We were on the third table, with a contingent of livestock merchants from Gallinate, a city on Gudrun's southern continent. Our status afforded us the company of Lady Fabrina, Captain Terronce from the household guard, and a talkative man named Kowitz, a House Glaw official responsible for buying produce.
Lord Oberon and his brother, Urisel, presided over the head table, with their visiting cousin, the ship master Locke and an elderly ecdesiarch called Dazzo. Kowitz was happy to tell me that Ecdesiarch Dazzo represented a missionary order from the sub-sector edgeworld Damask, which House Glaw was sponsoring.
In fact, it was difficult to shut Kowitz up. As the butlers refilled his cup, he rattled on, identifying the other parties of guests. House Glaw had interests on worlds throughout the sub-sector, and regular banquets such as this oiled the wheels and kept mings moving.
Eventually, I managed to hand Kowitz off to Aemos, the only man I knew capable of out-talking him. The two fell to complex discussion of the sub-sector balance of trade.
I kept a close eye on the head table. Urisel Glaw, a bloated, thick-set man in bejewelled ceremonial battledress, was giving Gorgone Locke plenty of attention. I watched Urisel closely. There was something about the man, not the least that his wide, puffy face and slick, lacquered hair made his resemblance to portraits of his infamous ancestor Pontius uncanny. He drank unstintingly, and laughed a wet, loose laugh at the ship master's jokes. His fat, powerful fingers constantly pulled at the braided collar of his uniform jacket to ease his wide neck.
Lord Oberon was a taller, leaner man with generous, cliff-like cheekbones rising above a forked goatee. The familial characteristics of the Glaw line were plain in his physiognomy, but he was more regal and distinguished, and lacked the dissolute languor of his younger sibling. Lord Glaw spent the night chatting happily with his off-world cousin, a bumptious young cretin with a whooping laugh and flamboyant courtly manners. But his real interest seemed to lie with the quiet ecdesiarch, Dazzo.
I took note of the ship master too. Gorgone Locke was a raw-boned giant with hooded, sunken eyes. He had long red hair, tied back and
beaded, and his jutting chin was peppered with silver stubble. I wondered about his ship, and his business. I would contact Maxilla and make enquiries.
The banquet lasted until past midnight. As soon as was polite, we retired to our rooms.
The Glaws had given us a suite of rooms in the west wing. Outside, the wind had got up, and was making plaintive sighs down the old chimney flues and open grates. Rain pattered against windows, and doors and shutters twitched and knocked in the drafts.
Heldane was alone in the suite's sitting room when we came back. He had several data-slates open for study on a table and looked up as we came in.
'Well?' I asked him.
He and Betancore had run sweeps of the immediate wing whilst we had been dining. He showed me the results. Most of the rooms were spy-wired with vox-thieves and a few pict-sensors, and there was a complex infrastructure of alarm systems. Heldane had set up a small jammer to blind the spy-ware in our suite.
'Comparisons/ he said, showing me an overlay of two charts on a data-slate. 'The green areas show the parts of the buildings my master gained access to during his visits.' Voke had been obliging enough to supply me with reports of his inspections.
We can overlay in red the results of the sweeps your man and I have managed to make this evening.'
There were considerable discrepancies. Voke may have opened every door he could find, but this showed me ghost areas that he had not gained access to because he hadn't known they were there.
'These are cellars?' I asked.
'Underground rooms, certainly' said Heldane. He had a soft, sickly voice that seemed to seep from his slit-like mouth. 'Adjoining the wine vaults.'
The drapes billowed in as an exterior window opened. Betancore, his hooded black bodyglove wet with rain, climbed inside. He pulled off his grip-gloves and boots, and unstrapped his equipment harness.
