“That is the second reason we need the rusty hammer,” Gidula said. “If you lead a team of assassins into the Secret City, we can cut the head off the snake.” He smiled a little at that. “Cut the head off the snake,” he said again. “Your name will live forever.”
The scarred man sank back in his seat, overcome by his contending emotions.
The Brute wanted this.
The Sleuth saw it as a game, an intellectual exercise.
The Pedant wanted to recover lost memories.
But Inner Child was terrified,
the Silky Voice doubtful,
and neither Donovan
nor the Fudir saw any gain to be had.
“My name would live forever?” the Fudir said. “That sounds far too posthumous. If it’s to be one or the other, I’d rather the name die and the rest of me live.” He cackled, picked up the uisce bowl, but it trembled so that he could barely sip from it.
“Indeed.” Olafsdottr smiled. “Posthumous fame is something few enjoy.”
Gidula scowled at her, but Donovan almost choked and the uisce burned his throat. He set the bowl down so hard that it nearly toppled. “What name is it,” he croaked, “that would live forever?”
“Do not speak it aloud,” Dawshoo cautioned him. “Not until the time is ripe and we rally the masses.”
“Geshler Padaborn,” said Gidula.
Donovan heard Ravn suck in her breath, and realized that it was a revelation to her, too. Otherwise, she might have used it as an argument during the slide down the Tightrope. He could feel Pedant digging and digging. But … nothing surfaced. All memories had been cauterized.
“Padaborn,” he whispered, as if the sound of the name on his own lips might resurrect some sense of identity. But it was the name of a stranger.
“An inspiration to us all,” said Gidula. “When the others learn you have returned, their morale will soar.”
“You owe it to the men you once led,” Oschous added, “to lead them once more—and their sons and daughters with them.”
“Do we?” Donovan said. “We have no recollection of being Padaborn; no desire to pick up his fallen torch.”
Dawshoo smacked the table. “I never thought this play too promising, and the promise grows less. A man is the sum total of his deeds. If this Donovan buigh does not remember that Padaborn, he will not remember how he escaped the Secret City. Olafsdottr?”
The ebony Shadow cocked her head. “Yes, First Speaker?”
Dawshoo jerked his head at Donovan and shrugged.
“Hold,” said Gidula. “Rofort once wrote that ‘A house is a pile of blocks, but not only a pile of blocks. When the house is torn down, the blocks remain, but where has the house gone?’”
“We haven’t time for your philosophy,” Dawshoo said impatiently. “We leave for Ashbanal tonight. Manlius awaits us there.”
“The house of Padaborn has been demolished,” Gidula said. “But perhaps some blocks remain. He need not remember himself in order to remember his deeds. And all we need is the remembrance of one deed particular.”
Oschous grinned. “You’re a clever one, Gidula. Or you’re a fatuous old fool. We’re as likely to hear wisdom from the one as the other. What say, Dawshoo? We’ll take him with us. Something familiar may jog a memory or two.”
Dawshoo rose. “It’s your play, Gidula. Take it as far as you can without risking us all.”
“Will you start the whisper campaign?”
“If I do, you had best deliver Padaborn. If not the Padaborn, at least a Padaborn. Train him up, if you must.” He watched Donovan drain the uisce bowl. “And if you can.”
With that, he departed. One of the magpies left with him.
Gidula too, prepared to leave. To Olafsdottr, he said, “Be sure he arrives at Port Rietta before the departure deadline. Keep the boots off his neck. Are you coming, Oschous?”
The third Triumvir shook his massive head. “I think I’ll stay with our hero.”
Gidula shrugged. “As you will.”
After Gidula had left with the other magpie, Oschous shifted to the other side of the table so he could sit facing Donovan and Olafsdottr. He leaned back against the partition and lifted his feet to the table, linking his hands behind his head. His smile heightened his foxlike appearance. “So, Gesh,” he said. “What are we to do with you?”
The scarred man shrugged. “Send me home? I doubt we can be of much use to you.”
But Oschous shook his head. “That’s not what we do with things of ‘not much use.’ You should be grateful to Gidula, you know. He saved your life—twice—this past hour.”
The Fudir grunted. “Tell me again the difference between your lot and Those.”
The Dog head smiled broadly. “‘It takes all kinds to make a world,’ an ancient prophet said. People are like those gas molecules the scientisticals jabber of. They go about in every direction and so the whole body of them goes nowhere in particular. To have enough people move in the same direction you can’t wait until they do it for the same reasons. Afterward—if there is an afterward—there will be a sorting out. And Friend Donovan?” He stopped smiling. “I think you’ll be a lot more useful than you realize.”
Cengjam Gaafe: The Fourth Interrogatory
A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon. Bridget ban studies this herald through the bay window. Her hand reaches involuntarily to her right breast, where the Badge of Night is placed, before she remembers that she is not in uniform. Her daughter and her subordinate watch in equal wonder, for to gaze out the window she has turned her back on the Confederal Shadow.
Olafsdottr, for her part, pays this no apparent mind, and selects delicately from a tray of finger sandwiches that Mr. Wladislaw has unobtrusively conducted into the room. Behind her, the Shadow hears the creak of Graceful Bintsaif’s jaws and smiles. The long tense night is poised to yield a daylight no shorter or relaxed.
Méarana plays a melody tangled and unresolved. It is neither geantraí nor goltraí but, like the meeting in the pit of Apothete, it searches for its boundaries, for its resolutions. It hungers for the progressions that will grace it with either triumph or tragedy. Much depends, she tells herself, on whether her father is dead or not. But she tells herself this at such a deep level that she is herself barely conscious of the thought. Donovan had told her once that Confederal Shadows are past masters at the arts of torture, and she has no choice now but to believe him. For Olafsdottr has been torturing her since the story’s inception—by withholding that one particular facet of it, the only one that matters. The entire mode of the song depends upon that one fact; and so the Ravn’s silence on that point can have no other purpose than to keep the harper balanced on the knife’s edge.
Yet Olafsdottr is telling the story and not her father. Absence is also a fact, of sorts. And it may be that it needs no elaboration.
Méarana glances at Bridget ban just at the moment her mother turns away from the window. Does Olafsdottr’s coy silence torture her mother, as well? Does the uncertainty gnaw at her, too? Does she ache—as Méarana aches—to reach down the Confederal’s throat and drag the words forth by main force?