Vendel Kryger looked the young midshipman up and down, then smiled and spoke in Almaeic. "Hmh! Add a few inches to your stature and you'd be a perfect example of the well-dressed Gorrbian profligate!" The ambassador stepped in front of the mirror then. "I'm afraid I look more like a jaded roue."
He turned to his Gorrbian houseboy. "You may go now, Fellik," he said in Djezian, and watched him out the door, then spoke again to Werlingus. "Let's go."
They left, followed by Kryger's two burly bodyguards, Almaeic marines. The bodyguards were short by Djezian standards, but they looked formidable nonetheless; dangerous. They were. They'd been assigned to Kryger from the Imperial Guard.
Midshipman Werlingus felt uncomfortable with his role in this. Lying was foreign to his character, and distasteful, even when the lie was only implied. Even when he saw the clear necessity of it.
Not to seem covert, the four Almites left the palace through the main entrance, as they usually did when invited to parties in aristocratic homes. And tomorrow was a Freeday—a convenient coincidence that made things considerably more comfortable. No one would wonder when they didn't return.
If they'd been followed, those earlier times, hopefully the practice had been abandoned as unnecessary. Although even being followed wouldn't necessarily prove dangerous. Kryger had sent Werlingus that morning with his carefully packed Almaeic formal suit; he'd have it tomorrow when it was needed. Now they took nothing with them except the clothes they wore and what incidentals they carried in their purses. They must by all means look as if they expected to be back by morning. As before, instead of hiring a cabriolet, Kryger had kaabors waiting. They mounted and rode off down the unlit street, the hooves of their animals clopping on brick pavement.
A thirty-minute ride brought them to the city wall, where guards passed them through a narrow nighttime gate. This too was not unusual. Some of the city's wealthier merchant-aristocrats made their homes outside the walls—men wealthy enough to have and defend walls of their own.
Kryger had dropped his joviality. The eyes with which he looked about him now were calculating. Werlingus wondered what he was thinking. He also wondered what might happen to the two embassy staff they'd left at the palace. He could see why the ambassador couldn't take them all with him, but felt somehow guilty that he should escape while they wouldn't.
The road they took paralleled the beach at a distance of some two hundred yards, separated from it by fields and occasional private compounds, trees showing their crowns above stout encircling brick walls. After a mile or so, the compounds became rapidly fewer.
Finally, at one of the last, Kryger stopped. One of the bodyguards dismounted and, with a key, opened a heavy, ironfaced wooden gate. They rode inside and the man locked and barred it behind them. The place was the retreat of a merchant who'd been happy to lend it to Kryger for two days. He hoped to do a profitable business with Almeon, in what Kryger had portrayed as a coming export-import bonanza. He'd assumed, from a hint of Kryger's, that the ambassador planned a tryst with some noblewoman.
They dismounted behind the small two-story villa, and the Gorrbian groundskeeper/guard took their mounts to the shed, to feed and brush down. Normally the place had no house servants when the family was away, but for Kryger's convenience a housekeeper was waiting for them at the door. She asked if they cared for anything to eat or drink, then hurried off to prepare the spiced wine that Kryger requested for himself and Werlingus. The bodyguards would have satta; they were not to drink alcohol on duty.
Kryger was familiar with the house; he'd been a guest there before. The others followed him upstairs, where three balconied rooms faced the Inside Passage—the protected channel between the mainland and the intermittent chain of low offshore islands. He assigned the bodyguards to one room and Werlingus to another; then he and Werlingus sat on the balcony of the master's room which Kryger had taken. When the housekeeper had brought their wine, Kryger dismissed her for the night. She left wondering that they'd brought no pleasure girls or other women, wondering if perhaps the foreign lord preferred young men.
The two sat on the balcony in silence. Sleep would likely prove elusive. The fleet should arrive the next day, sometime before or around noon. It wouldn't do to be at the palace when it steamed into the roadstead and began leveling the waterfront district with naval gunnery. He'd informed the admiral of which villa they'd be at; a gig would be sent to pick up the four of them when the fleet had dropped anchor.