Madame Flambard herself was at the desk. The plump, gray-haired woman broke into a smile at the sight of him.

“Monsieur Jonah—I mean, Paladin Levin! It’s an honor to have you back with us.”

Jonah could not help smiling in return. “You have a room, then? I sent word from Belgorod—”

“Yes, yes. We were all so surprised—we hadn’t thought we’d see you here again, now that you’re not just a Knight anymore.”

He shook his head reprovingly. “Nobody is just a Knight.”

“Of course not. But Paladins—”

“Should give up staying in places where they’re known and comfortable, and go stay somewhere big and impressive instead? No, Madame, the Pension Flambard suits me very well.”

He took the key-card and ascended to the small room up under the eaves, which had been his favorite ever since he first came to Geneva as a new-made—and far from wealthy—Knight. The garments he had bought from the tailor in Belgorod would arrive later by van from the transit hub. Anything important or private had come with him in his single small bag.

He secured the bag and its contents in the wall safe, then turned to the combination desk, communications console, and entertainment center that took up most of the space in the room not occupied by the bed.

Madam Flambard’s grasp of the priorities was yet another thing that Jonah approved of. Most of the Pension Flambard’s furnishings were either genuinely old or deliberately retro, but its communications consoles were always kept current with the state of the art. Jonah connected to the government’s secure network and entered the password that gave him access to the Paladin-level files and private areas. He needed to get an idea of the general state of affairs—and not just the commonly available information, either—before he talked to anybody.

Genevan politics at the Knight level had been full of old feuds and secret alliances, private antipathies and conflicting agendas, and he had no reason to believe that things would be different now that his rank was higher. So far as he knew, being named a Paladin had never made a man—or a woman—any more righteous than he or she was before, and even people of goodwill and good intentions could be bitterly divided on what course of action was best for The Republic.

He went to the situation updates on the Prefectures first. With regret, he noted the changes in the format there. Updates were no longer available in as close to real time as to make no difference. Instead, entries were tagged with the date of their first report and the date of their confirmation, and sorted by provenance and reliability—direct transmission, official government data disc or other storage medium, commercial or personal data medium, verbal report from official source, verbal report from outside source, and so on.

Scanning the entries, he found himself missing Anna with a real and sudden pang. She had always been much better than he was at disentangling complex webs of hearsay and pulling loose the threads of truth and relevance.

Intelligence analysts do this sort of thing all the time, he told himself sternly. So can you.

The hot spots of the moment appeared to be Prefectures II and III. Former Prefect Katana Tormark and her supporters in the Dragon’s Fury were making serious inroads there. Katana made as formidable an enemy of The Republic as she had made a supporter, and her defection—nobody wanted to use the painful word “betrayal”—had shocked a number of people who’d thought that her loyalty was absolute.

And maybe it still was, Jonah thought. Perhaps Katana’s loyalty had always been given to something whose true nature only she knew, and which she didn’t see as embodied in The Republic anymore.

He turned from the Dragon’s Fury to Clan Wolf. The Steel Wolf faction had been active recently, but at the moment appeared quiescent. Reports had come into Kervil several Terran months back that Prefect Kal Radick, the Wolves’ de facto leader in The Republic, was dead in a challenge, and that his successor had led the Steel Wolf forces in a strike at Northwind. But if the Wolves had thought to profit from the relative inexperience of Katana Tormark’s replacement as Prefect, they were sadly mistaken. Countess Tara Campbell—with the aid of Paladin Ezekiel Crow—had repulsed them handily.

A far bigger threat, in Jonah Levin’s mind, came at the moment from Jacob Bannson. The business tycoon, thwarted once already in his desire to set up operations in Prefecture III, was rumored to be moving again in that direction.

Jonah frowned. Bannson was dangerous. Richer in his own right than some planetary governments, the man hungered now for things other than money: power, high office, and a voice in the running of The Republic. Some informants claimed that he even had his eyes on Paladin status. More than one person, in fact, had confided in Jonah that his own elevation had enraged Bannson, who had thought of the vacant seat as owed to him.

Jonah could not imagine Bannson wanting the title of Paladin for its own sake, or even for the sake of what a Paladin could accomplish. But for the sake of a shot at the highest prize of all, though… yes.

Jacob Bannson doesn’t want to be a Paladin, Jonah thought. Jacob Bannson wants to be Exarch.

Belgorod DropPort

Terra

Prefecture X

March 3134; local winter

Lieutenant Owain Jones of the Northwind Highlanders had not been on Terra for more than two hours before he knew that they planned to kill him. He was not completely clear on who “they” might be—although he had a strong opinion about who had sent them—but he had no doubts whatsoever concerning their intent. He was a combat soldier who had been entrusted with a vital mission, and he knew that he was going to die.

The leather portfolio in his right hand, heavy with data discs and papers containing the testimony and the pictures concerning the battles of Tara, the attacks across the northern hemisphere, and the destruction of Castle Northwind—and concerning the part that a certain Paladin of the Sphere had played in all those events—was slippery with the sweat from his palm, in spite of the chilly winter air. He drew his other hand across his forehead, brushing back his hair.

He had felt for some time now that he was being shadowed. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, but he could feel eyes watching him. He would need to deliver the material in the portfolio to someone—to a Knight, perhaps, or to a member of the Senate. If, that is, his shadowy pursuers allowed him to approach anyone remotely like that.

His arrival at the Belgorod DropPort had been unremarkable, and his clearance through the checkpoints had been swift and easy. The feeling of being watched came upon him when he left the port building and reached the sidewalk outside, just beyond the edge of the field. The feeling didn’t lead him to anything that he could put his finger on, any more than his nervous glances found a skulker in the shadows or a hovercar with tinted windows parked across the way. Nevertheless, his jumpiness increased.

Lieutenant Jones took the first hovercab that presented itself under the awning at the DropPort transit stop, and directed it to take him downtown to the transportation hub. Buildings flashed by him outside the windows on either side of the cab, causing him to think uneasily that he couldn’t tell whether the driver was going to the location he had specified.

He pointed to a restaurant on the side of the road, up by the next corner. “Stop here.”

“But we aren’t anywhere near city center,” the driver protested. “I thought you wanted—”