WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(31)

The monitor looked at her. For the first time Adele had realized that he was little more than a boy himself. He took the pistol's grip reflexively, realized what he held, and let it drop from his fingers. Adele stepped clear as the monitor began to vomit over the ground, the pistol, and his own silken trousers.

Nobody spoke to Adele as she walked back toward the house. None of her classmates spoke to her for weeks thereafter. Servants packed the monitor's belongings that evening, but he never reentered the house or attended another lecture at the Academy. A long time ago . . .

The third-story loggia bayed out from the wall directly over the ramp leading from the palace into the terraced garden. Two servants had gone out to eat lunch while Leary was in the library. They were seated on the stone rail. One of them gestured with a handful of mince stuffed in a wrapper of large leaves as he told a story, wobbling on what seemed to Adele to be a dangerous perch.

She smiled at the thought. Less dangerous, perhaps, than a duel.

Leary opened the glass doors onto the loggia. The servants looked at him with surprise and a degree of belligerence.

"I'm sorry, but we need this location," Leary said with a peremptory gesture. "I'll let you know when you can return."

The male servant who'd been telling the story snarled a reply in a northern dialect; Lupanan, Adele thought, but she didn't have to understand the exact words to get the meaning. Status on Kostroma was generally indicated by bright colors. Leary's uniform was gray with black piping and, to a rube from Lupana, looked like a pot boy's garb.

Leary grabbed the servant's loose collar and tossed him through the doorway. The Kostroman hit the far wall of the corridor. His companion squealed and scurried after him.

Leary closed the glass doors, faced Adele, and crossed his hands behind his back. "Mistress," he said in a clipped voice, "I know nothing about politics except that they exist. My father and sister take care of that end of family affairs."

Adele said nothing; she hadn't been asked a question. Leary wasn't a large man, neither as tall nor as bulky as the servant he'd thrown into the corridor. For a moment she'd thought he was going to pitch the fellow down into the gardens, and even now she suspected the choice had been a near thing.

"When I was just turned seven, there was all kinds of excitement at Bantry," Leary continued. "My father had gotten information from an Alliance agent; tortured it out of him, I suppose, but all I knew at the time was a conspiracy to murder us in our beds with Alliance help. Father flew off to Xenos with most of the guards. The rest of us stood watch all night in case the Alliance attacked."

He shook his head in wry marvel. "Hogg gave me a shotgun," he said. "I'd never been so excited in my life. Now, well, I wonder what a bunch of house servants and groundskeepers were going to do if a squad of Alliance marines in battle armor dropped on Bantry in an assault boat. But that's all I knew or know about the Three Circles Conspiracy, and I care even less."

Adele said nothing. And I care even less. . . . Did she care? She certainly hadn't cared about the issues at the time. That's why she'd gone to Bryce where the proscriptions had passed her by as surely as they had passed by Speaker Leary's young son.

"While I'm on Kostroma," Leary continued in a tone as emotionless as that of an accountant making a report of expenditures, "I intend to avail myself of the privilege of using the Electoral Library, granted all members of the delegation by his Excellency Walter III. I understand that might be a problem for you, Ms. Mundy. I therefore—"

He took a small case from his purse and opened it. His fingers moved with assurance though he continued to meet Adele's eyes.

"—offer you my card with the address of my present lodgings written on the back. If you choose to have a friend call on me, my landlord will take the message even if I'm absent and we can proceed with arrangements."

Shouted confusion rattled windows in the north wing. The noise might well be coming from the library, but for the moment that wasn't the most important situation Adele Mundy had to deal with.

She looked at the card of bi-surfaced plastic. The front read:

DANIEL OLIVER LEARY

LIEUTENANT, RCN

The finish was slick and hard enough to turn a knifepoint. She flipped the card over to read the address written on the porous back in a neat hand. The street was somewhere down by the harbor, she thought, but she hadn't made an effort to learn the geography of Kostroma City.

As she weighed her response, knuckles tapped and the glass doors opened. She and Leary looked around, Adele in surprise and the lieutenant with obvious irritation.

The woman who'd intruded was big and had close-cropped black hair. She was around thirty and would have had an attractive face if it weren't for the scar across her lower left cheek, ear-tip to chin.