Lois McMaster Bujold - The Mountains of Mourning

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book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

trail through the scrub, military double time. His feet

squished in his old wet shoes. He slowed in curiosity as he

became conscious of the voices.

The woman's voice grated with grief and exhaustion.

"Please, lord, please. All I want is m'justice..."

The front gate guard's voice was irritated and embar-

rassed. "I'm no lord. C'mon, get

, woman. Go back to the

village and report it at the district magistrate's office."

"I tell you, I just came from there!" The woman did not

move from her knees as Miles emerged from the bushes and

paused to take in the tableau across the paved road. "The

magistrate's not to return for weeks, weeks. I walked four

days to get here. I only have a little money...." A desperate

hope rose in her voice, and her spine bent and straightened

as she scrabbled in her skirt pocket and held out her cupped

hands to the guard. "A mark and twenty pence, it's all I

have, but —"

The exasperated guard's eye fell on Miles, and he

straightened abruptly, as if afraid Miles might suspect him

of being tempted by so pitiful a bribe. "Be off, woman!" he

snapped.

Miles quirked an eyebrow and limped across the road to

the main gate. "What's all this about, Corporal?" he inquired

easily.

The guard corporal was on loan from Imperial Security,

backcountry written all over her. She was younger than her

strained voice had at first suggested. Tall, fever-red from

her weeping, with stringy blonde hair hanging down across a

ferret-thin face and protuberant gray eyes. If she were

cleaned up, fed, rested, happy and confident, she might

achieve a near-prettiness, but she was far from that now,

despite her remarkable figure. Lean but full-breasted — no,

Miles revised himself as he crossed the road and came up to

the gate. Her bodice was all blotched with dried milk leaks,

though there was no baby in sight. Only temporarily full-

breasted. Her worn dress was factory-woven cloth, but

hand-sewn, crude and simple. Her feet were bare, thickly

callused, cracked and sore.

"No problem," the guard assured Miles. "Go

away

," he

hissed to the woman.

She lurched off her knees and sat stonily.

"I'll call my sergeant" — the guard eyed her warily —

"and have her removed."

"Wait a moment," said Miles.

She stared up at Miles from her cross-legged position,

clearly not knowing whether to identify him as hope or not.

His clothing, what there was of it, offered her no clue as to

what he might be. The rest of him was all too plainly dis-

played. He jerked up his chin and smiled thinly. Too-large

head, too-short neck, back thickened with its crooked spine,

daddy, he died in the Service. It s my right.

"Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan," said the guard stiffly,

"is on his country estate to rest. If he were working, he'd

be back in Vorbarr Sultana." The guard looked as though he

wished

were back in Vorbarr Sultana.

The woman seized the pause. "You're only a city man.

He's

count. My right."

"What do you want to see Count Vorkosigan for?" asked

Miles patiently.

"Murder," growled the girl/woman. The security guard

spasmed slightly. "I want to report a murder."

"Shouldn't you report to your village speaker first?" in-

quired Miles, with a hand-down gesture to calm the twitching

guard.

"I did. He'll do

nothing

." Rage and frustration cracked

her voice. "He says it's over and done. He won't write down

my accusation, says it's nonsense. It would only make trouble

for everybody, he says. I don't care! I want my justice!"

Miles frowned thoughtfully, looking the woman over. The

details checked, corroborated her claimed identity, added up

to a solid if subliminal sense of the authentic that perhaps

escaped the professionally paranoid security man. "It's true,

Corporal," Miles said. "She has a right to appeal, first to

the district magistrate, then to the count's court. And the

district magistrate won't be back for two weeks."

Scan her, and let her in, said Miles. On my authority.

The guard was one of Imperial Security's best, trained to

watch for assassins in his own shadow. He now looked scan-

dalized, and lowered his voice to Miles. "Sir, if I let every

country lunatic wander the estate at will —"

"I'll take her up. I'm going that way."

The guard shrugged helplessly, but stopped short of sa-

luting; Miles was decidedly not in uniform. The gate guard

pulled a scanner from his belt and made a great show of go-

ing over the woman. Miles wondered if he'd have been in-

spired to harass her with a strip-search without Miles's in-

hibiting presence. When the guard finished demonstrating

how alert, conscientious, and loyal he was, he palmed open

the gate's lock, entered the transaction, including the

woman's retina scan, into the computer monitor, and stood

aside in a pose of rather pointed parade rest. Miles grinned

at the silent editorial and steered the bedraggled woman by

the elbow through the gates and up the winding drive.

She twitched away from his touch at the earliest oppor-

tunity, yet still refrained from superstitious gestures, eyeing

him with a strange and hungry curiosity. Time was, such

openly repelled fascination with the peculiarities of his body

had driven Miles to grind his teeth; now he could take it with

a serene amusement only slightly tinged with acid. They

would learn, all of them. They would learn.

destiny, despite her mulish determination at the gate, for as

they climbed unimpeded toward her goal a nascent panic

made her face even more drawn and pale, almost ill. "How —

how do I talk to him?" she choked. "Should I curtsey...?"

She glanced down at herself as if conscious for the first

time of her own dirt and sweat and squalor.

Miles suppressed a facetious set-up starting with,

Kneel

and knock your forehead three times on the floor before

speaking, that's what the General Staff does,

and said in-

stead, "Just stand up straight and speak the truth. Try to

be clear. He'll take it from there. He does not, after all" —

Miles's lips twitched — "lack experience."

She swallowed.

A hundred years ago, the Vorkosigans' summer retreat

had been a guard barracks, part of the outlying fortifica-

tions of the great castle on the bluff above the village of

Vorkosigan Surleau. The castle was now a burnt-out ruin, and

the barracks transformed into a comfortable low stone resi-

dence, modernized and re-modernized, artistically landscaped

and bright with flowers. The arrow slits had been widened

into big glass windows overlooking the lake, and com link an-

tennae bristled from the roof. There was a new guard bar-

racks concealed in the trees downslope, but it had no arrow

slits.

A man in the brown and silver livery of the Count's per-

peal before the district magistrate s court. The court s not

here, but the Count is, so she now proposes to skip the mid-

dlemen and go straight to the top. I like her style. Take her

up, will you?"

"During

breakfast

?" said Pym.

Miles cocked his head at the woman. "Have you had

breakfast?"

She shook her head mutely.

"I thought not." Miles turned his hands palm-out, dumping

her, symbolically, on the retainer. "Now, yes."

"My daddy, he died in the Service," the woman repeated

faintly. "It's my right." The phrase seemed as much to con-

vince herself as anyone else, now.

Pym was, if not a hill man, district-born. "So it is," he

sighed, and gestured her to follow him without further ado.

Her eyes widened, as she trailed him around the house, and

she glanced back nervously over her shoulder at Miles. "Little

man...?"

"Just stand straight," he called to her. He watched her

round the corner, grinned, and took the steps two at a time

into the residence's main entrance.

* * *

After a shave and cold shower, Miles dressed in his own

room overlooking the long lake. He dressed with great care,

as great as he'd expended on the Service Academy ceremo-

where he d dropped them before going swimming.

He straightened and checked himself in the mirror. His

dark hair hadn't even begun to recover from that last cut

before the graduation ceremonies. A pale, sharp-featured

face, not too much dissipated bag under the gray eyes, nor

too bloodshot — alas, the limits of his body compelled him to

stop celebrating well before he could hurt himself.

Echoes of the late celebration still boiled up silently in his

head, crooking his mouth into a grin. He was on his way now,

had his hand clamped firmly around the lowest rung of the

highest ladder on Barrayar, Imperial Service itself. There

were no give-aways in the Service even for sons of the old

Vor. You got what you earned. His brother-officers could be

relied on to know that, even if outsiders wondered. He was

in position at last to prove himself to all doubters. Up and

away and never look down, never look back.

One last look back. As carefully as he'd dressed, Miles

gathered up the necessary objects for his task. The white

cloth rectangles of his former Academy cadet's rank. The

hand-calligraphed second copy, purchased for this purpose,

of his new officer's commission in the Barrayaran Imperial

Service. A copy of his Academy three-year scholastic tran-

script on paper, with all its commendations (and demerits).

No point in anything but honesty in this next transaction. In

a cupboard downstairs he found the brass brazier and tripod,

He strolled over and around the graves until he came to

the one he sought, knelt, and set up the brazier and tripod,

humming. The stone was simple,

General Count Piotr Pierre

Vorkosigan,

and the dates. If they'd tried to list all the

accumulated honors and accomplishments, they'd have had to

go to microprint.

He piled in the bark, the very expensive papers, the cloth

bits, a clipped mat of dark hair from that last cut. He set it

alight and rocked back on his heels to watch it burn. He'd

played a hundred versions of this moment over in his head,

over the years, ranging from solemn public orations with mu-

sicians in the background, to dancing naked on the old man's

grave. He'd settled on this private and traditional ceremony,

played straight. Just between the two of them.

"So, Grandfather," he purred at last. "And here we are

after all. Satisfied now?"

All the chaos of the graduation ceremonies behind, all the

mad efforts of the last three years, all the pain, came to

this point; but the grave did not speak, did not say,

Well

done; you can stop now.

The ashes spelled out no messages;

there were no visions to be had in the rising smoke. The

brazier burned down all too quickly. Not enough stuff in it,

perhaps.

He stood and dusted his knees, in the silence and the

sunlight. So what had he expected? Applause? Why was he

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Allrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPublishingEnterprisesP.O.Box1403Riverdale,NY10471www.baen.comtrailthroughthescrub,militarydoubletime.Hisfeetsquishedinhisoldwetshoes.Heslowedincuriosityashebecameconsciousofthevoices.Thewoman'svoic...

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