The Children of the Company Part 12

"Uh-Madam Van Drouten, this gentleman was a pa.s.senger on my s.h.i.+p, and he seems to have some grievance against one of your tenants-" Kalugin explained hastily, turning around. The mortal used this opportunity to push under Kalugin's arm and slip past me into the hall, and from there into the parlor.

"Where is the diamond cutter?" he shouted, flinging his cloak back over one shoulder and revealing a box he was clutching, also the sword and matching dagger on his hip. Kalugin and I were both beside him at this point, but unfortunately Eliphal had heard all the commotion and come running downstairs.

"What is it? Who wants to see me?" he asked. The mortal singled him out with a deadly look and hurled the box down so that it bounced open at Eliphal's feet, spilling out three or four bricks of something wrapped in oiled paper. A fragrance rose up from the broken box like, well, like paradise. Something tropical and exotic and yet evocative of cozy winter kitchens where you could curl up by the stove with a nice hot cup of ...

Theobromos. Not the ordinary stuff mortals bought and sold, either, but the high-powered Company cultivar with a kick like a mule. Every immortal in my increasingly crowded parlor leaned forward involuntarily, including me.

"Where the h.e.l.l are my emeralds?" the mortal snarled, drawing steel.

Eliphal looked up openmouthed from his contemplation of the spilled delight.

"What emeralds?" he replied. "Who are you, sir?"

"Sanpietro del Vaglio," the mortal replied, as though it was terribly obvious. "And I tell you to your face you are a liar and a thief and the son of Barbary apes!"

"How dare you? I've never heard of you in my life," Eliphal shouted, drawing himself up, and I winced because he takes his character very seriously, but before the mortal could lunge forward with his sword there was yet another clatter of feet on the stoop and in came Joost and Latif, all dusted with snow as though they'd just stepped out of a toy globe. They halted and stared at the scene, astonished.

"Do you dare to deny you offered me six Peruvian emeralds of the finest grade, and sent me this instead?" screamed del Vaglio. "What do you think I am, a confectioner?"

Joost's eyes went wide with horror, and so did Latif's. They exchanged a glance. Everybody in the room knew right then, except for the mortal, whose back was turned to them.

"Yes, I deny it," Eliphal retorted. "Somebody has been using my name to do business!"

And he turned an accusing stare of terribly righteous wrath on Latif.

Latif met his stare and backed up a pace, unblinking; then he turned and buried his face in my ap.r.o.n, and burst into very, very loud sobs.

Sixteen Turtle and Smythe smirked at each other.

"Mistress, it wasn't his fault," Joost cried. "I must have sent the parcels to the wrong addresses!"

Latif sobbed even more loudly.

"You mean you were supposed to send emeralds to this man and chocolate to somebody else?" I asked Joost. Del Vaglio had turned to stare at us in incomprehension; Eliphal folded his arms in indignant triumph.

Joost looked abashed. "Yes, mistress. But-"

"Where did you get six Peruvian emeralds of the finest grade, Latif?" I inquired, so dazed the minute details were holding my attention. Latif's sobbing went up a decibel.

"You're that little brat who was training with Houbert, aren't you?" remarked Smythe suddenly, leaning forward to stare at him, or at least at the back of his head. "Ha! You put your tour of duty in New World One to good use, I must say."

"You mean-" I began, meaning to ask if the child had spent all his free time making smuggling connections, but at that moment somebody else came slinking up on the stoop and peered in through the door, which was still open and in fact letting in floating snow.

"Er-excuse me," she murmured, or at least that's what I think she said because she was so m.u.f.fled up in scarves and fur. "I'm looking for Facilitator Van Drouten ... ?"

"Well, come in and shut the door after you," I said wearily, but she drew back.

"Er ... no, I-" Her gaze riveted on the broken box and its fragrant contents.

"Oh." Light dawned on me. "You got something you didn't expect in the mail, huh?"

She looked as though she was about to turn and run, but Kalugin stepped close and took her arm firmly. He led her outside and they had a whispered conversation. A moment later he returned, bearing a small wooden box remarkably like the one del Vaglio had brought.

"I believe this is yours, sir," Kalugin said, offering it to him. Del Vaglio sheathed his sword and took it doubtfully, and Kalugin bent down and swept up the broken box and its contents. "Excuse me a moment, won't you?"

Kalugin took the Theobromos outside and a second later we could hear the immortal, whoever she was, running away as if for dear life. Del Vaglio, meanwhile, had opened the new box and carried it over to the window to inspect its contents. He took out a lens in an eyepiece and examined whatever was in there-six Peruvian emeralds of the finest grade?-pretty carefully before closing the box with a snap and tucking it under his arm in a possessive kind of way.

"Acceptable," he said, and swinging his cloak around him he strode to the door. "Grazie, Captain Kalugin. Under the circ.u.mstances I will seek no further redress for this insult."

"What about the insult to me, you pig?" roared Eliphal, but del Vaglio exited regally, if hurriedly. At least he shut the door after himself. But the room was no less crowded, because here came Lisette down the steps again at a run, crying out: "Joost! You'd better go see Margarite right away."

"Is she all right?" He looked alarmed. Lisette scowled at the rest of us and came and whispered in his ear. The alarm in his face vanished; he lit up like a chandelier.

"Lord G.o.d," he whooped. "It worked!" He rushed at Latif to hug him, but Latif was stuck to my ap.r.o.n like a limpet, still sobbing, so he contented himself with kissing the top of his head and yelling: "G.o.d bless you, little master, it'll be a son for sure." He turned and ran away upstairs, and we could hear his feet thundering all the way to the fourth floor.

"So ... you've been slipping Margarite hormones or something, too?" I guessed. Latif was still too wracked with sobs to reply, which was answer enough. Well! Guess who was going to be lighting the fires and sweeping the stoop for the next few months? Not Margarite, huh? "And I'll bet you got Johan transferred, didn't you?"

Sixteen Turtle and Smythe rose to their feet.

"Perhaps we'd best depart," said Sixteen Turtle in a voice like silk. As he was pulling on his furs, his eyes glinted with malevolent humor. Unless the young gentleman wishes us to take his remaining stock off his hands? Though I'm afraid we couldn't possibly offer more than fifty percent.

Latif's sobs kept going, but his little fists clenched in the folds of my ap.r.o.n.

"How much ... merchandise is upstairs, Latif?" I asked him.

"Five hundredweight chests," he paused in his sobbing long enough to say distinctly.

Kalugin and Eliphal reeled. Well, that just about accounted for the hole in my budget. Joost and Latif must have had it brought in by ca.n.a.l barge and lifted it up with the warehouse block and tackle, possibly while I was out shopping. I don't know where I found the presence of mind to look Sixteen Turtle in the eye and transmit to him: Nothing doing. I'm confiscating his entire stock. You can deal with me now! And you'll either pay me full retail value or- and I really don't know where I found the nerve to say this-or maybe I'll go into business for myself. You said you wouldn't mind a little compet.i.tion. Hmm! This close to Belgium, I'll bet I could cut into your markets with a vengeance.

I must have expressed myself badly, replied Sixteen Turtle without batting an eyelash. Naturally we'd pay full retail value for an order that size. Five hundred-weights? Let me think, we could offer ...

He conferred briefly and subvocally with Smythe, and then she named a sum. It wasn't quite enough to bring my budget into the black.

What do you think, Latif? I wondered. Perhaps we could work out a marketing strategy. 'If You're Tired of Waiting for G.o.diva, Wait No More! Primo Black Magic Is Here!' And we can always claim it's fresher and purer than the compet.i.tion's because it comes in on the Dutch East Indies s.h.i.+ps- Smythe winced and named another sum. It was a lot higher than the other sum she'd named. Latif cautiously lifted his perfectly dry face from my ap.r.o.n and mouthed Take it! in silence, then buried his face again and gave another wail of misery.

"Done," I said aloud. "Who's your banker?"

Eliphal oversaw the transfer of funds. We had the stuff loaded out of the house by that evening.

"So, you see?" I said, dipping my scrub brush in the soapy water and going after the greasy patch in front of the kitchen hearth. "You weren't ready to be fast-tracked after all."

"You're right, of course," Latif replied gloomily, dipping his scrub brush, too. He put it down a moment to roll up his sleeves again and then attacked a blob of spilled jam. "But it almost worked." If Joost hadn't mixed those labels and if I'd had a better idea what the black market rate ought to be ... You know I was only trying to defray operating expenses and make your job easier, I hope?

"Oh, yeah," I agreed. "And it might have worked at that, sweetie. But the logic's really simple here: you're a child.You don't know everything about this job yet. That's why you're not in Africa. And aren't you glad that if you were going to make a big boomeranging blunder, you did it in front of me and not your hero Suleyman?"

"I guess so," he replied, edging forward to get some tracked-in mud.

"Or Labienus! Though I can't imagine you'd be having a conversation like this one with him," I added, snickering at the idea of Mr. Super-Cyborg Executive Facilitator General on his hands and knees scrubbing a floor. "I guess I must have fallen pretty short of your expectations after you'd studied under Labienus."

"Everybody under his command hates Labienus," Latif told me quietly.

"I'd heard that," I said. "I've heard he treats his mortals like animals."

Latif nodded. He dipped his brush again and went on scrubbing. After a moment he said: "He hates them. He thought I'd hate them, too, because of the slave s.h.i.+p. He told me I could go far with him. But ... Labienus never breaks the rules where anybody can see. And he always makes sure there's somebody else to take the blame. But I saw. And I thought ... well, so much for role models." He scowled down at the rust stain he was attacking. "But Suleyman doesn't do stuff like that. I hope?"

I slopped suds on a crusted bit of something I didn't want to think about-how long since the last time Margarite had scrubbed this floor?!-and said: "No, Suleyman's a nice guy. You'll see, when you finally get yourself a.s.signed to his HQ. And, you know what? Even with a little setback like this, I'll bet you get your wish. I'll bet you'll be a.s.signed to his command in no time at all, a smooth operator like you."

He actually giggled at that.

"Though actually I should probably continue on here a while longer," he said, with elaborate casualness.

"So you can learn the finer points of getting dirt up off of a floor, huh?" I panted, sitting up and dropping my brush in the bucket.

"Or something," he replied, dropping his brush in there, too. He stood up.

"Good, because you wouldn't believe how much of an Executive Facilitator's job is cleaning up messes," I told him, getting to my feet and surveying what we'd done so far. "Okay! Now we mop and then, what do you say? Want to go shopping on the Dam? I could use some marzipan cakes."

"Me too," Latif replied, slipping his little hand into mine.

Labienus shudders, wills the memory away. He puts back the offending file. Settling down with the red project file he opens it, paging through the material with his reports, his annotations.

When he opens it, the first image to greet his eyes is a slightly out-of-focus field photograph of a street in sixteenth-century London. Labienus remembers an overwhelming sense of nausea. Standing in old Egypt, finicky over a little smoke and dung, he'd had no idea of the filth he'd have to endure over the next four thousand years! London had certainly been one of the low points in his long life. He had endured, however. And profited ...

Turning the page, he sees the face as through a shroud. He removes the protective covering of tissue paper from the drawing. His gesture is almost tender, as though he were lifting a blanket to gaze upon a sleeping child.

It is no more than a study for a portrait never painted, a sketch on paper in red chalk and black ink, by some long-dead Italian master. The subject is a young male mortal. He had posed stiffly, regarding the artist with disapproval, for the artist had been a papist and the subject of the sketch was a heretic.

The artist had therefore not made much effort to flatter his subject. He had presented with blunt realism the boy's long homely face, his broken nose, his small cold eyes, his wide mouth. Even if he had been well disposed toward the boy, however, the artist would have been unable to make him look quite human.

But no mortal living could have known why. The boy himself hadn't known why. Precious few immortals would have known, either, by the year 1543! Labienus looks down at the portrait and mentally calls up Budu's features, superimposes them over the boy's.

There is a resemblance, would be even more of a resemblance if the portrait had been done in color. A certain expression in the eyes. A certain set of the mouth. The same cheekbones. If a G.o.d had taken that ancient flatheaded creature in the photograph and sculpted it like clay until it looked human, the result would be the boy in the portrait. One of them is a monster and the other is a man.

The delicious irony, of course, is that it is the boy who is the monster.

Though not in a moral sense, Labienus admits to himself. Regardless of the predilection for violence and the prodigious carnal appet.i.tes with which he had been created, Nicholas Harpole had been quite a virtuous boy.

Labienus was never officially posted to London, but there he happened to be, in the dismal year 1527. He chanced to be riding back from Hampstead to his lodgings in the City, one night.

No moon and few stars, under the thin fog. Almost a warm night, if wretched England could be said to have such a thing, for it was high summer. Ahead and to his left were the flickering lights of London, but out here in the fields was unfathomable darkness, unless of course one was a cyborg and could see by infrared. Labienus wasn't bothering to do that, however. He knew the way well and so did his horse.

It paused to crop the long gra.s.s at the edge of the ditch and he waited patiently, deciding to cut across the fields toward Gray's Inn Road. As he sat there, however, he heard a faint cryptic signal in the ether.

It was coming from the opposite side of the road, off in the direction of St. Marylebone. Frowning, he turned his head and scanned.

Nothing there in the darkness. He was about to ride on when the signal came again, like a faintly glowing puff of mist in the night. He switched to infrared; no result. Turning his horse's head to the right, he urged it across the ditch and into the fields beyond. The animal trotted forward, then slowed to a walk; then stopped, whickering uneasily.

Labienus saw nothing. In the instant before he realized there was a voice in his head telling him he saw nothing, he felt a paralyzing shock, and something black rose up from the ground at tremendous speed.

He found himself caught in darkness, cradled like a child across a lap except for the fact that a ma.s.sive hand had closed on his windpipe. Another ma.s.sive hand, on an arm like a tree trunk, had firm hold of his mount's bridle, and though the horse was trembling it stood obediently still. He looked up. A black silhouette rose against the night, a giant crouching in the new-cut hay.

Labienus calmed himself. Father, he transmitted.

"Why are you wearing a black armband?" said a voice in the night. It was not the deep, growling voice one would expect to hear coming out of something that looked so much like a bear. It was rather flat and high-pitched.

I'm in deep mourning. Hadn't you heard? Niccol Machiavelli just died.

The giant shook with silent laughter. Labienus felt his throat released, and he gulped air gratefully.

So the rumors are true. You went rogue!

"Some time ago," said Budu. "The Crusades were the last straw. You can speak out loud. The Company won't hear us."

Remembering the shock, Labienus ran a diagnostic on himself and realized his datafeed to the Company had been shorted out. He felt incredulous delight.

"How long will it last?"

"Long enough." Budu released him and he sat up, brus.h.i.+ng hay from his doublet.

"I've been hoping you were out there," Labienus said.

"Have you?"

"They should never have retired you. I had no idea how vile a place the world would become, with the mortals free to spread like pestilence. Our masters are imbeciles, father!"

"You think so?"

"Yes," said Labienus, realizing he'd said too much. He sat back, evening his breath, studying the Enforcer.

"Good," said Budu. He wore layered rags and a leather hood that must have required two cowhides. It was all stained, faded, dull stone colors, superb camouflage. He sheathed an immense hunting knife, making it vanish somewhere in his clothing.

Labienus realized that if he'd said the wrong thing, he might have had his throat cut and Budu would simply have made off with his horse. He had no particular desire to wake, chilled and painful and covered with his own blood, in gray dawn in the middle of nowhere with a long walk ahead of him.

He licked his lips and said: "When the Black Death broke out-I half hoped it was your doing, somehow."

"No," said Budu, "but you were thinking in the right lines. It was impressive."

"It was marvelous! It crippled Justinian's work in Byzantium, and what it did to Europe! Whole towns vanished and went back to clean earth. It swept through their filthy little cities the way you used to, father, and nothing stopped it."

"But it was stupid, son," Budu told him. "Don't waste your admiration on it. It killed indiscriminately. Innocents died with the guilty."

"How many of them are innocent any more?" said Labienus bitterly. "How many of them were ever innocent?"

"You were, once," Budu replied.

Labienus reminded himself never to speak from the heart.

"What have you been doing with yourself, father? a.s.suming you can tell me."