Sweep in Peace
Page 63

“I’m trying to figure out a way to explain it and not screw things up between the two of you. I’ve done enough damage as is.”
“Why don’t you just say it straight?”
Wilmos took a deep breath. “You’re young.” He made some uncomfortable motions with his hands, as if he were trying to juggle something and failing. “Just… try not to take it as a blow to your ego. When the night is long and dark, you picture dawn in your head and you wait for it. It sustains you and gives you hope. In a war you search through your memories and you find that one thing, that anchor that tethers you to home. You are that to him. You are everything that is clean and peaceful and beautiful. You are someone who would cry if she heard he died. Soldiers do this. Sailors and long-range space crews, too. Men, women, doesn’t matter. We all wish for someone at home who might be waiting for us. It’s not always fair to those who stay behind, but that’s the way it is.”
Gorvar rose and trotted over and Wilmos patted the big wolf’s head.
“Sean is no fool. He knows there wasn’t anything solid there, but he thinks there might be if he ever made it off Nexus. He thinks there is a chance. When he fought his way through that dark night, covered in gore and with no end in sight, he thought of you. He thought of coming home and seeing you smile. You are worth living for. You kept him going. He couldn’t let you die, Dina. I knew this was a long shot. I hoped that if worse came to worst, you’d let him down gently, so he had some piece of a heart left. Now it doesn’t matter anymore. He will go to his fate knowing that he kept you out of harm’s way and he will be perfectly content.”
“He won’t be going anywhere. I’m going to save him,” I told him. I would deal with being Sean’s dawn later. Now I had to keep him alive.
“You can’t.” Pain brimmed in Wilmos’ eyes. “The only way to save him is to bring about peace on Nexus. It is impossible. I know the Arbiters are trying, but it can never be. They’ve been enemies for far too long. That’s why the Office of Arbitration gave it to some greenhorn Arbiter nobody ever heard of.”
Nice to know this was George’s first try. I leaned forward. “You said yourself I have stardust on my robe and the Universe in my eyes. I want to save Sean. After I saved him, I’ll decide if I am going to give him a chance or not. Right now that’s still up in the air.”
Wilmos’ eyebrows crept up.
“I’m not an angel who will soothe all his wounds, I’m not his dawn, and I’m not his perfect sweetheart who is waiting for him to come home from the war. He’ll figure it out very quickly, if he doesn’t know that already, and then he will have to decide if he wants to let go of that and work on getting to know the real me. But none of this can happen until I pry him out of the Merchants’ contract. Are you going to help me or not?”
Wilmos stared at me for a long time. “What do you need?”
I passed him a piece of paper. “There are many bounties on this person.”
Wilmos glanced at the name and raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”
“I need to know if any of those contracts came off the market after 2032 Standard.”
“I can check that.”
“And I need the psy-booster.”
Wilmos leaned back. “The psy-booster has to be fed with life energy.”
“I know.”
“It’s agony. One of the worst pains known to a human.”
“I know.”
Wilmos thought it over. “Okay. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
So did I.
After the heat of Baha-char, the cool interior of the inn was more than welcome. And I could finally stop rolling the bag. The psy-booster wasn’t something I wanted close to my skin, so Wilmos’ dealer had packed it into a large wheeled bag. The bag was cumbersome and made for an easy target. I had dragged it through a mile worth of Baha-char streets, worrying that some enterprising thief was going to make a play for it. But I was finally home. I strolled through the hallway, with the bag rolling behind me, and opened a screen to George. “Meet me in the Grand Ballroom.”
He nodded.
This wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, but I didn’t really care.
I walked to the back of the ballroom. Where would be a good place… To the side? No, I’d want them to be in a circle around me. I stopped in the center, where the mosaic floor offered a depiction of Gertrude Hunt circled by a stylized broom. This had to be the best spot.
A hole opened in the center of the mosaic, small, but growing larger and larger, swallowing the mosaic pieces. That was okay. I would redo it later.
George walked into the ballroom.
“So this is your first assignment,” I said.
“Yes.”
The hole was now three feet wide. Good enough. I raised my hand, coaxing one of the inn’s bigger roots out. Thinner roots wouldn’t work. They were capillaries and I need a nice thick vein, a direct access to the heart of the inn. This would take a while.
“Was this supposed to be a feather in your cap? Your first assignment, which you must accomplish without any regard to the cost to everyone else?”
“Feathers are for people who seek recognition,” George said. “Recognition does not matter to me.”
“People don’t seem to matter to you either. You came here and appealed to my trust. You pretended to know nothing about the inns or how they worked. Then you systematically manipulated the events and chipped away at my resolve until you brought me to this point.”
“You wouldn’t have reached it unless you were desperate,” he said.
“Yes. Did you know Sean was Turan Adin and he and I had a history?”
“Yes. There was a chance that his presence would give you that final push. Nuan Cee was growing increasingly frantic. His back is against the wall. Both the Holy Anocracy and the Horde are martial cultures, and the lees are not. The prolonged war is harder on them than on any of the others. Ancestral worship is so ingrained in the lees’ society, they’ve killed each other over the privilege of taking care of their elders. Nuan Cee is half-exile; his obsession with forging the cast-outs into a clan has dominated his business strategies for the last twenty years. He did take the time to cover his tracks, but when you examine his financial maneuvering with his ancestry in mind, the pattern emerges quite readily. When he finally acquired the rights to Nexus, it must’ve felt like a triumph. Finally he could make his people whole. He jumped the gun with colonization. It was quite possibly the most emotion-driven decision of his entire career. Then he saw it all fall apart. Without peace, there is no clan, no shrine, no closure. He wanted to bring Turan Adin into the negotiations, because he is their biggest weapon. I just needed to give him an excuse. With the negotiations breaking down and the Khanum’s eldest son having died on Nexus in the past year, she would need the Autumn Festival. It was her only chance to see her son again. She would do almost anything for it. So I suggested to Robart that sometimes people do not truly understand the situation until they had a chance to see it through their own eyes. His budding alliance with House Meer was tenuous; he was blinded by grief over his beloved. House Meer understood this and placed very little confidence in him, so when he offered them a seat at the metaphorical and actual table, they jumped on the chance and sent three of their finest to ruin the negotiations.”