Below the Salt

Half a standard year ago:

The chamberlain walked him one chair further down than last time.

Nothing in the man's carriage marked it. White-headed, narrow, seventy at the least, the shoulders held back so long they'd set that way, the chain of office polished thin at the links where four decades of thumbs had worried it. Chamberlains at the palace are selected for gait and for the ability to carry a neutral face through the fall of houses, and this one had carried his through two. He drew the chair, inclined, withdrew. The service was laid perfectly, of course. The sunburst on the plate sat true to the table's long axis, and someone had measured it.

He'd sat fifth last season. Tonight he sat sixth.

Cassian took the chair, put his hands on the arms of it, and looked down the table at the exotic flowers, which were Ecazi and out of season and had cost somebody a small holding.

Sixty places had been laid in the great hall of the lesser dining room, a joke nobody at Corrinth had found funny in two hundred years. Light came off the ceiling glass in long panels. The channel cut down the centre of the table ran its whole length, and you could hear it under the talk, water moving for no functional reason, because on Kaitain water is decoration.

Up near the dais his father ate almost nothing. The Emperor at sixty-eight was a spare, close-made man, the Corrino red gone sandy and thin at the crown, the beard cut so short it read as a shadow, and he sat with his back off the chair and his food untouched and his attention working the room in slow passes. He had eaten almost nothing at that table for twenty years. Two seats along on his right sat Irulan, pale in dove grey, no jewel on her anywhere, which at that end of the hall was the loudest thing a woman could wear. Hands folded in her lap. Spine clear of the chairback by a finger's width and holding there through the whole first course without deviating once. She was turned to the Bashar of the Third, a wide old soldier of the Imperial Guard with a shaved skull and a scar running up out of his collar into the hairline, and she was listening to him with an attention so complete it couldn't possibly be real.

The wine came down the left arm of the table. A boy in imperial livery poured it, fifteen or sixteen, jaw still soft, the coat taken in at the shoulders by somebody in a hurry. First chair, second, third. His lips moved a little. He was counting. At the fifth he stopped, turned, and passed the carafe across to a servant of the household staff, an older woman with grey coming in at the temples and a burn scar over two knuckles, who took it and went on down. The household servant filled Cassian's glass. She didn't look at him while she did it.

His face did nothing, which was what his face was for. The rest of him was slower. Heat came up under the temples and his pupils went wide and his pulse climbed half a step before he could get a hand on any of it. He drank, and nodded pleasantly to her, and she went on to the seventh chair.

Irulan looked up. She looked at him over the Bashar's shoulder, then went back down into the rotation schedule of the Third. She'd been waiting for the pour. You don't catch a thing that fast unless you already know when to look.

So she has known for some time.

The soup arrived cold and faintly green, smelling of cucumber and expense, and tasting of nothing at all.

"Better company down here anyway," said the man on his left. Viscount Pelloran, of a house that had been minor when the Corrinos were minor and had made a virtue of staying that way. Sixty, wide through the middle, pink from the wine before the first course, a good coat let out at the seams and let out again. He ate without watching himself eat. "Nobody up there says anything. They can't. It's all posture and no digestion. You'll eat better this year, Highness."

Kindness, and cheap at the price. Pelloran had never held anything worth taking, which was why he could afford to be gracious about a chair; a man with nothing at stake gets to be generous all his life and call it character. Somewhere between the fish and the sweet he'd talk about his daughter's marriage negotiations, and it would be the largest event of his year, and he'd tell it well. The Imperium could fall and he'd still be seated here, eating, comfortable, at peace with his own irrelevance.

"I look forward to it," Cassian said, to the man's plate rather than his face.

Four words, and two of them came out flat.

Pelloran went on talking. The man on Cassian's right had stopped eating. He started again.

Cassian turned his head.

No house colours. A coat of good grey cloth cut by somebody competent and unfashionable, made on Kaitain, made recently. Sixty years old, perhaps sixty-five, long in the face and shaved close, the mouth held level, the eyes pale and reddened at the rims from forty years of close reading in poor light. Hands square and clean. A ridge of callus along the inside of the right middle finger where a stylus had sat and sat and sat. He'd eaten his soup at an even rate and would finish it when the Emperor did, which meant he'd been watching the head of the table without appearing to.

A counting-house man, then. Up from some outer world on competence alone, with nobody behind him and nobody to tell him where to sit.

"We haven't met," Cassian said.

"Hollen Mahr." He set his spoon down. "The Directorate's shipping accounts. Melange lift, primarily."

"CHOAM."

No house. No qualifying phrase, no apology for the absence of one, no small performance of pleasure at being here.

The fifth chair. The chair Cassian had held at his father's table since he was nineteen had gone to a man who counted spice tonnage for a commercial directorate.

Which is not a demotion. That is the elegance of it.

He ate a little of the soup and set the spoon where the servants would take it.

The lamb came and was overcooked along one edge. He cut a piece of it and drank the household wine and turned the flowers a quarter turn so the good faces showed to the room, and up on the dais his father's attention travelled down the left arm of the table, unhurried, weighing the guests one after another, and passed over the sixth chair without stopping.

"May I trouble you with something dull?" Mahr said.

"Please."

"The Directorate is revising its hazard indexation. Personnel on the Arrakeen line, principally." He turned his glass a little on the cloth. "We index against water cost and mortality both, and it gives us figures our own people call absurd. I've wondered how the imperial household does it."

"For its own staff?"

"For anyone it sends."

There was no reason for a shipping factor to ask a third prince about hazard allowances, and no reason for the question to be dull if it was only dull. Though a man seated beside a Corrino for the first time in his life might reach for any subject he could carry, and pick the one he knew.

"I've never asked," Cassian said. He turned the ring on his second finger a half turn with his thumb, once, and stopped doing it. "I imagine somebody has a table."

"Somebody always has a table."

Down the left arm the household servant came back with the second carafe and filled Cassian's glass, and this time nothing in him moved at all, eleven minutes too late to be any use to anyone.

Irulan didn't look up again, through the fish, through the sweet, through the Emperor rising and the whole hall rising after him. She was three places above him and she'd go on being three places above him. Cassian kept his eyes on his own end of the table and asked her nothing, because there was no question he could put to her that wouldn't tell her more than her answer told him.

The room began breaking into its knots and currents. Cassian stayed in the sixth chair while the hall emptied around him and watched the grey coat rise and fold its napkin and set it down beside the plate, squared, the corners true.

Mahr counted things. Mahr knew what the Directorate paid to put a man on Arrakis, and men who know the price of things are the last people in this hall anyone thinks to guard against, and Cassian had just spent an entire dinner seated where such men are seated.

Find out what the question was for. Be charming and stupid and available.

He stood, straightened his cuff, and went after the grey coat with a warm and idle enquiry about tonnage already forming in his mouth.