Chapter 21
THE CHILDREN WERE looking around the office with wary curiosity. Paledan saw the boy’s eyes widen at the arrangement of crossed swords on the wall behind the desk.
“Ziem sabers, I believe?” he said.
“They’re on your wall,” the boy said. “Don’t you know?”
This time he nearly lost the battle not to smile. He was not lacking in nerve, this Davorin.
“Contention valid,” he agreed.
“Take one away,” the girl said sweetly, “and write ‘Without Warning’ on the wall, and you’ll have your very own calling card from the Raider.”
Again, he battled the urge to smile. He’d found little enough besides the occasional game of chaser to amuse him here, so he was enjoying this.
“You admire this raider of yours.”
“Every true Ziemite does,” the boy said staunchly. “We will join him as soon as we are of age.”
“If,” the girl added pointedly, “he hasn’t destroyed you all by then.”
This time, he couldn’t beat back the smile. So neither of them were short in the courage department. He found that surprising in ones so young. And, from what he’d heard, their sister was the same. Which made him wonder, if Davorins indeed bred true and these had such spirit left, what had happened to really break their elder brother?
“Why did you not try an escape on the way here, when you found you could slip the chains?”
The girl rolled her eyes at him. “Um . . . blasters?”
“Even we can’t outrun those,” the boy explained as if he were unable to figure it out himself.
He felt a sudden jab of sympathy for the man responsible for these two.
“Names,” he ordered firmly.
“Nyx,” said the girl.
“And Lux,” said the boy.
He studied them both, saw that glint in their eyes again.
“Perhaps I should have been more specific. Which name goes with who?”
Surprise flickered across both faces. And he caught a note of grudging respect in the girl’s voice when she said, “Opposite.”
“Ah.” He gestured toward the two chairs that sat before his desk. Hard, wooden chairs, for he did not like to encourage anyone to stay too long. “Sit.”
They obeyed without further comment.
“Explain to me what really happened,” he said when they were seated.
The boy, Nyx, blinked, clearly surprised. “Since when does the Coalition care about the truth of anything?”
“Don’t trust him,” Lux declared.
“I trusted you when I unchained you,” he said to the girl. “Left myself at your mercy.”
“We’re just children,” Lux protested.
“And that,” he said, “leads many to underestimate you, I’m sure.”
The two exchanged a glance that told him how accurate he’d been.
He found himself in a difficult and unaccustomed position. He liked these two little scamps. Yet he did not assume that because they were children, they could not have been spying. Who better?
“Tell me,” he ordered again, “what happened.”
The boy started. “We weren’t spying, no matter what that old slimehog says.”
He supposed he should correct this maligning of a Coalition governor, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. It was, after all, something he’d thought himself. And besides, he was finally getting answers.
“We weren’t,” the girl confirmed.
“We were there—”
“First.”
“It’s our tree—”
“And we were just sitting up there—”
“Like always, when they—”
“Happened to stop there.”
“And Jakel—”
“Is evil—”
“So we don’t mess with him. He’ll—”
“Slice your throat as soon as—”
“Look at you.”
“So we stayed quiet up—”
“In the tree. But—”
“Jakel saw us.”
It was like trying to track two individual stingers through a swarm of them. He almost laughed aloud. He’d never been around twins before. And now he envied their keeper even less.
“And did you hear anything of interest?” he asked when they appeared to have paused long enough for him to get a word in.
“Nothing.”
“No, nothing.”
Too insistent. “So, something,” he said dryly.
“We learned the governor is an even bigger blowpig than we thought,” Lux said.
“And Jakel a rabid barkhound,” Nyx put in.
Since he could disagree with neither assessment, Paledan said nothing. And while he doubted the governor had been truthful in saying he’d discussed nothing of import with the brutal enforcer, he had little choice but to take the man at his word. And let the results be on Sorkost’s head.
He turned just enough to activate the comm system. His aide answered instantly. “Have a guard bring me the taproom keeper,” he ordered. “Tell him who we have here.”
He sensed the twins going very still the moment he spoke.
“Under arrest, sir?” Brakely asked.
“Not yet,” he answered.
He in fact had nothing to arrest Davorin for, at the moment, but he thought it might capture the attention of these two little demons if they thought their brother was in jeopardy. And it apparently had. They stayed quiet.
“Nothing more to say?” he asked mildly.
The boy grimaced. “Drake’ll say enough when he gets here.”
And I will be very interested to hear it.
DEAR EOS, WHAT had they done now?
Drake didn’t try to hide the worry that had flooded him upon the arrival of the Coalition trooper with orders from Post Commander Paledan to present himself immediately in the matter of Nyx and Lux Davorin. He would be expected to worry, would he not?
“What has happened?” he asked, more to give himself time to assess the possibilities than with any thought the man would actually tell him anything. He was proven correct in short order.
“Just hasten. The commander is not one to keep waiting, if you know what is good for you. And them.”
He had to work on the assumption that this was only about something the twins had done. And that the trooper’s implied threat meant that at least they were still alive. Given that, the best thing all around would be for the new commander to be presented with what he expected to see: the quiet, ineffectual taproom keeper. He stopped what he’d been about to do—pull off the stained apron he wore. Instead, he left it on and moved quickly from behind the bar, as if he were in a hurry to accede to the trooper’s demand. Satisfied, the man turned on his booted heel and no less than marched out the door, assured that the lowly tapper would of course follow on his heels.
Which he did.
He had never been inside the compound in daylight. He knew the ground it stood on well; it had once been the courtyard of the council building where his father’s office was, before the Coalition had arrived and thrown up this large complex practically overnight. They had used the building itself as one wall of the compound. Never let it be said they weren’t efficient.
Drake looked around, wiping his hands on the apron as he did, as if he had a twitchy sort of feeling inside. Which he did, for several reasons. He let his gaze dart around as if he were nervous, but the trooper didn’t seem to be bothered; in fact, he barely glanced at him as they reached the headquarters building that had been the council building itself. Nor did he pay him much mind as they walked down the wide hallway, even when he glanced through the few open doorways they passed along the way.
When they stepped into the office at the end of the hall, he looked around quickly. The walls were bare of ornament save for a crossed pair of traditional Ziem swords on one wall. The rest of the space was taken up by, surprisingly, old-style paper charts, maps, and a few books that he hadn’t seen the like of since his father’s collection of the old tomes had been confiscated and burned after his death. The requisite viewscreen, holographic station, and other gear was present, but to one side, as if there only under protest.
And nowhere were the twins. Drake’s pulse kicked up at the thought that he’d been wrong, that they were already dead. He clamped down on the burgeoning apprehension and faced the man behind the desk that he guessed was large for use, not show.
He didn’t know what the office of the prior commander, Frall, had looked like, but he somehow doubted it was as stark and severe as this.
But then, Commander Frall had been nowhere near the man Paledan was, and Drake didn’t need the man’s history to know that. He needed only to look at him across the expanse of that desk, watch as he stood. The office needed no ornament, because the man who now owned it needed none. The aura of power and command was enough.
He put on his best imitation of a man who had been through this many times before. Since it was nothing less than true, he hoped it would work to trivialize whatever they’d done.
“What,” he said with an audible sigh, “have those two hedgebeasts been up to now?”
“Spying,” Paledan said.
Drake’s heart jammed in his throat. A sudden fear that he couldn’t get them out of this one shot through him.
“At least,” Paledan continued, “according to Governor Sorkost.”
Something in the way he said it, some faint undertone he couldn’t—or didn’t—quite mask, made Drake risk saying, “They are children. I’m afraid they don’t quite respect the governor’s office.”
“Or the man in it?” Paledan suggested.
“They are children,” he said again. Then, carefully, “I don’t believe they yet realize there can be a difference between respecting the office and the one who holds it.”
Paledan walked slowly around the desk, leaned a hip on the edge of it, and crossed his arms over his chest. “You surprise me, tapper.”
With a sinking feeling he’d gone too far, Drake masked his misgivings and said only, “I do?”
“I was given to believe you barely above a muckrat in intelligence, and below a skalworm in courage.”
“I lay no claim to great amounts of either. Sir.”
“And yet you have raised two imps that have an overabundance of both.”
“It is their nature,” he said. “They take after our parents, I’m afraid.”
“Hmm.”
Drake said nothing more as the man studied him for a long moment. He wasn’t sure what he would do—what he could do—if Paledan had indeed killed the twins, or had them killed.
“You do not ask for details,” Paledan observed.
Drake steadied himself inwardly. “I have learned it is wiser to wait to be told what the Coalition is willing to tell.”
“And one should always follow the wiser course, is that not true?”
“That,” Drake said, “I cannot argue with. Sir.”
He could have sworn the man’s mouth quirked slightly, as if suppressing amusement. “Then allow me to point out that your wisest course now is to keep those two out of the way of the governor for the foreseeable future.”
Drake sucked in a breath. “Then . . . they are alive?”
Paledan frowned. “You thought otherwise?”
“The governor is . . . of uncertain temper at times.”
“Odd,” Paledan said, “I’ve found him of a steady and certain temper—bad—most times.”
Drake didn’t dare let himself smile, but it was an effort.
“I do not intentionally slaughter children, Davorin. Not even those with the name of an infamous rebel.”
“I am . . . thankful for that, commander.”
He used the title purposely, for the first time. He saw it register. After a moment, Paledan nodded. He leaned over and spoke into the communicator on the desk.
“Bring them in.” Then he looked back at Drake. “I wish you luck with those two. I fear you will need it.”
“I fear I’ve already run through my allotment with them,” Drake said.
The man did smile then. And Drake had the oddest feeling it was with a sort of relief that the twins were not his to deal with.
A relief he could completely understand.