“I think I should get half,” she continued. “It was my niathol that killed him.”

“Are you a journalist or a bounty hunter?” Cain asked wryly.

“Why don’t we say that I’m an underpaid journalist, and let it go at that.”

He stared at her and finally nodded in agreement. “Okay. If there’s any reward for him, you get half.”

“You know,” commented Terwilliger, who had been scrutinizing her, “you could be damned attractive if you’d just go to a little effort.”

“Too bad the same can’t be said for you,” she said, turning her attention back to Cain. “All right, Songbird—are you ready to compare notes?”

“I’m ready,” he answered.

“I have a feeling that this is going to be a long and amiable relationship,” predicted Virtue.

“I’ll settle for its just being profitable,” replied Cain.

“That goes without saying.”

He smiled and shook his head. “That’s the one thing that never goes without saying.”

She extended her hand. “Partners?”

“Partners.”

They shook hands over the unmourned corpse of Whittaker Drum.

Part 2

The Virgin Queen’s Book

6.

She can drink, she can swear, can the Virgin Queen,

And she isn’t a stranger to sin.

She knows what she wants, doesn’t care where she’s been,

And she’ll do what she has to to win.

The name was Black Orpheus’ idea of a joke, because while Virtue MacKenzie was a lot of things good and bad, virginal wasn’t one of them.

He met her just once, out by the Delphini system—which was as close to the worlds of the Democracy as he ever tended to go—and she made quite an impression on him. She was drinking and playing cards at the time, and she wasn’t even aware of his presence; but when she accused a fellow journalist of cheating and backed it up with a couple of swift kicks to his groin and a whiskey bottle slammed down on top of his head, she guaranteed herself a couple of verses in his ongoing epic.

In point of fact, she didn’t even know she’d been written up until some months later, and then she was furious about the name he’d saddled her with—but after a couple of weeks she cooled down, right about the time she decided that being in Black Orpheus’ song just might open a couple of doors for her out on the Frontier.

It did, too. She had to wait until the balladeer’s disciples and interpreters figured out that Virtue Mackenzie and the Virgin Queen were the same woman and started disseminating the information across the Inner Frontier, but once the word got out it helped her get into a couple of previously inaccessible places on Terrazane, where she found out about Socrates, and it got her Socrates’ address from a trader on Jefferson III.