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Forty-Eight

The rikksha stopped at the main gate to the palace grounds. Brokols got out and paid the runner. Reeno was no longer with him. Someone, probably Allbarin he thought, had decided they needn't monitor him any longer, and the way things stood now he no longer needed a bodyguard, although his home was still guarded.

The gate guard saluted him casually through, and he walked up the paved drive to the palace. A houseman had been waiting for him at the door, and led him through the building to a sitting room where he was met by the amirr, his wife and daughter. The namirrna hadn't been continued on the grenades project after all, but been given a different job. She rode east out of Theedalit each morning and worked cultivating plots of medicinal herb that would be processed and shipped to Kammenak for poultices, to be used on wounds when the war started. To Brokols she looked—not tired, really, but less lively than usual.

Smiling, the amirr stood at once, stepped forward and shook Brokols' hand. "It won't be long," he said, "before we can dispense with having you met at the door and conducted to us. But as the namirrna's fiance, you understand . . ." He gestured. "Sit! Sit down! What news do you have of your project?"

"All good," he said, then addressed himself more to Juliassa than her parents. "Yesterday we tested cast iron grenade casings from the Theed Valley Ironworks. Two, actually: one for throwing by hand and a larger one for ballistas. They're serrated, and blow apart into ugly fragments with quite adequate penetration. And this morning we finished the tests of Amaadio's fuse designs. The fuses were the most worrisome aspect of the whole project."

"How so?" It was the amirr that asked.

"The imperial army uses a fuse that explodes the grenade five seconds after the head is turned a quarter turn. But it would take us too long to develop and manufacture them here, so we've settled for impact fuses; the grenade explodes when it strikes. Which could make them dangerous to transport over rough mountain roads. We've settled for a design in which the fuse is not fully armed until the grenade is ready to be used. It's not entirely safe—the fuses won't be installed at all until they get to Kammnalit—but I'm not afraid to handle them myself."

The amirr looked unhappy. "Cast iron cases? I thought you'd meant to use ceramics. We're making a lot of demands on our ironworks these days."

Brokols nodded. "I understand. Reeno's been quite reluctant to go with iron, but with the ceramic casings, the fragments didn't penetrate enough."

A houseman had come in while Brokols was finishing. "I believe supper is ready," the amirr said, and got up to lead them into the summer dining room. "If iron it must be," he went on, "then iron it must be. The price of iron is getting much too high, and the prices of things made of it, but it seems we have little choice."

Brokols thought the amirr's concern was overblown. This society used enough iron that obviously it had a significant capacity to make it. And he didn't know about the arming of the barbarians. It wasn't public knowledge, and there hadn't been any particular reason to tell him.

At supper they talked about other things—about agriculture in Almeon and how things were done there. The talk introverted Brokols a bit, making him compare life there with life in Hrumma. It would be difficult to live in Almeon again, even if he'd be welcome there. Almeon was beautiful—greener than Hrumma, more fertile—but the way people lived, the oppressions there, would be hard for him to take now.

They'd made a mistake sending him to Hrumma, he realized. He'd been a misfit at home, but had learned early to conceal, to conform, to fool even himself; there'd be a lot like him there. And he'd never realized it until he'd come to know Hrumma. Nor had Almeon built cultural defenses in him—a set of "we're the best because . . .." They hadn't needed to, when he'd known so little of any alternative until he was grown.

He wondered if the Djezian culture had impacted Glembro Dixen at all like the Hrummean had impacted himself. Kryger, he assumed, was beyond being appreciably touched; Kryger was Almeon.

Almeon was much more advanced technologically, of course. The fruit custard he was eating was delicious, but he couldn't help thinking that it would have been nicer chilled.

Hrumma had excellent artisans though, and he wondered if he knew enough about electricity, and about physics and chemistry in general, to get them started on a refrigeration plant after the war.

Hrumma after the war? A free Hrumma? He'd forgotten about that problem, and remembering it, his spirits slumped.

After supper he sat in the garden with Juliassa, on facing chairs under Torissia's chaperonage. The youthful aunt sat far enough away to give them privacy of conversation if they spoke quietly. From a hedge, a flute bird warbled a liquid cascade of notes.

"I dreamed of you again last night," she said smiling. "It was—most pleasant."

Brokols nodded. "And I dreamed of you. That was my first dream. Then, when I'd gone back to sleep, I dreamed another dream less pleasant."

Her gaze was direct. "Tell me about it. About the later dream that was less pleasant."

He didn't start at once. It had been realistic, as dreams go, like the dream in which the Almaeic army had been embarking in the time of lenn harvest.

"I dreamed," he said, "that the army had left Almeon. But the training camps were full of men, a second army. I watched them train. They were new, green. Their cadre was cursing them, working them hard."

He looked bleakly at Juliassa. "It seemed that the fleet planned to return to Alemon when they'd unloaded the first army, to get the second and bring them over." His lips were thin, straight. "And with two such armies, it seems to me there can be no possible victory over the empire."

Juliassa didn't answer for a moment, but neither did she look frightened or dismayed. "We'll just have to follow the advice of Vessto Cadriio then," she said. "And Allbarin and Panni. We'll have to do all we can, and hope that our efforts will bring Hrum's intervention."

"What further can I do?" Brokols asked. "Besides die in battle eventually."

"You might take your dream to Panni," she said.

The suggestion took Brokols by surprise, and he decided that he would, the next day.

* * *

He saw Panni sooner than that, that night in another dream. Panni wasn't in a cave or on a hilltop. He was sitting on a roof somewhere, with an exceedingly old, spidery-looking man that Brokols somehow knew was Tassi Vermaatio, the Is-ness of Hrum. They went somewhere together, the three of them, and did something that Brokols couldn't afterward remember. But when he woke to gray dawn and morning birdsong, a thought stuck in the front of Brokols' mind: Go talk with K'sthuump.

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Framed