Ivan smiled grimly. "Gregor can do that to you, when he's being Emperor."

"Being? Or playing?"

"Oh, not playing."

"He gave me his number." And I think he got mine.

Ivan's brows rose. "Welcome to the club. I can count the number of people who have that access without even taking both boots off."

"Was . . . Miles one of them?"

"Of course."

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Ivan, apparently acting under orders—from the Countess, was Mark's first guess—took him out to lunch. Ivan followed a lot of orders, Mark noticed with a slight twinge of sympathy. They went to a place called the Caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another groundcar ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets—alleys—in the ancient district.

The Caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines.

This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district's center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the Caravanserai its original risky reputation. On the way, Ivan proudly pointed out a building in which he claimed to have been born, during the war of Vordarian's Pretendership. It was now a shop selling overpriced hand-woven carpets and other antique crafts supposedly preserved from the Time of Isolation. From the way Ivan carried on Mark half expected there to be a plaque on the wall commemorating the event, but there wasn't; he checked.

After lunch in one of the small cafes, Ivan, his mind now running on his family history, was seized with the notion of taking Mark to view the spot on the pavement where his father Lord Padma Vorpatril had been murdered by Vordarian's security forces during that same war. Feeling it fit in with the general gruesome historic tenor of the rest of the morning, Mark agreed, and they set out again on foot to the south. A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the Caravanserai proper, or improper.

This time, by God, there was a plaque, a cast bronze square set right in the pavement; groundcars ran past and over it as Ivan gazed down.

"You'd think they'd at least have put it on the sidewalk," said Mark.

"Accuracy," said Ivan. "M'mother insisted."