Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [280]
"The report came in yesterday afternoon. So you see . . . it becomes measurably more important that I know where you stand. In relation to Barrayar." He started again up the trail, then took a side branch that narrowed and began to rise steeply through an area of taller trees and thinner brush.
Mark toiled on his heels. "Nobody in their right mind would stand in relation to Barrayar. They would run in relation to Barrayar. Away."
The Count grinned over his shoulder. "You've been talking too much to Cordelia, I fear."
"Yes, well, she's about the only person here who will talk to me." He caught up with the Count, who had slowed.
The Count grimaced painfully. "That's been true." He paced up the steep stony trail. "I'm sorry." After a few more steps he added, with a flash of dark humor, "I wonder if the risks I used to take did this to my father. He is nobly avenged, if so." More darkness than humor, Mark gauged. "But it's more than ever necessary . . . to know . . ."
The Count stopped and sat down abruptly by the side of the trail, his back to a tree. "That's strange," he murmured. His face, which had been flushed and moist with the hill-climb and the morning's growing warmth, was suddenly pale and moist.
"What?" said Mark cautiously, panting. He rested his hands on his knees and stared at the man, so oddly reduced to his eye level. The Count had a distracted, absorbed look on his face.
"I think . . . I had better rest a moment."
"Suits me." Mark sat too, on a nearby rock. The Count did not continue the conversation at once. Extreme unease tightened Mark's stomach. What's wrong with him? There's something wrong with him. Oh, shit. . . . The sky had grown blue and fine. A little breeze made the trees sigh, and a few more golden leaves flutter down. The cold chill up Mark's spine had nothing to do with the weather.
"It is not," said the Count in a distant, academic tone, "a perforated ulcer. I've had one of those, and this isn't the same." He crossed his arms over his chest. His breath was becoming shallow and rapid, not recovering its rhythm with sitting as Mark's was.
Something very wrong. A brave man trying hard not to look scared was, Mark decided, one of the most frightening sights he'd ever seen. Brave, but not stupid: the Count did not, for example, choose to pretend that nothing was the matter and go charging up the trail to prove it.
"You don't look well."
"I don't feel well."
"What do you feel?"
"Er . . . chest pain, I'm afraid," he admitted in obvious embarrassment. "More of an ache, really. A very . . . odd . . . sensation. Came up between one step and the next."
"It couldn't be indigestion, could it?" Like the kind that was boiling up acidly in Mark's belly right now?
"I'm afraid not."
"Maybe you had better call for help on your comm link," Mark suggested diffidently. There sure as hell wasn't anything he could do, if this was the medical emergency it looked like.
The Count laughed, a dry wheeze. It was not a comforting sound. "I left it."
"What? You're the frigging Prime Minister, you can't go around without—"
"I wanted to assure an uninterrupted, private conversation. For a change. Unpunctuated by half the under-ministers in Vorbarr Sultana calling up to ask me where they left their agendas. I used to . . . do that for Miles. Sometimes, when it got too thick. Drove everyone crazy but eventually . . . they became . . . reconciled." His voice went high and light on the last word. He lay back altogether, in the detritus and fallen leaves. "No . . . that's no improvement. . . ." He extended a hand and Mark, his own heart lumping with terror, pulled him back into the sitting position.
A paralyzing toxin . . . heart failure . . . I was to get alone with you . . . I was to wait, in your sight, for twenty minutes while you died. . . . How had he made this happen? Black magic? Maybe he was programmed, and part of him was doing things the rest of him didn't know anything about, like one of those split personalities. Did I