Christian sect known as Catholic. For a second the Consul had forgotten
the significance of the black clothing and Roman collar, but then he
remembered St Francis Hospital on Hebron where he had
received alcohol trauma therapy after his disastrous first diplomatic
assignment there almost four standard decades earlier. And at the
mention of Hoyt's name he remembered another priest, one who had
disappeared on Hyperion halfway through his own tenure there.
Lenar Hoyt was a young man by the Consul's reckoning - no more than his
early thirties - but it appeared that something had aged the man
terribly in the not too distant past. The Consul looked at the thin
face, cheekbones pressing against sallow flesh, eyes large but hooded in
deep hollows, thin lips set in a permanent twitch of muscle too
downturned to be called even a cynical smile, the hairline not so much
receding as ravaged by radiation, and he felt he was looking at a man
who had been ill for years. Still, the Consul was surprised that behind
that mask of concealed pain there remained the physical echo of the boy
in the man - the faintest remnants of the round face, fair skin, and
soft mouth which had belonged to a younger, healthier, less cynical
Lenar Hoyt.
Next to the priest sat a man whose image had been familiar to most
citizens of the Hegemony some years before. The Consul wondered if the
collective attention span in the Worldweb was as short now as it had
been when he had lived there. Shorter, probably. If so, then Colonel
Fedmahn Kassad, the so-called Butcher of South Bressia, was probably no
longer either infamous or famous. To the Consul's generation and to all
those who lived in the slow, expatriate fringe of things, Kassad was not
someone one was likely to forget.
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was tall- almost tall enough to look the
two-meter Her Masteen in the eye - and dressed in FORCE black with no
rank insignia or citations showing. The black uniform was oddly similar
to Father Hoyt's garb, but there was no real resemblance between the two
men. In lieu of Hoyt's wasted appearance, Kassad was brown, obviously
fit, and whip-handle lean, with strands of muscle showing in shoulder,
wrist, and throat. The Colone!'s eyes were small, dark, and as
all-encompassing as the lenses of some primitive video camera. His face
was all angles: shadows, planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father
Hoyt's, merely carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his
jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as
blood on a knife blade.
The Colonel's intense, slow movements reminded the Consul of an
Earth-bred jaguar he had seen in a private seedship zoo on Lusus many
years before. Kassad's voice was soft but the Consul did not fail to
