On the Razor’s Edge

IX. Never Do What You Said You’d Do

That evening, as the sun-lamps dimmed in Sector Seventeen, Ravn escorted Méarana to a nearby restaurant called, in that cozy Confederal fashion, Restaurant No 17-04. It was also known, unofficially, as Demvrouq’s Place. That it was called this, and called this unofficially, was a flower blossoming through the duroplast of Confederal culture.

It stood a short distance across the concourse from the hotel, but to gain its entrance meant breasting the madding, elsewhere-bent transient streams. The shuttle-fresh starward bound clashed, mixed, and eddied with inbounders intent on the capital. Gray suits, saffron turbans, embroidered gowns, gold and red and black, willowy women, head-scarfed men, skipping children—that last the only spot of humanity not yet humbled and broken.

The harper scanned the faces—masked, veiled, open, wimpled—as she and Ravn swam through them cross-current, thinking she might notice the woman Gwen once more. With rather less anticipation, her eyes also sought out shadows and patches of darkness left by the boulevard-lamps, waiting for one that might come to life and speak.

She thought now that the sweet smell she had perceived in the hotel room had been a gas vented into the air system. She herself knew two ways to accomplish this, which her mother in a fit of whimsy had once taught her. But knowing how the hallucination might have been induced gave her no desire to experience a second time the voice that spoke in the night.

“What are you looking for?” Ravn asked her when once they had installed themselves in the restaurant.

“Oh, I like to study faces. Sometimes I see a song in them.”

The Shadow leaned across the table. “Well, stop doing it. No one stares directly at another person here, unless they have superior rank. Eyes downcast, please. Draw no attention to self.”

Ordinary citizens here were called “the sheep,” Méarana remembered. But she had also seen in covert glances that sheep might harbor bitter resentments. “I saw another Shadow the other day,” she commented while inspecting the menu, “the first day we were here.”

“What!” Ravn seized the harper’s wrist and the menu fell to the floor. “Who? Why did you say nothing!”

Méarana tried to pull back, failed. “How would I know who? She was tall, dark skinned—darker than I, but not quite so dark as you—and she carried a thick staff.”

“A staff. What mon did she wear?”

“Mon?”

“Her logo, her sign. What was it?”

“Umm … Oh! The yin-yang. The taiji.”

Ravn hissed. “Ekadrina Sèanmazy! Did she notice you?”

“Why would she notice me? She wouldn’t…” Then, under Ravn’s insistent gaze, “No. She didn’t even turn in my direction.”

Ravn shook her head. “That is what you must expect should Ekadrina notice you. She knows what Bridget ban looks like, and you resemble your mother passing well.”

“She was heading toward the Dao Chetty drop-ports. Probably returning to the Lion’s Mouth from some mission.”

“I’m sure she was. How many magpies accompanied her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t count them.” But Ravn squeezed her wrist tighter, and Méarana closed her eyes and tried to conjure the scene in her mind. “One. Two … Seven. I think.”

Ravn released her. “She should have had eight.”

“Maybe I just didn’t notice. Or she lost one on her mission, or…”

“Or she left one here to watch us. Kumbe! I thought I sensed a nearby presence.”

Méarana almost said, Don’t worry; it’s only a pair of Hounds. But to a Shadow that would hardly be a comfort. “I’m sure she didn’t notice me, let alone mistake me for my mother, or she would have…” She fell silent as she considered all the things a Shadow “would have” done if she thought a Hound sat alone on a hotel patio.

“An such a wan sees me wi’ ye—”

Ravn’s finger touched Méarana’s lips. “Hoosh, hoosh, my sweet. Coome with me to the women’s comfort station…” They rose from the table and wound calmly through the potted shrubbery to the back of the restaurant. “Let no dialect of Gaelactic twist your tongue,” Ravn cautioned her. “Search earwig. Become one with it. Empty mind and let Confederal dialect fill it, lest moment of stress betray you. Try dialects of Heller Connat. There is one that resembles Gaelactic—no, out side door—but your kind, the golden-skinned gingers, are found on … on Miniforster, Bhaitry, and Wing Bahlo, not on Heller Connat.” She looked both ways up the service corridor, then allowed Méarana to follow. “Never do,” she whispered, “what you say you will do when your speech may be overheard.”

“But Ravn,” the harper said in realistic tones. “The likelihood that a detached magpie has been watching us and overheard—”

“Is not zero, and few are the Shadows who have died from an excess of caution.” Ravn reached into her shoulder pouch and pulled out something about the size and shape of a dinner napkin. This she pounded several times with her fist and then pressed against her face. It hissed, and steam rose.

“Ravn!” Méarana exclaimed—but in a whisper.

Ravn gasped and pulled the towel from her face, and the harper was shocked to see the Shadow’s features sagging like a wax candle. Quick massages raised cheekbones, shortened nose, shaped ears. A close examination in a pocket mirror led to some last-moment touch-ups before her face had once more hardened.

“Ayiyi,” she said in a voice Méarana had never heard her use before, “dat hoits like da beaches.” She pulled a knife from her sleeve and said to the harper, “Yer mop’s too long.” A few swipes of the blade sufficed to correct it. “Ah, I missed my vocation, me. Shoulda been a beautician.” Then she reached once more into her pouch and from a tube squeezed a dollop of gel, which she rubbed vigorously between her palms. She worked it first into her own bright yellow hair, turning it a dull brown, then into Méarana’s now-shortened red hair, turning it dark auburn.

“Now the piece of resistance. A few fasteners pulled loose an’ refastened carelessly. A rumplin’ o’ da clothin’. Wait—while I smear yer lip dye.” Before the harper could react, Ravn took Méarana’s face in her two hands and kissed her hard on the lips. “Dere,” she said, stepping back with satisfaction, “jus’ two friends, is all, who stepped up a service corridor fer a quickie.”

Ravn put her arm around Méarana’s waist and led her out to the plaza. Ravn became another person. She slouched, her eyes searched the walkway, she made way for anyone more colorfully dressed. Méarana perforce did likewise.

The harper thought their dishevelment would attract everyone’s attention, but only a few heads turned. A business traveler grinned at them. Beneath one of the boulevard-lamps, a black-clad night-walker in a girdle-skirt and lacquered hair that fit her head like a helmet scowled as if at potential competition. A short man stirring his drink idly at a café table barely glanced at them. Méarana wanted to see whether anyone was watching the restaurant, but Ravn, by body pressure, steered her away onto Corridor 1716-M-2, which led to the Sixteenth Sector.

“I don’t know,” Méarana said when they were out of the public square and in a narrow walkway lined with anonymous doors. “This may be a lot of trouble for nothing.” She pulled away from the Shadow. “How did you do that with your face?” She studied her companion’s features closely. “It wouldn’t long fool those who know you.”

The Ravn took quick glances over her shoulder. “Don’t hafta. Jus’ enough to get through a tight spot. Wouldn’ta fooled Ekadrina herself for a Bhaitry minute. Kumbe, does my face hurt! Subcutaneous implants,” she added in a more normal tone. “The hot pad softens them up so I can mold them, but there’s a limit to how far I can push and pinch, and after a while it reverts to normal.”

An escalator led to the Upper Deck, Level Four, and they backtracked through Seventeen Upper to Sector Eighteen, where they found a seedy residence hotel called Mamma Kitten’s. “Mamma,” as it developed, was a bewhiskered man who massed at least twenty-one accelerated stones, and his name really was Kitten. He ran everything by word and hand and nothing of his crossed the threshold of Tungshen’s information net. His was, in a sense, a hole in the habitat.

Ravn departed for a time, returning later with some fresh clothing and other items that she had secured from an autovendor.

“You leavin’ anythin’ at th’ Kings?” she asked.

Méarana’s harp was aboard Sèan Beta. “No.”

“Good, ’cause I ain’t goin’ back there.”

What Méarana very much feared she had left behind—along with Sèanmazy’s hypothetical magpie—were Gwen and the voice that spoke in the night. For a moment, Méarana wondered if Ravn’s maneuver had been intended to throw the two Hounds off the scent. But Ravn couldn’t know about them. She was not that clever. Was she?

Ravn Olafsdottr had known when she had thrown in with the Revolution-within-the-Revolution that she must forswear any vestige of heartfelt comradeship. Every hand might at some time be raised against her, and she could count upon no friends among her friends, and but a handful among her enemies. She had entered the Abattoir in her youth, a gift to the Lion’s Mouth from parents forever unknown. Her entire life, she had done the Mouth’s bidding, silencing those whose silence was required, aware always of the knife at her back if she failed, until one day she had graduated to second and held the knife herself. She had grown to respect the skill and the craft with which her colleagues maintained the order of the Confederation, but never once did she question the order they maintained. The means were noble, and the means justified the ends.

And now her colleagues stood arrayed against one another for reasons she could barely credit, with herself and too few others standing between them. She could conjure many motives for bringing the Names down, and as many for holding them up. Because Those had laid too heavy a hand upon the sheep. Because Those had saved the Confederation from the chaos that plagued the Periphery. She could understand men who fought for loyalty, for tradition, for justice, or even for raw ambition. But to fight for Kelly Stapellaufer?

The quarrel between Epri Gunjinshow and Manlius Metatxis for the charms of their colleague had provided the trigger. Ekadrina had sided with Epri and Dawshoo with Manlius, and everything followed from that. But she knew that was only the excuse, not the reason. One may as well fight for Jenkins’s ear as for Kelly’s jade gates. The fault lines had already underlain matters, fracturing the Lion’s Mouth into factions before even the factions themselves were aware of it. The rending awaited only some petty conflict to open up.

On the evening of the morning on which the Shadow War had been announced, Ravn Olafsdottr and Domino Tight and two others whose names she must never more remember held a dinner of great beauty and state. The wines had been exquisite; the fare more than fair. Their four banners had hung over the banquet hall in comradeship. One of them—she must not think his name—had made a long, tear-driven speech declaring that when all was over this best foursome would one day reconvene. At the end of it, all were weeping—Shadows, magpies, even the servants and the banquet-hall staff—and they had embraced and kissed one another and cast many a vow aloft.

And the next morning, Domino Tight had gone to join the rebels and the other two to stand by the loyalists. And now, that “best foursome” could never meet as more than three, and the tally was not yet final.

She had attached herself to Gidula because he had seemed the one steady rock in the tumbling chaos. He could reform the excesses of the decadent Names while providing a brake on the wilder ambitions of Oschous Dee.

But even Dawshoo had known the way was forward, not back into a storybook past.

To what extent, she sometimes now wondered, had her own loyalties been formed by those storybooks, by tales of brightly caparisoned Shadows flying forth to fight and die for duty and honor? Tales in which noble words were spoken in noble company, and in which even an execution could be conducted with pomp and rite. In days of yore, the scaffold erected on Edakass for Mengwa Chertahanseon had been draped with cloth-of-tears and the condemned had been given a red velvet blindfold (which he had of course refused), and his executioner had been his own particular friend, Paphlaq bin Underwood. There had been mournful songs beforehand and playing of such instruments as befitted Mengwa’s rank, and no one had touched Paphlaq’s right hand afterward for nine and ninety days.

When Shadow Prime—not the present Prime, but an earlier one—had been honored for his services during the Discontentment of the Oatland Sheep at a banquet hosted by the Dreadful Name himself, he had stubbornly refused to wash his hands in the same basin as the Name. The Abattoir had spoken of nothing else for days, and the senior Shadows debated the propriety of the gesture. No one doubted that the gesture was meaningful and beautiful and edifying, and it had now become the custom at any banquet for the guest of honor to three times refuse the basin of his host. The basins themselves had become progressively more ornate.

When the current Prime was a young man, he had received the undershift of Lady Ielnor as prelude to a pasdarm held on Old Eighty-two. He had cradled the garment in his arms the night before, even—so it was said—kissing it, and appeared at the pasdarm the next morning wearing only the shift over his shenmat, no dispersal armor. In consequence of this, he had emerged from the fighting bloody and cut up and with a serious wound in his side. Ah, but what a gesture! It won him the prize despite his scoring only third on points. He had sent the bloody shift back to Lady Ielnor, and she had kissed it and worn it over her gown at the banquet afterward. Ravn Olafsdottr knew that it was all smoke, now wafting away in the new-risen wind, if indeed it had ever been anything more. But she resented that loss and wondered if her determination to go down with the heroic dream of the beautiful life would itself one day be marked as the last in a long line of beautiful, doomed gestures—to bring hot tears to Gidula’s eyes and mockery to the lips of Oschous Dee.

Meanwhile, she had her vow to Gidula to consider. The Vow of the Raptor was often sealed by kaowèn—her back twinged where she had been striped—but it was customarily done to underline the keeping of it, not to induce the taking of it. Did Gidula—poor, determined Gidula—even realize that he had crossed a line that he himself had drawn?

Two years past, while Ravn had been hunting Donovan in the Periphery, the Old One had learned … something … What that something was Ravn did not know, but the learning of it had induced introspection and worry. The man to whom Ravn had delivered Donovan was a very different man than the one who had sent her forth to fetch him. After Donovan had shown himself sane and integrated in his combat with Ekadrina, Ravn had feared Gidula would execute him as no longer suitable for the play. The plan had always been to raise the rebels’ hopes with the name of Padaborn, then crush them with the reality of the scarred man. But the plan had shifted—to the invasion of the Secret City—and Donovan’s value had changed from brass to gold.

She glanced at foolish, romantic Méarana. Dragging the bait might lure a Hound into the Mouth, even if that were not its main basic function. But the difficulties arose from attracting other hunters beside. She had not wanted to start Ekadrina on this particular scent, and hoped that her suspicions were vain. Yet she had felt herself watched from time to time. If not by Ekadrina’s magpie, then by whom?

And there was something else that Ravn could not quite put a finger on. The harper’s attitude had changed. Fractionally, to be sure, but it ought not to have changed at all.

Domino Tight was a true believer in the Revolution. It was his strength and his weakness—beyond the obvious weakness of trusting his comrades too greatly. Give him years enough and he might give Oschous a run, a fact of which Oschous was undoubtedly aware. But in the meantime, his zeal burned hot and he imagined a bright day, joy drenched and sunshine filled, if just a trifle vague and rosy, in which every tear would be wiped away. It was a future state worth visioning, and he had not recognized that while all might agree that the present was no longer tolerable, there was no such unanimity on what the future ought to be.

But he and Ravn were gozhiinyaw, blood brothers, and once contact was made it required little to induce him to come with her to Zãddigah-Terra.

“I haff good news,” the Ravn announced after returning to Mamma Kitten’s from a comm. center in Sector Two Under, one the far side of the cooper body in and around which Tungshen was built. “And bad news.”

Méarana, who had spent the better part of the day transcribing notes into the particular code that Clanthompson employed, had delighted to hear the former but worried at the latter. “What is the good news?” she asked.

“My darling Dominoo will be here soon!”

Méarana hesitated only fractionally. “And the bad?”

“My darling Dominoo will be here soon!”

The harper blinked and puckered in thought. “Ah,” she said at last. “That isn’t good, is it?”

The Ravn threw herself onto the tatty old couch that disgraced the center of the common room they shared. Springs complained, fabric tore.

“Light wants a languid seven hours to make the trip. Shoottles want days. Yet Dominoo will meet me this very afternoon! What cause has Dominoo Tight to shoow light his heels?”

“There are two possibilities.”

Ravn cocked an eye at Méarana and planted her chin on her fist. “Which two?”

“One, it’s a trap. You’re being led to meet someone already on Tungshen. Sèanmazy’s magpie, maybe.”

“And the timing is unrealistic because…?”

“He doesn’t know how long it took you to contact Domino and thinks your friend left Dao Chetty back when you sent your first call-worm.”

“Very good. I am assigning that medium probability. And second?”

“Domino Tight came by quondam leap.”

“And that means…”

“… one of the Names, likely this Tina Zhi, knows about the rendezvous.”

“Yays, and that is the bad news of it. What might Domino Tight have told her in passion of pillow-bed? Or what might she have extracted from him? Your mother did teach you three things, maybe even four. We make you Shadow someday soon.”

“No, thanks. I’ll stick with harping.”

“This I assign the higher chance. The call-worm I received referenced elliptically in the form of an allegory a bistro in the Fifth Sector that Domino and I know from old. No one but he and I would associate that particular phrase with that particular place. If my enemies know this, they can only have torn it from Domino’s lips; and if they have done so, then all is lost in any case.”

“Any man might be broken,” Méarana agreed. “But if the Technical Name desired to meddle, she would not have so obviously transported her lover here, and so announce her participation.”

Ravn Olafsdottr contemplated that wisdom, and reluctantly nodded.

Ravn led Méarana through an intricacy of tunnels and maintenance ways halfway around the habitat to enter from an unlikely angle a commercial mezzanine overlooking the plaza where the meeting was to be. And yes, down below was her sweet Domino Tight sitting at a café table and but lightly disguised in the drab, baggy clothing of a sheep.

She turned away from the rail and ushered Méarana into a store. “You stay here,” Ravn cautioned the harper. “This shop offers entertainments for transients who must lay over for their connecting flight. There are active and passive sims—mojies, they are called here—musics, and suchlike foo-foo. Browse until I come back for you.” Then, arranging with the shopkeeper to keep rogue males from bothering the harper and cautioning him on the many undesirable things that would befall him if he failed, she took a circuitous route to the plaza below, so as to approach Domino from another direction.

She came up behind him in his “four,” but of course he had positioned a reflective vase to reveal such quadrants and, since they were not at enmity, he rose and turned and held out a weaponless hand in greeting.

The weapon, of course, was in his other hand; but he slipped it into its sheath with an economy of motion. They sat across from each other, and neither said anything for a long moment.

Domino Tight was a changed man from the last time Ravn had seen him. There was a haggard look to him that reminded her of trapped animals. Ravn immediately suspected kaowèn—or, worse, duxing kaoda. Had he been caught and turned by Ekadrina or her people? Could both of Méarana’s scenarios be true? Domino and a trap?

Domino Tight spoke first. “You look like your face had an argument with the duroplast.”

“Yayss. And the duroplast loost.” But her gozhiinyaw did not laugh, and Domino Tight was a man known for his humors. “You do not look well,” she told him. “Is the quondam leap so harrowing?”

He shook his head. “Have you ever coupled with a cobra?”

Ravn thought about that, and finally shook her head. “Not to my certain memory.”

“That is what it likens to,” he said.

“You mean coupling with Ti—”

But Domino hushed her. “If I call her name, she … feels it. Somehow. We’re entangled, whatever that means; and she would be at my side in an instant. I don’t know what might happen if someone else says her name in my presence.”

“I had thought her your pleasure.”

“As a clerk in the Gayshot Bo, she was sweet and pliable. But now … Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse?”

“Of course. Is part of basic training.”

“Well, I’m the mouse. She is insatiable. The things she desires … It is as if normal pleasures have long since withered for her, and so she must seek out the novel and the … creative. Oh, laugh all you want, Ravn. But it wears. And there is always the thought in the back of my mind: What if I cannot perform to her satisfaction? What if I am of no more use to her?” He paused and took the drink that was before him, and it sloshed a little onto the table. “She seems so young, but she is old, old. Eternal youth? You would think it would pall after the first few lifetimes.”

“Gidula would find the prospect pleasing. Age does not creep upon him; it races toward him on tiger’s feet. He would not mind learning her secret. Ah, but he’ll not have the opportunity. Domino, my sweet. Listen to me. There is something I must do—something I have vowed to do—but I need you to make the play.” And she explained to Domino Tight the nature of her vow.

“Of course I will help. But why move Gidula? He pretends openly to be neutral, but he is one of us.”

Ravn picked up a glass of water that her companion had left untasted. “He pretends openly to be neutral, and pretends covertly to be rebel; but that is of no account. My task is outside the Shadow War. He tortured me to extract a vow I was disinclined to give.”

“And…?”

“The torture should have come afterward.”

“Ah. As when we take the Shadow’s Oath…”

“Exactly so. So that we know, down in the bone, the penalty for breaking it.”

“It seems a delicate point, a matter of mere timing. You would slay Gidula because he missed a beat?”

“If you’ll not help me…” Ravn made as if to push away from the table.

“I’ve already said I would. And—hmm—I suppose that tells me all I need to know about why you must do what you must do. A vow extracted by torture ought not be valid. Come the Revolution, all that oathing goes by the board.”

Ravn sighed. “I suppose it will. Listen. I will give you back your cloaks and drop you onto the tableland north of the Forks. There will be a ceremonial entry—the Old One keeps the ancient troth—then, while everyone is focused on the Iron Bridge, you will slip though the sensors on Kojj Hill and make your way into the stronghold and go to ground until the moment comes. I have maps, with the key locations pricked off. Study them along the way.”

Domino Tight accepted the data slug and it disappeared into his pockets. “Now,” he said, “about the woman you left in the mojy shop…”

Ravn was not surprised he had noticed and apprised the situation. Much could be learned by peering into reflective surfaces. “What about her?”

“Who is that other woman she’s talking to?”

Ravn had been watching Méarana with half an eye, and was aware that others had entered the shop and were walking about the displays. Now she saw the harper deep in conversation with a tubby woman in tight, black curls. “Looks like a transient off the liner. Those are traveling clothes.”

Domino stared into his reflective vase. “She keeps glancing at us.”

“The harper?”

“No, the fat one.”

Ravn focused on the strange woman and, as if that infinitesimal shift had been a signal, the strange woman lifted her eyes and stared at her. The moment of contact was brief, because in it Ravn had leapt from her chair and the woman had turned to fly; but it was long enough for a kind of recognition. She was in the Life.

Ekadrina’s magpie? Without thinking, Ravn whipped an étrier to the balcony and clambered up it. The tubby woman was almost around the corner of the corridor when a spike blossomed from her back and her dull gray coverall began to blacken. A back-glance told Ravn that Domino had been the thrower. Méarana had no trouble blending in with the bleating crowds on the balcony. “Get down and stay down!” Ravn shouted; and the sheep, of course, obeyed. The floorways were carpeted with the backs of transients and shopkeepers.

Blood on the duroplast provided a trail to follow—spinward along the upper level, toward a corner from which all sheep had wisely fled. Ravn halted prudently, then pirouetted across the corner to flatten against the other side. The dance gave her a glimpse of a dim, narrow side corridor where the overhead lamps had failed and had not yet been replaced. The farther recesses of the hallway were shrouded in black, save where the sole surviving lamp spotlighted the body of the fleeing woman, splayed facedown five strides along the corridor.

Never one to take the obvious at face value, Ravn studied the prostrate form until certain it was not moving, and even then approached only by careful incremental steps.

It did no good. An arm from an alcove shoved a dazer to her temple, and the voice behind the arm said, “Don’t move.”

In that instant, Ravn knew she dealt with a Hound. Only the agents of the League withheld their fire at such moments. “I am as a stoone,” she replied, and kept her hands where her ambusher could see them, and waited her chance. For some reason she trembled. The air held a faint musty scent, as if something had crawled up this passage to die. Not the blocky woman. It was too soon for her aromatic contribution to matter. But Ravn suddenly wanted very badly to leave the narrow confines in which she found herself.

“Who are you?” she asked the unseen voice. Her eyes sought the side of her head, as if by sheer torque they could see through her own ear.

The voice chuckled. “Do you truly wish to know?”

It was the sort of thing a Name would say, but Ravn was morally certain that she confronted a Hound. She tried to turn her head the least bit but found herself unable to do so. Fool! she told herself. It is but a Hound! And when has Ravn Olafsdottr feared puppy dogs?

“You are off your manor, I am thinking. The Rift is out the other way.”

“Do not be afraid,” the voice caressed her. “We are not come to your damage. Our interests lie but with one of our citizens whom you have kidnapped. To wit: Méarana Harper. It would please us greatly if you would commit her to us. We will take her home and never more bother you, until some other time.”

Ravn was astonished to feel within herself an ardent desire to please this person. “I weep from gratitude at your forbearance.”

The voice chuckled. “I see I was not misinformed about Ravn Olafsdottr. I sense you will not turn your hostage over to us…”

“What point in bringing her this far if I do not take her a little farther? When she has once served her purpose, you may have her.”

She heard hesitation in the silence of the voice.

Then, horrifyingly, the voice spoke again, this time from her other side.

“No, don’t turn. It might startle me, and my companion’s fate does not fill me with thoughts of rainbows and spun sugar. Let it be a truce, then, and well met between you and I.”

“You are no Shadow. How can you call upon the customs of the Abattoir?”

“You would be surprised at what I am, and upon what I can call. Shall it be so? I’d fain take my companion to our ship. There may yet be time to save her. You may keep Méarana for this little while. But be warned. Others are coming for her who will not be so forbearing.”

“What stoops me,” Ravn hazarded, “from infoorming the Tungshen Riff so that he can interdict your ship?” But she knew the answer in the asking, and knew that the other knew as well.

“Not when you yourself move as the fish that swim in the seas. You’d not draw attention to yourself, nor raise a commotion on the habitat. Your friend’s spike was conspicuous enough. We are both best served now by swift and silent departure.”

Ravn had never heard dire necessity turned so artfully into negotiated agreement. It was not in the Hounds of the Ardry to stand by while a colleague lay dying. It was one of their great weaknesses. And so the voice must salvage a truce to rescue her companion, and would “allow” Ravn to keep Méarana—as if her permission had been required.

Yet there was no denying that the voice had induced in Ravn the desire to agree, to give up Méarana. That Ravn knew it had been induced by adroit perfumes and clever pheromones made it no less real an impulse, and she thought that if she had been any less committed to her dangerous course she might have been persuaded. And the voice had made adroit use too of ventriloquism, the darkness, and inattentive blindness to cloud the Shadow’s mind and move unseen in her very presence. That solitary overhead lamp should have warned her. It too neatly framed the body of the squat woman, and that meant that the other lamps had been disabled scant moments after the woman had fallen where she had. That one bright spot in the darkened corridor had focused her attention, leaving a penumbra of inattention within which the strange Hound had moved.

“I agree,” she said, and then noticed with a sinking heart that the presence beside her had vanished and the body spotlighted by the overhead lamp was gone, with only the blood-trail as evidence that it had ever been there.

Ravn had seldom felt the grip of fear, but she slumped now against the wall of the corridor and trembled. A glance at her timepiece showed that several minutes had passed between the voice’s last words and her own agreement, minutes in which she had stood in a trance, prey to any that might have happened along. Of all the Hounds she had ever encountered, even Gwillgi, this one alone frightened Ravn. And she did not even know her name.

Ravn returned to the mojy shop to find Méarana sitting on the floor under the watchful guardianship of Domino Tight. The shopkeeper too was there, but the remaining sheep had been allowed to depart.

“I warned you what would happen,” Ravn told the shopkeeper, “if you allowed this woman to be bothered!”

The man ducked his head. “But, Deadly One,” he said.

“But what?”

Méarana spoke up. “You told him only to keep strange men away. If you meant more than that, he is not responsible for your oversight.”

Ravn trembled for a moment, still angry at the fear that had possessed her. She made an abrupt motion with her head, and the shopkeeper scuttled to the back of the store. Deprived thus of one target, she turned to the other.

“And you!” she said to Méarana. “That might have been Ekadrina’s magpie! What were you thinking?”

“Is she all right?”

“Who, that woman? Why should you care?”

“Because, as far as I know, she was just a nice lady who stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. And then your friend threw a knife in her back.”

Ravn put her face close to Méarana’s. “And what did you two chat about?”

The harper waved a hand around the store’s displays. “What do strangers normally discuss in such places?”

“The woman was Jugurthan,” put in Domino Tight. “Maybe a quarter by blood. That gave her the wide-set body. Their ancestors were genetically modified for some high-gravity planet somewhere in ancient times. The point is: there are no Jugurthans in the Confederation. That ‘nice lady’ was at least a Pup, maybe even a Hound.”

Méarana gasped, but Ravn had the distinct impression that the surprise was feigned and the harper had either guessed or been told the woman’s nature. “What did she say to you, Méarana? Did she tell you her name?”

“It wouldn’t have been the real name,” suggested Domino Tight.

“She called herself Gwen.”

Ravn nodded and opened a file on her hand screen. Domino said, “It even sounds Peripheral. Ravn, did you search the body?”

Olafsdottr shook her head absently. “There were two of them. The other suggested a truce and took her away.”

Domino Tight grinned. “Walked into a trap. But you’re not dead,” he added.

“You are ever a keen observer of fact, my darling.”

The harper cocked her head in her mother’s manner. “And what did the other look like?”

“I never saw her. She remained ever in shadows.” Then she found a name in her file. Cŵn Annwn. Close enough, assuming the name was real.

“I’ve heard of this shadowy Hound,” said Domino. “She calls herself Matilda of the Night.”

Ravn closed up her hand screen. Then, because the ill-hidden smile of the harper irritated her, she touched Méarana gently on the arm. “I am so sorry, sweet.”

The harper withdrew a little. “Sorry? Why?”

“That your mother sent only these others in her place, and did not come herself.”

The harper flinched at the thought but then suggested, “Or else she has brought a Pack with her.”

Ravn exchanged glances with Domino Tight and both set their faces in grim lines. One more complication in the play. Best they heigh for Terra immediately and conclude their business with Gidula. But Ravn thought it highly likely that the voice that spoke in the dark would be waiting when they landed there.