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Carr spoke automatically, reaching for the foreigner's port-of-passage, which gleamed gold with the seal of the Queendom of Yclau. Carr's mind was not on his work today; it was on the fact that he'd spent half the night dreaming of his father's valet, and the other half of the night trying to forget the dream.
"Yeah," said the foreigner, "but unless you're going to do a body search on me, you're not likely to get a chance to yank it."
Carr's gaze jerked up from port-of-passage, which was signed, not by a minor government clerk in Yclau, but by an official from the Queen's palace. The foreigner was smirking at him.
Carr looked down at the port-of-passage again to give himself time to think. First name, last name – no title initial, of course, but the foreigner's class was clear enough. Not just from the palace official's signature, and not just from the fact that the foreigner was in a second-class cabin rather than steerage – his class was clear from his behavior. Yclau's commoners, on the rare occasions that they visited the Dozen Landsteads, were either deferential or belligerent toward the border guards. They didn't smirk.
Carr flipped through the rest of the port-of-passage, but it was blank, showing no indication that the foreigner had left his queendom before. Carr glanced up at the man again. Young, perhaps a year or two older than Carr. Dressed in a nondescript travelling cloak that hid his clothes. As light-skinned as Carr himself, but with dark hair and hazel eyes, like a Vovimian. Perhaps the young man was from northern Yclau, near the border to the Kingdom of Vovim? Carr couldn't quite place his accent.
"Do you have any items you wish to declare, comrade?" As always, the final word emerged awkwardly, even though it generally had no effect on foreigners passing over the border. Some foreigners would assume that his mode of address was a quaint custom in the Dozen Landsteads. The ones who knew better tended to be amused rather than angry.
Amusement seemed to be the young man's response; he was smirking again. "'Comrade'? Are you a member of the Commoners' Guild, then? I didn't know that the labor unions had made such inroads into the Dozen Landsteads."
"I'll need to see a second piece of identification, sir." He kept his voice empty of emotion as he held out his hand. For all he knew, this youth with the lordly manners and the signature of a palace official on his port-of-passage was a titled heir. Yclau liked to claim that it was the perfect egalitarian state, where all class divisions had been abolished. Judging from the behavior of the elite men whom Carr had met at the border since he reached journeyman age, Yclau still had a long ways to go before reaching its ideal.
The young man, laughing, tossed Carr his identification. Carr caught the plastic card neatly in one hand and examined it carefully. First name, last name, and one of those eerie holopics that the Yclau government used. The young man peered out of his holopic, solemn-faced.
Everything looked in order. Carr was about to say so; it was hardly worth pressing an aristocrat as to whether he had any valuables to declare, since everything this young man owned was likely to be of value. At that moment, though, the foreigner asked abruptly, "What is your name?"
He kept his gaze focussed on the identification. "M Carruthers, sir."
"What's the 'M' stand for?"
It was a question he had received from innocent visitors before, but something about the tone of this young man's voice was disingenuous. Carr flicked up his gaze and said steadily, "It's my first name."
The foreigner laughed again and grabbed Carr's hand, the one that was holding the identification. Before Carr had time to pull back, the foreigner had jerked up Carr's sleeve to reveal the M tattooed on the back of his wrist.
Carr jerked back, his heart pounding as much as though the young man had unexpectedly pulled open the flap of his trousers. . . .
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