On the Razor's Edge

by Michael Flynn

  Méarana sat on her bed in the Four Kings hotel with her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms wrapped around them. Ravn had been a congenial traveling companion—at least she had acted the part—but not until meeting Gwen had Méarana realized how alone and exposed she had been feeling. Even on her quest into the Wild she had had her own companions around her.

  As sector evening came on, Ravn stuck her head in the room and announced that she was returning to the message center in case her earlier calling card had found its mark. “I think maybe noot. Is too soon, but who can say?” She flashed her teeth. “Now you stay here, my sweet. Better you be bored in these room than that you be swept up.”

  After the Shadow had gone, Méarana hugged her knees tighter. She had not thought on the Shadow War for a long time, so concentrated was she on the task at hand. But that war swirled all around her: silent, deadly, wafting around the unkenning sheep like a ghostly wind—and Ravn was a player in that war. Even the traitors to the Revolution were yet traitors to the Names. So there was no safety or protection for anyone.

  The lights in the suite appeared to grow dim, and the temperature fell. Méarana shivered and pulled the blanket from the bed and draped it over her shoulders. But she did not lie down. In the air, she detected a sweetish aroma, something cold and peppermint.

  There were no windows in the suite. Ravn had preferred rooms into which none could enter from the outside. Méarana could see the door to the suite from where she sat, and it had not opened since Ravn’s departure. Yet Méarana knew there was someone else in the suite. Perhaps in the kitchenette. Perhaps in the common room. But let it not be in her very room.

  Darkness forgathered in corners and spread wraithlike along the folds of the walls, along the baseboard, along the cornice. The common room grew indistinct, faded into gloom. The tapestry beside her bed billowed, as if there had been a breeze. The needlework featured some ancient battle in which men battled with creatures of fiendish mien, men with the heads of dogs. Heads lolled, fangs showed. The rippling curtain sent them into motion, and at each other’s throats.

  Hello, Méarana.

  Was that a voice? It didn’t sound like a voice, not exactly. It sounded like the whisper of the air circulator. It sounded like the thrumming of the habitat’s engines deep in the bowels of Tungshen Waising. The ripples in the tapestry seemed to move with purpose.

  You have caused us a lot of trouble. We ran considerable risks to come here, and it is not yet clear that we have outrun them.

  “I’m sorry.”

  No, you are not. You would do it again in a metric minute. You went once to rescue your mother; how can you refuse to rescue your father? But the Confederation is not the League; it is not even the Wild. It is something far more deadly than either. You were a fool to step into it, to allow yourself to be taken.

  “I know that, but Mother wouldn’t go. I had to force her hand. I knew I would be safe again when she caught up with me.”

  You know a great deal that isn’t so. Putting two into danger is not safety.

  “You’ve come with her…”

  Maybe. We run few and scattered though the coursings of the Confederation. There is no Circuit this side of the Rift. How may our words reach one another’s ear? Perhaps she has been caught and pithed—all because of you.

  “No. I would know it if it happened. Our hearts are one. As hers stills, mine stops. Who are you?”

  The tapestry billowed revealing … the empty wall behind it.

  There are no names.

  This time the voice seemed to come from the darkness of the common room, just outside her doorway.

  “Gwen told me her name.”

  Your mother’s daughter cannot be so naïve as that.

  “How … How many did Mother bring? Or is this a sending and not a bringing?”

  Enough and not nearly enough. We have not all come only for you, child. There are other prizes to be plucked. You will not know our numbers or our names, lest these fall out of your memory onto your tongue. Or, worse, be pulled there. Know only that we go to Terra before you and behind you and beside you. But you must tell us one thing. Why has she stopped here?

  Méarana hesitated. There were others, not Hounds, who might want to know Ravn’s plans.

  “How do I know I can trust you? You might be rival Shadows, or even Names!”

  The intercom clicked on and the voice whispered over it. “Would Shadows or Names have approached you thus? Let our stealth be our assurance. There have been two close calls already, and we’d not court a third.”

  “You won’t show yourself—”

  “—because you cannot describe what you’ve never seen.”

  “I wouldn’t tell Ravn.”

  The laughter that greeted this reminded Méarana of the barking of a mastiff. It was short, low, huffing. “I do not underestimate Ravn Olafsdottr. Take grave care that you do not. But let this be a surety. An ancient banner bears a bloodstain that must never be expunged.”

  That ancient banner hung from the rafters of Clanthompson Hall. Méarana exhaled a long-held breath. “All right. We came here to secure the aid of Domino Tight in our attack on Gidula’s stronghold.”

  “Ah,” the intercom breathed. “Domino Tight. Three snowballs’ chances. Success is now assured.”

  “Three, plus however many you represent,” Méarana retorted with grave assurance. “How do you know that Ravn has no recording devices planted in these rooms?”

  A little late to think of that, child. (The voice came again from the common room, and it seemed to Méarana as if that room was growing less dark.) She has, but her recordings will tell her nothing. There is one further boon that we would ask of you, but only if it can be done without arousing suspicions. Learn what you can from Domino Tight about the Vestiges that his paramour guards.

  “I’m not sure I can do that, Voice. Voice?”

  But there was no answer. The tapestry was still. The sound of the distant machinery, muted. The lights returned slowly to their normal brightness. The sweetness in the air was gone.

  Méarana lay back on the bed, fighting tears. They had not come for her at all. They had come for the Vestiges. She had been shown once more her place in the scheme of things.

  Later, when Ravn returned to the rooms with Domino Tight’s reply, she saw the harper lying in her bed, weeping. Ravn did not ask why. But she did sniff the air and frown at the subtle tang.

  VIII. ONE MAN WITH A DREAM, AT PLEASURE

  Prizga sits on a long, narrow hill whose blunt end overlooks the gorge of the rushing Qornja River. To the east lies a bowl valley rich with farms. To the west the river snakes across a broad scrubland toward a delta twelve miles distant. Lazarus species roam this plain: go-beeshon and go-camels and the like. A long, graceful bridge spans the gorge. Supported entirely by gravity grids, it hangs faerielike in the air.

  Prizga ATC tells Donovan that the local weather is cool today, but from cruising altitude Donovan spies the white of the northlands. In the future, it seems, Prizga will grow cooler still.

  * * *

  After departing the ice cap, Donovan had crossed first a thin, tall-grass prairie and then a polar desert before entering the defiles of immense mountain ranges, dressed in fir and spruce but punctuated also with the quaking golden leaves of aspen. After that, he had headed due west over a temperate semidesert until he struck the coast and turned north into the traffic corridors for Prizga.

  In all that time, he had not seen another city.

  There had been towns scattered on the grasslands, cheerful lights glowing in the night beneath him. But mountain and desert had been devoid of all signs of human habitation. Glacial pockets in the high mountains had caught the starlight and twinkled false images of house lamps, creating faux cities on the ice fields. Now and then, his general receiver had caught snatches of music, so he supposed that villages or mining towns snuggled unseen in the black crevasses, but never anything even as large as Ketchell until he entered
the airspace over the Southwestern Desert.

  He passed over great circles of greenery, crops conjured from the arid soil by the constant drip-drip of spidery irrigators that spread like steel webs from the morning-flushed towns at their centers. But the first such installation he had seen after leaving the mountains had been rusting in the fields and the town at its heart abandoned and clatterdown.

  It was hard to imagine that this world had once ruled the stars.

  * * *

  But Prizga proved a bustling, friendly city, larger than Ketchell, and, unlike her east coast counterpart, she still squatted upon an anciently urban site. Beneath the modern city lay the broken plasteel and metaloceramic of earlier settlements, and beneath those, fragments of concrete block, broken marble, and the rusty stains of iron rebar. And beneath even that, pieces of wood that scholars felt had once been cut and shaped into boards.

  The latter claim was still controversial, and the scholars were limited in their exhumations. Save where happy excavation revealed the bones of the city, the layered ground of Prizga was paved over. To most of the inhabitants, the rubble beneath their feet was a “jinko nuisance,” and much of it had long disappeared into ballast, recycle, or scrap sales. The major exception was the ruins poking like iron trees from the soil of the agricultural basin. These were simply too massive to remove, and the farming co-ops had programmed their autoplows to wind around them. The spars and girders were still known by their ancient Murkanglais name: the elfwendevaxii and the basin as a whole was called the vaxi’prizga.

  Donovan rented a hotel room using the name on one of several ID cards he had prepared for the trip, and spent his first day in town visiting the ruins. Afterward, he took a leisurely dinner on a terrace restaurant overlooking the Qornja gorge. The sound of the rushing water, muted by the mist that rose out of it, soothed him insensibly into sleep.

  * * *

  He hurries down a darkened stairwell. Quietly, because the enemy may have already infiltrated the building. He passes dim and empty offices, long looted of anything of use, littered with casings and sabots and exhausted battery packs, and here and there too the corpses of those who came to seize the offices and those who had defended them.

  He pauses at the broadcast studio to beckon to Issa Dzhwanson, the silver-throated actress, idol of millions, who has been for these past few days the clarion voice of their futility. But she shakes her head and like the men and women left behind on the rooftop will not leave her post. “I will maintain the illusion,” she tells him. “I will tell the world that reinforcements have come, not that the remnants have left. I will sow doubts in the mind of the Protector.”

  “I cannot tell you where I’m going,” he says. “Any lips can be brought to speak.”

  “They’ll not take me.” She laughs. “Go, and go quickly. If you do not escape, it will not matter that we ever fought.”

  There is not time even for a last kiss. He makes his way into the subbasement, where he scrounges in the maintenance shops for something that can hack and dig and chop. The blocks are ceramic and hard to break, but once through the surface facing progress is easier. He wonders how thick the wall is. Will the Protector’s men enter the building to seize it or simply stand back and bring it down, as they brought down the Chancellory? Seventeen stories tower above him. There would be time to realize that it was all coming down to crush him.

  Then he is through the wall.

  He pulls out the ceramic block and attaches a piton and line to the back side. He wriggles feetfirst through the space thus opened and hunts with his boots for a step or platform. Finding one, he drops the short distance to it and then pulls the block back into the space he had chipped it from.

  Only then does he turn and using his black lamp and goggles view the space into which he has crawled.

  * * *

  Donovan gasped awake at his dining table. “The steam tunnels!” he cried.

  A waiter appeared by his side. “Is something wrong, snor?”

  “No,” Donovan said. “No. Do you have food served on steam tables?”

  “Oh, yes, snor. We have steamed perch and sturgeon.”

  “I’ll have some of that.”

  The waiter hurried off to do as bid, and Donovan rose and approached the rails along the lip of the gorge. The old steam tunnels, once used to heat the buildings in the center city. He remembered now. They had been abandoned in place centuries earlier, when microwave-beamed power had been rediscovered and ancient technologies had replaced technologies more ancient still. No one knew they were there—except the Pedant, who knew everything.

  Thanks, Donovan. But I didn’t know I knew.

  “The memories were suppressed.”

  You can’t delete memories. You can only erase the markers that flag them. But memories are holographic and eventually can be recalled “sideways.”

  Oh, wonderful, said the Sleuth. Another lecture on how Pedant’s mind works. Or in this case did not.

  Don’t be harsh with him, said the young man in the chlamys.

  Besides, added the young girl in the chiton, it was better for us that we did not remember earlier.

  “We haven’t remembered enough, anyway,” the Fudir pointed out. “The idea is not how to get out, but how to get in. We need to remember where those tunnels exited.”

  Somewhere along the river, obviously.

  Sure, Sleuthy, but where? We can’t have our little expedition poking around up and down the riverfront. Might have some impact on the surprise factor.

  I have a question. Who suppressed those memories?

  The Names?

  Not the Names. Had they known to do so, they would have already known the way out. And if the Names knew, Gidula would have known—and then what point the secret to inveigle.

  Silky! said the Sleuth. You’re becoming logical. The answer is as logical as the question. We did it to ourselves!

  “We…,” said Donovan. “Which ‘we’ would that be?”

  His mind fell silent. There had once been a tenth Donovan, but he had gone insane and the others had combined to extinguish him. From time to time, he wondered which aspect of the espionage art that particular persona had been. Ruthlessness, perhaps. An agent needed ruthlessness to kill for expediency, or commit suicide when cornered. It had been the part of man that craved death.

  The waiter pushed the steam table over and Donovan selected some choice slices, thanked the waiter, and watched him go. “That was you, Inner Child, wasn’t it? Calling for the steam table.”

 

  Do you really think someone might be listening?

  Ahh, the Kid always thinks someone might be listening.

  “I hate fish,” grumbled Donovan.

  * * *

  The Archives of Zãddigah were housed in a building called the Miwellion, dedicated by a minor descendant to a major ancestor who in his day had brought the entire Northern Mark under his sway. Built in a style known locally as Late Imperial and elsewhere not at all, it sported great fluted columns and floating roofs. The live attendant—an old monkey-faced fellow wearing something much like a bathrobe over a plain tunic—blinked astonishment when Donovan strode into the building and confronted him at the desk in the foyer.

  The foyer was both narrow and tall, a cylinder, and featured a hemi-dome decorated with holomurals of the great men and women of ancient Terra. The three-dimensional quality of the mural made the dome seem to float in the farthest recesses of the sky. Embedded in the depths of the whirling figures, on the very bottom layer of the hologram, an elderly man with unruly white hair extended his finger to bring all of space and time into being. Evidently, the god Einstein. Across the dome from him, the dark god Maxwell hurled lightning bolts that roiled space and time into superluminal tubes. Overtop of these primeval acts floated more mundane heroes: slaughtering big game, building the first fire, pushing a crude canoe into the sea … There were
mud-brick cities, marble temples and palaces, and steel laboratories, explorers setting foot on strange shores and on stranger worlds. The whole was in constant motion so that images deeper in the mural could be glimpsed through the parting clouds of later ones overlain atop them.

  Donovan wondered why the lobby was not full of people, come for no other reason than to crane their necks at this wonder. But the attendant only shrugged when asked. “Guess everyone seen ’em already.” He continued to regard his visitor with tight, beady eyes.

  “I’ve come here to do some research,” Donovan told him—and he could feel the warm glow of the Pedant rubbing his hands.

  “Research,” the attendant said in a voice indicating the novelty of the concept. “You can look at most our holdings on the mong, y’know.”

  Donovan resisted sarcasm. “I don’t wish to look at most of your holdings, but at the rest. I have already searched the jandak mong, and those searches led me here—to examine items not remotely available.”

  There is no sigh more lingering and heartfelt than that of a man required to do his job. The wizened creature seemed to shrug within his robe. “And what subjects are those, snor?” he asked. “Be aware. There are some that require Nominal permission to view, and these inquiries are noted, logged, and reported.”

  Donovan already knew from the public mong that the interdict included pretty much everything dealing with Commonwealth times. “I am but a poor zhingo shun from Old Eighty-two. I search-again through old materials in hope of finding a new understanding.”

  Eyebrows arched. “Meaning no disrespect, snor, but what could you possibly learn from them that hasn’t already been learned? The great ’uns of the past…” A vague gesture took in the dome above. “… have already said everything so perfectly there’s nothing more left for the likes of you.”

  Maybe so, said the Pedant, but there are ofttimes benefits from saying the same thing in a different way, just as one may better appreciate the sight of the Go-Gates by viewing them from different angles.