In the Lion’s Mouth

Prolegomenon

The winds whistling o’er the breasts of the Dōngodair Hills carry much of the loneliness that can be found in those remote peaks and scatter it like pollen across the eastern plains, so that the Beastie boys, and the Nolan Beasts they tend, suck it in with every breath, and even the bluestem and inching grass, and the rip-gut in the wet bottomlands whose leaves are serrated knives soak up despair like sunshine and release it to the breeze. Thus it is that the rustle of the tallgrass can wring a sigh from a strong man and drive a lonely woman to weeping.

When night falls over the gloaming prairies of the Out-in-back, it falls complete. The city lights, such as they are, glow like hearth fires on the far side of the Dōngodairs; but their gleam does little more than limn the crests with a narrow pale-white band. Otherwise, green is simply another kind of black, and for half the year even the sky holds little more than a second pale band: the distant shore of the Orion Arm across the Rift of stars. It too, is the glow of distant hearths: the ancient home-stars of mankind.

Amidst such engulfing shadows, what is one more shade drifting o’er the heath?

Clanthompson Hall sits an oasis of light on a swell of the prairie atop a deep, clean well; but the light is tightly held within fortress walls, and leaks out only through slits and windows. Her towers bespeak an earlier epoch in the history of Dangchao Waypoint, when her stone facing was more than mere decoration, and warring clans fought over water rights and control of the open range. The range wars are long over; and over the generations the squat functionality of her battlements has softened to more graceful and moderate lines. She stands now a stately matron, surrounded by her family of outbuildings, barracks and mess hall for the ranch hands, repair shops, a helipad, orchards, and a few tastefully hidden gun emplacements.

Oh, she is still a fortress in her heart! For Clanthompson Hall is the keep of Bridget ban, a Hound of the Ardry, and therefore for some a target. The rise the Hall sits upon is not much to speak of, let alone to speak of it as a hill. It does not so much as bear a name. But from it, and for miles around, nothing can approach unseen.

Or almost nothing.

It is called a “sitting room,” but two of the three women in it are standing. The first is Francine Thompson, d.b.a. Bridget ban, mistress of Clanthompson Hall. She stands by the large bay window that overlooks the endless prairie, though she herself overlooks nothing. The curtains are drawn open and the night without is held at bay only by lamps burning bravely on tables. Even so, night has won his victories here and there, in darkened corners, in shadowed alcoves. Bridget ban wears high riding boots and a casual, loose-fitting blouse in the reds and yellows that the Thompsons favor. Her hair is a bright red and her skin a deep gold. She stares into the night, her back to the room, while she listens to the report.

Graceful Bintsaif, who is delivering the report, is a junior Hound and wears the powder-blue undress uniform of that grade. It bears at present only a single blazon, but it is a worthy one and, quite properly, she will not speak of how she won it. She is lean as a whippet and seems always to be straining forward, as if against some unseen leash. She interrupts her report to say, “Shall I kill it?”

“Not yet,” says Bridget ban, who does not turn from the window.

Lucia Thompson, the third woman present, is seated on a stool. She is an ollamh of the clairseach, a master harper, and plays under the name Méarana, which means both “fingers” and, by a shift in accent, “swift.” She is her mother, stamped at an earlier age, though with sharper corners, and with flint in her eyes. She has, it is said, a cutting glance, and she turns that gaze toward the window. “Where is it now?”

“By the maintenance yard. Behind the baler. Continue, Bintsaif.”

The junior Hound stands with arms clasped behind her back and feet slightly spread. She has already loosened the flap on her holster. “The Bartender on Jehovah,” she says, “is convinced that Donovan has left the planet. Furthermore, he believes that Donovan left voluntarily. He had spoken earlier of … coming here.”

Bridget ban turns her head to look at the junior, and then snaps her attention back to the yard outside. But she is too late. The shadow is no longer by the baler. Her eyes search and do not find it. So she sighs and takes a teaser from the drawer in a lamp-table and checks the charge.

“Does this ever grow easier?” asks Graceful Bintsaif, drawing her own weapon.

Bridget ban tosses her head. “No. What else did you learn?”

“The Terran Brotherhood did not expect Donovan’s departure. They had begun negotiations with him over a venture, possibly an illegal one.”

Méarana stifles a laugh. “An illegal venture? In the Terran Corner of Jehovah? I may die of shock.”

Bintsaif glances at her curiously. “Is it wise for you to linger here?”

The harper smiles. “And where might one be safer than between two Hounds?” She herself is no Hound, though her mother has taught her a thing or two.

The junior Hound shrugs and continues her report. “Port Jehovah records show that a petty thief tried to use the ticket Donovan bought, but his identification papers proved to be forgeries. He had killed a man in a burglary gone bad and was anxious to leave the planet. He claims to have found the chit fortuitously, lying by the walkway outside the terminal, and so seized the opportunity for escape.” Bintsaif cocks her head, listens, then moves to stand beside the door from the Hall. “The Jehovan proctors believe he killed Donovan precisely to steal the chit, and Donovan’s body lies now somewhere in the waste tunnels below the city.”

Both Bridget ban and Méarana snort derision, a gesture so alike in mother and daughter as to bring a smile to the otherwise sober lips of Graceful Bintsaif. “Yes,” she says. “The Terran Brotherhood is likewise skeptical. Not that Donovan cannot be killed, but that he cannot be killed by such a quotidian man as the proctors arrested.” Bintsaif shrugs and holds her teaser straight up from the elbow. “I cannot say he impressed me, the one time I met him.” She nods to the harper. “But then I can’t say that you impressed me, either. Not then. In any case, Donovan has thoroughly disappeared from League space.”

Bridget ban turns sideways to the door so as to present the smallest target. “We’ll see what it wants first.” And she aims her teaser directly at the door.

Their hearts beat, their breathing slows.

The door eases open, and the shadow that had crept over the heath slides into the room.

Méarana lifts her arm just so and a throwing knife snaps into her grasp from the harness in her sleeve. It is a different sort of plectrum with which she might pluck the heartstrings. Death is in the room, and ready, but not yet do they slip his leash.

Nearly as thin as Graceful Bintsaif, clad in a black, form-fitting body stocking, and coal-black also in her skin, the intruder is a portion of the night that has come alive, a bit of the darkness that has slipped into the light. Her eyes are twin moons. She holds both hands up, palms out, and says in the hooting accents of Alabaster, “I haff noo waypoons,” this being as big a lie as anyone has ever spoken in Clanthompson Hall.

The white flash of the intruder’s teeth is her most vivid feature. “Boot, you moost admeet, that in the mooment I entered, I coold have keeled … oh, two of you, I think. Yes, Gracefool Bintsaif, even you behind me.”

No one lowers her weapon, and the intruder cocks her head. She shifts to the birdsong twitter of Confederal Manjrin, and there is no hoot in her voice when she does. “You situate very nice. No one in fire line of other. But, if I step, just so…” And she slides with a cat’s grace. “Hounds cannot fire without perhaps hitting each other.”

“My knife’s flight remains unhindered,” Méarana points out.

“Ah. So. But, you throw knife…” A flip of the wrist. “I catch knife. Now, if Bintsaif is finish her most excellent and respectable report, I fill in rest, and tell you fate of man Donovan.” She tugs her hood free, revealing close-cropped, bright yellow hair.

“You’re Ravn Olafsdottr,” says Méarana, pointing. “You were the Shadow agent sent to kill Donovan a case of years ago.” In the dodeka time used in the Old Planets, a case is twenty-four.

“Ooh, noo, noo, noo,” again in Alabastrine. “Nayver to keel him—oonless he fell his dooty. May I seat? If you be nervoos, you strip me naked, tie me oop. Once I helpless be and you oonafraid, you can listen to my tell. Plans have change. All plans have change. There is stroogle in the Lion’s Mouth.”

That a Confederal Shadow, even bound and naked, would be the second-most dangerous person in the room, no one doubts for a moment. But no one doubts either that if assassination had been her object, Ravn Olafsdottr would have acted in the moment when she had stepped between the two lines of fire and both Hounds had for an instant hesitated. That she is not to be trusted goes without saying. But there are degrees of distrust; there are scales to suspicion. It is not yet clear in what way they should mistrust her.

They search the Confederal with consummate care, and she submits to this with cheerful indifference. She had expected as much, and would not have come but that she had resigned herself beforehand to its indignities. They discover scars on her body that evidence harsher searches, more insistent interrogations; and some of those scars are fresh.

Finally, the Hounds are convinced, not so much that Olafsdottr is weaponless, but that short of amputation she cannot be further disarmed. They sit her on a broad sofa of soft brown-and-white Nolan hide, but do not bother to strip and bind her. That offer, they ascribe to a certain whimsy on the Ravn’s part. But the sofa is a subtle thing: one sinks into it, and cannot rise without a struggle, a safeguard against sudden attack by anyone sitting on it. Hounds and harper take seats on three widely spaced chairs surrounding her. Olafsdottr shows her teeth again. “Be not afraid,” she says. “I am a courier, true, but Death is not today my message.” But she knows they are only exercising normal prudence. In its way, it is a compliment to her skills that, outnumbering her three to one, they remain wary of what she yet may do.

Graceful Bintsaif laughs from a seat behind the courier. “I’m not afraid.”

Olafsdottr turns her head. “Then you are a very foolish girl.”

The junior Hound flushes but Bridget ban intervenes. “You’ve been tortured,” she says.

The courier waves a hand. “Soom people, I pay them soo leetle mind, they moost ask more insistently to gain my attentions.” She flashes teeth, relaxes on the sofa, and spreads her arms across the back of it. She looks in turn at each of the three women. It is nicely arranged. To keep any two of them in view, she must turn away from the third. This thought broadens her perpetual smile.

Bridget ban, coming to a decision, lifts her voice slightly. “Mr. Wladislaw? Could you bring some assorted nectars and four glasses to the sitting room, please?” Then she turns her attention to her importunate guest. “Explain, then. How do ye know what happened to the Donovan?”

“I know his fate because I took him to it.”

It is a rhetorical trick, this abrupt dropping of the hooting accent, but no less effective for that. It freights her pronouncement with greater significance. Méarana starts to say something, but her mother halts her with a show of her hand. “You mean he has resumed the service of the Confederacy?” There is a hardness in her question that she has not shown even to Olafsdottr. One no more despises an enemy than the knife despises the whetstone. But a turncoat—that is another matter.

Olafsdottr smiles. “He foond the leeps of my dazer most eloquently speaking. He soobmitted, and a small droog assured that his secoond thoughts would come too, too late to matter. But interesting…” This, in Manjrin. “That betrayal rather than death first cross your mind.”

“So, he was coming here,” murmurs the harper, and she gives her mother a glance that the Hound chooses to ignore.

“Very well. Ye kidnapped him,” the Hound acknowledges. “But that seems a long risk to run to pluck such meager fruits.”

“Ooh, I think there is a flesh beneath the skin of that oold fruit, however dried and wrinkled he seems; and perhaps a hard noot at the saint-er.”

“Yet, here you are; and he is not.”

“He woonted to coome, boot he was tied oop.” The teeth flash once more.

The door opens and Wladislaw enters with a silver tray balanced on his right hand and a projectile pistol gripped in his left. He pauses in the doorway and assesses the threat level in the room before he steps forward and places the tray on the low table before the sofa. He steps back and speaks to Bridget ban without taking his eyes from the Confederal. “Will there be anything else, Cu?”

“Yes, pour the nectar for us, Mr. Wladislaw. All from the same pitcher.”

The butler fills the goblets one by one with a frosty pear nectar. Olafsdottr ducks her head sidewise to look at him as he bends over.

“Are you truly left-handed?”

Wladislaw glances at his pistol. “Ambidextrous, ma’am.” He sets the pitcher back on the tray and steps away.

“Ooh, I would give my right arm to be ambidextrous!”

A faint smile twitches the butler’s lips. “Will that be all, Cu?”

“Yes, Mr. Wladislaw.”

“Mr. Tenbottles asks that I tender his apologies for allowing this intrusion. No one saw…”

“They were not intended to see. Was anyone hurt?”

“Only their pride, Cu.”

“Then the scab may serve them well.”

After the butler leaves, Ravn Olafsdottr rubs her hands together as she contemplates the four glasses. “All from same pitcher,” she says in Manjrin. “Such gracious assurance drink not tinctured.” She reaches out and takes not the drink directly before her, but the one closest to Méarana. Then she settles back on the sofa. She does not sip the nectar yet.

The Hound smiles briefly and takes the glass in front of Olafsdottr and waits until the others are similarly settled. She too allows the nectar to sit untasted.

“Noo, harper,” says the Confederal. “This will be a tell to tangle your strings, oon my word; but I will give it to you in my oon way and reveal things in their oon time. Life is art, and must be artfully told, in noble deeds and fleshed in colors bold.”