The house had a hallway along the side; doors of a simpler pattern than the ones Adele passed through nested in the left-hand wall of each room. The hall was for servants, not the owner and his guests.
The door of the third room was open; Adele saw glass-fronted bookcases within. “Please go through, mistress,” the servant said, bowing again. As Adele entered the library, he closed the door behind her.
Bernis Sand rose from a banquette in a corner and gestured Adele to the other end of its upholstered curve. “Good of you to come, Mundy,” she said. “Here, sit down. Can I offer you refreshment? My friend Carnolets keeps an impressive cellar.”
“Nothing, thank you,” Adele said. “Well—water, if that’s possible? My throat’s dry, I find. Very dry.”
“Yes, of course,” Sand said, touching a call-plate set into the table in the center of the banquette. She was a stocky woman of indeterminate age, almost sexless in the library’s muted light. She wore a pants suit of brown herringbone twill, nondescript from any distance but of natural fabric and the best workmanship. “I hear you had some trouble this evening. Is there anything I should know about it?”
Adele shook her head curtly. She sat on the banquette, concentrating on her action so that she didn’t have to meet the spymaster’s eyes. “It was a private matter,” she said. “It’s been resolved, or it shortly will be.”
Her left hand, the hand she’d killed with again tonight, twitched with an incipient cramp. She massaged the palm with her right thumb and fingers, staring at the rich honey-on-bronze grain of the table and seeing instead the face of the gunman as her first pellet blew two teeth out through his left cheek.
The servant set a carafe and glasses on the table and silently vanished again. “Mundy?” said Mistress Sand. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something stronger?”
“Very sure indeed,” Adele said in a steady voice. She poured herself a glass of water and drank, pleased to note that her hand barely trembled.
Sand seated herself on the other end of the banquette; she and Adele weren’t quite facing one another across the small table. She glanced at the tantalus in an alcove near the door, but instead of getting a drink she took a tortoiseshell snuffbox from her waistcoat and poured a dose into the cup of her left thumb.
“Do you know anything about the Commonwealth of God, Mundy?” she asked conversationally, then lifted the snuff to her nose.
“I know very little about any part of the Galactic North,” Adele said. She’d brought out her data unit and its control wands without conscious consideration. “My family had no business interests in the region. I’ve sometimes considered—”
She looked at Sand with a wry grin.
“—that there might be interesting pre-Hiatus volumes in what passes for the libraries of various local rulers, but I’m not going to live long enough to catalog a fraction of what I could find in attics here in Xenos.”
In the center of the room stood a globe whose continents were set in seas of contrasting semi-precious stone. The planet wasn’t Cinnabar or any other world Adele recognized.
Sand blocked one nostril with her index finger, snorted, then sneezed violently into the handkerchief she’d taken from her right sleeve. She looked up, her expression shrewd.
“The Commonwealth isn’t very prepossessing for a fact,” she said. “Half the local captains are pirates if you turn your back on them, and the central government makes up with brutality for what it lacks in competence. But it’s big—loose as it is, the total trade out of the Commonwealth supports a good tenth of the merchant houses in Cinnabar and our allies. For generations the Commonwealth’s been more or less friendly to us. If it should side openly with the Alliance, there’d be serious effects for our relations with the smaller states which depend on trade with the North.”
Adele found what she’d been searching for in the holographic display hanging above her data unit. She leaned back against the cushion and smiled coldly at Sand. The mere cite was enough to bring the episode of family history vividly to her mind.