The midday recess arrived.
Kimia disliked recesses.
Appointments possessed shape. Meetings had beginnings and endings. Revenue figures occupied columns. Delegations came through doors and eventually went back through them. Even unpleasant duties could be survived because they divided time into portions which somebody else had already named.
Now there were a little less than three hours until council.
Three hours was dangerous.
Kimia stood in the foyer after the delegation had departed and looked once more at the closed doors through which they had gone. Tarkhe remained several paces behind her. The indrel remained farther still, motionless beneath its garment.
Neither counted as company in the particular way Kimia required.
They were witnesses. Witnesses made solitude worse.
She drew out the pocket watch.
Twelve eleven.
The council met at three.
Two hours and forty-nine minutes.
She closed the watch.
The number immediately became larger.
Kimia could eat. She had already eaten. She could read. Reading required attention and attention presently had other ambitions. She could work. There was always work.
This should have solved the problem, except work chosen voluntarily lacked the coercive quality that made scheduled work useful. She could stop whenever she wished.
That was the danger.
Somewhere within the palace existed kilcane. Somewhere else existed whiteblood.
Kimia knew both locations.
She knew which servant could be instructed to retrieve either without asking a question. She knew which cabinet key remained beneath a folded handkerchief in her private desk.
Knowledge was frequently indistinguishable from access.
She started walking. Tarkhe followed. The indrel followed Tarkhe.
No one asked where they were going. Kimia did not know until the corridor selected the answer for her.
The library.
Fine.
Kalgkur would still be there.
Probably.
She turned toward the western passage.
Halfway there she smelled alcohol.
Not the faint dignified odor of wine taken with lunch. Not the sterile sharpness of medicine.
Liquor. Fruit spirit.
Enough of it that the scent arrived before the person.
Vehm came around the corner.
He wore a broad dark hat pushed too far back on his head and a long waistcoat whose buttons had been fastened incorrectly in at least one place. His fur was a muted brown that became almost bronze where the corridor lamps touched it. His eyes were a clear, soft yellow.
Vehm possessed the peculiar ability of the experienced drunk to appear more sober than people who had consumed nothing. His gait remained straight. His ears remained attentive. His speech, when it came, would probably be precise.
Only the smell betrayed him. And perhaps the half-second too much care with which one foot followed the other.
Kimia stopped. Vehm stopped too.
For a moment his expression brightened with genuine pleasure.
Then court etiquette descended upon him like something remembered from another life.
He removed his hat. The bow that followed was deep, correct, and almost absurdly sincere, and he spoke with an Peshtulan accent that was nearly intoxicating, being far more dense than Tarkhe's somehow.
“Pryvit, Your Grace.”
“Vehm.”
He rose.
Tarkhe said nothing. This itself communicated volumes.
Kimia tried to remember where Vehm had come from.
A city. Somewhere east. Or perhaps a Peshtulan enclave.
There had been a story involving a monastery that was not a monastery, a riverboat, three months in a mining district, and a magistrate who had either employed Vehm or attempted to arrest him.
Kimia had heard several versions.
None agreed.
Another rumor involved Vehm being an Val Salian Royal Navy officer who stared death in the face and came close to oblivion countless times, fighting in some war everyone forgot about. Vehm never spoke of this, but it would explain why he drank as much as he did if it was true.
Vehm possessed no noble genealogy anyone could verify. He had arrived at court several years before attached to someone else's retinue, stayed after that person left, and gradually became one of those arrangements no clerk had formally authorized but nobody wished to undo.
He was a yinglet of many faces.
When sober he could discuss the spirit with such clarity that Kimia sometimes hated him for it.
The self. Alsper. Death. Despair.
Whether there was any meaningful distinction between the person one imagined oneself to be and the habits accumulated around that imagining.
He could sit with Kimia until dawn saying almost nothing and somehow make silence less hostile.
At other times he would drink with her until neither could reliably stand.
Whiteblood. Kilcane. Sex. Music. Televox. Cards. Arguments with paintings. Entire nights spent fleeing themselves in company.
This contradiction did not seem to trouble Vehm. It troubled Kimia enough for both of them.
He looked at her.
“Today is treating you gently?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“But I am treating today gently.”
Vehm smiled.
“More difficult.”
“You've been drinking.”
“I have.”
“Before lunch.”
“I began before breakfast.”
Tarkhe inhaled through his nose.
Vehm looked toward him.
“Doctor.”
“Vehm.”
“You look healzhy.”
“I am.”
“Excellent. Continue.”
Tarkhe did not answer.
Kimia nearly smiled.
Vehm replaced his hat. His eyes returned to her.
For a moment the corridor ceased being a palace corridor and became one of those quiet spaces in which they had spoken during worse nights.
Vehm's expression changed.
Only slightly.
He saw something, or Kimia wanted him to.
That uncertainty mattered.
“You are holding yourself very tightly,” he said.
Kimia's smile vanished.
“Tarkhe has already taken over observation today.”