“So how did it go?” Ivan inquired.

“I feel drained,” Mark admitted.

Ivan smiled grimly. “Gregor can do that to you, when he’s being Emperor.”

“Being? Or playing?”

“Oh, not playing.”

“He gave me his number.” And I think he got mine.

Ivan’s brows rose. “Welcome to the club. I can count the number of people who have that access without even taking both boots off.”

“Was … Miles one of them?”

“Of course.”

Ivan, apparently acting under orders—from the Countess, was Mark’s first guess—took him out to lunch. Ivan followed a lot of orders, Mark noticed with a slight twinge of sympathy. They went to a place called the caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another ground-car ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets—alleys—in the ancient district.

The caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines.

This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district’s center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the caravanserai its original risky reputation. On the way, Ivan proudly pointed out a building in which he claimed to have been born, during the war of Vordarian’s Pretendership. It was now a shop selling overpriced hand-woven carpets and other antique crafts supposedly preserved from the Time of Isolation. From the way Ivan carried on Mark half-expected there to be a plaque on the wall commemorating the event, but there wasn’t; he checked.

After lunch in one of the small cafes, Ivan, his mind now running on his family history, was seized with the notion of taking Mark to view the spot on the pavement where his father Lord Padma Vorpatril had been murdered by Vordarian’s security forces during that same war. Feeling it fit in with the general gruesome historic tenor of the rest of the morning, Mark agreed, and they set out again on foot to the south. A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the caravanserai proper, or improper.

This time, by God, there was a plaque, a cast bronze square set right in the pavement; ground-cars ran past and over it as Ivan gazed down.

“You’d think they’d at least have put it on the sidewalk,” said Mark.

“Accuracy,” said Ivan. “M’mother insisted.”

Mark waited a respectful interval to allow Ivan who-knew-what inward meditations. Eventually Ivan looked up and said brightly, “Dessert? I know this great little Keroslav District bakery around the corner. Mother always took me there after, when we came here to burn the offering each year. It’s sort of a hole in the wall, but good.”

Mark had not yet walked down lunch, but the place proved as delectable on the inside as it was derelict on the outside, and he somehow ended up possessed of a bag of nut rolls and traditional brillberry tarts, for later. While Ivan lingered over a selection of delicacies to be delivered to Lady Vorpatril, and possibly some sweeter negotiation with the pretty counter-girl—it was hard to tell if Ivan was serious, or just running on spinal reflex—Mark stepped outside.

Galen had placed a couple of Komarran underground spy contacts in this area once, Mark remembered. Doubtless picked up two years ago in the post-plot sweep by Barrayaran Imperial Security. Still, he wondered if he could have found them, if Galen’s dreams of revenge had ever come real. Should be one street down and two over … Ivan was still chatting up the bakery girl. Mark took a walk.

He found the address in a couple of minutes, to his sufficient satisfaction; he decided he didn’t need to check inside. He turned back and took what looked like a short cut toward the main street and the bakery. It proved to be a cul-de-sac. He turned again and started for the alley’s mouth.

An old woman and a skinny youth, who had been sitting on a stoop and watched him go in, now watched him coming out. The old woman’s dull eye lit with a faint hostility as he came again into her shortsighted focus.

“That’s no boy. That’s a mutie,” she hissed to the youth. Grandson? She nudged him pointedly. “A mutie come on our street.”

Thus prodded, the youth slouched to his feet and stepped in front of Mark. Mark stopped. The kid was taller than he—who wasn’t?—but not much heavier, greasy-haired and pale. He spread his legs aggressively, blocking Mark’s dodge. Oh, God. Natives. In all their surly glory.

“Shouldn’t ought to be here, mutie.” He spat, in imitation-bully-mode; Mark almost laughed.

“You’re right,” he agreed easily. He let his accent go mid-Atlantic Earth, non-Barrayaran. “This place is a pit.”

“Offworlder!” the old woman whined in even sharper disapproval. “You can take a wormhole jump to hell, offworlder!”

“I seem to have already,” Mark said dryly. Bad manners, but he was in a bad mood. If these slum-louts wanted to bait him, he would bait them right back. “Barrayarans. If there’s anything worse than the Vor it’s the fools under ’em. No wonder galactics despise this place for a hole.” He was surprised at how easily the suppressed rage vented, and how good it felt. Better not go too far.

“Gonna get you, mutie,” the boy promised, hovering on the balls of his feet in nervous threat. The hag urged her bravo on with a rude gesture at Mark. A peculiar set-up; little old ladies and punks were normally natural enemies, but these two seemed in it together. Comrades of the Imperium, no doubt, uniting against a common foe.

“Better a mutie than a moron,” Mark intoned with false cordiality.

The lout’s brows wrinkled. “Hey! Is that back-chat to me? Huh?”

“Do you see any other morons around here?” At the boy’s eye-flicker, Mark looked over his shoulder. “Oh. Excuse me. There are two more. I understand your confusion.” His adrenalin pumped, turning his late lunch into a lump of regret in his belly. Two more youths, taller, heavier, older, but only adolescents. Possibly vicious, but untrained. Still … where was Ivan now? Where was that bloody invisible supposed outer perimeter guard? On break? “Aren’t you late for school? Your remedial drooling class, perhaps?”

“Funny mutie,” said one of the older ones. He wasn’t laughing.

The attack was sudden, and almost took Mark by surprise; he thought etiquette demanded they exchange a few more insults first, and he was just working up some good ones. Exhilaration mixed strangely with the anticipation of pain. Or maybe it was the anticipation of pain that was exhilarating. The biggest punk tried to kick him in the groin. He caught the foot with one hand and boosted it skyward, flipping the kid onto his back on the stones with a wham that knocked the wind out of him. The second one launched a blow with his fist; Mark caught his arm. They whirled, and the punk found himself stumbling into his skinny companion. Unfortunately, now they both were between Mark and the exit.

They scrambled to their feet, looking astonished and outraged; what kind of easy pickings had they expected, for God’s sake? Easy enough. His reflexes were two years stale, and he was already getting winded. Yet the extra weight made him harder to knock off his feet. Three toone on a crippled-looking fat little lost stranger, eh? You like those odds? Come to me, baby cannibals. The bakery bag was still clutched absurdly in his fist as he grinned and opened his arms in invitation.