Eglay too was surprised. “Ravn’s not dead? Gidula has said nothing.”
Pyati shrugged. “She offended him over some matter, and he is not speaking her name until she brings him a present.”
Donovan knew what the offense must have been. When she had rushed forth wearing Padaborn’s colors, Ravn had joined the Revolution wholeheartedly—and Gidula was inside the Revolution in order to subvert it.
“Well,” Donovan said, placing a hand on each knee and pushing himself erect. “Perhaps I will have a present for him, too.”
The three of them departed by aircar the next day, ostensibly to show Donovan the wonders of Ketchell. Pyati assured him that these wonders were not so numerous as to require the entire day, and the fact proved as true as the word. Ketchell was a crescent of low buildings, none more than ten stories high, around a circular harbor formed, according to local folklore by a stone dropped by the god who built the sky-vault. Donovan supposed it a remnant of the Cleansing and spent long moments on the quayside watching the waters break along its rim.
“What was Ketchell called before it was Ketchell?” he asked his companions.
Eglay Portion shrugged. “As far as I know, it was always Ketchell. There are traces of buried ruins farther inland, though, where the shoreline used to be before the ice sucked up all the water. There are supposed to be layers of successive cities there going back to ancient times.”
Donovan wanted very much to visit those ruins, which he took to be those of Ũāvajorque, but he could not spare the time for it now. He and Eglay and Pyati retired to a quayside restaurant where they huddled with other diners around a radiant fireplace and consumed large steaks of a fatty meat and root vegetables cooked nearly to sludge. “City’s not noted for its chefs,” Eglay commented superfluously.
Donovan looked around the dim-lit room. It reminded him a little of Gatmander: cold and lonesome, and despair coating everything like a fine dusting of grit. “This must be some happening place during the winter,” he said.
Eglay shrugged. “We usually bunker up at the Forks. And there isn’t much that is more cheerful than evergreen boughs and hot-rod wine and a roaring fire come Midwinter Eve and a visit from Sĩgyawn Yowshã. But I hear down here in the city the suicide rate always spikes that time of year.”
Donovan wondered that they had not used everyone up by now.
Pyati shrugged. “Usually off-planet, me.”
“They say the ice came on sudden,” Eglay volunteered. He raised a fatty slice of beeshun to his lips and chewed thoughtfully. “Something like,” he said, then swallowed. “Something like the ice caps—you’d think they’d always been there. But the locals tell me it was only a century or two from a nice, pleasant, temperate world to … a wall of white along the north.”
Pyati said, “When did it happen?”
Eglay waved his now-empty fork in spirals and intoned, “‘In the time before my grandfather’s grandfather.’”
Donovan grunted. “Back then, was it? Surely there are records in archives somewhere. This world was civilized longer than any other in the Spiral Arm.”
“Sure, but only the mountains last forever. There’s a town over the other side of the world has a clay brick with writing on it that goes back to prehistoric times. I seen it myself, but it looks like chicken tracks to me, and no one knows how to read it. But there was war and fire and mice and all what have you. There was a long Dark Age when almost nothing was recorded.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Gidula told me that things had been ‘written in the sand.’ He said that meant ‘in silicon.’ It was all digital bits and you needed special machines to read them, and—”
“I can guess the rest,” Donovan said. “New technology. New machines. Pretty soon they couldn’t read the old storage devices, and the media eventually decayed.”
“Crazy people. The sign by the Iron Bridge is about the only thing left from that era. We got the better idea: something works, don’t change it.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
Eglay Portion laughed. “Don’t change that, either. Might get worse.”
After dinner, Eglay and Pyati flew back to the Forks where, using this stratagem or that, they would create the illusion that Donovan had returned with them. Donovan for his part shook the dust from his feet and went off in search of a foo-doctor whose name he had extracted from the Assistant Undercook of the Common Mess. (He had been surprised at the extent to which the kitchen staff emulated the manners of the Shadows. The Chief of the Cuisine cooked nothing himself but sat in a great chair much like a throne set in the center of the kitchen while others in strict hierarchy cooked, baked, washed, and served—and brought things to him for taste and approval.)
The search took Donovan to a part of town that the touristas would have shunned, had there been any tourists desperate enough to visit Ketchell. Construction standards across the Confederation were unimaginative but solid, yet even plasteel and metaloceramic could take on a decrepit appearance when too little attention was paid to their upkeep. Façades became darker from grime and neglect. Here and there, a splash of color around some doorframe or window or a brightly polished god only served to heighten the general drabness.
The people with whom he mingled were a close and solitary lot, each intent on his or her own personal mission, lifting no eye for a passing stranger but giving the Fudir as if by instinct a wider berth. Not even the body over which they stepped engaged their attentions.
In a few places, the buildings were coming down. A couple were demolition sites with large machines idling on rubble-strewn lots, but most were a more spontaneous and involuntary dismemberment. Where the foundations were exposed, Donovan noted older foundations buried deeper in the ground.
This was a city with a long past, he thought, but a short future.
He found the promised daforni—what he would have called a “pub”—along the northeast end of the waterfront, where the ground-car wires ended and only walkways penetrated the warren of tumbledown shanties. It was called “The Severed Arm” and above its entrance a well-muscled arm, clench fisted and flexed, extended toward the street. It had once been painted in lifelike colors, something between bronze and tan, but the years of dirt and sea-brine had tarnished it and it seemed now as if gangrene had set in.
When Donovan entered, all activity within ceased and eyes turned toward him. No one came to The Severed Arm by happenstance, and the patrons paused to assess his significance. After allowing time for a sufficient appraisal, Donovan stepped up to the bar, taking a position from which he could watch the entire room. The bartender ignored Donovan until he slapped a five-bayzho coin on the bar. This was a part of Ketchell that preferred its transactions manual and untraceable.
“Ẽgrizhdahl o’uizhgy, borva.” He employed the Late Murkan dialect still used in parts of the Northern Mark continent. The “please” seemed to amuse the bartender, but he feigned a lack of understanding, so the Fudir ordered the whiskey in Manjrin. “In clean glass,” he added.
The bartender set a tumbler down, and the amber fluid sloshed over the rim and spattered the bar top. “It’s alcohol,” he said. “Sanitizes the glass.”
The Fudir lifted the glass and, as he sipped, mentioned a name.
The bartender shook his head. “Never heard ’f him.”
Before he could turn away, the Fudir said, in the accents and rhythms of Old Eighty-two, “He should be grieved to hear so.”