The Kennel’s success rate at protecting…
“You’re an ass, Pedant,” said the Fudir. “Probabilities don’t matter. What difference to the corpse that it was one chance in a million that slew him?”
Resentment swelled within him like a rancid bubble. I sense I am not welcome here.
“That’s the first sense you’ve made all evening.”
The Pedant broke off, and Donovan became acutely aware that there were things he had known that he had now forgotten. “Smart move, Fudir. Pedant’s our data base.”
“Ah, who needs him?”
There was something about Bridget ban, said the Sleuth.
The late Bridget ban.
Donovan gestured to the gellrin, and wagged an empty carafe. “Red,” he called.
Sleuth, said the Silky Voice, why would this agent of theirs be interested in Méarana?
A worm of hope stirred painfully in the Fudir’s breast. “Because he hopes she will lead him to Bridget ban?”
She may be alive? After all this time? Or does he simply not know she’s dead?
Their agents use the Circuit like everyone else, said the Sleuth. If one of them had capped her, they’d all know by now.
“Or he hopes Méarana will lead him to whatever it was Bridget ban was hunting. The weapon that would protect the League against Them. She would not have told them what it was when they caught her. She would have died silent.”
The gellrin came by with a fresh carafe, and it was on this occasion that she sought to re-light the café-candle and Donovan snapped at her.
“Great,” said the Fudir after she had stalked off. “It’s one thing to piss the Pedant off; quite another to anger the waitress. What do we do when this carafe runs dry?”
Wave a Gladiola Bill ‘stead O’ the empty. She’ll come running.
“Brute,” said Donovan, “there is something charming in your simplicity.”
Yeah. And sometimes ya need the charm.
“But what was it about Bridget ban, Sleuth?” said the Fudir.
I’ve forgotten. The Pedant knew. He never forgets anything.
“Well, kiss him on the lips. Maybe he’ll tell us.”
He had raised his voice. A couple at a nearby table who had been drowning in each other’s gaze turned and looked at him. “Why don’t you drink your own wine,” the woman snapped.
Maybe it was the dim lighting, but he thought for an instant that the woman was Bridget ban herself, warning him off. Her hair was shorter and darker than the Red Hound’s—but hair can be dyed, and cut. Her complexion was dark, like hers—and it might prove golden in a better light. But… No one lops eighteen thumbs off her height for the sake of mere disguise, and the woman was that much shy of the witch’s height. The scarred man, who had begun to lean forward, slumped back in his chair.
After all these years, the witch’s spells were still potent. A good thing he had left her when he had. He closed his eyes—and a dozen others in the stoop relaxed. Two put weapons away.
The Fudir remembered a bright spring afternoon atop a wooded hill overlooking the Dalhousie Estate on Old’ Saken. He and Bridget ban had been scouting the estate under the pretext of bird-watching. The breeze had been gentle and cool, flowing off the Northbound Hills, and the birds had trilled and piped; and Bridget ban had placed her hand upon his arm, perhaps forgetful for just a moment of their purpose, and said with pure delight… “Listen, that’s a rubythroat! We have them at home on Dangchao.”
Let the Pedant settle for factual memories, for bricks dry from the kiln. The memories of touch and smell, the sound of her voice, could immerse him like a living river lazy on the plains.
“There’s an interesting bird,” he heard the remembered Fudir say. “A double-bellied nap-snatcher.” It had been the approaching ornithopter with two security guards in it. He and Bridget ban had been using aliases on that scramble. Méarana’s mother had called herself…
The fact would not come. The kiln had grown cold.
A strange sensation crept over him, as if something loomed behind him, vast and implacable. And he was sitting with his back against the wall. Inner Child shivered and the Brute clenched his fists under the table.
I feel it, too, said the Silky Voice. And it’s not the first time.
He waited, and he felt the others waiting, too.
A time went by and then another time, until slowly, the feeling abated, like a pool of spilt wine soaking into the thirsty dirt. Though no candles had been lit, the room grew sensibly lighter.
The release was a long-held breath expelled. Inner Child began to cry and tears stained the scarred man’s cheeks.
Later that night, Méarana awoke and found herself unable to go back to sleep. She kept thinking of poor Enwii, killed brutally for what she did not know. Little Hugh had thought the murderer a Confederate agent who, while on another mission, had recognized Donovan. But he might have been watching Donovan on Jehovah and had followed him from there.
In either case, she was responsible for Enwii’s death. The scarred man would never have left Jehovah but for her importuning.
It was this thought that had unsettled her sleep, and which kept her now awake.
Restless, she arose and took her harp to the common room, where she played on muted strings a suantraí for Enwelumokwu Tottenheim. The chords wept, but she found her heart was not in it; or perhaps that her heart was too much in it. So she laid the clairseach aside and sat in silence in the darkened room.
Eventually, she grew aware that, opposite her sofa, the door to Donovan’s room stood ajar, and curious at this anomaly, she crossed the room and peeked inside.
The room was empty.
The bedclothes were rumpled, thrown aside and Méarana remembered Little Hugh’s bitterness when he told of the Fudir abandoning him twenty years ago. That must have been some knock on the head the Fudir had given him, to hurt so after so long.
There was a Terran Corner in Pròwenshwai and the Terrans of the Hanse ran to wealth and power—more perhaps than other Hansards found comfortable. With the Brotherhood’s aid, Donovan could hide indefinitely. Stepping inside the room, she checked the fresher, half expecting for reasons she could not name, to find he had hanged himself.
But no body dangled from the “rain shower,” no body lay blood-drained in the tub. She chided herself on the expectation, blaming the late hour and her own feelings of guilt.
Returning to the sleeping quarters, she threw open the closet and found his meager wardrobe still inside. His kit littered the vanity in wild confusion. If he had fled, he had fled without his clothing, without his personal items. But what did that prove? He had left such ephemera behind in Chel’veckistad, too, when he had walked out on Bridget ban.
She had picked up his brush. Now she laid it down and noticed, tucked to the frame of the vanity’s mirror, a palm-sized hologram. She plucked it up and held it to the lamplight that speckled through open window-blinds.
Four figures sat at an outdoor café table on the sunlit cobbles of the Place of the Chooser, the great public square in Èlfiuji, in the Kingdom on Die Bold. It was one of those images that strolling artists would take of touristas. Donovan, Greystroke, her mother, and Hugh. The image was old, but only Hugh had noticeably aged. He had not then acquired the hardness in the corners of his mouth, and still retained something of his youthful insouciance, as if the world were a joke and only he knew the punch line. Bridget ban sat in the middle—difficult to accomplish in a group of four, save that Greystroke had managed to fade a little into the background and was nearly obscured by Donovan and her mother. Méarana smiled a little to note that detail. The Gray Hound was a dear little man, if a trifle too cold for her comfort.