far away as the summer skies." Having supplied the Bashir's armies with their sorcerous weapons, the Consortium could hardly dictate from distant Valentin the use to which they were put.

Yadleen drummed his fingers on the armrest. "The visitors will be detained and questioned as to their purposes," he said at last, "but if we determine that they mean no harm, then we cannot in conscience harm them; they will be set free, even as Emperor Dhatacharya set free the rebel soldier Eshana when he swore fealty, and Eshana became Dhatacharya's most trusted man. History teaches us that we cannot build trust by treachery, nor loyalty by deceit."

The boy's conscience, Jagat thought, was what would destroy him. His tutor had given him too many ancient histories of the Empire to read, with their men in white gowns making noble speeches in white-walled palaces. He should rather have been sent out for a year or two of rough living with the tribesmen, to hear the blood-red songs of this century's feuds and tragedies and to bloody his own hands in a minor border skirmish or two.

"My master the Bashir will no doubt be overjoyed to hear your decision," Jagat said with a low bow. "If it pleases the Vakil, this humble one begs the privilege of remaining until the outlanders are brought in for questioning, that he may better understand their motives. It may well be that we in Udara are grown too suspicious of strangers; the Bashir would be only to happy to have your reassurance that these two mean no harm to our lands." And once Yadleen had the outlanders detained, Jagat would find it easy enough to make certain that they did not survive to trouble the Bashir.

Valentin on Kalapriya

After the assassination attempt that night, Gabrel thought their best course was to leave immediately. Clearly somebody in Valentin—somebody in the Society, not just a native!—didn't want a Diplomat investigating upcountry. Which made it seem more likely that there was some truth in Orlando Montoyasana's allegations, or at the very least, something that should be investigated and stopped.

Strictly speaking, Gabrel should have consulted his superior officers in the Society's private army before setting forth on this expedition. But what if they were part of the group trying to stop Calandra's inquiry? It seemed better to leave as quickly as they could, and without mentioning the fact to anybody official in Valentin.

Anuman, the Kalapriyan merchant who'd outfitted Gabrel for previous upcountry treks, was a friend as well as a trader; he was good-natured about being awakened in the middle of the night and almost as amiable about accepting Gabrel's chit in payment for food, traveling clothes, and other supplies. Of course, he increased the cost of everything by at least fifty percent; that was understood as the price of being in a hurry, and no doubt contributed to Anuman's amiability.

Gabrel's best friend in the regiment, Leutnant Moylen Cornelis, was not quite so pleased about having his quarters invaded in the dark hours before dawn. But after a few jibes about the unusual duties involved in being the assigned escort of a Diplo, and a few remarks about the possible rewards thereof—which, couched as they were in Barents slang, Gabrel devoutly hoped Diplomat Vissi had not understood—he emptied his purse for them willingly enough and even volunteered the services of his groom for the first part of the journey.

"Moylen, you're too good," Gabrel protested.

"Not in the least, dear fellow. Naturally you'll take my spare mounts as far as you can ride, and I'll want Sanouk to bring them back. And you'll need gold to pay for a couple of ghaya to carry your things into the hills. I don't want you being tempted to sell my racing string to some hill-country Vakil of two villages and a farm in trade for his pack animals."

Moylen Cornelis was Old Trader Family on both sides and could well afford to keep a string of racing turagai and otherwise live in the style befitting an Old Family scion; his monthly pay as Leutnant in the Society army wouldn't have paid his mess bill for a week. So Gabrel, whose father's military pension had to cover not only family expenses but also the education of his three younger brothers, was able to accept his friend's generosity without too great a struggle with his own pride and conscience.

"Besides," Moylen had added as the clinching argument, "if Sanouk's with you, he can't gossip about this in the bazaar. Your departure will remain a mystery for at least four more days."

"How did you know I wanted it kept secret?" Gabrel demanded, suddenly feeling suspicious even of Moylen. Kaspar Slevinen—whose body would be discovered tomorrow—had been close to Haars Huyberts and Stoffelsen. Whatever was going on, at least those two of the Old Trader Families were involved in it. Was House Cornelis also part of the plot?

Moylen gave him a mocking smile. "Dear boy, officers planning to travel upcountry on legitimate missions don't take off in the middle of the night with a pretty girl in tow."

"Diplomat Vissi," Gabrel said stiffly, "and she's not exactly a girl."

Moylen cocked an eye at Calandra, who was tactfully standing a few feet away and pretending deafness while studying the maps tacked to Moylen's sitting-room wall. She hadn't had time to change into the anonymous traveling clothes provided by Anuman; the borrowed ball dress, with its gauzy panels of peach and lavender dampened by sweat, clung to and emphasized the lines of her slender figure. Her hair was a mass of black curls, also damp with sweat and making a frame of ringlets around a delicate oval face. "No? But hardly a doddering old lady yet, wouldn't you say? Also, official missions don't begin with somebody half strangling my groom and scratching at my bedchamber door. I don't know what you're up to, Gabrel, and something tells me I don't want to know, but—be careful, will you? The regiment would be damned dull without you."

In the event, it had hardly been worthwhile borrowing Moylen's turagai; Calandra had never ridden before. At the end of the first day Gabrel had had to lift her from the saddle, and she'd managed only a few steps before her legs failed her and he had to carry her the rest of the way to their rooms in the Vaisee village where he'd planned to stop for the first night.

"Why didn't you tell me you couldn't ride?" he scolded her.

"Why didn't you tell me it was so bunu hard? Anyway, I'm learning. I'll do better tomorrow."

"You will not," Gabrel contradicted her, and walked out to make other arrangements.

Selling one of the turagai to a Rohini caravan leader provided enough extra money to pay both their passages on a boat going up the broad reaches of the Vaisee-jara as far as it was navigable, and left a little over for Sanouk to remain in the village a few days before returning to his master with the remaining two beasts. Gabrel hoped Sanouk's reluctance to tell Moylen that one of his prized racing turagai had been sold after all would keep him in the village until his money ran out; he hoped Moylen would understand the necessity and forgive him when they returned; come to think of it, he hoped they would return. He'd traveled upcountry before, but always as an officer of the Barents Trading Society's army, with all the might and support of Barents behind him. Now he was traveling as one half of a young, anonymous offworld couple with an inexplicable curiosity to sample Kalapriyan life outside the coastal enclaves. The difference was evident in the attitude of the innkeeper, who'd wanted payment in advance at three times the going rate; Gabrel had to waste time haggling with the man, demonstrating his fluent Kalapriyan and his intimate knowledge of both lodging rates and Kalapriyan curses, to get the price down to a mere one and a half times what a native would pay. The other purchases he made in the local market before returning to Calandra required a similarly protracted spell of bargaining; chaffering was Kalapriya's unofficial planetary sport, and if a Kalapriyan Olympics were ever organized, the herbalist in the market could have chaffered for Vaisee.

"Here," he said on his return, tossing the herbalist's round leather box at Calandra, "put this on your—um—where it's sore." He unstopped the stiff leather bag that had been his other purchase and took a drink of the contents to cover his embarrassment. The local madira burned like fire going down his throat; he was out of practice. "That salve will numb you up and help the skin heal over, and you'll have time to heal in the next few days; we're leaving the turagai here and taking a boat up the Vaisee-jara."

"All the way to whatsit—Darample?"

"Dharampal," Gabrel corrected, wondering what incompetent slob had created the Kalapriyan maps in the Diplomat's download. "And not all the way, naturally, the river's unnavigable once we reach the foothills. But you can't take turagai into the mountains. We'll have to buy a couple of ghaya to carry our packs, and we'll walk."

"All right by me," declared Calandra cheerfully, but her grin faded when she tried to stand up. "Um—I think I might need some help . . ."

It turned out that Calandra needed help not only to get from the rug she'd collapsed on to her narrow bed, but also to get the herbalist's salve on all the places that were sore, some of them being quite hard to reach in her present stiffened condition. Gabrel told himself that he should have thought of that and hired a girl from the marketplace to aid Calandra, then told himself that he'd have been an idiot to do any such thing. It was hard enough for a couple of outlanders to travel inconspicuously outside the coastal enclaves without setting any extra mouths chattering, and there was no impropriety in helping out a fellow traveler in difficulties. Then he concentrated on thinking of his fellow traveler as Diplomat Vissi rather than as the laughing girl he'd danced with the previous night. It took some strenuous thinking about other things to keep his reactions under control while he smoothed the salve onto the backs of her thighs. Every once in a while he stopped and took a drink from the leather sack of madira, not so much because he needed it as for an excuse to take his hands off the Diplo before they wandered where they shouldn't. Diplos probably had extremely effective ways of warding off unwanted attentions . . . And doing sums in his head wasn't enough distraction. He would have to find something else to recite . . . but the only poem he could think of offhand was the ballad of Rusala's adventures with the seven daughters of King Death. Not a good choice; Rusala had had entirely too much fun with those girls despite their unfortunate parentage.

"You don't have to curse," Maris said, her voice slightly muffled by the pillow she was biting.

"I wasn't cursing." Gabrel drew a blanket over the slender, girlish form and stood up, wiping little droplets of sweat from his brow. "I was—um—reviewing Kalapriyan grammar. Ishti-class verbs. In the past subjunctive."

"Find you get a lot of use for the past subjunctive, do you?" The Diplo had stopped chewing on the pillow and was propped up on her elbows, regarding him with a bird's bright inquisitive glance from under her mop of black curls.

"Easy for you to sneer," Gabrel said, finding a heaven-sent evasion for just why he'd felt it necessary to chant ishti-class verb conjugations for the last ten minutes, "but us ordinary citizens don't get whole languages downloaded into special chips in our heads. We have to learn them the old-fashioned way, by repetition and sweat."

Maris flopped back onto her pillow, facedown. "Those language chips aren't as great as everybody assumes," she said through the red and black embroidered pillow cover. "We don't come out, like, talking the language fluently or anythin'."

"Oh. More like a running start on learning the language?"

Maris sputtered into the woolen pillow cover. "Oh, yes. You could definitely say I got a running start." She shook with suppressed laughter.

"Now what's so funny about that?" Gabrel demanded.

Probably not a good idea to explain. "Uh, nothing. The, the salve burns a little bit," Maris improvised.

"That should stop soon. At least, the stuff my Gran used on nettle stings always burned at first and then made the skin go numb, and this smells like the same mixture." Gabrel sniffed at the pot of greenish-yellow grease. That and the fumes of the madira smelled like home to him, a rich mixture of stinging and floral perfumes that Barents could never match. Reminded of the madira, he upended the bag and took another mouthful. It didn't burn so much now. "Made it up from Kalapriyan herbs she gathered up in the Hills, she did, and never would tell me what went into it."

"I thought you were from Barents?" Maris propped herself up on both elbows and rested her chin in her hands; she wasn't ready to risk sitting up yet, but it was impossible to conduct a conversation with one's face in a pillow.

"In a manner of speaking," Gabrel said. "I'm the third generation of career military in our family. My grandfather was in on the pacification of the plains states. He did his best to see people treated fairly when they came under Barents law, and some of them remembered that when he retired. The ex-Vakil of Latacharya offered him a house on the slopes of the foothills, looking up at the mountains. I used to stay with him and Gran a lot when I was a kid; by that time my dad was in the Service here." He smiled, remembering those enchanted days in the freedom of Latacharya, and toasted them with another swallow of madira.

"And your mother stayed on Barents, did she?"

"Oh, no. Not Mam!" Gabrel chuckled. "She followed Dad wherever he was assigned. But—they were both only children, you see, and her parents hadn't approved of her marrying into the military; they were minor Barents nobility and as high in the instep as only impoverished minor nobles can be. So I think she planned on building her own extended family. I had three younger brothers, all born here on Kalapriya. Only trouble was, every time Mam was expecting she got hellish sick, so they'd send us kids up to Latacharya for the duration. And after my second brother was born Gran suggested we just stay there where she could school us until Mam was through with her family-building." Gabrel smiled reminiscently. "It's not like being in the true Hills, Latacharya isn't, but it's got that smell of conifers and snow-melt, and when the traders came through for a fair we kids used to sneak away from Gran and hang around the caravanserai all day, learning Kalapriyan words—some of which got our mouths washed out with soap when we tried them out at dinner, because Gran and Grandfather knew the language well enough themselves! And when I was ten I got my own hawk with her perch in Grandfather's mews; I was going to train her myself and go hawking with the native boys . . ."

"What happened?" Maris could tell from the way Gabrel's voice slowed that something had interrupted the idyll.

"My Dad took a saber cut across the thigh, dealing with some bandits along the river who hadn't quite understood that Vaisee was under Barents protection now. He didn't lose the leg, but—he couldn't ride anymore. They offered him early retirement and three-quarters pension, and he decided it was time for us all to go back to Barents. He thought the climate in the plains might have been part of Mam's trouble . . . she lost two babies after Number Three was born. And he may have been right," Gabrel said, "because Number Four came along ten months after we moved back to Barents, only then the doctors said she mustn't try to have any more. So she's been saving her expansionist ideas for the next generation. She wants me to get married to a nice fertile girl with a big family. She must be the only mother on Barents who wants a lot of in-laws . . . Sorry, I don't know why I'm boring you with all this nonsense."

"Keep talking," Maris urged. "It takes my mind off." Not to mention that when he was telling her about his past, he wasn't asking her any embarrassing questions. "So how did you wind up back on Kalapriya?"

"Told you," Gabrel said. Or had he? For some reason he was finding it hard to remember exactly what he had and hadn't said. "Career military. Oldest son, naturally follow in m'father's footsteps. Grandfather's too. Besides, cheapest education on Barents is military academy. For us army brats, that is. With four sons to raise on a pension, m'father couldn't very well feature sending any of us anywhere else. Besides, got me back to Kalapriya." He tilted the leather bag and was disappointed to find that only a few drops of madira trickled out. Oh well. No need to sit up if he wasn't drinking. He lay back on the rug and stared at the criscrossing wooden rafters above them. "More chance of promotion here, never know, could be we'll have to take over the hill states, nice little war. Peacetime on Barents, nothing to do but get older waiting for your superior officers to get older and retire. No kind of career for a soldier." He tossed the empty bag up in the air, failed to catch it, and winked at Maris. "They think that's why I volunteered for Kalapriya, y'see? Young fire-eater, looking for action. Actually . . ." He yawned. "Actually I jus' love the place. Would've come back anyway. But don't tell m'colonel that."

"I promise not to tell your colonel that you like Kalapriya," Maris said, "and . . . don't you think you'd better take your boots off before you go to sleep?"

But her suggestion had come too late.

Apart from his headache the next morning and the mystery of why he'd downed an entire bag of madira when he didn't even like drinking, Gabrel found the days of the boat trip upriver uneventful enough. Calandra was clearly still stiff on the first morning, but she assured Gabrel that the salve had worked wonders and that she would be able to apply it herself from then on.

The boat wasn't really designed for passengers; it was more of a one-size-fits-all, carrying crates of salt fish and tropical fruits and spices upriver, presumably returning with boxes of nuts from the mountain orchards and bales of the coarse, bright fabrics the hill people wove from the long hair of their ghaya. It veered from one side of the Vaisee-jara to the other, stopping at every little village along the river on either bank. An old grandmother took the boat back after a visit downriver to see the newest grandchild, a slightly younger midwife traveled upriver to attend the accouchement of a minor hill-Vakil's third wife; a Rohini jewel trader squatted over his brass-bound box of gilt-filigree trifles and scowled suspiciously at the Rudhrani soldier, on leave from his post with the Vaisee Royal Guard, who demeaned himself to take the boat for a visit with his upcountry family because, as he cheerfully explained, his last turag had lost her race with a colleague's gelding and had become that colleague's property, and he now meant to apply in person to his father for a loan to finance another string of racers.

Gabrel slouched against a stack of crates, his gold hair covered by an anonymous loose felt hat, his fair skin turning brown in the hot sun over the river, his height at least somewhat disguised by his slouch and by a coarse blanket of hill-country weave thrown over his shoulders. He breathed in the spice-scented air and the babble of dialects and felt himself at home in a way he never felt in Valentin, much less on Barents itself. This was where he belonged, in the field, soaking up local lore and stories. He listened to the midwife and the grandmother trading competing stories of difficult births, and learned much that a Barents Trading Society officer would not normally understand about the importance of a red cord under the bed and the disastrous possibilities inherent in offending Vasanti of the Three Breasts by leaving cooking implements in view during an accouchement. When a curtained box was carried on board by four dark southern men who stationed themselves at its corners, glaring at all passengers impartially, he recognized that a bride of good family was being sent north and understood, with regret, the old ladies' unspoken decision to stop telling childbirth stories for a while.

Soon enough their place was taken by a Rohini star-gazer who offered to make the pilot's birth-chart in trade for passage to the next village, and who explained with great fluency the effects of the stars Lokaishana and Kanchana in guiding the pilot to a water trade, and the necessity of the man's placating the water demons also ruled by Lokaishana. This led to a theological argument with a dour man who now revealed himself as a hill-priest returning home from pilgrimage to the holy mouth of the Vaisee-jara, and who asserted categorically that demons could not be placated by offerings but must be controlled by amulets containing sacred writings. He just happened to have a supply of such amulets stitched into the seams of his bedroll and might be willing to part with some for an appropriate price.

The discussion became lively enough for Gabrel to pick up several interesting new terms of abuse concerning the ancestors, personal habits, and sexual preferences of both holy men; he felt some regret when the bride's guards bought up the hill-priest's entire stock of amulets, engaged him on the spot to protect them against malign influences, and took their cortege off the boat when it tied up for the night just downstream from the Ford of the Dead Emperors. Oh well, this part of their journey was nearly over anyway; half a day more would bring them to the rapids where the Dharam-jara joined the Vaisee-jara and created a river deep enough for boat travel, and from there on they would have to go on foot.

He had to admit that Calandra's presence had been a help on this part of the journey, rather than the unmitigated nuisance he had expected. She didn't complain about having to squat on the deck of a creaking packet boat steaming slowly against the current; she didn't say anything about the clouds of midges that descended with the evening sun, or the burning heat of midday; she didn't object to scooping her share of the midday lentils and spiced sauce from the communal bowl with two fingers of her right hand or to washing them down with slightly muddy spice tea. In fact, for the first two days she said remarkably little; like Gabrel, she sat and listened. Unlike him, she bounced up and down with excitement at the sights revealed by the river: the painted villages gay with their patterns of red and black and ochre mud drawn on the walls; a troop of horned bhagghi drinking at a ford and throwing up their heads and fleeing into the forest as the boat approached; the great grey ruined walls and crumbling carvings of a long-abandoned palace of the First Empire. Somehow he had expected a Diplomat to be scornfully blasé about the sights of Kalapriya. He liked Calandra even better for her unabashed enthusiasm.

And the combination of silence and visible enthusiasm helped immeasurably, as the chattering old women decided that this quiet girl who looked so thrilled at what they considered everyday sights must be another bride, this one from a village too small to name, being escorted upriver to some mountain state whose ruler was wealthy enough to hire an outlander soldier as her guard. Gabrel felt a little chagrin that they'd seen through his disguise so easily—but what matter, as long as they told themselves a story that accounted for his presence in a way that wouldn't come to the ears of the Society representatives? It was their good fortune that Calandra was slim and dark enough to pass for an exceptionally tall and pale-skinned Rudhrani, and beautiful enough to make it plausible that she'd been sold as a bride to some mountain Vakil or Wazir. And it was his good fortune that she must have picked up on the old ladies' gossip and decided to help it along; all through the first day she spoke only to him, and that in an undertone, which helped immeasurably in creating her character as a shy girl being sent away from her home to an unknown husband.

Private conversation was all but impossible on the crowded boat; even at night the passengers slept shoulder to shoulder, rolled into their traveling rugs and crowded so close on the deck that the nightmares of one became the property of all. But toward the end of that first day, during the splashing and colorful curses that accompanied the off-loading of some crates onto a half-rotted village quay Gabrel found a chance to speak quietly to Calandra and to compliment her on helping him out. "You're acting the shy village bride very well. Keep it up; they made me for an outlander, and the explanation they've given themselves for my presence will do very well as long as they think you're a Rudhrani, too proud and too shy to speak to any common passengers."

Also, their blatant speculation about her probable destination helped to fill him in on the current political situation in the hill country. He knew, of course, that Thamboon and Narumalar had been taken over by Udara; that was the source of Orlando Montoyasana's complaints. He claimed that the Udaran army was using weapons of prohibited technology that could only have been smuggled in from offworld. But when Gabrel was called back from Dharampal to dance attendance on the Diplomat, there'd been no hint that Udara was menacing that state as well. Now the old women chattered about an Udaran envoy to Dharampal, assessed the probability that the young Vakil of Dharampal would meekly give in to the Bashir's demands and that his state would become another vassal state of Greater Udara, and debated the possibility that the Vakil was making a marriage alliance with Calandra's village as an excuse to bring in a whole troop of outlander soldiers against the Udaran threat.

The land where the Dharam-jara joined the Vaisee-jara was too rocky and precipitous to support a village, but over the years a small outdoor bazaar had grown up to meet the needs of traders and travelers. Here one could purchase anything—intricately carved nut shells with magic words carved into them to protect the wearer from evil spirits, sweet syrup with dozy-juice for a fretful baby, poison for a brutal husband, a birth-chart from a native astrologer or an earful of gossip about the doings of the hill kings. Having no particular desire to add more than necessary to the gossip of the bazaar, Gabrel overpaid for a pair of ghaya and refused the offer of overpriced lodgings in the mud-walled serai behind the bazaar. The sooner he and Calandra were out of here, he thought, the less chance there was that anybody would recognize her for an outlander.

That happy belief was rudely shaken by the gratitude of the trader who sold him the ghaya. While Gabrel was adjusting the harness on the great, shaggy beasts and demanding ointment for the sores left on their backs by the previous owner, the trader approached him and said quietly, "For the ointment, one tul; for a word more precious than all ointments, you have already paid enough. Two outlander men on turagai were here two days past, demanding word of an outlander couple, a man and a woman, whom they believed to have ridden this way. At the time, naturally, no one knew anything of interest to them."

"The noble lady whom I escort to her wedding . . ." Gabrel began.

The trader spat sideways into the mud around the ghaya stalls. "The noble lady," he said, "speaks Kalapriyan like a child of four years, and had never seen ghaya before, nor eaten yao pai. You may have dyed her hair and tinted her skin to make her pass for Rudhrani, but she is too ignorant to be anything but another outlander. I have no love for the men of Barents, but you have paid me well and those others offered little enough; I have no reason to babble tales of what I surmise to them. But they will be back, and some other will have noticed as much as I did and will tell it them for a handful of tulai. Get her out of here, and have your trouble with the other outlanders somewhere else, not in my bazaar."

The trail that snaked along the rocky side of the Dharam-jara was quite rough enough if one took it directly from the place where the two streams met. After the trader's warning, Gabrel thought it prudent to follow the narrow stream that was the origin of the Vaisee-jara east from the bazaar until they were well behind the first range of hills, and then to cut back across the barren, rocky country to intercept the trail they really wanted. That made for some interesting and strenuous walking, interrupted periodically by the necessity to persuade the ghaya that they did want to take the thorny uphill path and did not want to lie down and roll on the thorns, luxuriously scratching their thick hairy hides and squashing the packs they bore. And in many places there was no path at all. Gabrel consulted his compass frequently, watched the passage of the sun closely, and wished devoutly that he had not packed his maps so carefully at the very bottom of one of the long leather rolls now bound in the pack-harness of the larger ghay. But there'd been no need to consult a map while they were on the boat, and—he hadn't exactly planned to leave the bazaar so precipitately, or in a direction so different from that he really wanted. He envied Calandra her Diplomat's head, doubtless loaded with detailed maps of Kalapriya as well as vocabulary, grammar, and whatever other information Rezerval had thought she might need. But he didn't want to ask her for help, as if he were such an idiot as to get lost as soon as he was out of sight of the Vaisee-jara. Besides, he knew where they were. Approximately. More or less. With reasonable certainty . . . oh, devils, what was that crag of rock doing in front of them? He'd intended to cut across in a westerly direction, to meet the Dharam-jara well before they got anywhere near the Old Man's Head, but the steep eroded gullies had forced them north and north again. Now, to reach the smoother going of the trail along the river before nightfall, they were going to have to go right across that eerily eroded hill.

The Dharampalis believed that such hills were the homes of the serpent-people, the Nagai and Takshakai, avoided by all right-thinking hill people, and that was just the good part; what really worried Gabrel was the maze of water-drilled holes that splashed across the surface of the limestone rock, perfect for catching and breaking a pack-ghaya's leg, and the narrow fissures that ran across the rock and gave homes to poisonous snakes.

Gabrel studied his compass again, squinted at the sun, and tried to convince himself that they could afford the time to backtrack and pick up the Dharam-jara somewhere south of the Old Man's Head. Even if they didn't quite reach the river this night, wasn't camping among the rocks better than crossing this pockmarked disaster area? No—the ghaya needed water, were used to drinking their fill twice a day, and there was barely enough water in the gullies they'd passed, this time of year, to keep a snake alive. Besides, he wasn't entirely sure they could find a better way through the hills; there was a reason why this triangle of land between the Dharam-jara and the Vaisee-jara was so empty. Only a madman or an outlander would attempt to cross it.

He caught Calandra studying him, a slight frown between her dark brows, and snapped, "If you know a better way to get back to the Dharam-jara, feel free to mention it!"

"If you feel we should go this way, I'm sure you're right," she said cheerfully. "Much farther now?"

"You know as well as I do. About three hours more to get back to the river." If they were lucky, if neither men nor beasts broke a leg crossing the Old Man's Head, if his guess as to their position was right.

In the event, it was nearly four hours, and the sun was down before they had a fire to light their campsite, and Gabrel was not quite sure that they had reached the Dharam-jara at the point he had been aiming for, well north of the two villages upstream from the bazaar but south of the Dharampal border. And he did not find leisure to study his map until all the work of camping for the night was done: pack beasts fed and watered, tent up, firewood collected. As he had expected, Diplomat Vissi had been quite useless at all these tasks; as he had not expected, she had been cheerfully ready to pitch in where she could and to learn what he wanted to tell her. She was hopeless with the pack animals, of course, probably had spent all her life on high-tech worlds; he had to tell her several times that they weren't machines where you punched a button and got a response.

"Got that," the woman said the third time he made this explanation. "They're dumber than machines."

"That too," Gabrel acknowledged with a smile. Nobody had ever accused Kalapriya's native ghaya of high intelligence. But they were strong, tireless, and reasonably obedient when handled by somebody who understood their limitations. "But they'll take us up into the High Jagirs on paths none of your machines could negotiate."

"Flitter could, though," Calandra said.

Gabrel mimed astonishment. "What, you'd take a flitter over these mountains and give these simple hillmen the surprise of their lives? And you here to investigate allegations of inappropriate technology importation? I'm shocked, Diplomat Vissi, shocked!"

"Didn't say I wanted to," Calandra pointed out. "Just said a flitter could do it. And a sight easier and faster than these ghays."

"Right. The plural, in case you're interested, is ghaya." Gabrel studied the Diplomat's face in the uncertain firelight. "I would've thought your language implant would tell you that much."

Calandra looked down. "I told you, the chips ain't like magic."

"That's clear," Gabrel said meanly. "The chap who sold me these beasts said you speak Kalapriyan like a four-year-old."

Calandra blinked hard and Gabrel wondered at his own snappiness. The woman had really behaved quite well; why was he suddenly being bitchy at her? He felt desperately uneasy and couldn't quite put a finger on the reason.

" 'Scuse me, I gotta . . ." Without saying exactly what it was she suddenly needed to do, Calandra crawled into her tent and dropped the flap. Leaving Gabrel on his own to prepare their meal. Well, what had he expected of a pampered offworlder? It must have been quite a shock for Diplomat Vissi to live under the primitive conditions of Kalapriya outside the coastal enclaves; she'd taken the boat journey well enough, but trekking on foot over the High Jagirs with only the supplies a pair of ghaya could carry might well be more than she'd bargained for.

In the privacy of her tent, Maris stuck a plug into her right ear and settled down to concentrated study of the audio plugs of Kalapriyan for Dummies that she'd boosted from Moylen Cornelis's rooms. That had been a lucky find, but it wouldn't do her much good if she didn't get more time to use the plugs. The slow, lazy days of the boat journey upriver had been a gift from the gods; both Gabrel and the other passengers had invented their own story for why she didn't say much, and with her curly hair worn loose to cover the plug in one ear she'd been able to listen her way through a good half of the language lessons. By the time they reached the bazaar she had acquired enough vocabulary to get the gist of most conversations. If the people were speaking slowly. If she already had a good idea what they were talking about.

Was that enough to pass for a Diplomat's downloaded language capabilities? It would make sense that the download would help more with understanding than with talking; nothing substituted for actual real-time talking with real people, but apparently she hadn't learned enough yet. Okay, she would pretend exhaustion, spend as much time as possible in the minuscule tent, get a good grasp of ishti-class verbs. Just as well not to spend the evening out by the fire, chatting with Gabrel, anyway; the more she said, the greater was the chance that he'd catch on to her imposture. It was exhausting, watching every word she said, always trying to guess how a highly educated Diplo would react to these surroundings.

It was exhausting, remembering not to trust Gabrel.

It had been easy at first, when he was so stiff and full of resentment toward her. But that had started to change at the ball—and after, the attack in the dark alley—they worked together well, Maris thought sleepily. Concealing the body, cleaning up the mess, getting out of town fast and inconspicuously . . . the man had a natural talent for her kind of work, a talent that probably didn't get much exercise in the confines of the Society's military branch. No wonder he preferred slightly covert upcountry assignments, no wonder he'd resented being pulled back from the field to dance attendance on an offworld VIP. Johnivans would have tried to recruit him as a natural talent . . . but Johnivans wouldn't have had much luck, would he? There was something about Gabrel Eskelinen that would never bend to the sort of underhanded dealing Maris had grown used to on Tasman. He could lie fast and fluently, he could disguise himself, he could dispose of a corpse, and Maris didn't think he would have much compunction about killing somebody who attacked him. But she couldn't imagine him stabbing somebody in the back, or arranging . . . arranging to have a girl killed just because her dead body was more useful to him than her living self.

She swallowed hard. Ishti-class verbs in the past conditional chattered unheard in her right ear while the memory of her last hours on Tasman swamped her. Who did she think she was to make guesses about Gabrel's character? She had trusted Johnivans absolutely, damn near worshipped him ever since he'd seen a talent in her that made it worthwhile for him to take her into his gang and save her from working the corridors as a child-whore . . . and all the time she'd been nothing to him, less than nothing, a card to be played when convenient. And now she was tempted to trust Gabrel as she'd trusted Johnivans, to confess her imposture to him, because something about him felt straight and true and she was hating her lies more every day. Idiot! So she didn't feel that Gabrel Eskelinen would dump her if he knew the truth, so what? She hadn't felt any warning about Johnivans either, had she? Face it, she had no judgment for people. The only thing she knew was that she knew nothing and could trust nobody.

"Calandra?"

"Dhulaishta, I would have betrayed—dhulaishtami, you would have betrayed—dhulaishtaiyen, he, she, it would have betrayed—dhulaishtamai, no, you leave it out in first- and second-persons plural—dhulamai, we would have betrayed," Maris muttered under her breath, wishing whoever wrote the language plugs had picked a different example of ishti-class verbs. She'd already conjugated betrayal in present, simple past, simple future, and present conditional, and with each tense the choice of verb seemed more personal.

"Calandra!"

"Dhulamiye, you plural would have, oh shit." Between Gabrel's ratty mood and the ishti-class conjugations, Maris had temporarily forgotten her assumed name. She jerked the plug out of her ear and stuffed it into a fold of the embroidered sash that held her coarse woven shirt and leggings together, backed out of the tent and tried not to think about the impossibility of exiting these tiny tents with any degree of grace. Sitting up, she scowled at Gabrel and pushed her hair back. "What is it?" No great emergency, obviously; he was leaning against the broad back of a resting ghay while peering at some folding papers in the firelight.

"I just wanted you to compare this map with the ones your people downloaded to you," he said, holding out a page covered with spidery brown lines.

"Thought you knew this country backwards and forwards," Maris said.

"Last time I visited Dharampal," Gabrel said patiently, "I was officially there on official business, and I could simply follow the Dharam-jara upstream. This time I thought we might save time by cutting across where the river loops, here—" he pointed to a curved double line "—and then we could drop down from here to water the ghaya. Looks like about a day's travel, and then go back off-trail again and straight for Dharamvai—the Vakil's city. But I didn't make this map, some clerk in Valentin drew it up from Orlando Montoyasana's notes last time the man visited the Enclave, and he just might have left out a few little things like hostile villages or impassable cliffs on the route I'm thinking of taking. So I wanted to check it against what you know of the territory."

Oh, shit indeed! Maris blinked and stared into space, looking as she thought somebody with database chips and maps and languages planted in their head might look, and then said, "Looks all right to me, but then why wouldn't it? Rezerval doesn't have any more detailed maps of this area than you do."

"I thought the satellite scans might show some details of the terrain."

"Well, they don't," Maris said. "They're really not very clear at all. Sorry I can't help you and all that." She took the stick Gabrel had been pointing with, thrust it into the bubbling mess in the cook-pot on the fire, and stirred vigorously—perhaps a little too vigorously; the stuff slopped over and a few drops sizzled on the hot stones.

"Better let me do that," Gabrel said, dropping the map to rescue their dinner.

"I'm not much help to you, am I?"

"Well," Gabrel said, stirring the pot almost as vigorously as she had done, "it's not supposed to work that way, is it? I've been assigned to help you. Anyway, I don't suppose a Diplo's normal training covers situations quite this primitive."

"You could say that," Maris allowed. For sure she couldn't contradict it, anyway!

"And I think you more than did your share on this trip the night we started," Gabrel added.

"I—? Oh, that." Maris suppressed an internal shudder as she remembered the soft mushy place her rock had left in Kaspar Slevinen's skull. She averted her gaze from the anonymous glop boiling in the cooking pot.

"Saving my life," Gabrel said with a straight face, "is usually good for one ticket into upcountry Kalapriya, all expenses paid, pack beasts managed, meals prepared, and tents erected. And you didn't even use any of your special weapons! You Rezerval types take this tech prohibition seriously, don't you?"

"Oh. Ummm . . ." Of course, a real Diplo would have done something much more elegant than bashing Slevinen over the head with a rock. Maris looked for a way to change the subject. "Would that be a one-way ticket, or round trip?"

"You don't think I can bring us out safely?"

"I've no worries at all about that," she lied, "just wondering whether I would have to save your life again in Udara or else learn to lead ghaya and set up me own—my own tent."

"I'd enjoy watching you attempt the latter," Gabrel said, "but the ghaya might not like it! Let's agree that you've earned a free ticket back to Valentin. Although if there is any useful information in those satellite maps in your head, to supplement my trail notes, I'd appreciate your sharing it. For instance, how do they show the elevation of Dharamvai? I'd estimated it at about six thousand meters, when I was there treating with the Vakil, but of course I was restricted to the kind of prehistoric measurement instruments allowed under the technology prohibitions. I'm sure your mapping programs are much more accurate. How high above sea level would you say the city lies?"

"Oh, six thousand sounds like a pretty good estimate," Maris mumbled. Time for another change of subject. "Is that stuff ready yet? I'm so hungry I could eat a ghay!"

"I wouldn't recommend it," Gabrel said, "the meat tastes really sour. Something about the native grasses they eat. Or does your training as a Diplomat include a course in swallowing anything you're offered with a smile? You never have told me much about your studies. What exactly do Diplomats learn in that school?"

"Umm. It's mostly classified," Maris offered wildly. "Y'know, don't want to give away our systems and all that."

"Including what you had for dinner?"

"Ahh, just the usual. You know." At least she hoped he did. Maris herself didn't have the faintest idea what toppies would eat in a fancy school, but she was pretty sure it didn't resemble the hodgepodge of dryfood stolen from shipping crates and odd dishes liberated from a Tasman dining hall on which Johnivans fed his gang. "I'd rather hear about how you found out that ghay meat tastes sour. I bet there's a story behind that?"

"Reconnoitering trip that went bad." Gabrel accepted the change of subject gracefully, leaned back against his bedroll, and launched into a tale of travels into uncharted territory, a native "guide" who'd never been more than a day's journey from his home village, and an early blizzard that effectively closed what he'd thought was the only pass back through the High Jagirs from their campsite.

Later that night, after the campfire was banked to a rock-encircled bed of slumbering embers and they had crawled into their separate tents, Gabrel lay awake with arms folded behind his head and considered the riddle of Calandra.

Basically, he liked the woman. She'd been a good companion so far on this journey upcountry, accepting the difficulties of travel without any of the whining he'd have heard from most of his colleagues in Valentin—and that was the men; he shuddered to think what a gently bred Barents lady, even one accustomed to the "hardships" of life in Valentin, would have made of a trip by turag, native packet boat, and foot into the foothills of the Jagirs. And—remembering that last night in Valentin—she was a damned good companion to have at one's back in a fight. Quick reflexes; if it had been up to him, they'd both have been trussed helpless in the tanglenet before he knew what was happening. Not that Slevinen would have left him alive long enough to be embarrassed by his stupidity, but that was scant comfort. Well, she was an offworlder and a Diplomat; she was used to watching for high-tech weaponry. He hadn't expected any such thing. No, that was no excuse, not after reading Orlando Montoyasana's letters about the prohibited technology he'd stumbled on in Udara. The fact was, he hadn't taken Montoyasana seriously, hadn't taken the whole mission seriously until Slevinen's attack on them. Putting that together with the trader's tale of the two Barents Society men who'd tried to cut them off at the junction of the Dharam-jara and the Vaisee-jara, Gabrel no longer had any doubt that there was something in the mountains that somebody didn't want them to find. And given Slevinen's use of a tangler, it seemed very likely that Montoyasana had been exactly right about what was going on in Udara.

What was keeping Gabrel awake tonight, though, was his inability to figure out what was going on right here and now with Calandra . . . if that was really her name! From the first she had not been what he expected in a Diplomat; but then, one of the things you expected was that Diplos would keep you off balance. So he had deliberately not worried about the fact that she seemed too young and innocent, and talked too bluntly, to be a Rezerval-trained Diplo. That could have been part of the training, a way to keep you off guard.

And on that day of her arrival, he'd hardly had time to think about it much. What with formal dinners, ball gowns, and assassination attempts, not to mention scrambling to get out of Valentin at least half a step ahead of whoever had it in for them, the occasional oddities in Calandra's behavior had been the least of his worries.

The days of travel, though, had given him time to observe . . . and think.

Calandra definitely did not behave like anything Gabrel had heard of Diplos. Put that down to his ignorance, if you would; but how could you explain the way she changed the subject whenever he asked anything about her background and training? And since she wouldn't tell him anything, what could he go on but the rumors that passed for common knowledge?

Diplos were supposed to have chips in their heads that could be loaded with the basics of any language they were likely to need. Calandra herself admitted that, but her statement that the language downloads weren't all they might be was a gross understatement. She spoke Kalapriyan, as the trader had pointed out, like a four-year-old or worse. And she seemed to spend all her spare time muttering verb conjugations.

Diplos toured many different worlds and were exposed to many varied civilizations before they graduated into active assignment work; Calandra reacted to the sights of Kalapriya like a kid who'd never seen anything outside the four walls of a study cubicle.

Diplos carried weapons unlike anything you'd ever imagined secreted on their persons and in their clothes; Calandra had bashed Kaspar Slevinen's head in with a handy rock. Wasn't there such a thing as carrying respect for prohibited technology a bit too far?

Was she some impostor posing as a Diplo? Obviously there were some Barents Trading Society people involved in the transfer of prohibited weapons to Udara; could they have disposed of the real Calandra Vissi and substituted one of their offword accomplices? Would such a woman have been cold-blooded enough to murder Slevinen—a coconspirator of hers, according to this thesis—just to establish her credibility in Gabrel's eyes?

Some women might. All Gabrel's experience of Calandra, though, said that she wasn't capable of such an act.

Besides—he remembered with relief—she had to have passed the routine spaceport ID checks in transit to Kalapriya. She had Calandra Vissi's retinas, fingerprints, and DNA. Gabrel shook his head. No, whatever the woman was or wasn't, she had to be Calandra Vissi of Rezerval. Pure logic, Occam's Razor, dictated against multiplying improbabilities in the service of his private paranoia; to suppose this woman an impostor was piling impossibility upon improbability.

So what was she? Perhaps a Diplomat in training, posing as a full graduate to improve her standing on Valentin. Someone who hadn't had the final tours yet, hadn't been issued the mysterious weapons, maybe didn't even have all the implant chips necessary to download languages and maps.

Gabrel chuckled quietly to himself. Yes, that made sense. Orlando Montoyasana's reputation as the galaxy's most paranoid and quarrelsome anthropologist had preceded him to Kalapriya. Probably the man had been pestering Rezerval for years, complaining about every world he studied. They weren't going to waste a real Diplo on a mission purely for show, to placate a crazy anthropologist; they'd use it as a training mission for one of the students.

And, of course, they wouldn't feel it necessary to mention to Montoyasana—much less to the Barents Trading Society—that the kid they were sending out wasn't a real Diplo.

Unfortunately, it seemed that she'd stumbled into a real conspiracy. So what was he going to do about it? Head back to Valentin and demand a real Diplo, and preferably a contingent of Rezerval Guards, to investigate Udaran weaponry? With what that trader had said of Barentsians hunting for him, Gabrel had serious doubts as to whether they'd even get back to Valentin, much less get access to the ansible to contact Rezerval.

Pushing ahead seemed the better of the two alternatives. Anyway, if Gabrel had taken Montoyasana's complaints seriously, he wouldn't have wasted his time going back to Valentin and whining for a Diplo's assistance, would he? No, he would have started investigating on his own, right there where he was in Dharampal—close enough to Udara, and with his good Dharampali friends to help him.

No reason he couldn't do the same thing now. The only difference was, Calandra's arrival had caused the conspirators inside the Barents Trading Society to tip their hand. After Slevinen's attack and the trader's warning, Gabrel knew he couldn't risk taking any evidence he discovered to his superiors in the Society—not until he knew exactly who was involved, and how.

Calandra would come in handy there too; with her contacts in the Diplomatic School, she could take his report directly to Rezerval and hand it over to authorities who would think nothing of arresting half a dozen top officials in the Society, who would have the resources to clean up the nasty mess of corruption and cultural contamination they seemed to be stumbling into.

All he had to do, Gabrel reckoned, was penetrate a hostile Indigenous Tribal Territory, collect evidence of their use of prohibited offworld technology, find some leads as to who was supplying the weapons, get himself and Calandra back to the coastal enclaves, and smuggle her off-planet to deliver the report. Without the backup that a fully trained and armed Diplo could have provided. He smiled grimly. Wasn't there a character in some ancient children's book who believed in doing six impossible things before breakfast? At least he didn't have to do all this before breakfast—and now he thought about it, the phrase had been "believe six impossible things before breakfast." Fine, he'd start by believing they could accomplish their tasks with no difficulty.

But as he drifted off to sleep, he wasn't worrying about the dangers ahead of him; a life of alternately soldiering and spying had taught Gabrel Eskelinen not to stay awake over next week's problems when there was a reasonably good chance tomorrow might kill you before you had to face them.

The one thing that really bothered him was that he wished, irrationally, that Calandra would trust him with the truth about herself.

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