And here they were at the very palace in question. As an architectural pile, the Imperial Residence made Vorkosigan House look small. Sprawling wings rose two to four stories high, accented with sporadic towers. Additions of different ages crisscrossed each other to create both vast and intimate courts, some justly proportioned, some rather accidental-looking. The east façade was of the most uniform style, heavy with stone carving. The north side was more cut-up, interlocking with elaborate formal gardens. The west was the oldest, the south the newest construction.

The groundcar pulled up to a two-story porch on the south side, and Illyan led them past more guards and up wide stone stairs to an extensive second-floor suite. They climbed slowly, matching steps to Lieutenant Koudelka's awkward pace. Koudelka glanced up with a self-conscious apologetic frown, then bent his head again in concentration—or shame? Doesn't this place have a lift tube? Cordelia wondered irritably. On the other side of this stone labyrinth, in a room with a northern view of the gardens, a white old man lay drained and dying on his enormous ancestral bed. . . .

In the spacious upper corridor, softly carpeted and decorated with paintings and side tables cluttered with knickknacks—objets d'art, Cordelia supposed—they found Captain Negri talking in low tones with a woman who stood with her arms folded. Cordelia had met the famous, or infamous, Chief of Barrayaran Imperial Security for the first time yesterday, after Vorkosigan's historic job interview in the northern wing with the soon-to-be-late Ezar Vorbarra. Negri was a hard-faced, hard-bodied, bullet-headed man who had served his emperor, body and blood, for the better part of forty years, a sinister legend with unreadable eyes.

Now he bowed over her hand and called her "Milady" as if he meant it, or at least no more tinged with irony than any of his other statements. The alert blonde woman—girl?—wore an ordinary civilian dress. She was tall and heavily muscled, and she looked back at Cordelia with even greater interest.

Vorkosigan and Negri exchanged curt greetings in the telegraphic style of two men who had been communicating for so long all of the amenities had been compressed into some kind of tight-burst code. "And this is Miss Droushnakovi." Negri did not so much introduce as label the woman for Cordelia's benefit, with a wave of his hand.

"And what's a Droushnakovi?" asked Cordelia lightly and somewhat desperately. Everybody always seemed to get briefed around here but her, though Negri had also failed to introduce Lieutenant Koudelka; Koudelka and Droushnakovi glanced covertly at each other.

"I'm a Servant of the Inner Chamber, Milady." Droushnakovi gave her a ducking nod, half a curtsey.

"And what do you serve? Besides the chamber."

"Princess Kareen, Milady. That's just my official title. I'm listed on Captain Negri's staff budget as Bodyguard, Class One." It was hard to tell which title gave her the more pride and pleasure, but Cordelia suspected it was the latter.