“Nobody else is here,” Adele said in a husky voice. “Just the three of us.”
There were six thugs, all of them male. They prowled the short rank of stacks, holding their guns out at arm’s length as though to fend off any figure leaping from among the books. Two of them opened cartons and peered at the contents.
Adele got to her feet. Her right temple throbbed, but the momentary dizziness had passed. She stretched her left arm to the side and twisted it, making sure that it moved normally again.
Prester knelt on the floor with her forehead pressed against a bookcase. She was sobbing and her hands still squeezed her temples. Blood from the ruin of Vanness’s head had dribbled to her bare toes, but she didn’t seem to be aware of that.
The aide lowered the communicator and smiled faintly at Adele. “I’m to escort you to the Grand Salon, mistress,” she said. Two of the gunmen looked at her. She nodded to them and added, “You two come with me. You others, take the woman there to the cage in the gardens. Report to whoever’s in charge for reassignment.”
“She’s just an assistant,” Adele said softly. “She isn’t even a Hajas. Just the niece of a cousin of the Chancellor.”
The aide shrugged. “Not my department,” she said. “Maybe nothing will happen to her.”
Two of the gunmen lifted Prester by the elbows. She hung as a dead weight, her feet drawing smears of blood on the tile floor.
“Shall we go, mistress?” the aide said. She waggled the submachine gun. That wasn’t a threat; the weapon simply happened to be in her hand. Adele doubted that the woman ever threatened in the usual blustering sense of the word.
Without speaking, Adele Mundy walked into the hall and turned toward the staircase. If she delayed she’d find herself stepping in the trail of tacky blood Prester left on the floor.
The arched windows of Candace’s four-story townhouse were shuttered, and there were no lights on in the front rooms to glimmer through the cracks. Candace lived with a retinue of twenty servants, so even if he himself had left the city there was certain to be somebody still in the house.
Daniel stepped into the shallow door alcove and knocked with the pads of his fingertips. The slapping sound of flesh on steel was enough to be heard inside without rousing the whole street. The panel was armored to resist battering rams.
Each of the tiles covering the facade was divided diagonally, half blue and half white; figured friezes separated the floors. The pattern seemed to strobe in direct sunlight because the rods and cones of the human eye didn’t register at quite the same point on the retina. Now Daniel’s only reaction was to wish the background was a neutral gray that his uniform would blend with. He felt as exposed as an infant in a hog pen.
There wasn’t much traffic in Kostroma City tonight. You couldn’t really call the situation quiet, though, because every few minutes there were gunshots somewhere in the darkness. Occasionally a firefight spread its lingering roar, and twice Daniel heard plasma cannon in use. The beams of ions had a hissing snarl that distance quickly muffled, but stone or concrete in their path fractured loudly.
Metal burned. A door like this one would expand in a bellowing white inferno, rising to the fourth story and scouring tiles from the wall in shattered fragments.
An eyehole opened at the side of the alcove. There was no illumination within, but Daniel caught the movement as a lighter shadow appearing among darker ones.
“It’s Lieutenant Daniel Leary,” he hissed. “Quick, let me in before somebody comes by.”
The eyehole closed. Daniel waited a moment for bolts to draw back. He heard nothing. He patted the panel again with his fingertips.
Ducted fans thrummed through the sky. The vehicle was too low over the housetops for Daniel to see it, but he could tell from its powerful note that the motors supported not an ordinary aircar but the twenty-odd tons of an APC. Window sashes rattled.
The Alliance vehicle passed on, still invisible. There was no sound within the house.