Free Transition by Iain M. Banks

permitting myself a look of polite puzzlement.
    “What’s the message you bear, sir?”
    I hope I shall never lose my sincere admiration for those able to invest the word “sir” – on the face of it a genuine honorific – with
     the level of brusque contempt that the good lord has just achieved.
    “Ah.” I put cup and saucer down. “I understand you may have expressed some doubts regarding the direction the Central Council
     might be taking.” I smile. “Concerns, even.”
    Harmyle’s already pallid complexion appears to lose whatever blood it previously contained. Which is rather impressive, really,
     given that all this is basically an act. He sits back, glances around. He puts his own cup and saucer down, rattled. “What
     on earth are you talking about?”
    I smile, raise one hand. “Firstly, sir, have no fear. I am here to ensure your safety, not threaten it.”
    “Are you indeed?” The good lord looks dubious.
    “Absolutely. I am, as I have always been, attached,
inter alia
, to the Protection Department.” (This is actually true.)
    “Never heard of it.”
    “One is not supposed to, unless one has need to call upon its services.” I smile. “Nevertheless, it exists. You may have been
     right to feel threatened. That is why I am here.”
    Harmyle looks troubled, and possibly confused. “I understood that the lady in Paris was unflinchingly loyal to the current
     regime,” he observes. (At which I look mildly surprised.) “Indeed, I was under the impression she herself formed a significant
     part of that regime, at its highest level.”
    “Really?” I say. I ought to explain: in terms of Central Council politics, Lord H is a one-time waverer who is now a d’Ortolan
     loyalist but who has been instructed by Madame d’Ortolan to seem to grow remote from her and her cabal, to speak out against
     her and, by so gaining their confidence, try to draw out the others on the Central Council who would oppose the good lady.
     She would have a spy in their midst. However, Lord H has been conspicuously unsuccessful in this endeavour and so fears he
     is caught between two very slippery stepping stones and is in some danger of skidding and falling no matter which way he tries
     to go a-leaping.
    “Yes, really. I’d have thought,” he continues cautiously, still glancing around the quiet, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room,
     “that if she heard I was – that I had any doubts regarding our… prevailing strategies… that she would have been my implacable
     opponent, not my concerned protector.”
    I spread my hands. (For a moment, my brain chooses to interpret this movement as one hand diverging into two different realities.
     I have to perform the internal equivalent of a mind-clearing shake of the head to dispel this sensation. My mind is in at
     least two different places at the moment, which – even with the rare gift I have and the highly specialised training I’ve benefited
     from – requires a deal of concentration.) “Oh, she is quite placable,” I hear myself say. “The good lady’s loyalties are not
     entirely as you might have assumed.”
    Lord Harmyle looks at me curiously, perhaps not sure how good my English is and whether he is somehow being made fun of.
    I pat my pockets, appear distracted (I
am
distracted, but I’m holding it together). “I say, d’you think I might borrow a handkerchief? I think I feel a sneeze coming
     on.”
    Harmyle frowns. His gaze shifts fractionally towards his breast pocket, where a white triangle of handkerchief protrudes.
     “I’ll ask a waiter,” he says, half turning in his seat.
    The half-turn is all that I need. I rise quickly, take one step forward and while he is still swivelling back to look at me – his
     eyes just beginning to widen in fear – slash his throat pretty much from ear to ear with the glass stillete I have been concealing
     up my right sleeve. (A pretty Venetian thing, Murano, I believe, bought on Bund Street not ten