"Do you know—I have to ask this." I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. "Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?"

"No," she said.

"Ah," Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. "Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the Ba died."

Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.

"Don't you see it too? The Ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back.

Your Ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the Ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned." Almost certainly not as planned.

He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but he could not keep still. "And while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes home with the only real copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-competition. After first arranging the Ba's reward for its double-treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes. It works. Or it would have worked, if only . . . the satrap governor had remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy." Not when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him, striving not to melt. "How soon can you analyze this Great Key, and support or explode these theories?"

"I will examine it immediately, tonight. But whatever has been done to it, my examination will not tell me who did it, Barrayaran." Her voice grew glacial with this thought. "I doubt you could have created a true duplicate, but a non-working forgery is certainly within your capabilities. If this one is false—where is the real one?"

"It seems that is just what I must discover, milady, to, to clear my name. To redeem my honor in your eyes." The intrinsic fascination of an intellectual puzzle had brought him to this interview. He'd thought curiosity was his strongest driving force, till suddenly his whole personality had become engaged. It was like being under—no, like becoming an avalanche. "If I can discover this, will you …" what? Look favorably upon his suit? Despise him for an outlander barbarian all the same? "… let me see you again?"

"I don't . . . know." Reminded, her hand drifted to the control on her float-chair for the concealing force-screen.

No, no, don't go. … "We must have some way of communicating," he said hastily, before she could disappear again behind that faintly humming barrier.

Her head tilted, considering this. She drew a small comm link from her robes. It was undecorated, utilitarian, but like the nerve disruptor he'd taken from Ba Lura perfectly designed in what Miles was beginning to recognize as the haut style. She whispered a command into it. In a moment, the androgynous ba appeared from its guard post beside the pond. Did its eyes widen just slightly, to see its mistress without her shell?

"Give me your comm link, and wait outside," haut Rian Degtiar ordered.

The little ba nodded, and turned the device over to her without question, and withdrew silently.

She held the comm link out to Miles. "I use this to communicate with my senior servitors, when they run errands outside the Celestial Garden for me. Here."

He wanted to touch her, but scarcely dared. He instead extended his cupped hands toward her like a shy man offering flowers to a goddess. She dropped the comm link into them gingerly, as into the hands of a leper. Or an enemy.

"Is it secured?" he dared to ask.

"Temporarily."

In other words, it was the lady's private line only as long as no one in higher-level Cetagandan security troubled to break in. Right. He sighed. "It won't work. You can't send signals into my embassy without causing my superiors to ask a whole lot of questions I'd rather not answer just now. And I can't give you my comm link either. I'm supposed to turn it in, and I don't think I can get away with telling them I lost it." Reluctantly, he handed the link back to her. "But we have to meet again somehow." Yes, oh yes. "If I'm going to be risking my reputation and maybe my life on the validity of my reasoning, I'd like to prop it up with a few facts." One fact was almost certain. Someone with enough wit and nerve to murder one of the most senior Imperial servitors under the nose of Cetaganda's own emperor would hardly balk at threatening a decidedly un-senior female Degtiar. The thought was obscene, hideous. A Barrayaran scion's diplomatic immunity would be an even more useless shield, no doubt, but that was merely the price of the game. "I think you could be in grave danger. It might be better to play along for a bit—don't reveal to anyone you have obtained this key from me. I have a funny feeling I'm not following his script, y'see." He paced nervously back and forth before her. "If you can find out anything at all about Ba Lura's real activities in the few days before it died—don't run afoul of your own security, though. They have to be following up on the Ba's death."

"I will . . . contact you when and how I can, Barrayaran." Slowly, one pale hand caressed the control pad on the arm of the float-chair, and a dim gray mist coalesced around her like a fairy spell of seeming.

The ba servitor returned to the pavilion to escort not Miles but its mistress away. Miles was left to stumble back through the dark to Yenaro's estate alone.

It was raining.

Miles was not surprised to find that the ghem-woman was no longer waiting on the bench by the red-enameled gate. He let himself in quietly, and paused just outside the lighted garden doors to brush as many of the water droplets as possible off his formal blacks, and to wipe his face. He then sacrificed the handkerchief to the redemption of his boots, and quietly dropped the sodden object behind a bush. He slipped back inside.

No one noticed his entry. The party was continuing, a little louder, with a few new faces replacing some of the previous ones. The Cetagandans did not use alcohol for inebriation, but some of the guests had a late-party dissociated air about them similar to over-indulgers Miles had witnessed at home. If intelligent conversation had been difficult before, it was clearly hopeless now. He felt himself no better off than the ghemlings, drunk on information, dizzy with intrigue. Everyone to their own secret addictions, I suppose. He wanted to collect Ivan and escape, as swiftly as possible, before his head exploded.

"Ah, there you are, Lord Vorkosigan." Lord Yenaro appeared at Miles's elbow, looking faintly anxious. "I could not find you."

"I took a long walk with a lady," Miles said. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. "Where is my cousin?"

"Lord Vorpatril is taking a tour of the house with Lady Arvan and Lady Benello," said Yenaro. He glanced through a wide archway at the room's opposite side, which framed a spiral staircase in a hall beyond. "They've been gone … an astonishingly long time." Yenaro's smile attempted to be knowing, but came out oddly puzzled. "Since before you … I don't quite . . . ah, well. Would you care for a drink?"

"Yes, please," said Miles distractedly. He took it from Yenaro's hand and gulped without hesitation. His eyes almost crossed, considering the possibilities of Ivan plus two beautiful ghem-women. Though to his haut-dazzled senses, all the ghem-women in the room looked as coarse and dull as backcountry slatterns just now. The effect would wear off with time, he hoped. He dreaded the thought of his own next encounter with a mirror. What had the haut Rian Degtiar seen, looking at him? A simian black-clad gnome, twitching and babbling? He pulled up a chair and sat rather abruptly, the spiral staircase bracketed in his sights. Ivan, hurry up!