Hellflower (v1.1) by Eluki bes Shahar Page B

Library under the mercy seat. Even if I wanted to chance Tiggy twigging Paladin, I couldn’t ship him all over the Empire in a ship the size of a Teaser’s conscience. For one thing, I wasn’t sure we’d both be alive when we got to Kiffit, air being what it was. Not to mention the fact that he was all tangled up in his honor by now and was probably going to try to purify the whirling fusion out of me soon as he figured out the best way.
    And if I did take Tiggy to Kiffit, it’d be a real kidnapping for sure, and no way of talking myself out of the charge.
    But if I didn’t either take the hellflower with me to Kiffit or put him back on the heavy side here at Wanderweb, that left only one thing to do with Tiggy Stardust-all of which made the evening’s fun not particularly funny, and never mind that if I hadn’t showed up he’d of been dead in a few hours anyway.
    He’d been in the Last Gasp looking for me. And because he had been, I was alive now and he’d killed serious Guardsmen, for which Wanderweb wanted to chop him.
    I sat there and thought about it, and punched up the numbers for the High Jump to Kiffit, and looked at my life-support inventories and counted on my fingers. Paladin knew what I was doing, but he didn’t say zip.
    And when everything was done but making up my mind, I raised the cockpit back into the hull again and went back to talk to my passenger.
    Firecat’s internal compensators weren’t good enough that she could of moved without him noticing, and after our takeoff Tiggy Stardust knew it. He put his knife away and stood up. Different cultures have different body language. On alMayne I bet this didn’t mean respect.
    "Ea, chaudatu?"
    "You ain’t going to like this, che-bai. Your ship ain’t there." I still wasn’t ready for way he moved.
    "You are lying!" Tiggy snarled in my ear. He’d wrapped himself around all my bruises hard enough to hurt, and had his alMayne arthame snugged up to several of my important veins. If I flinched in the wrong direction I’d be nonfiction, but if I didn’t know people I would of sold my bones a long time ago.
    Tiggy was scared.
    "Hellflower, I am for-sure sorry your folks ain’t there. But it ain’t nice to pull heat on people for true-tell." I talked real slow, trying to punch it across two languages. I didn’t flinch neither, and eventually he let me go.
    "They could not leave! How could they have left? It is not possible that they should leave; they—" Tiggy went off into helltongue, ramifying his position, which was pretty to listen to and told me precisely nothing. Paladin didn’t know it either, at least not well enough to translate.
    "The Pledge Of Honor was not listed at the Wanderweb ships-in-port directory, thus we may infer that its stop here was not an official one. The most reasonable construction to place upon the matter of the ship’s absence from the area now is that the Pledge Of Honor departed according to a predetermined schedule. If it were bound for Grand Central, a plausible hypothesis considering its nature as a consular vessel, the captain would have had no other option. Whether the legation was aware of Valijon Starbringer’s absence from its midst at the time of departure is a matter for conjecture at this time," said Paladin.
    I rubbed my neck and counted my new bruises. Paladin still sounded just like a talkingbook, which meant he was still mad. I thought I’d share his facts with Tiggy.
    "Was Da shopping cubic for Throne? He’d of had to kyte by mandated o’chrono no matter where you was," I said. Tiggy stared at me, glazed and blank like a well-scrubbed palimpsest.
    "Try Interphon," suggested Paladin in my ear, which was fine for him but it’d been a long day and I was tired.
    "Pledge is gone, j’ai?" I said to Tiggy. "Scanners don’t lie, not mine, if gardenship was highbinding-orbiting-it isn’t there now." Tiggy nodded, looking sulky.
    "When Pledge tik’d to Wanderweb, was on way to Throne-Grand