WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(47)

The aide led down the helical stairs. They might have been strangers to one another for all the palace staffers they met on the staircase could tell. At the bottom Adele caught up with her guide and said, "I notice you're a Kostroman yourself. Have you known your employer long?"

The aide stopped and looked at her. "I'm a messenger, mistress," she said. "I do what I'm told, and only what I'm told. If you have questions, you'll have to ask somebody else."

Adele nodded curt assent. She was angry and frustrated, but it would be wrong to take it out on the aide. To prod the woman verbally would be pointless cruelty—safe enough because the aide was a flunky and unable to respond, just as a big carnivore behind bars can be teased. The aide was as much a victim of Markos, and of life, as Adele herself was.

They went up the ramp from the palace entryway and out into the gardens beyond. Litter remaining from the night's celebrations lay on the paths or was thrust into the hedges' netted branches. A pair of red brocade breeches, probably a man's, perched on the head of a statue.

There weren't any strollers this early the morning after the festival. To Adele's surprise there was work going on, however.

A crew had broken up some brick planters and appeared to be digging a pond in their place. A truck backed toward the workers, its transmission whining. The foreman shouted directions to the driver while other workmen leaned on their tools and talked among themselves.

The area to the right of the central walk was laid out in hedged squares. The aide led Adele down one of the bricked side paths and finally bowed her into an enclosure. The aide remained behind at the single entrance.

Markos was waiting there, as she'd expected. He sat on a stone bench with his back to the dense hedge. Though the top floor of the palace overlooked the garden, no one watching from there could see even the top of his head.

Markos looked at her with cool appraisal. He nodded but didn't speak, apparently to emphasize his control of the situation.

A worm from the Pleasaunce slums does not control a Mundy of Chatsworth. . . .

"I saw a colleague of yours last night," Adele said in her normal voice. "Somebody should tell her to work on her Pleasaunce accent if she's going to pretend to be a Casque."

"No one of that name is a colleague of mine," Markos said. His anger showed in the way his own real origins rasped in his voice. "Let me assure you, mistress—the fact that persons may be sloppy in the way they prepare for a task shouldn't be taken to mean that they won't correct errors in a terminal fashion. Quite the contrary."

"What do you want?" Adele said.

Markos patted the bench beside him. She shook her head minusculely and crossed her arms in refusal.

"Sit down," he said. "I don't choose to raise my voice, mistress. And don't play games with me or third parties will regret it! That's a personal promise, not a professional one."

Adele seated herself beside him. A man like Markos would sooner lie than tell the truth, but she didn't think that particular threat had been a lie. She'd made him angry by refusing to be cowed.

"I want an electronic copy of the palace guard rosters for the next month," he said, calm again. "Names and addresses, and any other information on record about the persons on duty. I believe some of the guards are billeted in the palace proper while others are off-premises except while they're on duty. And of course I want their pay records as well."

"Where do you expect me to find that sort of thing?" Adele snapped.

"I really don't care, Ms. Mundy," Markos replied. "Fuck the chamberlain if you choose. But I suspect you'll turn it up quickly enough through a data search of the sort you're uniquely qualified to perform."

"All right," Adele said coldly. She stood up. "I'll see what I can find. Contact me in a week."

"You will come back here before you leave the palace grounds," Markos said, his tone heavy with the menace that was natural to him. "You will have the information complete. You will deliver the information to my secretary."

Adele looked toward the opening in the hedge. The aide was watching them sidelong; her thin mouth smiled very faintly.

Markos wouldn't have been sent to Kostroma without expert staff and equipment comparable to anything Adele could provide—but the experts and particularly the equipment might not be solely committed to the Fifth Bureau. The Goetz von Berlichingen needed a powerful data processor simply for navigation purposes, but Markos couldn't be certain that the uses he made of the computer wouldn't be analyzed by the likes of "Mirella Casque" or agents of other rival organizations.

An impecunious librarian whose only friend was a hostage within the Alliance was a much more trustworthy tool than Alliance naval officers protected by their own organization from the wrath even of a member of the Fifth Bureau. Besides, it was a game that would appeal to the sort of person Markos was.