The scarred man cackled. “Who is Ekadrina?”
Oschous smiled. “The one who broke it.”
That elicited a short silence, but one wide enough for the scarred man’s thoughts to fall into it. Inner Child trembled; the Brute growled revenge. The Sleuth pointed out that Ekadrina might know the identity of others like himself. <Why?> cried the Child. <Who cares if there are others?>
But a young man in a chlamys stood beside him. The ancient garment was open up the right side, showing him naked underneath. His face was Donovan’s, but as Donovan had been in the blush of his youth. He placed a hand on the scarred man’s shoulder. For brotherhood, he said.
Or seemed to. The sundered parts of Donovan’s mind wondered why this young man—and the young girl in the chiton—were the only shards that manifested as visual hallucinations.
“Let’s not forget,” the Fudir muttered, “that we were going to Dangchao Waypoint. There’s business there that wants doing.”
“Does he always talk to himself?” Manlius asked his host.
“Gidula has hopes for him,” said Ravn.
Manlius turned to her. “It was Gidula, your master, who told Dawshoo this war would take ten years,” he pointed out.
“And so it has,” said Oschous. “Twice.”
Manlius blinked, then threw his head back in a great guffaw, and slapped the table with his left hand. “Oh, that’s a good ’un, Oschous. Have you told the Old One?”
“Gidula cracks his own jests,” Dee Karnatika said. “He doesn’t need mine.”
“Yeah. I’d watch myself around him, too. He may be old, but who knows the plays better?”
“It is because he is master of plays,” Ravn pointed out, “that he succeeds in growing old.”
Manlius grunted. “I take nothing from him. His exploits are legendary. I studied them when I was schooled. Our common goal makes allies of us all.”
“Well said,” Oschous told him. He raised a flagon of wine and the others at the table did as well. After a moment, Donovan aped them. “The Downfall of the Names!” Oschous said, and the others murmured concurrence; but Donovan noticed variation in the enthusiasms with which they did so. There were a few faint hearts among Manlius’s magpies.
And neither Oschous nor Ravn regards Manlius highly, the young man said. Surely, you have noticed. It is in their bodies and in their voices. They are “Hail, Comrade” aloud; but it is only necessity that has driven them together. They hold his actions with Kelly to be contemptible.
“I don’t know,” the Fudir temporized. “I rather like the idea of Shadows in love.”
While Donovan was thus distracted, Manlius pressed him on how he would lead them all into the Secret City.
“I don’t know,” he snapped. “I haven’t said I’d join you!”
“What would it take to convince you?” Oschous asked mildly.
“If I get steamed up enough!”
Manlius frowned. “‘Steamed up’…?”
“A Terran expression,” Donovan told him.
“That’s not important,” Oschous said. “Gesh is simply unsure that in his present state he can be of any use to us.”
That was not precisely the source of Donovan’s reservations, but it would do for use among his present companions. Getting tangled in the secret war among the Confederal Shadows was a ticket to the knacker’s block, in his opinion.
Privately, he wondered more whether the others would be of any use to him, either in staying alive or in gaining home. It was a tribute to their skills that the rebellion had lasted twenty years, for based on what he had seen so far, he would not have given them twenty weeks. They were an unlikely band of brothers. Manlius had fallen into rebellion because he had fallen into love, and while that might ring brightly in song, it dulled on closer inspection. A man driven by desire might be driven in whichever direction his member pointed. Ravn, on the other hand, showed genuine distress over the state to which the Lion’s Mouth had fallen, but remained a reluctant rebel obedient to Gidula’s orders. Remove Gidula from the equation and in which direction would she turn? And Oschous and Manlius both harbored doubts over Gidula on account of his age. He had not gotten a “read” on Dawshoo yet, but noted that he had been conspicuously absent from the conversation of his fellows.
Inner Child shivered. He was alone, and deep within the Confederation, without friends and uncertain of his allies, and every day farther from his daughter and Bridget ban.
After dinner, Oschous dismissed his staff, sending two magpies to relieve the watch, granting the others liberty. Manlius returned to the autoclinic for another healing session and his own magpies went with him or back to this own ship, Fell Swoop. Ravn Olafsdottr lingered, but Oschous waited her out and, after an uneasy glance at her charge, she too departed.
The scarred man cackled across the dinner table. “Alone at last.” And he essayed a Terran expression. “The bull’s in your court, Oschous Dee. Start waving your cape.”
If the idiom confused Karnatika, he gave no sign of it. Instead his lips quirked in a brief and frosty smile, and he retrieved a bottle of spirits from the sideboard. “My people will want to clear the dishes,” he said, “and I do hate getting in their way. You’ll be coming to my room directly. There’s something I want to show you. But first, a question. Neither appeals to revenge nor appeals to vanity have moved you to join us.”
Inner Child came alert. <Ah! Here comes a third appeal.>
Donovan chose his words with care. “Those who wiped my memory and broke my mind did a very professional job. Without memory, vengeance is a theory; without memory, past glories are tales told in books. Neither the great deeds you claim I wrought, nor the tortures I once suffered live within me. It is like a numbed tooth. There is nothing there.” He accepted a glass of the liqueur, waited until Oschous had poured and sipped from the same bottle, then tasted the drink and found it to smack of apples. “But Oschous Dee … that I am disinclined to join this feckless rebellion does not mark a lack of sympathy. I would disclose the secret way if I could remember it, even if I don’t crawl down there with you myself. But in practice, pride and glory really mean death and gore.”
Oschous finished his drink in a swift toss. But he did not set his glass down, turning it instead in his hand. “You object to death and gore?”
“Well, to death and gore and losing. Winning makes it easier to turn over the memorial glass.”
“Death may be preferable betimes to life itself,” Oschous said, looking off a little to the side.
“I’ll believe that when I hear it from someone with firsthand experience of both.”
“A life spent cringing on your knees is no life at all.”
“Finely spoken, Oschous Dee. But how long did you serve the Names before you finally stood upright?”
The Shadow rose from the table. “Bring your glass.” He had his own and the bottle in his hands. “Don’t be too harsh on us, Gesh,” he said as they proceeded down the hallway toward his suite. “Before he would risk all, a man must see some small hope of success. The revolution comes when the iron grip has just relaxed. When it is tightly held, none dare.”
“There’s a lesson in that…”
“Know when to strike?”
“No. Never relax your grip.”
Oschous glanced over his shoulder. “Windhook Keopisenichok attacked and burned a district governor’s station on Basilònway fifty standard years ago. It was one of those small local rebellions that people sing about in pubs and wine-stoops when the nights grow long and the fire turns to embers and they don’t know too many of the details. Bold Windhook drew a line and cried ‘Nay more!’ It really is a rousing song, but the line was drawn less from a love of justice than in the hope of liquidating his debts. Madness and desperation drove him. The ashes of the station were still hot when the boots leveled the entire township. Most of the townies hadn’t been in on it. In fact, most of them had opposed Windhook, called him a lunatic. But it didn’t matter. They all died. And Windhook wasn’t even in the township at the time. It’s funny. The over-governor could imagine arson and rebellion, but he could not imagine that a man might leave his licensed township.”