Tempting to make Sfenni waste the stuff, but... “That won’t be necessary,” Brezan said as diplomatically as he could manage. His parents would have been proud of him.
Sfenni tapped out a summons on his terminal. After an agonizing wait, the tasseled woman appeared again. “Hi there,” she said with no sign of diminished cheer. “What do you have for me now, Sfenni?”
“Take our guest somewhere comfortable to wait,” Sfenni said. “Make sure he’s fed, hydrated, the usual. I absolutely must deal with that damnable Vidona envoy now.”
“Sure thing,” the woman said, and dimpled at Brezan.
Fuck, he hoped she wasn’t flirting with him. Not because she didn’t attract him, but because she did, and right now he desperately needed fewer distractions in his life. Thankfully, the woman left it at that.
They took the lift again, to an entirely different level. To distract himself from his misgivings, he cataloged the decor. Whoever had decorated this level liked monochromatic paintings of ice planets bordered by dizzying fractal swirls. Nice work: Brezan wasn’t artistic himself, but his youngest father was a children’s illustrator with a chronic inability to look at artwork without vivisecting it.
By the time they arrived at the waiting room, it had already been set up with a tray of little dishes, everything from a bowl of noodles topped with half a boiled egg to platters of sliced fruit. Even a shelf of books that Brezan had no intention of touching. The room was overwhelmingly blue-and-cream, so soothing that Brezan’s shoulder blades itched.
“And that’s that,” the woman said. “Anything I can provide to make this less aggravating?” She dimpled again, hopefully.
Tempting, but—“No, I’m fine,” Brezan said. His dilemma wasn’t her fault.
“All right, then. I’ll fetch you later.”
Brezan had just enough time to sag into a damnably comfortable chair and wonder what it would be like to go through life so blithely. Then, appallingly, he fell asleep. He woke up an indeterminate amount of time later with a horrible crick in his neck. The remnants of the peach brandy tasted foul, although he had scarcely touched it. And the tasseled woman was nowhere in sight.
Deliberately, Brezan hauled himself up, stalked over to the wall, and began writing on it with his finger:
FOXES ARE COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY
over and over again, like a children’s writing lesson. Could handwriting be sarcastic?
The waiting room opened into a compact but complete bathroom. He knew what this implied about how long they planned to stash him here. He demanded to talk to someone in charge. This didn’t work, but he hadn’t expected it to.
Resigned, he ate the food. Pure military practicality. Besides, that milk-and-carrot pudding was tasty. He’d have to try to duplicate it if he ever got out of here, which was looking increasingly unlikely.
More waiting. More food trays, always deposited through a slit that looked like it would guillotine his hands if he put one in. More sleeping in chairs, in spite of his resolution to do better. His sergeant back in academy would have been ashamed of him. The next time he saw General Khiruev, he swore he would apologize for ever thinking of watch repair as a frivolous hobby and ask for engineering lessons.
Finally, scant moments before he tried ramming the door with his shoulder, the kind of stupid stunt even a Kel would only do in a Kel joke when trapped in a Shuos building, the tasseled woman showed up.
“There you are,” she said, as if she hadn’t been the one to deposit him here. “Let’s go!”
She might have made small talk on the way to Sfenni’s office. Brezan responded with distracted grunts. Still, he envied her the ability to be unoffended by his terrible manners.
“Sfenni,” the woman said once they’d made it to the office with its menagerie of books. “Here he is. Enjoy!”
Her teasing voice would have made Brezan smile grudgingly at her on another day, but not today.
“There’s been a complication,” Sfenni said as soon as the door shut behind Brezan.
Brezan’s heart sank. Sfenni wanted another bribe, the wormfucker. Which could be managed. That wasn’t an issue in itself, since at this rate he was going to die of exasperation before retirement became pressing. But what guarantee did he have that Sfenni wouldn’t string this out until Brezan was broke, and all without ever delivering the promised terminal access?
FOXES ARE COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY, indeed.
“It’s your turn to listen,” Brezan said coldly, without bothering to sit, no matter how much his legs would have appreciated it. Out of habit, he stuck to the polite forms of verbs, and the more-or-less polite pronouns. “I bet you know to the hundredth how much I have left in my primary account, and my obligatory health and retirement accounts, and my independent investments, and everybloodything else. Just clean it all out and buy yourself a few libraries, or hell, hire yourself a planet of bookbinders. I need to get that warning out. Name your price. The real one this time.”
Sfenni didn’t blink at this outburst. But then, who knew how many just like it he had weathered? Instead, matter-of-fact, he slid his tablet across the desk. “I know you hawks are used to the big, wallopingly fancy terminals that look like ancient shrines from back when people sacrificed chickens to fox spirits,” he said, “but this is a Shuos model, and it is secured.”
The hexarchate’s six-spoked wheel with its faction emblems sheened gold-silver-bronze against the black of the tablet’s display. Sfenni said, “I’ll leave the room so you can make your call. You’ll be monitored in the sense that alarms will go off if you try to set anything on fire—which I don’t recommend, by the way, I’m positive some of that paper is made of weird toxic shit—but otherwise you’ll be left alone. Believe me, don’t believe me, it’s all one to me.”
“Then what do you mean, ‘complication’?” Brezan said, because he couldn’t let well enough alone. What he should have done was snatch up the tablet, although admittedly he expected it to be rigged to zap him. Shuos Sfenni, collector of bribes, gardener of books. What had changed? “I don’t understand.”
“We received word that the Swanknot swarm had been subverted about a month ago,” Sfenni said. “You’ve been out of it for a few weeks.”
Brezan hissed in despair.
“We only found out about your outlandish claim to be a personal agent of Shuos Zehun’s because an analyst was double-checking the usual torrent of nonsense messages to find something especially funny to tell their teammates about. Your story was sufficiently odd that we looked into the matter. We figured we’d better evaluate your motives before dumping you back on the Kel, because it was clear that you’d had some kind of breakdown. Let’s not kid ourselves, Kel Medical’s solution to broken birds is usually to throw them in the stewpot.”
“And—?” Brezan said, flabbergasted.
“Let me guess,” Sfenni said. “You couldn’t get anyone to believe a crashhawk”—Brezan didn’t bother correcting him—”so you played up a glancing connection to Shuos Zehun back in academy in the hopes of getting your warning out. It’s the Immolation Fox, isn’t it?”
The world shuddered dark. “General Jedao,” Brezan said. “Jedao’s made his move and I’m too late.”
“Don’t be like that,” Sfenni said kindly. “Any information you have might yet be useful in putting down the hawkfucker for good. Now, go ahead and make that report. And don’t bother looking for the green pills in the desk unless you’re into foul-tasting rubbish. They’re not real anxiety medications, and something tells me that placebos don’t do you a whit of good.”
CHAPTER NINE