The noise had shut down now to a nighttime roar; her feet, in thin shoes, slid on the slippery, sleeted sidewalks. She was glad to get into the Temporary HQ building, where Temporary Coordinator Russ Montray-Darkover wasn’t important enough in the Empire; yet, to be assigned a proper Legate for liaison with the native residents-met her in the outer office.
“It’s good of you to do this for me, Magda. It won’t hurt to let them know we have some people who can speak the language the way it really ought to be spoken.” He was a plump, balding man in his forties, with a habitual worried look; even in his centrally heated office, with the thermostat turned up to the maximum, he always looked, and was, cold. “I took the lady into my inner office,” he said, and held the door for her.
He said, in his poor and stumbling cahuenga (the lingua franca of the Trade City), “Lady Ardais, I present to you my assistant, Magdalen Lome, who will speak with you more easily than I can do.” He added to Magda, “Tell her we are honored at her visit, and ask what we can do for her. She must want something, or she’d have sent for us instead of coming here herself.”
Magda gave him a warning look; she guessed, from the flash of intelligence in the lady’s eyes, that she understood Terran Standard-or that she was one of the occasional telepaths rumored to be found on Darkover. She began, “Domna, you lend us grace. How may we best serve you?”
The woman looked up, meeting Magda’s eyes; Magda, who had spent her life on Darkover and knew the nuances, thought, This woman is from the mountains; the women of the lowlands are more timid with strangers. As custom demanded for all of the Comyn, she had brought a bodyguard-a tall, uniformed man in the green and black of the City Guard-and a lady companion, but she paid no attention to either of them. She said quietly, “I am Rohana Ardais; my husband is Gabriel Dyan, Warden of Ardais. You speak our language well, my child; may I ask where you learned it?”
“I spent my childhood at Caer Donn, Lady, where the citizens mingled more with the Terrans than is the custom here; all my playmates were Darkovan children.”
“Ah, that explains, why you speak with the accent of the Hellers,” Rohana said. Magda, studying her with the eyes of a trained observer, saw a small, slightly built woman, not nearly as tall as Magda herself. It was hard to tell her age, for there were no telltale lines in her face, but she was not young; the heavy auburn hair, coiled low on her neck and confined with an expensive butterfly-clasp of copper set with green gems, was liberally streaked with gray. She was well and warmly clad in a heavy dress of thick green wool, woven and dyed and elaborately embroidered. She bore herself with great poise, but her hands, clasped in her lap, moved nervously on one another.
“I have come here, against the will of my kinfolk, to ask a service of you Terrans. Perhaps it is foolish, a forlorn hope-” She hesitated, and Magda told her that it would be an honor to serve the Lady Ardais.
Rohana said quietly, “It is my son; he has disappeared. We feared foul play. Then a workman who is employed here in your port on one of your great buildings-surely it is no secret that many of these are paid by us to tell us what we wish to know about your people-one of these workmen, who knows my son slightly, reported to us that he had seen my son here, at work. This was some months ago; but it seemed to us, at last, that any rumor was worth investigating . . ..”
Startled, Magda relayed Rohana’s words to the coordinator. “It is true that we employ many Darkovans. But your son, Lady? Most of those we employ are put to work as common laborers, running machines, doing carpentry and building-”
“Our son is young, and eager for adventure, like all men his age,” Rohana said. “To him, no doubt, it would seem a great adventure, to mingle with men from another world. He would not hesitate to work as a layer of bricks or a pavement-maker, for the sake of that. And as I say, he was seen and recognized here.” She handed Montray a small packet wrapped in silk; he unwrapped it, slowly, glancing at Magda as she translated Rohana’s words.