“It’ll go very well indeed, Hogg,” Daniel said. “Bring on the brandy!”
He leaned back in his chair, a heavy thing of plush and dark wood borrowed from the landlord. He was at peace with the world.
Some time in the distant past a librarian having a bad day had said something that Daniel must have misinterpreted. Who could be angry about such things when life was a wonderful thing, shadowed only by the absence of command?
Command would come, as surely as good fellowship and good wine and the stars themselves had come to Daniel Leary!
The Grand Salon where the Elector held formal dinners rose the full height of the palace’s second and third stories, with a rebated clerestory above that. The ceiling was a single enormous fresco, but the light wasn’t good enough for Adele Mundy to see more than a hint of bare limbs and flowing drapery.
She’d have liked a better view, but since she hadn’t bothered to visit the salon in daylight she didn’t suppose that her interest could be as great as all that. Primarily she was feeling the utter boredom of the gathering.
“Now . . .” said the man to her left, a provisions merchant from Kostroma City and the only person seated below Adele at the fourth and lowest table of the dinner. “This is egg salad, of course—”
He wiggled a dab of vaguely peach-colored matter on his fork; Adele wasn’t sure that “of course” would have been a phrase she used in the identification.
“—but what kind of egg, I ask you? Not hen as you might think, but domesticated Kostroman Diamondtail!”
“Pardon me, mistress,” said the member of the Alliance delegation on Adele’s right. He was a husky, dark-haired fellow in his forties who’d said his name was Markos. He spoke Academy-grade Universal with a rasping undertone of the Pleasaunce slums. “I believe I’ve been seated higher than my proper precedence should have allowed. Please accept my apology and change places with me.”
“I’m sure—” Adele began, then caught herself. “Ah.”
Even if Markos were a junior clerk as he’d claimed, he should have been higher as a simple matter of diplomatic checkers. At the head table Admiral Lasowski sat to the Elector’s right while the Alliance chief of mission was on the left of Walter’s mistress, looking sour. Not only had the Cinnabar envoy been given precedence, an admiral’s dress uniform with six full rows of medals and a gorget of honor at the throat completely upstaged the robes of the Alliance civilian.
The order at the two middle tables was reversed. A grandnephew of Guarantor Porra, a peacock in full plumage, sat at the top while the Cinnabar civil head was two places below him; likewise the two naval captains at table three, an Alliance delegate sitting above Le Golif of the Aglaia—not properly a member of the Cinnabar mission, but present in Lt. Leary’s place.
It was proper that at table four the mid-ranking functionary from the Cinnabar Navy Office restore balance by being seated higher than Markos; but no member of the delegations for whom the banquet was arranged should have been so low. The notion that Markos should really have been below the Electoral Librarian was ludicrous, a piece of gallantry which Adele knew her looks didn’t justify and nothing else could justify.
“Yes, thank you for your courtesy, sir,” she said as she rose with Markos to trade places. She could deal with whatever lay beneath the surface of the fellow’s offer when it appeared. For now, the important thing was that Adele no longer sat next to the merchant, whose invitation had evidently been bartered for the food. Adele had begun to doubt that even a free meal would be worth another five minutes of the Kostroman’s rambling boredom.
Adele sat down. Servants were already removing the settings for this course, so there was no need for her and Markos even to trade flatware.
She heard her former neighbor address a question in his inevitable nasal whine. “I’m sorry, sir,” Markos said in a loud voice. “I’m deaf in my left ear and I can’t hear a word you say.”
When Adele had gotten the new data console running three days before, she’d tested its connection to the palace net by accessing the guest list for the banquet to which she’d just received an invitation. The information was protected, but what passed for protection on Kostroma was child’s play for Adele with an extremely powerful processor at her service. She had a talent for information retrieval and had trained at the most advanced center for the purpose in the human universe.