The Confederal nods. “I see you do not lie.”
Bridget ban stiffens for a moment. “Being kidnapped could have been no reason to smile for Donovan buigh. Have you no regrets at what you deprived him of?”
“Ooh, I have many regrets; as many as I have winters behind me. The Fates deprive a man of nothing but that they do not grant him something else. What have I deprived him of? You? By your own account, he did not have that when he left Jehovah.”
“When you took him from there,” Méarana corrects her. She has been tuning her harp to the second mode, for Olafsdottr had told a sad onset to the tale. Father ripped untimely from his own intentions, on the very verge of coming home. What, she wonders, could be more tragic than that?
“But how closely do you attend me?” the Confederal asks the room. “He had great fun, the scarred man did. Opening my locks. Poisoning my food. Throwing metal slugs at my head. Planning my ambush and death. What more fun may a man have and live afterward? As you have orchestrated this tête-à-tête, so did I orchestrate our little voyage. He woke too early, I grant you. But … have you ever danced with a cobra? Sometimes, in a life grown hardened to danger, one must seek the greater risk to enjoy the greater thrill.”
Méarana hums a tenor F, pauses to adjust one of the half intervals on the strings (for her chords are no more well tempered than she), and then pauses expectantly and looks around the room at the others.
Graceful Bintsaif has been watching her with some incredulity. Perhaps she wonders at playing music with a cobra in the room. But music, by long tradition, eases the serpent’s bile.
Bridget ban, for her part, has waited patiently. She is long inured to her daughter’s eccentricities. And well so, for had not one of those eccentricities impelled her to seek out her father and to rescue her mother from utter oblivion? And all that with no small risk to herself. Bridget ban does not fear death, for she holds to a belief that death is not the end. But unending suspension in a lost and derelict ark was no more death than it was life. Rather, it was some awful schrödingerian halfway point, partaking of the worst features of both.
When all seems settled, the Hound, who has never once taken her eyes from her guest, pours out a cup of coffee and hands it to Ravn Olafsdottr. “A small question,” she says.
Olafsdottr drinks the hot brew without hesitation, even though its bitter taste could hide a thousand potions that in pear nectar would curdle its sweetness. “Ask,” she says.
“For all his games at escape, for all his secret passageways, and picked locks, and poisoned Joe Freezy, I see that Donovan buigh…” She spreads her arms to take in the room. “… is not here. And this tells me that all such attempts failed. Else, he would be telling me this tale—and with far more relish, as I recall the man—and you would be sitting less comfortably.”
Olafsdottr’s laugh is like the trilling of a bird on the wing. “Noo. The Fates rule all, and some things are not to be. Our two destinies were intertwined. I meant what I said, that he and I would become great companions; although the Fates are cruel and have a sense of humor, so that while the foreseeing was true, the companionship was not what anyone expected. The joke, as always, is on us; though seldom to our amusement. Play, harper, and your strings our tale promote and with your chords catch out the discord note.”
II. Riftward: The Frog Prince
The next day, the Fudir broke Rigardo-ji’s security code and entered the smuggler’s files. These proved as dull as any collection of legitimate invoices, as the sundry planetary and state governments around the Periphery were notional in what goods they chose to blockade. During the Great Cleansing, the peoples of Terra had been scattered widely on the hither side of the Rift and unequally gifted as regards terraformation. Some worlds had in plenty what others lacked entire. Thus, it was worth a rich man’s purse to smuggle boxes of oatmeal cookies from Hawthorne Rose to Ramage; or tobacco sticks onto Gladiola.
The smuggler’s most recent invoice was for the delivery to Foreganger Prime of a secret protocol entered into by Abyalon with the People of Foreganger. He had been returning to Abyalon with the chopped protocol—and a gift called “the Frog Prince” from the People to the Molnar of the Cinel Cynthia deep in the Hadramoo.
The People’s Navy swore revenge on the pirates of the Hadramoo, the Pedant remembered, after the hijacking and massacre of the tour liner Merry v Starinu, four standard years ago.
Perhaps the gift is a peace offering.
The Fudir was doubtful. “The People of Foreganger make peace on their own terms, usually after some notable vengeance.”
“One way or the other,” Donovan said, “Foreganger won’t be happy that their present was hijacked along with the courier’s ship. Pedant, where was the Starinu hijacked?”
Off Abyalon.
<And Abyalon and Foreganger have entered into a secret protocol.>
How much you want to bet, said the Sleuth, that this “Frog Prince” is some sort of vengeance weapon that Abyalon hired from the People to use against the Cynthians?
“No bet,” said Donovan.
A bomb, do you think?
“Wonderful,” said the Fudir. “A bomb on board. We didn’t have near enough problems.”
If we can find where it’s stashed, the Brute suggested, we maybe can use it to knock off Olafsdottr and take the ship from her.
“If it’s a big enough bomb to take out the Molnar,” Donovan pointed out, “it’s too big to set off aboard a monoship. A takeover weapon must be one that can kill or incapacitate the Ravn without killing or incapacitating us.”
<Someone in the room!> cried Inner Child.
The scarred man swung abruptly away from the holostage, saw nothing, turned the other way.
More nothing. The ward room was empty.
Where did you see it, Child?
<From the corner of our eye. To the right of the stage.>
“Sleuth, you and Fudir check it out.”
The Fudir took control of the scarred man and went to the back wall, where the nautical instruments were mounted.
The wood paneling was genuine, and done up in a basket-weave pattern of vertical and horizontal slats, so that the wall seemed some vast sort of wickerwork. The Fudir glanced toward the console’s swivel chair. If Inner Child had glimpsed something in this direction … The Sleuth did the geometry … it would have stood approximately—here. He ran his hands along the interstices.
You’re thinking a secret door, ain’t ya, Sleuthy?
It was a logical deduction, and logic was the Sleuth’s forte. The smuggler’s ship was riddled with such things. The Fudir’s explorations had already found secret cabinets with jewels and stolen artwork intended for clandestine delivery in the Old Planets. Nothing to use as a weapon, except perhaps for the Peacock vase.
I just thought of something, said the Sleuth.
And you’re gonna tell us.
The road to the Hadramoo splits off here at Abyalon. What happens if we don’t deliver this “Frog Prince”thing to the Molnar?
Who cares?