Lady Scour’s chief aide followed immediately behind the signaler. He had drawn a pair of long swords, one in each upper arm. Rawsl slashed and thrust at any commoner he could reach, whether or not the target was actually in the palanquin’s path. Rawsl’s swords were more than a meter long.
“What’s the matter?” Ran asked. He tried to keep his voice neutral, despite his distaste. “Didn’t he want to make a trip back to the Empress?”
Rawsl stabbed through the side of a barrow. Thin wood splintered. The blue-clad woman huddling under a tarpaulin within screamed and thrashed upward, then collapsed.
“Who knows what men think?” Lady Scour said dismissively.
She looked at Ran as her fingers played with his garment again. “He didn’t want me to go back,” she said. “And more particularly, he didn’t want to see you again, Ran Colville. But I am mistress of Clan Scour.”
The palanquin came out into open air. The sun was low on the horizon. The western sky was flame-streaked, sharply changing the balance of light. The paper-walled town filtered out all colors except duns, grays, and yellows so pale that they might as well have been grays.
“This is my home,” said Lady Scour. They passed a pair of gateposts, stone but carved as intricately as the panels of the palanquin itself. “All that down there—”
She gestured with the delicacy of a sea anemone clasping prey, one hand/two hands/three.
“—is to serve me.”
The palace was a complex of buildings and gardens, encompassed by a high stone wall. An additional score of armed Szgranian males was drawn up in the first courtyard. Beyond them—in the same line, rather than as a separate rank—were officials in court dress, wearing ludicrous but highly symbolic headgear; noblewomen; and so on down through craftsmen to menial servants.
There must have been a thousand people greeting Lady Scour and her entourage. The last in line wore rags and stank obviously of night soil. The palanquin bearers quickened their pace at that point. All of the waiting contingent put their hands behind their heads and warbled tunelessly until their mistress’s vehicle swept to the porte cochere serving one of the separate buildings.
Ran thought he recognized the maid who opened the door on his side of the palanquin as one of the pair who’d attempted to summon him to Lady Scour’s suite on the Empress. On the other side of the vehicle, Rawsl stood stiffly at his mistress’s service.
Lady Scour strode by the warrior, ignoring him. She offered her three left hands to Ran above the palanquin poles. “Come,” she said. “We’ll eat first, and then we’ll have entertainment.”
She laughed again. “And then,” she said, “we’ll have entertainment.”
The fine fur on Rawsl’s face and bare limbs stood out like the quills of a porcupine. The muscles of his arms were as rigid as the blades of the bloody swords he held.
* * *
“Good evening, Abraham,” Marie Blavatsky called to the lone passenger she’d spotted amid the transparent bulkheads and real fish of the Undersea Grotto. “I’d have expected you to be out on the town tonight.”
Abraham Chekoumian rose from his chair with a lazy smile. “Szgrane is an exotic place to the other passengers, even the crew, Marie,” he said. “Myself, I import from Szgrane; I travel here ten times a year on buying trips. Sometimes I come twice a month.”
Chekoumian stretched. He held a hologram reader in one hand and in the other—as Blavatsky expected—the slick blue spacemail envelope of one of his fiancee’s letters.
“Today,” the importer continued, brandishing the envelope, “I am going home to marry my Marie—not to do business. I don’t need to see Szgrane this trip. The part of their society which they show humans is—”
He shrugged.
“—dirt. And the rest of it, the way the Szgranians themselves live, that would appeal even less to me if I had to be here for any length of time.”
The section of wall behind the importer was stocked with benthic species from the depths of Ain al-Mahdi, patterns of slow-moving dots which fluoresced rose and warm yellow. Occasionally two patterns merged in sluggish dance that ended with one partner progressing down the tooth-fringed maw of the other.