In the Lion's Mouth

by Michael Flynn

  But of course Ekadrina expected the same, and Big Jacques recoiled from a bolt that flashed across his dispersal armor; and he too, vanished.

  Tridents began to appear in the spaces previously occupied by mums, and had linked up with the mixed bag of magpies Ravn had sent out. The taijis were backed up against the burning annex, safe from the rear only in that their rear was become an inferno.

  “Another one!” cried Domino Tight.

  Irritated beyond measure, Ravn Olafsdottr started to reprimand him, but bit her words short.

  A man stood in the angle between the two annexes. Hard muscled and hard eyed, wearing body armor of a strange and ornate kind that seemed to glow in a sullen ruddy color, enclosed by sparkling lights, he turned slowly and surveyed the battle space with a studied contempt. His eyes seemed to pick out each combatant individually.

  Fire in the battle space had died off while taijis and tridents, black horses and yellow lilies, assessed this new arrival and wondered who it was and what he portended. No one fired at him, for it was not clear which side he intended, and something about his appearance, so suddenly and so indifferently in the very midst of the battle space, indicated a level of power not lightly to be aggrieved.

  Then he laughed, and his laugh was like the booming of a cannon, and he lifted to his shoulder a tube. And he turned and fired into the tridents who had taken the mums’ positions.

  An eye-searing flash blossomed and spread linearly to left and right, followed moments later by the sharp clap of an explosion. Simultaneously, a casing flew from the tube.

  A missile of some sort. “Foul!” she heard Oschous say. “The chapters forbid the use of military-grade weapons.”

  The man in the marshaling yard must have heard, because he laughed, and his voice boomed over the links. “How can there be rules when men murder men?” And he pulled another missile from his belt—it was about a forearm long—and fed it into the tube and fired again: this time toward the guardhouse.

  But the tridents there had wasted no time. The fates of their brothers near the auxiliary building had been all the warning they required, and they had already melted into the brush beyond. The rearguard and the black horses in the main warehouse directed fire on the newcomer from their own weapons and from the prepositioned remotes and submunitions. But the golden cage of fireflies that enclosed the man simply flickered more brightly and neither bolt nor pellet penetrated to wound him.

  Ekadrina Sèanmazy appeared once more, bloody and with one arm dangling. She raised a long knife in her other fist and gave the ululation of the taijis. At this, the taijis set in pursuit of the tridents.

  And the man in the yard turned to the warehouse and pulled a third missile from his belt.

  Ravn took careful aim with a pellet rifle, but with no hope that her bullet would penetrate where others had failed. And a hand stilled her arm.

  It was a stranger’s hand: a woman dressed in silver armor similar to that of the man with the missile tube. Her close-cropped silver hair was bound in a metallic band that was almost a crown. “Do not draw Ari Zin’s attention, yet,” she said. And she turned to Domino Tight and handed him a curious two-barreled weapon. “Hold this horizontally so that the sights bracket him. That will ‘short’ his armor. You, black-woman, when his armor snaps off, shoot him. But aim well, for armored or no, he is a fighting man. Quickly now, before he reloads.”

  “Who…” said Domino Tight.

  “The Woqfun Bo is angry because you shot his wife. Her brother summoned him. Now fire, each of you, for it is your lives to hesitate.”

  Domino Tight steadied the U-shaped weapon in both hands so that one barrel was left and the other right of Ari Zin. The firing stud rested under his thumb. He exhaled and, at the nadir of his breath, gently pressed the stud.

  Ravn had followed his rhythm and his breath with her own and, an instant after Domino Tight had fired, her own weapon barked, one-two-three.

  The protective glow winked out, but the first shot glanced off his ruddy armor. The second bullet penetrated. The third struck him in the hand. He howled and clapped the hand to his chest, smearing the golden bands with blood. Whirling, he saw Tina Zhi with the defenders, raised a hand and wagged a finger at her, once, twice; but if he meant to say anything, it was cut short by his abrupt disappearance.

  Bullets cut the space he had occupied, too late to slay him.

  “Domino Tight,” said Ravn Olafsdottr, “when we have the leisure, you will explain. And you…” She turned to their silver-clad savior to find that she too, had vanished.

  “She said,” said Domino Tight, “that they had all been recalled.” He stared at the smoke-embroiled roof of the annex and what he saw there—or did not see there—must have comforted him, for he relaxed for the first time since sailing through the air to land at her side. “Now we have only Ekadrina to worry about.”

  “Only!” said Ravn Olafsdottr, who, but moments before, would have named her the deadliest individual in the battle space. “Where have you been, sweet Domino? You have made new friends.”

  “There is no time now,” he said. “But, here … In case…” And Domino Tight aimed his interface at her and downloaded what she supposed must be an accounting of his suit record. She would review it later; if there was a later.

  The taijis still had the tridents on the defensive. They would pick them off at retail. Ravn closed her eyes and thought; but she did not think long. Finally, she sighed. “What banner,” she asked Oschous over the link, “did Padaborn fight under?”

  “Forest-green,” he answered, “under sky-blue. Why?”

  But Ravn Olafsdottr was reprogramming her shenmat so that her waist and legs were green and her blouse and sleeves were sky-blue.

  “What are you doing?” Domino Tight asked.

  “Forgive me, Gidula,” she said. Then she pulled the white comet from her arm, set aside the long arms, and hung her belt with close weapons, checking the loads or the edges as the case might be.

  “We must rally them,” she said, “before Ekadrina can drive home the counterattack that Ari Zin creature opened up.”

  Domino Tight peered around the edge of the shipper. “Where is Big Jacques? The tridents have fallen back onto the woods across the roadway. The taijis are closing in; but a few are still watching the warehouse against a sortie.”

  Ravn nodded. She thought about Gidula, about Oschous, about Donovan. She remembered long nights with Domino Tight. She turned her grin on him. “Follow me.”

  She backed away into the loading docks, then turned and ran through the building, ran through the main warehouse, crying “Padaborn! Padaborn is back!” She did not look to see if Domino Tight followed. Jacques’s magpies, those that had been inside the warehouse, saw her colors, cheered, and leapt up to join her. “Padaborn!” Half of Oschous’s magpies did the same, though surely they knew that Donovan was supposed to be Padaborn. Perhaps they thought now that Donovan had been a diversion, and that Padaborn had traveled with them sub rosa.

  She had a moment to glimpse Donovan’s astonishment and Oschous’s widened eyes, then she was past them, into the burning annex.

  “Through the fire?” she heard Domino Tight ask, though when she turned her head she did not see him.

  “From which corner are we least expected; from which stage might we more dramatically enter the fray?” Ahead, framing had caught fire and the paneling was peeling and dripping into the main gangway. “Explosive rounds!” she called to the magpies following her. The truck door at the end of the hall must be weakened from the flames. “Plant your munitions around the frame, by the numbers. Call out!”

  The boys behind her hollered, “One, Two, Three…” and she noted that half of them, even the black horses, had altered on the fly the colors of their shenmats, so that they too sported the colors of Geshler Padaborn. Gidula had been right about the inspirational power of his name, though wrong about so much else.

  “Someday you must tell me, Domino Tight,” she said
conversationally, “how it is that you have become invisible.”

  “Don’t be too sure you want to know,” a voice beside her said.

  The heat in the annex was intense, the flames a tunnel through which they sped. A portion of the ceiling came down in a shower of sparks. The runners scattered and danced around the debris, shaking off the fiery fragments. She heard one of the boys holler, loud and shrill, and Ravn thought the girl had been burned on the face. Breathing, even through the filters, was becoming difficult; and the heat was approaching the top of the shenmat’s rating. “Standard breakout, seventh modulation!” she called to the others above the sound of the crackling and snapping joists.

  “Padaborn!” they shouted in return.

  And there was the metal door ahead of them. It was the sort that rolled up into an overhead bin. On the floor, consumed in flames, lay the two taijis who had entered earlier, felled by the fire nests that Oschous had emplaced, dead well before being offered as a holocaust. Ravn measured the paces to the door.

  “On my call, fires explosives. After breakout, fire as opportune to relieve the tridents. Ready, three, two, one, fire!”

  Fire, indeed! A dozen guns let loose, each aimed at a different point around the door, and the rounds bored into the putty-soft walls and exploded as nearly simultaneous as made no difference. The door shuddered loose from the structure even as Ravn’s combat team hit it, feet first, and it toppled like a loading ramp onto the ground beyond. They poured out across the door, breaking in all directions, still shouting, “Padaborn!”—and three taijis too slow to realize that they were dead, fell with their backs still turned.

  * * *

  Ekadrina Sèanmazy turned a scarred and bloody face toward the newcomers who had burst so unexpectedly out of the inferno of the annex. She whipped a flying star in a single fluid motion even as she dove for cover and summoned the rest of her flock over her link. The star struck someone in the attack team, pierced the cords of his armor, but did not bring a cry to his lips as he fell. “Padaborn!” they shouted. Padaborn? She saw a green and blue apparition bear down upon her and she fired her dazer.

  She did not wait to see its effect, but whirled in a three-point tumble to come down behind an old truck barrier, where she rolled to the side and brought a pellet gun to bear. The dazer should have jangled Padaborn, slowing him, allowing the bullets opportunity to pierce the armor.

  But never be surprised when the enemy does something else. Padaborn had sidestepped just before the dazer pulse and was nowhere to be seen. Ekadrina quickly ducked back behind the barrier, disappointing several bullets eager to meet her.

  Save for the crackling and collapsing annex, silence lay over the battle space. Of the combat team that had burst from the annex there was no sign; of her own taijis not a trace. This was not going well. Or rather, it was seesawing too wildly for the orderly tastes of Ekadrina Sèanmazy. First, the unexpected presence of the black horses, when it should have been the tridents caught in her pincers. Then the attack from the rear by tridents who should have been bottled up in the warehouse. The fight with Big Jacques from which they had both withdrawn bloody by mutual and unspoken consent. Then the intervention that Epri had so grandly promised succeeded brilliantly, only to unexpectedly collapse. Now Padaborn had returned from the living dead.

  She lay still for a moment before, in a controlled, economical gesture, she strewed crispies to the other side of the old truck barrier, so no one could approach from that quarter without a betrayal. Then she flipped her wrist and extended a see-me-more fiber scope that she slaved to her goggles and extended above the lip of the barrier.

  Nothing. Discreet pops and snaps from across the roadway told her that the fight with the tridents continued. “Odd numbers,” she whispered over the link, “disengage from trident. Padaborn had a troop lying in reserve. Some will try to relieve da tridents.”

  “Padaborn!” said her Number One, and the way he said it made her wish she had not mentioned the name.

  “He’s a sick old man,” she told Number One. “I have dat on best authority. Dis is a desperation play.” That the play had her pinned down behind a plasteel barrier did not make it any less desperate.

  “Taiji,” her Number One said, “the flock is down fifty percent. Perhaps we should disengage.”

  “I have never departed a kill space in defeat.”

  “No, ma’am. But no one leaves here unharmed. Pendragon is slain and most of the chrysanthemums. Domino Tight is slain along with the lyre. The black horses were mauled. Big Jacques is badly wounded and the tridents as battered as we. You are badly wounded. And … Others were wounded. Perhaps that is sufficient for the day.”

  Ekadrina’s left eye had spotted motion through her fiber periscope. She logged the coordinates into a smart gun and launched a pinwheel bomb. The explosion came as a flat slapping sound but the truck barrier kept the blast from reaching her.

  If she withdrew now, the one sure winner would be Oschous who, so far as she knew had sat untouched in the warehouse directing the battle like a spider in the center of her web—and Padaborn, whose unexpected entry into the battle space would be seen by all as the tipping point.

  No, she must first harm Padaborn. Only then could she withdraw with face.

  She paused a moment to curse Epri and what he had brought into the fight. The ruddy man had to have been the Woqfun Bo, a man who should have been supreme on any field, but who had by his use of shoulder-launched missiles introduced a further escalation in the Shadow War, but who, far worse, had shown himself fallible.

  “Are these the men that we protect?” she asked, half-aloud.

  She heard the distinctive crinkle of crispies stepped upon, grinned and rolled to her knees, and aimed …

  And there was no one there.

  A lesser Shadow might have paused and gaped; but Ekadrina Sèanmazy had not reached seniority through being lesser in any respect. The only reason for making a sound in front of her was to approach behind her. She whirled.

  And there was Padaborn only two strides away, already raising a pellet gun for a fatal armor-piercing shot.

  Ekadrina, who had already chambered her gun to fire on the crispies, fired on this new threat.

  The bullet caught Padaborn on the chest and the transferred momentum knocked him backward, even as the recoil pushed Ekadrina back.

  Oh, fortunate recoil! A flying star scissored through the space her body had occupied, and Ekadrina executed a dancing pirouette and laid down fire toward the location where no one stood. The shot caught something, however, for the air rippled and brightred blood seemed to blossom unsupported. Then that something leapt away, higher and faster than a man might leap.

  A clever play, whatever it had been. Epri had possessed such a Cloak, but it was apparent now that Others had been equally generous with the opposing side. She did not like the implications of that, but filed it for later consideration. Now was not the time for introspection.

  She walked over to where Padaborn lay on his back, spread-eagled to the sky, and stared into the face.

  The black face of a Groomsbritch, and a woman’s face at that. She smiled up at Ekadrina. “This hurts moore than I thoot it wood.”

  “You are not Padaborn!” Ekadrina said. An accusation, an outrage, an affront.

  “No,” said a new voice. “I am.”

  And there at the gaping entry to the burning building stood the hook-chinned old man she remembered, wearing the green-and-blue shenmat and a belt of weapons and bandoliers.

  CENGJAM GAAFE: THE EIGHTH INTERROGATORY

  “So,” says Graceful Bintsaif, “he joined them at the last.”

  Méarana explores the battle with dancing fingers. Her harp howls and twangs with sudden-plucked strings; she runs a nail down their lengths to evoke the whine of energy weapons. Domino Tight leaps about in octaves; Names appear in discords. “Or perhaps,” she says over the chaotic jangle of the music, “it was they who finally joined him.”

  “Fas
h! What nonsense,” her mother says. “It was not that he joined, but why he joined.”

  Ravn Olafsdottr smiles at her. “You think?”

  Bridget ban smiles too, but it is a smile that few have rejoiced to see. “I think you are more clever than you let on.”

  “Ne’er mind yer chawin’,” says Méarana, stilling her chords. Then, to Olafsdottr: “How did Fa—How did the Fudir fare against Ekadrina?” She thinks that if she does not call him “father” his loss will not hurt as badly.

  The Shadow shrugs. “Understand. I was unconscious, and when I awoke they were gone, all of them, and the wind blew leaves and papers across an empty lot. What I learned, I learned later, from my suit’s recorders after I awoke—and that only what passed before their sensors.”

  “I am surprised you awoke at all,” Graceful Bintsaif interjects from her corner behind the Shadow.

  The Ravn turns to her and smiles. “Noo lace than I,” she adds. “Boot the surprise is always pleasant.”

  Méarana strikes an imperious chord. “But ye can tell us how the struggle ended, however supine ye might hae been during the fighting of it!”

  “I think,” the Shadow tells her with a nod to Bridget ban, “that your mother suspects.”

  “You’ve come here on a fool’s errand,” the Hound responds cryptically. “Tell me, for I am passing curious, why you donned the garb of Geshler Padaborn and pretended to be himself.”

  A shrug. “Someone had to do it.”

  But Méarana judges the indifference feigned. “To rally the rebels.”

  Ravn leans forward, arms on her knees. “They needed a Padaborn; I gave them one.”

  “You gave them a false one.”

  The Shadow flashes her teeth, leans back on the sofa, and spreads her arms along the backrest. “Did I?”

  “No,” says Bridget ban. “She gave them the true quill. He was impervious to every persuasion but the last. Revenge, glory, or the liberation of Terra—these three things could not sway him. But that you had been felled acting in his place brought him forth at last.”