Yet Donovan understood that Ravn had been sent to snatch him more than two metric years ago and the rebels had determined to attack the Secret City a little over a year ago. Their curiosity regarding Padaborn’s escape was more recent than their desire to secure his person.
Unless, said the young man in the chlamys, we have been misreading them all along.
“That’s your job,” Donovan murmured. “You’re supposed to get inside the heads of our enemies and figure out what makes them tick.”
“Without,” the Fudir warned, “empathizing too much.”
Several of the Shadows now in rebellion had fought to suppress Padaborn’s Rising. One obvious reason for the contradiction was that the Rising had been premature and in the interim minds had changed, enthusiasms had shifted, and the doubtful had grown convinced. Perhaps the Names had overreacted in the aftermath. Such measures could trigger the very revolutions they meant to crush. Lucky Nanduri, the fifteenth maxraj of New Chennai, had put down the Mylapore riots with exquisite cruelty. His tontons had burned entire neighborhoods, blown up family compounds, executed citizens rounded up in sweeps regardless of whether they had participated in the riots or not. “Fear begets obedience,” the maxraj had declared. What it begat was twelve weeks of quiet. Then rebellion erupted across the continent, from Royapuram to Coromandel. When royal troops were ordered decimated as punishment for allowing the sack of the Coromandel Taj, the Palace Guard itself had turned on the maxraj, slaughtered him, and offered the Golden Tuban to a surprised—and rather unwilling—second maternal cousin.
Something similar may have happened in the wake of Padaborn’s Rising.
Watch the magpies, the young man advised them. They dream “the great game of the beautiful life.” There is ever romance in the heart of cruelty.
Aye, thought Donovan. The grand gesture, the emotion that tugs at the heart, the sheer drama of Padaborn on the Rooftops might lure Shadows into rebellion for no better reason than the tears of a pasdarm.
On the Rooftops…? There was a vague recollection there, but it would not come clear.
There was another answer, less obvious. The Shadow War was not in fact a resumption of Padaborn’s Rising. “The lamp that was lit” had not been lit again but was another struggle entirely, with different goals and only coincidentally similar objectives.
“Who fights for anything so abstract as ‘liberty’ or ‘tradition’ anyway?” Donovan grumbled. “The Shadows fight for injury or revenge or ambition, and because they have reached the point where nothing else is left. The fine words they make up later to justify themselves. An ambitious man like Oschous Dee might prate about oppression, but he was not oppressed, and had the paths of his ambition wound the other way, he would be defending the Names as loyally as Ekadrina.”
“You’re too cynical,” the Fudir told him. “Méarana always said so. Ambitious Oschous may be, but there are safer ambitions than raising the red banner.”
And would Ekadrina fight so doggedly were she not equally fervent in her loyalty? asked the Silky Voice.
“The drivers of doggedness and bravery needn’t be devotion and conviction. Ekadrina and Epri are Korpsbrüder, trained together by Shadow Prime himself. She’s in it because Epri is in it, and Epri stayed loyal because Manlius did not…”
“And Dawshoo rebelled because Manlius did … Never mind. We get the picture.” Motives were complex and seldom known, even to the actor. Purposes were easier, and often could be teased out. Two men might conspire to murder a third: but one to protect himself, the other merely to rob him.
The inner door opened and a fourth magpie emerged. This one betrayed no emotion on noticing Donovan, and the young man tagged him as “enthusiasm unknown.” The other two magpies rose and the three left the room together, murmuring in low voices.
The paraperceptic did not look away from her work. Hands danced across touch screens, eyes scanned scrolling images on her goggles, information whispered in her ears. She spared a moment of her mouth. “He see you now,” she said with admirable concision.
The scarred man hesitated and waited for Two’s reaction to the hesitation.
“He wait.”
Donovan grinned at her. “What are you doing after work, babe?”
The term of endearment was Terran, and unfamiliar to her; the essence of the question was not. “No ‘after work,’ me,” she told him. “You wish enter ‘jade gate pond,’ I multitask.” The face she turned to him was rendered beetlelike by the flickering data goggles, and she seemed suddenly a strange and alien thing.
Donovan recoiled, his joke gone sour in his mouth. He could imagine her busily manipulating multiple information streams even while she beat her chosen lover wet, and the pleasures of the latter would in no wise interfere with the efficiencies of the former. There was something in that which repelled him. One ought to take pleasure in one’s pleasures.
Gidula sat in a high-backed black padded chair at the far end of a long room. The carpeting was hard and durable, and woven in a tapestry of interlocking brightly colored lines against a sable background. The pattern reminded the Fudir of vines and creepers; the Sleuth, of mazes. The sable was shot through with silver threads, which lent it an odd sense of depth, as if the pattern comprised a catwalk above a deep and dimly lit cavern.
Crossing the room, Donovan made a play of walking carefully on the tapestry, as if he feared falling into the illusory sable pit.
“Really, Gesh,” Gidula said. “We know better, don’t we?” He gestured broadly with his left arm. “Please, sit.”
Gidula had no desk, as such. He sat within a nest of shelves and surfaces and glowing screens, some of which seemed permanent, some mobile, and some of which recessed into floor or ceiling as needed. At his word, a chair slid up from the floor, locking itself in place. Donovan made himselves comfortable and waited.
Gidula gestured with his right hand and a door slid open on the back wall to admit an androgynous servant bearing hot drinks on a wooden tray. The fey offered the drinks first to Donovan, who selected one at random, then to Gidula, who raised the second to his lips.
Donovan sipped from the steaming mug. If Gidula had wanted to poison him, he would have been poisoned while lying helpless in the autoclinic. The beverage was an infusion of some sort, with a hint of licorice. He blew on it to cool it.
“Why play the scatterbrain?” the Old One asked. “We brought you back to lead us, to lend your legendary name to our cause.”
“You brought me back to learn the entry into the Secret City.”
How better to lead us, Gidula’s shrug proclaimed, than to lead us to victory? But Donovan had long decided that the last thing a triumvirate wanted was a fourth man.
“Naturally, your infirmity dismayed us and we had almost given up hope you would recover your wits. Oschous promised to revive you, and Olafsdottr went with him to assist. And it is clear from your actions at the Battle of the Warehouse that they succeeded. Surely,” and here Gidula’s voice took on a note of disapproval, “surely the continued pretense does not mean that Geshler Padaborn has gone shy!”
The scarred man pondered his reply. If Gidula had hoped for a broken Padaborn, what would he do when faced with a whole? Ravn Olafsdottr had advised him to act disintegrated, and it was clear now that in doing so she had betrayed her master. “You know you get scatterwit,” he said in the Terran patois. “Billy Chins tell him so.”