Méarana plays aimlessly. She has not yet found the right motifs for the tale. She has a bounding, rollicking, menacing melody for the Frog Prince, but she has not yet captured her father or his captor—or the lam lam.
“There is one thing I do not understand,” says Graceful Bintsaif.
“Ooh, there is moor than woon, I’m thinking.”
The junior Hound colors, but presses ahead. “Why did your rebels want Donovan buigh so badly. What is one more used-up, discarded agent among so many thousands fresher?”
“Many hands make light the work, but no one pair of hands lightens much. One may as well ask why we needed anyone at all, as in the limit the marginal assistance goes to zero. But…” Olafsdottr shrugs. “… I am but a simple Shadow. I am not told what I need not know.”
But Méarana has the impression that the Ravn’s duty had been more than mere courier work and that she regards a part of it at least a failure. Aye, a goltraí it would be for this opening section. And two melodies in counterpoint for Olafsdottr’s theme, because for a certainty she had two purposes. But which had failed? The overt one of carrying Donovan into the storm? Or the covert one that remains as yet concealed?
“Now must I digress,” says Olafsdottr, “and relate some while of such events as earlier befell; for our discord had been long a-building. Hear then while heroes in bold strife contend for twice-ten years among the homes of men.”
III. Henrietta: The Dream of Agamemnon
On scattered worlds were here and there strongholds held in rebel hands, strongholds made of discourse, not of stone. Such a redoubt might be an office, a department, an assignment, possessed of those oathbound for the overthrow of the regime. For this war sought not patches of land, but patches of command. Warriors did not storm beachheads, but subverted key positions, bureaus, jurisdictions; and an enemy might be isolated and surrounded by usurping the authority of his boss, by issuing a new procedure, or by infiltrating his department and undermining his efforts.
Not that there were no bodies. Wars want bodies. Quantity is a detail. The Glancer at the Dumold Fisc, known to all his friends as a keen outdoorsman, was found dead beside his fuel-depleted dũbuggi in the Great Pan of the Wúdãshwĕy Desert, “having brought insufficient potable water to last the crossing.” This tragedy, suitably mourned by all and sincerely by some, meant that the oversight of the fisc passed to his deputy. And this meant in turn that Certain Expenditures made in the name of the rebellion passed unquestioned. This was neither the first nor the last death dealt retail in that quiet struggle. “The rats gnaw one another in the wainscoting,” the boots muttered. As always, they preferred the wholesale.
An auditor here, a decoding room there, an intelligence office elsewhere—in such wise did the revolution proceed—by promotion, transfer, and untimely passing. Worms were planted in soft wares, so that loyal men unquestioning went forth to do the biddings of their foes. The Protector of Western Sagzenau was shot down by his own bodyguard, acting in the firm belief that such were their orders from above—and who themselves died before the firing squad believing their executioners suborned.
It was the worst sort of civil war, for its primary weapon was deceit and its first casualty, trust.
The Shadows and agents who fought it carefully avoided the pitched battles and guerillas and street-by-street destruction that had marked earlier risings. But there is at least a kind of honesty in storming the barricades—and in defending them. One knows if nothing else where everyone stands. And a head that is “bloodied but yet unbowed” has a certain nobility of cast lacking in that head shaken in incomprehension over an unexpected demotion.
The game proceeded. Pieces shifted about a board composed of stars—threatening here, checking there, protecting elsewhere a pawn or knight. Complexity built upon complexity, intricacies difficult at times for even the players to comprehend. Key pieces were lost. Positions were abandoned. Identities fatally revealed. Or kept! (Grizzlywald Hupp died because his cover identity had been marked for death by a comrade. Even secret wars have friendly fire.)
But what began in grim anticipation had grown to smell more of desperation—or at least of impatience. After twice ten years, even the most eager of rebels might find his enthusiasm thinning, and a certain hunger for results had begun to inform their thoughts.
And so those who must never meet in person had decided that they must meet in person. They had chosen for this purpose the outpost of Henrietta in the remote border province of Qien-tuq. They gathered there from across the CCW: from Dao Chetty and the Century Suns, from Big Dog and the Groom’s Britches, from Hasselbard and Paladin, from worlds of legend and ancient renown. And while they could not hope to meet entirely in secret, they hoped at least to meet where no one paid much attention.
Henrietta was the sort of world that had betrayed the promise of her youth. The lushness of her terraformation imbues the visitor with awe at the powers of the old Commonwealth of Suns—or would have, had Henrietta visitors to awe. Her verdant hillsides ache for the plow, her splendid vistas for the well-sited villa. Her broad, gleaming rivers want earnest industrious traffic and even more earnest fishermen. By rights, the planet should have been thickly settled centuries since.
But she sits hard by the border with the Peripheral League, and her strategic value is too great to pimp herself as a tempting prize. She dare not be too wealthy, too prosperous, too desirable, lest she invite attack—by the pirates of the Hadramoo, if by no one else. Yet here and there stand ancient ruins, tumbled reminders that there had once been a different age, when no borders ran through the worlds of men.
Like a promising young woman who has settled for a lesser beau, Henrietta has been rimmed in steel and not in verdure. Grim men stand guard along the walls of the world. Fortresses orbit o’erhead, and burrow deep within her vales. Corvettes hold station at the Visser hoops of her roads, even the narrow, minor stream known as the Tightrope.
Of course, no one attacks. No one has ever attacked; and the thought that the sprawling, barely United League of the Periphery could muster enough common purpose to do so has grown every year less likely. But the pretense that they might still do so serves a purpose, and the garrison acts as garrisons always have when bored in their duties. They are far enough from Dao Chetty to feel the slack in their tethers. The natives of Henrietta, heirs to obsolete traditions, find the boots of the garrison heavy on their necks; but they cannot remember a time when those soles did not rest there, and most have forgotten that it had ever been otherwise.