Текст книги "Burning Bright"

Автор книги: Melissa Scott

Соавторы: Melissa Scott
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“Na Damian,” the secretary said. “Jafiera Roscha is here.”

Damian paused, flicked a spot on the shadowscreen to mute the various displays. “Send her in.”

The door opened almost at once, and a woman stood for an instant outlined against the lobby’s buttery light. She was tall, and exquisitely built, her waist narrow between perfectly proportioned breasts and hips. Snug trousers and a dock‑worker’s singlet only emphasized that perfection; the light jacket that trailed from one hand was a shade of indigo that matched her eyes. Damian had forgotten–he always forgot, remembered again each time he saw her–just how striking she was, and despite the previous night felt a stirring of interest in his groin. Roscha came forward into the light, the corners of her wide mouth drawn down in an attempt neither to smile nor frown, and Damian slid the complaint across the desktop at her.

“What the hell was this?”

Roscha took it warily, studied the printed message, her eyes flicking back and forth between the paper and the other’s face. Somehow, despite the hours she spent on the Water, she had kept her skin dazzlingly fair, the color of coffee cream; her red hair flamed against her shoulders, held out of her eyes by a strip of black ribbon. More black bands–braided ribbons or strips of leather–circled each wrist, and Damian recalled himself sternly to the business at hand.

Roscha set the paper carefully back on the edge of the desk. “I guess I had too much to drink last night.”

“I guess you should be more careful where you drink,” Damian answered.

Roscha shrugged, looking rather sullen. “There were a bunch of us, celebrating, and enough of us making noise. I don’t know why they picked on me.”

“Just accident‑prone, I guess,” Damian said.

Roscha looked away, not quickly enough to hide the flash of anger. “I just got carried away. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t pay my people to get carried away,” Damian Chrestil said. “I pay you to do your job, and do what I tell you. Not to go around collecting complaint sheets.” He glanced down at the slip of paper again. “Do you even know this man?”

Roscha looked at the intricately patterned carpet, visibly mastering her temper. “By sight, mostly, and I know the name–he’s in the Game, I’ve seen him playing on the nets. I did know he works for the MIS.”

“Do you know what he does for them?”

“Works for one of the factors, I think,” Roscha answered. “Computer jockey.”

“Ah.”

In spite of his best efforts, there was enough satisfaction in Damian’s voice that the wary look in Roscha’s eyes faded to something more like curiosity. Damian glared at her, and she met his stare with a stony face.

“They give you a choice,” he said, after a moment. “Pay the fine, a hundred and fifty real, or take it to court. You’ll pay.”

There was another little silence, Roscha’s too‑large mouth thinning slightly, and then she said, without inflection, “I don’t have that much in my account.”

Damian looked at her for a long moment, and she returned the stare unflinching. A little color might have touched her wide cheekbones, but it was hard to tell. “All right,” he said, and ran his hand over the shadowscreen. The second printer, the one loaded with draft forms, chirred softly under the desktop, and spat a slip of soft paper. “Here, give this to Rosaurin, she’ll give you a voucher–and I’ll stop you twenty‑five reala paycheck to cover it. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Roscha still looked grim, but the tight set of her mouth eased a little.

Damian nodded, and slid the draft across the desktop toward her. Roscha took it, pocketed it without looking at the faint printing. “Right, then,” Damian said, and the woman turned away, accepting that dismissal. Even before the door had closed behind her, Damian reached for the shadowscreen, raising the priority of his inquiry about the MIS complainant. A member of the Merchant Investors, even a low‑ranking one, who was also a computer jockey and who was around his warehouses often enough for Roscha to recognize him by sight, was a man who would bear watching. It just might explain how local Customs had come to question a shipment of his last month. On the whole, he thought, it was worth paying Roscha’s fine–he might not even bother taking all of it out of her check.

He sighed then, and turned his attention back to the waiting messages. As he’d expected, his eldest sibling, Altagracian, the Chrestil‑Brisch Pensionary, was at the top of the list. Damian scanned the curt message– call at once–but dumped it into a holding file without answering. Chrestillio always overreacted; he could wait a little longer.

The secretary chimed again, and said, “There is an incoming message under your private and urgent code. Do you wish to accept?”

Damian frowned, but none of his siblings had that set of numbers. “Yes. Put it on the main board.”

The central panel of the unimpressive triptych on the far wall– I should commission something better, he thought, not for the first time–slid apart to reveal the main screen, and a moment later the connect codes streamed across the black glass. The Visiting Speaker Kuguee ji‑Imbaoa looked out at him, heavy body framed by the curtains of an enormous bed.

Ambassador Chauvelin does well for himself, Damian thought, and hid a grin. He said aloud, “Good morning, Na Speaker. I trust everything’s well with you.”

“Na Damian.” The Visiting Speaker was making an effort to be polite, unusual for him. Damian Chrestil waited warily.

“You had some concerns about one of the ambassador’s agents,” ji‑Imbaoa said abruptly, and Damian glanced involuntarily at the security telltales embedded in the desktop.

“Na Speaker, our conversation was rather more secure–”

“I have taken precautions,” ji‑Imbaoa interrupted. “My end of this transmission is safe.”

The hissing accent made the words even more of a rebuke, and Damian frowned, looking again at the security readout. “So is mine, but it’s not a chance I like taking.”

“You had been concerned about this agent, this Ransome,” ji‑Imbaoa went on, and Damian resigned himself.

“Yes. I was and am.” And I’ve been trying my damnedest to get him back into the Game and off the main nets. The bastard spends too much time on the nets, he’s bound to see what I’ve done to move the lachesi–

“I have told Chauvelin that you want Ransome back in the Game,” ji‑Imbaoa went on, “and that I believe Ransome should do what you want–so that we can find out what you are up to, of course.”

“Christ.” Damian controlled himself with an effort, said only, “Don’t you think that’s a little obvious, Na Speaker?” And what if he actually does find out?

“I rely on your bait to be good enough.” Ji‑Imbaoa inspected his fingerclaws, a smug and satisfied gesture.

“As I relied on you to get him off the nets,” Damian snapped. “Na Speaker, if you want this cargo that you’ve invested so heavily in to get where it’s supposed to be going, Illario Ransome has to be distracted.”

“I do not understand why he is so important.” Ji‑Imbaoa sat down abruptly on the bed, flicked claws in impatient dismissal.

Because he’s the best netwalker I’ve ever seen. And he plays politics. Damian said aloud, keeping a tight rein on his temper, “Illario Ransome is brilliant on the nets. He is also an imagist, he taps all the nets, all of them, he goes trawling for images for his story eggs, and he remembers everything. He’s the only person who would be at the right place at the right time to spot the paper trail, and the only one who has enough outside information to put the pieces together. Does that make it clear?”

There was a little silence, and then ji‑Imbaoa looked away. “Still, you should have what you want. He should be distracted, investigating your Game.”

“I hope so.” Damian paused, considering. It might work, at that, might give him the time he needed to–adjust–the customs nets to accept his new cargo. If Ransome did as he was told, of course, and if Cella’s scenarios were enough to catch his eye… But Storm was coming, too, and the first few days of Carnival were celebrated on the nets, as well as on the streets. The two things together might be enough to let him get away with it. “Have you gotten the destination codes?”

“I am still waiting,” ji‑Imbaoa said. “I will pass them on to you as soon as I have them, you need not worry.”

I always worry, Damian thought, but said, “All right. The sooner the better, though, Na Speaker, because without them I can’t get this cargo into HsaioiAn.” He paused, seeing annoyance in the sudden clenching of ji‑Imbaoa’s hands, made himself add, “Thanks for dealing with Ransome, though.”

Ji‑Imbaoa’s hands relaxed. “We are in this together, Na Chrestil. Now, I have had an active night, and wish to sleep.”

“Sleep well, then,” Damian answered, and cut the connection. He leaned back in his chair, ran his hand across the shadowscreen to close down the link. The triptych slid slowly back into place over the now‑empty screen, and he stared at it for a moment. I wonder what it would cost me to commission Ransome to do a piece to replace it? he wondered, and grinned at the thought. It might keep him busy for a while, and he’d be furious: it’s an insultingly minor job. Hell, it might be worth asking just to see the look on his face. He fiddled with the shadowscreen, filing the thought for later consideration, and touched another icon to bring up the rest of his mail. The secretary, programmed to be helpful, appended a to‑do list as well. Damian considered it for a moment, and succumbed to temptation. Rosaurin wanted him to approve the next week’s shipping plot, and that was much more fun than the painstaking records‑melding that needed to be done. He pushed himself away from his desk and out the door before he could change his mind.

Day 30

High Spring: Ransome’s Loft,

Old Coast Road, Newfields,

Above Junction Pool

Ransome half sat, half lay in the chair that conformed itself to his thin body, barely aware of the shifting cushions that held him exactly where he wanted to be. Images filled the air around him, ghostly yet substantial‑seeming, all but blocking out the cityscape spread out below the loft windows. The windows dimmed again, cutting out the sunlight–they had been dimming steadily since sunrise, following the house programming–but Ransome did not notice, lost in the flickering narrowcasts that held and surrounded him. The implants set into the bones at the outer edges of his eye sockets caught and amplified the conflicting signals; his wire gloves, thin and flexible and warm as blood, let him sculpt the space around him, defining each unreal volume according to his whim. The offerings of half a dozen different narrownets danced in the air around him: Gamers to his left, four different sessions played out in as many different venues, three old, pretaped, the fourth a late‑night session that had dragged on into the morning. Faces and streets and shadows, culled illegally from the Lockwardens’ security systems, wove in and through the other images, overlaying them with a bizarre patchwork of morning light and shade. The matching audio murmured on a dozen channels from the speakers at the base of the room’s walls, backing the images with the solidity of sound. His attention was fixed on a single image, floating overhead, at the apex of the cone of light and noise: flickering market glyphs from the port computers spun in delicate linkage, legitimate public numbers and private taps combined into a single database, strings of numbers combined into a dazzling three‑dimensional shape that had a weird organic beauty all its own.

He let the shapes wash over and around him, put out his hand to draw in another narrowcast band. The air glowed briefly amber, control icons sparking in the system space that he had placed within easy reach, and then cleared again. A woman’s face appeared, a mask of white paint and strong black lines and the vivid red of her mouth; he watched for a moment and pushed it away, to one side of the dancing market numbers. For a brief instant, his hand seemed to sink into the image, marring its edge, and then it moved, obedient to his touch. He reached again into the control space, found the symbols and the tool he wanted, and a second image, identical to the delicate, complex shape that was the graphic representation of the elaborate transformational database overhead, appeared in the air in front of him. He chose another tool, the wires of his gloves growing faintly warmer around his hands in confirmation of the choice, and then reached for the shape. He wrapped his hands around it, squeezed gently, compressing it, until it hung in a space no more than a dozen centimeters in diameter. Some of the delicacy had vanished in the compression, become little more than texture. He frowned, and reached for a second tool, used its all‑but‑invisible point to pry the numbers apart, untangling the channels, until the various strands were distinct again.

He lay back against the shifting cushions, studying the image, set it slowly rotating in front of him. The shape derived from those twining numbers would be the main focus of one of his story eggs, a commission for a Syndic of the Merchant Investors, a woman who lived and died by the movements of the trade that created the numbers coiling in the air in front of him. He reached for the face that hung in the air beside it, brought it down, until the strands of numbers slowly writhed behind the mask, like DNA beneath the skin. It was interesting, but not, he thought, what was needed now; it detracted from the bizarre beauty of the shifting numbers. He banished the face with a wave of his hand, leaving only the intertwining numbers, bronze and green and all the shades of metal, floating in unreal space. He smiled, contemplating it, and reached into the control space to preserve the image in one of the dataspheres waiting linked to the main consoles. The sphere would store both the algorithm that transformed the numbers to this graphic and the formulae for the connections to the financial nets–even the private ones, one of which had been donated by the client–that provided the raw data. All that remained was to set the image into a proper casing, and that was already waiting, ready on the shelf: a smooth, pale green egg the color of old, well‑weathered copper, with streaks and spills of stronger green, and the ghost of the metal showing through. He smiled, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done, and closed the particular volume.

A voice that had been speaking from one of the floor‑mounted receivers for some time now, he realized belatedly, was calling his name.

“–Ransome, I know you’re there. I can see your taps.” There was a brief pause, and then, reluctantly, “It’s important, I‑Jay.”

Ransome sighed, suddenly aware that it was morning and that he had been awake most of the night, and that it was Chauvelin himself who was making this connection, not one of the apparently numberless ambassadorial servants. He muted the remaining images with a wave of his hand, and reached into control space to connect himself with the communications channel. “I’m here.”

“About time.”

The familiar face, elegant and worn and lined beneath the brown hair just going cloudy with grey, bloomed in the air above him. Ransome winced, and moved it to a less dominating position. “I was working,” he said, and winced again at the defensive note in his voice. “What is it?”

Chauvelin smiled slightly, sourly, a faint quirk of one corner of his long mouth. “I need to talk to you–not on the nets. The Visiting Speaker has come up with some interesting information you and I need to discuss.”

“Fuck the Visiting Speaker,” Ransome said, and Chauvelin’s smile widened into something approaching humor.

“A privilege not likely to be granted.” Chauvelin’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Tell me something, why would Cella Minter want you back in the Game?”

Ransome blinked, wondering where this question had come from, and what it really meant. Cella he knew, both as Damian Chrestil’s mistress and as an accomplished Gamer, but only from a distance. “I’ve no idea,” he said, and then, because it was usually best to tell Chauvelin the truth, “I didn’t know she wanted me back Gaming.”

“So ji‑Imbaoa says,” Chauvelin said, and held up a hand, forestalling any answer from the other. Ransome grinned, and let him continue. “And so it looks to me, too, looking at the nets. I tied in to some of the club gossip boards. There’s a lot of talk about Ambidexter, and usually Cella hinting in the background that he ought to come back to show people how his templates are supposed to be played.”

Ransome shrugged, felt his face go wooden. “Ambidexter’s dead–”

In spite of himself, the words came out bitter, and it was the bitterness that Chauvelin answered. “You’re not dead yet. I don’t have time for self‑pity, I‑Jay, I need your help.”

Ransome lifted both eyebrows, a deliberate imitation of Chauvelin’s gesture. “You must be desperate.” He paused then, shook his head, shaking away the bad temper that was becoming a habit with him. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why Cella would want me on the Game,” he said again. “Unless it’s something Damian Chrestil wants?”

“I’d say that was highly likely,” Chauvelin murmured. “Which raises the question of why he would want it. And that is something I don’t want to discuss on the nets.”

Ransome made another face, though he had to admit the wisdom of it. He himself was not the only netwalker on Burning Bright, or the only imagist who tapped unlikely lines looking for good sources. “I suppose you’ll want me to come to you.”

“Yes.” Chauvelin’s tone blended forbearance and the resignation of an adult dealing with a child. “I think that would be best.”

Ransome laughed, gestured apology, miming the hsai gesture that linked wrist spurs. The scars where his implanted spurs had been removed touched briefly, an odd, unpleasant feeling; he jerked his hands apart without finishing the movement. Chauvelin said nothing, did not move at all, as though nothing had happened, and Ransome said, “I’ll be there in an hour.” He knew he sounded curt, made himself add, by way of further apology, “It’ll take me a while to pull myself together. I was up all night working on a commission.”

Chauvelin nodded. “May I see?”

“It’s a private commission,” Ransome said, with genuine regret–Chauvelin was one of the very few whose opinions mattered to him–then grinned suddenly. “But I’ve done something for you, I’ll show you when I get there.”

“That will be the first good thing that’s happened all day,” Chauvelin said. He gave a twisted smile, as though he regretted the admission, and said, in an entirely different voice, “In an hour, then.” He cut the connection before Ransome could respond.

Ransome sighed, staring at the still‑busy images without really seeing them, then brought his chair upright. The net taps whirled around him, readjusting themselves to his position, but he waved them away, then closed both fists to shut down the system. Glyphs and codestrings flickered past, too fast to be understood at more than the subliminal level, and then the pictures vanished. Ransome sighed again, stretching, feeling the long night’s work claw at his back, the old familiar ache in the bones and tendons of his hands. He peeled off the tight gloves, wincing a little, and set them aside. His chest was tight, catching in his ribs; he could hear the fluids at the base of his lungs, a harsh rasp that cut each breath too short for comfort. He reached instinctively for the cylinder of Mist, flipping it backwards to unfold the facemask, but stopped abruptly. The red light glowed under the trigger button, warning him that he had taken a dose within the last two hours. He stared at it for a second, his mind forming a curse to override the fear, then made himself set it aside.

“Input,” he said aloud. “Housekeeper systems.” The words caught in his chest, the lack of air catching him by surprise. He coughed, hard, the spasm driving painfully deep. His mouth filled with phlegm that tasted like bitter copper; he spat it into a sheet of tissue, and saw the familiar thick white laced with a froth of red. That was answer enough. “Cancel,” he whispered, voice harsh and strange to his own ears, but the room responded calmly.

“Input canceled.”

Ransome scowled, hating the sickness, hating the fact that his systems remembered that choked voice as his own, and pushed himself up out of the chair. The injector lay on the shelf where he kept the story eggs’ shells. He went to get it, feeling the too‑familiar giddiness, laid the cold tip against the veins of his neck as he had been taught, where the skin was more or less permanently reddened from the injections, and pressed the trigger. The machine stung once, painfully, and he imagined he could feel the drug spreading like cold fire under his skin. The doctors swore it was a hallucination, a common side effect. It felt real enough, and he stood for a long moment, waiting, eyes fixed on nothing, as the chill spread through his chest and down his right arm, and the pain eased and his breath came easier, the rattling in his lungs fading slightly. It had been three years since the maintenance drugs, the ones that had kept the white‑sickness at bay, had failed him, as he had known they would: five to seven years, he could expect the injections to work, and then he was dead.

Ransome stuffed the injector into his pocket, made himself shower and shave and find a clean shirt and jerkin, going through the motions until the fear and anger had retreated again. White‑sickness was common in hsai space, a common killer of jericho‑humans; it was also incurable, though onset and death could be delayed for decades with the right drugs. It was just his bad luck to have shared a cell with a carrier, back on Jericho. My mistake to have been on Jericho at all, to have worked for the Chrestil‑Brisch in the first place… He shook the thought away, and glanced for a final time in his mirror. He was looking haggard– too little sleep; nothing new–but the hectic flush from the injection still burned on his cheeks, two ugly, fake‑looking spots of red. The black jerkin and trousers and the loose white shirt had been meant to complement his usual bone‑white pallor. He suppressed the instinct to rub his face, to scrub the red away, and reached instead for the handful of carved stones waiting on his workbench. He slipped those into his pocket, and left the loft, double‑sealing the palmprint lock behind him out of habit.

His flat was one of a dozen in a converted warehouse, purchased cheap by one of the artists’ cooperatives now that most cargoes moved through the new Junction Pool cargo lifts rather than the long way around, from the ramps at Dry Cut along the Old Coast Road that skimmed the cliff edge. The old warehouse districts were no longer convenient, or profitable; the buildings that had not been converted to other uses–ght manufacture, particularly, and in this district the embroiderers’ shops that made the embellished fabrics that were Burning Bright’s primary export product–stood empty, their windows cracked, frames emptied by last year’s Storm. The lift was occupied, as usual–there were enough heavy‑materials workers in the building to ensure that the single lift was always in use or out of order–and Ransome made his way down the side stairs. It had been a fire access once, running along the outside of the building, and the outer wall was pierced at intervals by narrow panels of wire mesh. The air that flowed in was soft and heavy with the salt smell of the canals, and warm with the promise of Storm. There were more signs of approaching Storm in the corners of the stair, or at least of the Carnival that took up most of the two‑week period: a raki bottle stood empty on each landing, and the lowest level, where the walls were solid to prevent unauthorized access, stank of urine. Ransome made a face, and stepped carefully over the puddles to unlock the gate.

The alleyway was crowded with denki‑bikes and two‑and three‑wheeled velocks, the latter chained to anything substantial enough to defeat a standard wirecutter, the denki‑bikes clustered around the charging bollards, a blue haze showing where the security fields intersected. Ransome reached cautiously into the tangle of cables and locks to free his own machine, and winced as the fizzing security stung his fingers. Then he backed the bike out of the tangle–for once without setting off someone else’s security system–checked the power reserve, and climbed aboard. The machine was woefully underpowered, for his taste, but it was serviceable, and better than the tourist‑trolleys. He edged the throttle forward–the bike whined and shivered–and let it carry him sedately into the traffic stream.

He took the short road to the Ghetto where Chauvelin lived with most of the rest of Burning Bright’s noncitizen residents, skirting the cliff edge above the delivery basins of Junction Pool, then cutting straight through the industrial zone past the spaceport at Newfields. A column of smoke and steam hung in the distance, the winds slowly bending and fraying it to nothing: someone was saving money on launch costs, flying chemical rockets. The pilots who ran the orbital shuttle would be cursing, Ransome thought, and smiled.

The ambassadorial residence stood on one of the highest points in the Ghetto–on all of the Landing Isle, the largest piece of the original landmass: the hsai liked heights, and most of Burning Bright’s inhabitants didn’t care. The household staff had been told to expect him. Ransome paused at the gate only long enough to identify himself–most of Chauvelin’s household knew him by sight, after nearly fifteen years in the ambassador’s service–and then a pair of hsai servants came out of the main house to meet him. The male took the denki‑bike, and the hsaii–Chauvelin’s steward Iameis je‑Sou’tsian, Ransome realized with some surprise–bowed politely.

“Sia Chauvelin has asked me to bring you directly to the garden,” she said, in tradetalk, and Ransome answered in low mian‑hsai.

“I’m honored by the courtesy.” And very surprised by it, he added silently. What the hells is going on, to make me rate this treatment? He followed without question, however–he knew better than to ask that question–and je‑Sou’tsian brought him through the sudden cool of a service passageway, bypassing the main house, and led him out as suddenly onto a path that ran between tall walls of flowering hedge. Ransome blinked, momentarily confused, then oriented himself. This was the maze, a part of the garden derived from hsai tradition, and one that Chauvelin rarely used. Je‑Sou’tsian followed the turns without hesitation, however– maybe it is true, Ransome thought, that there really is only one pattern in use on all the worlds of HsaioiAn–and let them out through a red‑lacquered gate onto the carefully landscaped lawn of the upper terrace. Chauvelin was waiting a few meters away, seated comfortably in the shade of a bellflower tree, a luncheon tray beside him and a data manager resting in his lap.

“Na Ransome is here,” je‑Sou’tsian said, and the ambassador looked up with an abstracted smile.

“Ransome. Join me, why don’t you?” To je‑Sou’tsian, he added, “Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“Yes, sia,” the steward answered, bowing, and backed away.

Ransome made his way down the terraced slope, stepping carefully around the elaborately casual plantings. He was very aware of the ambassador’s residence looming behind him, the sunlight polishing the white‑stone walls and glinting off the long windows. It felt unpleasantly as though someone were watching him, and he seated himself deliberately on the wall that overlooked the lower terrace. Chauvelin glanced up at him, gave a quick smile, and Ransome smiled rather wryly in return. If it had been the cliff wall, overlooking the hundred‑meter drop to the Old City, he would never in a thousand years have settled himself there, especially with Chauvelin sitting less than two meters from him, and they both knew it.

“So good of you to come,” Chauvelin said, with only the lightest note of irony.

Ransome let his smile widen. “I was working,” he said. “What is this about Cella, and the Game?”

“That’s the very question I’d like you to answer,” Chauvelin said.

Ransome spread his hands–a human gesture, not hsai, and deliberately so. “I don’t know. I’ve been out of the Game for three years, I barely pay attention to the Game nets except when I’m trolling for images. I don’t know what Cella wants–except that if she wants it, Damian Chrestil probably wants it, too.”

Chauvelin nodded slightly, though Ransome could not be sure if the movement was a response to his words or to something on his screen. “I need to know why. Ji‑Imbaoa came in this morning–”

“Sober?” Ransome murmured, with just the right note of shock, and allowed himself a brief smile when the word surprised a laugh from Chauvelin.

“Mostly so. At any rate, he came to me complaining that Damian Chrestil is interested in you, via Cella–he knows you as my agent, so don’t ask–and demanding to know why. When I checked him out, I found the same thing: lots of agitation to get you back into the Game, and usually Cella’s at the back of it. I want to know what’s going on.”

“I told you,” Ransome began, and Chauvelin nodded.

“I know you’ve been working. A commission for Syndic Leonerdes, and that big installation for the governor. But I need to know what’s going on, I‑Jay. Ji‑Imbaoa–well, I won’t bore you with hsai politics.”

“Bore me,” Ransome said.

Chauvelin grinned, sobered instantly. “Suffice it to say that ji‑Imbaoa has more influence than he should, and he wants this done. And that’s the other thing I want to find out: why the hell should he be so worried about Damian Chrestil?”

Ransome shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe they had a bar fight, their tastes seem similar enough. Though I don’t think Damian Chrestil drinks quite so much.”

“Let me put it this way,” Chauvelin said, and his voice was suddenly devoid of all expression. “Ji‑Imbaoa is worried enough to remind me that, since I made you min‑hao, you could still face charges in HsaioiAn, for lese majesty.”