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Chapter Fourteen
Dharampal on Kalapriya

When the soldiers from Dharampal surrounded them, Gabrel immediately demanded to be taken straight to their Vakil. He went on demanding this, with increasing loudness and firmness, while the soldiers tied their hands and feet and went through their packs.

"There's no need to play with those," the captain of the troop reproved a young soldier who was looking with interest at some fibrous plugs that had fallen to the ground when he shook out Maris's packed clothes.

Gabrel stopped his loud complaints for a moment to listen. He recognized what the young recruit had found, if the captain didn't.

"Looks like outlander magic to me," the soldier said defensively.

"Red Radhana take you, fool," said the captain. "They're obviously some of the things women use at, you know, their private times."

"Huh?"

The captain's face turned dark reddish brown and he pressed his lips together while one of the older soldiers shouted an offer to take young Varisha aside and explain about women to him. "Later, Odaka," the captain said. "Later you can take him to a brothel and demonstrate, if you like, but right now we're to bring these two in unharmed." He looked reflectively at the red marks on Gabrel's chin, where bruises would soon rise. "Reasonably unharmed. Now put all their outlander stuff back in the packs, and since you and Varisha are so interested in it, Odaka, the two of you can carry them. We'll turn the ghaya loose; they'll find good enough grazing along the river."

"Worth good money, those ghaya," Odaka grumbled, but he followed the captain's orders.

"Ghaya can't manage the paths we're taking," the captain said, "although why I bother to explain anything to you blockheads I do not know."

Hands bound in front of them, led on short ropes by two soldiers, Maris and Gabrel had a hellishly uncomfortable stumbling journey over mountain paths steeper and narrower than anything Maris, at least, had encountered before. The captain made no allowance for light or dark, and in the interval between sunset and moonrise they both collected a number of fresh bruises and scrapes from falling over rocks and thorn bushes that the locals avoided as if by instinct.

"I want to see the Vakil," Gabrel repeated at intervals, whenever the steep scrambling climb left him breath to make the demand.

"That's up to the Vakil, not to you or me," the captain said, reasonably politely, the first five or six times.

"He will be most annoyed to find that his good friend Gabrel Eskelinen has been mistreated this way."

The captain snorted. "That why he told me to bring his good friend Eskelinen at a rope's end? And the witch who travels with you, she a buddy of the Vakil's too?"

"Did he issue his orders personally?" Gabrel demanded. "Or did you have them from someone else—Minister Kansiya, perhaps? Does Yadleen even know what's going on?"

"The Vakil, may his beard increase, knows and sees all that is within the bounds of Dharampal," the captain said, but after that he allowed the marching pace to slacken a little and even loosened Gabrel's bonds so that he could catch himself when he stumbled. "Sorry about the witch," he said, looking at Maris, "but I daren't take any chances with her."

Gabrel started to complain again, but the captain interrupted him. "And if either of you say anything else, I'm to have you gagged. We've been warned that these outlander witches can corrupt honest men's thoughts, and maybe work worse magic, with their spells. I can't take the risk she might be working through your speech . . . you understand?"

"You'd better hope my friend Harsajjan Bharat, the Vakil's adviser, understands," Gabrel warned him.

The captain sighed. "And just who do you think signed the orders to bring you to the palace under guard? And told me to waste no time about it?" He patted the embroidered pouch tucked into his tunic sash, where stiff papers crackled under his hands.

After that Gabrel stopped arguing and saved his breath for getting up the mountain paths, and helping Maris when he could. At least the soldiers didn't seem to object to their walking together, though they were quick to interrupt any whispered conversation.

They reached the crest of the hills overlooking Dharamvai just after dawn, when the crude buildings of wood and mud were given a fleeting glory by the slanting red-gold light of the sun, the carvings that decorated every doorway and balcony thrown into high relief, and the piles of ordure in the gutters mercifully concealed by morning shadows. Gabrel could have wept at the irony of it. He'd dreamed of showing this mountain kingdom he had come to love to this girl whom—whom he had come to like a great deal—in just such a light, hoping that she would see the beauty and the decayed grandeur of this relic of empire as he did.

His dreams had not involved their being dragged down the mountain trail at a rope's end, jerked this way and that and staggering with weariness, hands bound before them like prisoners on their way to execution.

Not that it would come to that, of course. As soon as he had a chance to speak with Harsajjan, or even the Vakil, this foolish mistake would be cleared up. Gabrel resolved that he would beg the Vakil not to deal too harshly with the captain, who had dealt fairly with them within his understanding of the orders. He seemed to be a decent man overall; the mistake was doubtless not his fault.

And it was less troubling to think about begging the Vakil's mercy for the captain than to wonder whether he might be in need of it for himself and Maris.

Once within the walls of Dharamvai, after following tortuous narrow passages between leaning houses to a muddy and desolate walled yard, Gabrel was so tired that he actually sat down and fell asleep against the wall. He woke with a shock from a pleasant dream whose details vanished into the air even as his consciousness returned. It was close to noon, the sun falling as directly into this narrow yard as it ever could, and his pillow was the lap of the Honored Diplomat Vissi. He jerked upright, a stammered apology on his lips.

"It doesn't matter," the Diplo said. "I wouldn't have waked you now, only I think something is about to happen."

Something was indeed happening. The heavy gate of the courtyard swung open, pushed by a dark man in a blue and silver uniform who glanced at the prisoners and said, "On your feet, and quick about it!"

"I demand to see the Vakil," Gabrel said.

"You come with me, then."

The stranger's demands were interrupted by a file of soldiers in the red and gold of Dharampal, headed by the captain who had taken Gabrel and his companion prisoner the night before.

"Honorable Envoy Jagat," the captain said with a low bow that somehow was not at all respectful, "I am commanded to escort the prisoners to the Vakil's midday audience."

"My master wishes them brought to him."

"Should the Vakil, may his beard increase, so direct me, I shall be honored to bring the outlanders to the borders of Udara for your men to take over. Naturally the Bashir of Udara would not so insult the Vakil as to send soldiers into a country with which he still has peaceful relations. But for now, as I told you, my orders are to bring them before the Vakil himself."

Gabrel observed Calandra blinking rapidly and looking from side to side as though she were doing her best to follow the conversation. "They're arguing about who takes us out of here," he explained in a cautious undertone. "If we get any choice, we want to go with the guys in red."

"Why?" Calandra whispered back. "They're the ones who tied us up in the first place!"

"They're locals. I used to have a friend at the court here; if I can speak with him, everything will be all right. The other fellow is from Udara. We don't want to be prisoners of the Bashir of Udara, trust me." Gabrel wasn't sure exactly what happened to all the political opponents of the Bashir who had "disappeared" over the years, but then he didn't much care about the details—whether they had been beheaded, or strangled, or simply dropped over a mountain cliff hardly made much difference. The one thing they didn't do was come back from the Bashir's prisons to discuss their experiences.

After some more reasonably polite fencing, the man in blue and silver, whose name appeared to be Indukanta Jagat, gave in to the irrefutable argument of the twenty soldiers behind the captain and agreed that the Vakil might have audience with his own prisoners. He insisted on accompanying them, which did not reassure Gabrel, but he comforted himself with the thought that the alternative would have been much worse.

The palace of the Vakil was unfamiliar to Gabrel; on his previous visits to Dharampal, he had stayed in private houses—in the sprawling compound of Harsajjan himself, last time—and the Vakil had met him incognito, in the unconvincing disguise of a young merchant, which everybody politely pretended not to see through. It had been that dangerous, already, for the ruler of a state close to Udara to show favor to a representative of the Barents Trading Society.

On the way to the palace, he occupied his mind by thinking out the politics of the matter. Udara itself had had a Barents Society Resident for some years, one Lorum van Vechten, of whom Gabrel knew little except that the man had been completely unhelpful as to local information about the Independent Tribal Territories of the High Jagirs. He came of an Old Trader family, had studied offworld, and done some kind of scientific or medical work before returning to Kalapriya, and the way people in Valentin avoided talking about him had left Gabrel with the impression that van Vechten was a minor family black sheep who'd been shipped off to a conveniently distant position of little importance, where he would have few chances to embarrass the family.

But though the Bashir of Udara had accepted a Barents Resident, he resolutely opposed any of the neighboring Independent Tribal Territories accepting such a resident or having any direct diplomatic relations with the Trading Society. The events of recent years made the reasons easy enough to understand. One by one, the states neighboring Udara had come under the Bashir's control and lost their independence. A Resident in a conquered state might have complained to the Trading Society, might even have got official support against yet another Udaran conquest. So long as Udara was the only state in the High Jagirs with a resident representative of Barents, the Bashir could presumably count on Udaran interests being represented in Valentin to the exclusion of those of the conquered territories. Phalap, the Seven Villages, Rudhatta, Thamboon, Narumalar were just names to the Barentsians of Valentin, fragments of an empire that had dissolved into feuds and chaos long before their arrival. Udara itself was scarcely more than that in the general Valentin consciousness.

All of which was too complicated to explain to Calandra in the few muttered words they had an opportunity to exchange on the way, and of no particular use to them anyway, as far as Gabrel could see. The only lever he might be able to use was the fact that at least some of the advisers to Yadleen, Vakil of Dharampal, were evidently not in favor of lying down while Udara trampled over them. Certainly Harsajjan wasn't—

But Harsajjan himself, according to this young captain of infantry, had signed the orders for their detention. Gabrel felt himself lost in puzzles and ancient intrigues beyond his capability to decipher.

That was, however, no excuse for not at least trying.

Yadleen's "palace" turned out to be merely an open, airy building perched, naturally, at the very top of the mountain. It had an air of rustic simplicity and freshness that matched Gabrel's impressions of the young Vakil as a direct and honorable man, trying to do the right thing by his subjects while treading a political maze laid down in the days of the ancient empire. Wide, low-ceilinged rooms roofed with cedar and walled with white plaster opened onto dazzling blue-and-gold vistas of sky and mountains; the snowy breezes of the highest Jagirs blew straight through the rooms when the screens were rolled up, as they were today. The air was chill for travelers coming direct from the lowlands, whose ghaya-skin cloaks were still rolled up in the packs that had been confiscated, but Gabrel preferred it to the usual stale air and sweet smoky smells of rooms closed up against the winter cold. Even Yadleen's chair of state was just that, no throne, but a plain straight armchair of dark wood whose only decoration was the patina of decades. The Vakil inspected his prisoners' faces with a searching stare as they entered, and Gabrel straightened as well as he could in the ropes that bound his arms.

"Leutnant Eskelinen." Yadleen made hard work of pronouncing the foreign rank and name, but they were recognizable. He went on more easily in Kalapriyan. "You may explain yourself."

"Explain?" Gabrel decided there was nothing to lose by taking a high hand—verbally, anyway. "The explanations are due to me! Is this how the Vakil of Dharampal greets his friends? Or is the Vakil about to apologize for a gross error? The Honorable Trading Society of Barents can forgive a mistake. A deliberate insult to its representatives is another thing."

The soldiers lined up against either wall stirred, but the Vakil motioned them to remain where they were.

"Most of my 'friends,' " Yadleen said mildly enough, "come to Dharampal openly, not sneaking across its borders. You have been accused of attempting to smuggle an outlander witch into our territories for the purpose of creating internal disruption." His glance toward Indukanta Jagat left Gabrel in no doubt as to who had made the accusation.

"A witch?" Gabrel tried to look indignant and surprised. "My lord Vakil knows that we of Barents do not believe in witchcraft."

Yadleen waved a negligent hand. "Please do not waste my time in arguing theology. Witches undeniably exist, as do ifreets and spirits of the air; you may say you do not believe in the High Jagirs, but that will not save you from freezing in the snow if you try to cross the wrong pass in winter. The question here is whether you brought this woman into our lands knowingly, or whether you are innocent of her plans."

"She is not a witch, but an ordinary woman of my people."

"She does not look like your people." Yadleen's casual glance contrasted Maris's short, slender figure, olive skin, and tumbled black curls with Gabrel, a standard-issue tall fair Barentsian. "Although I must admit she does not look like a powerful witch, either."

"May the Vakil's wisdom and beard increase," Indukanta Jagat put in. "These Diplomatai are clever enough to conceal their otherworldly powers until such time as it benefits them to use them."

His indiscreet use of the foreign word gave Gabrel the clue he needed. "Has the Vakil been told that this woman is a Diplomat?" He laughed loudly. "What a tale! If she were a Diplo, we'd have flown out of our prison as easily as a bird leaves a tree. What has the Vakil heard of Diplos?"

"Our honored friend Indukanta Jagat," Yadleen said, with a glance toward Jagat that was anything but friendly, "tells us that the Diplomatai—what were your words, Jagat? 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'—was that not it?"

Indukanta Jagat bowed.

"Well then!" Gabrel nodded toward Maris. "Why did this so-powerful Diplo allow your soldiers to capture us?"

"Perhaps she was taken by surprise," Yadleen suggested.

"And does the Vakil know why she has not yet spoken to him?"

Yadleen's eyebrows shot up. "A woman speak to the Vakil, when there is a man to speak for her?"

"Ah. But by the account of your 'friend' Indukanta Jagat—" Gabrel allowed a little sarcasm in his voice "—this is no ordinary woman but a Diplo. Don't you think she would speak for herself if she could? But she has so little mastery of your tongue that she does not even understand what we are saying now. She has been studying the language on our way here but has not yet reached the point where she can carry on an ordinary conversation, much less speak for herself before the Vakil."

"It is difficult to prove that someone does not speak a language," Yadleen observed.

"Well, I can certainly prove that she has been studying it!" Gabrel shot back. "Ask your captain, here, to bring forth our packs, and I shall show you the evidence."

There was a necessary delay while the packs, left behind in the courtyard where they had been held prisoner, were sent for. While they waited, the Vakil ordered chairs brought for Gabrel and Maris, had his servants bring them cups of fruit sorbet chilled in the mountain snows, and even allowed their bonds to be loosened so that they could hold the cups for themselves.

"We're making progress," Gabrel muttered to Maris.

"How? What have you been saying? I can't understand more than a word here and there."

"Good, that's maybe going to help get us out of here. Keep right on not understanding. I'll explain later." Indukanta Jagat was protesting to the Vakil that the prisoners should not be allowed to confer in their outlander tongue, and Gabrel didn't want to upset the delicate progress of negotiations by letting their conversation become an issue.

When the packs were brought, Gabrel requested the captain to open the one belonging to the woman and bring out "those articles which one of your men thought were used for women's purposes."

One of the soldiers upended Maris's pack and spilled the contents out onto the polished wooden floor. With an expression of distaste on his aristocratic features, the captain picked through the litter and eventually retrieved one of the small fibrous plugs. "This?"

"Yes. If you look at it closely, you will see it is far too small to be used for the purpose you mentioned."

The captain shrugged. "Village women use sundhu bark. It expands when, ah, with moisture. Besides, outlander women may be, um, smaller." Reddish-brown splotches of color rose on his face.

"She is made after the manner of all women," Gabrel asserted, "but it is not necessary to humiliate her by putting this to the test. Just insert the plug in your ear, Captain."

"What?" The captain's face was quite red now, clashing vilely with his scarlet uniform.

"It's not a joke, Captain," Gabrel said. "These are not what you thought, but tools for learning languages. You will hear an elementary lesson in Kalapriyan grammar if you insert the plug into your ear."

The captain brought the plug close to the side of his head with a dubious expression.

"It doesn't activate until it's fitted into the ear," Gabrel said.

"Activate?"

"Ah—speak."

With a look of determination, as if he thought it equally probable that his head would explode as soon as he inserted the thing, the captain compressed the plug in two fingers and pushed it into his own ear.

"Ai! Devil voices!" he exclaimed, reaching to pull it out.

"No, listen!"

A moment later the captain looked more amused than apprehensive.

"What do the voices say, Captain?" Yadleen demanded.

"Um—Dhulaishta, dhulaishtami, dhulaishtaiyen," the captain recited. "Varaishta, varaishtami, varaishtaiyen. Kudjiishta—"

"Enough," Yadleen said, smiling for the first time, "you will make me think I am back with my tutor!" He looked at Gabrel. "It really is a lesson in the grammar of our language."

"I told you," Gabrel said, smiling back, and too relieved to remember the polite mode of addressing the Vakil in third person only.

"But it is also a strong magic, to capture these voices and imprison them in such a tiny thing."

"No magic," Gabrel said, "only the skills of my people. The Vakil knows we come from the stars; there are many things we can do which we are forbidden to reveal to the people of Kalapriya. The point is, this woman doesn't speak your language, and she is having to work just as hard at learning it as I did, or any other outlander. These stories of her special powers are tales to frighten children."

"And the weapons?"

"The Vakil may ask if any were found in our packs."

The captain was shaking his head before the Vakil even framed the question.

"The Vakil may remember that the Diplomatai are said to carry weapons concealed in their bodies," Indukanta Jagat put in.

"An assertion rather difficult to test without killing the subject," Yadleen commented.

"And one the Vakil already knows to be ridiculous," Gabrel said quickly, "since if we were in possession of such wonderful weapons, surely we should not have allowed ourselves to be captured and brought here like this!"

"At least have them searched more thoroughly," Jagat said.

Gabrel tried again to straighten his shoulders against the ropes that bound his arms. "Search me if you like," he said, "but an insult to this woman under my protection is an insult to the Barents Trading Society!"

Jagat shrugged. "If the Vakil is afraid of the Society, of course there is no more to be said."

His words raised a flush of anger on Yadleen's dark-ivory cheeks and Gabrel tensed. What if Calandra were in fact carrying secret weapons? He dared not ask her now.

"The Vakil of Dharampal fears neither the Barents Trading Society nor the upstart empire of Udara," Yadleen said after a moment's visible struggle to control his anger. "We will convene our council to consider this matter further. In the meantime, Captain Thanom, you shall escort the prisoners to a place where they can be kept in safety and all reasonable comfort."

"The cells of Dharampal's Stone House are comfort enough for such as these!" Jagat interrupted.

Yadleen turned an icy glance on the Udaran envoy. "Indukanta Jagat, if you think that Dharampal maintains prisons like those of Udara, your spies have much misinformed you. We have no need to confine so many of our subjects. Let me inform you of two things." He paused for so long that Jagat's face paled with the fear that he had gone too far.

"First," Yadleen said, "we have found a better use for the Stone House than the ancient Emperors who built it. Being of stone and quite solidly built, it makes an excellent granary; it can be kept almost free of rats. And second," he added as Jagat began to relax, "the last man to interrupt a Vakil of Dharampal upon his chair of state had his mouth closed by filling it with salt. That was, of course, in the time of my father of blessed memory," he went on, "but for some reason it has not been necessary to apply the penalty for many years."

"An envoy of Udara is not subject to the laws of Dharampal!" Jagat protested.

"No? But what, then, of these envoys of the Barents Trading Society?" Yadleen asked with brows slightly raised. "At one time, Indukanta Jagat, you were pleased to praise our even-handedness. Surely you would not have us treat these Barentsian envoys with any less courtesy than we have shown to your honored self." He glanced at Captain Thanom. "Escort them to the private house of my trusted councillor Harsajjan Bharat. They will not, of course, be permitted to leave the house while the council deliberates, but I would have them used with all possible courtesy short of giving them their freedom. Oh, and cut off those ropes. If we start tying up envoys from other states now, we just might get carried away and tie them all up."

By the time Maris got a chance to talk to Gabrel in reasonable privacy she was close to dying of curiosity. It clearly hadn't been safe to confer while he was—she supposed—talking for their lives in front of the ivory-skinned boy who carried himself like a great king in a historical holodrama. And even after they were untied, he had discouraged her from talking while the soldiers in red and gold escorted them to their new prison. If it was a prison? She didn't know what to make of the endless sprawling compound, with its big and little courtyards and balconies and three steps down and two steps up leading through a maze of rooms that seemed to have been designed one at a time by people with vastly differing sensibilities. And almost as soon as they got there they were separated. Gabrel seemed to understand why they were being led off in different directions and not to be worried about it, so she copied his manner of lofty unconcern.

She was surrounded by women who fluttered around her talking too quickly for her to catch more than an occasional word, all waving their hands from swathes of tissue-light shalin dyed in brilliant jewel colors until Maris felt as though she were being abducted by a flock of talkative butterflies. They touched her hair and skin lightly, as if to reassure themselves that she was human like them. The middle-aged woman who seemed to be in charge clucked with disapproval when her fingers caught in the snarls of Maris's tangled curls, and kept saying, "Ghur, ghur!"

At least that was one word Maris knew from her surreptitious ventures with the audio plugs. "Dirty, dirty, is it? Well, I'm sorry to inform you of this, but the washin' facilities in this wonderful country leave something to be . . ."

She stooped to pass under a low door curtained with layers of hanging tapestries, and came into a dark place glowing with banked fires and moist with aromatic steam.

" . . . desired," Maris finished with a longing look at the great cedar-lined sunken tub of steaming water that occupied the center of the room.

The women smiled at her and started taking off her clothes.

"I can do that for meself," Maris protested, but to no avail. She gave up, abandoned herself to events. After all, they all wanted the same thing: to get her clean.

Thoroughly, blissfully clean and totally relaxed, she corrected after an hour of their ministrations. There'd been hot steam and warm water and cold water, gentle scrubs with wads of bark that were just scratchy enough and that released a scented, soapy foam, oils and powders and massages and soft warm towels to wrap up in, more washing and combing and oiling for her hair, and finally, clean clothes in what seemed to be the style of the country—that was to say, soft loose trousers, an indecently tight upper garment, and a long pleated shalin with enough fabric in it to clothe a dozen people.

The butterfly ladies had a fine time trying to show her how to pleat the shalin into her sash so that it would stay up, and Maris had a bit of trouble getting the thing adjusted so that she could walk in it. They seemed to feel that a "proper" length was trailing an inch or so of fabric on the floor; the first step Maris took like that, she tripped on her own hem and almost fell. She tugged the fabric up above her sash to ankle height.

The middle-aged woman, whom Maris had privately christened "Boss Lady" promptly tugged it down again.

"I can't walk like that," Maris said. She searched her brain for some scraps of Kalapriyan. "Sajja, meer sajja." That meant "much long." She pulled the pleats of the shalin up into her sash again.

"Hai, hai, meer sajja," Boss Lady agreed, pulling the shalin down again.

"Much" wasn't getting her meaning across. How in the name of the God of Minor Fuckups did you say "too long"? Demons take it, she'd have to rely on sign language. Maris pulled the shalin up again, not quite as high as before, and said, "Sajja?" When Boss Lady reached for her, she skipped back, shaking her head. "Uh-uh. This here is plenty bunu sajja enough, get me?"

They compromised on a length hovering just below her ankles, which had the dubious virtue of leaving everybody dissatisfied; Maris felt constrained to take tiny, mincing steps, and Boss Lady clearly felt the occasional glimpses of bare toes verged on indecency.

"This," she announced as soon as she was back in a room with Gabrel, "is the bunu weirdest country! They don't want me to wear me good hiking boots, but they throw a fit if me toes show under this thing. And all the while their midriffs are bare as an egg and what's up top might as well be the same, for all the cover this thing gives." She tugged at the neckline of the thin, tight-fitting bodice that was supposed to preserve decency while the upper folds of the shalin floated around like butterfly wings.

"I've seen worse fashions," Gabrel said. His blue eyes were curiously light in his tanned face, as though some inner fire had been lit. "I won't complain if they concentrate on concealing the feet instead of . . . other areas."

Maris felt uncomfortably warm up top, even though her feet were still freezing from walking barefoot over floors of polished wood and stone. She curled up on one of the oversized cushions that furnished the room and wrapped the free end of her shalin around her shoulders. "So. Are we still in jail, or what? And what happened back there? I couldn't understand more'n one word in ten," she confessed.

Gabrel grinned at her; flash of white teeth against that tanned face, light sparking from blue eyes and gold in his hair . . . the man would cause a riot down in the levels on Tasman. Unfairly distracting, it was. "I know you couldn't follow the talk. That's partly what saved us. It seems the Udaran envoy has been filling the Vakil with terror-stories about the unearthly powers of Diplos and trying to convince him you're here to overthrow his throne. He relaxed considerably once I explained that you were no Diplo."

Maris felt her stomach sinking as if she'd just been dropped into free fall without warning. "You did what?"

"Oh, give it up," Gabrel said with a trace of impatience. "We haven't the luxury of playing games here. I know what you are and I can't afford to preserve your pride at the risk of my mission—and our lives."

Worse than free fall, Maris thought. She'd never wanted to throw up in zero-g, as some less fortunate Tasmans did. Right now, though . . .

"How—did you find out?" she managed through a mouth gone suddenly dry. And are you going to send me back to Tasman? No, he couldn't do that—not from here. She relaxed just a fraction.

"I've had my suspicions for some time," Gabrel said. "You just didn't seem old enough—or sure enough—or knowledgeable enough for a Diplo. And you were too open-minded. Diplos usually think they know everything about everything and wouldn't be caught dead listening to a local's information; as soon as you asked my opinion on the Kalapriyan situation I began to wonder."

And I thought I was being so clever, finding out enough from him to let me pass with the others. Maris shook her head at her own stupidity.

"Oh well. I never really thought I could get away with it," she said, as much for her benefit as his.

"You didn't have maps, your Kalapriyan was terrible, you just didn't have the prep a Diplo would require," Gabrel went on. "But what really clinched it was when I searched your pack—"

Maris let out a hiss of outrage before remembering that she wasn't in a position to be outraged.

"—and found the audio plugs of Kalapriyan for Dummies." Gabrel grinned unrepentantly. "You gave it a good try, Calandra, but that made the situation obvious."

"It did?" Then why are you still calling me Calandra? 

"You might as well admit it, I've figured everything out. You haven't graduated yet, have you? You're still in training school. You haven't even had the surgery for the download implants. But Rezerval figured, it's only another complaint by that raving paranoiac Montoyasana, why waste a fully trained Diplo; we'll send out a trainee and let her get some practice and make it look like we're taking Montoyasana seriously. Put you in a hell of a spot, didn't it?"

Maris slowly let out her breath. "You—could say that." What Johnivans had taught her was still true, even if Johnivans himself was a lying treacherous SOB. If you get caught out, say as little as possible. Let people make up their own stories about who you are and what you're doing off your proper level. Would she be in more trouble, or less, if she told him how far off his guesses were? Probably more. Gabrel wouldn't be pleased to find out he hadn't been that clever after all, and he probably would be furious to learn he'd been wasting Barents-style courtesy and chivalry on some ragamuffin from a Tasman smuggler's gang.

He might be even more furious, later on, if he found out she was still lying.

It was too dangerous. Once he found out the truth he'd probably despise her.

Eventually he'd despise her anyway. Was it so bad to let him believe his own story for a little longer? To have him treating her like a person who deserved courtesy and respect? She'd probably never get that again. She wanted just a little more of it.

They were in a dangerous situation, in foreign territory, and he deserved to know the exact truth of it.

What difference did it make? He wouldn't be expecting her to do any magical Diplo-type stunts now, either way.

Gabrel sat down beside her; his weight squashed the cushion down so that she slid against him, feeling the warmth and strength of his body. "What are you looking so worried about?"

"What happens next," Maris said truthfully.

She meant, what she did next, but Gabrel took it as a question for him and that let her off the hook for a while, anyway.

"Well, we're not exactly in jail," Gabrel said. "But we're not exactly free to go either. I guess it's a kind of house arrest—but the house belongs to my friend Harsajjan Bharat. We'll be comfortable enough, and at the moment Yadleen—that's the Vakil—seems to be considerably more pissed off at the Udaran envoy than he is at us."

He stretched his long legs out and leaned back into the cushion, hands behind his head. To avoid rolling onto his chest, Maris edged back until she was perched insecurely on the very edge of the mattress-sized cushion.

"On the other hand," he went on, "the Udaran envoy seems to think we ought to be executed out of hand."

"How can you be so calm about it?"

"Oh, Yadleen isn't going to have us killed; he can't afford to be seen as giving in to Udaran demands. Half his council would resign in protest."

"That makes me feel so safe. Can't we get out of here? We're not, like, under guard or anything, right?"

"The other half of the council is pro-Udara. They'd resign in protest."

"That," Maris said tartly, "strikes me as Yadleen's problem, not ours."

Gabrel sighed. "Calandra, by the time you graduate from Diplo School, you'll hopefully understand a little more about not upsetting the balance of power in a region. It will be much easier to carry out our mission if we leave Dharampal with the Vakil's blessing. It will also make the Udarans think twice about assassinating us on the road. Unless," he added, his face falling, "they are ready to attack Dharampal. I hadn't thought about that . . . Yadleen letting us go, or even seeming to collude in our escape, would make an excellent casus belli."

"Cassus belleye," Maris repeated. "And what might that be when it's at home, a Kalapriyan dessert? Thanks very much, but I don't want to be served up on the Bashir of Udara's dinner table. I vote we leave here, quietly, now."

"Don't you understand anything about diplomacy? That would be the worst possible—"

Gabrel broke off as the gold-brocaded hangings over the door stirred. A middle-aged Kalapriyan man in tunic and trousers as stiffly brocaded as the hangings parted the curtains. He looked tired.

"Eskelinen! I had hoped to have more time to spend with you. I am sorry to be inhospitable, but you must leave here, quietly, at once," Harsajjan Bharat announced.

Maris just managed not to say "I told you so," when Gabrel translated for her. She listened attentively while Gabrel and his Dharampal friend talked, and found that now she wasn't tied up and scared out of her wits it was a lot easier to catch bits of the conversation. Especially since she knew pretty much what it had to be about. Harsajjan Bharat thought the Udaran envoy was going to arrange to have them assassinated tonight, and he didn't want that to happen. She would have felt more grateful if it hadn't seemed to her that his main concern was the way such an event would affect the honor of his house. Oh well, maybe that wasn't true; it could be due to her not understanding court Kalapriyan real well. In any case, it appeared that they were going to get their traveling clothes and their packs back and that some of Harsajjan's people were going to smuggle them out to . . . there her limited Kalapriyan vocabulary gave out, because what came next wasn't what she was expecting. She'd thought he would say that his guides would set them on the way to Udara. Instead there was excited talk about some other place that she'd never heard of.

When Harsajjan finally left, she pounced on Gabrel for explanations and details. "All right, I got that part," she cut him off when he started to translate the whole conversation word for word. "He wants us out of here so we don't get killed in his house. What I didn't get is where we're going from here. Not into Udara, I got that much, but why? Too dangerous?" Not going to Udara seemed like an excellent idea to her . . . but she sure didn't have any better ideas. Returning to Valentin would probably not work out real well; obviously she wasn't keeping up the Diplo act well enough to fool anybody for long. If Dharampal hadn't suffered from the minor defect of being, apparently, full of Udaran assassins, she thought she could have been happy to stay right here as an involuntary guest of Harsajjan Bharat. Hot baths and clean clothes and regular meals and not even having to steal anything to justify her existence—sounded pretty good.

The likelihood of getting stabbed, beheaded, poisoned, or dismembered in the night was a definite drawback to that arrangement, though.

"Where we're going may not be any safer than Udara," Gabrel said now, "and it'll definitely be a harder journey."

Maris sighed. "More scrambling up forty-five-degree slope trails designed for goats, like we did to get here?"

"Oh, much worse than that. If this world were ever opened to tourism, rock jockeys from all over the galaxy would be coming here to climb the High Jagirs." He sounded obnoxiously cheerful at the prospect.

"Let me guess," Maris said, "rock climbing is one of your hobbies."

"How did you know?"

"Diplo intuition!" she snapped. "And in case you were wondering, mountaineering is not among my favorite sports."

Gabrel shook his head. "Rezerval must have known what the interior of Kalapriya is like. Why didn't they send somebody who could—oh, well, I suppose they only expected you to poke around Valentin for a while and then report back that Montoyasana was raising a fuss about nothing as usual." His sudden smile warmed Maris down to her freezing toes. "You have done much more than Rezerval could possibly have expected of you. I hadn't thought even a fully trained and experienced Diplo would be willing to trek into the Jagirs, much less a kid who hasn't even finished the course work or had the surgeries yet." He looked thoughtful. "That's another thing that made me wonder about you. You're not thirty, Calandra. Nowhere near. How old are you really?"

"Does it matter?" Maris fenced. Give Gabrel time and he'd probably tell her how old he thought she was, then all she'd have to do is agree.

"Let's see, Diplo School doesn't take candidates under eighteen, and they wouldn't have let a first- or second-year student go out alone; you must be almost through with the classes and on a waiting list for surgery. So, twenty-three, twenty-four, something like that?"

"Something like that," Maris agreed. Sounded a lot better than the truth, although she did wonder—briefly—how Gabrel would react to that. I'm almost seventeen . . . I think. Definitely not the right thing to say at this point. She kept her mouth shut and let him go on explaining their immediate plans.

Apparently Harsajjan Bharat meant to smuggle them out of his compound as soon as it was dark, guiding them out of Dharamvai to meet a messenger from the Udaran resistance.

"There's a resistance movement?"

"Even the Bashir of Udara hasn't managed to kill everybody who disagrees with his methods."

This messenger knew a Diplo was being sent to investigate the allegations of illegal weapons trading, and according to him, the place to look was not in Udara proper but in a remote complex of caves in the former state of Thamboon. There, he had told Harsajjan, the outlanders would find evidence and explanation of all that was going on.

"Or a quick death," Maris suggested. "How do we know we can trust this guy?"

"We don't," Gabrel admitted. "But Harsajjan seems to think he's genuine . . . and anyway, you have a better idea?"

Maris shook her head.

"Well then. Fortunately, they haven't washed our traveling clothes yet, so we can put them right back on."

Mixed blessing, Maris thought. All that bathing and massaging and here she was going to smell like a goat again after ten minutes in that filthy outfit. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to walk again.

"And, Calandra . . ."

It took Maris a moment to remember that Gabrel still didn't know her true name. "Yes?"

"There's no need to let this Chulayen Vajjadara, the Udaran resistance contact, know you're not yet a fully trained Diplo. It might shake his confidence in us."

"Understood," Maris murmured.

She did wish, irrationally, that Gabrel would call her by her own name just once. But obviously this was no time to explain just how unlike a fully trained Diplo she really was, and he was too sharp for her to think she could confess to the one lie without getting into the whole tangle.

Besides, she reminded herself, he wouldn't like or respect Maris Nobody from the slums of Tasman. It was "Calandra Vissi" he was being nice to.

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Framed

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Chapter Fourteen
Dharampal on Kalapriya

When the soldiers from Dharampal surrounded them, Gabrel immediately demanded to be taken straight to their Vakil. He went on demanding this, with increasing loudness and firmness, while the soldiers tied their hands and feet and went through their packs.

"There's no need to play with those," the captain of the troop reproved a young soldier who was looking with interest at some fibrous plugs that had fallen to the ground when he shook out Maris's packed clothes.

Gabrel stopped his loud complaints for a moment to listen. He recognized what the young recruit had found, if the captain didn't.

"Looks like outlander magic to me," the soldier said defensively.

"Red Radhana take you, fool," said the captain. "They're obviously some of the things women use at, you know, their private times."

"Huh?"

The captain's face turned dark reddish brown and he pressed his lips together while one of the older soldiers shouted an offer to take young Varisha aside and explain about women to him. "Later, Odaka," the captain said. "Later you can take him to a brothel and demonstrate, if you like, but right now we're to bring these two in unharmed." He looked reflectively at the red marks on Gabrel's chin, where bruises would soon rise. "Reasonably unharmed. Now put all their outlander stuff back in the packs, and since you and Varisha are so interested in it, Odaka, the two of you can carry them. We'll turn the ghaya loose; they'll find good enough grazing along the river."

"Worth good money, those ghaya," Odaka grumbled, but he followed the captain's orders.

"Ghaya can't manage the paths we're taking," the captain said, "although why I bother to explain anything to you blockheads I do not know."

Hands bound in front of them, led on short ropes by two soldiers, Maris and Gabrel had a hellishly uncomfortable stumbling journey over mountain paths steeper and narrower than anything Maris, at least, had encountered before. The captain made no allowance for light or dark, and in the interval between sunset and moonrise they both collected a number of fresh bruises and scrapes from falling over rocks and thorn bushes that the locals avoided as if by instinct.

"I want to see the Vakil," Gabrel repeated at intervals, whenever the steep scrambling climb left him breath to make the demand.

"That's up to the Vakil, not to you or me," the captain said, reasonably politely, the first five or six times.

"He will be most annoyed to find that his good friend Gabrel Eskelinen has been mistreated this way."

The captain snorted. "That why he told me to bring his good friend Eskelinen at a rope's end? And the witch who travels with you, she a buddy of the Vakil's too?"

"Did he issue his orders personally?" Gabrel demanded. "Or did you have them from someone else—Minister Kansiya, perhaps? Does Yadleen even know what's going on?"

"The Vakil, may his beard increase, knows and sees all that is within the bounds of Dharampal," the captain said, but after that he allowed the marching pace to slacken a little and even loosened Gabrel's bonds so that he could catch himself when he stumbled. "Sorry about the witch," he said, looking at Maris, "but I daren't take any chances with her."

Gabrel started to complain again, but the captain interrupted him. "And if either of you say anything else, I'm to have you gagged. We've been warned that these outlander witches can corrupt honest men's thoughts, and maybe work worse magic, with their spells. I can't take the risk she might be working through your speech . . . you understand?"

"You'd better hope my friend Harsajjan Bharat, the Vakil's adviser, understands," Gabrel warned him.

The captain sighed. "And just who do you think signed the orders to bring you to the palace under guard? And told me to waste no time about it?" He patted the embroidered pouch tucked into his tunic sash, where stiff papers crackled under his hands.

After that Gabrel stopped arguing and saved his breath for getting up the mountain paths, and helping Maris when he could. At least the soldiers didn't seem to object to their walking together, though they were quick to interrupt any whispered conversation.

They reached the crest of the hills overlooking Dharamvai just after dawn, when the crude buildings of wood and mud were given a fleeting glory by the slanting red-gold light of the sun, the carvings that decorated every doorway and balcony thrown into high relief, and the piles of ordure in the gutters mercifully concealed by morning shadows. Gabrel could have wept at the irony of it. He'd dreamed of showing this mountain kingdom he had come to love to this girl whom—whom he had come to like a great deal—in just such a light, hoping that she would see the beauty and the decayed grandeur of this relic of empire as he did.

His dreams had not involved their being dragged down the mountain trail at a rope's end, jerked this way and that and staggering with weariness, hands bound before them like prisoners on their way to execution.

Not that it would come to that, of course. As soon as he had a chance to speak with Harsajjan, or even the Vakil, this foolish mistake would be cleared up. Gabrel resolved that he would beg the Vakil not to deal too harshly with the captain, who had dealt fairly with them within his understanding of the orders. He seemed to be a decent man overall; the mistake was doubtless not his fault.

And it was less troubling to think about begging the Vakil's mercy for the captain than to wonder whether he might be in need of it for himself and Maris.

Once within the walls of Dharamvai, after following tortuous narrow passages between leaning houses to a muddy and desolate walled yard, Gabrel was so tired that he actually sat down and fell asleep against the wall. He woke with a shock from a pleasant dream whose details vanished into the air even as his consciousness returned. It was close to noon, the sun falling as directly into this narrow yard as it ever could, and his pillow was the lap of the Honored Diplomat Vissi. He jerked upright, a stammered apology on his lips.

"It doesn't matter," the Diplo said. "I wouldn't have waked you now, only I think something is about to happen."

Something was indeed happening. The heavy gate of the courtyard swung open, pushed by a dark man in a blue and silver uniform who glanced at the prisoners and said, "On your feet, and quick about it!"

"I demand to see the Vakil," Gabrel said.

"You come with me, then."

The stranger's demands were interrupted by a file of soldiers in the red and gold of Dharampal, headed by the captain who had taken Gabrel and his companion prisoner the night before.

"Honorable Envoy Jagat," the captain said with a low bow that somehow was not at all respectful, "I am commanded to escort the prisoners to the Vakil's midday audience."

"My master wishes them brought to him."

"Should the Vakil, may his beard increase, so direct me, I shall be honored to bring the outlanders to the borders of Udara for your men to take over. Naturally the Bashir of Udara would not so insult the Vakil as to send soldiers into a country with which he still has peaceful relations. But for now, as I told you, my orders are to bring them before the Vakil himself."

Gabrel observed Calandra blinking rapidly and looking from side to side as though she were doing her best to follow the conversation. "They're arguing about who takes us out of here," he explained in a cautious undertone. "If we get any choice, we want to go with the guys in red."

"Why?" Calandra whispered back. "They're the ones who tied us up in the first place!"

"They're locals. I used to have a friend at the court here; if I can speak with him, everything will be all right. The other fellow is from Udara. We don't want to be prisoners of the Bashir of Udara, trust me." Gabrel wasn't sure exactly what happened to all the political opponents of the Bashir who had "disappeared" over the years, but then he didn't much care about the details—whether they had been beheaded, or strangled, or simply dropped over a mountain cliff hardly made much difference. The one thing they didn't do was come back from the Bashir's prisons to discuss their experiences.

After some more reasonably polite fencing, the man in blue and silver, whose name appeared to be Indukanta Jagat, gave in to the irrefutable argument of the twenty soldiers behind the captain and agreed that the Vakil might have audience with his own prisoners. He insisted on accompanying them, which did not reassure Gabrel, but he comforted himself with the thought that the alternative would have been much worse.

The palace of the Vakil was unfamiliar to Gabrel; on his previous visits to Dharampal, he had stayed in private houses—in the sprawling compound of Harsajjan himself, last time—and the Vakil had met him incognito, in the unconvincing disguise of a young merchant, which everybody politely pretended not to see through. It had been that dangerous, already, for the ruler of a state close to Udara to show favor to a representative of the Barents Trading Society.

On the way to the palace, he occupied his mind by thinking out the politics of the matter. Udara itself had had a Barents Society Resident for some years, one Lorum van Vechten, of whom Gabrel knew little except that the man had been completely unhelpful as to local information about the Independent Tribal Territories of the High Jagirs. He came of an Old Trader family, had studied offworld, and done some kind of scientific or medical work before returning to Kalapriya, and the way people in Valentin avoided talking about him had left Gabrel with the impression that van Vechten was a minor family black sheep who'd been shipped off to a conveniently distant position of little importance, where he would have few chances to embarrass the family.

But though the Bashir of Udara had accepted a Barents Resident, he resolutely opposed any of the neighboring Independent Tribal Territories accepting such a resident or having any direct diplomatic relations with the Trading Society. The events of recent years made the reasons easy enough to understand. One by one, the states neighboring Udara had come under the Bashir's control and lost their independence. A Resident in a conquered state might have complained to the Trading Society, might even have got official support against yet another Udaran conquest. So long as Udara was the only state in the High Jagirs with a resident representative of Barents, the Bashir could presumably count on Udaran interests being represented in Valentin to the exclusion of those of the conquered territories. Phalap, the Seven Villages, Rudhatta, Thamboon, Narumalar were just names to the Barentsians of Valentin, fragments of an empire that had dissolved into feuds and chaos long before their arrival. Udara itself was scarcely more than that in the general Valentin consciousness.

All of which was too complicated to explain to Calandra in the few muttered words they had an opportunity to exchange on the way, and of no particular use to them anyway, as far as Gabrel could see. The only lever he might be able to use was the fact that at least some of the advisers to Yadleen, Vakil of Dharampal, were evidently not in favor of lying down while Udara trampled over them. Certainly Harsajjan wasn't—

But Harsajjan himself, according to this young captain of infantry, had signed the orders for their detention. Gabrel felt himself lost in puzzles and ancient intrigues beyond his capability to decipher.

That was, however, no excuse for not at least trying.

Yadleen's "palace" turned out to be merely an open, airy building perched, naturally, at the very top of the mountain. It had an air of rustic simplicity and freshness that matched Gabrel's impressions of the young Vakil as a direct and honorable man, trying to do the right thing by his subjects while treading a political maze laid down in the days of the ancient empire. Wide, low-ceilinged rooms roofed with cedar and walled with white plaster opened onto dazzling blue-and-gold vistas of sky and mountains; the snowy breezes of the highest Jagirs blew straight through the rooms when the screens were rolled up, as they were today. The air was chill for travelers coming direct from the lowlands, whose ghaya-skin cloaks were still rolled up in the packs that had been confiscated, but Gabrel preferred it to the usual stale air and sweet smoky smells of rooms closed up against the winter cold. Even Yadleen's chair of state was just that, no throne, but a plain straight armchair of dark wood whose only decoration was the patina of decades. The Vakil inspected his prisoners' faces with a searching stare as they entered, and Gabrel straightened as well as he could in the ropes that bound his arms.

"Leutnant Eskelinen." Yadleen made hard work of pronouncing the foreign rank and name, but they were recognizable. He went on more easily in Kalapriyan. "You may explain yourself."

"Explain?" Gabrel decided there was nothing to lose by taking a high hand—verbally, anyway. "The explanations are due to me! Is this how the Vakil of Dharampal greets his friends? Or is the Vakil about to apologize for a gross error? The Honorable Trading Society of Barents can forgive a mistake. A deliberate insult to its representatives is another thing."

The soldiers lined up against either wall stirred, but the Vakil motioned them to remain where they were.

"Most of my 'friends,' " Yadleen said mildly enough, "come to Dharampal openly, not sneaking across its borders. You have been accused of attempting to smuggle an outlander witch into our territories for the purpose of creating internal disruption." His glance toward Indukanta Jagat left Gabrel in no doubt as to who had made the accusation.

"A witch?" Gabrel tried to look indignant and surprised. "My lord Vakil knows that we of Barents do not believe in witchcraft."

Yadleen waved a negligent hand. "Please do not waste my time in arguing theology. Witches undeniably exist, as do ifreets and spirits of the air; you may say you do not believe in the High Jagirs, but that will not save you from freezing in the snow if you try to cross the wrong pass in winter. The question here is whether you brought this woman into our lands knowingly, or whether you are innocent of her plans."

"She is not a witch, but an ordinary woman of my people."

"She does not look like your people." Yadleen's casual glance contrasted Maris's short, slender figure, olive skin, and tumbled black curls with Gabrel, a standard-issue tall fair Barentsian. "Although I must admit she does not look like a powerful witch, either."

"May the Vakil's wisdom and beard increase," Indukanta Jagat put in. "These Diplomatai are clever enough to conceal their otherworldly powers until such time as it benefits them to use them."

His indiscreet use of the foreign word gave Gabrel the clue he needed. "Has the Vakil been told that this woman is a Diplomat?" He laughed loudly. "What a tale! If she were a Diplo, we'd have flown out of our prison as easily as a bird leaves a tree. What has the Vakil heard of Diplos?"

"Our honored friend Indukanta Jagat," Yadleen said, with a glance toward Jagat that was anything but friendly, "tells us that the Diplomatai—what were your words, Jagat? 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'—was that not it?"

Indukanta Jagat bowed.

"Well then!" Gabrel nodded toward Maris. "Why did this so-powerful Diplo allow your soldiers to capture us?"

"Perhaps she was taken by surprise," Yadleen suggested.

"And does the Vakil know why she has not yet spoken to him?"

Yadleen's eyebrows shot up. "A woman speak to the Vakil, when there is a man to speak for her?"

"Ah. But by the account of your 'friend' Indukanta Jagat—" Gabrel allowed a little sarcasm in his voice "—this is no ordinary woman but a Diplo. Don't you think she would speak for herself if she could? But she has so little mastery of your tongue that she does not even understand what we are saying now. She has been studying the language on our way here but has not yet reached the point where she can carry on an ordinary conversation, much less speak for herself before the Vakil."

"It is difficult to prove that someone does not speak a language," Yadleen observed.

"Well, I can certainly prove that she has been studying it!" Gabrel shot back. "Ask your captain, here, to bring forth our packs, and I shall show you the evidence."

There was a necessary delay while the packs, left behind in the courtyard where they had been held prisoner, were sent for. While they waited, the Vakil ordered chairs brought for Gabrel and Maris, had his servants bring them cups of fruit sorbet chilled in the mountain snows, and even allowed their bonds to be loosened so that they could hold the cups for themselves.

"We're making progress," Gabrel muttered to Maris.

"How? What have you been saying? I can't understand more than a word here and there."

"Good, that's maybe going to help get us out of here. Keep right on not understanding. I'll explain later." Indukanta Jagat was protesting to the Vakil that the prisoners should not be allowed to confer in their outlander tongue, and Gabrel didn't want to upset the delicate progress of negotiations by letting their conversation become an issue.

When the packs were brought, Gabrel requested the captain to open the one belonging to the woman and bring out "those articles which one of your men thought were used for women's purposes."

One of the soldiers upended Maris's pack and spilled the contents out onto the polished wooden floor. With an expression of distaste on his aristocratic features, the captain picked through the litter and eventually retrieved one of the small fibrous plugs. "This?"

"Yes. If you look at it closely, you will see it is far too small to be used for the purpose you mentioned."

The captain shrugged. "Village women use sundhu bark. It expands when, ah, with moisture. Besides, outlander women may be, um, smaller." Reddish-brown splotches of color rose on his face.

"She is made after the manner of all women," Gabrel asserted, "but it is not necessary to humiliate her by putting this to the test. Just insert the plug in your ear, Captain."

"What?" The captain's face was quite red now, clashing vilely with his scarlet uniform.

"It's not a joke, Captain," Gabrel said. "These are not what you thought, but tools for learning languages. You will hear an elementary lesson in Kalapriyan grammar if you insert the plug into your ear."

The captain brought the plug close to the side of his head with a dubious expression.

"It doesn't activate until it's fitted into the ear," Gabrel said.

"Activate?"

"Ah—speak."

With a look of determination, as if he thought it equally probable that his head would explode as soon as he inserted the thing, the captain compressed the plug in two fingers and pushed it into his own ear.

"Ai! Devil voices!" he exclaimed, reaching to pull it out.

"No, listen!"

A moment later the captain looked more amused than apprehensive.

"What do the voices say, Captain?" Yadleen demanded.

"Um—Dhulaishta, dhulaishtami, dhulaishtaiyen," the captain recited. "Varaishta, varaishtami, varaishtaiyen. Kudjiishta—"

"Enough," Yadleen said, smiling for the first time, "you will make me think I am back with my tutor!" He looked at Gabrel. "It really is a lesson in the grammar of our language."

"I told you," Gabrel said, smiling back, and too relieved to remember the polite mode of addressing the Vakil in third person only.

"But it is also a strong magic, to capture these voices and imprison them in such a tiny thing."

"No magic," Gabrel said, "only the skills of my people. The Vakil knows we come from the stars; there are many things we can do which we are forbidden to reveal to the people of Kalapriya. The point is, this woman doesn't speak your language, and she is having to work just as hard at learning it as I did, or any other outlander. These stories of her special powers are tales to frighten children."

"And the weapons?"

"The Vakil may ask if any were found in our packs."

The captain was shaking his head before the Vakil even framed the question.

"The Vakil may remember that the Diplomatai are said to carry weapons concealed in their bodies," Indukanta Jagat put in.

"An assertion rather difficult to test without killing the subject," Yadleen commented.

"And one the Vakil already knows to be ridiculous," Gabrel said quickly, "since if we were in possession of such wonderful weapons, surely we should not have allowed ourselves to be captured and brought here like this!"

"At least have them searched more thoroughly," Jagat said.

Gabrel tried again to straighten his shoulders against the ropes that bound his arms. "Search me if you like," he said, "but an insult to this woman under my protection is an insult to the Barents Trading Society!"

Jagat shrugged. "If the Vakil is afraid of the Society, of course there is no more to be said."

His words raised a flush of anger on Yadleen's dark-ivory cheeks and Gabrel tensed. What if Calandra were in fact carrying secret weapons? He dared not ask her now.

"The Vakil of Dharampal fears neither the Barents Trading Society nor the upstart empire of Udara," Yadleen said after a moment's visible struggle to control his anger. "We will convene our council to consider this matter further. In the meantime, Captain Thanom, you shall escort the prisoners to a place where they can be kept in safety and all reasonable comfort."

"The cells of Dharampal's Stone House are comfort enough for such as these!" Jagat interrupted.

Yadleen turned an icy glance on the Udaran envoy. "Indukanta Jagat, if you think that Dharampal maintains prisons like those of Udara, your spies have much misinformed you. We have no need to confine so many of our subjects. Let me inform you of two things." He paused for so long that Jagat's face paled with the fear that he had gone too far.

"First," Yadleen said, "we have found a better use for the Stone House than the ancient Emperors who built it. Being of stone and quite solidly built, it makes an excellent granary; it can be kept almost free of rats. And second," he added as Jagat began to relax, "the last man to interrupt a Vakil of Dharampal upon his chair of state had his mouth closed by filling it with salt. That was, of course, in the time of my father of blessed memory," he went on, "but for some reason it has not been necessary to apply the penalty for many years."

"An envoy of Udara is not subject to the laws of Dharampal!" Jagat protested.

"No? But what, then, of these envoys of the Barents Trading Society?" Yadleen asked with brows slightly raised. "At one time, Indukanta Jagat, you were pleased to praise our even-handedness. Surely you would not have us treat these Barentsian envoys with any less courtesy than we have shown to your honored self." He glanced at Captain Thanom. "Escort them to the private house of my trusted councillor Harsajjan Bharat. They will not, of course, be permitted to leave the house while the council deliberates, but I would have them used with all possible courtesy short of giving them their freedom. Oh, and cut off those ropes. If we start tying up envoys from other states now, we just might get carried away and tie them all up."

By the time Maris got a chance to talk to Gabrel in reasonable privacy she was close to dying of curiosity. It clearly hadn't been safe to confer while he was—she supposed—talking for their lives in front of the ivory-skinned boy who carried himself like a great king in a historical holodrama. And even after they were untied, he had discouraged her from talking while the soldiers in red and gold escorted them to their new prison. If it was a prison? She didn't know what to make of the endless sprawling compound, with its big and little courtyards and balconies and three steps down and two steps up leading through a maze of rooms that seemed to have been designed one at a time by people with vastly differing sensibilities. And almost as soon as they got there they were separated. Gabrel seemed to understand why they were being led off in different directions and not to be worried about it, so she copied his manner of lofty unconcern.

She was surrounded by women who fluttered around her talking too quickly for her to catch more than an occasional word, all waving their hands from swathes of tissue-light shalin dyed in brilliant jewel colors until Maris felt as though she were being abducted by a flock of talkative butterflies. They touched her hair and skin lightly, as if to reassure themselves that she was human like them. The middle-aged woman who seemed to be in charge clucked with disapproval when her fingers caught in the snarls of Maris's tangled curls, and kept saying, "Ghur, ghur!"

At least that was one word Maris knew from her surreptitious ventures with the audio plugs. "Dirty, dirty, is it? Well, I'm sorry to inform you of this, but the washin' facilities in this wonderful country leave something to be . . ."

She stooped to pass under a low door curtained with layers of hanging tapestries, and came into a dark place glowing with banked fires and moist with aromatic steam.

" . . . desired," Maris finished with a longing look at the great cedar-lined sunken tub of steaming water that occupied the center of the room.

The women smiled at her and started taking off her clothes.

"I can do that for meself," Maris protested, but to no avail. She gave up, abandoned herself to events. After all, they all wanted the same thing: to get her clean.

Thoroughly, blissfully clean and totally relaxed, she corrected after an hour of their ministrations. There'd been hot steam and warm water and cold water, gentle scrubs with wads of bark that were just scratchy enough and that released a scented, soapy foam, oils and powders and massages and soft warm towels to wrap up in, more washing and combing and oiling for her hair, and finally, clean clothes in what seemed to be the style of the country—that was to say, soft loose trousers, an indecently tight upper garment, and a long pleated shalin with enough fabric in it to clothe a dozen people.

The butterfly ladies had a fine time trying to show her how to pleat the shalin into her sash so that it would stay up, and Maris had a bit of trouble getting the thing adjusted so that she could walk in it. They seemed to feel that a "proper" length was trailing an inch or so of fabric on the floor; the first step Maris took like that, she tripped on her own hem and almost fell. She tugged the fabric up above her sash to ankle height.

The middle-aged woman, whom Maris had privately christened "Boss Lady" promptly tugged it down again.

"I can't walk like that," Maris said. She searched her brain for some scraps of Kalapriyan. "Sajja, meer sajja." That meant "much long." She pulled the pleats of the shalin up into her sash again.

"Hai, hai, meer sajja," Boss Lady agreed, pulling the shalin down again.

"Much" wasn't getting her meaning across. How in the name of the God of Minor Fuckups did you say "too long"? Demons take it, she'd have to rely on sign language. Maris pulled the shalin up again, not quite as high as before, and said, "Sajja?" When Boss Lady reached for her, she skipped back, shaking her head. "Uh-uh. This here is plenty bunu sajja enough, get me?"

They compromised on a length hovering just below her ankles, which had the dubious virtue of leaving everybody dissatisfied; Maris felt constrained to take tiny, mincing steps, and Boss Lady clearly felt the occasional glimpses of bare toes verged on indecency.

"This," she announced as soon as she was back in a room with Gabrel, "is the bunu weirdest country! They don't want me to wear me good hiking boots, but they throw a fit if me toes show under this thing. And all the while their midriffs are bare as an egg and what's up top might as well be the same, for all the cover this thing gives." She tugged at the neckline of the thin, tight-fitting bodice that was supposed to preserve decency while the upper folds of the shalin floated around like butterfly wings.

"I've seen worse fashions," Gabrel said. His blue eyes were curiously light in his tanned face, as though some inner fire had been lit. "I won't complain if they concentrate on concealing the feet instead of . . . other areas."

Maris felt uncomfortably warm up top, even though her feet were still freezing from walking barefoot over floors of polished wood and stone. She curled up on one of the oversized cushions that furnished the room and wrapped the free end of her shalin around her shoulders. "So. Are we still in jail, or what? And what happened back there? I couldn't understand more'n one word in ten," she confessed.

Gabrel grinned at her; flash of white teeth against that tanned face, light sparking from blue eyes and gold in his hair . . . the man would cause a riot down in the levels on Tasman. Unfairly distracting, it was. "I know you couldn't follow the talk. That's partly what saved us. It seems the Udaran envoy has been filling the Vakil with terror-stories about the unearthly powers of Diplos and trying to convince him you're here to overthrow his throne. He relaxed considerably once I explained that you were no Diplo."

Maris felt her stomach sinking as if she'd just been dropped into free fall without warning. "You did what?"

"Oh, give it up," Gabrel said with a trace of impatience. "We haven't the luxury of playing games here. I know what you are and I can't afford to preserve your pride at the risk of my mission—and our lives."

Worse than free fall, Maris thought. She'd never wanted to throw up in zero-g, as some less fortunate Tasmans did. Right now, though . . .

"How—did you find out?" she managed through a mouth gone suddenly dry. And are you going to send me back to Tasman? No, he couldn't do that—not from here. She relaxed just a fraction.

"I've had my suspicions for some time," Gabrel said. "You just didn't seem old enough—or sure enough—or knowledgeable enough for a Diplo. And you were too open-minded. Diplos usually think they know everything about everything and wouldn't be caught dead listening to a local's information; as soon as you asked my opinion on the Kalapriyan situation I began to wonder."

And I thought I was being so clever, finding out enough from him to let me pass with the others. Maris shook her head at her own stupidity.

"Oh well. I never really thought I could get away with it," she said, as much for her benefit as his.

"You didn't have maps, your Kalapriyan was terrible, you just didn't have the prep a Diplo would require," Gabrel went on. "But what really clinched it was when I searched your pack—"

Maris let out a hiss of outrage before remembering that she wasn't in a position to be outraged.

"—and found the audio plugs of Kalapriyan for Dummies." Gabrel grinned unrepentantly. "You gave it a good try, Calandra, but that made the situation obvious."

"It did?" Then why are you still calling me Calandra? 

"You might as well admit it, I've figured everything out. You haven't graduated yet, have you? You're still in training school. You haven't even had the surgery for the download implants. But Rezerval figured, it's only another complaint by that raving paranoiac Montoyasana, why waste a fully trained Diplo; we'll send out a trainee and let her get some practice and make it look like we're taking Montoyasana seriously. Put you in a hell of a spot, didn't it?"

Maris slowly let out her breath. "You—could say that." What Johnivans had taught her was still true, even if Johnivans himself was a lying treacherous SOB. If you get caught out, say as little as possible. Let people make up their own stories about who you are and what you're doing off your proper level. Would she be in more trouble, or less, if she told him how far off his guesses were? Probably more. Gabrel wouldn't be pleased to find out he hadn't been that clever after all, and he probably would be furious to learn he'd been wasting Barents-style courtesy and chivalry on some ragamuffin from a Tasman smuggler's gang.

He might be even more furious, later on, if he found out she was still lying.

It was too dangerous. Once he found out the truth he'd probably despise her.

Eventually he'd despise her anyway. Was it so bad to let him believe his own story for a little longer? To have him treating her like a person who deserved courtesy and respect? She'd probably never get that again. She wanted just a little more of it.

They were in a dangerous situation, in foreign territory, and he deserved to know the exact truth of it.

What difference did it make? He wouldn't be expecting her to do any magical Diplo-type stunts now, either way.

Gabrel sat down beside her; his weight squashed the cushion down so that she slid against him, feeling the warmth and strength of his body. "What are you looking so worried about?"

"What happens next," Maris said truthfully.

She meant, what she did next, but Gabrel took it as a question for him and that let her off the hook for a while, anyway.

"Well, we're not exactly in jail," Gabrel said. "But we're not exactly free to go either. I guess it's a kind of house arrest—but the house belongs to my friend Harsajjan Bharat. We'll be comfortable enough, and at the moment Yadleen—that's the Vakil—seems to be considerably more pissed off at the Udaran envoy than he is at us."

He stretched his long legs out and leaned back into the cushion, hands behind his head. To avoid rolling onto his chest, Maris edged back until she was perched insecurely on the very edge of the mattress-sized cushion.

"On the other hand," he went on, "the Udaran envoy seems to think we ought to be executed out of hand."

"How can you be so calm about it?"

"Oh, Yadleen isn't going to have us killed; he can't afford to be seen as giving in to Udaran demands. Half his council would resign in protest."

"That makes me feel so safe. Can't we get out of here? We're not, like, under guard or anything, right?"

"The other half of the council is pro-Udara. They'd resign in protest."

"That," Maris said tartly, "strikes me as Yadleen's problem, not ours."

Gabrel sighed. "Calandra, by the time you graduate from Diplo School, you'll hopefully understand a little more about not upsetting the balance of power in a region. It will be much easier to carry out our mission if we leave Dharampal with the Vakil's blessing. It will also make the Udarans think twice about assassinating us on the road. Unless," he added, his face falling, "they are ready to attack Dharampal. I hadn't thought about that . . . Yadleen letting us go, or even seeming to collude in our escape, would make an excellent casus belli."

"Cassus belleye," Maris repeated. "And what might that be when it's at home, a Kalapriyan dessert? Thanks very much, but I don't want to be served up on the Bashir of Udara's dinner table. I vote we leave here, quietly, now."

"Don't you understand anything about diplomacy? That would be the worst possible—"

Gabrel broke off as the gold-brocaded hangings over the door stirred. A middle-aged Kalapriyan man in tunic and trousers as stiffly brocaded as the hangings parted the curtains. He looked tired.

"Eskelinen! I had hoped to have more time to spend with you. I am sorry to be inhospitable, but you must leave here, quietly, at once," Harsajjan Bharat announced.

Maris just managed not to say "I told you so," when Gabrel translated for her. She listened attentively while Gabrel and his Dharampal friend talked, and found that now she wasn't tied up and scared out of her wits it was a lot easier to catch bits of the conversation. Especially since she knew pretty much what it had to be about. Harsajjan Bharat thought the Udaran envoy was going to arrange to have them assassinated tonight, and he didn't want that to happen. She would have felt more grateful if it hadn't seemed to her that his main concern was the way such an event would affect the honor of his house. Oh well, maybe that wasn't true; it could be due to her not understanding court Kalapriyan real well. In any case, it appeared that they were going to get their traveling clothes and their packs back and that some of Harsajjan's people were going to smuggle them out to . . . there her limited Kalapriyan vocabulary gave out, because what came next wasn't what she was expecting. She'd thought he would say that his guides would set them on the way to Udara. Instead there was excited talk about some other place that she'd never heard of.

When Harsajjan finally left, she pounced on Gabrel for explanations and details. "All right, I got that part," she cut him off when he started to translate the whole conversation word for word. "He wants us out of here so we don't get killed in his house. What I didn't get is where we're going from here. Not into Udara, I got that much, but why? Too dangerous?" Not going to Udara seemed like an excellent idea to her . . . but she sure didn't have any better ideas. Returning to Valentin would probably not work out real well; obviously she wasn't keeping up the Diplo act well enough to fool anybody for long. If Dharampal hadn't suffered from the minor defect of being, apparently, full of Udaran assassins, she thought she could have been happy to stay right here as an involuntary guest of Harsajjan Bharat. Hot baths and clean clothes and regular meals and not even having to steal anything to justify her existence—sounded pretty good.

The likelihood of getting stabbed, beheaded, poisoned, or dismembered in the night was a definite drawback to that arrangement, though.

"Where we're going may not be any safer than Udara," Gabrel said now, "and it'll definitely be a harder journey."

Maris sighed. "More scrambling up forty-five-degree slope trails designed for goats, like we did to get here?"

"Oh, much worse than that. If this world were ever opened to tourism, rock jockeys from all over the galaxy would be coming here to climb the High Jagirs." He sounded obnoxiously cheerful at the prospect.

"Let me guess," Maris said, "rock climbing is one of your hobbies."

"How did you know?"

"Diplo intuition!" she snapped. "And in case you were wondering, mountaineering is not among my favorite sports."

Gabrel shook his head. "Rezerval must have known what the interior of Kalapriya is like. Why didn't they send somebody who could—oh, well, I suppose they only expected you to poke around Valentin for a while and then report back that Montoyasana was raising a fuss about nothing as usual." His sudden smile warmed Maris down to her freezing toes. "You have done much more than Rezerval could possibly have expected of you. I hadn't thought even a fully trained and experienced Diplo would be willing to trek into the Jagirs, much less a kid who hasn't even finished the course work or had the surgeries yet." He looked thoughtful. "That's another thing that made me wonder about you. You're not thirty, Calandra. Nowhere near. How old are you really?"

"Does it matter?" Maris fenced. Give Gabrel time and he'd probably tell her how old he thought she was, then all she'd have to do is agree.

"Let's see, Diplo School doesn't take candidates under eighteen, and they wouldn't have let a first- or second-year student go out alone; you must be almost through with the classes and on a waiting list for surgery. So, twenty-three, twenty-four, something like that?"

"Something like that," Maris agreed. Sounded a lot better than the truth, although she did wonder—briefly—how Gabrel would react to that. I'm almost seventeen . . . I think. Definitely not the right thing to say at this point. She kept her mouth shut and let him go on explaining their immediate plans.

Apparently Harsajjan Bharat meant to smuggle them out of his compound as soon as it was dark, guiding them out of Dharamvai to meet a messenger from the Udaran resistance.

"There's a resistance movement?"

"Even the Bashir of Udara hasn't managed to kill everybody who disagrees with his methods."

This messenger knew a Diplo was being sent to investigate the allegations of illegal weapons trading, and according to him, the place to look was not in Udara proper but in a remote complex of caves in the former state of Thamboon. There, he had told Harsajjan, the outlanders would find evidence and explanation of all that was going on.

"Or a quick death," Maris suggested. "How do we know we can trust this guy?"

"We don't," Gabrel admitted. "But Harsajjan seems to think he's genuine . . . and anyway, you have a better idea?"

Maris shook her head.

"Well then. Fortunately, they haven't washed our traveling clothes yet, so we can put them right back on."

Mixed blessing, Maris thought. All that bathing and massaging and here she was going to smell like a goat again after ten minutes in that filthy outfit. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to walk again.

"And, Calandra . . ."

It took Maris a moment to remember that Gabrel still didn't know her true name. "Yes?"

"There's no need to let this Chulayen Vajjadara, the Udaran resistance contact, know you're not yet a fully trained Diplo. It might shake his confidence in us."

"Understood," Maris murmured.

She did wish, irrationally, that Gabrel would call her by her own name just once. But obviously this was no time to explain just how unlike a fully trained Diplo she really was, and he was too sharp for her to think she could confess to the one lie without getting into the whole tangle.

Besides, she reminded herself, he wouldn't like or respect Maris Nobody from the slums of Tasman. It was "Calandra Vissi" he was being nice to.

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