The “cold comforts of Krinth” were proverbial across the Spiral Arm. But he had meant to console her, even to encourage her in his own fashion, and of the three, he had been the one most selflessly in love with Bridget ban, and that should count for something. “Thank you,” she said.
Greystroke rose, but paused and turned back. “Oh,” he said. “I nearly forgot. One of the jawharries was murdered. I thought, maybe, you would want to know.”
A cold hand stroked Méarana’s heart. “Who…?”
Greystroke held a hand to his ear, consulting his dibby “We picked it up on the newsfeed as we crawled upsystem… Ah. Here it is. A woman named—oh, by the Owl!—En… wel… um.”
“Enwelumokwu Tottenheim,” Méarana answered. The numbness spread. “Enwii.”
“Yes, that’s the one. At Côndefer Park. Another’ Loonie attack, apparently. Like what nearly happened to that poor Chins devil. They scrawled irredentist slogans on the shop walls. The Marshal of Preeshdad said there had been a string of incidents recently. I’m sorry.” He offered her a small kerchief from his sleeve. “I didn’t know you felt so about her.”
“No, it’s not that,” Méarana cried. “We only spoke a few minutes; but the woman was so terribly cheerful and friendly.” Hound’s business? Enwii had said. That’s a magnet for trouble. I don’t want to be involved.
Violence was common in Preeshdad, and jewelry shops were tempting targets… Maybe it was inevitable that one of the places they had visited should be attacked. But Méarana shrank from Greystroke, suddenly wary of who he was and what he might do in pursuit of a prize for the Ardry. She did not believe in coincidence.
And neither did Donovan when she told him about it.
He went immediately to the’ face in Méarana’s stateroom and found the Preeshdad marshal’s report readily accessible. “The prick,” he said. “He wants us to know about it.”
“Why? Was it a warning? Did he and Little Hugh…?” “What? No. Greystroke can be guilty of a great many foul deeds. Terrifying you counts as one. But he’ll never wear the Badge of Night.”
Méarana sat and leaned over her folded hands. “None of you want me to find Mother. You keep throwing obstacles at me. You keep trying to discourage me. You, Greystroke, Little Hugh. They spread doubts about you. You spread doubts about them. You keep secrets from me.” “What secrets have I kept from you?” “Ōram,” the harper said distinctly. “Eḥku. Enjrun.” Donovan closed his eyes. Greystroke really can sneak up on you. “That caracan,” he said. “That son of a whore.”
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear about those places.” Donovan looked around the room. “Should we invite Greystroke and Hugh to sit in personally, or is it enough that they can listen when the mood strikes them?”
“At least Greystroke…”
“If the Gray One were really interested in finding Bridget ban, he’d be out looking himself, not trying to find out what we know. By the gods, I hope he did hear that!” He struck the table hard with both fists. The ’face jumped and a Friesing’s World death hoot fell off its hook on the wall and clattered to the floor.
Billy Chins came scurrying in from the common room, his face creased in anxiety. “Why such shout-shout? Is master want Billy?”
The scarred man rubbed his face and for a moment all was silence. Then he pushed to his feet and walked over by the door, where he picked up the fallen instrument. He played a few notes in the horrid and unnatural intervals of the Qelq-Barr Mountains, then placed the hoot once more on its hooks, but it fell again to the floor. This time Billy Chins rushed to retrieve it and held it defensively in his hands.
The Fudir turned to Méarana. “Greystroke had a reason for trying to frighten you. No, stay, Billy. You deserve to hear this.” He returned to his seat and tapped the screen.
“The Preeshdad Marshal said this Tottenheim woman was savagely beaten. But I saw the morgue photos on the upload, and there was nothing of the savage in it. It was a careful and methodological beating, designed to extract the maximum of information. Kaowèn, it’s called.”
“Kaowèn? Maximum information? Enwii didn’t know anything! She had a—”
Donovan put a finger to her lips. “And now Those know she didn’t know anything.”
“Those?”
Donovan seemed to withdraw into himself. “Something is following us.”
VI. A SNAKE IN THE GRASS
The great’ Saken philospher Chester Demidov, known as’ Akobundu,” once described the United League as “raisins in a bowl of porridge.” This struck many of his readers as just another of his obscurities; but people who put raisins in their porridge—and there were some—understood what he had meant. The best philosophy begins in sense experience, and a bowl of porridge is as sensible as it gets.
The raisins are the great clumps of civilized planets: the Old Planets, the Jen-Jen, Foreganger-Ramage-Valency, and elsewhere. Within these clumps, great and powerful worlds lie mere days apart, with war and commerce bustling between them, with cities large and impressive, and with those activities that make of life something more than being alive. It is here you find Akobundu’s “grand continuum of culture”: great literature, music, high art, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanities, and the intoxication of the senses. The nature of a civilization could be gauged, he had said, by the point along this continuum where its people draw the line and say, “Below this lies the merely vulgar.”
Everything else is the porridge. These comprise the more widely-scattered solitaries, like Peacock Junction or Ugly Man, the barbarous regions like the Cynthian Hadramoo. These may boast great accomplishments, but they are not where the action is.
The Greater Hanse is one of the raisins, and a juicy one at that. There, fortunes are made—and many a second sib arrives in the dewy-eyed hope of making one. The Hanse chews them up and spits them out. It grinds them like polishing grit, and the result is a gleaming money-making machine—once the grit is washed off.
On Akobundu’s continuum, the Hansards set great store by the social vanities, pursuing their rivalries not only in board rooms and markets and entrepôts, but in balls and cotillions, in fashion, in clubs and organizations, at dinner parties, and in orders of nobility. But they draw the line at the intoxication of the senses. “Drink dissolves profit,” they say; “and dreams go up in smoke.” A man obsessed with pleasure seldom thinks clearly, and women are consequently a sort of weapon to intoxicate one’s rivals. They do not launch missiles at one another, so much as mistresses. Befuddle a rival with perfumes and tender caresses and you can diddle him in every way that she does not.
Dancing Vrouw had been settled initially from Agadar and Gladiola, and it is said that when the first ship had set down, after a harrowing voyage through then-uncharted roads, the landing party officer had stripped herself naked and, from a sheer and undiluted joy, whirled through the thigh-high spindle-grass of the landing field. Consequently, the blazon of tawny a nude danseuse all proper appeared in the flags of every state but one on the Vrouw, and was quartered in the arms of most of the Merchant Houses.
There is an addendum to the legend that involves an Ursini’s viper and the inadvisability of stepping on one, even while dancing, but it is a complication seldom mentioned by the tour guides and myth-mongers. The bite proved nonfatal, though chastening, and both it and the dance have provided fodder for local proverbs ever since and a warning against excessive exuberance. The one contrary state that eschews the danseuse emblazons a snake on its flag with the motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”