The harper shrugged. She had neither seen nor heard the voice that spoke in the night since the brawl on Tungshen Habitat. “One never knows how things will turn out.”
Unobtrusively, Donovan made a blade of his left hand and ran it across the index finger of his right, much as if he were rubbing an itch. Méarana nodded fractionally. Yes, one of the two Hounds was out.
(Will be here soon?)
(Not known. Ravn protect.)
(Trust no one here.)
“Only you, Father,” she said in clear Gaelactic.
“Especially not me,” he answered.
* * *
After the buffet, Méarana and Ravn were escorted into Gidula’s office, and there she saw her father again, standing beside Gidula’s chair. Two other Shadows—one wearing a rose on buff, the other wearing a daffodil on blue—flanked them both. Roses and daffodils? Méarana thought Ravn’s viper far more candid.
Gidula sat room-center in an egg-chair, looking like a corpse propped in his coffin and ready for his ground sweat. He wore a billowing black robe with the comet on his front, and his cap was of the sort Peripherals called a Tudor bonnet. If there had ever been a desk before him, it was nowhere now in evidence. There was not another chair in the room, and magpies stood scattered about in a pattern Méarana recognized from shaHmat as one of mutual support. They might be pawns or rooks or counselors, poised for either attack or defense.
She wondered if Ravn felt vulnerable with no magpies of her own. Méarana touched her sleeve and the knife scabbard strapped underneath it. Poor support she could render in company like this.
The walls were hung with what she called “the art of impressions.” Shapes that suggested without depicting. One hung directly behind Gidula’s chair: a blackish-brown massif occupied the left side of the frame, while the right was open to a sky in which floated a yellow orb of indistinct border. It suggested a hill overlooking a river valley. A black twisting shape in midair seemed at first a human silhouette but on closer inspection proved to be a bird flying off into the distance.
Ravn bowed before Gidula, sweeping her right arm out. Méarana half-expected her to come out of the bow with a pantherlike leap upon the Old One. Her desire for vengeance might run deep enough to hold her own life disposable in the bargain. And where would that leave Méarana Harper and her father?
Donovan looked on without expression, but his eyes were everywhere at once and full of pain. Had he been tortured and broken?
Ravn rose from her obeisance. “Puissant Gidula,” she said, “let the rift between us heal. Let this unworthy one abase herself and salve the wound of her earlier words with the balm of a gift. Behold! I bring you Méarana Swiftfingers, the daughter of Donovan buigh and of Bridget ban and perhaps—though this I cannot guarantee—her mother following desperately and close behind. Prepare then your nets, my sir, for a large fish swims toward them.”
Donovan stiffened and took half a step forward before checking himself. Méarana herself managed little more than a hoarse, “Ravn!” But Olafsdottr did not so much as turn to face her. Two of Gidula’s magpies—one of them weirdly goggled and engulfed by a headset—took her firmly by the arms and led her beside the egg-chair on the side opposite Donovan. The Shadow who stood there—the daffodil-on-blue one—turned his head fractionally, and gave her a surreptitious wink.
Gidula spoke. “We thank you with great kindness, Ravn Olafsdottr, for the generosity of your gift. Accept these tokens of our appreciation.” He gestured and a young afflicted man stepped forward with a silver tray. “First, the balm for those stripes you carried.” The servant proffered a cruet of gold and glass. “Secondly, a signet with the comet upon it.” The servant placed the ring on the Shadow’s finger. “And thirdly, a mere trifle of credits to your accounts, the sum total of which need not concern us.”
Ravn bowed again, thanked Gidula, and stepped back. Tears blazed the cheeks of many of the magpies, astonishing Méarana.
The Old One turned smiling to Donovan buigh. “There. You see, Gesh? There was never any need to torture you.”
Donovan faced him, though the rose-on-buff Shadow laid a hand on his arm as if to restrain him. Donovan shook him off. “You turtle’s egg,” he told Gidula, and the accusation carried all the more weight for the lack of volume in Donovan’s voice. “There was no need for this.”
“Will you now,” said Gidula blandly, “tell us what we need to know?”
“Don’t tell him, Father!” Méarana blurted.
The magpie in the goggles tsked and the harper felt a sharp pain in her side. When she glanced at her, the magpie said, “Shh.”
Gidula sighed. “So untrusting, the youth these days. Harper, I have as many reasons for keeping your father alive as there are stars in the heavens. Well, Gesh?”
“I never had intention of holding back. But a certain caution informs me. After twenty years and more, topography may have changed and the image in my memory may not match the reality on the ground. I could describe the scene, but you might not recognize it on sight.”
“But you would.”
“More likely than any other. I will lead you where you need to go. You may trust the word of Geshler Padaborn.”
“Into the Lion’s Mouth?” Gidula framed his chin in one hand, the elbow for which rested on the arm of the chair.
“Even so. I will need close reconnaissance to specify it precisely. You need not detain the harper, but send her on her way home.”
“Ah, Gesh, ever the romantic! You and I are more alike than you would allow. We cannot take her with us whither we fare. The Fates hazard the dice, and collect all bets. She would stand in endless peril. No, best that she remain here, well looked after, until we return—or until her mother arrives to fetch her.” He looked about the room. “And which of my Shadows would remain here to welcome Bridget ban Hound?”
The Shadow beside Méarana stepped forward. “I, my lord.”
Gidula raised his eyebrows. “You, Khembold Darling? How often has Eglay Portion laid you in the dust?”
Khembold’s cheeks flushed and he stood more stiffly. “To fall to Eglay Portion is no man’s shame. Many are those who may conn a slider, but you set forth against the Names and their Protectors. If Eglay is the more puissant of us, he is more needed in the streets of the Secret City than here.”
Gidula laughed. “Adroitly put. Very well; the boon is yours. Two, stay with him and see to administration of the keep. Khembold, you will take care of the harper?”
Khembold bowed. “Of course. As a rose in a summer garden.”
Ravn Olafsdottr laughed. “Take care, Khembold Darling, that you not prick your thumb upon a thorn. She carries a knife or two up her sleeve.”
“A hammer does not make a carpenter,” he said, “or a pile of stone a house.”
Méarana contemplated flinging the dagger into Gidula’s right eye, and had unconsciously flexed her elbow when she felt the press of a muzzle in the small of her back. It was the small, insectile magpie with the flickering data goggles and the numeral 2 on her brassard. “Please,” the magpie whispered. “Try.” And it was a measure of Méarana’s anger that she very nearly did, despite the promise of death.
But prudence—and a small scissoring of Donovan’s finger—forestalled her. There would be other opportunities perhaps in this nest of adders. She had come to rescue Donovan, but it now appeared that he must rescue her, for it was clear that Gidula had exacted her father’s submission by an implied threat to torture her. She was thus leverage over a man Gidula both needed and feared, and he was not inclined to give up such a lever.
As Khembold led her away, past the bleak eyes of her father, Méarana said to Ravn Olafsdottr, “Ravn, how could you?”
But of course it was obvious how she could. Later, it became more obvious still.
* * *
Gidula climbed to the crest of the Nose as he did most every Fifthday when he was at the Forks, but this time he went with only the Ravn for company. He had cha
nged his bonnet for a beret and his billowing robe for a more travel-friendly singleton. Ravn drove the quadwheeler and when she had parked it off the road went to stand near the elder Shadow.
The wind through the pinch of the hills that flanked the river tousled the trees and the struggling wildflowers. Gidula removed his headgear and contemplated the river, white flecked and tumbling as it rolled below the Nose. The sound of the waters seemed muted and distant. Quietly Ravn pulled her teaser from its holster and held it loosely by her side. The setting and the solitude were perfect, and artistically satisfying. She rehearsed her moves once more in her mind.
“It almost sounds like voices,” Gidula said without turning. “The river, I mean. I wonder if anyone could decipher them.”
“That would depend on the language, I should think,” Ravn said. She raised the teaser and aimed it at the small of Gidula’s back. Paralyze, then push him over. It was important that he know that he was dead, and why. But it surprised her how heavy the teaser seemed.
Gidula tossed a handful of gravel over the side of the Nose. “My wife went off here,” he said. “But that was before your time. Before anyone’s time, I think.”
It would take only the smallest pressure on the firing stud to set up the neural pulse. Ravn tensed. A command went from the motor neurons down the arm to the finger. She could actually feel it, like a line of fire. But the finger remained frozen. She reminded herself that he deserved to die for torturing her. And perhaps for betraying the Traditions he claimed to love.
But she lowered her arm slowly until the teaser dangled by her side.
Gidula sighed and raised his eyes to the sky. “To die,” he said, “might almost be a blessing.” Then he turned about. “Why did you not tease me?”
Ravn did not ask how he knew. There were a dozen ways he might have discerned her actions. And yet he had stood there waiting for her to act.
“I don’t know,” she answered him. “I have every reason to.”
“Do you? Every reason?”
“Why would death be a blessing?”
Gidula faced the cliff’s edge once more. “You never knew Ielnor. She was a woman to match a man: strong where I was weak; needy where I was strong. Her eyes were coal-black, her mind as clear as diamond. She was not in the Life, but she could have been. She held the Forks for me, and that during a time when the holding wanted wit and fortitude.”
“She fell off the cliff here?”
Gidula nodded. “And the baby.”
Ravn returned her teaser to its holster and secured it. “You must have cared for her very much.”
Gidula said nothing for a moment, then stepped to the edge. “Since that time, I have never loved anything.”
“Surely—”
“No, it is not good for a Shadow to love. Duty is the higher calling, and duty may one day call upon us to traduce our love. You saw how love led the harper into our trap, as by a nose-ring, and how love gives us now a handle on Geshler Padaborn himself. What was love to them but a hobble! And yet, I have grown passing fond of you during these years of struggle.”
“Of me!”
“As you seem to have grown fond of the harper.”
“She sings well.”
“And yet you turned her over to me.”
“I was oath bound to do so. I could not lure Bridget ban herself. But I think Donovan would have told you what you wanted even without the added spur. His memories were genuinely locked away.”
“Perhaps. We leave shortly for Dao Chetty. They are waiting for me at Mount Lefn.”
Ravn nodded. “Then we had better move.”
Gidula smiled briefly. “They won’t leave without me.” He glanced down the side of the Nose. “It does not look so far, but then it is the speed, not the distance, that matters.”
Ravn stepped beside him and looked down at the rushing waters below. It was far enough, she thought.
For an old man, Gidula was remarkably strong. He seized her and tossed her in a hip roll over the edge of the cliff.
She found herself suddenly a bird, though without a bird’s authority for flight. She spun, and sky, waters, and Gidula’s weeping face passed rapidly before her.
Endless training had taught her body what to do. Her right arm snatched a piton gun from her belt and fired a spike into the cliff face. The cable ran out and she swung at the end of it, striking the rocks with such brutal force that she nearly lost her grip on the gun. She grunted and pulled herself up, found a foothold, and shoved her left fist into a crack in the rock face.
Gidula looked down at her, judged where the piton had struck—well below the lip of the cliff. “It is much harder that way,” he said. “You will grow tired and lose your grip and only then complete what has begun. Better far to have concluded the business in one fell swoop.”
“Why? Because I thought to kill you?”
Gidula appeared to consider that. “Some might count that a reason, but mine is more serious. As I said: I had begun to grow fond of you.”
A horrible cold seized Ravn’s heart. “And Ielnor?”
Gidula’s head bobbed. “It was faster for her. She had no place to seize hold.”
“You pushed your wife off the Nose?”
“No! Oh no. She leapt. Trying to grab the baby. It was the baby I threw off.”
Ravn refused to let the image focus. “You threw your baby off the cliff?”
“Of course not. It wasn’t my baby. That was the whole point.”
“Ah.” Ravn had always thought of duty as a noble beast. But it had fangs. It had fangs.
“In each Shadow’s path,” said Gidula, “there is some fell deed that empties him out and after which there is no returning. Have you ever…?”
“I killed my gozhiinyaw when we moved the governor of Stratfondle.” Once more, she saw that farewell feast, tasted the wine they had toasted with. No one knew which side the others had chosen until one day she found the path to the governor’s life running through the body of Anwar Cheston.
“There, you see?” Gidula said in tones of sweet reason. “After that what other deed can be so dire? One may trod the Shadowed Path with a lighter heart.” He pointed to the rocky knob that crowned the cliff. “Best if you simply let go, Ravn. The upper face is unclimbable. Many others have tried. Why do you suppose Number One has not returned? You see what affection does to one’s instincts. Next time, Ravn, once the gun is aimed, don’t hesitate.”
“I will keep that in mind. For the next time.”
“Well…” He stood and dusted himself off. “I’m off to take down the Committee. Wish me luck.”
“Ooh, my sweet Gidula. I fear I can spare you none. For I need all of it for myself.”
XII. HANGING TOUGH
A stealthy knave may in the grave
Lay better men and true,
But treachery vile his hands defile
And honor’s not his due.
There is many a way a man to slay
With garrote or knife or gun;
But the best of ways is face to face
Only thus has the better man won.
With banner high your death defy
And proudly win or fail.
The troubadours your deeds encore
And skalds will chant your tale.
Méarana remained in good cheer, and this for two reasons. Although Donovan had gone with the kill team and left her here, she had reasoned that this was for her the safest course. Had he told Gidula everything and stayed here with her, the Old One would have had no further need of Donovan, and thus no further need of her. Until Donovan pointed out the secret entrance, Gidula might still need her to hold over him.
That did not mean she was safe. For so long as she was in the Forks, she walked among cobras, and felt small black eyes tracking her every step. They had not forgotten, in the midst of their civil war, that they had another enemy across the Rift. And if she was a lever over her father, she was also a bait for her mother.
Khem
bold had established Méarana in a small apartment, plainly furnished and of two rooms, just off Jeshire Street in the transient quarter. The sitting room featured a play deck, large stuffed chairs, and a well-supplied cabinet of sensory intoxicants. The back room had a two-fold bed with multiple pillows and a foldaway dresser and wardrobe. To the side were the usual conveniences for those with use for beds.
She had placed her harp atop the pillows and carefully loosened all the strings—metal strings that she played with the nails. Sometimes, when the music carried her, she would find afterward her fingertips red with blood. She bent over the harp and kissed it. Cecilia preserve me, she thought. And she added Jude for good luck.
In the front room, she inventoried the contents of the cabinet. There were several aerosols, but none seemed suitable for her needs. Solids whose smoke might be inhaled. A variety of liquids in bottle or syringe. The bottles were steel, ceramic, plastic—but two were glass, and these she removed from the cabinet. She poured herself a tumbler of each. The green-tinged liquid proved a wine of some sort, quite good. The clear one was a silverplate head-banger. Even a sip set up an ache between her eyes. She made a face and poured the rest of the bottle down the drain, leaving the empty bottle on the sideboard.
Afterward, she turned her attention to the play deck, where she played shaHmat against herself.
Before departure, Donovan had sent a missive by way of Magpie Three Padaborn. It was a list of numbers arranged to resemble an account in Dangchao groats: Gr 844.60 + Gr 288.60 + Gr 311.18 + Gr 109.11 and she immediately recognized it as a Clanthompson code derived from Rosie’s Thesaurus. The numbers represented a taxonomy of concepts. Donovan had seen the code exactly once, years before on Harpaloon, but the Pedant remembered details.
Méarana was not so lucky. She pretended to refer to a list of accounts, muttered something about overcharging for services, and translated the message. Anticipate/expect. Cross-grained/rough/unsmooth. Sporting/hunting-dog. Cheerfulness.
That was clear enough. He knew that one or more Hounds were on their way to her. There would be a rough time between his departure and the Hounds’ arrival, but she should maintain hope.
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