Barrayar Part 10

Koudelka turned red, and recoiled from her. "Sir," he began, and trailed off, as startled as Cordelia by the icy anger in Vorkosigan's eyes. Vorkosigan's gaze flicked over him, and they both clamped their jaws shut.

Cordelia drew in a very deep breath for a retort, but released it only as a furious "Oh!" at Vorkosigan's back as he wheeled and stalked out, spine stiff as Kou's swordblade.

Koudelka, still red, folded into himself, and using his sword as a prop levered himself to his feet, his breath too rapid. "Milady. I beg your pardon." The words seemed quite without meaning.

"Kou," said Cordelia, "you know he didn't mean that hateful thing. He spoke without thinking. I'm sure he doesn't, doesn't..."

"Yes, I realize," returned Koudelka, his eyes blank and hard. "I am universally known to be quite harmless to any man's marriage, I believe. But if you will excuse me--Milady--I do have some work to do. Of a sort."

"Oh!" Cordelia didn't know if she was more furious with Vorkosigan, Koudelka, or herself. She steamed to her feet and left the room, throwing her words back over her shoulder. "d.a.m.n all Barrayarans to h.e.l.l anyway!"

Droushnakovi appeared in her path, with a timid, "Milady?"

"And you, you useless... frill," snarled Cordelia, her rage escaping helplessly in all directions now. "Why can't you manage your own affairs? You Barrayaran women seem to expect your lives to be handed to you on a platter. It doesn't work that way!"

The girl stepped back a pace, bewildered. Cordelia contained her seething outrage, and asked more sensibly, "Which way did Aral go?"

"Why... upstairs, I believe, Milady."

A little of her old and battered humor came to her rescue then. "Two steps at a time, by chance?"

"Um... three, actually," Drou replied faintly.

"I suppose I'd better go talk to him," said Cordelia, running her hands through her hair and wondering if tearing it out would have any practical benefit. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h." She did not know herself if that was expletive or description. And to think I never used to swear.

She trudged after him, her anger draining with her energy as she climbed the stairs. This pregnancy business sure slows you down. She pa.s.sed a duty guard in the corridor. "Lord Vorkosigan go this way?" she asked him.

"To his rooms, Milady," he replied, and stared curiously after her. Great. Love it, she thought savagely. The old newlyweds' first real fight will have plenty of built-in audience. These old walls are not soundproof. I wonder if I can keep my voice down? Aral's no problem; when he gets mad he whispers.

She entered their bedroom, to find him seated on the side of the bed, removing uniform jacket and boots with violent, jerky gestures. He looked up, and they glared at each other. Cordelia opened fire first, thinking, Let's get this over with.

"That remark you made in front of Kou was totally out of line."

"What, I walk in to find my wife... cuddling, with one of my officers, and you expect me to make polite conversation about the weather?" he bit back.

"You know it was nothing of the sort."

"Fine. Suppose it hadn't been me? Suppose it had been one of the duty guards, or my father. How would you have explained it then? You know what they think of Betans. They'd jump on it, and the rumors would never be stopped. Next thing I knew, it would be coming back at me as political chaff. Every enemy I have out there is just waiting for a weak spot to pounce on. They'd love one like that."

"How the devil did we get onto your d.a.m.ned politics? I'm talking about a friend. I doubt you could have come up with a more wounding remark if you'd funded a study project. That was foul, Aral! What's the matter with you, anyway?"

"I don't know." He slowed, and rubbed his face tiredly. "It's the d.a.m.n job, I expect. I don't mean to spill it on you."

Cordelia suspected that was as near as she could expect of an admission of his being in the wrong, and accepted it with a little nod, letting her own rage evaporate. She then remembered why the rage had felt so good, for the vacuum it left filled back up with fear.

"Yes, well...just how much do you fancy having to break down his door one of these mornings?"

Vorkosigan frowned at her, going still. "Do you... have some reason to believe's he's thinking along suicidal lines? He seemed quite content to me."

"He would--to you." Cordelia let the words hang in the air a moment, for emphasis. "I think he's about that close." She held up thumb and forefinger a bare millimeter apart. The finger still had a smear of blood on it, and it caught her eye in unhappy fascination. "He was playing around with that blasted swordstick. I wish I'd never given it to him. I don't think I could bear it if he used it to cut his own throat. That seemed to be what he had in mind."

"Oh." Vorkosigan looked smaller, somehow, without his glittering military jacket, without his anger. He held out his hand to her, and she took it and sat beside him.

"So if you're having visions of, of playing King Arthur In our Lancelot and Guinevere in that pig-head of yours, forget it. It won't wash."

He laughed a little at that. "My visions were closer to home, I'm afraid, and considerably more sordid. Just an old bad dream."

"Yeah, I... guess it would hit a nerve, at that." She wondered if the ghost of his first wife ever hovered by him, breathing cold death in his ear, as Vorrutyer's ghost sometimes did by her. He looked deathly enough. "But I'm Cordelia, remember? Not... anybody else."

He leaned his forehead against hers. "Forgive me, dear Captain. I'm just an ugly scared old man, and growing older and uglier and more paranoid every day."

"You, too?" She rested in his arms. "I take exception to the old and ugly part, though. Pigheaded did not refer to your exterior appearance."

"Thank you--I think."

It pleased her to amuse him even that little. "It is the job, isn't it?" she said. "Can you talk about it at all?"

His lips compressed. "In confidence--although that seems to be your natural state, I don't know why I bother to emphasize it--it looks like we could have another war on our hands before the end of the year. And we're not nearly well enough recovered for it, after Escobar."

"What! I thought the war party was half-paralyzed."

"Ours is. The Cetagandans' is still in good working order, however. Intelligence indicates they were planning to use the political chaos here following Ezar Vorbarra's death to cover a move on those disputed wormhole jump points. Instead they got me, and--well, I can hardly call it stability. Dynamic equilibrium, at best. Anyway, not the kind of disruption they were counting on. Hence that little incident with the sonic grenade. Negri and Illyan are now seventy percent sure it was Cetagandan work." "Will they... try again?"

"Almost certainly. But with or without me, consensus in the Staff is that they'll be probing in force before the end of the year. And if we're weak--they'll just keep right on moving until they're stopped."

"No wonder you've been... abstracted."

"Is that the polite term for it? But no. I've known about the Cetagandans for some time. Something else came up today, after the Council session. A private audience. Count Vorhalas came to see me, to beg a favor."

"I'd think it would be your pleasure, to do a favor for Rulf Vorhalas's brother. I gather not?"

He shook his head unhappily. "The Count's youngest son, who is a hotheaded young idiot of eighteen who should have been sent to military school--you met him at the Council confirmation, as I recall--"

"Lord Carl?"

"Yes. He got into a drunken fight at a party last night."

"A universal tradition. Such things happen even on Beta Colony."

"Quite. But they stepped outside to settle their affair armed, each one, with a pair of dull swords that had been part of a wall decoration, and a couple of kitchen knives. That made it, technically, a duel with the two swords."

"Uh--oh. Was anyone hurt?"

"Unfortunately, yes. More or less by accident, I gather, in a scrambling fall, the Count's son managed to put his sword through his friend's stomach and sever his abdominal aorta. He bled to death almost immediately. By the time the bystanders had gathered their wits sufficiently to get a medical team up there, it was much too late."

"Dear G.o.d."

"It was a duel, Cordelia. It began as a mockery, but it ended as the real thing. And the penalties for dueling apply." He rose, and paced the room, stopping by the window and staring out into the rain. "His father came to ask me for an Imperial pardon. Or, if I could not grant that, to see if I could get the charges changed to simple murder. If it were tried as a simple murder, the boy could plead self-defense, and possibly end up with a mere prison term."

"That seems... fair enough, I suppose."

"Yes." He paced again. "A favor for a friend. Or... the first crack in the door to let that h.e.l.l-bred custom back into our society. What happens when the next case Is brought before me, and the next, and the next? Where do I begin drawing the line? What if the next case involves some political enemy of mine, and not a member of my own party? Shall all the deaths that went into stamping this thing out be made void? I remember dueling, and what things were like back then. And worse--an entry point for government by friends, then cliques. Say what you will about Ezar Vorbarra, in thirty years of ruthless labor he transformed the government from a Vor-cla.s.s club into some semblance, however shaky, of a rule of law, one law for everyone."

"I begin to see the problem."

"And me--me, of all men, to have to make that decision! Who should have been publicly executed twenty-two years ago for the selfsame crime!" He paused before her. "The story about last night is all over town, in various forms, this morning. It will be all over everywhere in a few days. I had the news service kill it, temporarily, but that was mere spitting in the wind. It's too late for a coverup, even if I wanted to do one. So what shall I betray this day? A friend? Or Ezar Vorbarra's trust? There is no doubt which decision he would have made."

He sat back beside her, and took her in his arms. "And this is only the beginning. Every month, every week, there will be some other impossible thing. What's going to be left of me after fifteen years of this? A husk, like that thing we buried three months ago, praying with his last breath that there may be no G.o.d? Or a power-corrupted monstrosity, like his son, so infected it could only be sterilized by plasma arc? Or something even worse?"

His naked agony terrified her. She held him tightly in return. "I don't know. I don't know. But somebody... somebody has been making these kinds of decisions right along, while we went along blissfully unconscious, taking the world as given. And they were only human, too. No better, no worse than you."

"Frightening thought."

She sighed. "You can't choose between evil and evil, in the dark, by logic. You can only cling to some safety line of principle. I can't make your decision. But whatever principles you choose now are going to be your safety lines, to carry you forward. And for the sake of your people, they're going to have to be consistent ones."

He rested in her arms. "I know. There wasn't really a question, about the decision. I was just... kicking a bit, going down." He disengaged himself, and stood again. "Dear Captain. If I'm still sane, fifteen years from now, I believe it will be your doing."

She looked up at him. "So what decision is it?"

The pain in his eyes gave her the answer. "Oh, no," she said involuntarily, then bit off further words. And I was trying to speak so wisely. I didn't mean this.

"Don't you know?" he said gently, resigned. "Ezar's way is the only way that can work, here. It's true after all. He does rule from his grave." He headed for their bathroom, to wash and change clothes.

"But you're not him," she whispered to the empty room. "Can't you find a way of your own?"

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Vorkosigan attended Carl Vorhalas's public execution three weeks later.

"Are you required to go?" Cordelia asked him that morning, as he dressed, cold and withdrawn. "I don't have to go, do I?"

"G.o.d, no, of course not. I don't have to go, officially, except... I have to go. You can see why, surely."

"Not... really, except as a form of self-punishment. I'm not sure that's a luxury you can afford, in your line of work."

"I must go. A dog returns to its vomit, doesn't it? His parents will be there, do you know? And his brother."

"What a barbaric custom."

"Well, we could treat crime as a disease, like you Betans. You know what that's like. At least we kill a man cleanly, all at once, instead of in bits over years.... I don't know."

"How will they... do it?"

"Beheading. It's supposed to be almost painless."

"How do they know?"

His laugh was totally without humor. "A very cogent question."

He did not embrace her when he left. He returned a bare two hours later, silent, to shake his head at a tentative offer of lunch, cancel an afternoon appointment, and withdraw to Count Piotr's library and sit, not-reading a book-viewer. Cordelia joined him there after a while, resting on the couch, and waited patiently for him to come back to her from whatever distant country of the mind he dwelt in.

"The boy was going to be brave," he said after an hour's silence. "You could see that he had every gesture planned out in advance. But n.o.body else followed the script. His mother broke him down... . And to top it the d.a.m.ned executioner missed his stroke. Had to take three cuts, to get the head off."

"Sounds like Sergeant Bothari did better with a pocketknife." Vorrutyer had been haunting her more than usual that morning, scarletly.

"It lacked nothing for perfect hideousness. His mother cursed me, too. Until Evon and Count Vorhalas took her away." The dead-expressioned voice escaped him then. "Oh, Cordelia! It can't have been the right decision! And yet... and yet... no other one was possible. Was it?"

He came to her then, and held her in silence. He seemed very close to weeping, and it almost frightened her more that he did not. The tension eventually drained out of him.

"I suppose I'd better pull myself together and go change. Vortala has a meeting scheduled with the Minister of Agriculture that's too important to miss, and after that there's the general staff... ."By the time he left his usual self-possession had returned.

That night he lay long awake beside her. His eyes were closed, but she could tell from his breathing it was pretense. She could not dredge up one word of comfort that did not seem inane to her, so kept silence with him through the watches of the night. Rain began outside, a steady drizzle. He spoke once.

"I've watched men die before. Ordered executions, ordered men into battle, chosen this one over that one, committed three sheer murders and but for the grace of G.o.d and Sergeant Bothari would have committed a fourth... I don't know why this one should hit like a wall. It's stopped me, Cordelia. And I dare not stop, or we'll all fall together. Got to keep it in the air somehow."

She awoke in the dark to a tinkling crash and a soft report, and drew in her breath with a start. Acridity seared her lungs, mouth, nostrils, eyes. A gut-wrenching undertaste pumped her stomach into her throat. Beside her, Vorkosigan snapped from sleep with an oath.

"Soltoxin gas grenade! Don't breathe, Cordelia!" Emphasizing his shout, he shoved a pillow over her face, his hot strong arms encircling her and dragging her from the bed. She found her feet and lost her stomach at the same moment, stumbling into the hall, and he slammed the bedroom door shut behind them.

Running footsteps shook the floor. Vorkosigan cried, "Get back! Soltoxin gas! Clear the floor! Call Illyan!" before he too doubled over, coughing and retching. Other hands bundled them both toward the stairs. She could scarcely see through her madly watering eyes.

Between spasms Vorkosigan gasped, "They'll have the antidote... Imperial Residence... closer than ImpMil... get Illyan at once. He'll know. Into the shower--where's Milady's woman? Get a maid...."

Within moments she was dumped into a downstairs shower, Vorkosigan with her. He was shaking and barely able to stand, but still trying to help her. "Start was.h.i.+ng it off your skin, and keep was.h.i.+ng. Don't stop. Keep the water cool."

"You, too, then. What was that c.r.a.p?" She coughed again, in the spray of the water, and they exchanged help with the soap.

"Wash out your mouth, too... . Soltoxin. It's been fifteen, sixteen years since I last smelled that stink, but you never forget it. It's a poison gas. Military. Should be strictly controlled. How the h.e.l.l anyone got hold of some... d.a.m.n Security! They'll be flapping around like headless chickens tomorrow... too late." His face was greenish-white beneath the night's beard stubble.

"I don't feel too bad now," said Cordelia. "Nausea's pa.s.sing off. I take it we missed the full dose?"

"No. It just acts slowly. Doesn't take much at all to do you. It mostly affects soft tissue--lungs will be jelly in an hour, if the antidote doesn't get here soon."

The growing fear that pounded in her gut, heart, and mind half-clotted her words. "Does it cross the placental barrier?"

He was silent for too long before he said, "I'm not sure. Have to ask the doctor. I've only seen the effects on young men." Another spasm of deep coughing seized him, that went on and on.

One of Count Piotr's serving women arrived, disheveled and frightened, to help Cordelia and the terrified young guard who had been a.s.sisting them. Another guard came in to report, raising his voice over the running water. "We reached the Residence, sir. They have some people on the way."

Cordelia's own throat, bronchia, and lungs were beginning to secrete foul-- tasting phlegm, and she coughed and spat. "Anyone see Drou?"

"I think she took out after the a.s.sa.s.sins, Milady."