Her mind whirled, but she managed to assemble a protest. “That doesn’t have to be true.”
Casimir laughed. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Introduce me to your Peer friends? And what will I be tothem ? An exotic pet.”
Sula took a step away from him. She felt her face harden into anger. “That is simply not true,” she said.
There was a touch of scorn in his voice. “Of course it is. I’m a cliqueman. The only way I can get into the High City is to fight my way in with an army.”
Angry words boiled up from her heart, but she caught them at the last minute.Don’t destroy this, she thought. She had smashed perfect evenings in the past, and she would smash this one if she wasn’t careful.
“I’m fighting my way in too,” she said.
“Yes. And I know how much it must have cost you to get where you are now.”
Her mind staggered under the certainty that Casimir somehow knew about Caro Sula. Howcould he? she thought wildly.
“What do you mean?” she said in a whisper.
“The night that Julien was arrested,” Casimir said. “That performance you put on in my office, showing up naked under your coat. I was completely boggled by what you did that night.” He reached out a cool hand and drew a long finger along her bare shoulder. “You haven’t acted like that since, but then you haven’t had to. You got what you wanted—me clear of Julien’s arrest, which you’d arranged so you could get old Sergius on your side in the war.”
Her nerves turned to ice. “Who else knows?” she said.
“I figured it out, but that’s because I was there to see that very impressive show you put on for my benefit. Julien will never guess, but I wouldn’t put it past Sergius to work it out eventually.”
Sula let out a long breath. Her head swam.
“Yes,” she said. “I manipulated you at first.” A nervous laugh rasped past her throat. “Why not? I didn’t know you.” She looked at him. “But I know you now. You’re not someone I can simply use any longer.”
His brows came together. “What accent is that?”
She could only stare. “What?”
“You’re speaking in a different accent now. Not Riverside, not High City.”
Sula cast her thoughts back and reformed the words in her mind. “Spannan,” she said. “The Fabs. Where I was b—I mean, where I grew up.”
“You were on Spannan long enough to pick up the voice, but you left and became Lady Sula, with the swank accent. And that’s what you’ll do again, once we win the war.” He turned away, his fingers pressed to his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve upset you. I shouldn’t have brought this up tonight, not before we make our move on the High City. You need to be focused on that, not on anything I say.”
She watched him, despair rising like a flood to drown her heart. “Look,” she said, “I’m dreadful at being Lady Sula. I’m an absolutely awful Peer.” She followed him, touched his arm. “I’m much better at being Gredel. At being the White Ghost.”
Casimir looked at her hand on his arm. A bitter smile twisted his lips. “You may hate being Lady Sula, but that’s who you are. That’s who you’ll have to be, if we win. And I’ll still be Casimir Massoud, the cliqueman from Riverside. Where does that leave me, when all the Peers come back to run things?”
I amnotLady Sula! she thought desperately. But it wasn’t something she could say aloud, and even if she did, it wouldn’t make any difference.
Sula dropped her hand and straightened, as defiant in her despair as any derivoo.
“It leaves you Lord Sula,” she said, “if you want to be.”
His jaw dropped in astonishment and he turned to face her. “You can’t mean it.”
“Why not?” she said. “You couldn’t be any worse a Peer than I am.”
A trace of scorn crossed his face. “They’ll laugh,” he said. “I’ll be a freak—a cliqueman in a High City palace. Until someone finds out some of the things I’ve done, and then I’ll be tried and strangled.”
“Wrong.” Urgency sent the words spilling in a cascade from her lips. “You don’t remember that I’ve promised amnesties. Once you get your amnesty, you don’t have to go back to your old life. You’re an honored businessman, probably with a medal and the thanks of the empire.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “And what happens then? I sit in a palace and rot?”
“No. You make money.” A hysterical laugh bubbled from deep within her. “You don’t get it, do you? How the Peers made their money? Theystole it.” She laughed again. “Only they did it legally! If you have the right connections, if you have the right name, you can wedge yourself into legitimate business and collect your dues forever. It’s not called protection, it’s not called extortion, it’s apatron-client relationship ! You just need to learn the rightvocabulary !”
Sula couldn’t stand still any longer. She walked the two paces to the outside wall, then walked back again, then repeated the circuit. “There are two ways to take the High City,” she said as she walked. “One is with guns, and we’ll do that in two days. The other way is with the right name, and Sula is one of the right names. You haveno idea how ripe the empire is for plunder. The whole place is tottering, and not just because the Naxids have got greedy. I say we turn pirate and leave the place in smoking ruins. What doyou say?”
She stopped her pacing and grinned up at him. Astonishment and confusion and chagrin and reluctant understanding worked their way across his face, each in its turn.
“I think you could do it,” he said in a voice of soft surprise.
“Wecould do it,” Sula said. “I’d need help. I told you I’m lousy at being a Peer.”
“Life is such a strange adventure,” Casimir remarked, and shook his head. He held out his arms. “How can I say no to becoming a lord?”
She stepped into his arms and felt them close tight around her.
There was a little problem with the Peers’ Gene Bank that she would have to resolve, the drop of blood she was required to contribute if she ever married and which could prove her an imposter. The drop of blood that had come between her and Martinez.
But the gene bank was in the High City, and if she won her battle in the next few days, the genetic records of the Sula clan could vanish in the aftermath. Any barrier to marriage would vanish with them.
It wasn’t just the cliquemen, she thought, who were now fighting for love.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance grew to thirty ships, then thirty-five, then forty. The Naxids at Magaria were known to have thirty-five ships, and many Fleet officers wanted to launch at once for immediate battle, but Tork continued his orbit of Chijimo and his drills. Martinez had to concede that Tork was probably right—if he was going to use the stodgy old tactics against a fleet that had already won a colossal victory against just those tactics, it was best to have a massive advantage in numbers.
The Naxids were reinforced to thirty-seven, the Orthodox Fleet to forty-six. Still Tork didn’t move. Still he continued to drill his squadrons and hector his officers with demands for obedience and conformity. Still he bombarded the Convocation with demands for a vast new wave of ship construction, not simply warships, but support vessels, shuttles for landing troops, and the troops to be landed from the shuttles.
Then intelligence reports indicated that the Naxids numbered forty-two, which—since it happened to be the total number of ships they were absolutely known to possess—conceivably meant that the entire Naxid fleet might be at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet had grown to fifty-two by then. Martinez found himself begin to itch for action. Engagenow, he thought, before the Naxids could replace those unfinished ships destroyed at the shipyards by Chenforce and Squadron 14.
Tork was apparently immune to such itches. The Naxids were reinforced to forty-eight, which meant they had shipyards producing warships in places that neither raiding squadron had reached, probably including Naxas and Magaria. Tork then gained four new frigates and four heavy cruisers of the newObedience class,Obedience, Conformance, Compliance, andSubmission .
From the tenor of the lineup, Martinez suspected that Tork now had a hand in the naming of ships. “Logically,” Martinez told Michi, “the next in the sequence will be ‘Surrender.’”
Despite the reinforcements, Tork still declined to launch for Zanshaa. Martinez began to receive hints from Michi Chen—which had apparently originated with her brother—that both the government and the Fleet Control Board had lost patience with Tork and were on the verge of taking action—if, that is, they could make up their minds whether the action would be to replace Tork with Kringan, formerly of the Fourth Fleet and now Tork’s second in command, or simply to order Tork to attack.
Possibly Tork heard these same hints, because he announced that he would move as soon as he had been reinforced by another three frigates from Laredo, ships that were already on their way. By the time that happened, the Naxids had received five ships, and Tork’s advantage in numbers had fallen from twelve to ten.
Tork delayed for another four days after the Laredo frigates arrived—long enough, Martinez observed, for a query to be sent to the Control Board on Antopone, and for the return of an adamantine response. At this point Tork finally committed himself. Orders were sent to his squadron commanders, to individual ships, and to other Fleet elements in other systems.
The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance kindled its mighty antimatter torches, echeloned its squadrons, took a last high-gee swing around Chijimo, and hurled itself for Chijimo Wormhole 1 and the foe that waited at Zanshaa.