In the Lion's Mouth

by Michael Flynn

  The Fudir sighed. “Me-fella acetanan. Poor ignorant-man. You-fella Gidula say two reasons why rusty hammer for delicate job.”

  Gidula’s lip curled again. “No need for the Terran jabber. First of all, you were an inspiration to millions when you led the earlier uprising, and you may be so again.”

  “What!” Donovan nearly spilled his bowl and stood from the bench.

  Olafsdottr put a hand on his arm. “You have forgotten even that? ‘The lamp that was lit has been lit again’? ‘The names that were not forgotten have been remembered’? Do these bold slogans not ring in your ears?”

  “You led the last holdouts atop the Education Ministry,” Gidula insisted. “And then, when all was lost, came within a hair’s-breadth of escape, save that you were betrayed by one of your own comrades.”

  Those dreams we had on Gatmander, said the Pedant. They were memories unlocked by Teddy’s drug! If I dig, I can find them again! I know it!

  Oh! To remember! cried the Silky Voice.

  The scarred man’s mouth worked, but no words emerged. Slowly, he resumed his seat. “But then,” he managed at last.

  Gidula leaned across the table. “Yes.” The word was almost a hiss. “Yes. You were found on the riverbank, on the eastern bank, miles from the Education Ministry.”

  “Which means,” said Dawshoo, “that you knew a secret way out of the Secret City.”

  “Appropriate that there be one,” murmured Ravn.

  “And a secret way out,” said Oschous, “may be a secret way in.”

  “That is the second reason we need the rusty hammer,” Gidula said. “If you lead a team of assassins into the Secret City, we can cut the head off the snake.” He smiled a little at that. “Cut the head off the snake,” he said again. “Your name will live forever.”

  The scarred man sank back in his seat, overcome by his contending emotions.

  * * *

  The Brute wanted this.

  * * *

  The Sleuth saw it as a game, an intellectual exercise.

  * * *

  The Pedant wanted to recover lost memories.

  * * *

  But Inner Child was terrified,

  * * *

  the Silky Voice doubtful,

  * * *

  and neither Donovan

  * * *

  nor the Fudir saw any gain to be had.

  * * *

  “My name would live forever?” the Fudir said. “That sounds far too posthumous. If it’s to be one or the other, I’d rather the name die and the rest of me live.” He cackled, picked up the uisce bowl, but it trembled so that he could barely sip from it.

  “Indeed.” Olafsdottr smiled. “Posthumous fame is something few enjoy.”

  Gidula scowled at her, but Donovan almost choked and the uisce burned his throat. He set the bowl down so hard that it nearly toppled. “What name is it,” he croaked, “that would live forever?”

  “Do not speak it aloud,” Dawshoo cautioned him. “Not until the time is ripe and we rally the masses.”

  “Geshler Padaborn,” said Gidula.

  Donovan heard Ravn suck in her breath, and realized that it was a revelation to her, too. Otherwise, she might have used it as an argument during the slide down the Tightrope. He could feel Pedant digging and digging. But … nothing surfaced. All memories had been cauterized.

  “Padaborn,” he whispered, as if the sound of the name on his own lips might resurrect some sense of identity. But it was the name of a stranger.

  “An inspiration to us all,” said Gidula. “When the others learn you have returned, their morale will soar.”

  “You owe it to the men you once led,” Oschous added, “to lead them once more—and their sons and daughters with them.”

  “Do we?” Donovan said. “We have no recollection of being Padaborn; no desire to pick up his fallen torch.”

  Dawshoo smacked the table. “I never thought this play too promising, and the promise grows less. A man is the sum total of his deeds. If this Donovan buigh does not remember that Padaborn, he will not remember how he escaped the Secret City. Olafsdottr?”

  The ebony Shadow cocked her head. “Yes, First Speaker?”

  Dawshoo jerked his head at Donovan and shrugged.

  “Hold,” said Gidula. “Rofort once wrote that ‘A house is a pile of blocks, but not only a pile of blocks. When the house is torn down, the blocks remain, but where has the house gone?’”

  “We haven’t time for your philosophy,” Dawshoo said impatiently. “We leave for Ashbanal tonight. Manlius awaits us there.”

  “The house of Padaborn has been demolished,” Gidula said. “But perhaps some blocks remain. He need not remember himself in order to remember his deeds. And all we need is the remembrance of one deed particular.”

  Oschous grinned. “You’re a clever one, Gidula. Or you’re a fatuous old fool. We’re as likely to hear wisdom from the one as the other. What say, Dawshoo? We’ll take him with us. Something familiar may jog a memory or two.”

  Dawshoo rose. “It’s your play, Gidula. Take it as far as you can without risking us all.”

  “Will you start the whisper campaign?”

  “If I do, you had best deliver Padaborn. If not the Padaborn, at least a Padaborn. Train him up, if you must.” He watched Donovan drain the uisce bowl. “And if you can.”

  With that, he departed. One of the magpies left with him.

  Gidula too, prepared to leave. To Olafsdottr, he said, “Be sure he arrives at Port Rietta before the departure deadline. Keep the boots off his neck. Are you coming, Oschous?”

  The third Triumvir shook his massive head. “I think I’ll stay with our hero.”

  Gidula shrugged. “As you will.”

  After Gidula had left with the other magpie, Oschous shifted to the other side of the table so he could sit facing Donovan and Olafsdottr. He leaned back against the partition and lifted his feet to the table, linking his hands behind his head. His smile heightened his foxlike appearance. “So, Gesh,” he said. “What are we to do with you?”

  The scarred man shrugged. “Send me home? I doubt we can be of much use to you.”

  But Oschous shook his head. “That’s not what we do with things of ‘not much use.’ You should be grateful to Gidula, you know. He saved your life—twice—this past hour.”

  The Fudir grunted. “Tell me again the difference between your lot and Those.”

  The Dog head smiled broadly. “‘It takes all kinds to make a world,’ an ancient prophet said. People are like those gas molecules the scientisticals jabber of. They go about in every direction and so the whole body of them goes nowhere in particular. To have enough people move in the same direction you can’t wait until they do it for the same reasons. Afterward—if there is an afterward—there will be a sorting out. And Friend Donovan?” He stopped smiling. “I think you’ll be a lot more useful than you realize.”

  CENGJAM GAAFE: THE FOURTH INTERROGATORY

  A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon. Bridget ban studies this herald through the bay window. Her hand reaches involuntarily to her right breast, where the Badge of Night is placed, before she remembers that she is not in uniform. Her daughter and her subordinate watch in equal wonder, for to gaze out the window she has turned her back on the Confederal Shadow.

  Olafsdottr, for her part, pays this no apparent mind, and selects delicately from a tray of finger sandwiches that Mr. Wladislaw has unobtrusively conducted into the room. Behind her, the Shadow hears the creak of Graceful Bintsaif’s jaws and smiles. The long tense night is poised to yield a daylight no shorter or relaxed.

  Méarana plays a melody tangled and unresolved. It is neither geantraí nor goltraí but, like the meeting in the pit of Apothete, it searches for its boundaries, for its resolutions. It hungers for the progressions that will grace it with either triumph or tragedy. Much depends, she tells herself, on whether her father is dead or not. But she tells herself this
at such a deep level that she is herself barely conscious of the thought. Donovan had told her once that Confederal Shadows are past masters at the arts of torture, and she has no choice now but to believe him. For Olafsdottr has been torturing her since the story’s inception—by withholding that one particular facet of it, the only one that matters. The entire mode of the song depends upon that one fact; and so the Ravn’s silence on that point can have no other purpose than to keep the harper balanced on the knife’s edge.

  Yet Olafsdottr is telling the story and not her father. Absence is also a fact, of sorts. And it may be that it needs no elaboration.

  Méarana glances at Bridget ban just at the moment her mother turns away from the window. Does Olafsdottr’s coy silence torture her mother, as well? Does the uncertainty gnaw at her, too? Does she ache—as Méarana aches—to reach down the Confederal’s throat and drag the words forth by main force?

  If so, neither her face nor bearing betrays her. Perhaps nothing can break a wall built against twenty-four years’ resentment. Yet Méarana had spent a long, hard journey with Donovan and found him not the man of her mother’s memories. He had been both more and less than the tale told of him, and so, more or less, a man.

  The silence breaks when Olafsdottr wipes her hands on her pants and says, “One drawback of the ‘invitashoon for cooffee’—it leads of necessity to anoother invitation; or to at least a request.”

  Bridget ban snorts brief amusement. “I will go with you.”

  Olafsdottr ducks her head. “Please, is there to be noo privacy for even my moost intimate mooments? In my coolture…”

  “You are not in your culture. Here, we think nothing of going together. Graceful Bintsaif, you will stand guard at the door. Alert Mr. Tenbottles that our guest is on the move.”

  Méarana chuckles and, when her mother and the other Hound glance her way, she says, strumming an arpeggio on her strings, “Is she such a poor storyteller that she would leave before her climax?”

  “Why assume her purpose is storytelling?” says Bridget ban. “She may have come only to gain access to this building; in which case, the less she sees of it, the better. Perhaps, I should have a chamber pot brought in.”

  Olafsdottr cringes at this. “With my complexion you cannot see me blush, but I cannot bear the thought of pot-squatting.”

  “Ravn,” says Bridget ban, “ye hae nae blushed ower muckle in yer entire life.”

  “Oh, how little you know! I was born on the Groom’s Britches—the race you call Alabastrine is common there—and attitudes ingrained in childhood the adult cannot easily ignore.”

  “Naetheless,” Bridget ban says with a wave of her teaser.

  Her prisoner sighs and leaves the room bracketed between the two Hounds. When they are gone, Méarana laughs out loud and plays a little passage on her harp.

  “Miss?” says Mr. Wladislaw with a cock of the head. Ever attentive, he has seized the moment to tidy up the library.

  “Oh, nothing, Toby. An’ I bethought me the ainly one who could play anither.”

  “I don’t understand, miss.” He picks up the sandwich tray and waits to see if clarification is forthcoming.

  “Hae ye e’er seen an instrument try to speil the harper e’en while the harper tries to speil the instrument?”

  This is not clarification. He smiles politely, responds, “No, miss, an’ I hae no,” and he beats a hasty retreat.

  * * *

  “Regarding the explosion,” Bridget ban says, when all have been refreshed and have resumed their respective positions, “who knew that Donovan was to be on that pod?”

  “The pod starter,” Méarana suggests.

  The other three women laugh. “No, darling,” says Bridget ban. “He would have known they missed their pod and would have passed along the new pod number.”

  “The boots, then. Their humiliation festered, so they called a colleague in the city and…”

  “Noo, noo, noo, Little Lucy,” says Olafdottr, once more comforted on the sofa. “They not know first pod, only second. But man watching pod platform may note our queue number, and having transmit this, he depart.”

  “That was a mistake,” Graceful Bintsaif comments. “He should have waited and confirmed that you had in fact entered the pod.”

  The Shadow shrugs. “Even enemy make mistakes. May theirs be worse than ours. But best place observe ready-board in queue itself. Break queue draw attention, as we did. Perhaps,” she continues in lilting Gaelactic, “the man was after knowing Padaborn by sight, and feared that Padaborn would recognize him in turn if he lingered or drew attention to himself.”

  “I think he waited,” says Graceful Bintsaif. “But he waited at Riettiecenter. He was the bomber.”

  Bridget ban tosses her red hair. “Then he could have detonated himself at SkyPort. Why wait, if he were certain of his target then? He was not tender of bystanders.” She considers a moment before murmuring, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

  Olafsdottr spreads her hands. “Oschous consider play from all angle, and all as he say. But one aspect bother me.”

  “You mean,” says Méarana, “aside from narrowly escaping an assassination?”

  “Ooh, that boother me less than noot escaping.”

  Bridget ban steeples her fingers under her chin. “Style.” The other two professionals nod.

  “Shadows usually more subtle with message they deliver,” the Confederal says. “Bomb artistically dissatisfying. Our people minimalist.”

  “Aye,” says Bridget ban. “There was no need to shout. And that means…”

  “… message meant for someone else.”

  Méarana is incredulous. “You mean their pod was targeted randomly?”

  Olafsdottr shakes her head. “Ooh, noothing randoom. All is Fates. You know proverb: ‘Two birdies, one stone’? Donovan and I, we first birdie. Big noise for second.”

  “So, who was the second birdie?” asks Bridget ban.

  Olafsdottr spreads her arms wide. “Maybe swoswai—caution him against choosing sides. Maybe Triumvirs—show their secrets known. Oschous no such fool that this escape him. Of all of us, some say, he is best. So joins he us to fare with our reluctant guest.”

  V. ASHBANAL: A GATHERING OF SHADOWS

  Inbound toward the suns of men we slid,

  The old Home Stars from which we once set forth,

  Which saw gone days of glory burn and fade

  To embers and to ashes raked and cold.

  “Bright suns shining in the memories of men,”

  Worlds from sterile stone and rock long wrested,

  Whereon the scattered assets of our strength

  Struggled with the foe and waited word:

  Those few we sought who might essay assault

  On Secret City. Bold men and subtle, sufficient

  For the task which Oschous limned for our endeavor

  When once we should gain entry. But Donovan, the key,

  Stayed silent, the mem’ry lost amidst the shards

  Of he who once he was. Or—remembered, but withheld?

  What lies engendered in such jangled minds

  As his? He, having cause a-lack to join our stock,

  Might fain keep peace, and so evade the lock.

  The Confederation names its Krasnikov tubes after rivers, finding the analogy to flowing streams more apt. From Henrietta, Oschous followed the Gong Halys into New Anatole, and thence by the Mekong past St. Khambong before joining the Great Ganga and the stately voyage into Ashbanal.

  On this latter world awaited Manlius Metataxis, who had gone thither to settle an old score. Many were the motives that drove men into our ranks, O harper; and for Manlius those had been the oldest in all the worlds: jealousy over a woman. Kelly Stapellaufer had been a colleague—a “sister” under the rules of the Abattoir, and so forbidden to him. But in the course of several missions, they had become entangled, and Shadow Prime had dispatched Epri Gunjinshow, his second-best student, to separate them. This, h
e had done in the old-fashioned way: by seducing Kelly to himself. Manlius might have tolerated her kidnapping, her imprisonment, or even her assassination, but not the theft of her heart, and not by Prime’s second-best.

  * * *

  Donovan was granted the liberties of Oschous’s ship, but those liberties were few in any case. It was a large and sprawling vessel. Nestled in a planet’s arms, she might resemble more a castle than a means of flight. There were rooms for exercise, for zazen, for torture, for relaxation, for dining. There were even places where Donovan could enjoy the illusion of solitude. But he was not so foolish as to suppose that any move of his was unobserved, that any word he spoke expired unheard, or that any text or entertainment he consulted passed unremarked. The smuggler’s ship had been retrofitted in haste and there had been inadvertent pockets of privacy, but Black Horse was Oschous’s personal vessel and was permeated with his intentions.

  Eight magpies crewed her, standing alternate watches on the old naval pattern. They wore black body stockings—shenmats—that left only their faces bare. After a day on the crawl up Henrietta, Donovan confirmed that there was always one magpie in his line of sight. This caused him some unease, for there was an ancient Terran fable by which a magpie at one’s window was a foreboding of death.

  * * *

  During the transit, Oschous sought by sundry means to quicken Donovan’s memory, calling him habitually by the name Padaborn, or more familiarly as Gesh. He supplied the summary reports on Padaborn’s Rising, both the official and the unredacted versions, and praised him for his deeds therein. There was even a bootleg partisim—a “participative simulation”—produced before the Names had decided that the Rising had never happened, and had obliterated all references to it. But even when he reenacted the role of Padaborn himself, Donovan’s memory came back dry. The simulation was deficient. Most of the rebels had perished and so their deeds were sheer guesswork.