no weapons of any sort are permitted
within Anadyomene Gardens.
please use the secure lockers in our dressing
rooms to store valuables until your return.
The main entrance beyond the greeter was framed by the cage of a sophisticated detector screen. It could easily have been concealed within the molded wall coverings, but its very prominence was part of the message. Two immaculately dressed but burly attendants stood beside the apparatus.
Of course, Adele thought with a grimace. The Gardens would otherwise be a choice site for duels, which would drive away the ordinary visitors come to spend the day in a variety of exotic settings.
She sighed and stepped down the hallway to an unoccupied dressing room. Daniel made a small finger gesture to show that he understood. He waited, whistling a rigadoon softly while later guests passed by.
Adele closed the door behind her and examined the bank of lockers with thumbprint latches in the sidewall. Only two of the twenty were closed, that is, in use.
It was very unusual for people of the status of Vaughn’s guests to carry weapons themselves: they had servants for their protection. Adele’s parents, however, had believed in an ideal of equality—which meant that a Mundy should be able to do anything a servant could, only better.
Besides that, the Mundys’ progressive political views meant they might at any time be challenged to a duel—if the affronted party thought he or she might survive the encounter. In her youth Adele had spent almost as many hours on a virtual target range as she had with a data unit, and her skill with a pistol was comparable to what she could achieve with her wands.
She took the small electromagnetic pistol from her side pocket and set it inside a locker, which she closed with her thumb over the plate. In theory, at least, only her thumb could release the latch. She hoped the lockers were as secure as the management claimed, because that gun had been a friend to her in difficult times.
Adele returned to Daniel and the servants. She glanced at Tovera’s attaché case and raised an eyebrow, a gesture that only someone with a great deal of knowledge of what Tovera was could interpret.
Tovera smiled blandly and walked through the detector without incident. Hogg sauntered after her, his hands in his pockets. His whistling was a discordant echo of his master’s.
“That’s odd,” Daniel murmured to Adele, indicating that they’d been thinking along the same lines.
“Isn’t it?” she said, taking his offered arm and stepping though the screen beside him. Ahead of them Hogg and Tovera stood back to back, their hands at their sides, taking in their human and material surroundings with perfectly feigned nonchalance.
When she’d first accepted Tovera’s allegiance, Adele had wondered how she was going to get along with Hogg. In fact the two . . . “servants” was the wrong word; they were retainers in the full sense of the term—the two retainers showed mutual respect and a spirit of emulation which didn’t spread to direct competition. Open rivalry between them would have been unpleasant and very brief: Tovera had been born missing a conscience, and Hogg was ruthless the way only a countryman can be.
On the other side of the detector arch, the Gardens opened out into a broad park with benches and, beyond the grass, a canal. A dozen awning-covered boats, ranging from a four-seater to a barge that would hold at least forty, were drawn up along the canal bank. Scores of guests stood in loose groupings; the servants formed a semicircle at a distance around their betters.
A man in silver-slashed magenta stepped from the largest group and waved. “Lieutenant Leary!” he called. Adele recognized the voice as Vaughn’s; the facial makeup repeated the motifs of his garments and had completely concealed his identity so far as Adele was concerned. “Come over here and let me introduce you to a friend from Strymon before we get under weigh.”
Why is he so interested in Daniel?
“I wonder why he’s so interested in me?” Daniel murmured under his breath. He straightened his shoulders and added, “Well, perhaps we’ll learn,” as he sauntered with Adele toward their host.