In the Lion's Mouth

by Michael Flynn

  “We are bringing home all agents from the Periphery.”

  “You’ve made a mistake then. We’re not an agent. We’ve been retired.”

  “Ooh. Our retirement plan is very singular. There is oonly one way to retire.”

  Donovan did not ask her what that one way was. “You forget Those of Name discarded us.”

  “Then when you join with us you may take your revenge for that, and sweet will be the taking, I think.”

  “Very sweet, but I had it in mind to watch from the sidelines. Revenge is a dish best served cold—and by someone else.”

  Olafsdottr shook her head. “No sidelines this fight.”

  Donovan wiped up the last of his sauce and stuffed the naan in his mouth. He had gotten hints of this last year from Billy Chins. “How many of you are in it?” he asked around the bread.

  “Almost half have lit the lamp.”

  “Almost half…” He swallowed. “Oh, that’s encouraging. Half the Lion’s Mouth against a regime in power for centuries, with total control of the police, the Protectors, and the … What of the ‘boots,’ the military? Where do they stand?”

  Ravn cocked her head. “We conduct this war as we always have—with stealth, with intrigue, with assassination. Some boots,” she allowed, “may know a civil war is broken out. But there are no bloody battles; no planets bombarded. No great stupid mobs rushing about shooting at one another … and missing.”

  “Not yet, anyway.” Donovan tossed his napkin into the fresher and took his dishes to the sink, where he scraped the remnants into the recycler. He turned abruptly and faced her. “Why me?” he said. “What good would I do the rebellion? I’m one, broken old man.”

  “Not so old as that; and broken pieces have the sharpest edges.”

  A facile response, Donovan thought. That her people meant to use him in some manner, he had no doubt; but in what manner, was as yet unclear. Perhaps as no more than a knife thrown by one side at the other.

  “You think on what I have told you, Donovan,” Olafsdottr said as she marched him back to his nominal prison cell. “You will see it is the right thing to do, and you and I will be famous comrades.”

  That argument, more than any of the others, planted caution in the heart of Donovan buigh. For he had never heard an agent of Those of Name cite “the right thing to do” as an argument in favor of anything.

  CENGJAM GAAFE: THE FIRST INTERROGATORY

  Méarana strikes the arm of her chair with the flat of her hand. “I knew it! He was coming here, after all. To see you, Mother. You know what that means?”

  Bridget ban tosses her head. “That he’s a masochist?”

  The harper makes a moue. “He wanted a second chance.”

  “He’s had that already.”

  “A third, then. What difference does the count make?”

  Bridget ban sets her face and turns to her. “This is something we can discuss later.” And a motion of her eyes indicates both Olafsdottr and Graceful Bintsaif.

  The harper shrugs. “As you will. But I think there are no surprises for the tale-spinner.”

  The Hound gives her attention back to the—Prisoner? Guest? Visitor? “Tell me,” she says, “how you can know the thoughts of Donovan buigh, when I doubt even he knows them so well?”

  The Confederal smiles. “You must grant me two things. The first is many weeks of conversation between us, in which he may have revealed his mind to me.”

  “That would be quite a revelation as I understand things. And second?”

  “And second, you must grant me some poetic license.” Olafsdottr nods at the glasses of nectar that stand before each of them. “You have not drunk from your glass. Do I take that as evidence that the glass set initially before me was tinctured with sooth juice? Oho! I have not heard Graceful Bintsaif behind me lift her glass, either.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” says the harper. “Here!” And she drinks from her own glass and then reaches across the table to hand it to the Confederal. Bridget ban hisses, but the agent makes no move to snatch her daughter. It might come to a struggle later—at some point they must all give thought to whether and how Olafsdottr would leave the Hall—but for now she has come merely to talk.

  The Shadow swallows the rest of the nectar. “Ooh. Very tasty. Stoorytelling is dry work.”

  “How much of the story so far has been true?” asks Graceful Bintsaif.

  Olafsdottr turns to look at her. “Soo untroosting, you are. All of it true. Perhaps not all factual.”

  The junior Hound snorts. “A contradiction.”

  “On the contrary! What is factual is what is done, accomplished. A verdict. But what is true is what is faithful, and loyal. Perhaps all facts are true, but not all truths are fact.” She turns to face Bridget ban and the harper. “A story may be true to life.”

  “Verdict,” says the harper, “means ‘to speak truth’ in some ancient tongue.”

  The Confederal tilts her head sideways. “Does it? Oh, there are languages older than the oldest tongues! Why do you not fetch your harp? He toold me how well you play, how well you improovise on a theme.”

  The harper looks to her mother. “I think she tells the truth. The Donovan she describes is a man I recognize. If she has embellished his thoughts, she has not done so falsely.”

  Bridget ban considers this for a time. She folds her hands flat together and tucks them under her lips, and her eyes grow hard and distant. Her lips move, just a little. Finally, she makes a sign with her right hand and lays both hands flat on the arms of her chair. “I will be no barbarian. You came to us unafraid. You may remain in the same manner. Mr. Wladislaw, bring Miss Lucia’s harp to the sitting room, please. And…” She nods to Olafsdottr. “May I serve you some coffee?”

  The Confederal’s eyes widen; then she laughs. “Of course. I come expecting to drink more than that.”

  “And bring coffee, also,” the mistress of the Hall tells the Ears through which her butler listens.

  “I don’t understand,” Méarana says to the smiles she sees on the other three women. “What is so funny about coffee?”

  Olafsdottr answers. “It is what we say in the Confederacy, lady harp, when we bring someone in for questioning. Cengjam gaafe. ‘Invite in for coffee.’ There are other phrases—samman, kaowèn, or worst of all duxing kaoda. La, we have more ways of asking questions than we have questions to ask. Ooh, here come faithful retainer with harp and coffee!”

  Mr. Wladislaw accomplishes this Herculean task by carrying the harp in his own hands. It is a clairseach, a lap harp of the old style, with metal strings played with the nails. It is draped in a velvet cloth of royal purple and Méarana believes she can hear the strings singing to her. Likely, it is the breath of the air passing through the chords as the butler carries it; but Méarana prefers the poetic to the mundane. The passage of air explains how it sings; it does not explain that it sings.

  The coffee is brought in a more pedestrian manner by the butler’s assistant, who wears white gloves of all things and pushes before him a gravity cart with a silver coffee service upon it. If the Confederal wonders that the coffee has already been waiting to be fetched, and that Bridget ban has orchestrated the meeting to achieve this gesture, she does not show it on her face, which is as cheerfully concealing as ever.

  “You smile too much,” Bridget ban tells her.

  Olafsdottr’s grin broadens. “I will try to be more dooleful as my tale unwinds. Most people, I think, would wish more opportunity to smile than what their lives give them.”

  “A man may conceal with a smile more effectively than with a great stone face. The stone face may not reveal much; but it will always reveal that it is not revealing. The smiling face appears open, which makes it the greater lie.”

  The Confederal nods. “I see you do not lie.”

  Bridget ban stiffens for a moment. “Being kidnapped could have been no reason to smile for Donovan buigh. Have you no regrets at what you deprived him of?”

&
nbsp; “Ooh, I have many regrets; as many as I have winters behind me. The Fates deprive a man of nothing but that they do not grant him something else. What have I deprived him of? You? By your own account, he did not have that when he left Jehovah.”

  “When you took him from there,” Méarana corrects her. She has been tuning her harp to the second mode, for Olafsdottr had told a sad onset to the tale. Father ripped untimely from his own intentions, on the very verge of coming home. What, she wonders, could be more tragic than that?

  “But how closely do you attend me?” the Confederal asks the room. “He had great fun, the scarred man did. Opening my locks. Poisoning my food. Throwing metal slugs at my head. Planning my ambush and death. What more fun may a man have and live afterward? As you have orchestrated this tête-à-tête, so did I orchestrate our little voyage. He woke too early, I grant you. But … have you ever danced with a cobra? Sometimes, in a life grown hardened to danger, one must seek the greater risk to enjoy the greater thrill.”

  Méarana hums a tenor F, pauses to adjust one of the half intervals on the strings (for her chords are no more well tempered than she), and then pauses expectantly and looks around the room at the others.

  Graceful Bintsaif has been watching her with some incredulity. Perhaps she wonders at playing music with a cobra in the room. But music, by long tradition, eases the serpent’s bile.

  Bridget ban, for her part, has waited patiently. She is long inured to her daughter’s eccentricities. And well so, for had not one of those eccentricities impelled her to seek out her father and to rescue her mother from utter oblivion? And all that with no small risk to herself. Bridget ban does not fear death, for she holds to a belief that death is not the end. But unending suspension in a lost and derelict ark was no more death than it was life. Rather, it was some awful schrödingerian halfway point, partaking of the worst features of both.

  When all seems settled, the Hound, who has never once taken her eyes from her guest, pours out a cup of coffee and hands it to Ravn Olafsdottr. “A small question,” she says.

  Olafsdottr drinks the hot brew without hesitation, even though its bitter taste could hide a thousand potions that in pear nectar would curdle its sweetness. “Ask,” she says.

  “For all his games at escape, for all his secret passageways, and picked locks, and poisoned Joe Freezy, I see that Donovan buigh…” She spreads her arms to take in the room. “… is not here. And this tells me that all such attempts failed. Else, he would be telling me this tale—and with far more relish, as I recall the man—and you would be sitting less comfortably.”

  Olafsdottr’s laugh is like the trilling of a bird on the wing. “Noo. The Fates rule all, and some things are not to be. Our two destinies were intertwined. I meant what I said, that he and I would become great companions; although the Fates are cruel and have a sense of humor, so that while the foreseeing was true, the companionship was not what anyone expected. The joke, as always, is on us; though seldom to our amusement. Play, harper, and your strings our tale promote and with your chords catch out the discord note.”

  II. RIFTWARD: THE FROG PRINCE

  The next day, the Fudir broke Rigardo-ji’s security code and entered the smuggler’s files. These proved as dull as any collection of legitimate invoices, as the sundry planetary and state governments around the Periphery were notional in what goods they chose to blockade. During the Great Cleansing, the peoples of Terra had been scattered widely on the hither side of the Rift and unequally gifted as regards terraformation. Some worlds had in plenty what others lacked entire. Thus, it was worth a rich man’s purse to smuggle boxes of oatmeal cookies from Hawthorne Rose to Ramage; or tobacco sticks onto Gladiola.

  The smuggler’s most recent invoice was for the delivery to Foreganger Prime of a secret protocol entered into by Abyalon with the People of Foreganger. He had been returning to Abyalon with the chopped protocol—and a gift called “the Frog Prince” from the People to the Molnar of the Cinel Cynthia deep in the Hadramoo.

  The People’s Navy swore revenge on the pirates of the Hadramoo, the Pedant remembered, after the hijacking and massacre of the tour liner Merry v Starinu, four standard years ago.

  Perhaps the gift is a peace offering.

  The Fudir was doubtful. “The People of Foreganger make peace on their own terms, usually after some notable vengeance.”

  “One way or the other,” Donovan said, “Foreganger won’t be happy that their present was hijacked along with the courier’s ship. Pedant, where was the Starinu hijacked?”

  Off Abyalon.

 

  How much you want to bet, said the Sleuth, that this “Frog Prince” is some sort of vengeance weapon that Abyalon hired from the People to use against the Cynthians?

  “No bet,” said Donovan.

  A bomb, do you think?

  “Wonderful,” said the Fudir. “A bomb on board. We didn’t have near enough problems.”

  If we can find where it’s stashed, the Brute suggested, we maybe can use it to knock off Olafsdottr and take the ship from her.

  “If it’s a big enough bomb to take out the Molnar,” Donovan pointed out, “it’s too big to set off aboard a monoship. A takeover weapon must be one that can kill or incapacitate the Ravn without killing or incapacitating us.”

  cried Inner Child.

  The scarred man swung abruptly away from the holostage, saw nothing, turned the other way.

  More nothing. The ward room was empty.

  Where did you see it, Child?

 

  “Sleuth, you and Fudir check it out.”

  The Fudir took control of the scarred man and went to the back wall, where the nautical instruments were mounted.

  The wood paneling was genuine, and done up in a basket-weave pattern of vertical and horizontal slats, so that the wall seemed some vast sort of wickerwork. The Fudir glanced toward the console’s swivel chair. If Inner Child had glimpsed something in this direction … The Sleuth did the geometry … it would have stood approximately—here. He ran his hands along the interstices.

  You’re thinking a secret door, ain’t ya, Sleuthy?

  It was a logical deduction, and logic was the Sleuth’s forte. The smuggler’s ship was riddled with such things. The Fudir’s explorations had already found secret cabinets with jewels and stolen artwork intended for clandestine delivery in the Old Planets. Nothing to use as a weapon, except perhaps for the Peacock vase.

  I just thought of something, said the Sleuth.

  And you’re gonna tell us.

  The road to the Hadramoo splits off here at Abyalon. What happens if we don’t deliver this “Frog Prince”thing to the Molnar?

  Who cares?

  No, I don’t mean what will the Molnar do. Or even what will the Abyalonic Council or the People of Foreganger do. I mean, what will the Frog Prince do?

  The scarred man paused in his examination of the wall. If the Abyaloni and the People were deploying a vengeance weapon against the Cynthians, there might be a delicate matter of timing involved.

  As in time bomb?

 

  “Abyalon wouldn’t agree to that,” the Fudir muttered.

  “Foreganger might,” Donovan replied, “without telling Abyalon.”

  Wonderful. If the Frog Prince were a bomb set to detonate when it reached the Hadramoo and Olafsdottr took the ship to Megranome Road instead, the thing would detonate instead when they were on the Tightrope.

  Who says it’s on a timer? asked Pollyanna. Or even that it’s a bomb?

 

  If Silky had not heightened the scarred man’s senses with a cocktail of enzymes, he might not have felt the light puff of air that wafted from between two vertical slats. If Inner Child had not mentione
d poison gas, he might not have flinched from it. The Sleuth explored the slats with his fingertips and identified the edge of a door; and once he had the edge of it, the rest of the outline followed easily.

  No obvious handle. The Fudir began to push and twist the various instruments fastened to the wall.

  It’s probably not booby-trapped, Pollyanna said.

  The scarred man hesitated.

  “Pollyanna!” said Donovan.

  She’s right. What sort of fool booby-traps his own ship?

  Inner Child suggested.

  Nah. He’d set locks, not bombs. The Brute twisted the chronometer, jiggled the barometer, pushed the binnacle. It was only when he turned the knob on the compass that they heard a click and the panel swung gently inward.

  “You can come out now, Ravn, dear,” he cooed.

  But no one stepped forth and, when Donovan entered he saw it was not a cache but a passage. The back wall was a blind. To the right a short connection joined a second passage that seemed to run lengthwise up the ship—probably the one behind the cabinets. To the left, was a narrow corridor and it was from that direction that he heard the soft sound of a closing latch.

  Inner Child edged around the blind, saw that the passage was empty and crept gingerly through it. The Fudir made no sound with his footfalls; and even his breath was still as death.

  Was this an elaborate ambush? But Olafsdottr had no need of ambushes. She could have executed him at any time. She was keeping him alive because her side wanted to use him in their civil war. So what was this about? Just playing stealth games? There were more exercises than the merely physical, and boredom was a wondrous motivator.

  The passageway made a dogleg and, passing through a second door, Donovan emerged into the cold well of the pantry, surrounded by cuts of harvested meats, vegetables, and juices in rows of low-entropy receptacles. The door he had come through had masqueraded as a rack of shelves.

  Leaving the cold well, Donovan passed into the pantry. A wintermelon, an arm’s length long, sat on the carving board. Succumbing to impulse, he pulled a carving knife from its scabbard and holding the blade by the point, threw it from the far side of the pantry. The blade performed a satisfying somersault before sinking to its hilt into the melon.