Dragon's Honor - Kij Johnson [81]
His comm badge beeped urgently. He stopped abruptly, less than fifty meters from the soaring double doors of the High Hall of Ceremonial Grandeur. “Worf here,” he barked.
“Mr. Worf,” Captain Picard’s voice said. “We have an emergency. The Green Pearl has disappeared.”
The harem was in an uproar. Nubile serving girls and scantily clad concubines shrieked in alarm as Picard, accompanied by Lord Lu Tung himself, hiked past the massive armed guards, down the incenseladen hallways, past a multitude of doorways offering glimpses of dozens of luxurious boudoirs, to the very heart of Lu Tung’s harem. Picard barely noticed the voluptuous pulchritude on display; his mind was filled with the dreadful implications of this shocking new development. He paid enough attention to his surroundings, though, to note that his presence alone was not responsible for the obvious consternation and excitement spreading through the harem. News of the Pearl’s disappearance was traveling quickly. He just hoped the G’kkau had not learned of the bride’s absence already—provided, that is, that they were not directly responsible for it.
Picard had barely left the Dragon’s kitchens when Beverly informed him that the Pearl was missing; in fact, he had been searching for the palace infirmary in hopes of finding something to settle his upset stomach. All hope of intestinal relief disappeared entirely when he learned that the bride—the very linchpin of the Pai peace settlement—had vanished mysteriously. Acid had churned in his gut as he’d raced through the palace, encountering Lu Tung along the way. Picard couldn’t help wondering what Lu Tung had been doing away from his own quarters, especially this late in the evening, but there seemed no tactful way to interrogate a father whose only daughter might have been abducted.
Lu Tung paused before a forbidding iron door embossed with the image of a ferocious dragon. Picard looked on as the former rebel commander used some sort of laser concealed in a ring to activate the lock. Ruby eyes sparkled in the skull of the dragon, shortly before the entire door dematerialized. Lu Tung stared at the now-open doorway with a bewildered expression on his face.
“This is impossible,” he declared. “The Eyes of the Dragon have guarded this portal since the hour I departed. No one could have entered or departed this chamber. No one!”
Picard was inclined to believe him. Lu Tung appeared genuinely shocked by his daughter’s disappearance. His formerly implacable visage betrayed signs of grief and anger; his broad face had flushed nearly as pink as the walls beyond the doorway. His hands trembled as he spoke, although whether he shook from fear or fury Picard could not tell.
He briefly wondered if Q could be responsible for the Green Pearl’s inexplicable vanishing act. This seemed like one of his pranks; hiding a bride the night before a pivotal wedding might appeal to his cosmic sense of the perverse. But no, Picard chided himself, he could hardly get into the habit of blaming Q for every bizarre mystery he encountered. Q, as annoying as he could be, was hardly the only source of chaos in the universe. Would that my life could be that simple, Picard thought.
He found Beverly standing in the middle of a chamber of overpowering pinkness. A sulky-looking adolescent girl squatted nearby on top of a stack of rosy, brocaded cushions. For a second, Picard permitted himself the hope that the Green Pearl had turned up alive and well, but the apprehensive look on Beverly’s face quickly dispelled that notion. “Hsiao Har,” Beverly explained, nodding toward the girl. “The Heir’s daughter by his first wife. She was keeping Yao Hu company.”
“Yao Hu?”
“The Green Pearl,” Beverly said. She took a deep breath as the missing girl’s father approached