The smuggler vanished like smoke. The panel beside the holostage clicked shut. Donovan threw himself into one of the chairs and sat twisted on the cushions.
Olafsdottr opened the ward room’s door and entered just behind her teaser. Her left hand slapped the lights on and Donovan pretended to be flustered by the sudden light. He raised his head, as if he had been dozing in the chair, and shielded his eyes with his arm.
The Shadow looked about the room, grinned, and said, “Good night, Doonoovan-buoy. You have a very crowded head, boot noo moor whisper. Sleep tight.”
The next day ran slow. Donovan read a book from the ship’s virtual library, but afterward he could not have explained what it was about. He participated in a simulation of the battle of Mushinro, taking the part of the doomed Valencian general Kick. It was widely assumed that Kick had the battle won and it was only his hesitation at a crucial juncture that had permitted the victory by the Ramage-led coalition. But Donovan’s attention was not on the simulation and his own hesitation at a different juncture lost the battle yet again. Only when the dinner hour at last approached, did the scarred man realize the root of his unease.
He did not trust the smuggler, Rigardo-ji.
It was a small thing, but the devil, it was said, lurked ever in the details. There had been a hint of thuggishness beneath the fear, and there had been that moment when, simulating a gun with his fingers, Edelwasser had said, “Pop. Pop.”
Two shots.
A second shot just to make sure? Or a second shot to tie up the other loose end?
Last meals, it is said, are consumed with greater gusto than any other. Dinner conversation ranged from the various modes of mayhem he and Ravn had mastered to the craft with which Aloysh-pandit arranged colored oils on the surface of still pools. Were it not for the fact that Ravn was dragging him into a civil war of which he wanted no part and in which he would likely find his doom, he would have found her an agreeable companion.
On the other hand, years before, she had been tasked to kill him if he failed his mission. A close relationship, an intimate relationship; but not a cuddly one. Olafsdottr had a most pleasant smile. But she would smile while she cut him down.
They left the refectory together and walked down the short hallway in their usual parade: Donovan to the fore, Olafsdottr behind with her teaser to the ready. She no longer held it shoved into his back, but neither had she relaxed to the point of shoving it into her holster. “But I suggest you are wrong, sweet,” she said, continuing their conversation as if they had been amiable companions on a stroll. “The Roomie tradition of opera was much too bombastic. Their drama was too melo. The Nipny tradition was more spare, more elegant, more minimal.”
The scarred man allowed the Pedant to hold up the other end of the conversation. “You misunderstand the criteria. Grand opera and Nō have not the same objectives. One may as well assail the lemon for lacking the sweet of sugar cane. Each may excel—but toward different ends. It is only the values we place on the ends themselves that make one means seem less than the other.”
“Ah, but sweet, are not the weights we place upon our goals what matter most in the end?”
They had reached the T-intersection and had turned down the long stem of it. Donovan paused and said, “For me, the overthrow of the Names pales against one hour with my daughter in her home.” When he closed his eyes, he saw Méarana’s face before him, puzzled and hurt. He turned and faced his captor. “Make me one promise, Ravn.”
Olafsdottr stopped a pace short of him and tilted her head, birdlike, to the side. “And what is that, my sweet?”
“Promise me that if I go with you, you will go to Dangchao afterward and tell Francine Thompson and her daughter Lucia why it was I never came.”
“I am to walk into the enemy’s lair on such a lark? You ask much of me, Donovan buigh.”
Indeed, he was. He could see down the length of the corridor the blank wall where the secret panel must be. The expression “fish in a barrel” came to mind. Rigardo-ji would have a clear shot down the entire length of the corridor, all the way to the cargo lock at the end. No one in the corridor could escape, unless they made it to the ward room, or into the closet where he had first been kept.
And that included him. A steady eye might pick off the Confederal without also hitting her prisoner, but Donovan knew in that moment of clarity that the smuggler meant to kill them both.
“Let’s go,” Donovan said, turning to resume their trek.
Perversely, it was now Olafsdottr who held him back. “What is the hurry, Doonoovan? You ask me to venture into the heart of the Oold Planets to accost a Hound? From sooch a joorney even I may not return.”
“Fair is fair, then. Isn’t that what you’re asking of me?”
“Ah, but I am not asking. Your condition is not a conditional.”
Donovan could not take his eyes off the wall at the far end. He waited for the panel to open and death to emerge. “We can discuss this in my room,” he said.
And still, like an ancient hero, ankle tied to a stake in the ground, Olafsdottr remained in the line of fire. “Ooh. Soo anxious! Do you have a trap led for me in your room? What cleverness have you been oop to?”
But then she noticed that his attention was fixed not upon her, but upon the far wall. She spun and aimed her teaser down the hallway. “What is it, sweet? What wickedness have you wrought?”
In turning away, she had turned her back on Donovan buigh. The Brute took charge of the scarred man’s body and leapt for her. She buckled under his sudden weight and went to her belly and the breath woofed out of her. A moment, she lay still; and then she twitched and Donovan felt a burning tingle in his side.
And came to lying on the cramped bunk in the ward room. Olafsdottr sat, chin cupped in one hand, in one of the two soft chairs that gave the room its center. “Clever move, O best one. How you lulled me these past days! And had I lost my grip either on my teaser or my wits, success might have been yours. That would have been no good thing, either for me or for you.”
She leaned forward and patted Donovan’s cheek, and when he struggled to grab her arm he learned that he was strapped into the bunk. “You stay here some few day, I think. Review error of ways. Soon we enter Abyalon-Megranome Road. You no jog elbow.”
After the Shadow had left, Donovan engaged in some experimental struggles, but Olafsdottr was a professional. He did not expect much to come of it, and was not disappointed when not much did.
“You did not want to see her killed,” Donovan told himselves. “Why?”
The captive comes to love his captor, said the Silky Voice.
I don’t love that stick, said the Brute.
Edelwasser promised he would not go for a kill, said the Pedant. Did you not trust him?
“And our lack of trust was justified,” said the Fudir. “He didn’t show.”
<A different sort of betrayal than the one we feared …>
“Yes, why did he not show?” asked Donovan.
A) He lost his nerve, suggested the Sleuth. B) We had the time or place mixed up. C) We were early. D) We were late. E) He couldn’t find the weapon he planned on using. F) He found it, but it wasn’t loaded. G) He …
Shaddap, suggested the Brute.
It doesn’t matter. Brute didn’t want to see her killed. Why?
Who sez? Was me that jumped her.