Domino Tight accepted the data slug and it disappeared into his pockets. “Now,” he said, “about the woman you left in the mojy shop…”
Ravn was not surprised he had noticed and apprised the situation. Much could be learned by peering into reflective surfaces. “What about her?”
“Who is that other woman she’s talking to?”
Ravn had been watching Méarana with half an eye, and was aware that others had entered the shop and were walking about the displays. Now she saw the harper deep in conversation with a tubby woman in tight, black curls. “Looks like a transient off the liner. Those are traveling clothes.”
Domino stared into his reflective vase. “She keeps glancing at us.”
“The harper?”
“No, the fat one.”
Ravn focused on the strange woman and, as if that infinitesimal shift had been a signal, the strange woman lifted her eyes and stared at her. The moment of contact was brief, because in it Ravn had leapt from her chair and the woman had turned to fly; but it was long enough for a kind of recognition. She was in the Life.
Ekadrina’s magpie? Without thinking, Ravn whipped an étrier to the balcony and clambered up it. The tubby woman was almost around the corner of the corridor when a spike blossomed from her back and her dull gray coverall began to blacken. A back-glance told Ravn that Domino had been the thrower. Méarana had no trouble blending in with the bleating crowds on the balcony. “Get down and stay down!” Ravn shouted; and the sheep, of course, obeyed. The floorways were carpeted with the backs of transients and shopkeepers.
Blood on the duroplast provided a trail to follow—spinward along the upper level, toward a corner from which all sheep had wisely fled. Ravn halted prudently, then pirouetted across the corner to flatten against the other side. The dance gave her a glimpse of a dim, narrow side corridor where the overhead lamps had failed and had not yet been replaced. The farther recesses of the hallway were shrouded in black, save where the sole surviving lamp spotlighted the body of the fleeing woman, splayed facedown five strides along the corridor.
Never one to take the obvious at face value, Ravn studied the prostrate form until certain it was not moving, and even then approached only by careful incremental steps.
It did no good. An arm from an alcove shoved a dazer to her temple, and the voice behind the arm said, “Don’t move.”
In that instant, Ravn knew she dealt with a Hound. Only the agents of the League withheld their fire at such moments. “I am as a stoone,” she replied, and kept her hands where her ambusher could see them, and waited her chance. For some reason she trembled. The air held a faint musty scent, as if something had crawled up this passage to die. Not the blocky woman. It was too soon for her aromatic contribution to matter. But Ravn suddenly wanted very badly to leave the narrow confines in which she found herself.
“Who are you?” she asked the unseen voice. Her eyes sought the side of her head, as if by sheer torque they could see through her own ear.
The voice chuckled. “Do you truly wish to know?”
It was the sort of thing a Name would say, but Ravn was morally certain that she confronted a Hound. She tried to turn her head the least bit but found herself unable to do so. Fool! she told herself. It is but a Hound! And when has Ravn Olafsdottr feared puppy dogs?
“You are off your manor, I am thinking. The Rift is out the other way.”
“Do not be afraid,” the voice caressed her. “We are not come to your damage. Our interests lie but with one of our citizens whom you have kidnapped. To wit: Méarana Harper. It would please us greatly if you would commit her to us. We will take her home and never more bother you, until some other time.”
Ravn was astonished to feel within herself an ardent desire to please this person. “I weep from gratitude at your forbearance.”
The voice chuckled. “I see I was not misinformed about Ravn Olafsdottr. I sense you will not turn your hostage over to us…”
“What point in bringing her this far if I do not take her a little farther? When she has once served her purpose, you may have her.”
She heard hesitation in the silence of the voice.
Then, horrifyingly, the voice spoke again, this time from her other side.
“No, don’t turn. It might startle me, and my companion’s fate does not fill me with thoughts of rainbows and spun sugar. Let it be a truce, then, and well met between you and I.”
“You are no Shadow. How can you call upon the customs of the Abattoir?”
“You would be surprised at what I am, and upon what I can call. Shall it be so? I’d fain take my companion to our ship. There may yet be time to save her. You may keep Méarana for this little while. But be warned. Others are coming for her who will not be so forbearing.”
“What stoops me,” Ravn hazarded, “from infoorming the Tungshen Riff so that he can interdict your ship?” But she knew the answer in the asking, and knew that the other knew as well.
“Not when you yourself move as the fish that swim in the seas. You’d not draw attention to yourself, nor raise a commotion on the habitat. Your friend’s spike was conspicuous enough. We are both best served now by swift and silent departure.”
Ravn had never heard dire necessity turned so artfully into negotiated agreement. It was not in the Hounds of the Ardry to stand by while a colleague lay dying. It was one of their great weaknesses. And so the voice must salvage a truce to rescue her companion, and would “allow” Ravn to keep Méarana—as if her permission had been required.
Yet there was no denying that the voice had induced in Ravn the desire to agree, to give up Méarana. That Ravn knew it had been induced by adroit perfumes and clever pheromones made it no less real an impulse, and she thought that if she had been any less committed to her dangerous course she might have been persuaded. And the voice had made adroit use too of ventriloquism, the darkness, and inattentive blindness to cloud the Shadow’s mind and move unseen in her very presence. That solitary overhead lamp should have warned her. It too neatly framed the body of the squat woman, and that meant that the other lamps had been disabled scant moments after the woman had fallen where she had. That one bright spot in the darkened corridor had focused her attention, leaving a penumbra of inattention within which the strange Hound had moved.
“I agree,” she said, and then noticed with a sinking heart that the presence beside her had vanished and the body spotlighted by the overhead lamp was gone, with only the blood-trail as evidence that it had ever been there.
Ravn had seldom felt the grip of fear, but she slumped now against the wall of the corridor and trembled. A glance at her timepiece showed that several minutes had passed between the voice’s last words and her own agreement, minutes in which she had stood in a trance, prey to any that might have happened along. Of all the Hounds she had ever encountered, even Gwillgi, this one alone frightened Ravn. And she did not even know her name.
Ravn returned to the mojy shop to find Méarana sitting on the floor under the watchful guardianship of Domino Tight. The shopkeeper too was there, but the remaining sheep had been allowed to depart.
“I warned you what would happen,” Ravn told the shopkeeper, “if you allowed this woman to be bothered!”
The man ducked his head. “But, Deadly One,” he said.
“But what?”
Méarana spoke up. “You told him only to keep strange men away. If you meant more than that, he is not responsible for your oversight.”