In the morning, Greystroke and Little Hugh were gone, and their rooms as if no one had ever slept there. Méarana found herself oddly distraught by their absence. In their company, she had not felt so alone in her quest. Billy hardly counted at all, and Donovan had proven less than she had expected—although in another sense, he was more. Yet, a man can accomplish very little if he is of two minds about it, and Donovan was seven—or ten, if she had understood the Brute correctly. The Hound and his Pup had given her briefly the illusion that she had more allies in her quest, and indeed the greater illusion that they would lift the burden of her quest from her.
Did that desire make her a bad daughter? Or did it mean only that she was afraid she might fail? Sometimes she remembered that she had but twenty years metric in her crios. Despair is the one unforgivable sin, her mother used to tell her, for it is the only one that never seeks forgiveness. Yet Méarana could not but feel the beat of its wings nearby.
Mother had first told her that maxim when a very young Lucia had thrown her child’s harp from her in frustration over its intransigent strings. There had been tears, and strong encouragement. She had persevered and gained eventually a small degree of fame in and around the Old Planets. She would persevere in this task, too.
She had no memory of ever having met Greystroke before—and what sadder fate than that could be told of any man? But she did remember Hugh from her childhood and remembered how Mother had brightened at his visits. She had formed certain conclusions from that, conclusions that she now saw were utterly fantastic, and now recalled that Hugh had always borne a sad and winsome countenance on his sojourns. After a time, he had no longer visited.
Now, inexplicably, he had abandoned her again. Duty had called, Donovan explained, but duty was a cold lover and false in the bargain.
“Is that so?” Donovan told her when she had said so. “Wherefore, dost thou seek thy mother?”
“That is love, not duty,” she explained.
“Love,” said Donovan, “is a duty, and a hard one.”
They had gathered around the breakfast table in the common room and Billy Chins provided from the hotel’s larder plates of egg and bangers, tomato juice, daal and beans—and a concoction of his own which he called fool. He brewed qalwah, which tasted much like ordinary Vrouwish kaff, save that it was bitter and muddy. “Billy savvy duty,” the khitmutgar said, taking the seat his master had ordained him. “Duty, me, to sahb Donovan.”
“You may wish otherwise,” Donovan said. “Let’s talk plans. No, Billy, you stay here. You may as well hear what you’re getting into. You may decide it’s more efficient to kill yourself now.”
“He doesn’t mean that, Billy.”
Donovan tore a piece of naan in two. “Don’t I? There’s a Confederate courier somewhere on our backtrail. That is not certain, but has more certainty than it ought to. We can’t afford to assume he will stay back there. If he knows we left Harpaloon with Greystroke, he may learn through other contacts that the Hound was bound for Yubeq. So he’ll follow down the Spiral Staircase to Dancing Vrouw. At that point, if he’s tracking the fossil images in the berms, he’ll see the blue shift and know that we stopped here. Tracking is slower going, so we have perhaps another day before we can expect him here. He may be in the coopers already and crawling down-system. So, let’s finish up and—to use a Terran phrase—‘haul ass.’ If we leave here before he shows, he’ll not know where we’re going next, and we’ll lose him.”
Billy Chins nodded vigorously. “Hutt, hutt; go jildy! Bungim paus, me.” He started to rise, but Donovan held him back.
“Some matters must be checked out before we go. Tomorrow, we go.”
“Oh, Fudir,” said the harper. “We spent weeks investigating on Harpaloon.”
“Then,” said Donovan, tossing his napkin to the table, “there’s not a moment to lose. Billy. This big-deal samting. We go, mistress harp and me, but come back no long time. No ansa him the door, less this knock.” He rapped his knuckles on the table in a tattoo. “You hear that, you answer back this…” Another, different tattoo. “…but only if alla pukka. If alla dhik, no knock-back. Savvy, you?” He ran Billy through the sign and countersign several times before he was satisfied. “No special knock, no ansa door. No ‘room service,’ no maid. No for nogat nothing.”
“I with you, me,” said Billy. “You see. I go with you wokabout. Out to Rim? I go. Out to Rift? I go. You wokabout place nogut, Billy Chins there. I good man, you see.”
Unaccountably touched, Donovan extended his hand, equal to equal, and Billy, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.
They took the easy way in.
“There were only two reasons why the Kennel never got a sniff of her,” Donovan explained to the harper after the Toll had franked their visas and issued them their green cards against their deposit of funds. “Either she entered East Cape in secret—in which case, we’ve no hope of picking up any trail—or she used a name they never thought to check. Normally, on official business, she would have used her office name—Bridget ban—and on personal business, she would have used her base name.”
“So Gwillgi only checked to see if ‘Bridget ban’ had entered East Cape, and she went in as Francine…”
Donovan steered her down a corridor of the Toll-for-One building.
The walls were tiled in pale masonry with a frieze at head level relieved into wreaths and tendrils. “Gwillgi is not stupid. He checked both names. We know she was on Harpaloon as Francine Thompson.”
“Then what…?”
“Bridget ban was not name-lacking. Gwillgi checked all the Kennel knew of.”
“Then…”
“The Kennel may not have known all of them. You told me once that your mother believed in the Four Strengths. Courage…”
“Courage, prudence, justice, and moderation.”
Donovan nodded. “If one is to believe in gods, those beat Greystroke’s Friendly Ones.”
“Yes, four to three.”
Donovan shot her a surprised glance. “You seem more cheery than earlier.”
“The sun is up. It’s easier to be cheery in the sunlight.”
“Even winter sunlight? Never mind. Prudence. The witch had the courage to take risks, no doubt of that. Otherwise, she’d have come home by now. But she would have been prudent enough to leave… breadcrumbs.”
“Breadcrumbs?”
“Old Terran fable. A trail of clues. The Sleuth deduced that. And I had to get him drunk to get that out of him. That helps sometimes, if we all get cheery-drunk together. Then the Pedant quit and we all forgot… Aaah, you don’t want to hear all that. Listen, and mallum bat. Your mother did not expect problems. She told you she’d be back soon. But she coppered her bets. She kept the Kennel updated on her whereabouts, if not on her whyabouts. She wasn’t ready to tell them what she was looking for. If it was a wild goose, she’d look foolish, and—you had some taste of Kennel politics—no Hound wants that. And if it was the goose that laid the golden eggs, she wanted first dibs.”
“Goose?” said Méarana. “Dibs?”
“Here we are.”
They entered an office which, like most such offices throughout the Spiral Arm, bustled with earnest activity. Clerks filed, frowned at screens, read hardcopies, entered data by voice, key, and touch. “If only they had the artificial intelligences of Olde Earth,” he told Méarana, who only laughed.