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his hand half-open, the key resting invitingly across his palm.
"Is that . . . the last of your price?" if
"Yes. I'll ask no more." ff
It was a small triumph. He was going to see a haut-woman, and Ivan wasn't. It
would doubtless embarrass the old dragon, to reveal herself to outlander
eyes, but dammit, given the runaround Miles had suffered, she owed him
something. And he was deathly serious about being able to identify where the
Great Key went. The haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Creche, was
certainly not the only player in this game.
"Very well," she whispered. The white bubble faded to transparency, and was
gone from between them.
"Oh," said Miles, in a very small voice.
She sat in a float-chair, clothed from slender neck to ankle in flowing robes of
shining white, a dozen shimmering textures lying one atop another. Her hair
glinted ebony, masses of it that poured down across her shoulders, past her
lap, to coil around her feet. When she stood, it would trail on the floor like a
banner. Her enormous eyes were an ice blue of such arctic purity as to make
Lady Gelle's eyes look like mud-puddles. Skin . . . Miles felt he had never seen
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skin before, just blotched bags people wore around themselves to keep from
leaking. This perfect ivory surface . . . his hands ached with the desire to
touch it, just once, and die. Her lips were warm, as if roses pulsed with blood.
. . .
How old was she? Twenty? Forty? This was a haut-woman. Who could tell?
Who could care? Men of the old religion had worshipped on their knees icons
far less glorious, in beaten silver and hammered gold. Miles was on his knees
now, and could not remember how he'd come to be there.
He knew now why they called it "falling in love." There was the same
nauseating vertigo of free fall, the same vast exhilaration, the same sick
certainty of broken bones upon impact with a rapidly rising reality. He inched
forward, and laid the Great Key in front of her perfectly shaped, white-
slippered feet, and sank back, and waited.
I am Fortune's fool.
CHAPTER SIX
She bent forward, one graceful hand darting down to retrieve her solemn
charge. She laid the Great Key in her lap, and pulled a long necklace from
beneath her layered white garments. The chain held a ring, decorated with a
thick raised bird-pattern, the gold lines of electronic contacts gleaming like
filigree upon its surface. She inserted the ring into the seal atop the rod.
Nothing happened.
Her breath drew in. She glared down at Miles. "What have you done to it!"
"Milady, I, I ... nothing, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan! I didn't even drop
it. What's . . . supposed to happen?"
"It should open."
"Um . . . um . . ." He would break into a desperate sweat, but he was too
damned cold. He was dizzy with the scent of her, and the celestial music of
her unfiltered voice. "There are only three possibilities, if there's something
wrong with it. Someone broke it-not me, I swear!" Could that have been the
secret of Ba Lura's peculiar intrusion? Maybe the Ba had broken it, and had
been seeking a scapegoat upon whom to shuffle the blame? "-or someone's re-
programmed it, or, least likely, there's been some kind of substitution pulled.
A duplicate, or, or . . ."
Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, moving in some subvocalization.
"Not least likely?" Miles hazarded. "It would surely be the most difficult, but
... it crosses my mind that maybe someone didn't think you would be getting it
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back from me. If it's a counterfeit, maybe it was meant to be on its way to
Barrayar in a diplomatic pouch right now. Or ... or something." No, that
didn't quite make sense, but . . .
She sat utterly still, her face tense with panic, her hands clutching the rod.
"Milady, talk to me. If it's a duplicate, it's obviously a very good duplicate. You
now have it, to turn over at the ceremony. So what if it doesn't work? Who's
going to check the function of some obsolete piece of electronics?"
"The Great Key is not obsolete. We used it every day."
"It's some kind of data link, right? You have a time-window, here. Nine days.
If you think it's been compromised, wipe it and re-program it from your
backup files. If that thing in your hand is some kind of a non-working dummy,
you've maybe got time to make a real duplicate, and re-program it." But don't
just sit there with death in your lovely eyes. "Talk to me!"
"I must do as Ba Lura did," she whispered. "The Ba was right. This is the end."
"No, why?! It's just a, a thing, who cares? Not me!"
She held up the rod, her arctic-blue eyes fixing on his face at last. Her gaze
made him want to scuttle into the shadows like a crab, to hide his merely
human ugliness, but he held fast before her. "There is no backup," she said.
"This is the sole key."
Miles felt faint, and it wasn't just from her perfume. "No backup?" he choked.
"Are you people crazy?"
"It is a matter of ... control."
"What does the damn thing really do, anyway?"
She hesitated, then said, "It is the data-key to the haut gene bank. All the
frozen genetic samples are stored in a randomized order, for security.
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