Ravn Olafsdottr had known when she had thrown in with the Revolution-within-the-Revolution that she must forswear any vestige of heartfelt comradeship. Every hand might at some time be raised against her, and she could count upon no friends among her friends, and but a handful among her enemies. She had entered the Abattoir in her youth, a gift to the Lion’s Mouth from parents forever unknown. Her entire life, she had done the Mouth’s bidding, silencing those whose silence was required, aware always of the knife at her back if she failed, until one day she had graduated to second and held the knife herself. She had grown to respect the skill and the craft with which her colleagues maintained the order of the Confederation, but never once did she question the order they maintained. The means were noble, and the means justified the ends.
And now her colleagues stood arrayed against one another for reasons she could barely credit, with herself and too few others standing between them. She could conjure many motives for bringing the Names down, and as many for holding them up. Because Those had laid too heavy a hand upon the sheep. Because Those had saved the Confederation from the chaos that plagued the Periphery. She could understand men who fought for loyalty, for tradition, for justice, or even for raw ambition. But to fight for Kelly Stapellaufer?
The quarrel between Epri Gunjinshow and Manlius Metatxis for the charms of their colleague had provided the trigger. Ekadrina had sided with Epri and Dawshoo with Manlius, and everything followed from that. But she knew that was only the excuse, not the reason. One may as well fight for Jenkins’s ear as for Kelly’s jade gates. The fault lines had already underlain matters, fracturing the Lion’s Mouth into factions before even the factions themselves were aware of it. The rending awaited only some petty conflict to open up.
On the evening of the morning on which the Shadow War had been announced, Ravn Olafsdottr and Domino Tight and two others whose names she must never more remember held a dinner of great beauty and state. The wines had been exquisite; the fare more than fair. Their four banners had hung over the banquet hall in comradeship. One of them—she must not think his name—had made a long, tear-driven speech declaring that when all was over this best foursome would one day reconvene. At the end of it, all were weeping—Shadows, magpies, even the servants and the banquet-hall staff—and they had embraced and kissed one another and cast many a vow aloft.
And the next morning, Domino Tight had gone to join the rebels and the other two to stand by the loyalists. And now, that “best foursome” could never meet as more than three, and the tally was not yet final.
She had attached herself to Gidula because he had seemed the one steady rock in the tumbling chaos. He could reform the excesses of the decadent Names while providing a brake on the wilder ambitions of Oschous Dee.
But even Dawshoo had known the way was forward, not back into a storybook past.
To what extent, she sometimes now wondered, had her own loyalties been formed by those storybooks, by tales of brightly caparisoned Shadows flying forth to fight and die for duty and honor? Tales in which noble words were spoken in noble company, and in which even an execution could be conducted with pomp and rite. In days of yore, the scaffold erected on Edakass for Mengwa Chertahanseon had been draped with cloth-of-tears and the condemned had been given a red velvet blindfold (which he had of course refused), and his executioner had been his own particular friend, Paphlaq bin Underwood. There had been mournful songs beforehand and playing of such instruments as befitted Mengwa’s rank, and no one had touched Paphlaq’s right hand afterward for nine and ninety days.
When Shadow Prime—not the present Prime, but an earlier one—had been honored for his services during the Discontentment of the Oatland Sheep at a banquet hosted by the Dreadful Name himself, he had stubbornly refused to wash his hands in the same basin as the Name. The Abattoir had spoken of nothing else for days, and the senior Shadows debated the propriety of the gesture. No one doubted that the gesture was meaningful and beautiful and edifying, and it had now become the custom at any banquet for the guest of honor to three times refuse the basin of his host. The basins themselves had become progressively more ornate.
When the current Prime was a young man, he had received the undershift of Lady Ielnor as prelude to a pasdarm held on Old Eighty-two. He had cradled the garment in his arms the night before, even—so it was said—kissing it, and appeared at the pasdarm the next morning wearing only the shift over his shenmat, no dispersal armor. In consequence of this, he had emerged from the fighting bloody and cut up and with a serious wound in his side. Ah, but what a gesture! It won him the prize despite his scoring only third on points. He had sent the bloody shift back to Lady Ielnor, and she had kissed it and worn it over her gown at the banquet afterward. Ravn Olafsdottr knew that it was all smoke, now wafting away in the new-risen wind, if indeed it had ever been anything more. But she resented that loss and wondered if her determination to go down with the heroic dream of the beautiful life would itself one day be marked as the last in a long line of beautiful, doomed gestures—to bring hot tears to Gidula’s eyes and mockery to the lips of Oschous Dee.
Meanwhile, she had her vow to Gidula to consider. The Vow of the Raptor was often sealed by kaowèn—her back twinged where she had been striped—but it was customarily done to underline the keeping of it, not to induce the taking of it. Did Gidula—poor, determined Gidula—even realize that he had crossed a line that he himself had drawn?
Two years past, while Ravn had been hunting Donovan in the Periphery, the Old One had learned … something … What that something was Ravn did not know, but the learning of it had induced introspection and worry. The man to whom Ravn had delivered Donovan was a very different man than the one who had sent her forth to fetch him. After Donovan had shown himself sane and integrated in his combat with Ekadrina, Ravn had feared Gidula would execute him as no longer suitable for the play. The plan had always been to raise the rebels’ hopes with the name of Padaborn, then crush them with the reality of the scarred man. But the plan had shifted—to the invasion of the Secret City—and Donovan’s value had changed from brass to gold.
She glanced at foolish, romantic Méarana. Dragging the bait might lure a Hound into the Mouth, even if that were not its main basic function. But the difficulties arose from attracting other hunters beside. She had not wanted to start Ekadrina on this particular scent, and hoped that her suspicions were vain. Yet she had felt herself watched from time to time. If not by Ekadrina’s magpie, then by whom?
And there was something else that Ravn could not quite put a finger on. The harper’s attitude had changed. Fractionally, to be sure, but it ought not to have changed at all.
Domino Tight was a true believer in the Revolution. It was his strength and his weakness—beyond the obvious weakness of trusting his comrades too greatly. Give him years enough and he might give Oschous a run, a fact of which Oschous was undoubtedly aware. But in the meantime, his zeal burned hot and he imagined a bright day, joy drenched and sunshine filled, if just a trifle vague and rosy, in which every tear would be wiped away. It was a future state worth visioning, and he had not recognized that while all might agree that the present was no longer tolerable, there was no such unanimity on what the future ought to be.