Kimia stepped into the corridor. Tarkhe closed his notebook.
“You look very official.”
“I am very official.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The indrel’s head turned toward her.
Kimia wondered whether clothing made any difference to it. Perhaps all the kaftan communicated was altered thermal distribution and new smells from clean fabric.
She drew out the pocket watch. The lid opened beneath her thumb.
Eight twenty-nine.
She looked again.
Eight twenty-nine.
Thirty-one minutes until nine. Thirty-one minutes until the revenue consultation.
She closed the lid.
“Zhe library, zhen. Let’s go.”
They went. Kimia did not need to think about the route.
That was a mercy.
The palace had existed around her for enough of her life that movement through it required less conscious thought than movement through her own mind. Left at the portrait gallery. Across the enclosed bridge. Down one level beside the old council chamber. Through the eastern hall where the floor tiles changed from cream to green.
The body remembered. She let it.
Servants greeted her.
She answered correctly.
A clerk carrying document boxes bowed too deeply and nearly lost the uppermost one. Kimia pretended not to notice. Two visiting officials stood aside at the bridge and addressed her as Your Grace. She gave them the required acknowledgment and passed.
The duchess moved through the palace. Kimia accompanied her.
The library occupied an older section of the residence and had grown into neighboring rooms over the centuries. Once it had been predominantly books. It still contained tens of thousands of them, shelves rising nearly to the ceiling and ladders traveling along brass rails, but more recent generations had filled portions of the floor with card indexes, document cabinets, microform readers, and computer terminals linked into an information network.
The computers altered the sound of the place.
Not loudly.
A low electrical hum. Fans. The occasional chatter of a printer. Keys struck in restrained sequences.
Information, once silent between covers, now made noise while being retrieved.
Kimia entered.
A librarian glanced up and bowed.
Only a handful of people occupied the room this early. One human sat before a terminal reading green text from a dark screen. Another person replaced books onto a cart. A yinglet clerk stood on a low stool feeding papers into a scanner one sheet at a time.
At a long table near the windows sat Kalgkur.
Kimia recognized him from the shape of his back before she saw his face.
The baxxid was old.
Age did not diminish baxxids in the same visual language as humans or yinglets. Kalgkur had not become smaller. His body remained immense. But the exoskeletal plates, his head, and appendages had lost their youthful color and become deep gray with years, scored by old abrasions, repairs, and pale lines where injuries had healed imperfectly. Some edges had worn smooth. One plate along the upper ventral part of his body carried a split so ancient that the material beneath had long ago hardened around it.
He had placed numerous papers across the table.
Maps. Notes. Several handwritten translations.
A book lay open beneath one of his manipulator fittings.
His head rose as Kimia approached.
There was the faint delay before speech as his vocal cords warmed up to shape words. Kalgkur had never cared enough to train it out.
“Kalgkur.”
His mouthparts shifted.
“Miss Kimia.”
Something in her loosened. Not much. Enough.
She stopped beside the table.
Tarkhe and the indrel remained several paces behind, granting the small fiction of privacy.
Kalgkur regarded her. His eyes moved across her face with the peculiar distributed attention of his species.
“Is today... better?”
Kimia considered lying.
“Slightly.”
The baxxid waited.
“But I have much to do today.”
“Good.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Good?”
“That you can do it.”
“Ah.”
Another delay.
“I worry about you.”
For a moment she was not Duchess Kimia of House Chityala, one of Val Salia's many vassals.
She was merely Kimia being worried about by somebody old enough to remember her before the title had fully hardened around her.
She disliked how grateful this made her feel.
“Please leave zhat for Tarkhe. Don’t worry on my account, Kalgkur.”
One of the baxxid’s forelimbs shifted atop the papers.
“I’ll try.”
“You won’t.”
“No.”
“Zhen at least pretend.”